Abstract
Canada is home to a large and diverse community of academic experts on various aspects of international politics, but only a small subset of these scholars is actively engaged with Canadian Foreign Policy per se, and even fewer think of themselves as specialists working in Canadian Foreign Policy (CFP) as an academic subfield. This is strikingly different from the way things were during the Cold War years, when most Canadian scholars working on international affairs recognized an obligation to relate their work to Canadian Foreign Policy debates, and many thought of themselves as CFP specialists. Some would welcome these post-Cold War developments, as an indication that Canadian scholarship is now less parochial and more “worldly” than it once was. But we should be concerned about the apparent unravelling of CFP as an academic project, because without that project we lose decades’ worth of shared insights and concepts and the broader perspective gained over time and across issue areas.
The 2015 federal election stirred up some lively conversations in the hallways of the Political Science Department at Dalhousie, about continuities and disjunctures in Canadian Foreign Policy. But, as interesting and enthusiastic as those conversations were, we couldn’t help noticing how few of us were engaged in them, and how disconnected they were from the core research and teaching concerns of most members of the department—and this was at Dalhousie, which has historically been a leading centre for CFP and continues to have some enduring strengths in this area. On other campuses, there is still debate on the content and practice of Canadian Foreign Policy, but virtually no one comes to the debate with a broader grounding in CFP. What has happened to CFP, and why? Previous laments have emphasized historical developments, like the end of the Cold War, which have made Canada itself less important as an international actor, or shifting intellectual currents and professional incentives, which have drawn scholars away to other fields of study. These things are of course important, but there are still senior scholars that stick doggedly to CFP, and junior scholars that choose—sometimes against the advice of their supervisory committees—to pursue it. Our own conversations about these things kept coming back to political and professional socialization, and more particularly to the time and circumstances of an academic’s “coming of age,” politically. Informally comparing notes with colleagues, it seemed that whether and how an individual scholar thought about Canadian Foreign Policy, and about CFP, might be connected to which prime minister was in office at the time, what were the prevailing narratives about Canada as an international actor, and which intellectual currents they were exposed to in school.
These conversations became the core themes for what we have called “Generations,” an ongoing collaborative research project that connects up our shared interest in political socialization with the evolution of CFP as a field of study. How has our thinking about the parameters and purposes of CFP changed over time? Why have some scholars with an interest in Canadian Foreign Policy not come to think of themselves as part of the CFP community? Why are some scholars’ views of how and why Canadian Foreign Policy decisions are made disconnected from their own views about how and why those decisions ought to be made? And how are all of these things connected to the way individual scholars think about Canada as a political project, and their own relationship to it? The Generations project came about in part as a way of seeking an answer to these questions.
In August 2016, in conjunction with the Bill Graham Centre for Contemporary International History and the Canadian International Council, we organized a two-day workshop in Toronto that brought together an impressive and eclectic group of scholars to explore the Generations themes. Eight of the papers from that workshop have been brought together here, and most of the rest will be published soon in an edited volume. The eight papers here were selected as a varied cross-section of the Generations group, whose contributions reveal very different ways of thinking about the connection between socialization and scholarship. Most of those in the edited volume, on the other hand, take more of a bird's-eye view of the field as a whole, focusing more often on questions of disciplinarity, pedagogy, and professional incentives.
The Toronto workshop, and the many informal conversations that have followed from it, have generally supported our original hunches about the importance of socialization in shaping individual scholars’ disciplinary identities and therefore the broader academic landscape. But they have also forced us to re-examine our own professional narratives—outlined briefly below—and our thinking about which aspects of socialization might be most important, when and how individuals fit into their own generational cohorts, and how individual scholarly trajectories combine to reinforce or reshape disciplinary boundaries.
Bow: CFP by accident
The more I think about my own biography and early interests, the more puzzling it is that I ended up studying CFP—especially after I reflect on the other contributions to this special issue. I didn’t really start looking at CFP until my doctoral dissertation, which I wrote at an American university, under faculty supervisors with no background or interest in CFP. I was interested in a larger theoretical problem (diplomatic cultures), and the Canada–US bilateral relationship worked as a case study. I wanted a faculty position in Canada, and I figured that studying CFP couldn’t hurt.
