discoursedrome:

memecucker:

also whats the traditional explanation for how quebec independence seems to have dramatically deflated? in 1995 it got lost out in an election where the amount of tossed out ballots was larger than the margin of victory but now it seems to be mostly dead?

Honestly, I don’t totally get this either, so I’d be glad to hear from others who know more, but I get the impression that it’s a combination of fatigue after repeated failures to secure a mandate, and the fact that Quebec has won a lot of concessions and become more politically powerful federally, which has reduced what they have to gain and increased what they have to lose.

The original separatist movement was right on the heels of the Quiet Revolution, which I think did a lot to spark nationalist sentiment toward a distinct Quebec-ness, but there’s been a considerable degree of integration and a number of tactical retreats and gifts made at the federal level to try to tamp down the issue, so I think the generation that was really hot to trot about it is gradually being replaced with one that prefers to use established methods to secure its rights and privileges, rather than contend with the whole ordeal of a physical and economic separation.

A satisfying-enough autonomy and deference; the end of the 70s-90s decolonial wave it was drawing energy from; further internationalization of culture and commerce that revealed they were as peripheral to Francophonie as Jamaica is to the Anglophone world; a powerful wave of immigration to Canada that diluted the Québécois along with the Anglo “old stock”; that combined with the decolonial frame being replaced with others by which a white settler nation seeking cultural purity and territorial hegemony became less sympathetic