“You Cannot Trade What Is Not Yours”: Indigenous Governance and the NAFTA Negotiations

ABSTRACT

Contemporary International Relations scholars and practitioners generally recognize that substate governments affect the state’s international affairs; however, there is less acceptance of Indigenous governments as global actors that meaningfully impact the state. After all, the expectation would be that central governments, with considerably more resources and power, would be unlikely to face a challenge from an Indigenous government. However, Indigenous governments are negotiating new relationships with foreign and domestic governments, forming economic development corporations, hiring private firms to raise capital, funding trade missions, and even opening offices in key international locales such as Beijing to engage in trade promotion and push investment opportunities in projects such as resource extraction. Applying paradiplomacy theory, which argues that International Relations cannot be properly explained absent the global affairs of substate governments, this article analyzes the effect of Indigenous peoples and governance in the Canada–US trade relationship. It specifically considers how Indigenous engagement in the global economy affects the bilateral trade regime, foreign direct investment, and cross-border trade. The driver for these analysis centers on demands for the inclusion of a so-called “Indigenous chapter” in the North American Free Trade Agreement renegotiations in 2017 and 2018.     

Equality of Women's Economic Status? A Major Bone of Contention in the International Gender Politics Emerging During the Interwar Period*

This study brings together the often disparate scholarship on the League of Nations and the ILO. It follows the interactions between the League, women internationalists, and the ILO, which evolved around the question of woman-specific labor legislation and the equality of women's status. These interactions resulted in a broadening mandate of international gender policies while deepening the institutional and legal distinction between women's ‘political and civil’ as opposed to their ‘economic’ status. The ILO insisted on certain forms of women-specific labor regulation as a means of conjoining progressive gender and class politics, and was anxious to ensure its competence in all matters concerning women's economic status. The gender equality doctrine gaining ground in the League was rooted in a liberal-feminist paradigm which rejected the association of gender politics with such class concerns, and indeed aimed to force back the ILO's politics of gender-specific international labor standards. As a result of the widening divide between the women's policies of the League and the ILO, the international networks of labor women reduced their engagement with women's activism at the League. The developments of the 1930s deepened the tension between liberal feminism and feminisms engaging with class inequalities, and would have problematic long-term consequences for international gender politics.     

Fiasco: The Anglo-Franco-Soviet Alliance That Never Was and the Unpublished British White Paper, 1939–1940

This article is about the Anglo-Franco-Soviet negotiations in 1939 for an alliance against Nazi Germany and about how the British government later tried to represent those negotiations to public opinion. The first part of the essay presents the Soviet point of view on the negotiations and how the British and French governments, though mainly the British, reacted to Soviet alliance proposals. It is a fresh representation of the Soviet perspective from published and unpublished Russian language sources.

The second part of the essay focuses on how the British sought to represent the abortive negotiations through a white paper, placing the blame for failure on the Soviet Union. France opposed publication because, however carefully prepared, the white paper showed that the Soviet side had made serious alliance proposals with precise, reciprocal undertakings which the British government was reticent to entertain. The French were all the more annoyed because the white paper omitted to underline that they had been more receptive to Soviet proposals.

The trilingual, multi-archival evidence presented in the first part of the essay effectively supports the French perception of the white paper and more generally of the failed tripartite negotiations.     

‘Mucho malo for fascisti’: Languages and Transnational Soldiers in the Spanish Civil War

This article explores the linguistic experiences of transnational soldiers, using the Spanish Civil War as a case study. It argues that communication difficulties provoked by linguistic diversity within the Republican war effort and particularly within the International Brigades, caused the high command to move from a utopian, internationalist policy to a more pragmatic approach. The article evaluates the role played by language intermediaries in this evolving policy and in the wider Republican war effort. Finally, it argues that soldiers grassroots experiences of language contact forged new linguistic forms which underlined a strong sense of shared purpose and identity.     

Canada and the United States—Trading Partners and Transfer Pricing Opponents?

Given the significant trading relationships between Canada and the United States, their transnational corporations and their tax authorities share more than a border. However, differences in transfer pricing regulations, tax rates, and regulatory enforcement philosophies have exacerbated many existing risks, and created new risks for executives in these corporations. These risks must be managed proactively, yet attempts at risk management are often incompatible with one tax authority or the other. Assuming that an operational transfer pricing framework is in place, there are several proactive strategies available to mitigate transfer pricing risk and potentially satisfy both tax authorities. An operational framework and proactive strategies, including documentation and advance pricing agreements, are discussed from the Canadian and US perspective, including expert interviews.     

Food on the Borderlands: Josie Underwood’s Civil War Diary and the Kentucky Home Front, 1860–1862

The diary of Johanna Louisa ‘Josie’ Underwood (1840–1923), the daughter of Kentucky lawyer, politician and plantation owner Warner Underwood, portrays what happened to many elite households in Kentucky during the American Civil War (1861–1865), especially with its depiction of food as a scarce, and thus increasingly valuable, resource. Spanning the first two years of the conflict, Josie’s diary is essentially a war narrative written by a well-educated, articulate, outspoken, Unionist woman from a slave-owning family who was barely out of her teens when the fighting began. As she reveals through her entries, her state and in particular her hometown of Bowling Green, was a ‘hotbed of political and military action’, and at the centre of this ‘hotbed’ of activity was food. Often historians think about wartime hunger as a function of the later years of the war, but as Josie’s diary elucidates, food scarcity was an immediate and constant issue. Consequently, food became an important commodity in the borderlands during the war, especially in occupied cities like Bowling Green, where it was a vital, yet elusive, military and civilian resource which, when accessed and controlled, functioned as social currency and a political symbol of power, especially for women.