TRUE PATRIOT GLOBALIST LOVE.

In twin blows for political normalcy, which many in the world will value after the shocks of Brexit and Trump, there was no surprise winner in Sunday’s French presidential election and no surprise deviation of votes from what the polls had predicted. Good! The earth moving occasionally we can live with. The earth moving all the time? How do we stop it and get off ?

In another blow for normalcy, the losing candidate, Marine Le Pen, predicted, as losing candidates do, that the future belonged to her and her Front National, as together they would continue to work the current fault line of western politics — maybe of all politics today — the “divide between patriots and globalists.”

It’s a nice piece of political phrase- making, even if utterly self-serving (she is a politician, after all: self- serving is expected). And it accords with lots of analysis suggesting that these days the big cleavage in western societies is between those looking outward and those focused inward.

But surely it’s a false divide. Can’t one be a globalist and a patriot at the same time?

I certainly hope so. To be self- serving myself for a moment, two decades ago I wrote a book called Globalization and the Meaning of Canadian Life, which argued the globalist- patriot case. (I see on that great globalizer, Amazon, it’s currently available for $1.25. Advice to readers: Sometimes you get more than you pay for.)

The idea the book proposed was that a country could face outward, could engage with its neighbours, could be open to all the different currents of the world, whether commercial or cultural, and yet still retain its distinctiveness, maybe even become more distinctive, as in fact we in Canada had done in the first few postwar decades.

The 1960s were the years when we became most integrated with the United States economically, both in terms of trade and i nvestment, but also increasingly unlike them politically. In terms of social policy and taxation, certainly, the 1960s and 1970s, our first Trudeau era, were a time when we diverged from American patterns in important ways, even as, via GATT and the Auto Pact, we “continentalized” our economy — a term the Canadian nationalists of that day used as a slur.

Can a liberal on trade, investment and other economic relations nevertheless be a patriot, if to be a patriot means to care deeply what happens in one’s country and to one’s countrymen? Of course he can. (She, too.) Even people who look outward, metaphorical citizens of the world, have home towns and places where they actually, physically live and to which they are attached by mystic chords of many different sorts.

Yes, if you keep your mind and your borders open, you may be liable to more of the natural shocks that openness is heir to, which means there may be more churn in your economy and a generally higher level of stress than if you closed yourself off in every way possible in search of a calmer, more static life. But there would be a generally higher level of income and opportunities, too, both at home and abroad, and therefore greater means for dealing with any difficulties openness might cause you. Canada isn’t just, in Donald Macdonald’s wonderfully defiant phrase from the great free-trade debate, “a sort of sheltered workshop for the inefficient, the incompetent or the less capable.” It is rather, Macdonald went on stating the patriot-globalist view, a country “with a very considerable capacity, a very considerable record of success, and … the ability to use these talents out in a broader world market.”

Western societies, Canada included, have proven remarkably resilient to change. In a sense, that’s what they do. Which is a good thing, as change seems likely to continue almost no matter what.

Technology won’t stop any day soon, even if politicians do throttle back trade and investment. It may well slow down if the New Feudalists have their way. But stop? Not likely. And many other of the globalizing influences, especially culture and communication, will be harder to stop than trade. China has been trying and is changing nonetheless.

But the more important point is not that change is inexorable or unavoidable — “There is no alternative,” as people used to say in the 1980s — but that it is in so many ways desirable and welcome, even if it makes our economy and society more subject to knocks and jolts.

If by contrast the only way to express your patriotism is by agreeing to every Canadian interest and industry group’s request for enhanced protection, well, you may keep your country that way, but will it really be a country worth keeping?

WESTERN SOCIETIES, CANADA INCLUDED, HAVE PROVEN REMARKABLY RESILIENT TO CHANGE.