Interrogating the Politics of Canada's Human Security Discourse
In the Name of Emancipation? Interrogating the Politics of Canada’s Human Security Discourse
Umut zgüç
Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts
August 2007
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences The University of New South Wales
16 PLEASE TYPE THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES Thesis/Dissertation Sheet
Surname or Family name: OZGUC
First name: UMUT Other name/s: MA (Research) Abbreviation for degree as given in the University calendar:
School: School of International Studies Faculty: Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
Title: In the Name of Emancipation? Interrogating the Politics of Canada’s Human Security Discourse
Abstract 350 words maximum: (PLEASE TYPE) Canada has actively incorporated human security into its foreign policy framework ever since the first articulation of human security in the 1994 United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Annual Report. The Canadian Government has been at the forefront of promoting the concept internationally, thereby identifying Canada as one of the leading ‘humanist–activist’ states. This thesis, however, takes a more skeptical approach towards the emancipatory claims of Canada’s human security discourse. It argues that, despite its overarching humanistic tone, the question of who is secured through the language and operationalization of human security remains problematic. In examining Canada’s human security discourse in reference to this central question, this thesis analyses the promotion and operationalization of human security within Canada and abroad. The central argument of this thesis is that with its overwhelmingly statist and liberal language, Canada’s interpretation of human security is far from being a challenge to the traditional ontological claims of security as being the provider of political order. The Canadian human security agenda is driven by a traditional fear of national insecurity. It aims to secure national unity and identity in Canada, and its national and economic security abroad, by promoting the ideals of liberal democratic peace. Drawing upon the insights of critical security studies and post-structuralist approaches to international relations, this thesis reveals several meaning-producing effects of Canada’s human security discourse. First, domestically, it perpetuates the truth claims of the discourse of Canadian identity by naturalizing the idea of Canadian goodness. Canada’s human security discourse enhances the social control of the population by masking ‘human insecurities’ within Canada. Second, by framing ‘failed’ and ‘fragile’ states as a threat to Canadian security and liberal international order, the Canadian Government perpetuates the constant struggle between the zones of peace and the zones of chaos, and overcodes human security with simultaneously a statist and universalist language that aims to control as well as emancipate the ‘borderlands’. Third, while Canadian discourse on human security claims to encourage a bottom-up approach to security, it works ironically as an elitist policy which endorses an ideal form of governance in Canada and abroad.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iii ABSTRACT v LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS vi
INTRODUCTION 1
1. Preamble 1
2. Human Security: An Overview of the New Paradigm 3
3. Canadian Human Security Agenda: The Review of the Literature 7
4. Theoretical Remarks 11
5. Thesis Outline and Research Contribution 14
CHAPTER ONE 16
CONTESTING THE SECURITY LITERATURE
1. Introduction 16
2. A New Research Agenda: Security in the Aftermath of Cold War 17
3. Human Security 22 3.1 The intellectual roots of human security 22 3.2 Debating human security 26
CHAPTER TWO 34
GOVERNING CANADIANS: THE DOMESTIC CONSTRUCTION AND POLITICAL MANIPULATION OF HUMAN SECURITY
1. Introduction 34
2. Nation is in Crisis: An Overview of the Context in Canada in the Early 1990s 36
3. The History of Present: Canadian Internationalism as a Nation Builder 41
4. (Re)Constructing Canadian Identity through Human Security 51 4.1 Human security as a tool of national unity strategy 51 4.2 Promoting the myth of ‘shared values’ 55 4.3. (Re) Invoking the myth of ‘peacekeeping nation’ 61 4.4 Branding Canada as ‘soft power’: (Re)Finding the American ‘other’ 63
5. Framing Human Security: The Spheres of Liberal Subjectivity 67 5.1 Freedom from Fear: Introducing the niche diplomacy 67
i 5.2 Ethnic nationalism as a source of insecurity: Human security and liberal governmentality 71
6. Conclusion 76
CHAPTER THREE 78
GOVERNING FAILED STATES: THE PROMOTION OF LIBERAL PEACE IN CANADA’S HUMAN SECURITY DISCOURSE
1. Introduction 78
2. Securitization Theory 80
3. Setting the Context: Practices of Securitization in Canadian Human Security Policy 84 3.1 ‘A world of anxiety’: The discursive construction of ‘insecure Canada’ and early stages of human security discourse 84 3.2 Finding the ‘fearscapes’: Securitization of failed states 91 3.3 In fear of underdevelopment: The political implications of merging security and development 99
4. The Contested Tools of Soft Power: The Discourse on Good Governance 105 4.1 The good governance agenda 105 4.2 What failed ‘failed states’? Embedded statism in good governance discourse 109 4.3 Cartographies of human security: Contested identities and landscapes of good governance discourse 116
5. Conclusion 122
CONCLUSION 124
1. Whose Security? 124
2. Human Security, Emancipation and the Possible Directions for Critical Security Studies 126
BIBLIOGRAPHY 131
ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to express my gratitude towards my supervisor, Dr Anthony Burke. Without his perceptive comments and high standards, this thesis would not have been possible. His words “questioning the question” truly influenced many aspects of this thesis. Dr Jo-Anne Pemberton, who supervised the early stages of this thesis, helped with the development of the research topic. I greatly value her patience, interest, and encouragement. I would also like to convey my indebtedness to Dr Kyle Grayson at the Newcastle University, UK who unconditionally responded to all my emails regarding my queries and provided me feedback on the initial drafts of the thesis. His insights on Canada’s human security policy were truly inspiring. Professor David Black, Dalhousie University, Canada; Dr Richard Nimijean, Carleton University, Canada; and Professor Oliver Richmond, University of St. Andrews, UK were also of tremendous help, as they shared their research and valuable literature with me, which I would have been unable to locate and retrieve. I would also like to thank Ms Manon Lacroix, Department of Canadian Heritage, Canada. She sent me important data and several official reports on Canada’s multiculturalism policy. I would like to thank Professor Christine Inglis at the University of Sydney, and Dr Kevin Dunn and Dr Susan Thompson at University of the New South Wales (UNSW) for appointing me as the research assistant for the ARC funded Transnationalism Project (2005-2007). I appreciate their generosity and support. Working with them has not only provided me with financial assistance, but it has also allowed me to develop my research and writing skills. I would also like to thank the academic staff at the School of International Relations, UNSW for their participation in the annual progress reviews. Their comments and suggestions have been crucial to the refinement of my research. Dr Sarah Maddison, who was the research coordinator in School of International Relations (2005-2006), was also very supportive and encouraging. I would like to thank Lindsay Yeates for reading some parts of this thesis and for giving useful suggestions. The thesis would be impossible without financial and emotional support of my aunt and my parents. I am indebted to my father for his faith in me, love, and sensible advice, which helped me to keep going. My two closest friends, Anuradha Chatterjee and Vidhu Gandhi were always with me since the first iii day of this work. Our friendship was a boon. And I am grateful to Yigit Susmus, for his constant support, love and an exceptional friendship. Finally, I would especially like to thank my partner, Sarp Kaya, for his extraordinary love, never-ending support, and the sacrifices he has made over the years. Without him, I could not have completed this thesis.
iv ABSTRACT
Canada has actively incorporated human security into its foreign policy framework ever since the first articulation of human security in the 1994 United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Annual Report. The Canadian Government has been at the forefront of promoting the concept internationally, thereby identifying Canada as one of the leading ‘humanist–activist’ states. This thesis, however, takes a more skeptical approach towards the emancipatory claims of Canada’s human security discourse. It argues that, despite its overarching humanistic tone, the question of who is secured through the language and operationalization of human security remains problematic. In examining Canada’s human security discourse in reference to this central question, this thesis analyses the promotion and operationalization of human security within Canada and abroad. The central argument of this thesis is that with its overwhelmingly statist and liberal language, Canada’s interpretation of human security is far from being a challenge to the traditional ontological claims of security as being the provider of political order. The Canadian human security agenda is driven by a traditional fear of national insecurity. It aims to secure national unity and identity in Canada, and its national and economic security abroad, by promoting the ideals of liberal democratic peace. Drawing upon the insights of critical security studies and post-structuralist approaches to international relations, this thesis reveals several meaning-producing effects of Canada’s human security discourse. First, domestically, it perpetuates the truth claims of the discourse of Canadian identity by naturalizing the idea of Canadian goodness. Canada’s human security discourse enhances the social control of the population by masking ‘human insecurities’ within Canada. Second, by framing ‘failed’ and ‘fragile’ states as a threat to Canadian security and liberal international order, the Canadian Government perpetuates the constant struggle between the zones of peace and the zones of chaos, and overcodes human security with simultaneously a statist and universalist language that aims to control as well as emancipate the ‘borderlands’. Third, while Canadian discourse on human security claims to encourage a bottom-up approach to security, it works ironically as an elitist policy which endorses an ideal form of governance in Canada and abroad.
v LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
CCIC Canadian Council on International Cooperation CIDA Canadian International Development Agency CIFP Country Indicators for Foreign Policy CRI Countries at Risk of Instability DAC Development Assistance Committee DFAIT Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade DND Department of National Defence EDC Export Development Canada EU European Union FAC Foreign Affairs Canada FTA Free Trade Agreement GDP Gross Domestic Product GPSF Global Peace and Security Fund HIPC Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative HSP Human Security Program ICC International Criminal Court ICISS International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty IMF International Monetary Fund IPS International Policy Statement IRPA Immigration and Refugee Protection Act NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization NEPAD New Partnership for Africa’s Development NGOs Nongovernmental Organizations NORAD North American Aerospace Defense Command ODA Official Development Assistance OECD Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development PREN Poverty Reduction and Economic Network RCMP Royal Canadian Mounted Police ROC Rest of Canada R2P Responsibility to Protect SJC Special Joint Committee SIPRI Stockholm International Peace Research Institute START Stabilization and Reconstruction Taskforce UN United Nations UNDP United Nations Development Programme UNICEF United Nations Children’s Fund UNITA National Union for Total Independence of Angola UNSC United Nations Security Council US United States WB World Bank WOMP World Order Models Project WGA Whole-of-government Approach
vi Introduction
INTRODUCTION
1. Preamble
In the post-Cold War era, the way we understand security has changed dramatically. Security has become more multi-dimensional and complex than it was during the Cold War. The meaning of security is no more limited to military threats to states; it is now ‘broadened’ and ‘deepened’ to include various forms of threats and referent objects. As an element of this debate, the concept of human security was proposed by the 1994 United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Annual Report. The UNDP Report was a response to deep dissatisfaction with the traditional security understandings that privilege the preservation of territorial integrity of states over security of people.1 Human security, as developed by the UNDP, emerged as an attempt to call into question the very ideals of political realism whose authority has been unproblematically maintained by generations of policy-makers and academics. The most explicit normative argument made by the UNDP Report was that individuals and sub-state groups are rendered vulnerable through repressive state structures or unequal global practices that perpetuate a zero-sum understanding of security. In such circumstances, the Report argued, what really is at stake is not the state’s survival, but human integrity and dignity. Not surprisingly, the concept of human security, as proposed by the UNDP, was found very radical and idealistic at this early stage. However, by the late 1990s, the concept has become the main rationale of the policy agendas of many international organizations, most notably in many agencies of the United Nations (UN). In short, even as it has with various different definitions and meanings, human security now constitutes a new ‘security consensus’.
Human security has been a general framework of Canadian foreign policy since its first articulation in the 1995 government report, Canada in the World.2 The government report stressed the importance of the individual and society for a “shared security” and declared the promotion of the rule of law, good governance and human
1 United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Human Development Report 1994, Oxford University Press, New York, 1994. 2 Government of Canada, Canada in the World: Government Statement, Communications Branch, Ottawa, 1995. 1 Introduction
rights as hallmarks of Canadian foreign policy. In particular, under the Foreign Ministership of Lloyd Axworthy (1996–2000), Canada became one of the leading countries that advocated a human-centred policy agenda. During the Axworthy years, Canada played a leading role in the establishment of the International Criminal Court (ICC), the campaign to ban anti-personal landmines and the creation of the Human Security Network with like-minded states. Although the concept relatively lost its currency after Axworthy, the Liberal government, in its 2005 International Policy Statement (IPS), re-invoked the human security agenda through making regular references to failed and fragile states, and locating the newly emerging norm of Responsibility to Protect (R2P) at the centre of Canada’s new foreign policy.3 It is widely argued that these initiatives have not only demonstrated the promising role of an ethical foreign policy in constructing new international norms for individual security, but also proved the ‘humanist–activist’ nature of the Canadian state. This thesis, however, takes a more skeptical approach towards the promising values of human security as promoted by Canada. With the aim of providing a critical reading of Canada’s human security discourse, this thesis poses a basic question which also lies at the heart of the contemporary debate on human security: Who is secured through the language and implementation of the human security agenda? In examining Canada’s human security discourse in reference to this central question, this thesis analyses the promotion and operationalization of human security in Canada and abroad, and argues that, with its overwhelmingly statist and liberal language, Canada’s interpretation of human security is far from being a challenge to the traditional ontological claims of security as being the provider of political order. Driven by a traditional fear of national insecurity, Canada’s human security agenda aims to secure Canada’s national unity and identity, and its national and economic security abroad through promoting the ideals of liberal democratic peace. In seeking to expose the politics of Canada’s human security discourse, this study makes several claims. First, in regards to its domestic manipulation, the human security agenda plays an enormous role in making ‘Canada’, in enabling an ‘assertive national identity, and thereby enhancing the social control of the Canadian population. Second, framing ‘failed’ and ‘fragile’ states as a threat to Canadian security and liberal international order, the Canadian readings of human security aim
3 Government of Canada, Canada’s International Policy Statement: A Role of Pride and Influence in the World Diplomacy, Government of Canada, Ottawa, 2005. 2 Introduction
to contain as well as to emancipate the ‘borderlands’. Third, while Canadian discourse on human security claims to encourage a security which is written by ‘people’, it works ironically as an elitist policy which endorses liberal form of governance in Canada and abroad. The thesis concludes that Canadian practice of human security poses serious challenges to the transformative notions of human security. It not only strengthens the status-quo both in Canada and abroad, but also masks the role of the Canadian state in contributing to various forms of ‘human insecurities’. The most problematic feature of Canada’s human security agenda is that it not only perpetuates the ethnocentric constructions of international politics, but also with its strong language of emancipating Canadians from their ethnical and cultural roots, and failed and fragile states from their abnormal institutional structures, the current reading of human security limits the way in which human security should be understood.
2. Human Security: An Overview of the New Paradigm
Despite its early articulations, the concept of human security was popularized and institutionalized by the 1994 UNDP Report.4 The 1994 UNDP Report can be considered as a warning that alerted international society to the negative consequences of traditional definitions and practices of security. The normative emphasis of human security, as outlined by the UNDP, was that the provision of stable state or international system does not necessarily offer a viable environment for the security of individuals. Rather, people are made insecure by hunger, disease, repression, discrimination, all forms of violence, and all other “sudden and hurtful
4 Human security, as a term, was first used by Canadian psychologist William Blatz in his observation of how individuals develop the feeling of security throughout their lives. As a political term, in 1991 Jorge Nef defined human security as ‘risk reduction’ in his analysis on the political context of Latin America and emphasized insecurities experienced by individuals who are more subject to vulnerability than states. WE Blatz, Human Security: Some Reflections, University of London Press Ltd, London, 1966; J Nef, ‘Democratization, Stability and Other Illusions : Militarism, Nationalism and Populism in the Political Evolution of Latin America with Special Reference to the Chilean Case’, in M Dickerson & S Randall (eds.), Canada and Latin America Issues to the Year 2000 and Beyond: Proceedings of the Conference on Canada and Latin America, University of Calgary, Calgary, 1991, pp. 73-120. See also J Ross, ‘Is Canada’s Human Security Policy Really ‘Axworthy’ doctrine ?’, Canadian Foreign Policy, vol. 8, no. 2, winter 2001, p. 78. 3 Introduction
disruptions in the patterns of daily life—whether in homes, in jobs, or in communities”.5
The 1994 UNDP Report espoused four distinctive aspects of human security. First, human security is a universal concern. There are common threats, which endanger all people regardless of their different religion, language, culture, ethnicity and nationality. Second, the Report listed seven elements of human security: economic, food, health, environmental, personal, communal and political security.6 It acknowledged that threats to human security are independent and require local, national and global efforts. Third, the UNDP highlighted the importance of early prevention. Setting various indicators of human insecurity—such as human rights violations, military spending, and inequity between different population groups—the Report argued that early warning would be more constructive and less costly than later intervention. Finally, the most radical move made by the 1994 UNDP Report was that security is not about states, but about the elimination of sources of threats to individual well-being.
