This article examines the United States-Canadian defense issue area from a transnational and transgovernmental perspective, and attempts to develop conceptually the transgovernmental dimension through empirical application. The first part delineates those factors that encourage transnational and transgovernmental activity in the defense issue area. The second part considers pure intergovernmental transactions, referring to United States-Canadian dealings in which there is no transnational or transgovernmental activity. Because we know so little about how these dealings occur, this section examines pure intergovernmental transactions as a three-stage issue flow: preprocess, process, and postprocess. The third section identifies and examines the dynamics of mixed transactions, referring to intergovernmental flows having transnational or transgovernmental activity that does not essentially alter the outcomes of the flows. The fourth part identifies transformative transactions, referring to intergovernmental flows that become transnational or transgovernmental flows (or the reverse) through the involvement of new actors that significantly alter the outcomes of the flows. In summation, the fifth section considers those factors militating against transnational and transgovernmental activity in the defense area.

The concept of a transnational system applies well to a study of labor in North America. For one thing, the chief characteristics of the labor market and of the institutions, procedures, and practices of labor relations are broadly similar in Canada and the United States as compared with other parts of the world. Although such similarities are not alone sufficient to suggest a system, there is also a persistent structure of relationships and interactions in labor matters extending across the boundary between the two countries. American investment in Canada and the so-called international unions are at the heart of this structure of relationships. Other segments of labor, whether organized in trade unions or unorganized, are connected with the heart of this transnational system through the continental flow of economic transactions.

In this essay I suggest a newcomer to the list of types of transnational relationship discussed in this volume. This is the relationship that arises from the use of a common-property natural environment. These relations are not new, of course, and have led to conflict and accommodations at various levels for centuries, as Innis's work on the codfisheries testifies. As world population grows and technology broadens, both demand and capacity to exploit these international common property resources in ways that will harm other users have also increased. Yet international law has not been able to devise rights of tenure for international property as efficient as those for, say, agricultural land. This resulting lack of suitable concepts of ownership (or sovereignty) has, therefore, been one source of the loss of control by central governments that is frequently mentioned in the transnational relations literature.

Although ours is an age of transnational economic and political forces, itis even more an age of intense and intensifying nationalism. In fact, taken as a whole, the twentieth century has been a time of political fragmentation and disintegration. Much of the handiwork of political integration that characterized the nineteenth century has been undone and much else is under severe strain. The empires and multiethnic states that formerly provided order and unity over much of the globe have been destroyed. Once stable societies like Belgium, Canada, and the United States have become subject to severe internal strain. Yet despite the prevalence of this phenomenon, very few political scientists have studied from a systematic perspective the process of political disintegration.

Preceding essays have documented the dramatic growth of transnational relations between Canadians and Americans and have emphasized the development of new issue areas—private, local, regional, and national—between the two countries. As these relations expand in scope, complexity, and occasionally conflict, we would expect to see a corresponding growth in Canadian-American institutions to provide mechanisms for policy coordination, bargaining, and conflict resolution. The increase in formal governmental institutions between Ottawa and Washington has indeed been notable, but we must not conclude that these institutions constitute the core of the intergovernmental relationship. The informal and formal communications between federal government bureaucracies and between officials of the states and provinces are no less important; hence, the essay will focus not only on the bilateral institutions but also on the phenomenon that Nye and Keohane have called transgovernmental relations, that is, the non institutionalized relationships between subunits of governments and the activities they undertake that remain reasonably immune from central control (see their preceding essay in this volume).

Traditionally relations between nations, including Canada and the United States, have been analyzed in terms of the interaction between the executive branches of the two governments. This approach used to reflect relatively accurately the actual state of affairs. It is still broadly consistent with the constitutional allocation of powers, particularly in Canada. While the president of the United States must seek congressional action in order to declare war and Senate action to ratify treaties and to confirm ambassadorial appointments, these powers in Canada fall within the prerogatives of the crown, and constitutionally no parliamentary approval for decisions by the executive branch in any of these areas is required.

For a majority of Québécois whose mother tongue is French, transnational relations with the United States are like palm trees. They are known to exist elsewhere but are rarely talked about and much less seen. This apparent neglect, which contrasts markedly with the almost frantic attention now accorded to Canadian-American relations in anglophone Canada, does not imply that Québécois are unaware of the economic, cultural, and political proximity of the United States or that significant transactions across the Québec-American border do not take place. They do occur, but they are not always readily apparent.

Canadian-American relations have tended to bore statesmen and scholars who long to be where the action is. According to one scholar, “study of Canadian-American relations tells one almost nothing about the big problems facing the world,” while in a classic essay Arnold Wolfers used the unguarded border as an example of “indifference to power.” If we view world politics with “realist” assumptions that unified states are the only actors, force is the major source of power, and solving the military security dilemma is their overwhelming objective, then Canadian-American relations are indeed dull.

Without a counterpart for any other country there is in the United States government a deputy assistant secretary of state for Canadian affairs, a post created in December 1972. This, like the lower-level Office of Canadian Affairs established in 1965, was an institutional recognition of the increasing importance of Canadian-American relations. Were these offices also harbingers of increased state-centric attention to relations between the two countries, which until then had been subject primarily to transnational and transgovernmental management of affairs? Or were they rather recognition that in addition to the uniquely complex web of transborder relationships outside of or at levels below those dealt with by high political authorities, state-centric relations were increasing because of the importance of and increase in unofficial and bureaucratic transactions?