Are We Heading Toward a North American Union? Not Yet.

Next week, the leaders of Canada, Mexico, and the U.S. will meet in Montreal as part of the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), a trilateral framework for cooperation between the three states.

As a matter of international law classifications, the SPP is not a formal international organization nor is there a formal international agreement or charter that undergirds it. Rather, it is what political scientists call a “club” where countries meet regularly but not as part of a formal organization. The G8 is the most important example of this kind of “club.”

The fact that the SPP is not a formal IO has not kept critics from charging that the SPP will evolve into a “North American Union” of the three countries. I don’t see any serious evidence of that, and neither do the authors of this Hudson Institute report and the Commerce Department has this defense of the SPP here. But the fact that people are worried demonstrates the level of distrust out there about these somewhat mysterious impressive sounding names. If we ever do create an EU-style NAU, the only way to overcome this kind of distrust is subjecting such decisionmaking to full-blown constitutional and democratic scrutiny.