 |  Canada
These entries are from very early in my trip. I had a lot of time by myself, I hadnīt been writing in a while, and editing was very difficult since I was writing directly into a Visor with a keyboard. Anyway, most of this is probably more interesting to me than to anyone else, but some of the Canadian history stuff does go to the heart of the one of the questions that Iīve been interested in.
One of the things I found about Asia and the Middle East is that nations generally exist along national boundaries (and where they donīt there is usually a war going on, for example, the Kurds.) People in the America or Europe may not be aware of the history, but for example in Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam there is hundreds of years of pre-Colonial history that shapes their relationship with each other as much as the French occupation did. The lines on the map are usually drawn along either physical, religious, ethnic or language boundaries. This is notably not true in the Americas (or in Africa, but that is another ugly story.) In Eurasia, countries often appear like rocks, formed over time by many kinds of stress, compression, erosion. Wars, internal conflict, trade, migration, conversion and other forces gradually solidify these boundaries. Some years ago, I was surprised to learn that the boundary between Iran and the Arab nations Iraq and Kuwait is the same as nearly 2000 years earlier between Babylon and Persia. (The exception to being Poland, which seems to wind up somewhere new every 50 years.)
Nations in the "New World", on the other hand, seem more like ready poured concrete. America and England settled on a boundary near Minnesota at a parallel and ran it straight out to the west coast, and those to the north are Canadian, and those south America. This actually cuts across geographical lines, and the regions that would seem to create identity are really north-south - New England and the Maritimes, the Midwest and Ontario and Manitoba, Sasketchewan and the Dakotas, the Montana and Alberta, and the Pacific northwest. I'm not saying that Canada and America don't have different and strong identities, only that there is not as much history behind those differences and they are continuing to evolve.
America and Canada are only one example of this - Latin America started out as larger entities, such as the Central America States, or Gran Colombia. In most cases they splintered soon after independence. Iīm curious about how deep the differences go, and if theyīll survive the erosive effects of globalization when there are language and religious ties that are in common. In the case of the U.S. and Canada, I'd guess that they will, because there are more subtle cultural character differences that might be more profound that the language differences between some of the European Union countries.
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