Anschluss, Schulterschluss or Concrete Internationalism?
In these turbulent and rapidly shifting times, we often search for quick answers. “How to respond to Trump 2.0?” is a question that calls for an immediate response here in Canada. This question harbors other long-standing questions. What is Canada’s place in the world? How does Canada relate to the USA? How should left and emancipatory voices in English Canada, Québec, and Indigenous nations position themselves in the world as well as in relationship to the US?
To begin, we must also ask: what is Trump 2.0? It is far more than a vengeful new US administration. The various components of Trump 2.0: (1) embody the contradictions of US imperialism that are much deeper than Trump himself; (2) name the Trump regime’s project to bring these contradictions to the first ring of allies of the US empire (‘America First’); (3) move fast to establish a post-liberal-democratic form of rule at home (‘Project 2025’); and (4) consolidate an international alliance of the far right and neo-fascism. Needless to say, Trump’s interventions are riddled with tensions.
Anschlussor or Schulterschluss?
How have Canadian voices responded to Trump’s early threats to impose tariffs, annex the country, and claim its resources? Two perspectives have emerged. The first we could call Anschluss (in polemical analogy to Austria’s submissive incorporation into the German Reich in 1938). We are talking white supremacists that are torn between Canadian and US imperial nationalism, their representatives among ruling personnel (right populists from Danielle Smith to Pierre Poilievre), and neoliberal voices that favour an economic union with the US. Combined, these voices not only refuse or hesitate to push back against Trump’s tariffs. They see promise in Trump’s threat to annex Canada, an opportunity to boost their projects, be they corporate, libertarian, regionalist (Albertan or Western), conspiratorial, patriarchal, anti-trans, or ethno-nationalist.
The second perspective we could call Schulterschluss (German for corporatist projects to “stand shoulder to shoulder” across partisan distinctions, class lines, and other social divides). This project is carried by the Doug Ford wing of the Conservatives (Ford’s big daddy stance he already took during the Covid pandemic to moderate his avowed Trumpist leanings) and the candidates that ran for the leadership of the Liberal party. These folks are willing to accommodate Trump on many matters (including border control, migration, and military spending) but also invite us to join a united Canadian response to Trump’s tariff and annexation threats. They want to roll labour, immigrants, and Indigenous peoples into this response as willing subordinates. Some are willing to do so. Unifor local 444 agreed to host Ford on the first day of his Ontario election campaign in late January 2025.
Also, at the end of January, the Pledge for Canada offered a left-liberal version of the Schulterschluss. Looking at the initial signatories, the Pledge proposes an alliance of NDPers, Liberals, labour leaders, Indigenous voices, environmentalists, artists, and individuals with various ruling-class connections, past or present. Explicitly cross-partisan, the Pledge invites us to join hands under the flag and align our vision with the well-worn nationalist iconography of the Canadian North, in this case the Rockies.
Signatories of the Pledge have made explicit what is assumed in the text: the cross-class character of the project against Trump. A crucial example: Unifor and the Canadian national office of the international Steelworkers Union have joined various business interests on the Canada-US Trade Council (CUSTC), which formed on January 10 to respond to Trump’s tariff threats (see the statement on the site of the Business Council of Canada (BCC)). The BCC is today’s name for the Business Council on National Issues (BCNI), which was created by big business in 1976 to push for the neoliberalization of the country, including the free trade agreements with the US and Mexico.
Both Anschluss and Schulterschluss are nationalist. They translate material realities (the Canadian nation-state and national histories of political struggle) into an ‘ism: a doctrine elevating the nation above all other questions and a will to turn concrete realities shaping people’s lives into an abstract unity, an imagined community, or a mystification decked out with flags, anthems, borders, police forces, schoolbooks, museums, and other symbols and state institutions. Each of our two nationalisms subsumes under the English Canadian maple leaf two other national questions, the Québec question and many Indigenous national questions.
Anschluss nationalism is symbolized by the far right “freedom convoy” participant who flies the Canadian and the US flag together. It integrates Canadian nationalism with Trumpism and associated wings of the US far right. In turn, the Schulterschluss nationalism is a new version of the nationalism that defined the anti-free trade campaigns of the 80s and 90s, when many Liberals and NDPers proposed that (vital and legitimate) opposition to free trade must also be nationalist. Ironically, advocates for a Schulterschluss now defend free trade as being in the national interest. They react to Trump’s aggression but do not question the ways in which Canada is allied to the US as an active (but not autonomous) imperialist state, also through free-trade architectures.
Delinking
The Trump administration’s shock-and-awe unilateralism has also provoked reactions by the English Canadian left beyond the NDP. One such response is the suggestion to “delink” from the US to address Canada’s “dependency” on its neighbour to the South. The interventions by Sam Gindin on February 3 and March 11 and Harry Glasbeek on February 21 are a nod to Samir Amin, who wrote much about both dependency and delinking, albeit from the vantage point of the Third World, not Euro-America. More directly, they return to debates about the character of the Canadian state. These have defined critiques of political economy here since the late 1960s.