Once I’d started working on the Canada–US diplomatic relationship, I realized that I had a lot of “catching up” to do just to get a handle on CFP, and on Canadian politics. As someone who had previously focused mostly on international politics and American Foreign Policy, I found most of what I was figuring out about CFP and Canada interesting and even kind of “exotic.” It made me realize how strange it was that I had grown up in Canada, with an interest in politics, but had been disconnected from and uninterested in Canadian national politics. As a kid growing up in (pre-Expo’86) Vancouver, I was more inclined to think about politics in the local and the international contexts. National politics—and thus most of CFP—was something that played itself out in Ontario and Quebec, and therefore reflected the power and preoccupations of people “back east.” When I turned on the television, I saw national election results that had been decided before my neighbours had gone to the polls, national histories that ignored the west, and sitcoms that reflected the controversies, the culture, and even the weather of an entirely different place. My American friends could all perform a two-dimensional Canadian stereotype, but the accent and mannerisms seemed “foreign” and false to me.
As an undergraduate, I was philosophically social-democratic and therefore anxious about the Mulroney government’s Thatcher/Reagan-style pro-market agenda, and I’d inhaled plenty of the free-floating anti-Americanism that filled the air in those days, so I was opposed to the Canada–US free trade deal. But a lot of the arguments I heard against it didn’t resonate with me because they were being made by—and therefore often reflected the ideas and interests of—Ontario manufacturing associations or federal public sector union bosses. The emphasis-in CFP during the late Cold War and early post-Cold War years—on industrial policy, investment regulation, the United Nations (UN), the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and Europe, Africa, etc., all seemed interesting but unfamiliar. As a student, I figured it out and absorbed it as I went along, but it always fit awkwardly because it was all second-hand.
I didn’t really take an interest in studying politics until late in the game, and even then I was indifferent to Canadian politics as such. I had started in an undergraduate business program, and very quickly stumbled and fell out of it; embarrassed and confused, I did what most do, and decided to take a year off to figure out the rest of my life. Most of that year was spent happily wandering aimlessly around Western Europe, and it just so happened that the year was 1989. The human drama playing out in Eastern Europe grabbed my attention, but I wasn’t hooked on International Relations (IR) until I got back to Canada and saw the intellectual upheaval that the end of the Cold War had triggered in the classroom. The reading lists for my classes were full of the sterile, boring IR theory debates from the 1980s, but some of my instructors were prepared to drop the curtain and let us in on how disoriented—but also how excited—they were by the theoretical turmoil that was roiling the field in the 1990s. It was a free-for-all, and students could easily fool themselves into thinking they knew as much as their professors did about this new landscape. As a graduate student at York and then at Cornell, I was just as excited as everyone else to ride the post-positivist earthquake and jump on the constructivist bandwagon. But I was still pretty interested in the old stuff that other students were impatiently brushing out of the way, and I was keen to try to mix old and new.
When I first started at Dalhousie, I taught the CFP class a couple of times, but then reverted back to core IR subjects, leaving CFP to successive sessional instructors. I continued to research and write on CFP as well, but professional incentives were pushing me in other directions. And it was clear that I wasn’t the only one. Even within the small core of CFP, there seemed to be few that had read the classics in the field and not much of a sense of common purpose. There seemed to less and less CFP scholarship each year, partly because scholars were being pulled in other directions, and partly because—as Bessma Momani notes in her contribution to this collection—the Harper government seemed to have little interest in foreign policy, as I understood it, and even less interest in engaging with academics on foreign policy questions, apart from the all-consuming conflict in Afghanistan. Without thinking about it, I had been drifting away from CFP over the last few years. Now that “Canada is back”—or so we are being told—I am rediscovering many of the historical and cultural quirks of Canadian Foreign Policy that attracted me to CFP in the first place. And that, in combination with my experience co-organizing this project, has brought me back again.
