Christina Gabriel

The hypermobile, the mobile, and the rest: Patterns of inclusion and exclusion in an emerging North American migration regime

Abstract While the North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA), in contrast with the European Union, contains only limited provisions on labour mobility, an informal labour mobility regime is emerging in North America. This article evaluates ways in which NAFTA entrenches patterns of inequality within the North American region by rendering some groups of people more mobile than others. In particular, we focus on the unequal treatment of workers treated as “high-skilled” in contrast to those labelled “low-skilled.” This dichotomization means that Mexicans (even “high-skilled” Mexicans) receive unequal access to the North American labour market. We argue, therefore, that the newly configured economic space is not characterized by a single migration model but rather is framed by differing and intersecting circuits of labour migration that establish new patterns of inclusion and exclusion.

Of Borders and Business: Canadian Corporate Proposals for North American "Deep Integration"

One of the most important outcomes of 11 September 2001 is the new visibility of national borders and a renewed emphasis on border security. Various business leaders, think tanks, and government representatives in Canada have responded to US demands for greater border security by calling for the elimination or reinvention of the Canada-US border. Some of the more important business groups involved are the Canadian Council of Chief Executives (CCCE, formerly the Business Council on National Issues, BCNI), the Coalition for Secure and Trade-Efficient Borders, and businessoriented think tanks such as the C. D. Howe Institute and the Conference Board of Canada.

Managing trade engagements? Mapping the contours of state feminism and women's political activism

This article examines the impact on Canadian trade policy of the failure of official Canadian commitments to adopt gender equity policies. This failure must be understood within the context of broader restructuring of the Canadian state and state‐society relations. As Jane Jenson and Susan Phillips have argued, the Canadian “citizenship regime” has undergone dramatic changes in recent years. Neo‐liberal globalization destabilizes pre‐existing divisions between the national and the international, and puts strain on domestic practices of citizenship and representation. In particular, the article focuses on two related and emerging phenomena. First, international gender commitments, such as those at the Beijing meeting, seem to produce a widening of political space for a gender inclusive polity, although, simultaneously, the commitment to gender‐based analysis coincided with the Canadian states retreat from materially supporting and empowering grassroots womens groups. Second, womens policy machinery, such as Status of Women Canada, and feminist bureaucrats, “femocrats”, have identified international trade as a key policy priority. However, this identification takes place at the margins of the liberal democratic state and under a set of structural constraints. As a result, attempts to promote a gender analysis of trade issues encounter the economic rationalism promulgated by the Department of Finance, and Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade. The logic of economic rationalism is not gender sensitive. This has significant implications for the relationship between womens grassroots activism and those women pushing a feminist agenda within the state under the terms of economic globalization.

Multiculturalism with in a bilingual framework: language, race, and belonging in Canada

(partly, perhaps, because of the general lack of interest from anthropologists), the chapter on Iraq stands out as especially deserving of attention. The political scientist Brendan O’ Neill, who advised the regional Kurdish Government in the early 2000s, describes the preconditions for a functioning Iraqi state, with a focus on constitutional mechanisms precluding stalemate and the tyranny of the largest group. Alas, as subsequent events have demonstrated, constitutions are of limited value in the face of massive and indiscriminate violence. More generally, it might be pointed out that most Iraqis (like most Afghanis) tend to identify politically along extended kinship lines, and that a multiethnic Iraqi nation would therefore look very different from a multiethnic European nation based on individualism and meritocracy. Writing academic book chapters about currently unfolding affairs is a risky business. The conference on which this book is based took place in 2007, and it is not only the chapter on Iraq that now has mainly historical interest; the chapter on Scotland has also been superseded by more recent developments (and my comments will also be obsolete by the time this review sees print). At the same time, the analysis in Michael Keating’s chapter on Scotland remains valuable, as is his conclusion: the rift within the UK is not a result of clashing values or ethnic hatred, but rather concerns disagreement over the best institutional framework for the realisation of shared values. The second part of this book takes on normative questions concerning democracy, dual (or multiple) citizenship, sovereignty, multiculturalism and identity. In spite of a spirited defence of cosmopolitan values (by Cillian McBride) and a defence of multicultural nationhood (Catherine Frost), a main message from this part – and from the book as a whole – is that the nation-state remains not only the main source of political power, but also a main guarantor of democracy. As John Hutchinson shows in his chapter on violence, there is no necessary link between nationalism and violence; and as John McGarry and Brendan O’Leary argue, consociational models in plural societies may be preferable to civic integrationism, since the former recognise the significance of communal group membership. In spite of the question mark, the title of this collection – After the Nation? – has a postnationalist ring to it. However, the book itself conveys almost exactly the opposite message. Although accelerated change, mobility, hybridity, identity politics from below and supranational politics from above put pressure on the nation-state, it remains resilient across the world; surprisingly so, not least considering the great diversity in scale, culture and composition among the world’s nation-states (from Dominica to China, from Indonesia to Canada). There was a time, in the 1990s, when many theorists of nationalism and group identity assumed that future identities would be more situational, flexible and ambiguous than the clunky, essentialist and potentially destructive group identities of an earlier modernity. This largely optimistic view is all but gone, as witnessed in this excellent and timely book, where the authors seem to agree that essentialist group identities are here to stay, and that states will not voluntarily relinquish their power for the benefit of a higher (global) good. The question is not really about what the world will look like after the nation, but rather what kind of nations can be usefully reconciled with the world as we now know it.