A few weeks ago, a reporter asked President Donald Trump whether he was still going to impose tariffs on Canada. A simple “yes” would have sufficed, and been terrifying enough; but Trump being Trump, that question was enough to inspire a long and rambling answer which strongly implied that Canada was not actually a real country at all. His response brought to mind Vladimir Putin’s ominous 2021 essay, “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukraine”.
The bit that jumped out at me, though, was this: “If you look at a map, they drew an artificial line right through it, between Canada and the US, just a straight artificial line. Somebody did it a long time ago, many, many decades ago.”
In his garbled description of the slightly artificial nature of the border and its creation, he was… not entirely wrong. Where he was wrong was in the implication that this process makes it either illegitimate or unusual today. It’s neither – but it does tell us something about North American history.
The US-Canada border was defined in a series of treaties between the young US and what was then the British empire, stretching from the 1783 Treaty of Paris (which ended the War of Independence) to the 1846 Oregon Treaty (which extended the border along the last few hundred miles of the 49th parallel to the Pacific). The men who made those decisions were not, as Trump suggested, just “some guy”, they were senior diplomats. But it is true that they were often dividing territory they had never visited; in some cases, it was territory none their countrymen had ever visited, either.
The border is notable, in so far as it includes the longest straight section in the world – nearly 2,000km along the 49th parallel – and has been, for nearly 200 years, undefended. In the straightness itself, however, it’s not unusual at all. You’ll find straight lines on the map of Africa, and in the deserts of the Middle East; between Australian states and Canadian provinces. The map of the US, especially in the West, is full of the things. Two states – Colorado and Wyoming – are as close as you can get to rectangles on a curved surface. All of these places have something in common.
It is not merely that their borders are “artificial” or “man-made”. All borders are both: they’d often be invisible to animals or aliens, and while some seem more natural than others, at times mountains, deserts and seas have all been ignored by political geography. The presence of a straight line on a map instead tells you when and how a line was drawn, and likely by who, too. All the places I listed above were carved up by imperialists of European origin, to aid settlement or enable administration. A straight line suggests a border drawn not through organic division of territory between neighbours, but from a distance, using a map and a pen.
Empires have been dividing up territory for thousands of years; properly surveyed maps, though, have been around for less than 400. “We have been engaged in drawing lines upon maps where no white man’s foot has ever trod,” the sometime British prime minister Lord Salisbury famously said of the Scramble for Africa (don’t let the cynicism fool you, he was an enthusiastic participant). “We have been giving away mountains and rivers and lakes to each other, only hindered by the small impediment that we never knew exactly where the mountains and rivers and lakes were.” For most of history, this would have been impossible. By 1885, though, it was possible for the European powers to carve up an entire continent from the comfort of a conference room in Berlin. By then, the map of North America had already been set, in a not entirely different manner.
Straight line borders ignore natural geographical features, and how the inhabitants actually use the land. (This is how you know they’re external impositions.) By dividing people from peers and placing them under the control of distant capitals they may feel little connection to, they’ve sometimes increased conflict, too. In North America, there are several communities divided from their “natural” neighbours by the US-Canada Border: Point Roberts, a suburb of Vancouver, is south of the 49th parallel and thus finds itself in Washington State. In some places, perhaps, that border “should” have gone elsewhere, just as some in Africa or the Middle East should have.
But – it didn’t. The world is as it is. And the, in essence, stupidity of a 2,000km straight-line border matters far less than the basic fact that Canadians aren’t American, and have no intention of becoming so. The US-Canada border may be a product of imperialists of European origin, drawing arbitrary lines on a map – but it exists, and has done for generations. More to the point, Trump’s desire to simply erase it is a product of the exact same impulse. No, you do not gotta hand it to him.
[See more: The conviction of Marine Le Pen]
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