Lane: An anachronistic attraction to CFP
When I began my PhD in 2014, it was a homecoming of sorts; I’d completed the last two years of my BA in Political Science at Dalhousie in 2005, and at first glance, the department seemed largely unchanged. Beneath the surface, however, the differences were notable. Professors whose work focused on Canadian foreign and defence policy had retired and had not been replaced, leaving these subjects in the hands of a series of sessional instructors. Other faculty had drifted away from CFP-related topics, in part due to the elimination of the Security and Defence Forum funding and the concomitant professional incentives. And none of my graduate cohort peers in the IR field were writing dissertations that had anything to do with Canada, let alone CFP. Whatever the cause, the level of CFP discourse—and interest in CFP more generally—was markedly diminished when compared to a decade earlier. What was going on?
During the 2015 federal election campaign, I had been struck by my graduate student peers’ general disinterest in domestic politics, and their overall sense of Canada as a nonentity on the world stage. In particular, the Trudeau campaign’s “Canada’s Back!” rhetoric held no personal meaning for them, as it did for me—something I initially attributed to the difference in our ages, since I am considerably older than the other graduate students in my department. It wasn’t just age, though. In hallway chats with Generations participant Aaron Ettinger, then working as a sessional at Dalhousie teaching Canadian foreign and defence policy, I realized that my having an interest in CFP isn’t only a product of having been an idealistic undergraduate in the late 1990s when Canada seemed to matter, versus my younger peers having grown up under Prime Minister Stephen Harper. As Gutterman’s and Momani’s pieces in this collection show, having a similar “coming of age” is no guarantee that one’s personal and professional interests in CFP will be similar, too. A better explanation seemed to be the introduction to Canadian foreign and defence policy I had received as an undergraduate in 2003–2005, where seminars with Denis Stairs and Danford Middlemiss had encouraged me to take Canada and CFP seriously, and where the excitement of current events was leavened with the insights drawn from careful historical analysis. Whether discussing the Iraq War or the Korean War, it was through these classes that Canada’s role in the world seemed to me relevant and interesting. These classes were a welcome respite from the more Manichean tenor of public debate on campus, in which knee-jerk anti-Americanism and smug, beer commercial Canadian patriotism made simplistic bedfellows. I had been living in lower Manhattan on 9/11 and understood the visceral reaction to the attacks that seemed to motivate American support for the war in Iraq, even as I myself opposed it. In Stairs’ class, we were encouraged to think critically about the long-term effects of cheap political point-scoring at the expense of the Canada–US relationship and to justify our opinions by reference to empirical evidence and historical analogy. By the end of my first semester, I was hooked on CFP, and a particular version of CFP—measured, historical, and steeped in a sort of epistolary anglicism—at that.
Before the Generations workshop, I was convinced that this combination of factors—in essence, being at the right place, in the right time—could explain my interest in CFP. Now, however, I am less certain. In listening to the workshop presentations, talking informally with participants, and reading through these collected essays, the effects of upbringing and familial socialization are difficult to ignore. Without recognizing it, I grew up as a “soft nationalist” in the Trudeauian mould. Like my co-editor, I grew up on the West Coast, where national politics seemed far removed from daily life. But the milieu I was raised in was distinctly “Victorian”: cosmopolitan and bourgeois-bohemian; infused with public service and environmentalist values; decidedly anglophilic and yet committed, via early French immersion, to bilingualism as a national good; and influenced by the close proximity of our sister regions in “Cascadia”: Washington, Oregon, and California. By the time I was an undergraduate, I had absorbed that Canada was an important national project, one best steered by conscientious, bilingual civil service elites, whose foreign policies ought to balance US and UK interests while bowing to neither. In short, I was already primed to be interested in CFP; my undergraduate courses might just have lit the spark. For whatever reason, and in spite of repeated assurances that to focus on CFP as a junior scholar is to commit pre-emptive professional suicide, my interest in CFP endures.