In its broadest interpretation, human security refers to freedom from fear and freedom from want. Freedom from want aspects of human security link security with development and emphasize positive freedoms and rights. As outlined in the 1994 UNDP Report, freedom from want sees human development as a prerequisite for human security. For Mahbul ul-Haq, the central figure in developing the concept of human development, freedom from want refers to better distribution of productive assets, open access to market opportunities, a constructive policy environment for job creation and social nets for those who are bypassed by the markets, and global justice in the distribution of world income and resources, which calls for a global revolution in the North–South relations.7 In a much narrower perspective, according to the UN Secretary-General’s report, In Larger Freedom, freedom from want refers to
5 United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report 1994, p. 23. 6 According to the UNDP Report, economic security requires a basic income from ‘productive and remunerative work’, or from ‘publicly financed safety nets’; food security means ‘physical and economic access to basic food’; health security requires to increase health care especially in developing or underdeveloped countries; environmental security requires a healthy physical environment and controlled population; personal security is freedom from violence; community security refers to security in a family, a community, an organization, and in a racial and ethnic group that provides identity and set of values to individuals; political security is freedom from political repression, systematic torture, ill treatment or disappearance. ibid., pp. 25-33. 7 MU Haq, ‘New Imperative of Human Security: Barbara Ward Lecture 1994’, Journal of SID, Development, vol. 2, no. 4, 1995, pp. 40-43. 4 Introduction
economic growth that targets the world’s poorest.8 Freedom from want, in this sense, means gender equality, sustainable environment, strong rural and urban development, viable health, education and housing systems, which require governments strengthening democratic governance, combating corruption and putting in place the policies and investments to drive private-sector-led growth.9 Promoting the freedom from want approach of human security, the Japanese Government addresses the economic crises which severely threaten the marginalized within the society, in particular the poor, women and children.10
Freedom from fear offers a narrower agenda. It prioritizes violent threats to individuals, or, as put by the European Union (EU) Barcelona Report, it concerns regional conflicts, failed states, terrorism, weapons of mass destruction and organized crime.11 For many the freedom from fear agenda represents ‘the new humanitarianism’ and reflects the overarching concern with the increase in the number of civil conflicts by the end of the Cold war. It particularly addresses the direct impact of ‘new wars’ on civilian populations who become the target of ethnic cleansing and genocide. Since 1999, Canada has been at the forefront of promoting freedom from fear aspects of human security. According to the Canadian Government, the elimination of violence or threat of violence—such as crime, political violence, or armed conflict—constitutes a pre-condition for human development.12 In this regard, Canada’s freedom from fear agenda focuses on economic, social and ecological dimensions of these conflicts, protection of civilians, and strengthening the humanitarian law and international preventive strategies of state collapse. As a part its agenda, for instance, Canada played an important role in putting the protection of civilians in the United Nations Security Council (UNSC)
8 UN General Assembly, In Larger Freedom: Towards Development, Security and Human Rights for All: Report of the Secretary-General, A/59/2005/, March, 21, 2005. 9 ibid. 10 K Obuchi, Policy Speech by Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi at the Lecture Program hosted by the Institute for International Relations: Toward the Creation of A Bright Future for Asia, Hanoi, Vietnam, December 16,1998, viewed 12 November 2004, < http://www.mofa.go.jp/region/asia- paci/asean/pmv9812/policyspeech.html>. For human security dimension of Japanese foreign policy see Government of Japan, Diplomatic Bluebook 2000: Toward the 21st Century—Foreign Policy for a Better Future, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Tokyo, 2000. 11 Study Group on Europe’s Security Capabilities, A Human Security Doctrine for Europe: The Barcelona Report of the Study Group on Europe’s Security Capabilities, Presented to EU High Representative for Common Foreign and Security Policy Javier Solana, 15 September 2004, Barcelona, viewed 15 August 2006,
agenda which resulted in a number of UNSC Resolutions that showed a commitment to mobilize UN efforts on behalf of civilians.13 The UNSC Resolution 1261 on children and armed conflict, the Resolution 1265 on protection of civilians in armed conflicts, the Resolution 1296 on protection of civilians in armed conflicts, and the Resolution 1325 on women and peace and security are usually regarded as revolutionary moves as for the first time the impact of armed conflicts on children and women, and their protection, was placed in the UNSC mandate.14 Moreover, Canada’s Human Security Program (HSP) that was launched in 2000 clarifies the niches that Canada aims to promote in its foreign policy. These areas—protection of civilians, peace support initiatives, conflict prevention and resolution, governance and accountability and public safety—draw the general framework of a ‘Canadian approach’ to human security.15 It is important to note that the Harper government, which came to power in 2006, has downgraded the human security agenda, in particular the human security program. However the Harper government has adopted the freedom from fear aspects of human security —mainly Canada’s R2P agenda— set by Liberal government in its 2005 International Policy Statement.
13 Canada was elected to the UNSC in 1998 for a two-year term. During its presidency, Canada advanced three main human security themes: advancing the transparency in the Council work through the inclusion of more elected non-permanent members and the ones who are directly affected by the UNSC decisions; protection of civilians in armed conflicts; and enhancing the credibility and effectiveness of the UNSC. As a part of its agenda on enhancing UN capacity for rapid response, peacekeeping and peacebuilding, Canada actively supported the adoption of the recommendations made by the 2000 Brahimi Report. In addition, Canada played the major role in developing an agenda to tackle the ineffective sanctions regime which resulted in Council’s endorsement of recommendation to establish an expert panel through Resolution 1129 and 1237, and Fowler’s Report that explicitly named the individuals and states that deliberately break the sanctions regime against UNITA. For the overview of Canada’s human security agenda in the UNSC, see M Pearson, ‘Humanizing the UN Security Council’, in FO Hamspson, N Hillmer & MA Molot (eds.), Canada Among Nations 2001: The Axworthy Legacy, Oxford University Press, Toronto, 2001, pp.127-151; P Knox, ‘Canada at the UN: A Human Security Council’, in MA Molot & FO Hampson (eds.), Canada Among Nations 2000: Vanishing Borders, Oxford University Press, Toronto, 2000, pp. 303-320. 14 UNSC, Resolution 1261 on children and armed conflict, S/RES/1261 (1999), 30 August 1999.; UNSC, Resolution 1265 on protection of civilians in armed conflicts, S/RES/1265 (1999), 17 September 1999; UNSC, Resolution 1296 on protection of civilians in armed conflicts, S/RES/1296 (2000), 19 April 2000; UNSC, Resolution 1325 on women and peace and security, S/RES/1325 (2000), 31 October 2000. 15 Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, Freedom from Fear: Canada’s Foreign Policy for Human Security, DFAIT, Ottawa, 2002. For the details of the HSP, see Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, Evaluation of the Human Security Program Final Report, Evaluation Division, Ottawa, June 2003, viewed 20 March 2005,
6 Introduction
3. Canadian Human Security Agenda: The Review of the Literature
Since human security was incorporated into the Canadian foreign policy, there has been an extensive debate on the implementation and the implications of Canada’s human security agenda. The supporters of human security policy mostly stress Canada’s diplomatic accomplishments such as the Ottawa Convention, the ICC, and the Kimberley Process, and emphasize Canada’s role in changing the normative context of the international security agenda. It is argued that Canada’s ‘humanist activism’ has not only created a solid foundation of a more just and secure international order, but also played a leading role in developing new international norms.16
For the supporters of the Canada’s human security policy, Canada’s commitment to the inclusion of ‘soft security’ issues into the peace and security agenda of the UNSC fundamentally changed the state-centric considerations in international policy setting.17 From this perspective—in particular, Axworthy’s efforts to build a strong relationship between state and non-state actors in policy- making forums—have challenged the long established privilege of state actors in policy setting. Portraying, for instance, the Ottawa Process as an accomplishment of civil society, it is suggested that Axworthy’s international human security initiatives reflect a new form of internationalism—“postmodern internationalism”—that transcends narrow interests of particular states and state-to-state relations.18 Moreover, according to the modernist constructivist perspectives, Canada has promoted the role of ideational elements in international affairs by placing new
16 See for example, R McRae & D Hubert (eds.), Human Security and the New Diplomacy: Protecting People, Promoting Peace, McGill Queens University Press, Montreal, 2001; S Lee, ‘The Axworthy Years: humanist activism and public diplomacy’, Canadian Foreign Policy, vol. 8, no. 1, fall 2000, pp. 1-10; N Hillmer & A Chapnick, ‘The Axworthy Revolution’, in FO Hamspson, N Hillmer & MA Molot (eds), Canada Among Nations 2001: The Axworthy Legacy, Oxford University Press, Toronto, 2001, pp. 67-88. 17 Pearson, pp. 127-151. 18 R McRae, ‘International Relations and the New Diplomacy’, in R McRae & D Hubert (eds.), Human Security and the New Diplomacy Protecting People, Promoting Peace, McGill Queens University Press, Montreal, 2001, pp. 250-259. For a compilation of essays on the Ottawa Process and the Landmines Treaty see MA Cameron, RJ Jawson & BW Tomlin (eds.), To Walk Without Fear: The Global Movement to Ban Landmines, Oxford University Press, Toronto, 1998. 7 Introduction
security issues on the agenda through soft power diplomacy.19 It is argued Canada has played a leadership role in constructing new international norms, by acting as a “middle power”,20 “good international citizen”,21 “tipping agent”,22 “international norm entrepreneur”.23
These perspectives acknowledge the normative value of human security in challenging the state-centric understanding of international politics, and bring ideational factors into foreign policy analysis. However, what remains contested in these perspectives is that they depoliticize the constructions of human security norms, and analyse these norms through the common sense thinking that takes human security as apolitical and unproblematic.24 As critics point out in regards to, for example, the shortcomings of the campaign to ban anti-personal landmines, the Ottawa Convention fails to ask questions on the role of developed nations in contributing to the production of landmines, and sustains the economic interests of industrialized countries and transnational corporations in de-mining activities.25 Therefore, it is important to provide a critical inquiry on the political nature of Canada’s human security agenda.
One of the other most emphasized points in the literature is the relationship between the Canadian identity and the human security policy. For many, Canada’s human security agenda reflects Canada’s good international citizenship, generosity, and peacefulness. It is argued that since the end of the Second World War, Canada
19 The modernist constructivism as labeled by Emanuel Adler results from the combination of objective hermeneutics with conservative cognitive interests in understanding causal social mechanisms and constitutive social relations. In particular Alexander Wendt, John Ruggie, Peter Katzenstein are regarded as modernist constructivists. E Adler, ‘Constructivism and International Relations’, in W Carlsnaes, T Risse & BA Simmons (eds.), Handbook of International Relations, SAGE, London, 2002, pp. 97-98. 20 CJ Ungerer, ‘Approaching human security as “middle power”: Australian and Canadian disarmament diplomacy after the Cold War’, in WT Tow, R Thakur & I Hyun (eds.), Asia’s emerging regional order: Reconciling traditional and human security, The United Nations University, Tokyo, 2000, pp. 78-95. 21 A Franceschet & W Andy, ‘Internationalist citizenship: Canada and the International Criminal Court’, Canadian Foreign Policy, vol. 8, no. 2, winter 2001, pp. 51-84. 22 P Howard & R Neufeldt, ‘Canada’s Constructivist Foreign Policy: Building Norms for Peace’, Canadian Foreign Policy, vol. 8, no.1, fall 2000, pp. 11-38. 23 WA Knight, ‘Soft Power, Moral Suasion, and Establishing the International Criminal Court: Canadian Contribution’, in R Irwin (ed.), Ethics and Security in Canadian Foreign Policy, UBC Press, Vancouver, 2001, pp. 113-137. 24 This critique is also raised by Maja Zehfuss in regards to her discussion on the modernist constructivism. M Zehfuss, Constructivism in International Relations: The politics of reality, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002. 25 JM Beier & AD Crosby, ‘Harnessing Change for Continuity: The Play of Political and Economic Forces Behind the Ottawa Process’, Canadian Foreign Policy, vol. 5, no. 3, spring 1998, pp. 85-103. 8 Introduction
has always been at the forefront of promoting human rights, humanitarianism and protection of people.26 According to this view, a people-centred approach is not a new direction in Canadian foreign policy; rather, it is the continuation of Pearsonian internationalism or multilateralist traditions of Canada.27 This perspective, however, unproblematically recognizes the positive attributes attached to Canadian identity. What appears to be absent in this debate is the question of the role of Canadian internationalism or human security in discursively constructing Canadian identity.
