xNorth America
"Be astonished, O ye heavens, at this, and be horribly afraid."
Recovery (1982 to present)
These nuclear exchanges of the Third World War devastated North America. To be sure, the damage was not uniform -- there were no blasts in Mexico, Central America, or the Caribbean outside of the bombing of the isolated Isle of Pines' space-launch facilities. The Canadian heartland also escaped destruction, though British Columbia on the Pacific Ocean and Nova Scotia on the Atlantic Ocean were depopulated (the former by nuclear weapons, the latter by chemical depopulants) in an effort to deny the United States use of the port facilities of either province. The United States was, of course, by far the worst-hit country in all of North America. Perhaps 90 million people (out of the United States' pre-War population of 150 million people) died by the 15th of September, as major cities like New York City, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Boston were utterly destroyed and smaller cities in the West and the Northeast were decimated. Owing to Siberian targeting priorities, Louisiana was untouched, while New Mexico and parts of the Deep South survived with only minimal damage. Although Appalachia, in the east-central United States, was targeted, the region was effectively protected by the prototype ABM networks installed in the mountains of West Virginia.
The twelve months following the end of the Third World War were marked by death and suffering on a continental scale. The decimation of the United States in the nuclear exchanges disrupted the anti-Changist opposition; the only major battle took place in northern Louisiana, as the Chang-loyalist Third Army was defeated by the combined forces of the Louisianais Garde nationale and the Congress-loyalist Fifth Army in the Battle of Natchitoches. Outside of favoured regions like Louisiana and Cuba, though, the United States' population was more concerned with mere survival -- radiation sickness and cancers killed millions of Americans in the harsh winter of 1982-1983, while the breakdown of the United States' foreign trade and the destruction of its domestic transportation system left almost 15 million Americans to starve to death. With spring's arrival, epidemic diseases like tuberculosis and influenza claimed a further three million War-weakened survivors.
Elsewhere in the continent famine and disease also killed huge numbers of people. The lowest casualty rate was in Yucatán, where effective food-distribution and medical systems limited the dead to a mere tenth of the population. (Conversely, inside the government-occupied provinces of Guatemala a ruthless army policy of stripping Mayan villagers of their meagre food supplies killed half of the population of their occupied territories.) The larger countries of Mexico and Canada were handicapped by their vast distances and large urban popualtions, but they also managed to limit the death toll from starvation and springtime epidemic diseases to a fifth of their surviving populations. The subsistence agriculture of the Central American republics and Santo Domingo, along with such Venezuelan and Costa Rican food aid as arrived in the barrios of Managua, Santo Domingo, and San Salvador, limited the dead to roughly a quarter of their pre-War populations, while Cuba and Louisiana not only fed their entire national populations but gave vital food aid to the Bahamas and Jamaica as well as to hordes of refugees that crossed into their country. Haïti, though, collapsed into Hobbesian anarchy, and in the midst of civil war, severe food shortages, and rampant disease, more than half of its population died by the summer of 1983. In all, of the roughly 290 million North Americans living before the War, perhaps half -- roughly 150 million people -- died.
By the summer of 1983, the post-War balance of power in North America had shifted decisively away from the former United States, towards its neighbours. Mexico, with almost fifty million inhabitants and the largest surviving industrial base in the continent, was now potentially the most powerful country in the continent. Similarly, Canada found itself considerably more powerful relative to the rest of the continent despite the destruction of its peripheral provinces. Too, the survival of the Hispanophone populations of North America outside of the United States and the decimation of the United States' Anglophones left Spanish, with 75 million first-language speakers in North America in the mid-1980's, the most commonly-spoken language in the continent, with only some 50 million first-language speakers of English, and 15 million first-language speakers of French and Haïtian Creole. Certainly Mexico, Canada, Cuba, and even Yucatán, at their post-War nadirs, were more unified and functional societies than the United States. The reorganization of North America to reflect these new rankings was inevitable.
