As evinced by Canada’s prime
minister Mark Carney likening a planned referendum on whether Alberta should
vote to separate from the rest of Canada to “Brexit,” in which Britain seceded
from the E.U., as if the UK in the European Union were equivalent to Alberta in
Canada, political category mistakes can run rampant without being detected as
such. Referring to the referendum in the province, Carney said, “That is a very
dangerous bluff.” He was “pointing to the turmoil that followed the United
Kingdom’s vote to leave the European Union.”[1]
The implied false equivalence of Canada and the E.U., as if the former too had
been formed out of countries, is as incorrect as that which Carney was more
directly assuming between Alberta and Britain. A region of a country, even if
the latter has a federal system, is not equivalent to a country that joins a political
union such as the E.U. and U.S. That Britain was once the host kingdom in the
British Empire, and thus equivalent to other members of the empire, including
Ireland and Virginia, does not mean that the UK as a state in the E.U. was
equivalent to the latter, or to other political unions consisting of early-modern-scale
countries.
The full essay is at "California and Florida."