Many scholars have also raised their concerns on the operationalization of Canada’s international human security agenda. According to these critics, the Canadian Government offers unrealistic multilateral commitments that are far beyond the existing financial resources.28 Focusing on the so-called “commitment– capability gap”, these critics address budget deficits of the 1990s, and the decline in the number of government personnel and military spending.29 In this regard, the functionalist perspectives suggest that the Canadian Government should define its priorities, identify niches, focus on areas where Canada has a comparative advantage and mobilize the existing resources in that direction.30 Moreover, many scholars and Canadian nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) criticize the government for underestimating the role of ‘hard power’ in enhancing human security. It is widely argued that the significant changes in the nature of war and the increase in the number of civil conflicts require a highly complex defence capacity.31
26 G Maclean, ‘Building on a Legacy or Bucking Tradition? Evaluating Canada’s Human Security Initiative in an Era of Globalization’, Canadian Foreign Policy, vol. 9, no. 3, spring 2002, pp. 65-84. 27 ibid., pp. 65-84; FO Hampson, M Hart & M Rudner, ‘A Big League or Minor League Player?’, in FO Hampson, M Rudner & M Hart (eds.), Canada Among Nations 1999: A Big League Player?, Oxford University Press, Ontario, 1999, pp. 1-24. 28 D Stairs, ‘The Changing Office of the Minister of Foreign Affairs’, in FO Hampson, N Hillmer & MA Molot (eds.), Canada Among Nations 2001: The Axworthy Legacy, Oxford University Press, Toronto, 2001, pp. 26-29; D Copeland, ‘The Axworthy Years: Canadian Foreign Policy in the Era of Diminished Capacity’, in FO Hampson, N Hillmer & MA Molot (eds.), Canada Among Nations 2001: The Axworthy Legacy, Oxford University Press, Toronto, 2001, pp. 165-168; FO Hampson & MA Molot, ‘The New ‘Can-do’ Foreign Policy’, in FO Hampson & MA Molot (eds.), Canada Among Nations 1998: Leadership and Dialogue, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1998, pp. 7-18. 29 The term ‘commitment–capability gap’ was developed by Rod Byers in 1986. Since then, this terminology has become a point of reference for critics who emphasize the importance of the existing resources in planning the Canadian defense and foreign policy. RB Byers, Canadian Security and Defence: The Legacy and the Challenges, Adelphi Papers 214, winter 1986, London. 30 AF Cooper, ‘In Search of Niches: Saying ‘Yes’ and Saying ‘No’ in Canada’s International Relations’, Canadian Foreign Policy, vol. 3, no. 3, winter 1995, pp. 1-13; EH Potter, ‘Niche Policy as Canadian Foreign Policy’, International Journal, vol.52, winter 1996-1997, pp. 25-38. 31 E Regehr & P Whelan, ‘Reshaping the Security Envelope: Defence Policy in a Human Security Context’, Project Ploughshares Working Paper, 04-0, 2004; RJ Hay, ‘Present at the Creation? Human Security and Canadian Foreign Policy in the 21st Century’, in FO Hampson, M Rudner & M Hart 9 Introduction
Other critics argue that Canada’s focus on soft power diplomacy in its human security agenda is merely a justification for the reduction of military forces. From this perspective, Canada’s human security policy is a “pinchpenny” or “pulpit” diplomacy that downgrades the active engagement of the Canadian forces in foreign policy.32 Kim Nossal criticizes the human security agenda as being a false cover of Canada’s retreat from global affairs.33 For more conservative critics, who strongly hold realist/neorealist views, the Canadian human security agenda rests on a false depiction of world politics; it not only impairs Canadian national interests, but also disregards the traditional role of military statecraft.34
The problematic nature of these debates is the utilitarian perception of foreign policy. For these approaches, a prudent foreign policy simply means minimizing risks and maximizing benefits for the nation. These perspectives assume the continued privilege of existing order. As David Black suggests, they simply present a ‘problem-solving’ approach that does not question the prevailing power relations within Canadian foreign policy.35 A more critical inquiry requires calling into question the ‘rhetoric–practice gap’ and political constructions of the rhetoric, rather than addressing the ‘commitment–capability gap’. Moreover, the realist/neorealist prescriptions on Canadian foreign policy have a strong politico–normative content that informs the ideas and institutions driving Canadian foreign policy. These approaches, what Heather Smith calls “academic/elite discourse”, not only contribute to the marginalization of alternative perspectives within the literature, but also present themselves as being the only legitimate view that should inform the policy– practices.36 Despite the recent increase of critical approaches within the literature,
(eds.), Canada Among Nations 1999: A Big League Player?, Oxford University Press, Ontario, 1999, pp. 215-232; V Rigby, ‘The Canadian Forces and Human Security: A Redundant or Relevant Military?’, in FO Hampson, N Hillmer & MA Molot (eds.), Canada Among Nations 2001: The Axworthy Legacy, Oxford University Press, Toronto, 2001, pp. 39-64. 32KR Nossal, ‘Pinchpenny Diplomacy’, International Journal, 54, no.1, winter 1998-1999, pp.88-105; FO Hampson & DF Oliver, ‘Pulpit Diplomacy A Critical Assessment of the Axworthy doctrine’, International Journal, 53, no. 3, summer 1998, pp. 379-406. 33 Nossal, pp. 88-105. 34 Hampson & Oliver, pp. 388-392. 35 D Black, ‘Mapping the Interplay of Human Security Practice and Debates: The Canadian Experience’, in SJ Maclean, DR Black, TM Shaw (eds.), A Decade of Human Security: Global Governance and New Multilateralisms, Ashgate, Hampshire, 2006, pp. 53-62. Problem-solving approaches here refer to Robert Cox’s distinction between “problem-solving theory” and “critical theory”. RW Cox, ‘Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, vol. 10, no .2, 1981, pp. 126-155. 36 HA Smith, ‘Of Faultlines and Homefronts: A Letter to the Prime Minister’, Canadian Foreign Policy, vol. 12, no. 1, spring 2005, pp. 3-18. 10 Introduction
these conservative perspectives still dominate the analysis of Canadian foreign policy.37 The aim of this thesis then is not only to contest the prescriptions of functionalist and realist approaches, but also to provide a different theoretical perspective for the analysis of Canada’s human security policy that goes beyond a positivist methodology.
4. Theoretical Remarks
The theoretical orientation of this study draws on the insights of the critical security studies, and post-structuralist approaches to international relations.38 This research sees Canada’s human security agenda as a discourse. As Matt McDonald argues, an approach that regards human security as a discourse recognizes the constructed, fluid, and most importantly the political nature of security language, and thereby it calls into question the Platonic readings of security and policy–practices.39 Drawing upon post-structuralist insights, this study reads discourse as constitutive of reality. In this study discourse does not simply refer to a linguistic phenomenon. Rather it refers to both linguistic and non-linguistic practices: a complex set of social and political practices and representations that give meanings to the way in which people understand reality and act upon it.40 Meanings that are created by discourse, however, are not completed, fixed or final; rather they are ‘floating meanings’ which open up a space for change, variation, and struggles over the meaning of the
37 Some notable examples of the critical approaches in the Canada’s human security literature are HA Smith, ‘Niche Diplomacy in Canadian Human Rights Policy: Ethics or Economics?’, in R Irwin (ed.), Ethics and Security in Canadian Foreign Policy, UBC Press, Vancouver, 2001, pp. 77-94; K Grayson, ‘Branding “Transformation” in Canadian Foreign Policy: Human Security’, Canadian Foreign Policy, vol. 11, no. 2, winter 2004, pp. 41-68; M Neufeld, ‘Pitfalls of Emancipation and Discourse of Security: Reflections on Canada’s “Security with a Human Face”’, International Relations, vol. 18, no. 1, pp. 109-123; C Pratt, ‘The impact of Ethical Values on Canadian Foreign Aid Policy’, Canadian Foreign Policy, vol. 9, no. 1, fall 2001, pp. 43-53; SG Plunkett, Processes of Contradiction: An Exploration into the Geo-Strategic, Geo-Economic and Geo-Political Implications of Canada’s Human Security Discourse, unpublished MA thesis, Dalhousie University, 2003. 38 It is important to note that this study does not understand the critical security studies simply as emancipatory approaches within the literature, which are closely associated with the Welsh school. Rather critical security studies in this study refers to a general name of the approaches in security studies that include post-structuralism, critical constructivism and critical theory. In other words, this thesis uses “small-c definition of critical”. K Krause & MC Williams, ‘Preface: Toward Critical Security Studies’, in K Krause & MC Williams (eds.), Critical Security Studies Concepts and Cases, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1997, p. xi. 39 M McDonald, ‘Human Security and the Construction of Security’, Global Society, vol. 16, no. 3, 2002, pp. 277-295. 40 E Laclau & C Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, Verson, London, 1985, pp. 105-114. 11 Introduction
discourse.41 As Bradley Klein argues, “a discourse … is not a way of learning ‘about’ something out there in the ‘real world’; it is, rather, a way of producing that something as real, as identifiable, classifiable, knowable and therefore meaningful”.42 Seen in this light, the question posed by this study is how human security as a discourse produces the real, and how its meanings are changeable and contingent.
This understanding of discourse generates two theoretical commitments which constitute the basis of this study: productive aspects of the discourse on human security and its “the play of practice”—the dominant/hegemonic meanings of human security, which make certain practices intelligible, legitimate and possible.43 As will be discussed throughout this study, discourses have meaning-producing effects that enable the construction of identities and landscapes. William Connolly provides useful insights on how ‘taken-for granted’ identities are actually the products of practices of differentiation or exclusion that constitute otherness and make the construction of selves possible. As he puts it “one identity involves the conversion of some differences into otherness, into evil, or into one of its numerous surrogates. Identity requires difference in order to be, and it converts difference into otherness to secure its own self-certainty”.44 From this perspective, identities are contingent, relational and political constructions that are (re)produced by dominant discourses, which invoke certain representations of self and other.
The discursive nature of identities provides a different understanding of foreign policy discourses, which are not seen simply as external practices of pre- established states with pre-given identities, but as a constitutive of those identities through demarcating self from other, inside from outside, familiar from alien, and security from risk.45 In this regard, the discourses of foreign policy practices produce “landscapes of states … certain political, social and physical geographies [which] …
41 ibid., pp.111-115; R Doty, Imperial Encounters: The Political of Representation in North-South Relations, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1996, p. 6. 42 Quoted in J George, Discourse of Global Politics: A Critical (Re)Introduction to International Relations, Lynne Rienner, Boulder, 1994, p. 30. 43 J Milliken, ‘The Study of Discourse in International Relations: A Critique of Research and Methods’, European Journal of International Relations, vol. 5 (2), 1999, p. 230. 44 WE Connolly, Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1991, p. 64. 45 D Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1998; GÓ Tuathail & S Dalby, ‘Introduction: Rethinking Geopolitics: towards a critical geopolitics’, in GÓ Tuathail & S Dalby (eds.), Rethinking Geopolitics, Routledge, New York, 1998, pp. 3-7. 12 Introduction
enframe and incite certain conceptual, moral and/or aesthetic understandings of self and other, security and danger, proximity and distance, indifference and responsibility”.46 Drawing upon such insights, this study is particularly interested in how human security discourse as a foreign policy practice constructs the Canadian self by moulding certain representations of ideal Canada (Chapter Two), and how it produces contested geographies through the construction of danger posed by borderlands (Chapter Three).
In seeking the productive aspects of the Canadian discourse on human security, this study centres on a number of arguments made by Michel Foucault. Foucauldian understanding of discourse allows us to see truth, power, and knowledge as closely connected as implying each other. According to Foucault, power is not repressive or negative: it is a productive network, whose effects produce discourses of truth, certain practices and possible forms of legitimate behaviour. Foucault is particularly interested in the ‘ensemble of rules’ with which true and false statements are separated by, and the specific effects of power attached to truth.47 He argues that the exercise of power enables the production of truth, which in turn enables the exercise of power. Foucault calls this reciprocal effect of power and truth the “politics of truth”: “the mechanisms, and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned, the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth and the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true attached to the true”. 48
Further, for Foucault power and knowledge come together in a discourse by mutually reinforcing each other. As he put it, “there is no power relation without correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations”.49 Specialist knowledge, for Foucault, enables discourses to function as true, and creates new modes of practices through facilitating the circulation of truth within the whole social body. His formulation of power/knowledge provides a critical approach to see theory— such as expert propositions on what security or a prudent foreign policy ought to be —as not independent from practice. Rather in this formulation, theory becomes a
46 Tuathail & Dalby, p. 4. 47 M Foucault, ‘Truth and Power’, in C Gordon (ed.), Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, Pantheon Books, New York, 1980, pp. 109-133. 48 ibid., p. 73. 49 M Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Allen Lane, London, 1977, p. 27. 13 Introduction
political practice itself that creates common-sense assumptions, and makes possible the adoption of certain definitions and representations over others through strengthening the exercise of power which reveals itself in the ensemble of institutions, mechanisms and disciplinary techniques—political technologies.50 As Foucault explores in his later work on Governmentality, these political technologies derive from certain problematizations—such as problematization of social unrest, failures in military or economic productivity, or in other words societal, political, economic and military insecurity—and they work at the level of population with an aim to define, regulate, and organize the society in the desired direction.51
The analysis then is not about what human security is, but how it works and what it enables: what kind of power relations it produces both within Canada and abroad, how these relations sustain its ‘regime of truth’, what kind of problematizations it derives from, and which political techniques it generates. In short, the question is how Canada’s human security discourse works to maintain the conduct of its subjects—the Canadian society and failed states. The importance of taking such an approach is that it allows us to penetrate into the ‘politics of truth’ that the Canadian discourse on human security creates, and thereby to seek conditions of the existence of dominant representations in Canadian politics and their implications.
5. Thesis Outline and Research Contribution
This thesis will first discuss the scholarly debates on the broadened and human security with an aim to explore how traditional concerns remain dominant within the literature and how these approaches constitute a ‘legitimate knowledge’ that informs policy practices. Chapter Two analyses the domestic construction and manipulation of the human security agenda. The aim of this chapter is to show the reciprocal relationship between discourses of foreign and domestic policies. This chapter argues that human security works as a governmental practice in a way that it
50 In Discipline and Punish, where Foucault started to develop the term, he defines political technology as the array of judicial, penal institutions, scientific experiments and projects where the normal and abnormal individual are demarcated and become the object of disciplinary techniques— the constant control, surveillance and normalizing mechanisms. The disciplinary intervention at the level of individual body and mind, he writes, “makes possible the operation of a relational power that sustains itself by its own mechanism”. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, pp. 176-177. 51 N Rose & P Miller, ‘Political Power beyond the State: Problematic of Government’, The British Journal of Sociology, vol. 3, no. 2, Jun 1992, pp. 173-205. 14 Introduction
constitutes an important element of the Canadian project on nation-building. Chapter Three will look at the problematization of failed state discourse in Canadian foreign policy. Drawing upon securitization theory, this chapter will first show the discursive link between Canada’s national security and human security discourses. Then, it will bring forth the contested nature of the good governance agenda and show how it works as a governmental practice that aspires to expand the liberal zone. The Conclusion chapter will summarize the main arguments of this study and discusses possible directions for the critical security studies. By bringing these themes into light, this study contributes to the contemporary literature in three ways. First, despite many references, the link between Canadian identity and human security still remains under-researched. By examining the relationship between Canadian identity, domestic political context and human security, Chapter Two fills this gap. Second, although much attention has been paid to the global discourse on state failure, the securitization of failed states in Canadian national and foreign policy remains largely unexplored. By discussing Canada’s failed states discourse through post-structuralist lenses, Chapter Three fills this gap in Canadian foreign policy literature. Finally, and most importantly, despite its post-structuralist orientation, this study also provides a bridge between the post- structuralist readings of security—which often only implicitly bring forth or defer the normative argument—and emancipatory-oriented approaches—which often uncritically embrace the ideal of the universality of emancipation. This study argues that a Foucauldian approach gives us room to analyse the discursive constructions and the politics of policy practices without deferring the quest for the promising value that human security holds. Such an approach contributes to the critical security studies through emphasizing the transformative aspect of human security without advocating emancipation uncritically.
15 CHAPTER ONE
CONTESTING THE SECURITY LITERATURE
1. Introduction
By the end of the Cold War, security studies underwent a significant change. How to broaden and deepen the meaning of security became the main concern of research agendas. In response to this ongoing debate on the meaning of security, David Baldwin, in his influential essay, The concept of security, argued that despite various attempts to redefine security, the concept remained ambiguous and inadequately explicated.1 He suggested a conceptual analysis that would not only promote a rational description of security, which would guide policy responses to security problems, but also challenge the misguided argument that security is essentially contested. This chapter, however, argues that security is a contested concept; its very meanings are constructed, contingent, and, more importantly, political. The contestability of security cannot be solved through a conceptual analysis. On the contrary, this chapter argues that any disciplinary move in developing definitional consensus on the meaning of security does not exist in the form of objective description of security problems; rather, they exist in the form of a “legitimate security knowledge” that discursively constructs and frames certain understandings of security, the nature of political community and policy-practice.2
This chapter surveys the approaches and theoretical frameworks of the broadened security and human security literature. It aims to explore how security is framed through these debates: what kinds of meanings are attached to it. It argues that although it has become conventional to assert the changing nature of security and to accept the narrowness of Cold War security thinking, traditional concerns remain very powerful within the literature. In this light, this chapter does not regard the ongoing intellectual debate as independent from post-Cold War security
1 DA Baldwin, ‘The concept of security’, Review of International Studies, vol. 23, 1997, pp. 5-26. 2 J Huysmans, The Politics of Insecurity: Fear, migration and asylum in the EU, Routledge, New York, 2006. p. 42. 16 Chapter One: Contesting the Security Literature
discourses. Rather it sees the new security literature as constitutive of these discourses whose power derives from the scientific expert claims as to how security should be understood and guide policy practice. As Jef Huysmans argues, the security knowledge promoted by the new research agenda tends to legitimate certain understandings of security frameworks and asserts their validity through the ‘truth claims’ on the nature of security.3
This chapter will start with an analysis of the broadened security agenda and discuss what remains problematic within the literature. The second section will focus on human security by, first, exploring the intellectual roots of human security and then discussing the different interpretations of human security within the literature to highlight the contested nature of these interpretations.
