Marginalization, Resilience, Integration: Reconstructing and Globalizing Canada’s Celtic Fringe Island Region of Cape Breton

Abstract

Scholarship addressing informal peripheral regions in Canada is limited, with literature on territorial politics tending to privilege provinces and province groupings with uber-region status. The article provides a synthesized framework (using new institutionalism, identity, and new regionalism theorizations) for studying informal regions. The case of Cape Breton Island is presented to probe, through mixed methods, how political and cultural actors attempt to build, maintain, and reconstruct a region and adapt to globalization. Before Confederation, significant Scottish Gaelic immigration shaped a Celtic Fringe/Gaelic-sanctuary regional construction of Cape Breton. In 1820 Cape Breton was annexed to Nova Scotia, closing off a potential development path as a colony-province. It later entered a formally institutionalized province and federation as an informal region. Although Gaelic was then Canada’s third most spoken language, it was institutionally stigmatized, the Gaels marginalized. Industrialization, social modernization, attempted cultural homogenization, and transition in a post-industrial setting, have set the Gaels and the island on a challenging development path as the region is reconstructed. In the current era of globalization, pursuits of cultural, social, and economic development signal that, to some degree, regional cultures and political and institutional actors can resist, accommodate and offset globalization-related pressures, and, through incorporating regional preferences, identities, institution-building, and cultural revitalization, have an indigenizing effect on region-building and development.