The provinces want to reduce it to a clutch of semi-independent states.

Academics insist it must be reconstructed as a "multinational federation," on ethnic and linguistic lines. Postmodernists think of it as little more than a multicultural "hotel." And now my old friend Michael Bliss wants us to join the States.

Well, he doesn't come right out and say it. But in the last of three essays in what the Post is calling "the identity trilogy," he makes it clear he would have no objection to such a union. It may be "wildly impractical" and "political suicide" now, but suppose there were some crisis that drew us closer together? Or suppose someone, a distinguished historian perhaps, were to inject the topic into the national debate, and suppose with the passage of time the professor's central argument -- that there are no fundamental differences in values between the two countries -- began to take hold. "Would attitudes change," he asks, "and we began to ask why we bother to stay separate?

Would attitudes change if we thought more about how the Scots have dominated the United Kingdom?"" "If it was a good thing 135 years ago," he concludes, to "create a great nation stretching over half of North America, why would it not be a good thing in the next few years to at least wonder about a vision of the ultimate North American confederation?" I have been worried about Michael for some time now. He has grown increasingly gloomy about the country's future, not only as it is currently governed, but as a going concern. He really doesn't see the point any more. So let this be my attempt to buck him up a little.

The wrong answer to his concerns is the traditional nationalist one: to insist, a little defensively, that we are, too, different from the Americans. Indeed, the professor is mercilessly accurate in his cataloguing of the failings and delusions of the various prescriptions for national distinctiveness we have been sold over the years. Yes, it is true, the British connection is mostly a memory. The north of Diefenbaker's "vision" is as distant as ever. The left's attempt to reinvent Canadians as reflexive socialists has been exposed as self- serving mythology, though not before nearly ruining the country.

Bilingualism was never much more than a fond hope.

But, well, so what? So there is not much to distinguish us from the Americans -- so what? So we are essentially alike as pluralist, capitalist, liberal democracies --big deal. Pepsi is more or less the same as Coke. I don't notice them in any great hurry to merge. My family isn't much different from the one next door. But it's still mine.

Though he sets out to debunk the nationalists, my old chum has fallen into the same trap as them: the belief that what matters about nations is that they be different from one another; that each must have an identity that is recognizably distinct from all the rest. This 18th-century fantasy -- we can blame Herder for this -- is an outgrowth of the romantic obsession with authenticity. What matters in life, it says, is not fidelity to universal ideals, but only to oneself.

This is not an idea, oddly enough, that occurs to the Americans, the most nationalist people on earth. The professor notes in passing their "intense sense of patriotism," but he fails to note where it comes from.

It isn't from any heightened sense of cultural distinctiveness. Indeed, if distinctiveness were all, it would be hard to see why Texas and New York, or California and Alabama, should be part of the same country.

It isn't even patriotism, really, mere love of country: or not only that. It is identification with a collective mission, to be achieved for the world; with a set of principles and ideals the American believes to be right, not only for his nation, but for all nations. The American would not object if the rest of the world were to follow the American example, though it would make him less "distinct." He would see it as the fulfillment of his country's highest ambitions, and of his for his country.

But if a nation, at least in the New World, is defined by its ideals, and if our ideals do not differ greatly from the Americans', aren't we back at square one? What need is there of a separate national articulation of the same set of principles? The same as there is for more than one newspaper, or more than one historian: competition. We are each experiments in the universal search for the just society.

As it happens, we have been given the opportunity to make our own contribution to that search. That is more than a happy historical accident. It is a duty: to ourselves, to our children, to humanity, but mostly to our ancestors. They had big plans for this country.

Remember? It was going to be the first nation of the Empire, the inheritor of the 20th century. If we think that what they passed down to us is of some worth, then we owe it to them to build upon what they started -- to ratify their their struggles, to validate their lives, and not to tell them it was all just a silly waste of time.