Given the significant space on library shelves devoted to aspects of North American integration, there is remarkably little agreement within all that literature as to what North America actually is. For instance, the final instalment of Stephen Clarkson’s excellent trilogy on North America is titled Does North America Exist?, as if there is an agreed definition of North America that can be evaluated (Clarkson 2008). Even Robert Pastor’s last book on North America, The North America Idea, left the “idea” itself unsatisfyingly ill-defined, calling it “a spirit of community based on interdependence” (Pastor 2011: 28). When compared with Pastor’s 2001 advocacy of “deepening” the NAFTA by transforming it into a customs union, it is clear the “North American idea” includes a number of components well beyond the confines of a trade agreement such as the NAFTA (Pastor 2001: 177–86).

The point of this entire volume is to offer readers a short survey of contemporary North American integration, and the politics of the NAFTA as a component part within. This chapter is about the ideational origins of contemporary North America.

There is considerable variability among scholars, public officials and the general public about how North America should be conceptualized. Indeed, that conceptualization is often connected to what people think the NAFTA itself is or ought to have been. Is North America mostly about the NAFTA? What do we mean by North America as a region? Should it be defined geographically, geologically or geopolitically? A geologist looks at North America as inclusive of much of the Caribbean whereas students of political economy think mainly about Canada, the United States and Mexico. What about shared culture or institutions as a defining feature of the region?

Although there is disagreement over what the North American idea is or ought to be, we can anchor the ideational foundations of the NAFTA in terms of the politics of the global economy in the early postwar period and the domestic politics of each NAFTA country. The international and the domestic are, of course, connected. But situating the NAFTA’s origins in this way helps demarcate the boundaries of the North American idea.