A Diplomatic Counter-Revolution

Abstract

In a July 2011 wide-ranging interview with Madean's magazine, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, still glowing from his majority election victory, offered a stark confession. Since becoming prime minister [in 2006], he said, thing that's probably struck me most in terms of my previous expectations - I don't even know what my expectations were - is not just how important foreign affairs/foreign relations is, but in fact that it's become almost everything.1 Six weeks later, a report in the National Post revealed that the government planned act on Harper's new understanding of the significance of world affairs: Once considered an afterthought by a prime minister preoccupied with winning a majority, wrote Tobi Cohen, relations have moved centre for the Conservatives, who have undertaken a quiet but sweeping re-examination of federal foreign policy.2This essay addresses two questions that should be central Ottawa's review: first, what might have motivated the government's actions on the international stage between 2006 and2on? And, second, was this motivation consistent with Canadian national interests? To date, analysts have offered three answers question one. The first two are consistent with the content of a debate over the possibility of a distinct Conservative foreign policy that was published in a volume of Canada Among Nations shortly after Harper's first election victory in 2006. Conservative partisans argued that there was indeed a distinctly Conservative approach international relations - characterized by a combination of compassion, realism, engagement, focus, and global leadership. Opposing them were those who maintained that the strategic constraints imposed upon Ottawa both domestically and internationally limited the flexibility of any ruling party effect significant change in foreign policy, no matter its partisan leanings. The only real difference that a new government could make was at the rhetorical level.3Both suggestions are profoundly conservative: neither anticipates, nor allows for, broad divergences from the authors' general understandings of Canada's foreign policy history. And while analysts from both camps might point specific rhetoric and decisions from the last five years that support their interpretations, considering the activist nature of the Harper regime (not mention the prime minister's comments in Maclean's), neither theory is ultimately satisfying. Kim Richard Nossal, a professor of political studies at Queen's University, has offered a more plausible assessment. To him, Canadian foreign policy between 2006 and 2011 was driven more by a partisan desire to make the Conservatives the dominant political party in Canada, than it was by dear thinking about world affairs.11 But if the government of Stephen Harper's approach international relations was designed primarily erase any memory of Canada's allegedly Liberal (internationalist) past, why did Ottawa not reject the national security policy of 2004? Why did it not distance itself from the never-popular Afghanistan mission, or Paul Martin's efforts increase the focus of Canada's development assistance program? Further examination will demonstrate that Nossal's explanation is yet more compelling if one defines Liberal foreign policy as the practices manifested most clearly during an exceptional period of Canadian conduct in world affairs, when the national diplomatic personality was shaped primarily by a single Liberal member of parliament - Foreign Affairs Minister Lloyd Axworthy. Conservative foreign policy between 2006 and 2OII might therefore be most effectively characterized as an effort eradicate one individual's, as opposed one party's, legacy.To determine whether such an approach world affairs was consistent with Canada's national interests, an issue that has yet be dealt with by scholarly analysts in significant detail, one must take into consideration what the Harper government's global outlook attempted replace. …