One most dramatic change was the Yucatecan conquest of Guatemala by November of 1983. For all of Yucatán's wartime suffering the fact remained that Yucatán was far more functional a state than Guatemala, and that the vast majority of Guatemala's Maya supported the Yucatecan invasion. In a three-month-long offensive beginning in June, the Yucatecan army and Guatemalan partisans expelled Guatemalan military forces from the Guatemala Highlands, while the month-long battle of Guatemala City in October effectively destroyed the Guatemalan state. As Yucatán, weary but victorious, prepared to absorb Guatemala into itself, the elite First Army Corps of the Guatemalan Army fled the advancing Yucatecan army for Honduras. There, the Corps -- technically and organizationally far superior to Central American armed forces -- provided a military force that allowed a Salvadoran-Nicaraguan alliance to unite the Central American isthmus into the Central American Union. Poor but populous, the Central American Union was isolated both from its northern neighbours of Mexico and Yucatán and from its southern neighbours in South America owing to its regressive internal policies. Despite that, Nicaragua's control over the still-important Nicaragua Canal was enough to justify a pretense of ignorance of the worst barbarities of Central American domestic politics.
In 1983, the United States prepared for the Second American Civil War. Broadly speaking, Louisiana was an enthusiastic supporter of the claims of surviving Congresspersons -- led by John Hosperger -- to constitute a legitimate national government, while Cuba's self-proclaimed neutrality was decidedly biased to Hosperger's benefit. The situation would ultimately be resolved, though, in the continental United States. Broadly speaking, in the summer of 1983 military forces loyal to the Chang Administration controlled, from the Changists' Appalachian base, the United States east of the Mississippi and the Mexican-American border regions, while a motley assemblage of surviving military and National Guard units under the loose control of the Hosperger-led "Congressionals" predominated to the west of the Mississippi. To be sure, away from the frontlines inside Presidentialist and Congressional territories control was nominal at best; in practice, local control was left to whatever local government survived. (To be sure, though, local governments in the Congressional zones tended to be more sincere in their support for their ruling government than their counterparts living inPresidentialist zones. Indeed, Presidentialist garrisons in some remote areas never left their garrisons for fear of partisan or bandit attacks.) Once the Chang Administration's insincere peace offerings to the Congressionals in June and July of 1983 were rejected, combat began in earnest between Congressional and Changist, or Presidentialist, military units in Texas and the upper Midwest. There, the warfare could have continued indefinitely was it not for three foreign interventions.
The first encroachments upon the pre-War territory of the United States can be said to have begun with the Japanese Empire's occupation and annexation of the Hawai'ian islands in July of 1983, followed in September by the Japanese annexation of Alaska's Aleutian Peninsula, but only in March of 1984 did Japan take the first step towards carving a sphere of influence on the North American continent, as more than a million Fujianese refugees from south China were resettled in depopulated western Washington State. This new liberal Marxist state of New Fujian was intended to serve, among other things, as a vital base for Japanese influence in North America, and as a first line of defense against the United States' recovery and remilitarization. By this time, Mexico and Canada also became worried about the strength of Presidentialist forces along their borders and by the Chang Administration's gross mistreatment of ethnic Mexicans and French Canadians in the territories under its control. Secret negotiations between the Mexican and Canadian governments led directly to Mexico's Operacíon Norte and Canada's Opération Épinette. These two invasions, timed to begin simultaneously on the 15th of May, took advantage of intact Mexican and Canadian industries and military supplies to launch surprise attacks upon the overextended Presidentialist forces in their bases along the Mexican-American and Canadian-American borders.
Opération Épinette was a resounding success: By the end of 1984, Canadian forces had expelled Presidentialists from New England and the Midwest, and managed to establish a stable military occupation of most of the northern tier of the United States, from Minnesota through New England. Mexico's Operacíon Norte faced more problems thanks to the survival of the Presidentialist Third and Sixth Armies as functional military units, but by the end of 1984 the sheer numbers of Mexican attacks had broken down the Presidentialist and poured north over the former Mexican-American frontier to the acclaim of surviving Mexican-Americans. By the time that Mexico announced a unilateral ceasefire in March of 1985, Mexican forces were in occupation of New Mexico, Texas, California, Nevada, and even western Oregon. Although both Mexico and Canada came to administer their zones as part of their national territories, establishing state or provincial governments, encouraging the immigration of their nationals either to agricultural colonies or to rehabilitated cities like Los Angeles in Mexican Alta California and exploiting surviving industrial resources for Mexican or Canadian benefit, these twin invasions helped the Congressional cause immeasurably by depriving the Presidentialists of vital industrial resources and removing the possibility of a Presidentialist outflanking of the Congressionals.