2. A New Research Agenda: Security in the Aftermath of Cold War
With the demise of the East–West ideological conflict, the focus of the security agenda has shifted from inter-state conflict, arms control, and nuclear deterrence to non-state and non-military security threats. By the early 1990s, both the academic community and policy-makers were arguing that there was a growing need to broaden the framework of security to include hitherto neglected issues such as domestic and global poverty, environmental degradation, drug trafficking, crime, international migration, refugee crises, resource shortages, the growth of world population, and so on.
The central point surrounding the debate was that the in/security problem was more complex than it was during the Cold War. It became a common enterprise to argue that the traditional approaches to security became increasingly inadequate in grasping the interdependence between national and international security. Although not all perspectives acknowledged widening the framework of security analysis, by the early 1990s it was largely recognized that the focus on military threats and inter- state relations leaves states more fragile against the complexity of newly emerged
3 Huysmans, The Politics of Insecurity,pp.40-42. 17 Chapter One: Contesting the Security Literature
security problems.4 It was predominantly argued that, to quote from Richard Ullman, “defining national security merely in military terms conveys a profoundly false image of reality” which may cause states to ignore more harmful dangers: hence a narrow conceptualization of security may result in total insecurity.5 Environmental disasters, migration, over-population and so many other security threats were not new developments; they were evident during the Cold War. But what changed by the end of the Cold War was that, these issues were being framed as national security crises, and thereby their elimination was elevated to the central goal of policy- making.
In the light of these arguments, broadening the list of potential security threats now occupies the new research agenda. Following Ullman’s and Jessica Mathews’s ‘‘redefinition of security’’—which included internal rebellions, the problems of raw material shortages, environmental degradation, world population and migration under the rubric of security—there has been a number of important studies arguing the changing nature of security and seeking a reinvigoration of realism.6 Barry Buzan’s five security sectors—economic, military, political, societal and environmental security—has been accepted as a ‘new security definition’ which at the same time marked a shift from the dominance of strategic studies to that of security studies.7
The most explicit emphasis of this broadened agenda is that the realist focus on interstate relations and its obsession with military threats cannot explain and deal with proliferation of transnational threats to national and international security. It is argued that the array of threats was intensified under the forces of economic, political and social interdependence. From this perspective, for instance, Alan Dupont suggests that transnational phenomena such as demographic pressures, resource depletion, global warming, infectious diseases, and transnational crime can threaten
4 In response to the broadened security research agenda, some scholars argued that security studies should not abandon its traditional focus on military issues and state-to-state relations. See for instance, SM Walt, ‘The Renaissance of Security Studies’, International Studies Quarterly, vol. 35, 1991, pp. 211-239; DA Baldwin, ‘Review Article Security Studies and the End of the Cold War’, World Politics, vol. 48:1, 1996, pp. 117-141. 5 RH Ullman, ‘Redefining Security’, International Security, vol.8, no.1 summer 1983, p. 129. 6 ibid., pp. 129-153; JT Mathews, ‘Redefining Security’, Foreign Affairs, spring 1989, pp. 162-177. 7 B Buzan, Peoples, States and Fear: An Agenda for International Security Studies in the Post-Cold War Era, Harvester Wheatsheaf, London, 1991, pp. 23-24. 18 Chapter One: Contesting the Security Literature
all people regardless of national boundaries.8 The nature of new threats is different because they are not always coming from state actors, but mostly from non-state actors.9 In short, there is now a security consensus which suggests that the ‘threats without boundaries’ reduce the capacity of states, generate instability within states, and, in turn, undermine the international security. Therefore, the national security problems are not merely national—they have a strong international dimension.
The inclusion of environmental insecurity into the research agenda was one of the first moves that framed non-traditional threats as security problems. Following Matthew’s emphasis on the link between environment and security, the impact of environmental crises on national security has gained a widespread acceptance. It is argued that environmental problems such as greenhouse warming, deforestation, overuse and pollution of water supplies, and the depletion of fish stocks may lead to economic decline, population displacement, and disruption of regular and legitimate social relations, and, in turn, may cause conflicts within and between states.10
Regarding economic security, arguments are made that the dominance of ‘geopolitics’ is replaced with that of ‘geo-economics’ which requires governments to consider the relationship between national welfare and security.11 The link between economic problems and security was recognized long before the end of the Cold War.12 However, the accelerated globalization of the 1990s has loomed large in the
8 A Dupont, East Asia Imperiled: Transnational Challenges to Security, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001. 9 P Williams, ‘Transnational Criminal Organizations and International Security’, Survival, vol: 36, no.1, spring 1994, pp. 96-113. 10 TF Homer-Dixon, ‘On the Threshold: Environmental Changes as Causes of Acute Conflict’, in SM Lynn- Jones & SE Miller (eds.), Global Dangers: Changing Dimensions of International Security. An International Security Reader, The MIT Press, Cambridge, 1995, pp. 43-83; PH Gleick, ‘Water and Conflict: Fresh Water Resource Disputes and International Security’, in SM Lynn-Jones & SE Miller (eds.), Global Dangers: Changing Dimensions of International Security. An International Security Reader, The MIT Press, Cambridge, 1995, pp. 84-117. As a recent example, during the April 2007 UNSC debate on Energy, Climate and Security, the British Foreign Secretary showed climate risks as one of the root causes of conflicts within and between states. Framing environmental issues as a security problem, in a very alarmist way, Margaret Beckett calls climate change as a “threat multiplier for instability” which requires a common response. See M Beckett, UN Security Council Debate on Energy, Climate and Security, Speech made by the Rt. Hon. Margaret Beckett MP, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, 17 April 2007, viewed 09 July 2007,
studies of economic security that focus on security implications of energy shortages, defence industrial bases, technological production for goods and services, narcotic trafficking and migration.13
Perhaps, one of the most influential security concepts of this new research agenda is “societal security” introduced by the Copenhagen School.14 With the increase in the number of internal conflicts, it has started to be argued that when there is a clash between state and society, thinking within the framework of national security does not always provide a useful guidance to understand the dynamics of these conflicts.15 In such conflicts what is threatened is not ‘military power’, but ethnic, cultural and religious identity. Seen in this light, what is at stake in societal security is not the security of national borders, or economic and physical security of citizens, but the identity of states. Furthermore, for the Copenhagen School, not only internal conflicts, but also intensified regional integration—such as the EU—and migration and refugee flows contribute to the perception of societal insecurity. In societal security, migrants and refugees are called an explicit threat to identity of the group or state, and as a disturbing phenomenon that damages the feeling of ‘us’. It is argued that migrants and refugees not only cause economic problems such as unemployment, but also, by being ‘different’ and ‘alien’, they undermine the social fabric of the receiving country by disrupting its homogeneity and “firmly bounded quality”.16 From this perspective, what become dangerous are ‘people’ and their movement. In short, the main concern in the broadened security agenda is, in Gil
to maintain domestic political stability, the concept of comprehensive security included economic concerns such as food and energy security. For the discussion of the concept of comprehensive security, see WM Chapman, R Drifte, ITM Gow, Japan’s Quest for Comprehensive Security: defence, diplomacy, and dependence, Francis Pinter, London, 1983; D Dewitt, ‘Common, Comprehensive and Cooperative Security’, The Pacific Review, 1994, vol. 7, no. 1, p. 2; A Acharya, ‘Human Security: East versus West’, International Journal, Summer 2001, vol.16, no. 3, p. 451; A Burke, ‘Critical Approaches to Security and Strategy’, in R Ayson & D Ball (eds.), Strategy and Security in the Asia- Pacific, Allen and Unwin, NSW, 2006, p. 157. 13 Moran, pp. 74-90; EB Kapstein, The Political Economy of National Security: A Global Perspective, University of South Carolina Press, South Carolina, 1992. 14 O Wæver, B Buzan, M Kerstrup & P Lemaitre (eds.), Identity, Migration, and the New Security Agenda in Europe, Pinter, London, 1993; B Buzan, O Waever & J. Wilde, Security: A New Framework for Analysis, Lynne Rienner, Boulder, 1998. 15 P Bilgin, ‘Individual and Societal Dimension of Security’, International Studies Review, 5, 2003, p. 211. 16 MO Heisler & Z Layton-Henry, ‘Migration and the links between social and societal security’, in O Wæver, B Buzan, M Kerstrup & P. Lemaitre (eds.), Identity, Migration, and the New Security Agenda in Europe, Pinter, London, 1993, pp.148- 166. 20 Chapter One: Contesting the Security Literature
Loescher words, “the serious consequences that mass displacement have for national stability, international security and the emerging new world order”.17
It is clear that the broadened security agenda envisages security beyond military threats and inter-state relationships. Security is no more simply limited to the neorealist concepts such as ‘balance of power’, ‘security dilemma’, or ‘self-help’. The new security agenda certainly includes new actors and new sources of insecurity into the analysis. Yet, as widely argued by critical security scholars, the broadened security research agenda does not penetrate into epistemological and ontological claims of neo-realism—or more broadly political realism.18 Simply including a wide range of threats under the name of security does not provide a fundamental redefinition of security nor call into question the legitimacy of realism in sustaining a statist framework in security studies.
Despite the new threat definitions, on the normative ground, the broadened security agenda perpetuates realism’s silence on individual, group, gender, and race constructions of security language. Within this new security agenda there is no attempt to question the ways in which state plays a role in creating multiple sources of threats to individuals in the form of either state violence, the repression of human rights, or inaction in building sustainable livelihoods for well-being. The ‘state’ which needs to be protected by all means, continues to be the main subject of security and remains the only referent object which has a “legitimate claim to survival”.19 Put bluntly, in the broadened security agenda, the role of Leviathan in providing the political order continues to be the key understanding of international order. More importantly, as will be discussed in Chapter Three, calling various problems as security problems is not simply an analytical move or rhetoric; rather, it has enormous political implications. State as being the basic unit of security becomes problematic when the meaning of state security is widened to include various sources
17 Quoted in Huysmans, Huysmans, The Politics of Insecurity, p. 15. 18 For the critique of broadening the analytical framework of security, see for example, RD Lipschutz, ‘On Security’, in RD Lipschutz (ed.), On Security, Columbia University Press, New York, 1995, pp.1- 23; K Krause & MC Williams, ‘Broadening the Agenda of Security Studies: Politics and Methods’, Mershon International Studies Review, vol. 40, no. 2, October 1996, pp. 229-254; S Dalby, ‘Contesting an Essential Concept: Reading Dilemmas in Contemporary Security Discourse’, in K Krause & MC Williams (eds.), Critical Security Studies Concepts and Cases, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1997, pp. 3-31. 19 Buzan, Wæver & Wilde, p. 36. 21 Chapter One: Contesting the Security Literature
of threats, which normalizes and legitimitizes contested policies that target to avert those threats.
Furthermore, the broadened security research agenda holds to realism’s epistemological claims in a way that the new threat definitions are represented as unproblematic objective phenomena.20 However, the claims to gain the scientific knowledge of security/insecurity problematique are not simply intellectual moves. Rather, they are closely linked with the production of truth. The new research agenda on ‘broadening security’ does not simply describe the new threats, but strongly plays a performative role in enabling domains of insecurity. It is not an objective body of knowledge, but a political one whose definitions of security impose certain frameworks on how security should be understood. To put the argument in Foucauldian terms, the broadened security agenda sustains the legacy of political realism whose power derives from the ‘truth-claims’ of its scientific statements.21
3. Human Security
3.1 The intellectual roots of human security
Despite the dominance of state-centric conceptualizations of security during the Cold War, alternative ways of thinking about security also developed during this time period. The significant challenge to realist analysis of security was provided by peace researchers and Third World security approaches. These approaches can be seen as forerunners of the idea of human security. The aim of peace researchers was to provide an intellectual ground for a nonmilitary approach to security and to increase skepticism about the utility of nuclear weapons. Moreover, going beyond the nuclear dimension of conflict, peace researchers emphasized the link between underdevelopment and insecurity.22 One of the most influential peace researchers, Johan Galtung, proposed a new understanding for peace defined as the absence of
20 Krause & Williams, pp. 229-254. 21 M Foucault, ‘Truth and Power’, in C Gordon (ed.), Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, Pantheon Books, New York, 1980, pp.109-133. 22 For the development peace research see A Mack, Peace Research in the 1980s, Strategic and Defence Studies, Australian National University, Canberra, 1985; DJ Dunn, ‘Peace research versus strategic studies’, in K Booth (ed.), New Thinking About Strategy and International Security, Harper Collins Academic, London, 1991, pp. 56-72. 22 Chapter One: Contesting the Security Literature
both personal and structural violence.23 He defined structural violence as social injustice that derives from uneven distribution of income, education, and medical services. By emphasizing negative and positive aspects of peace, Galtung argued that peace is maintained not only through control or reduction of militarization, but also through vertical development.24 In similar vein, by the 1980s, the World Order Models Project (WOMP) launched an extensive debate on how state-centric security approaches jeopardized the security of ordinary citizens. Focusing on the devastating effects of militarization and nuclear warfare on individual well-being, the main proposal of the WOMP was to re-think of security not simply in terms of the protection of state boundaries, but of people, and to explore the possibilities of a “post-Machiavellian international order” and “post-nuclear world”.25
The ethnocentrism embedded in realist understandings of security also came under a great deal of criticism in this period.26 It was argued that the predominance of Anglo-American perspective in the study of security is a false depiction of the security needs of the marginalized Third World. The main concern shared by students of Third World security was that Western-oriented, outward looking and militarized security approaches maintain the status quo that is determined through the needs of developed countries, and contribute to more militarization of the Third World. For example, Caroline Thomas suggested that, security means provision of basic human needs.27 Thomas underlined structural causes of insecurity affecting the Third World and argued that lack of autonomy and lack of room for economic and political manoeuvre leads Third World countries to lose their control on economic, social and political policies and results in failure to meet their people’s needs.
23 J Galtung, ‘Violence, Peace, and Peace Research’, Journal of Peace Research, vol. 6 (3), 1969, pp. 167-191. 24 ibid., p. 183. 25 RA Falk, ‘Nuclear Weapons and The End of Democracy’, in BH Weston (ed.), Toward Nuclear Disarmament and Global Security: A Search for Alternatives, Westview Press, Boulder, 1984, p. 202. 26 K Booth, Strategy and Ethnocentrism, Holmes and Meier Publishers, Inc., New York, 1979. Booth defines ethnocentrism as “strong identification with one’s group and its culture, the tendency to see one’s own group as the centre of the universe, the tendency to perceive event in terms of one’s own interests, the tendency to prefer one’s own way of life (culture) over all others.” p. 15. During the Cold War, the field of security studies was seen as an American enterprise as most of the concepts informing realist thinking were developed by American scholars. Also see JS Nye & M Lynen-Jones, ‘International Security Studies: A Report of a Conference on the State of the Field’, International Security, vol. 12, no. 4, spring 1988, pp. 14-15. 27 C Thomas, In search of security: the Third World in international relations, Lynne Rienner, Boulder, 1987. 23 Chapter One: Contesting the Security Literature
These perspectives influenced a series of independent commission reports that established a solid background for the institutionalization of the idea of human security. One of the most influential reports, The Report of the Palme Commission, introduced the concept of ‘common security’.28 The main premise of the concept of common security was to develop a solid criticism against Cold War concepts such as ‘deterrence theory’, ‘arms race’, and ‘balance of nuclear power’. The Report argued that security cannot be achieved through the insecurity of others, and it called for cooperation between adversaries, gradual disarmament, and arms control methods. While the Report did not completely reject the role of military power in providing state security, it argued that economic, political and social issues should be considered as the sources of insecurity for states, groups, as well as for individuals.29
The report entitled North-South: A Programme for Survival (the Report of Brandt Commission) was perhaps one the first institutional reports emphasizing the unequal relationship between the North and South, and the marginalized role of the Third World.30 The report played an important role in bringing hunger, poverty, economic disasters, environmental catastrophes and disparities between living conditions of rich and poor into the framework of security. With its emphasis on developing a dialogue for economic and political equity between and within the countries, the Report of the Brandt Commission was an explicit call for a more inclusive conception of security that would address the interests of people living in Third Word countries.