Looking for patterns
Our own experiences suggest that when and where a person comes of age politically can have powerful effects on their decisions about what to study, and how, and to what ends. In this context, it can shape whether one takes an interest in Canadian Foreign Policy, whether one self-identifies with “CFP” as an academic project, and how one thinks about the scope and purposes of CFP as a scholarly enterprise. We began with a set of hunches about how this might work: Obviously individual scholars would be more likely to engage with CFP if they began their academic careers during the period when CFP was relatively robust, in terms of stature, publication venues, and research funding—that is, between the mid-1960s and the late 1980s. Refining that hunch, we expected that scholars interested in international politics would be more likely to take (and sustain) an interest in Canadian Foreign Policy, and to engage with CFP as an academic project, if they came of age during a time when the Canadian government had an ambitious and controversial foreign policy agenda—as with Pierre Trudeau in the early 1970s or Lloyd Axworthy in the late 1990s, in contrast with Jean Chrétien’s early years or Stephen Harper’s decade in power. And, although this wasn’t how it worked for Bow, we expected that those that went to university—and especially graduate school—in Canada would presumably be more likely to take an interest in Canadian Foreign Policy and more likely to become embedded in a network of CFP researchers. The contributors to this collection (and, it turns out, many of those in the edited volume to follow) often do not fit these expectations, and when they do, sometimes do so in unexpected ways.
Of course, we are drawing on a very small, and not particularly representative, sample of Canadian scholars here, so none of what follows is meant to be taken as true for all. But there are some interesting patterns, and they do set us up for interesting conversations about the links between personal experience and disciplinary evolution.
There is no straightforward connection, for example, between coming of age during CFP’s Cold War era “glory days” and taking a sustained interest in Canadian Foreign Policy, nor between going to university in Canada and choosing to join the CFP community. Denis Stairs went from University of Toronto to Oxford and took courses on history and politics at the international scale (which was then mostly about the West). Yet he took up close study of Canadian Foreign Policy as soon as he began teaching at Dalhousie in the late 1960s, even before CFP had really been established as an academic enterprise, and therefore played an important part in building the field itself. David Haglund grew up in Canada but did his PhD in the US; like Stairs, his education and his scholarly identity were built around international politics, not CFP. (And the differences in their respective approaches to this wider field generally fit with the usual clichés about British and American ideas about theory and “training” in IR.) But, like Stairs, Haglund has had an important and sustained interest in Canadian Foreign Policy and seems to have always assumed that he would be engaged with CFP as an academic enterprise, as reflected in his long editorial stewardship of International Journal (2003–12). Heather Smith studied in Canada and was initially immersed in conventional CFP, but then found that what she wanted to study, and how, didn’t fit into that container, and increasingly saw it as a foil for her own scholarly priorities. Yet she still maintains an interest in CFP as a field and remains an active and engaged member of the evolving CFP community. The other contributors here started university after the Cold War ended and all relate to CFP differently from the scholars above, but their experiences and their professional trajectories run the gamut. Ellen Gutterman and Aisha Ahmad both did their PhDs in Canada, and both take an interest in Canadian Foreign Policy, but neither saw CFP as a promising career pathway. Bessma Momani started university excited about Canadian Foreign Policy and interested in CFP but then drifted away to things that were more urgently in demand. Asa McKercher did his PhD in the UK, had a choice to make between studying American or Canadian diplomatic history, and chose the latter when he got a job here. Srdjan Vucetic went from Canada to a PhD at Ohio State, and then came back to CFP when he came back to Canada to teach; like many of the contributors here, he teaches CFP but doesn’t think of himself as a CFP specialist.
