Canada and the United States

Quite to the contrary: what in those years constituted the “bottom line” of good neighbourly behavior in the Western hemisphere south of the U. S.- Mexico border would come equally to represent the very essence of good neighbourliness north of the Rio Grande. [...] So when it comes to the practice of bilateral relations in North America (north of the Rio Grande, at least) we might say that even though the Good Neighbor Policy had yet to be invented, Canada and the U. S. had begun speaking this geopolitical prose in the early years of the 20th century, a time when many North Americans were regarding the bilateral relationship as representing something “specia [...] It is probably wisest to conclude that the two security communities arose more or less simultaneously, and did so independently of each other during the interwar period (by which time both sets would discontinue the non good-neighbourly practice of drafting war plans against the other member of the dyad).24 The second noteworthy feature of the Canada-U. [...] Significantly, the Kingston dispensation implies a level of reciprocal obligation that exceeds those that define either a security community or an alliance; for in the case of the former, the obligation is that one does not make or threaten armed conflict against one’s neighbour, while in the case of the latter (if NATO’s article 5 is taken as a guide) the obligation extends to treating armed atta [...] Rather, the opposite has occurred: we have seen the ‘re-borderization’ of the U. S. …”39 But if it has been the U. S. that has been “bordering up” in the physical sense of girding its northern and southern frontiers, it should not be assumed that the neighbours have been “de-bordering” from the point of view of identity.