Furthermore, the change in the conceptualization of economic growth provided an impetus to establish a link between development and security. In the late 1980s, as a response to the criticisms against structural adjustment programs, the
28 The Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues, Common Security: A programme for disarmament, Pan Books Ltd, London, 1982. Common security was the central theme of Gorbachev’s reform agenda. During the late the 1980s ‘new thinking’ on military and defense within Soviet security took place with the announcement perestroika, non-provocative defense, and initiatives on arms reductions which facilitated the end of the Cold War. 29 The concept of ‘common security’ was widely interpreted within the realist perspective. It is usually seen as merely ‘cooperation among adversaries’, and as rational pursuit of national interests concerning interests of other states and promotion of non-offensive defence. From this perspective, common security seeks to mitigate international anarchy and provides what Barry Buzan called a “mature anarchy”. B Møller, Common Security and Nonoffensive Defense: A Neorealist Perspective, Lynne Rienner, Colorado, 1992. For common security and ‘mature anarchy’ see B Buzan, ‘Is international security possible?’, in K Booth (ed.), New Thinking About Strategy and International Security, Harper Collins Academic, London, 1991, pp. 31-55. 30 The Independent Commission on International Development Issues, North-South: A Programme for Survival, Pan Book Ltd., London, 1981. 24 Chapter One: Contesting the Security Literature
United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) launched “adjustment with a human face” programmes to develop the notion of growth-oriented adjustment. The programmes drew attention to the negative impact of international economic environment and neo-liberal structural adjustment policies on people living in the developing countries.31 Although the programmes did not provide a link between security and development, they announced human welfare as an ultimate goal of development policies and put the emphasis on poverty eradication, employment, income distribution, and provision of basic services and needs. With the announcement of the agenda on ‘sustainable development’, the major concern shifted from earlier dominance of state-led modernization strategies based on the primacy of economic growth to a people-centred focus in developmental strategies that see improvements in health, education, employment and social inclusion as prerequisites of economic development.32 The Brundtland Report defined sustainable development as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” and brought environmental, economic, social and political concerns together under the rubric of development.33
Building on these developments of the 1980s, the UNDP launched the Human Development Report in 1990. The aim of the human development efforts was to declare human beings as the ultimate focus of economic planning. According to the 1990 UNDP Report, human development is “a process of widening people’s choices and the level of their achieved well-being”, not only in terms of income, but also in areas such as health, education, employment and environment.34 For Mahbul ul Haq, who was influential in launching the human development index, “human development model is a holistic concept … not for basic needs models which require only provision of basic social services, normally by the state. It is a paradigm that embraces all choices political, social, cultural, and economic.”35 In this regard, the significance of the 1994 UNDP Report was that it brought together the criticisms
31 GA Carnia, R Jolly, F Stewart, Adjustment with a Human Face, Vol 1, Protecting the Vulnerable and Promoting Growth, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1987. 32 M Duffield & N Waddell, ‘Securing Humans in a Dangerous World’, International Politics, vol. 43, 2006, p. 5. 33 Quoted in Duffield & Waddell, p. 5. 34 United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report 1990, Oxford University Press, New York, 1990, p. 10. 35 M Haq, Reflections on Human Development, Oxford University Press, New York, 1995, p. 20. 25 Chapter One: Contesting the Security Literature
against state-centric understanding of security and development, and linked sustainable human development and security under the concept of human security with a strong emphasis on the importance of poverty-reduction, productive employment, social integration, and environment regeneration programs at local, national and global levels. 36 In doing so, the 1994 UNDP Report did not simply broaden the security agenda, but offered a progressive definition of security which envisages security as the provision of sustainable social, political, and economic environments for individual well-being.
3.2 Debating human security
Since the concept of human security was first articulated by the UNDP, much has been written on the implementation and the interpretation of human security. The concept has been criticized as being impractical utopianism, a “shopping list”37, and “a reductionist, idealistic notion”.38 Many scholars have argued that human security is too broad and too vague, and hence it does not offer any useful tool for academic research and policy-making.39 These critics have argued that if human security as a concept includes all forms of threats to individuals, it may lose its descriptive power and utility for policy makers. In this regard, for example, Roland Paris suggests a common, narrow, practical and workable definition, if human security will be studied or operationalized in real life.40
As a response to these criticisms, many supporters of human security have developed different threat definitions which are expected to be more welcomed by policy-makers. For instance, Nicholas Thomas and William Tow have given a
36 United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report 1994, UNDP, New York, 1994, p. 4 37 K Krause, ‘Is Human Security More than Just a Good Idea’, in M Brzoska & PJ Croll (eds.), Brief 30 Promoting Security: But How and For Whom? Contributions to BICC’s Ten-year Anniversary Conference, Bonn International Center for Conversion, October 2004, p. 44. 38 B Buzan, ‘A Reductionist, Idealistic Notion that Adds Little Analytical Value’, Security Dialogue, vol. 35 (3), 2004, p. 370. 39 A great deal of literature shares the same line of criticism. See as an example, R Paris, ‘Human Security Paradigm Shift or Hot Air’, International Security, vol. 26, no. 2, fall 2001, pp. 88-90; SN Macfarlane, ‘A Useful Concept that Risks Losing Its Political Salience’, Security Dialogue, vol. 35, no. 3, 2004, pp. 368-369; G King & CJL Murray, ‘Rethinking Human Security’, Political Science Quarterly, vol.116, no. 4, 2001-02, pp. 585-611; E Newman, ‘A Normatively Attractive but Analytically Weak Concept’, Security Dialogue, vol. 35(3), 2004, pp. 358-359. 40 Paris, p. 8. 26 Chapter One: Contesting the Security Literature
specific list of potential threats which make individuals insecure. Their list includes terrorism and natural disasters that require urgent military or civil interventions. 41 Others have proposed a more generic understanding of threats which will be defined on the basis of their “actual severity”42 or of their effects on the “vital core” of human activities and abilities.43 Many others have offered the ‘measurement of human security’ by developing a human security audit.44 The attempts to produce a ‘precise and workable definition’ are also institutionalized in a sense that many non- governmental organizations have proposed human security audits or indexes. For instance, recently, the Canadian Government sponsored Human Security Center published a human security audit and index that ranks states according to their performances on how they secure their citizens.45 The main purpose of the index is to reach a consensual and a universally valid definition of human security, which in turn may generate a single measure to compare human security practices of governments.
What remains highly problematic in these projects is that, in these perspectives security is regarded as ontologically given or fixed. Firmly grounded on the positivist tradition in security studies, these perspectives suggest monitoring and empirical observation to define what constitutes a human security problem. However, as William Connolly argues “a description does not refer to data or elements that are bound together … to describe is to characterize a situation from a vantage point of certain interests, purposes or standards.”46 This “pathological obsession with the quest for definitional universality and practicality”, not only excludes more fundamental human security threats—such as structural political and economic inequalities—narrowing down the interpretation of human security, but also these expert claims on scientific definitions impose a certain understanding of
41 N Thomas & WT Tow, ‘The Utility of Human Security: Sovereignty and Humanitarian Intervention’, Security Dialogue, vol. 33, no. 2, p. 179. 42 T Owen, ‘Human Security—Conflict, Critique and Consensus: Colloquium Remarks and a Proposal for a Threshold-Based Definition’, Security Dialogue, vol. 35 (3), 2004, pp. 382-385. 43 SA Alkire, ‘Conceptual framework for Human Security’, CRISE Working Paper, # 2, p. 8, viewed 10 September 2004, www.crise.ox.ac.uk/pubs/workingpaper2.pdf>. 44 K Bajpai, ‘Human Security: Concept and Measurement’, Kroc Institute Occasional Paper, #19, August 2000, pp.53-60, viewed 15 October 2004,
human security which disqualifies the perspectives that question the status-quo.47 As Alex Bellamy and Matthew McDonald argue, the attempts to make human security ‘policy relevant’ risk certain definitions being co-opted into statist frameworks, which ultimately limit the transformative potential of the concept.48 Moreover, as will be discussed throughout this thesis, certain and narrow understandings of human security—which dominate both the practice and the theory—are not value-free: rather, they are in fact political projects which work as disciplinary practices that aspire to homogenize not only state policies, but also the way that individuals conceive their security and identity.
This ongoing debate suggests three different theoretical perspectives on how the meaning and content of human security is interpreted. The first one is closely associated with the realist/neorealist framework which privileges a statist definition of human security. The second one is what Oliver Richmond calls an “institutional approach” which blends realist and liberal thinking in International Relations.49 This school of thought, as Richmond argues, derives from the liberal peace theory and mostly focuses on the construction of effective institutions of governance through which human security can be imported into non-Western states. The third approach shares the normative arguments of the Critical Security Studies and promotes an emancipatory-oriented understanding of security which upholds a view of security that treats “people as ends not means”.50
The realist/neorealist perspectives offer the cooption of the human security agenda into a statist framework of security. It is argued that human security is not a replacement of national security. Rather it is a call for a dualistic security approach which at the same time privileges state and international security. For example, Liotta argues that in an era in which transnational threats have become the main source of insecurity in daily lives of citizens—in particular after September, 2001,
47 K Grayson, ‘A Challenge to the Power over Knowledge of Traditional Security Studies’, Security Dialogue, vol. 35(3), 2004, p. 357. 48 AJ Bellamy & M McDonald, “The Utility of Human Security’: Which humans? What Security? A Reply to Thomas and Tow’, Security Dialogue, vol. 33 (3), 2002, pp. 373-377. 49 OR Richmond, ‘The Intellectual History of Human Security’, in P Sorpong (ed.), Human Security in East Asia, Routledge, Forthcoming 2008; OR Richmond, ‘Human Security and the Liberal Peace: Tensions and Contradictions’, Whitehead Journal of International Studies, vol. VII, no.1, 2006. See also OR Richmond, The Transformation of Peace, Palgrave Macmillian, New York, 2005 50 K Booth, ‘Security and emancipation’, Review of International Studies, vol. 17, no. 4, 1991, p. 319. The Critical Security Studies, here, refers to emancipatory approaches in Critical Security Studies. 28 Chapter One: Contesting the Security Literature
terrorism—national security is important as much as people’s security.51 Naming themselves as “human realist”, Woosang Kim and In-Taek Hyun take a more neo- realist perspective and argue that human security strategies, policies and activities should not supplant those of national and international security.52 From this perspective, the ideal form of security is a “dialectic between state-centric and human-centric security” which reconciles two referent objects, and internal and external threats to both state and individual.53
Bringing state back to the theory—and practice—of human security, however, is highly problematic. First a statist framework will limit analytical utility of human security, which in its most critical form seeks to interrogate the very state structures that impinge people’s rights and needs. The dualist approaches and statist formulations raise a question as to whose security should be prioritized when people —such as refugees—are conceived as a threat to national security. Seen in this light, as will be discussed in Chapter Three, the statist interpretation of human security blurs the normative distinction between ‘broadened security’ and ‘human security’ in a way that various threats to individual security are considered as a danger to national or international stability, which in turn promotes state-centric solutions for human security problems. As Anthony Burke argues, the inclusiveness of human security does not simply derive from widening the threat agenda. Rather the normative ideal of human security requires re-thinking about masculine, disciplinary, exclusionary, and suppressive understandings of security which portray cultural, social, religious, economic and political differences as threats to state security and unity.54
The “institutional approach” is the most dominant discourse of human security both in practice and theory. As will be analysed in Chapter Three, this approach takes failed, failing and underdeveloped states as its main subject. The institutional approach aims to maintain international peace not simply through inter-
51 PH Liotta, ‘Boomerang Effect: Convergence of National and Human Security’, Security Dialogue, vol. 33, no. 4, 2002, pp. 473-488. 52 W Kim & IT Hyun, ‘Toward a new concept of security: Human security in world politics’, in WT Tow, R Thakur & I Hyun (eds.), Asia’s emerging regional order: Reconciling traditional and human security, The United Nations University, Tokyo, 2000, p. 41, 33-46. 53 P Kerr, The Evolving dialectic between state-centric and human-centric security, Working Paper 2003/2, Department of International Relations RSPAS Australian National University, Canberra, September 2003. 54 A Burke, ‘Caught Between National and Human Security: Knowledge and Power in Post-crises Asia’, Pacifica Review, vol. 13, no. 3, October 2001, pp. 215-239. 29 Chapter One: Contesting the Security Literature
state relations, but through the democratic governance of states. This interpretation of human security constitutes an influential rationale in the post-Cold War policies of international organizations, most notably in peace-keeping and post-conflict rebuilding activities of the UN agencies and development strategies of the World Bank (WB). In these policies, the way in which states treat their populations and structure their domestic governance constitutes the main concern. In this light, human security presents a shift in understanding of sovereignty, from control to responsibility.55
As a recently emerging human security norm, Responsibility to Protect (R2P) promotes the idea that “each individual state has the responsibility to protect its population … the international community should … encourage and help States to exercise this responsibility and support the UN in establishing an early warning capability”.56 In other words, human security is not simply a domestic matter, but also an international one in the way that if the state does not provide the security of its citizens, then the responsibility yields to international responsibility to protect. Human security in this sense aims to balance Westphalian norms of non-intervention with international intervention to protect foreign populations under the threat of mass killings or ethnic cleansing.57 Of course, this interpretation of human security manifests itself not only as a form of humanitarian intervention, but also in the form of development and good governance interventions in non-Western societies.
The institutional approach blends realist and liberal thinking in a way that it maintains the statism of realism and the ideal of promoting self-sufficient, self- governed democratic market economies of liberalism. It is commonly argued that the state may be threatening the security of its citizens, but also the very same state is a necessary condition for individual security.58 Pointing out the increase in civil conflicts, Thomas and Tow, and Steverre Lodgard point out that the main human
55 G Evans & M Sahnoun, ‘The Responsibility to Protect’, Foreign Affairs, vol. 81, no. 6, November- December 2002, p. 102. 56 The United National General Assembly, ‘2005 Summit Outcome’, A/RES/60/1, 25 October 2005, paras.138-139, viewed 15 January 2007,
insecurities are directly linked to inadequacy of the internal state system, and therefore the ‘strong state’ should remain as a main actor.59 These claims unproblematically recognize the Hobbesian state as the only alternative to the state of nature. Further, the human security approach converges with liberal-democratic peace debates that perceive liberal states as transcending power politics of realism in their relations, mostly because of their democratic and liberal structures. For liberal peace theorists, the ‘Pacific Union’ among liberal states is not accidental, but a result of the principles of freedom and moral autonomy of its citizens, the supremacy of law, and market-oriented economies that govern these states.60
Having strong parallels with liberal-democratic peace debates, the institutional approach to human security assumes that the existence of non- liberal/non-democratic states is the main obstacle for international stability, welfare, as well as individual security. Therefore human security aims to transform underdevelop and failing/failed states into civic, non-violent liberal spaces by introducing social, political, and economic reforms within these states.61 As will be explored later, the institutional form of human security endorses certain rationalities that call for liberal governance intervention of Western states into non-Western societies. The rationalities emerge from the way in which these societies are portrayed as an obstacle to social progress in liberal peace.