Reflecting on our own experiences, the discussion at the Toronto workshop and in the contributions to this collection, our attention is drawn to the importance of Canada—as an idealized, abstract, even emotional entity—to each author’s discussion of CFP and their place in relation to it. Normative considerations of Canada, and Canadian-ness, are woven throughout the essays in this issue, with authors asking implicitly: what is Canada? What ought Canada to be? Does Canada matter, both to me personally and to the broader world? What role does morality play in Canadian Foreign Policy? Is there a “natural” Canadian Foreign Policy, and if so, what does it look like? Is it purely a function of structural constraints, or is their something distinctly “Canadian” about Canadian Foreign Policy?
Some of these might seem to be questions about domestic partisan politics, but we view them—and the answers the authors provide in these papers—as more fundamental and personal than political. “Whether Canada matters and in what way” elicits cross-generational comparisons and contrasts between authors in a way that mere partisan affiliation cannot. For example, Stairs’, Smith’s, and Ahmad’s essays, while on the surface dissimilar, each acknowledge a unique Canada, with a specific role to play in the world. Their Canada has responsibilities, both to Canadians and to citizens of other nations, and those responsibilities stem in part from the character of Canada (in its own right and as not-US and not-UK). When contrasted with the more detached “Canada-as-case-study” approach taken by Haglund, Vucetic, and McKercher, the personal importance of Canada qua Canada to Stairs, Smith, and Ahmad is evident. From that initial impulse of “Canada matters,” Smith’s and Momani’s papers both refer explicitly to what Canada ought to be and do, while Ahmad describes her vision of Canada in a warning as to what would be lost were Canada to stray from it. Haglund’s essay would seem to paint him as one who rejects the normative discourse in CFP, yet his theoretical detachment cannot hide his affection for the very field of scholarship he is chiding. Indeed, were Canada and CFP to matter not a whit, why bother with the criticism at all? While Stairs has in previous works argued against the same moralizing tendencies that Haglund decries, his personal essay here is itself imbued with a quiet, sober ought: Canada has been blessed with peace and prosperity, and as such care must be taken that our foreign policy supports stability around the world.
One’s idea of Canada appears to affect one’s engagement with CFP, as well, but as to how, it remains unclear. Momani’s article engages with the intertwining of personal and professional normative aspects most directly, by comparing her experiences of being a scholar when Canada—and CFP—seemed exciting and prominent to her experiences in the post-9/11 era, when Canadian Foreign Policy (and CFP?) clashed with her ideas of Canada. Smith describes her complex journey from mainstream CFP scholar to one who sees the fraudulent national underpinnings of Canada’s international image as “helpful fixer,” and yet her desire to engage with CFP remains even as she questions her role within it. Gutterman’s article provides an interesting complication to our hypothesis linking Canada’s global profile with scholarly interest in CFP. In it, the 1990s that she describes is the same one that so excited Momani, and yet Gutterman’s conclusion is that Canada—and CFP—is too insignificant to be of any real personal academic interest. Neither does the idealization of Canada as special, or morally obligated, seem to predict engagement with CFP: Haglund’s, McKercher’s, and Vucetic’s non-normative (or non-idealized) views of Canada have produced sustained interest in CFP and in Canadian Foreign Policy writ large, while Ahmad’s academic interests have largely lain elsewhere, and Momani has found more fruitful professional venues outside CFP.
Of course, the eight short essays collected here cannot possibly answer all the questions posed above. But, taken together, they represent a thought-provoking catalyst for a more reflective and purposive re-engagement with/within CFP. The Generations project reminds us that there is still an energetic and diverse community of scholars with an interest in Canada’s foreign policy, who are—or, with the right kind of encouragement—could become part of a vibrant CFP community. By encouraging scholars to think about whether, when, and why they have engaged with CFP as a field of study, we hope to get a better sense of how it might be reinvigorated. This is not about finding our way back to some idealized version of the field’s “glory days.” Indeed, the narrowness of the field in the late Cold War decades is no doubt a big part of the reason why it faded after the Cold War. Rather, by welcoming and incorporating a more diverse array of scholars, disciplines, methodologies, theoretical approaches, and topics, we hope that the field can be made more attractive to new generations of CFP experts, while retaining and building on the contributions of past CFP scholars.