At Home in the World: Canada's Global Vision for the 21st Century

Abstract

AT HOME IN THE WORLD Canada's Global Vision for the 21st Century Jennifer Welsh Toronto: HarperCollms Canada, 2004. 266pp, $32.95 cloth (ISBN 0-00-200665-0)Jennifer Welsh has already made quite a splash with this revisionist look Canadian foreign policy for the new century. Not since Andrew Coheris While Canada Slept has a book on Canadian foreign policy made a significant impression not only in academic circles but in the wider reading public. But Coheris vision is a nostalgic lament for a lost golden age of the past and for how far we have fallen, while Welsh's voice is new, forward-looking, and refreshingly confident. Hers is a voice of a younger generation of scholars, impatient with traditional categories that seemingly no longer fit reality and with those established scholars who conclude that when their categories no longer fit, there is something wrong with reality. It is about time.Welsh begins with a personal disclosure that she is young, female, and of mixed Metis and white ancestry. Although readers' alarm bells may sound this point, this is not for the purpose of raising yet another complaint of discrimination and a demand for redress. Instead it is simply her way of indicating that she represents a new generation, not only younger but more diverse in origin than the generation she is challenging. Her point is not that special treatment is needed but rather that this very diversity is a valuable resource for Canada in the new multicultural, globalized world. She reinforces this point by opening each chapter with an introduction of a younger Canadian-whether in government, an NGO, or the private sector-who has made a difference. These are Canadians who, by virtue of their very youth and diversity, are at home in the and do not worry about having lost their place.Welsh's analysis of Canada's role in the world begins with North America, squarely in the post-9/11 George W. Bush reality. Here is the first shibboleth to be shed: that we are America's friend. That is a story that Canadians have been telling themselves for too long, but it is not one that Americans have ever paid much attention to. It is certainly not a story that the Bush administration has any time for. We have to find a new language to describe the sharing of the continent in a post-NAFTA and post-9/11 context, and friend no longer cuts the ice. Yet the traditional adhesion to multilateralism when confronted with the current unilateralism of the US (which is not, as Welsh correctly argues, just a Bush-era phenomenon, but has much deeper roots) is not much better. Of course, multilateral approaches will always be the Canadian preference-where they work. A results-based approach, Welsh suggests, is better, and encompasses instances where US unilateralism achieves the best Welsh may be a little too ready to gloss over the rogue superpower character of the Bush administration, but she is surely right to argue that Canada and other American allies must engage the US on the terrain of results. There is no reason to believe that even George W. Bush will not welcome results achieved by multilateral means-so long as they accord with US preferences, of course.Welsh moves from here to a concrete example of how results-based cooperation can work in practice. In the aftermath of 9/11, there was a danger of the US retreating into a fortress North America version of homeland security, which would leave no margin whatever for Canadian autonomy. In this conjuncture, there was (and still is) no shortage of those from the friend school who were ready more or less to abandon Canadian sovereignty in jumping to a North American security perimeter in which distinctive Canadian policies would be harmonized with US priorities. Instead, Canada initiated an inventive, results-based strategy of re-imagining and reconstructing the border. The smart border agreements are a genuine triumph of Canadian policy, offering sufficient reassurance on national security to the US to protect Canadian economic interests against border closures, while minimizing the potential damage to Canadian sovereignly. …