To put this argument in Foucauldian terms, the various forms of interventions promoted through the institutional form of human security can be understood as international technologies of governmental power that aim to control these dangerous landscapes which are seen as ‘abnormal’ and ‘pre-modern’ spaces of the international society. This approach has strong parallels with the modern governmental technology that started to emerge by the 19th century. Colin Gordon notes in regards to the emergence of social economy and its rationality in the first half of the 19th century: “To enable the wealth creating mechanisms of the economy
59 WT Tow & R Trood, ‘Linkages between traditional security and human security’, in WT Tow, R Thakur & I Hyun (eds.) Asia’s emerging regional order: Reconciling traditional and human security, The United Nations University, Tokyo, 2000, pp. 13-32; S Lodgaard, ‘Human Security: Concept and Operationalization’, paper presented at Expert Seminar on Human Rights and Peace Palais Wilson, Geneva, December 2000. 60 MW Doyle, ‘Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs, Part I’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, vol. 12, no. 4, 1983, pp. 323-353; BM Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace: Principles for a Post- Cold War World, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1993. 61 Richmond , Transformation of Peace, p. 70. 31 Chapter One: Contesting the Security Literature
to work, it is not enough to remove the obstacles of obsolete privileges … it is society itself, or the social problem”. 62 He writes that the way in which the poor were perceived as a form of social danger, as an obstacle to liberal welfare, rationalized a particular form of “political technology designed to form, out of the recalcitrant material of the dangerous classes, something more than economic man: a social citizen”.63 Seen in this light, what should be contested in institutional form of human security is that it not only draws strong dichotomies between strong and weak states, but it also creates a new form of international liberal power that uncritically penetrates into non-Western states and their population with an aim to expand the liberal zone; the universal “society of security”.64
The third theoretical approach focuses on emancipatory potential of human security. In this perspective, human security is a form of emancipation is defined as “the freeing of people from those physical and human constraints which stop them carrying out what they would freely choose to do”.65 This approach suggests that when men, women and communities experiencing state violence, political oppression, poverty, diseases, illiteracy, ethnic and gender discrimination become the central focus, the meaning of economic, political, environmental, and societal security shifts from securing states or state systems to an inclusive understanding of threats that degrade people’s life expectations and choices. Within this interpretation human security represents a critical project that aims to call into question the status quo which renders individuals insecure. According to Caroline Thomas, for example, human security has qualitative and quantitative aspects. While the quantitative aspect refers to material sufficiency, the qualitative aspect is about achieving “personal autonomy”, “control over one’s life”, “participation in the life of community”, and “emancipation from oppressive power structures” whether they are global, national
62 Richmond , Transformation of Peace, p. 38. 63 ibid., p. 38. 64 Foucault suggests that from the eighteen century onwards security constitutes the dominant component of modern rationalities of government whose primary target is the ‘ensemble of population’. Colin Gordon argues that, for Foucault, security is “a specific principle of political method and practice, distinct alike from those of law, sovereignty and discipline, and capable of various modes of combination with these other principles and practices within diverse governmental configurations. Modern society, then, is a society of security”. ibid., p. 20. Seen in this light, the universal society of security refers to totalizing and individualizing technologies of international governmental power which construct a universal liberal society of security. 65 Booth, Review of International Studies, p. 319. 32 Chapter One: Contesting the Security Literature
or local in origin.66 This perspective inspires the transformative ethos of human security that opens not only state, but also global economic and political structures into a critical scrutiny.
This thesis shares the critical inquiry promoted by emancipatory-oriented understandings of human security. However, it argues that there is still a need to approach the ideal of emancipation with caution. As will be argued in the following chapters, the language of emancipation can contribute to the maintenance of a particular form of power without calling into question how the current status quo— both within Canada and abroad—actually downgrades the transformative ethos of human security. Certainly the literature on emancipatory-oriented understanding of human security shows an implicit resistance to the discourse constructed by realist and institutional approaches. However, there is still a need to recognize that in particular the rationale of the institutional understanding of human security derives from an aspiration to maintain personal autonomy, freedom of people and emancipation from state structures. Human security, in this sense, emerges as a form of Enlightenment project with an aim to promote liberal societies whose populations can live freely with freedom from want and fear. Yet human security as an Enlightenment project also generates its disciplinary power in the form of a constant control and surveillance. Therefore it is important not to take emancipation as an ideal, but to investigate the language of emancipation, the discourses it creates, the ‘otherness’ it constructs, the arbitrary landscapes it generates, and the techniques it invents to control and shape people, their identities and environments. In short, it is important to penetrate into the ways in which human security discourse can become a Benthamite panopticism.
66 C Thomas, ‘Global Governance, development and human security: exploring the links’, Third World Quarterly, vol. 22, no. 2, pp. 161-162. 33 Chapter Two: Governing Canadians
CHAPTER TWO GOVERNING CANADIANS: THE DOMESTIC CONSTRUCTION AND POLITICAL MANIPULATION OF HUMAN SECURITY
Our efforts also demonstrated how an activist, internationalist policy can help shape an identity and promote unity in the country. International accomplishments reinforce our basic values and enhance our pride as a people … Our national interests go beyond the economic, and foreign policy can be a nation builder.1
1. Introduction
Since the Second World War, Canadian identity has been central to Canadian foreign policy. Traditionally, Canada’s longstanding commitment to international norms and organizations is seen as a reflection of the Canadian values embedded in Canada’s national identity. It is generally argued that Canada’s human security policy is a natural expression of the way that Canadians think of themselves as good international citizens, peacekeepers, honest-brokers, and ‘sharing and caring people’. This chapter does not take these characteristics of Canadian identity as given. Rather, it suggests that these descriptions are discursive political constructions. Hence, rather than asking to what extent human security is reflective of Canadian identity, this chapter asks how Canadianness is (re)constructed through Canada’s human security discourse.
The aim of this chapter is to highlight the mutual interaction between the discourses of foreign and domestic policies. Here, Canada’s human security discourse as a foreign policy agenda is not considered to be just an external state practice; rather, it is viewed as a part of a bigger project of the Canadian state in its nation-building project. With an aim to stress the domestic manipulation of the
1 L Axworthy, Navigating a New World: Canada’s Global Future, Vintage Canada, Toronto, 2004, p. 59. 34 Chapter Two: Governing Canadians
human security agenda, this chapter looks at the meaning-producing effects of human security discourse, and argues that, through invoking the various myths that shape the hegemonic meaning of Canadian identity, the human security agenda plays a performative role in constructing and injecting a national goodness into Canadian identity. As Duncan Bell argues, myths idealize the nation, and become the everyday actualization and means of propagation of nationalist sentiments that act to conceal the historical or ongoing inconsistencies within the state.2 Myths construct and legitimatize national identity by grounding it in institutions and power relations.
This chapter argues that human security as a governmental practice aims to constitute Pan-Canadianism and endorses the historical constructions of Canadian identity as being a tolerant, peaceful, generous, good international citizen, and non- American. The discursive formations of human security intimately link to the governmental practice whose exercise of power presupposes a governable Canadian population as a unified totality. Human security policy not only perpetuates the ‘truth effects’ of the discourse of Canadian identity (which creates a meaning of ‘Canada is good’), but also enhances the social control of the Canadian population by concealing the ‘human insecurities’ within the Canadian state. In short, this chapter analyses how the discourses of domestic and foreign policy mutually reinforce each other, and how performatives of these discourses work to produce the nationhood and mask the role of the Canadian state in creating various social, economic and political ‘human insecurities’ within Canada. In bringing these issues into light, this chapter not only identifies the inconsistencies, and the ‘rhetoric and practice gap’ of Canadian human security policy, but also contests the ontological claims of Canadian identity.
This section will start by giving an overview of the domestic context in the late 1980s and 1990s. This section will show how unprecedented political and economic crises had an enormous impact on the sense of belonging in Canada; which, in effect, led the federal government to take various efforts to rebuild the attachment to Canada with an aim to maintain national unity. It will be argued that the domestic crises ultimately provided a context for the emergence of human security policy. The second section will look at the historical function of the
2 DS Bell, ‘Mythscapes: memory, mythology and national identity’, British Journal of Sociology, vol. 54, no. 1, March 2003, pp. 63- 81. 35 Chapter Two: Governing Canadians
discourse on Canadian Internationalism and its performative role in making Canada. The third section will focus on how Canada’s human security policy goes hand in hand with domestic identity-making projects and how it reconstructs Canadian identity. The final section highlights how the specific framing of human security deeply invests various forms of subjectivity in the Canadian state. By framing human security in a particular way, the Canadian Government is able structure the discursive space in which certain security problems becomes invisible in Canada. This section argues that human security is ultimately a liberal project which works to construct self-governing Canadian liberal subjects.
2. Nation is in Crisis: An Overview of the Context in Canada in the Early 1990s
Between the early 1980s and 1990s, Canada was faced with many political, economic and social crises. Three major developments—the constitutional debates and 1995 Referendum, the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the US, and the economic decline—challenged the “imagined community” of Canadians that depicts Canada as peaceful, prosperous and united. Canadian human security policy emerged as a foreign policy framework when these crises divided Canadians and raised questions on the efficiency and the legitimacy of the federal government.
The first development, the constitutional crisis, began in the early 1980s and resulted in the 1995 Québec Referendum, which showed an unprecedented increase of support for Québec’s independence.3 The constitutional crisis arose through the Trudeau government’s constitutional reform and the patriation of the Canadian Constitution from British Parliament without the consent of Québec in 1982. The Constitution Act of 1982 was an entrenchment of the Trudeau government’s national unity strategy, which was driven by the logic that Québec nationalism could only be defeated through Pan-Canadian nationalism.4 Trudeau’s vision of Pan-Canadianism was based on explicit opposition to recognizing Québec as a ‘collectivity’ or a
3 In the 30 October 1995 Referendum, Quebec sovereignty was rejected by 50.6% of the votes against 49.4% voting for sovereignty. For details see Les Directeur Général Des Elections Du Québec, Referendum du 30 Octobre 1995, viewed 10 March 2006,
‘distinct nation’. For Trudeau ‘one Canada’ could only survive by making Québec ‘a province like the others’. From the perspective of Québec Francophones, the patriation in that sense was an explicit manifestation of how the meaning of Québec was being simply reduced to linguistic differences. As Kenneth McRoberts argues, the patriation was not only conceived by Québec Francophones as a violation of rules of federation, but it also demoralized those who support federalism.5
Québec’s refusal to sign the new Constitution started a new set of unsuccessful attempts to bring back Québec into the federation, and to secure their consent for the Constitution. When the Conservative government of Brian Mulroney was elected in 1984 with strong support from Québec, it promised “to reintegrate Québec into the constitutional fold with honor and dignity”.6 The first attempt, the Meech Lake Accord (the proposed Constitutional amendment of 1987) recognized Québec as a ‘distinct society’, if not a ‘distinct nation’. However, the Accord was defeated not by Québec, but by the Native deputy, Elijah Harper, on the ground that fulfilling the demands of Québec would postpone the First Nations’ right of self- government indefinitely.7 The defeat of the Meech Lake Accord demonstrated that the nation-building strategy could not be carried on by accommodating one of the two Christian, white, European nations of Canada, but it required the recognition of the historically ignored demands of First Nations. Following the Meech Lake Accord, various attempts—such as the Citizen’s Inquiry Forum, Canada 125 Celebrations, Special Committee Reports and various public debates—were taken in order to end the constitutional crisis. However the defeat of the Charlottetown Accord in 1992, by both French Canadians and First Nations, made it clear that Trudeau’s nation-building strategy was doomed to fail long before the shocking results of the 1995 Referendum. The close results of the Québec Referendum showed that Québec sovereignty was a very real possibility. The polls conducted in 1999 revealed that Quebeckers had indeed a lower attachment to Canada and higher attachment to ethnic group than the Rest of Canada (ROC).8
5 McRoberts, p. 174. 6 G Bourque, ‘Quebec Nationalism Struggle For Sovereignty in French Canada’, in B Berberoglu (ed.), The National Question: Nationalism, Ethnic Conflict, and Self-Determination in the 20th Century, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1995, p. 215. 7 ibid., p. 216. 8 FL Graves, T Dugas & P Beauchamp, ‘Identity and National Attachments in Contemporary Canada’, in HL Lazaar & T McIntosh (eds.), Canada: The State of Federation 1998–1999, How Canadians Connect, McGill-Queen’s University Press, Kingston, 1999, pp. 307-354. 37 Chapter Two: Governing Canadians
This challenge to the status quo also coincided with the debate on the US– Canada FTA that came into effect in 1989 with the strong opposition of the Liberal Party. Along with the privatization, the FTA was the dominant item in Mulroney’s government neoliberal agenda. Negotiations with the US over the FTA divided Canadians into continentalist and nationalist lines followed by a huge anti-free trade movement.9 The government and business support for the FTA concentrated on the argument that the FTA would increase Canada’s economic competitiveness, reduce the asymmetry between two countries, and secure Canada from protectionist policies of the US. The main concern of the nationalist camp, on the other hand, was largely about the possible negative impact of the FTA on Canada’s sovereignty and identity.10 The surveys conducted in 1988 and 1990 showed that, although Canadians were less opposed to the FTA than it was argued, their major concern was that Canadian culture and arts would be in danger due to the economic harmonization.11 Many Canadians worried that the FTA would leave Canadian culture unprotected against US cultural products, and the distinctive Canadian life would be threatened by American values, which were characterized as ‘winner-take-all capitalism’.12 Being proud of their safe and crime-free communities, as opposed to the violent American cities, and describing themselves as being social democratic and community-oriented nation, as opposed to the capitalist, individualistic and popularist features of the US, many Canadians believed that the FTA has symbolically challenged the master narrative of Canadian identity as being ‘non- American’.13
The third crisis was poor economic performance. Despite the Mulroney government’s economic growth promises, by the early 1990s Canada started to face
9 For detailed analysis of the anti-Free Trade movement in Canada see JM Ayres, Defying Conventional Wisdom: Political Movement and Popular Contention Against North American Free Trade, University of Toronto, Toronto, 1998. 10 In addition to concerns over Canada’s sovereignty and identity, opponents of the FTA made their arguments in terms of possible job losses in Canada. In particular labour unions opposed the FTA on the grounds that Canada had higher labour standards, therefore harmonization of labour standards would bring lower levels of unionization, lower wages and fewer benefits for Canadian labour. N Nevitte, The Decline of Deference: Canadian value change in cross-national perspective, Broadview Press, Ontario, 1996, p. 3. 11 ibid., pp. 2-3; HD Clarke & A Kornberg, ‘Support for the Canadian Federal Progressive Conservative Party since 1988: The Impact of Economic Evaluations and Economic Issues’, Canadian Journal of Political Science, vol. 25, no. 1, Mar. 1992 , pp. 41-42. 12 Ayres, pp. 22-23. 13 For the comparison of Canadian and American values, see SM Lipset, Continental Divide: The Values and Institutions of the US and Canada, Canadian-American Committee, 1990; M Adams, Better Happy than Rich? Canadians, Money and the Meaning of Life, Toronto, Penguin, 2000. 38 Chapter Two: Governing Canadians
the worst economic recession since the Second World War. Between 1990 and 1996, the real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) showed a serious decline.14 By 1993, when the Liberal government came into power, Canada’s net external debt was 44% of its GDP, which was the highest indebtedness rate among the G-7 countries.15 The unemployment rate rose into the double-digit range by the early 1990s and remained high until 2000.16
Not surprisingly, deficit elimination became the Liberal government’s priority as outlined in the Liberal Party 1993 election document, the Red Book.17 Preoccupied with the budget deficit, the Liberal Party made a significant transition in social policy regimes through a new fiscal federalism that reduced transfers from the federal government to the provinces.18 While the new fiscal federalism has increased the autonomy of provinces, it has also made them rely on their own resources. The new fiscal federalism had serious consequences in terms of cutbacks in federal funding of welfare programs, in particular public healthcare.19 The decrease in public healthcare funding has provoked feeling of insecurity among Canadians and raised serious criticisms against the Liberal government. It is notable that public healthcare has a symbolic meaning for Canadians; it is one of the most significant symbols of remaining ‘distinctively Canadian’. Equality in accessing healthcare is an important object of identification for Canadians, and it makes Canada different from the US.20 Cutbacks in health care affected one of the most compelling sources of attachment to Canada. The polls conducted in 1998 showed a significant skepticism about the effectiveness of government and fuelled the feeling of high economic insecurity
14 Canada’s real GDP per capita grew rapidly in the 1960s and 1970s, averaging over 3 per cent per year. However, this was followed by slow growth in the 1980s and almost no growth from 1990 to 1996. Department of Finance, The Economic and Fiscal Update 2002, Department of Finance, Ottawa, 30 October 2002, viewed 19 November 2006,
among Canadians.21 The poll results indicate that, in 1998, almost half of the Canadian population felt they had lost all control of their economic future.22
These three major crises disputed the national foundations of the Canadian state in a way that the country faced a threat of disintegrating regionally, ethnically and economically. In particular, the 1995 Referendum raised concerns on national unity and the nationalistic attachment to the Canadian state. It not only threatened the future of the ‘two nation state’, but also fundamentally challenged the Canadian ideal of being the ‘first post-modern state’ that accommodates various ethnic and cultural groups within a sense of unity. As Janine Brodie argues, in particular during the periods of political crises and economic hard-times when the attachment to country weakens, appeals to nation and national identity provide the glue that holds together a diverse population.23 When national unity and stability becomes the source of anxiety, states are deeply invested in the discursive (re)construction of national identity through symbols, myths and rituals that mould a ‘collective memory’: the subjective recollection of past and present events which turn into narratives of national identity.24 From the perspective of state and of governance, as Manuel Castell argues, the discursive construction of national narratives provides a “legitimizing identity” which serves to maintain allegiance and social control.25
Foreign policy initiatives, along with other public institutions, play a performative role in discursively constructing this legitimizing identity. According to David Campbell, foreign policy is not something subsequent to the state; rather it is integral to its constitution.26 He argues that foreign policy practices serve to produce the constitution of identity as well as to contain challenges to the identity that results.27 As the following sections will demonstrate, human security plays this
21 Ekos Research Associates, Canadians and Government in the Late Nineties: Core Conclusions and Emerging Forces, Ottawa-Hull, February 27, 1998, viewed 25 November 2006,
performative role and endorses national unity programmes of the Canadian Government through invoking myths, narratives and attributes that represent being Canadian as ideal. It is notable that constructing Canadian identity through foreign policy is not a new phenomenon. Historically the Canadian foreign policy, which has been identified with the ‘good international citizenship’, plays an important role in constructing Canadian identity and injecting goodness into the ‘imagined community’ of Canadians. As the next section will analyse, after the Second World War, Canadian internationalism played a significant role in nation-building.
