ABSTRACT
We begin this final chapter with Winston churchill’s vision, not because the vision has been realized over the past half century, but because churchill recognized something very durable and promising about the borderlands culture between the United States and canada. To a very great extent, respect and obligation remain as core values in the borderlands culture despite the changes at the border and in the two countries since churchill shared his vision at the brink of the Second World War. respect was earned over centuries in the borderlands because interactions and transactions across the border and at the frontier, depended substantially and ultimately on good will between neighbors often isolated and then divided by an international boundary. obligations between individuals and groups across the border bound the neighbors in agreement with regard to just about every aspect of exchange in the borderlands. The values of respect and obligation are found at the heart of border communities and border alliances, and the cross-border regions which evolve through community and alliance. In the process of globalization, as national contexts and international relationships become redefined, it is the borderlands culture that ultimately sustains linkages, assures continuity and maintains prosperity. The new relationships between nation-states and global processes are manifested in the borderlands, and in this sense borderlands as well as “world” cities are vanguard landscapes of globalization, but these borderlands also retain and exhibit the connections forged between states and localities across the border.2 Border culture is the sinew in time and space between bounded geographies.
