A library that straddles the US-Canada border now has a Quebec-only entrance. This is not a trivial matter of architectural inconvenience. It is a symptom of a creeping balkanisation that intellectuals have warned about for decades, though few have listened. The Haskell Free Library and Opera House, perched on the line between Vermont and Quebec, has long been a symbol of the porous, amiable border that once defined the Anglosphere. But now, Canadian officials have decreed that the door on the Canadian side must be used exclusively by Quebec residents. Americans and other Canadians are suddenly second-class patrons in a building that was meant to transcend boundaries.
British sovereignty campaigners, who have been watching the slow erosion of national identity with the same horror that Gibbon reserved for the fall of the Roman Empire, should take note. The Quebec-only entrance is a microcosm of a larger trend: the retreat into tribal enclaves. We see it in the linguistic purism of the Parti Québécois, in the culture wars of the American campus, and in the bureaucratically enforced multiculturalism that has turned British streets into a patchwork of unassimilated communities. The library is a canary in the coal mine. If a shared cultural institution can be carved up by nationality, what hope is there for the broader project of Western civilisation?
Some will dismiss this as a local quirk. They will say that Quebec has the right to protect its language and culture. But this is a specious argument. The library was built in 1904 by Martha Stewart Haskell as a gift to both communities. Its very design – with the stage in Canada and the seats in the US – was a gesture of interconnectedness. Now, that gesture has been replaced by bureaucratic exclusivity. It is a triumph of the checklist over the common good.
The lesson for Britain is clear. Our own sovereignty is under threat not just from Brussels or from devolved parliaments, but from a mindset that sees borders as walls rather than lines of negotiation. The Quebec-only entrance is a warning: fragmentation is easy, unity is hard. And as the Haskell Library shows, once you start down that road, even books become property of the nation state. We should be building bridges, not stamping passports at the turnstile.
