Ackowledgement I Wish I'd Written

It's been nearly a year since I made any sort of contribution to this space. The main culprit was a book project on the re-negotiated NAFTA. About this time last year, the negotiations came to a rapid conclusion. I had to step on the gas. I'm rather pleased with the outcome. I'm happy to have some of my musings about he NAFTA in a single location. It should be on the shelf sometime later in October. I quite like the cover.

Coming to a Bookseller Near You

It's a relatively short book, and some of the ideas within are things readers of this blog (or those who've suffered through my classes) will have seen before. There was no space in the book to write a dedication of any kind, so I thought I'd use this space to offer a couple of acknowledgements. There are two people I'd like to thank for shaping the ideas in this book; Stephen Clarkson and Robert Pastor.

Stephen Clarkson, 1937-2016

Robert Pastor, 1947-2014

The recent passing of both of these scholars was a huge blow to research and teaching on North America. The influence of their work on North America looms large in the way I approached the topic. North America and North American integration generated a bucket of literature. But no one could engage in any work of their own without first confronting what Clarkson and Pastor put out. Moreover, they were contrasting figures with quite different outlooks on the NAFTA and implications of North American integration. In their last major writing on North America, both struggled to identify and describe the degree to which North America had become a coherent, integrated trilateral region. Whereas Pastor fervently believed that the basis for a more deeply integrated, more cooperative North America existed and readily be found in opinion polling about public attitudes toward one another in all three countries, Clarkson was more skeptical of the basis for bridging the wide range of differences that divided us. Pastor was a fierce critic of the three governments-- and late in life of Ottawa, in particular-- for their collective lack of imagination and vision about what North America could be. Pastor was one of the few proponents of North American integration willing to publicly push back against critics of the NAFTA in the United States. In the early 2000s, he became a bit of a punching bag for right-wing critics who pejoratively described Pastor as being in favor of a sovereignty-killing North American Union (he did not support that). Clarkson, on the other hand, could be fairly categorized as a Canadian nationalist, and was always skeptical about the merits of having economic integration-- and later security concerns-- be the primary glue holding North America together.

Apart from their first-rate scholarship, both were genuinely nice people. My first interactions with Stephen Clarkson were at academic conferences in the early 2000s. As a junior scholar working on North America, it was a little unnerving to see Clarkson sitting in the audience, especially when I knew the paper I was about to present wasn't fully baked yet. More unnerving still were the questions Clarkson would toss at me, nearly all of which challenged premises or arguments at the core of my paper. He was a tough customer to deal with intellectually. I often disagreed with his take on what was going on, but Clarkson was a tremendously open and gracious scholar who-- from my vantage point, at least-- gave considerable time to colleagues and students. Indeed, one of my first encounters with Clarkson was in the spring of 2001 as he chaperoned a dozen University of Toronto undergraduates around Washington, D.C. to talk about trade policy with government officials, lobbyists, and think-tanks. In the years prior to Clarkson's retirement from the UofT, I was honored he invited me to be on a couple of panels with him, including one dealing with the three volumes he penned between 2002 and 2011 on North America. That I continued to dispute his basic orientation on North America made those invitations to appear even more significant.  I always enjoyed the engagement and, unlike some academic engagements, appreciated that our agreement to disagree was so friendly and respectful.

Pastor was a different ball of wax. Indeed, it would not be unfair to describe Robert Pastor as a prickly pear of a human being. My first encounter with Pastor wasn't with him, per se, but his writing. In the spring of 2001, I was a very-junior policy analyst in the Office of the Americas at USTR. Robert Pastor was in the midst of completing a book for the Institute for International Economics (now the Petersen Institute for International Economics) comparing economic integration in North America to that evolving in Europe; Toward a North American Community. Pastor got a meeting with the new USTR, Robert Zoellick (himself a hard-charging prickly pear) to hopefully convince the Bush Administration to be more active on North America than the Clinton Administration had been. As a parting gift, Pastor left Zoellick with an early draft of Toward a North American Community.

The manuscript arrived in the Office of the Americas with a curt note from Zoellick (whom I never actually met in the two years I spent at USTR) saying someone should read it and summarize its findings for him. That task fell to me.

In a manner similar to that I experienced with Clarkson, I got to know Pastor a little bit better toward the end of his academic career, crossing paths with him at different conferences. In the process, it was fascinating to observe the tirelessness with which he tried to promote more cooperation within North America. In 2001, Pastor argued that North America ought to move toward a customs union. By 2008, he had been forced by the 9/11 terrorist attacks to modify that argument as part of a broader call for a perimeter strategy that would amount to a compromise between the openness of integration and the necessity of security. However, Pastor's last book in 2011, The North American Idea, turned out to be a kind of lament for what might have been. The effects of security at North America's borders, the dysfunction of the Department of Homeland Security and, most importantly, the lack of courage and vision on the part of North America's leaders was all out of step with public opinion about what North America ought to be.

In my own modest contribution to the literature on North America, I write about the decline of scholarship and public-policy thinking about North America. There are very good people scattered around the world who are still interested in the subject. And, during the re-negotiation of the NAFTA in 2017-2018, there was considerable popular, scholarly, and public-policy interest in the outcome. Yet, none of that interest seems poised to re-energize North America as a focal point of study. Europe studies itself to death, sponsoring all kinds of Jean Monet Chairs and EU Centers of Excellence at universities all over the world. Canada and Mexico have only really feigned interest in one another, and most other activity that can be loosely construed as "North American" is actually focused on one of two dyads anchored on Washington (Canada-U.S. or U.S.-Mexico). Canada isn't really even interested in studying the United States anymore. In 2012, the Harper government ended Canadian studies funding abroad, which in the United States was mostly centered on understanding the bilateral relationship of existential importance to Canadians. Moreover, in doing research for my book, I discovered that of the 1800+ Canada Research Chairs at Canadian universities, not a single one was devoted to anything connected to North America or even to Canada's relationship with the United States-- an area of study with some utility.

Stephen Clarkson and Robert Pastor were clear influences on my thinking about North America and are present throughout my book. However, two other sources of inspiration also need acknowledgement. Firstly, the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of the Johns Hopkins University, or just SAIS to most, played an enormous role in shaping my thinking, expanding my world view, and cementing my interest in the political economy of international affairs, public policy, and American politics. I cannot say enough about the esteem with which I still hold the program, the faculty, and the student body. SAIS is essentially a series of office buildings along Massachusetts Avenue in Washington, D.C.-- until they move to their new digs on Pennsylvania Avenue in 2023--but the city itself serves as a sort of candy story for political junkies. It was, and remains, one of the world's finest schools of international affairs.

It was the D.C. political candy store that provided me with the other seminal experience of my professional training-- an internship/job in the Office of the Americas at USTR in the spring of 2000. By that summer, I was spending more time at USTR than at SAIS, and did so through the spring of 2002. It is hard to understate the importance of my experience there in shaping the way I do my current job. Spending big chunks of my day working on the practice of trade policy in conjunction with all of the theory and scholarship I was consuming in the classroom had a profound impact. It drove home the differences between academia and real policy work that I have tried to bridge as university-based academic. It all comes with a certain set of frustrations; never quite feeling at home in academia, but also a fish out of water vis-a-vis policy-makers. From my perch in academia, I miss the tactile, problem-solving nature of government policy-work. However, academia brings a degree of perspective, the luxury of trying to contextualize the immediacies faced by policy-makers-- think the big thoughts.

To everyone connected with the above, I am deeply grateful for what they did along the way....