President Chang's August 1984 Executive Order cancelling Presidential elections "until further notice" ignited the first major battles of the Second American Civil War. The Presidentialists still controlled their Appalachian heartland, with its functional industrial base, and exercised nominal control over the Deep South, Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana, while the Congressionals still controlled only the poor and depopulated lands west of the Mississippi. The resolution of the Missouri State Congress in late August that it recognized the Congressionals as the legitimate government of the United States and Hosperger as acting President ignited the first major battles. By the middle of September, a motley collection of Missouri National Guard units, the Congressionalist First and Third Armies, and local partisans had managed to repel the Presidentialist assaults and went on to mount a successful counteroffensive into Illinois.
For the next three years, the Presidentialists and Congressionals fought along a more-or-less static front. In autumn, after the harvests, both sides would mount major assaults; as winter fell, fighting would die down as both sides sought to conserve their fuel and food supplies; in spring reconnaissance missions would be sent into the opponent's territory; in summer, both parties would mount assaults aimed at securing surviving agricultural and industrial districts before the following winter. The Congressionals were hampered in their efforts to overthrow the Presidentialists by their comparatively small industrial bases and population; conversely, the Presidentialists commanded larger and better-supplied armed forces than the Congressionals, but incessant guerrilla warfare in the Deep South and on the north bank of the Ohio tied down Presidential troops, while the Presidentialists faced the unified scathing hostility of the entire world. The only hope for a breakthrough on either side was foreign intervention, but the massive damage inflicted upon neutral countries by United States military forces and the consequent global famine created such global hostility directed against all Americans that no party -- not even the Tripartite Alliance or the League of Nations -- was interested in intervention. Despite a steady trickle of arms from the rest of the world, the Congressionals were told that the only multinational intervention against the Presidentialists would come in the form of a saturation nuclear bombardment of Presidentialist districts, and that only if Presidentialist forces threatened League of Nations member-states or crossed the Mississippi in any large number. For all intents and purposes, the Congressionals were alone.
The first sign of the impending breakdown of the static front came in the summer of 1987, when the Presidentialists demanded that the prosperous farmers of south and central Florida provide Chang tried to intimidate the Florida food growers into providing Presidentialist forces with food free of change. Cuba -- independent since September of 1984 -- responded by dispatching armed "Market Guards" to position in south Florida as far north as Palm Beach County on behalf of the Conch Republic. The January 1988 decision of the Presidentialist garrison at Fort Pierce to break from the Chang Administration and establish a self-governing district in central Florida further eroded Presidentialist territories, and in particular the Presidentialist agricultural base.
The invasion of New Orleans in July of 1988 initially appeared to be a major reverse for the Congressionals and their sympathizers. The unexpected assault of the Presidentialist Second Army against New Orleans, with the aim of occupying Louisiana's oil wells and refineries and the port of New Orleans, threatened to give the Presidentialists an unbeatable edge over the Congressionals -- deprived of their main entrepôt, the Congressionals would inevitably weaken, perhaps even forcing a partition of the former United States at the Mississippi. Fortunately, though, it was at this episode that the Congressional First Army again went into action, along with the Garde nationale, rearmed with Mexican-produced infantry weapon and the devastating attacks of the A-7. By the 4th of August, the Presidentialists had driven beyond the Mississippi.
The Battle of New Orleans was a turning point in the Civil War. The horreurs néo-orléanaises once again brought Louisiana into the war and precipitated a Yucatecan declaration of war against the Presidentialists: Yucatecan armed units would become a common sight in many future battlefields. Too, unlike other massacres -- most notoriously, the slow-motion genocide of almost one-third of the 3.5 million War survivors living on the north bank of the Ohio in the late 1980's -- the events in New Orleans were widely publicized. This encouraged many Tripartite Alliance member-states, along with Mexico and Cuba, to commence the overt shipment of weapons to the Congressionalists. The European DGSE even went so far as to commence black operations against Presidentialist strongholds. Most crucially, the weakening of the Presidentialist Third Army led the way for a joint Congressional/Force expéditionnaire spearhead east of the Mississippi in 1989-1990. By the time that Louisiana retired from most fighting in 1992, half of the Deep South as far as East Georgia had been liberated. In 1991, a coalition of African-American (now self-identified "New African") nationalist democrats and guerrilla organizations proclaimed the independence an autonomous New African Confederacy to serve as a homeland for the long-suffering African-American/New African population. Despite some misgivings, the Confederacy and the Congressionals allied against their common enemy.