In this latter tradition, Gindin and Glasbeek are well known for refusing to neglect questions of class and state when analyzing the asymmetrical relationship between US and Canadian capitalism. In the first generation of Canadian political economy, this relationship had often been analyzed as an unequal trading relationship between national economies. Gindin and Glasbeek, however, stand on the shoulders of Leo Panitch’s interventions in the 1970s. They underline how pointless it is to expect the Canadian bourgeoisie to defend the integrity of the Canadian state (let alone working class and oppressed groups in Canada) against US interests. Their point is that this bourgeoisie developed in the 20th century by appropriating the imperative of US-led imperial expansion for its own purposes instead of developing autonomous strategies of accumulation and military expansion.
This insight is helpful when observing how Canadian business lobbies and party leaders have responded to Trump’s tariff threats by making immediate concessions or using Trump to advance their own agendas (to boost profits by lowering taxes and advancing deregulation under the guise of tackling “inter-provincial trade barriers.”) In this context, it makes sense to argue, as Gindin and Glasbeek do, that projects for genuine, economic independence can only come from the left and working-class organizations, and that, in turn, no serious domestic socialist planning and development strategy is possible without such independence. André Frappier argued similarly from his Québec vantage point: “no sector of [Canadian] capital will come to the rescue of democracy.” These arguments are counterpoints to the cross-partisan and cross-class “Pledge for Canada.” And they help us hypothesize that the alliances between capital and labour that came together in the Pledge won’t last under the adjustment pressures exercised by capitalist interests, big or small.
Gindin’s and Glasbeek’s short proposals intervene as key moments (and key texts) of English Canadian left nationalism from the 1960s to the Free Trade Debates in 1980s, rediscovered and recirculated, for example, on the web pages of Canadian Dimension magazine. Now, in my view, Gindin’s and Glasbeek’s interventions need not take a nationalist form. In this regard, Marcel Nelson’s longer piece (also in Canadian Dimension, on February 2) draws a useful distinction between nationalism and popular-democratic or national-popular projects (which could include socialist delinking strategies).
The distinction between nationalism and national-popular projects is vital. We owe it to crucial Marxist and anti-imperialist traditions (including Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, Frantz Fanon, and Stuart Hall). From these traditions, we also know, however, that left national-popular projects can offer alternatives to nationalism only if they are components within larger internationalist strategies. That was of course, Samir Amin’s own take: consider the national question – the question of national liberation in the Third World – as a conduit to building a new post-imperial and poly-centric socialist world. In this view, delinking is a starting point, not the end goal. It does not mean turning inward but rather opening up, dialectically, to a new international perspective within which the national question changes meaning and complexion.
In an earlier Euro-American conjuncture, Henri Lefebvre suggested a similar dialectical perspective on national and international questions. In 1937, he proposed that an internationalist response to fascism must be concrete instead of flipping back and forth between ultra-left internationalism and left nationalism (as the Moscow-centred Communist International and its national affiliates, including the French Communist Party (PCF), did between the late 1920s and the late 1930s). A concrete internationalism considers the national question as a conduit, a point of transformation, not an end goal. It avoids both nationalist cul-de-sacs and abstract internationalisms that ignore or sidestep instead of tackling the material weight of the nation state and the national scale of political struggle. Internationalism remains the only adequate perspective, but there are no short cuts to get there.
Concrete Internationalism
Given Trump’s many persistent threats and the profound inadequacies of domestic bourgeois responses to these threats, a socialist project of de-linking makes intuitive sense. It suggests that we build an ecological-economic alternative to respond to the layoffs and plant closures Trumpism might generate. But, as ambitious as such a project is, it remains insufficient and harbours dangers unless is embedded, qualified, or redefined by a concrete internationalist perspective. Here is why:
- While nationalism and national-popular projects can be distinguished conceptually and strategically, this distinction is more difficult to uphold in practice. The history of the English-Canadian left illustrates this problem clearly. Embedding left strategies aimed at the national scale within a wider internationalist horizon is essential to prevent projects for national economic independence from turning inward. It is also essential to avoid the tendency of all nationalisms (not only ethno-nationalisms) to demote emancipatory social questions of class, gender, and race, to treat them as afterthoughts or nuisances relative to the national question understood as an emotionally loaded abstraction, as myth or imaginary.
- In the Canadian context, an internationalist approach reminds us that the three national questions that define this part of the continent are, in fact, inter-national in character. We cannot assume that the Québec question and the many Indigenous national questions can be rolled into a singular pan-Canadian question (even though that for them, too, international Trumpism is a threat as several nations in treaty 6 and 8 territories underlined recently). Glen Coulthard reminds us that the relationship between the Canadian settler state and Indigenous peoples is a colonial relation. It can only be challenged by establishing (and re-affirming) nation-to-nation relations between treaty peoples. Without such relations, the cost of adjusting to Trump’s aggressions and a possible new world order will be born first by Indigenous peoples as the state and capital intensify resource extraction. Ghislain Picard just made this point in relationship to Québec and Labrador.