3. The History of Present: Canadian Internationalism as a Nation Builder
Nation building is a dual process; it requires the management of population through various strategies and the formation of national identity.28 Nation building in Canada has always been problematic. The Canadian Confederation was created in 1867. It was formed as a political pact between the three provinces of British North America. Unlike many European nations which created a state to express nationality that already existed, the Canadian state was formed to make a future nationality possible.29 Since Canada was created as a political pact, the national attachment identified with a common national identity was not safeguarded in Canada. From the outset, the ethnic and regional differences threatened the continuance of a strong and central Canadian state that underpinned the rationale of English Canadian nationalism. To put it differently, in Richard Gwyn’s words, Canada was not born as a “nation-state”, but as a “state-nation”.30 With an aim to prevent a possible ethnic conflict and to provide a domestic support for its nation-building projects, from the early days of Confederation the Canadian state has predominantly played a central role in constructing a national identity and securing national unity.31
The Canadian internationalism emerged by the end of the Second World War and turned into a national pride after Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson. Because of
28 E Mackey, The House of Difference: Cultural Politics and National Identity in Canada, Routledge, London, 1999, p. 23 29 A Brady, ‘The Meaning of Canadian Nationalism’, International Journal, vol. 19, 1963-1964, p. 349. 30 R Gwyn, Nationalism Without Walls: The Unbearable Lightness of Being Canadian, McClelland & Stewart, Toronto, 1995. 31 Brodie, p. 381. 41 Chapter Two: Governing Canadians
two significant roles it has played since the end of the Second World War, Canadian internationalism can be seen as a part of the continual nation-building project of successive governments. First, during the post-war years, it helped Canadian governments to gain full sovereignty that was independent from the British Government. It became a symbol of a distinct Canadian population. Second, throughout the Cold War, Canadian internationalism constituted a political platform which enabled the discursive construction of Canadian identity. In particular, in the 1960s, with Lester Pearson’s Nobel Peace Prize for the creation of the United Nations Emergency Force in 1956, and the increase of Canada’s active participation in peacekeeping operations, the discourse of Canadian internationalism started to reinforce a narrative of national goodness.
The first role of Canadian internationalism, as a symbol of sovereignty, can be analysed in the context of the decades following the Second World War, which marked a new impetus in the rise of Canadian nationalism. Although the Canadian Confederation was formed in 1867, it was not before the 1931 Statute of Westminster that Canada gained a distinct international character and a nationally directed foreign policy.32 Unlike in World War I, Canada made its own decision to participate in World War II. As Prime Minister Mackenzie King declared in 1945, the involvement in the war represented “a full stature of nationhood”: a move from a colony status to an independent country.33 Having made an important contribution to the Alliance during the war, Canada emerged as one of the principal powers with one of the world’s largest army forces and a strong economy. This new status strengthened the distinctive sense of Canadianness among many Anglophones who historically identify themselves with an independent and unified ‘Canadian state’.
Participation in designing post-war new international organizations —such as the UN, North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and Bretton Woods Institutions—furthered this distinct sense of nationality. At the San Francisco Conference, Canada used its own seal for the first time.34 Moreover, Canada’s full membership of NATO represented that the involvement in European affairs was not
32 DW Middlemiss & JJ Sokolsky, Canadian Defence Decisions and Determinants, Harcourt Brace, Toronto, 1989, p. 10. 33 WL Mackenzie King, ‘Canada, House of Commons Debate, March 20 and 28, 1945’, in RA Mackay (ed.), Canadian Foreign Policy 1945–1954: Selected Speeches and Documents, McClelland and Stewart Limited, Toronto, 1971, p. 11. 34 A Siegfried, Canada an International Power, Third Bedford Square, London, 1949, p. 196. 42 Chapter Two: Governing Canadians
a remote imposition of Britain. Rather, it was strictly based on Canada’s perception of its own national interests to which all major groups including French-Canadians agreed.35 Emphasizing the decline in British connections in foreign policy, Andre Siegfried wrote in 1949 that Canada “no longer considers herself as a part of a whole, but as a distinct and independent personality. Therefore, alongside English policy, there is a Canadian policy…"36
The post-war internationalism signified to the whole world—including French Canadians—that Ottawa was the only national government of Canada.37 In this regard, sovereignty in foreign policy established a rationale for post-war identity-making initiatives of the Canadian state. In the domestic sphere, the state discourse of building a Pan-Canadian nationalism was promoted with the 1946 Canadian Citizenship Act, which separated Canadian citizenship from Britain. The Citizenship Act was particularly significant in promoting a common Canadian identity in which Anglophones and especially Francophones would feel a sense of belonging to ‘one Canada’. In introducing the Bill to the House of Commons, Paul Martin, Secretary of State in the Mackenzie King Government, stated:
For the national unity of Canada and for the future and greatness of this country… it is felt to be of the utmost importance that all of us, new Canadians and old, have a consciousness of a common purpose and common interests as Canadians; that all of us are able to say with pride and say with meaning: I am a Canadian citizen.38
In addition to the Citizenship Act, as Eva Mackey notes, state intervention in economic, social, political and cultural life in the following post-war years became one of the main characteristics of the Canadian nation.39 The government’s Keynesian doctrine of economic management and the elaboration of the welfare state, the public support of scientific research and development, and the state sponsored promotion of distinctive Canadian culture both in the domestic and
35 E McInnis, ‘A Middle Power in the Cold War’, in HL Keenleyside, J Eayrs, G Smith, DR Deener, G Bergeron, VW Bladen & E McInnis (eds.), The Growth of Canadian Policies in External Affairs, Greenwood Press Publishers, Westport, 1981, p. 152. It is important to note that, as Edgar McInnis analyses, the participation in NATO was a silent recognition that Canada’s security interest was bounded with Britain. However, becoming an independent member of NATO removed the French- Canadians opposition to Westminster. 36 Siegfried, p. 203. [emphasis added ] 37 McRoberts, p. 24. 38 Quoted in Brodie, p. 385. 39 Mackey, p. 53. 43 Chapter Two: Governing Canadians
international sphere were all manifestations of state intervention, control and surveillance of the Canadian population.40 In Foucauldian terms, these nation- building practices of the Canadian Government represent a triangle of “sovereignty- discipline-government”.41 The management of Canadian population through the ensemble of new institutions and tactics—such as the Family Allowance Act, Canada Pension Plan, Medicare Act, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Canada Council and 1953 Immigration Act—not only provided the raison d’etre for the Canadian Government to use disciplinary techniques of Canadianization policies on whole Canadian subjects, but also it injected a state-sponsored single Canadian identity that imagined the Canadian self as Anglo-Saxon, white, and Christian. As Charles Taylor argues, the process of nation-building privileges the members of the majority culture.42 In Canada, until the 1960s, Englishness, which was associated with the Social Darwinist discourse of seeing ‘non-Anglo Saxon’ societies as racially disturbing, dominated the discourse on Canadian identity.
The government’s nation-building efforts were also an embedded part of its foreign policy. For instance, in the 1947 Gray Lecture, the Secretary of State for External Affairs, Louis St. Laurent identified national unity as one of the five principles of Canada’s foreign policy.43 In his speech, St. Laurent set the basis of Canada’s internationalist tradition by confirming Canada’s commitment to keep international organizations firm and active. Although St. Laurent’s 1947 Gray Lecture is usually cited as the touchstone of internationalist orientation of Canada’s foreign policy, it also reflects how in the post-war years the Canadian nation was defined in a selective way. By making no reference to First Nations as ‘people of
40 Mackey, p. 54. For the emergence of cultural diplomacy as a reaction of Quebec’s own cultural promotion at the international sphere see AF Cooper, ‘Canadian Cultural Diplomacy: An Introduction’, in AF Cooper (ed.), Canadian culture: international dimensions, Centre on Foreign Policy and Federalism and the Canadian Institute of International Relations, Waterloo, 1985, pp. 3- 26. 41 M Foucault, ‘Governmentality’, in G Burchell, C Gordon & P Miller (eds.), The Foucault effect: Studies in Governmentality: with two lectures by and interview with Foucault, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1991, p. 102. 42 W Kymlicka, Finding Our Way Rethinking Ethnocultural Relations in Canada, Oxford University Press, Toronto, 1998, pp. 29-30. 43 The other four principles of Canadian foreign policy as set out by St. Laurent were political liberty, the rule of law in national and international affairs, the values of a Christian civilization, and the acceptance of international responsibility in keeping with Canada’s conception of its role in world affairs. L St. Laurent, ‘An Address by the Secretary of State for External Affairs, Mr. L. S. St. Laurent inaugurating the Gray Foundation Lectureship at Toronto University, January 13, 1947’, in RA Mackay (ed.), Canadian Foreign Policy 1945–1954: Selected Speeches and Documents, McClelland and Stewart Limited, Toronto, 1971, pp. 388- 399 44 Chapter Two: Governing Canadians
Canada’, the meaning of the Canadian nation was simply reduced to French and English speaking people. St. Laurent stated:
For a hundred years, therefore French speaking and English speaking people… have been engaged upon the experiment of building, on their own responsibility and under their own direction, a modern nation. It is, as it had to be a nation constructed on the foundation of two cultures and two languages.44
In the same speech, St. Laurent emphasized that “no foreign policy is consistent nor coherent over a period of years unless it is based upon some conception of human values.”45 The emphasis of St. Laurent on human values is usually shown as an example of the idealist dimension of Canadian internationalism.46 However, the contested nature of this emphasis was that human values was described in an ethnocentric way. According to St. Laurent, human values were meant to be Western values, which at the same time posited the ideal of the Canadian nation as Christian, white and European. St. Laurent further emphasized:
… we have realized that a threat to the liberty of Western Europe, where our political ideas were nurtured, was a threat to our way of life ... In our national life we are continually influenced by the conceptions of good and evil which emerged from Hebrew and Greek civilization and which have been transformed and transmitted through the Christian traditions of the Western World.47
It is important to note that in the same speech, the French Canadians were recognized to the extent that their existence would not jeopardize national stability. Since St. Laurent’s 1947 Gray Lecture, in particular with the emergence of a new Québec nationalism by the late 1950s, national unity has become one of the most important aspects of Canada’s foreign policy and has been re-emphasized by various Canadian political leaders. In 1967, for instance, Paul Martin, Secretary of State, re- stated the foreign policy principles outlined by St. Laurent and emphasized the importance in developing relations with the Francophone countries, as it would
44 St. Laurent, p. 389. 45 ibid., p. 392. [emphasis added ] 46 For instance see C Melakopides, Pragmatic Idealism Canadian Foreign Policy 1945–1995, McGill- Queen’s University Press, Montreal, 1998, pp. 6-7. 47 ibid., p. 391, 392. 45 Chapter Two: Governing Canadians
contribute to national unity.48 Similarly, in 1968, Prime Minister Trudeau made it clear that,
Our paramount interest is to ensure the political survival of Canada as a federal and bilingual sovereign state. This means strengthening Canadian unity as a basically North American country. It means reflecting in our foreign relations the cultural diversity and the bilingualism of Canada as faithfully as possible …49
The second aspect of internationalism, as a state practice of promoting the narrative of national goodness, began to rise by the 1960s, when maintaining national unity required a shift from exclusion of differences to recognizing them. By the 1960s, the new nationalism of Québec with its strong emphasis on ‘sovereign Québec’ made it clear that assertion of a narrow and exclusionist project of nation- building would no longer maintain the political survival of Canada. As a result, the Canadian Government changed its rhetoric from assimilation to recognition of cultural diversity. As Richard Day writes, Canadian society had always been fragmented, but what changed by the 1960s was a rapid public awareness of this fragmentation.50 The transition from assimilation to recognition of diversity required a significant change in self-images of the nation.
