Defending the “Realm”

Abstract

Kim Richard Nossal is professor and head, Department of Political Studies, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario. Research for this essay was made possible through a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada: grant 410-2001-1075, Culture strategique et grande strategie au Canada, 1870-2000.FOR MANY IN THE INTERNATIONAL SYSTEM, security is about efforts to protect the political community against the possibility of predations by others. In other words, it seeks the maintenance of the community's territorial integrity and the protection and advancement of the interests of citizens. In most cases, the focus of national defence is relentlessly fixed on the state and its citizens alone. Indeed, most understandings of defence employ the elementary binary inside/outside division that underwrites most understandings of contemporary world politics.(1) In this view, those inside the state are the proper focus of efforts to provide citizens with security and well-being. By contrast, those outside the state are unambiguously defined as the Other and thus beyond the definition of altruism, to be assisted and defended only if it is in the state's interests to do so. Of course, this relentless pursuit of self-interest, defined purely in terms of the state and its citizens, is a core assumption of most theorizing about international relations, particularly realism and its many strands.(2)In the Canadian context, however, defence policy--at least as it has been pursued by Canadian policy-makers over the last century and a half--actually makes little sense if it is examined using such standard assumptions. It is not that those individuals who have comprised or governed the Canadian polity since 1867 have been any less self-centred, selfish and ungenerous towards outsiders in world politics. Rather, Canadian defence policy can only be understood when it is conceived as a policy designed to defend something more than just Canadian territorial integrity and the security and well-being of Canadians.But to be able to frame an analysis of Canadian defence, we need an ideational construct that goes beyond the restrictive definition of the sovereign state that is imposed on us by most strands of contemporary international relations theorizing. Instead, we need a concept that more closely reflects the way in which Canadians and their governors have conceptualized strategic culture,(3) in other words, what--and who--is to be defended and made secure. In this essay, I propose a different way to capture the broadened conceptualization of the focus of Canadian that Canadians and their governors have used in their defence policy. In particular, I will argue that Canadians have conceived of their grand strategy as seeking to defend a broader definition of political community than just Canada--they have sought to defend a broader realm, and it is only when Canadian security policy is seen as having been framed within this broader definition that it makes sense.I recognize that is a word that long ago passed from common usage, perhaps not surprisingly given its intimate connection to a form of governance that has long been discarded in most places in the world. For the commonest meaning of realm is the jurisdiction of a monarch, reflecting its etymological origins from the Old French reaume, derived from the Latin regimen, rule. While it has evolved a related meaning--a sphere or domain--it is still most commonly used in reference to the monarchy, sometimes with a hint of irony.However, my choice of a term that is deeply rooted in 19th century government is purposeful. While recognizing the word's linkage to a monarchical past, I use realm in this essay with an eye to both its meanings: a realm connotes a sphere or domain that is both a political space and an ideational construct of political identity and community that goes beyond the state as it is usually defined in international relations. …