- An internationalist approach explores all aspects of Canada’s relationship to the world, not only our relationship to the USA. As Todd Gordon, Tyler Shipley, Paul Kellogg, Jerome Klassen, Jeffrey Webber, and Greg Albo have pointed out, Canada has played a secondary but active role in organizing the political, military, and economic dimensions of the US-centred imperial world in the 20th century. In this context, Canadian capitalism has benefited from its own imperialist relations to the global South, notably from investment in mining and banking. Clearly, ‘delinking’ in Canada cannot mean the same as it might in Haiti, Chile, or the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Beyond deconstructing economic ties to the primary imperial power, the US, it must also mean undoing the imperial entanglements that connect us to the global South (including Haiti, Chile, and the Congo).
- Internationalism alerts us that left national projects are viable only if they are part of international political strategies, which may range from exchanging information to developing common forms of action. As commentators have pointed out in the last few weeks (in the pages of Spring and Midnight Sun magazines, for example), the threats that emanate from the Trump administration and its allies elsewhere affect workers negatively in many places, including in other parts of North America. Expanding linkages between English-Canadian and Québecois movements and popular organizations in Mexico and the USA in order to confront interconnected ruling classes in each country is thus not only an ethical imperative. It is also in the material interests of anyone engaged in emancipatory struggles from below at national or sub-national scales.
- The ‘ground’ upon which left projects develop in Canada is itself internationalized. Working classes and oppressed groups here are composed of people from all over the world; the linkages they may have to emancipatory struggles elsewhere are precious sources of strength for domestic political organizing. In turn, Indigenous nations on Turtle Island do not fit into the bordered territories of nation states, as Audra Simpson has pointed out. In fact, settler-colonial borders frequently cross Indigenous jurisdiction artificially and illegitimately. Both cases tell us that internationalism need not always mean linking up with struggles “elsewhere”. Whether in Toronto or Rouyn-Noranda (QU), Vancouver or Brooks (AB), internationalism includes building international linkages locally, often against the racialized segmentations and hierarchies that obstruct these linkages.
- Insofar as Trump’s threat is a far-right threat (laced with distinct neo-fascist elements), we can build upon the most promising traditions of left anti-fascism. Converging to confront Franco in Spain, Mussolini in Ethiopia, and Pinochet in Chile, these traditions have insisted that the far right is an international force that cannot be countered simply by acting at the national scale (let alone by flirting with nationalism). They remind us that anti-fascism must be an internationalism. We know that Trump is part of a tension-ridden far-right constellation that reaches from Italy, Hungary, and Israel to Russia, Turkey and India. It is a constellation that has many adherents in Canada. Only an international counter-constellation of left and anti-fascist mobilizations will have a chance to win the existential struggle against the forces that Trump embodies here and elsewhere.
- Anti-fascist internationalisms articulated to anti-colonial, anti-racist, and feminist traditions alert us to key aspects of anti-fascist struggle that national(ist) perspectives will minimize or ignore: the fact that wars against trans and queer people, migrants, racialized minorities, and Indigenous people are not sideshows. They are central to the populist and neo-fascist far right today. Comparative differences notwithstanding, they reverberate quickly across borders. Trump’s so-called war against ‘DEI’ (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) has intensified here too. As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor pointed out in the US context, at stake in this war are not only (or even primarily) actual institutional DEI initiatives but the Indigenous, Black, queer, and feminist struggles to which these initiatives responded (in limited and flawed ways). No class-based strategy against the far right will succeed without defeating the gender and race wars fought by the far right and its allies.
- Internationalist perspectives must also ask if there are strategic alternatives to socialist projects that prioritize national (or, rather, tri-national) economic-ecological development (call them delinking or otherwise). Beyond developing local and global networks of solidarity, how can one advance an international left strategy to build economic and ecological alternatives and link these to Québec left independence projects and Indigenous-led initiatives to confront climate change? For example, how could one develop a continental left project across the two national borders that divide Mexico, the US, and Canada and cut across numerous Indigenous territories? And how would such a project connect to struggles that continue to focus on the various scales of each nation-state, to defend themselves or advance this or that emancipatory agenda in the short- and mid-term?
- These are difficult times for internationalists. The sequence of struggles marked by the alter-globalization movement, the world social fora, and the movement of the squares (from Tunis to Athens by way of the ‘occupy’ movements in North America) is over. Another internationlist moment, Black Lives Matter, has also passed. However, internationalism is not dead. In a recent interview, Mostafa Henaway insists that we can still learn from earlier global movement cycles to reinvent internationally coordinated, cross-border forms of action with local traction. Many Canada-based organizations remain internationally connected, from labour unions to Indigenous movement networks. In fact, since late 2023, the mass movement in support of Palestinians in Gaza and beyond has been a remarkable case of global solidarity politics. Its continued presence also helps us understand the brutality of the current far-right reaction, Trumpism included. It must be a strategic reference point for any contemporary internationalist project. •