Outside of the battlefields, the various other states of North America tried to rebuild as best as they could. The Central American Union remained trapped in the poverty imposed by its military governments, and became more famous for the hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants crossing over to Costa Rica and the rest of the South American Community than for anything else. As peripheral members of the Caribbean League, both Santo Domingo and the Haïtis quietly slipped into international oblivion. Jamaica and the Bahamas maintained themselves as functioning democracies and plural societies, and even enjoyed modest per capita growth; continuing poverty drove continued emigration -- to Cuba, to Venezuela, and to the British Isles. New Fujian maintained itself as a guardedly separate state, depending upon Japanese investment and barter trade with the farmers of Mexican Oregon for those needs that it could not meet for itself, under its charismatic leader Madame Soong.
Only five major states -- Mexico, Canada, Cuba, Yucatán, and Louisiana -- showed signs of vitality. In part, this was because of their large domestic markets and consequent near-self-sufficiency and their relatively advanced technological bases, but the flourishing of the five countries' financial cooperatives prior to the Third World War gave these countries enough capital in the midst of the post-War global "capital famine" to make the minimal necessary investments in their financial infrastructure. Most exports from these countries were of low-end manufactures and agricultural products but an increasing proportion of Mexican and Cuban exports were high-technological communications and electronic goods. As stable democratic polities and pluralistic societies with prosperous Second World economies, these middle-income countries hoped to ascend to the First World. Mexico, in particular, believed that it could plausibly follow Korea's path as an export of advanced technological goods.
Mexico was much the most energetic of these five, not only because of Mexico's very large and potentially self-sufficient industrial economy, with 54.6 million Mexican residents in 1991, but because Mexico's close ties to Hispanophone South America gave the country a strong possibility of becoming a major exporter to lucrative Southern Hemisphere markets. By the early 1990's, Mexico had established itself as a country of immigration -- almost two million immigrants, mainly Koreans, Filipinos, Anglo-Americans, Central Americans, and Yucatecans made their homes in Mexico, whether as professionals in the burgeoning industrial cities of Mexico City, northern Old Mexico and Alta California, or as agricultural settlers in the vast northern territories. (To a considerable extent, the stability of Mexican democracy depended upon the northern territories, particularly Alta California but also Tejas and Oregon -- the rural poor could be resettled as productive farmers in Alta California's Central Valley, in the south Texas plains, or even in Oregon's Williamette Valley, while unemployed members of the working classes could be gainfully employed rebuilding the degraded infrastructure of the north.) As Mexico continued its evolution, most Mexicans prepared themselves for an inevitable prosperous future.
Cuba and Louisiana were equally optimistic. Although both countries were involved to varying degrees in the Congressional/Presidentialist conflict, as functioning societies that were home to the last remnants of pre-War American capitalism both countries retained an enormous lead over most of their major competitors. By 1990, Cuba had largely completed its economic recovery, and went on to become the prosperous metropole of the Caribbean League; Louisiana, for its part, contented itself with serving as the interface between the United States and the wider world. Both countries attracted large numbers of immigrants from their poorer neighbours -- in the case of Cuba, these immigrants (2.1 million between 1985 and 1992) included Anglo-Americans, Haïtians, Jamaicans, Bahamians, New Africans, and Santo Domingans, while almost all of the 400 thousand immigrants to Louisiana in the second half of the 1980's came from Louisiana's neighbours. The Bahamas and the Conch Republic shared in Cuban prosperity.
The Canadian recovery was less spectacular. In part, this was because of the death of immigrants to Canada -- apart from the tens of thousands of European settlements who joined French Canadian and New Brunswick Acadian settlers in repopulating Nova Scotia, and the million-odd Anglo-American refugees who had fled the north bank of the Ohio for Ontario, Canada absorbed few foreigners. The country's rapidly growing Francophone and Native American populations provided more than enough people to repopulate the new ex-United States Canadian territories and to create large new urban populations. The shift from a bare Anglophone majority prior to the War to a large and growing Francophone and Native American majority after the War worried many English Canadians. None of these demographic concerns threatened the viability of the Canadian recovery, though. Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland, off of the eastern coast of Canada, prospered in their own modest ways -- Prince Edward Island even supplanted Nova Scotia's former role as the intermediary between the European Confederation and the rest of Canada -- but both remained ultimately dependent upon their agricultural exports and their trade with their vastly larger neighbour.
