Abstract
Reviewed by: Ali G. Dizboni, Royal Military College of Canada
Liberal narratives, of varying types, have long dominated theories of Canadian foreign policy. The fundamental assumption behind concepts such as the Trading State and Middle Power is a basic recognition of Canadian cultural, economic, and geopolitical realities. According to this narrative, Canada's success involved not punching above its weight and seeking multilateralism, i.e. oscillating between continentalism, transatlanticism, and internationalism in order to maintain prosperity and sovereignty. As for Canada's military, peacekeeping marked Canadian forces' international missions and privileged Canada as a non-colonizing power—one welcomed in conflict zones as it carried out United Nations (UN)-mandated missions. This image has comforted the majority of Canadians for decades.
Since 9/11, realist narratives have come to rival the liberal line. By seeking safety at home with security beyond peace operations abroad, Canada jettisoned its image as the peaceful kingdom. The US motto “With the UN if possible and without it if necessary” and its corollaries of unilateral pre-emptive and preventive war confronted Canada with the stark choice to be out or to be in with its paramount ally in trade and security. Under the Conservative government, investment in defence rose and Canadian forces took leading roles in Afghanistan, Libya, Iraqi Kurdistan, and Syria. Soon the Middle Power image was eclipsed by Canada as a rising unilateral power with its own national and international agenda. Accordingly, Canada's military involvement in Afghanistan was increasingly explained by those in both academic and policy think tanks as part of a global war on terror, not only to honour Canadian international obligations (NATO) but also to assert its leadership and to curb threats of global radicalism to Canada's trade and safety interests. The government's Canada First Defence Strategy of 2008 further underlined the degree to which advocates of a more activist and militarily muscular defence strategy eclipsed policy in sync with the liberal tradition.
Nemesis to both the liberal and realist narratives, Empire's Ally offers an alternative take. A collection of essays inspired by critical theories and Marxist traditions, it offers a structuralist, and controversial, political economy approach. It construes Canada as a “secondary state” in the US imperial system. Although the volume's authors believe that historically Canada has been part of the Western-led capitalist empire, they focus on the post-Communist and post-Third Worldist era. They argue that the globalization of the American empire emerged out of the internationalization of the liberal nation-state and the dominance of US capital in the global market. World financial markets came to pivot around the Wall Street hub in which the US government is structurally embedded to finance its deficit and its military engagements and commitments (viii–ix). International institutions, be they economic or political, consolidate this unipolar hegemony based in six regional military command centres leading to continuous military interventions from the Balkans to Afghanistan, Iraq, and the list goes on. The authors maintain that the Middle East is possibly the case par excellence where these processes materialized in terms of economic space, oil flow, and military command. Unlike realists and liberals, the authors believe that Middle Eastern violence is not essentialist and endogenous but rather a reflection of regional grievances against the empire's impositions and its support for dictatorships (i.e. the comprador-bourgeoisies). In the second part of the book, “The political economy of Canadian foreign policy,” the key idea is that Canada, being integrated in the US empire, reproduces the same embeddedness between capital and politics to consolidate its position within the Western alliance and to expand its military infrastructures to defend Canada's Wall Street, so to speak. Delving into discourses and consequences, part 3, “Canada's war in Afghanistan,” suggests that Canada's increasing subscription of a 3D policy (development, diplomacy, and defence) during its involvement left Afghanistan in worse shape and ultimately served as a hegemonic discourse, in Gramscian terms, to legitimize capitalist expansion.
The problem with this model, as with any grand theory in the social sciences, is its self-fulfilling prophecy. Counterfactuals and disconfirming evidence are either ignored as epiphenomena or squeezed in the straitjacket of a structuralist explanation. Its very foundation (which forms its attraction and its weakness) is the Marxist assumption that the accumulation of capital is the only independent variable in explaining foreign policy or any other social relationship. This deductive reductionism overlooks the impact of factors such as ideology, the new security environment, and bureaucratic politics, and reduces complex events such as the terrorist attacks of 9/11 to the dynamics of US global capitalism. How can one then explain Canada's unilateral policy toward Iran? The reader may wonder how a trillion dollars of spending in the Afghanistan operation, not to mention the Canadian contribution of 18 billion dollars, ending in total withdrawal, were the only way to consolidate the empire. How does military intervention on such a large scale in one of the poorest countries in the world effectively result in a stronger global entrenchment of US capitalism? The problem is highlighted by the loose analytical connection between the volume's various sections. Most essays, such as John Warnock's “Afghanistan and empire,” Todd Gordon's “Canada in the Third World,” and Angela Joya's “Failed states and Canada's 3D policy in Afghanistan” provide independently useful and original insights into some of the realities behind decades of permanent war and intervention in Afghanistan. However, these essays need to be better linked à la Wallerstein and Cox, to the Marxist political economy approach as promised in the volume's introduction. In other words, there is a conceptual (and intellectual) gap between assertions such as the West colonized Afghanistan, Canada was rewarded for its cooperation with the US, or failed in bringing about Canadian values, on the one hand, and the book's Marxist assertion that historical materialism and capitalist accumulation explain each military deployment by Canada, on the other. One may hope that Jerome Klassen's new book Joining Empire: The Political Economy of the New Canadian Foreign Policy (University of Toronto Press, 2014) has addressed these issues.
Nevertheless, this book does have the virtue of challenging some mainstream beliefs and clichés, filling a gap in the study of Canadian foreign policy that was long monopolized by liberal narratives. It also challenges the current research obsession with institutional and domestic political factors and situates foreign policy analysis within a broader framework focusing on the social relations of capital both internally and, more importantly, at the global level. These advantages make it a welcome addition to the literature on Canadian foreign and defence policy.