ABSTRACT
The core of the argument presented in this chapter focuses on economic integration, the convergence of socio-cultural values, the formation of border-spanning institutions and the emergence of policy mechanisms that lead to policy parallelism. It reviews four central issues of economic and political integration: the economic integration of North America, the convergence of social and cultural values, the institutional development across the 49th parallel and the emergence of mechanisms of policy parallelism. The chapter suggests that a multitude of institutional networks and linkages cohere with processes that Deutsch identified as transactional, that is, those in which economic integration leads to political integration but a North American form of political integration. It has drawn on the findings from the research on the Canadian-US border led by Policy Research Initiative (PRI) since 2004 and on the recent PRI survey of Canadian-US leaders to show that the emergence of cross-border regions is an indicator of economic and political integration.