Yucatán was faced with a daunting task of reconstruction. In the north, in the old Republic, Yucatecans faced the task of restoring an economy that -- before the War -- was highly dependent upon exports. In the former Guatemala, the Yucatecan government and people were faced with the daunting task of building a modern economy from the ruins left by the Guatemala War and by centuries of misrules. The reconfiguration of the Yucatecan draft from purely military purposes to a multifunctional labour recruitment system that included a reconstruction corps allowed for the state's progressive construction of a modern Yucatecan infrastructure, while Yucatecan government programs of encouraging the formation of local cooperatives and of enacting land reform. At first, the large-scale migration of Guatemalans to the north created major problems of urban poverty, but the Yucatecan economy soon adapted to its larger urban markets. Although Yucatán in the mid-1990's remained visibly divided, it was less divided than a mere decade before.
By 1996, the Congressionals and their allies finished their occupation of the fringes of the Presidentialist territory -- East Georgia, the Carolinas, Indiana, and Kentucky had all been seized. It was at this time that the Congressional forces encountered the so-called "Presidential Quadrilateral," a heavily-armed defensive line formed by the Atlantic coasts of Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, and New Jersey to the east, by Pennsylvania's northern border to the north, by the Indiana-Ohio state border to the west, and by the Virginia-North Carolina border to the south. Although the Presidentialist forces by this time were facing shortages of matériel and mass defections of enlisted soldiers, the remaining Army units loyal to the Chang Administration and FBI paramilitaries fought on desperately, knowing that they could never reach any kind of agreement with the Congressionals. Indeed, when the Chang Administration sent a delegation to Montréal to try to bargain for recognition as an independent state, it was soon informed by radio reports that the delegation was arrested upon arrival for crimes against humanity. Though the Congressionals were able to bring superior force to bear and steadily wore away at the Presidentialists, the final stages of the conflict were bloody.
It was at this time, as Presidentialist forces came close to final victory in the former United States and as the major countries elsewhere in the continent began to enjoy the fruits of their economic recovery, that the different nation-states felt at liberty to resurrect their old disputes. Aside from the worrying border tensions between Yucatán and the Central American Union, the rivalry between the Haïtian states, and the question of New Fujian's political future, perhaps the most significant dispute was that between Anglo-American nationalists and the various successor states operating outside of foreign country. Though Japan had recognized both New Fujianese independence and the Mexican and Canadian annexations as early as 1985, and the South American Community followed suit in 1989, in the eyes of the League of Nations the ultimate disposition of these territories remained open. Although a return to pre-War borders was unthinkable, there was a real possibility of border adjustments, particularly in Canadian-occupied New England and Ohio and in Mexican-occupied Oregon and East Texas, where Anglo-American populations remained in the majority. Most non-Anglo-Americans -- and quite a few Anglo-Americans -- thought that this hope was not only unrealistic but dangerous; for all of their support of the Presidentialists, Mexican, Canadian, and New Fujianese all felt very strongly about the legitimacy of their rule over their new territories.
The crisis that erupted upon First Contact in August of 1998, then, following the preemptive Marketplace troop deployments to North America following the Holy Alliance occupation of the Eurasian landmass, was entirely predictable. Ill-informed about Tripartite Alliance Earth's political situation upon their arrival, the superior Marketplace troops did perform the invaluable service of utterly destroying the Chang Administration in a matter of days, putting President Chang and other leaders to flight, before Anglo-American nationalists made the fatal decision of trying to convince Marketplace of the legitimate rule of the restored United States over the entire territory of the Untied States. Though Marketplace's Chamber of Commerce eventually recognized its error before the matter came to an actual conflict, this episode did manage to worsen the relationship between the United States' successor states and the rest of the continent, and contributed to the eventual exodus of almost 25 million North Americans -- the vast majority of these Anglophones, most of these from the former United States, but including representatives from every major population in the continent -- to the world later known as Rattus Prime.
