Uncle Sam and US: Globalization, Neoconservatism, and the Canadian State

Abstract

UNCLE SAM AND US Globalization, Neoconservatism, and Canadian State Stephen Clarkson Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. viii, 534pp, $75.00 cloth (ISBN 0-8020-3758-5), $37.50 paper (ISBN 0-8020-8539-3)For over 35 years, Stephen Clarkson has been one of Canada's leading scholars and thinkers in field of Canadian foreign policy. As an ardent liberal and nationalist, his writings have always been original and critical, and often iconoclastic. For all this time his thinking has been strongly supportive of building an authentic Canadian culture and national identity, and of preserving and where possible enhancing national economic welfare and foreign policy autonomy. His longstanding skepticism about Chicago-school economics and its subversive role in fostering of anti-nationalism as core operating doctrine of Canadian political elite has evolved over years into a full-blown rejection of neoconservative policy package that came to dominate international political economy in post-Cold War era. Uncle Sam and Us is product of his systematic and quite profound reflections on damage done to Canadian state and Canadian national dream by forces of neoconservative globalist doctrine.Clarkson begins his analysis with confident assertion that Canada and Canadian state will survive indefinitely because American conservatives would never condone or endorse annexation of Canada's left-leaning population (11). The only real issue, then, is what structural form and range of capabilities Canadian future will take. But within a year of his book's publication, voices were being raised on behalf of political union with United States as a desirable goal for all English-speaking Canadians (Mark Lovewell and Anthony Westell, Union-but what kind? Globe and Mail, 14 October 2003). Clarkson's optimism about American right saving Canadians from themselves seems excessive. The history of economic and political accommodation of, and concessions to, American economic and geostrategic imperatives by successive Canadian elites since 1930s does not bode well for long-term survival of Canadian national experiment.The core of book reviews massive shift in public policies that have resulted from abandonment of principles of Keynesian state under Fordist economics in favour of core policies of neoconservative globalist paradigm. It is very much a must read for both students of political economy and Canadian foreign policy. Canadian accession to both CUFTA and NAFTA set stage for systemic retrenchment in economy by both federal and provincial governments. Clarkson examines two decades of policy reforms in banking, monetary policy, tax policy, and deregulation of financial services and telecommunications. He persuasively suggests that it was both neoconservative policy at work as well as rapid technological change and popular Canadian pressures for competitively priced products and most up-to-date services, as well as popular neglect of any serious attention to the national interest, that led to a tidal wave of deregulatery change (183). Neoconservative and neoliberal orthodoxies certainly played a dominant role in process, but so too did popular ignorance, apathy, venality, and narrow-mindedness. …