Generations: The sources of our ideas about Canadian Foreign Policy

Abstract

Canada is home to a large and diverse community of academic experts on various aspects of international politics, but only a small subset of these scholars is actively engaged with Canadian Foreign Policy per se, and even fewer think of themselves as specialists working in Canadian Foreign Policy (CFP) as an academic subfield. This is strikingly different from the way things were during the Cold War years, when most Canadian scholars working on international affairs recognized an obligation to relate their work to Canadian Foreign Policy debates, and many thought of themselves as CFP specialists. Some would welcome these post-Cold War developments, as an indication that Canadian scholarship is now less parochial and more worldly than it once was. But we should be concerned about the apparent unravelling of CFP as an academic project, because without that project we lose decades' worth of shared insights and concepts and the broader perspective gained over time and across issue areas.The 2015 federal election stirred up some lively conversations in the hallways of the Political Science Department at Dalhousie, about continuities and disjunctures in Canadian Foreign Policy. But, as interesting and enthusiastic as those conversations were, we couldn't help noticing how few of us were engaged in them, and how disconnected they were from the core research and teaching concerns of most members of the department--and this was at Dalhousie, which has historically been a leading centre for CFP and continues to have some enduring strengths in this area. On other campuses, there is still debate on the content and practice of Canadian Foreign Policy, but virtually no one comes to the debate with a broader grounding in CFP. What has happened to CFP, and why? Previous laments have emphasized historical developments, like the end of the Cold War, which have made Canada itself less important as an international actor, or shifting intellectual currents and professional incentives, which have drawn scholars away to other fields of study. These things are of course important, but there are still senior scholars that stick doggedly to CFP, and junior scholars that choose--sometimes against the advice of their supervisory committees--to pursue it. Our own conversations about these things kept back to political and professional socialization, and more particularly to the time and circumstances of an academic's coming of age, politically. Informally comparing notes with colleagues, it seemed that whether and how an individual scholar thought about Canadian Foreign Policy, and about CFP, might be connected to which prime minister was in office at the time, what were the prevailing narratives about Canada as an international actor, and which intellectual currents they were exposed to in school.These conversations became the core themes for what we have called Generations, an ongoing collaborative research project that connects up our shared interest in political socialization with the evolution of CFP as a field of study. How has our thinking about the parameters and purposes of CFP changed over time? Why have some scholars with an interest in Canadian Foreign Policy not come to think of themselves as part of the CFP community? Why are some scholars' views of how and why Canadian Foreign Policy decisions are made disconnected from their own views about how and why those decisions ought to be made? And how are all of these things connected to the way individual scholars think about Canada as a political project, and their own relationship to it? The Generations project came about in part as a way of seeking an answer to these questions.In August 2016, in conjunction with the Bill Graham Centre for Contemporary International History and the Canadian International Council, we organized a two-day workshop in Toronto that brought together an impressive and eclectic group of scholars to explore the Generations themes. …