The Cost of Bandwagoning

Abstract

the morning of n September 2001, the temptation to interpret the attacks as a hallmark of our individual and collective lives, to infuse the events with transformational properties, has been ever present. An Ekos poll published on 27 September 2001 showed that 77 percent of Canadians believed that their lives would be deeply and permanently changed by these terrorist attacks.1 David Bercuson rightly noted that, [as] with all such sweeping generalizations, no one will really know until many years have passed.2 Now, over a decade later, one can examine the effects of these events on Canadian security and defence policy with the sobriety the passing of a decade can bring. One common interpretation of Canada's response to 9/11 is that Canada experienced the events by proxy, through the United States. As Jonathan Paquin argues, Since the terrorist attacks in the United States in 2001, the foreign and security policies of no other US allies have been more affected than those of Canada.3 The United States did not present Canada with a choice. On 20 September 2001 President George W. Bush made his expectations of other nations clear Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.4In this article, I consider the impacts of 9/11 on Canadian security policy and, particularly, the notion that the attacks intensified Canada's posture toward the United States. I first examine the existing literature on the nature of Canada-US relations and Canada's behaviour as an example of or as a defence-againsthelp strategy, because, although theoretically plausible, this characterization of the Canada- US defence and security relationship could use further empirical assistance. Second, I argue that the ways in which states allocate their resources can provide a measure of how states perceive and react to their security environment. In this context, if the soft-bandwagoning hypothesis of Canada-US security relations is accurate, we should be able to trace the pattern in their respective military budgets. Finally, I develop an error correction model that analyzes the dynamic relationship between Canadian and US military budgets between 1991 and 2010. Findings from 1991 to 2001 show Canada's soft-bandwagoning with the US, as changes in US military budgets correlate with Canadian military spending. After 9/11 however, there appears to be a break in this relationship, as no evidence supports the bandwagoning argument. On the contrary, Canadian military spending in the period from 2001 to 2010 seems to be primarily influenced by Ottawa's federal budget variations. These results suggest counterintuitively that 9/11 did not heighten Canada's bandwagoning with the US in security and defence matters, but rather led to a more emancipated Canadian security approach.WHAT FLAVOUR OF SOFT?In its relations with the United States, Canada has two possible overarching approaches, one of opposition and one of accommodation.5 In international relations, these two postures give rise to two distinct strategies. States can either ally against the principal threat or soft-balance that threat by taking actions that do not directly challenge U.S. military preponderance but that use nonmilitary tools to delay, frustrate, and undermine aggressive unilateral U.S. military policies.6 By choosing to accommodate stronger states such as the US, states can adopt a bandwagoning strategy either in its hard version, i.e., by directly allying with the source of the insecurity, or its soft version, where support of US foreign policy preferences is only moderate or symbolic in nature.7In Canada, this fundamental dichotomy between opposition and accommodation of a stronger power has structured our discussion on foreign policy. In fact, one could argue that Canada's coming of age at the beginning of the 20* century took the form of a structural discussion between policies of opposition and accommodation. …