The Globalized Complexities of Transborder Governance in North America

Abstract

Our central concern in this chapter is to understand national integration in order to reflect on its implications for democratic participation in the continent’s governance. While no multi-state region can any longer be understood outside its global context, North America is unique in this regard: as the United States of America’s home base, the northern continent of the Western Hemisphere is the platform from which the world’s only superpower engages with the rest of the planet. Consequently, any attempt to analyze North America’s governance has to be placed within the broader context of globalization and its effects on government autonomy (see Cohen 2001). Additionally, given North America’s second most striking characteristic as a region — its combination of a heavy set of economic rules in the form of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and a flimsy set of mechanisms with which to manage it — the analysis of its transborder workings has to reach far beyond any formal institutions to encompass nongovernmental actors in civil society and the marketplace. Before we proceed to analyze the region’s transborder political economy, we need first to specify how we conceptualize both globalization and governance.

This chapter grows out of some of the research embedded in Stephen Clarkson, Does North America Exist?: Governing the Continent after NAFTA and 9/11 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008).