Transatlantic Relations in the New Strategic Landscape

Abstract

Security policy is the area in which Canada's growing estrangement from Europe is the most visible. While political and cultural affinities between the former Franco- British colony and the old continent remain strong, and while trade relations are again high on the agenda with the negotiation of an economic agreement, Canada's status has changed, in fewer than 20 years, from power - with several thousand troops stationed in Europe between 1952 and 1994 - to friendly but distant cousin. In part, this is due to demographic and political shifts in Canada as well as in Europe. While Canadians increasingly came to accept their dependence on the US and began to pay more attention to Asia, Europeans were fixated on eastern enlargement for the greater part ofthe 1995-2010 period. But, as we argue in this article, Canada- Europe security relations have been mostly affected by the evolution ofthe strategic landscape, an evolution in which Washington inevitably played the main part and capitals assumed a wide cast of supporting characters. Unable and unwilling to find a role suitable to its middle-power ambitions, Ottawa simply left the centre of the transatlantic stage.By strategic landscape, we mean the way political elites perceive and construct the nature of security challenges. Of course, the nature of security challenges tends to be shaped by the powerful, and among them the US is paramount. But, in a transatlantic security community where, even today, a sense of collective identity remains perceptible, smaller powers (say, France or Canada) have also been able at times to resist, reinterpret, and occasionally even reshape US security perceptions.1 In particular, we identify four problem areas that have dominated transatlantic relations over the past io years: the move from territorial defence to counterterrorism, the security architecture of Europe, the emerging balance of power, and political relations in a transatlantic security community. For each problem area we discuss where Canada fits in EU-US relations. The other transatlantic relationship must indeed begin with an understanding of the normal transatlantic relationship.We conclude on a fairly upbeat, though not a totally optimistic, note in respect ofthe ongoing quality of Canadian- strategic cooperation. Currently, both Canada and Europe are undergoing periods of inwardlooking attention that are not conducive to great joint endeavours. The improving state of EU-US relations since Barack Obama's election has also made the European character of Canada less salient compared to the Bush era. But diminishing strategic interdependence between Canada and Europe will not necessarily affect the quality of their political, cultural, and social relations. On the contrary, it may even contribute to improving them by erasing potential irritants in the realm of security. In our view, the CanadaEurope relationship is an illustration that a certain sense of collective identity (we-ness, in Karl Deutsch's words) does not have to be based only on common interests.FROM TERRITORIAL DEFENCE TO COUNTERTERRORISMBy one reading of events, terrorism might be said to be one indisputable key characteristic ofthe new strategic landscape. Indeed, for many it is not only easy but also necessary to believe that with the disappearance of the greatpower threats of yore that so marked the geopolitical landscape in the 20th century - starting with Germany and the Nazis and continuing with Russia and the Communists - there was only one real problem left on the strategic horizon, the problem of terrorism, conventional in the first instance, and nuclear in its most nightmarish variants. But were we to go back a bit more than a century ago, we would realize that the terrorist challenge of today is not something unknown in transatlantic affairs, and that it may not be as serious a challenge as that earlier one, which bore the descriptive label of the anarchist threat. …