Comment by Maxatar
14 hours ago
>It's condescending at best and exemplifies why we feel increasingly distant from the US.
As a Canadian, why would it be condescending to suggest that at some point in the distant past, Canada and the U.S. could have been a single country had history played out slightly differently? There is nothing offensive about it, if anything the fact that it's a claim about a historical matter only highlights how the two countries have evolved separately and independently.
Furthermore your other points are kind of bizzare. Spain and Portugal could absolutely have been a single country, and in fact they were under the Iberian Union. There are numerous other instances where the two countries came close to unifying.
The historical possibility of a unified Belgium and the Netherlands is even stronger since those two countries had been unified twice.
Germany and Switzerland however is a long shot, but at any rate I don't think anyone from Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain or Portugal would take offense or find it condescending that some historical event could have gone differently and reshaped all of Europe... taking offense to that suggestion as a Canadian, even during these times seems overly insecure and I don't think it's a sentiment shared by most of us.
Although I don't deny it could've happened, Spain and Portugal were different kingdoms during the Iberian Union (Philip II of Spain was known as Philip I of Portugal.)
It's condescending to describe it as a quirk, in the sense that it's no more a quirk than anything else in history. In the current climate where this sort of rhetoric has been publicly and visibly used by Russia to justify their invasion of Ukraine, and by the PRC to justify their ongoing pressure campaigns against the ROC, I also don't take this kind of wording at face value.
Wars were fought. People died, generations were involved in discourse about national identity and where borders should be drawn.
The US and Canada were both at one point British properties, so by some definitions, we also used to be unified. Then we weren't.
Is it insecure? Maybe. The reality is that in a shooting war, we wouldn't last very long against the US, in all likelihood. Under these conditions, the least I can do is to push back against rhetoric that undermines our legitimacy as our own country.