Inventing North America:

In the face of potent domestic and global forces, the U.S., Canada, and Mexico—the NA-3—have devised an enterprise that promises to draw them closer together in the twenty-first century. Inventing North America is an attempt to understand the NA-3's unique brand of regionalism within an increasingly globalized world.

Poitras dissects the commonalities and differences among the NA-3 that have created the foundation for—and set limits to—the integration of the region. He also explores how states use regionalism for their own purposes and how the North American enterprise must deal with predicaments about unity and diversity, gains and losses, and gaps between North and South. Testing the proposition that the North and South can play by the same rules within a regional regime, he portrays North America as essentially a two-level alliance between the dominant center and each of the smaller periphery states. Its fate, he argues, depends on whether and how this alignment changes and whether the NA-3 can embrace a comprehensive vision of the region as a community.