Nationhood Lab’s director sat down with the U.S. correspondent of Quebec’s newspaper of record about the political implications of the U.S. having always been a Balkanized federation of rival regional cultures
The Washington correspondent of Montreal’s La Presse, the traditional newspaper of record in Quebec, recently came to New England and sat down with Nationhood Lab director Colin Woodard to talk about the political implications of American Nations, his book about U.S. regionalism. Yves Boisvert’s feature appeared at the news site this morning and is entitled “Un pays, plusieurs nations.”
Woodard spoke about Americans’ lack of historical knowledge about their own country and its structure, which contrasts with Europe and, indeed, the Canadian fedeation. “Canadians have always been aware of at least two nations in their federation — now three with the indigenous people who were excluded from the debate for a long time,” he said. “Not so for Americans.”
“Americans maintain the fiction that the Europeans who came here left their history behind and came to a a country free from the past, where they could realize their full potential. They were ‘born again,'” he continued. . “The myth is that we escaped history, freed ourselves from it. In fact, after the Civil War, there was a concerted effort to forget regional differences. There had to be one American people. But this official story makes no sense and does not explain all of the current phenomena.”
La Presse, founded in 1884, was traditionally the Francophone newspaper of record in Canada, a daily broadsheet with a generally federalist editorial stance. It became fully online in 2019 and transformed into a non-profit model after decades of ownership by the Power Corportation.
Nationhood Lab, a project at Salve Regina University’s Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy, delivers more effective tools with which to describe and defend the American liberal democratic tradition and better understand the forces undermining it.