The subsequent 18 months proved decidedly eventful. As the continent adjusted to the sudden disappearance of any major independent Anglophone state on the North American continent, the remaining populations in the former United States and the intact nation-states outside tried to adjust to the new North American order. The Conch Republic annexed most of the Florida peninsula, while the New African Confederacy declared its independence from the former United States by September of 1998 and Appalachia -- including Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, and North Carolina -- took shape by January of 1999. In the western United States, the Free States Association formed around the independent agricultural communities of the area, while the Quaker Republic of Pennsylvania took gradual form in the east of the continent. Perhaps surprisingly, despite the immense disruption of contact and the brief year-long recession subsequent to contact with the ITA, there were no wars in the continent apart from the incessant anarchy that befell the north bank of the Ohio.
In February of 2000, this brief pause ended with the Central American Union's assault against the autonomous Native American/black province of Mosquitia, on the eastern coast of Nicaragua. Reports soon revealed that the Central American invaders were engaging in genocide against the defenseless population, and South America soon activated its treaty obligations under the terms of the Tripartite Alliance to launch a military intervention. The rapid escalation of the conflict, including a Central American blockade of the Nicaragua Canal and the use and threatened use by Central America of old United States kinetic-kill satellites in orbit against, first, military targets in Yucatán and Costa Rica and then against the Venezuelan capital of Caracas, managed to bring the entire North American continent against Central America. The Appalachian navy quickly managed to wreck the feeble Central American naval and air forces, while Mexico and Yucatán mounted a highly successful ground invasion of Honduras and El Salvador. By the time that the conflict was over in April, the Central American Union had collapsed, the League mandates of Nicaragua, Salvador, and Honduras had been erected in its place, Mosquitia gained independence and membership in the Caribbean League, and Belize and North Honduras had become Appalachian protectorates.
This conflict had repercussions elsewhere. On the fringes of the Mexican and Canadian states, Ohio, New England, Oregon with northern California, and East Texas broke away to constitute their own independent states. (Oregon and northern California merged to constitute an independent, bilingual, and pluriethnic republic of Pacifica, while East Texas joined the Free States Association.) Too, the New Fujianese government embarked on a rapid policy of political and economic liberalization in keeping with its desire to engage in a rapprochement with its neighbours. Perhaps most importantly, the experience of the Central American conflict made the different North American states realize that they needed some kind of continental framework to prevent any further outbreak of violence and to ensure the continent's prosperity. Meeting in the Free States Association capital of St. Louis, diplomats from more than a dozen states came together with remarkable speed to discuss the creation of a new union. (The April 2000 Mexico City Accords that formally rescinded the terms of the Treaty of Guadelupe Hidalgo, and gave the United States a decent end and security for its successor states, encouraged Mexico to lend its full support to the effort.)
The Confederation of North America was founded, in May of 2000, as a limited organization including three elements: a customs union that practically eliminated tariffs between each of the Confederation's member-states; a mutual-defense pact that effectively united the continent into a single geographical region; and, institutions based in the Confederation "capital" of St. Louis that established permanent institutional dialogues between each of the member-states, in order to head off any potential problems. Compared to the European Confederation or the South American Community, the Confederation is only a weak association; but then, neither confederation began as anything scarcely more complex.
North America in the early 21st century is a country of moderate promise. The beginnings of Mexico's rapid ascent to the ranks of the First World and the Great Powers suggests that at least part of the continent might gain a sort of parity -- of wealth, technology, and overall strength -- with the Tripartite Alliance. Certainly the marginal First World riches of Louisiana and Cuba is encouraging, while the abundant promise of Canada, Appalachia, Yucatán, and their hangers-on seems likely to be fulfilled, at least in part. The fortunes of even the Haïtis have improved immensely with their reunification under the suzerainty of the offworld United Food Corporation.
More than ever before, the continent is profoundly tied with the outside world; the Hispanophone and Francophone states of the continent are major players in la Hispanidad and the francophonie, while New Fujian is an indispensable link with Asia and Anglophone North Americans make up the single largest human population on Rattus Prime. Even the Central American mandates have at least the promise of improvement from their wartime nadirs of genocide and casual brutality. The continent's integration, intensified by post-War annexations, migrations, and trade, seems likely to be intensified by impending economic growth and the binding force of the Confederation's structures. It seems quite possible that for North America, the 21st century will be a far happier century than the 20th century.
Click here for tables describing basic statistics of the different North American states.