The NATO of its Dreams?

Abstract

INTRODUCTION: PLUS CA CHANGE ....?CANADA'S CONTEMPORARY 'ATTITUDE' towards the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) brings to mind the familiar image of the water glass and whether it is half full or half empty. Mutatis mutandis, one asks, of the topic of this paper: is Canadian attachment to the Atlantic alliance too little or too much?Current assessments of Canadian participation within the alliance vary significantly, from dedicated partisan and indeed founding member of the organization, to detached out-rider (and often a 'free' one at that) on the transatlantic waterway. This analytical eclecticism is hardly surprising: it accurately mirrors a shifting appreciation, on the part of a succession of governments, of the place NATO does or should occupy in Canada's foreign and defence policies or what we might call its international security policy (perhaps even its 'grand strategy').Related to, and in a way responsible for, this variation on an alliance theme is a conflation of two separate but frequently interchanged conceptual entities: atlanticism and Western Europe. Depending upon which one prefers as the referent for NATO, rather different answers ensue to the question of attachment. If NATO is first and foremost 'about' enhancing the security of its West European members, then it is not difficult to find evidence of a growing detachment of Canada from the alliance. But if it is equated with atlanticism, which in turn is regarded as a 'community of values' and not just a military alliance, then a different understanding emerges of a Canadian attachment that stayed relatively constant for several decades. The situation may be changing but in a manner, ironically, that belies today's conventional wisdom, which has Canada ever more disengaged from NATO. I will argue, instead, that the glass looks as if it may be getting fuller.Professor, Centre for International Relations and Department of Political Studies. Queens University. This article was written while the author was a visiting scholar at the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik in Ebenhausen, Germany.In this article, I hope to demonstrate that Canada has indeed blown hot and cold (lately, almost exclusively the latter) on the question of NATO conceived first and foremost as a mechanism for promoting the security interests of West Europeans and that it has evolved from one of the most steadfast (and early) contributors to collective defence in Europe to one of the least dedicated. I then address the important question of the 'transformation' of the alliance from a largely collective defence organization into what it might become, which must remain for the time being an open, but very important, question.Allowing myself the luxury of imagining that even a non-superpower might have a 'grand strategy,' I try to determine what such a construct could look like for Canada. For lack of a better concept, I claim that 'co-operative security' best encapsulates the regnant security doctrine in Ottawa and that this doctrine is a logical derivative of an earlier foreign-policy dispensation, namely Pearsonian internationalism.I then argue that as the alliance has come to be regarded more as a political and less as a military organization - the institutional embodiment, as it were, of the traditional Canadian understanding of atlanticism - Canadian interest in it has been rekindled in the past couple of years. This argument is buttressed with an additional claim about the co-operative security alliance of the post-cold war period, namely that for Canada it seems to imply lower costs and fewer risks.THE CANADIAN NATO NEUROSISIn some ways, Canada's relationship with NATO can be understood as a continuation first of its historic relationship with Great Britain and then of its long-standing relationship with Europe. In other words, the relationship has been a complicated one for which the adjective 'neurotic' hardly seems out of place. …