Lester Pearson’s efforts of changing the normative content of Canadian identity are worth emphasizing. First, Pearson developed a strategy to accommodate Québec within Canada. As a part of this strategy, the Québecois nation was given an “official state identity, [which] transformed it from other to a self position”.51 Second, various attempts were made in order to erase contradictory and competing symbols that could disperse the nation. These attempts were a government strategy of forming an ‘organized forgetting’ of past events of exclusion. The national flag was changed, a new official national anthem was approved, and 1967 Centennial
48 P Martin, ‘Statement by Mr. Paul Martin Secretary of State for External Affairs at Waterloo Lutheran University Convocation, May 22, 1967’, in AE Blanchette (ed.), Canadian Foreign Policy 1966-1976: Selected Speeches and Documents, Gage Publishing Limited, Ottawa, 1980, p. 334. 49 P Trudeau, ‘Statement by the Prime Minister, Mr. Pierre-Elliot Trudeau, Canada and the World, 1968, issued on May 29, 1968’, in AE Blanchette (ed.), Canadian Foreign Policy 1966-1976: Selected Speeches and Documents, Gage Publishing Limited, Ottawa, 1980, p. 340. [emphasis added] 50 Day RJF, Multiculturalism and the History of Canadian Diversity, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 2000, p. 178. [emphasis in original] 51 ibid., p. 178. [emphasis in original]. Lester Pearson’s efforts included the creation of a Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, developing the notion of ‘cooperative federalism’ and recognition of Quebec as ‘a nation within a nation’. For details see McRoberts, pp. 38-41. 46 Chapter Two: Governing Canadians
Celebrations took place as a part of the Pearson government nation-building efforts of reconstructing Canada.52 Furthermore, a gradual recognition of First Nations started to emerge. The rationale behind all these attempts was to transform Canadian identity from explicit Englishness to a more pluralist and inclusive identity which was supposed to heighten the sense of belonging to ‘new Canada’, thereby maintaining national unity.53 The new representation of Canada was completely different from the old one. It was ‘just, kinder, better, inclusive’ rather than assimilationist. The speech of Lester Pearson at the Centennial Celebrations reveals this new representation of Canada and Canadian identity. In his words:
Out of our experience in nation-building we are forging a new principle of democracy, the principle of political and economic unity in racial and cultural diversity … Tonight, we begin a new chapter in our country’s story … Let the record of that chapter be one of cooperation and not conflict; of dedication and not division; of service, not self…54
The pluralist and inclusive image promoted in the domestic sphere was reinforced through representing Canadian foreign policy as a manifestation of domestic political culture of peace, negotiation and compromise. Introducing a ‘humane’ overtone in the conduct of foreign policy, the discourse on internationalism facilitated a self image of Canada as an ‘enlightened nation’ whose world view, unlike many others, did not derive from a narrow realist conception of the world that typically rests on the notion of power maximization, ethnocentrism, and state and military security.55 It is said that the fundamental nature of internationalism was the “enhancement of interests or values commonly shared with others outside Canada, with a view to helping create or sustain a better world order”.56 Emphasizing the selflessness in Canadian foreign policy as an indication of Canadian world view, for instance, Joe Clark writes:
Two other values have helped shape the Canadian view of the world and our role in it. One is the notion of community, which implies difference and
52 For details of Centennial Celebrations see GR Miedema, For Canada’s Sake: Public Religion, Centennial Celebrations, and Re-making of Canada in the 1960s, McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montréal, 2005. 53 Mackey, pp. 55-63; Miedema, pp. 65-87. 54 Quoted in Miedema, p. 67. 55 For an argument on how Canada’s internationalism was a natural reflection of its enlightened world view, see Melakopides, p. 5. 56 M Tucker, Canadian Foreign Policy: Contemporary Issues and Themes, McGraw-Hill Ryerson Ltd., Toronto, 1980, p. 2. 47 Chapter Two: Governing Canadians
identity, and the other is the need for rules that reach across differences to allow common standards … All countries have national interests, but Canada has defined its national interest more broadly, less selfishly, than many others. That is why …C anada [ is called ] ‘The first international country’.57
More importantly, Canadian elites and scholars represented ‘Canada’s humane foreign policy’ as a natural reflection of Canadian identity. By linking the altruism in Canadian identity with Canadian foreign policy, the 1970 White Paper argued that one of the basic national aims of Canadian foreign policy was, “that all Canadians will see in the life they have and the contribution they make to humanity, something worthwhile preserving in identity and purpose.”58 Similarly, declaring that being Canadian is to be a “good world citizen”, Prime Minister Trudeau stated:
When I say national interests I am not thinking in the egoistical sense of just what is happening to Canadians. It’s in our national interest to reduce the tensions in the world, tensions which spring from the two-thirds of the world population who go to bed hungry every night, the two-thirds of the world’s population who are poor whereas the other third is rich … This is the aim of our foreign policy; it is to serve our national interests and to express our national identity abroad so that other countries know us. They know what we stand for, they know what our interests are and what our values are… 59
In short, throughout the Cold War, Canadian internationalism enabled successive governments to inject a “utilitarian morality” into Canadian identity through the representation of Canada as middle power, helpful fixer, honest broker, peacekeeper and a good international citizen.60 These positive images of Canada which constructed the narrative of ‘Canada is good’ were one of the main ‘truth effects’ of the discourse on Canadian internationalism. However, as Foucault suggests, what seems true in the set of propositions is not self-evident, rather it is the result of political and ideological contestation.61 By generating a consensus that
57 J Clark, ‘‘The first international country’ Canada has defined its national interest more broadly, less selfishly, than many others’, International Journal, vol. 52, autumn 1997, p. 541. 58 Department of External Affairs, Foreign Policy for Canadians, DEA, Ottawa, 1970, p. 10. 59P Trudeau, ‘Statement by the Prime Minister, Mr. Pierre-Elliott Trudeau to the Alberta Liberal Association, Calgary, April 12, 1969’, in AE Blanchette (ed.), Canadian Foreign Policy 1966–1976 Selected Speeches and Documents, Gage Publishing Limited, Ottawa, 1980, p. 343. [emphasis added ] 60 E Carriérre, M O’Reilly & R Vengroff, ‘ “In the Service of Peace”: Reflexive Multilateralism and the Canadian Experience in Bosnia’, paper presented at The International Studies Association Conference, Washington, D.C., February 16-20, 1999, viewed 11 August 2005,
Canadian foreign policy is a natural reflection of Canadian identity, successive governments aimed to defy the disunifying counter narratives of the First Nations and Québécois, and to posit a moral superiority vis-à-vis the US. As Mark Neufeld argues, by representing Canada’s selfless activism as the natural expression of Canadian society as a whole, the discourse on internationalism played an essential role in maintaining domestic hegemonic political order which promoted the notion that “the social order within Canada’s borders was an essentially just one and deserving widespread public support”.62
It is also important to note that, although Canadian elites liked to represent Canada as ‘the first international country’, an examination of Canada’s foreign policy during the Cold War reveals a rhetoric-practice gap. Throughout the Cold War, Canada’s foreign policy was determined through political realism. Both Liberal and Conservative governments supported the same conventional, deterrence-oriented and Western alliance-tied foreign policy understanding.63 Although Canada tended to believe that the aggressive behaviour of the Soviet Union was driven by its autocratic form of government, rather than solely by communist ideology, as Denis Stairs suggests, this perception should not be seen as a ‘humanist approach’.64 Rather, being preoccupied with military threats, the Canadian approach was to maintain a balance of power model of international politics by avoiding the tough policies that would damage the appeal of the Western world.
Political realism in Canada’s Cold War foreign policy was also evident in its strong support for the NATO and the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) which was gradually associated with Canada’s participation in the US ballistic missile defence planning and in its programs of nuclear reactor research.65 Canada was supportive of the UN efforts to foster international control of atomic energy, and it stated in the 1964 White Paper that “[Canada] elected, as a matter of
62 M Neufeld, ‘Democratization in/of Canadian Foreign Policy: Critical Reflections’, Studies in Political Economy, 58, Spring 1999, p. 101. 63 For an overview of Canada’s Cold War diplomacy see T Keating, Canada and World Order: The Multilateralist Tradition in Canadian Foreign Policy, Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 69-118 64 D Stairs, ‘Realists at work: Canadian Policy Makers and the Politics of Transition From Hot War To Cold War’, in G Donaghy (ed.), Canada and the Early Cold War 1943–1957, Canadian Government Publishing, Ottawa, 1998, p. 109, viewed 17 May 2006,
deliberate choice, not to become a nuclear power”.66 Nonetheless, in the same paper, the Canadian Government also declared that “the alliance must continue to possess nuclear weapons in the absence of controlled disarmament and as long as hostile forces have them”.67 Furthermore, although the Canadian Government continuously confirmed Canada’s restrictive sales of military goods to countries that represent a military threat or show a persistent record of serious violation of human rights, it continued to sell military goods to countries—such as Chile, Argentina, Guatemala, Pakistan, Paraguay, the Philippines and South Korea—which were cited as regular violators of human rights by the UN Commission on Human Rights in the mid- 1980s.68 In short, as Andrew Cooper writes, during the Cold War, Canada was a “system maintainer”.69 Rather than challenging the established parameters of the international system, Canada was part of the status quo.
Despite the rhetoric and practice gap, the success of internationalism was that it emerged as an area which united all Canadians. Since the end of the Second World War, English Canadians and French Canadians alike have been showing a strong support for an internationalist foreign policy.70 Various polls show that Canadians are highly supportive of an activist foreign policy. For example, according to a 1985 survey, most Canadians agreed that reducing world poverty, maintaining peace and reducing arms should be Canada’s high political priority.71 Most Canadians share a perception that Canada has played a major role in shaping the progressive events of international politics since the end of the Second World War. To conclude, although an internationalist foreign policy is not unique to Canada, what makes Canadian
66 PT Hellyer, ‘Paul T. Hellyer, Minister of National Defence, White Paper on Defence: 1964, Tables in the House of Commons , March 25, 1964’, in AE Blachette (ed.), Canadian Foreign Policy 1955– 1965: Selected Speeches and Documents, McClelland and Stewart, Toronto, 1977, p. 196. 67 ibid., p. 200. 68 E Regehr, ‘Military Sales’, in RO Matthews & C Pratt (eds.), Human Rights in Canadian Foreign Policy, McGill-Queens University Press, Kingston, 1988, pp. 209-220. 69 A Cooper, Canadian Foreign Policy Old Habits and New Directions, Prentice Hall and Bacon Canada, Scarborough, 1997, p. 36. 70 D Munton & T Keating,‘Internationalism and the Canadian Public’, Canadian Journal of Political Science, vol. 34, September 2001, pp. 517-549. Jean Sebastian Rioux, however, argues that there are some differences between French and English Canadians on their support of internationalism. Rioux suggests that although French Canadians are highly supportive of activist foreign policy, they oppose increased defence spending and they are much less in favour of humanitarian interventions in which Canadian troops are deployed under NATO or the US command. JS Rioux, ‘Two Solitudes: Quebecers’ Attitudes Regarding Canadian Security and Defence Policy’, prepared for the Canadian Defence & Foreign Affairs Institute’s Research Paper Series, February 23, 2005, Quebec, viewed 19 June 2006,
internationalism exceptional is that, as Richard Gwyn writes, it has been the very meaning of Canadianism itself in particular since Lester Pearson.72 4. (Re)Constructing Canadian Identity through Human Security
4.1 Human security as a tool of national unity strategy
The close results of the Québec Referendum and economic uncertainty set the national unity issue as the primary agenda of the federal government. The polls suggest that, at the public level, the national unity issue increased in importance from 0.6% in 1988 to 9.1% in 1997.73 In order to respond to the challenges to national unity, the federal government increasingly started to promote a positive image of the country, thereby to secure social cohesion among all Canadians.74 As a part of the new national unity strategy, reinforcing the attachment to Canadian identity and advancing the idea of Canadianness became the major domestic and international policy agenda.
At the domestic level, the Chrétien government took many initiatives to encourage a feeling of national unity and advance a sense of belonging to Canada.75 The promotion of Canadian symbols, Canada “wordmark’, and the encouragement of Canadian companies to use the Canadian flag and symbols in their advertising campaigns became the main part of this strategy.76 Further, the promotion of Canadian culture and values became a major policy agenda. In the 1997 Throne Speech, Prime Minister Jean Chrétien identified culture as the core of Canadian
72 R Gwyn, ‘Lloyd Axworthy Makes Pearsonianism Permanent’, Policy Options, December 1999, p. 14. 73 J Butovsky, ‘The salience of post-materialism in Canadian politics’, The Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology, vol. 39, issue 4, 1 November 2002, p. 471. 74 After the referendum the federal government set two national unity strategies—Plan A and Plan B. Plan B was about finding a legal ground to block any possible seccession of Quebec in the future. For details of Plan B, see F Roche, ‘The evolving Parameters of Quebec nationalism’, International Journal on Multicultural Societies, vol. 4, no. 1, 2002, p. 90. Plan A was basically a marketing strategy that sought to promote the idea of united Canada. McRobert, in this regard, argues that Plan A was an updated version of Trudeau strategy that sought to persuade Quebeckers and all Canadians to view their country in a positive way. McRoberts, p. 239. 75 These initiatives included creation of the Canada Information Office in 1996 whose aim was “to challenge the lies that are being propagated by the separatists” by giving information about Canada and government services. Editorial, ‘PropCan’, The Toronto Star, 18 September 1996, A24. 76 J Geddes, ‘Become unity boosters, Ottawa urges business’, The Financial Post, 2 February 1995, 1. 51 Chapter Two: Governing Canadians
identity and he pledged to ensure the continued access to cultural products and the long-term vitality of the CBC, the National Film Board and Telefilm Canada.77
The Plan A of the Chrétien government was increasingly reflected in a foreign policy agenda. Consistent with the domestic efforts, the 1995 government statement, Canada in the World, announced the projection of Canadian values and culture as the third pillar of foreign policy.78 The announcement of the ‘third pillar’ was identical with Trudeau’s foreign policy objectives which saw the promotion of culture as essential to respond to challenges to national unity. Although Canada in the World did not explicitly articulate the link between national unity and promotion of Canadian culture and values, the statement played a significant role in fostering the positive attributes attached to Canadian identity. Furthermore, the announcement of the program International Cultural Relations by Lloyd Axworthy in 1997 gave a new impetus to the projection of Canadian values and culture.
The promotion of culture and values was intended to serve two initial economic and political interests. The economic dimension of projection of culture and values was made explicit in Canada in the World which noted the importance of culture in economic success.79 The emphasis on the economic dimension of culture and values was consistent with the overall policy of the government’s statement which manifested an overriding concern for Canada’s prosperity. Driven by an economic interest, the government statement determined all areas of foreign policy as tools of promoting Canada’s economic security. Reflecting the view that saw cultural policy as a policy for economic prosperity, for instance, Lloyd Axworthy argued that cultural relations are “no longer simply the icing on the diplomatic
77 Prime Minister’s Office, Speech From the Throne to Open the Second Session Thirty-Fifth Parliament of Canada, February 27, 1996, viewed 10 August 2006,
cake.”80 Rather, he argued, the demonstration of richness and diversity of Canadian culture on the international stage is a valuable tool in fuelling exports of Canadian cultural products.81
It is important to note that the economic dimension of projecting Canadian values and culture was not a separate agenda from the national unity issue. From the perspective of the federal government, a strong economy would help a positive representation of the Canadian state by showing economic benefits of united Canada; hence, it would undermine separatist causes.82 Linking Canada’s unity with economic prosperity, Chrétien in his Speech to Throne emphasized the close relationship between “a high quality of life” and “united Canada”, and concluded that all actions that aim to strengthen the unity of the country would also focus on economic prosperity.83
On the political side, the projection of Canadian culture abroad was an initial attempt to counter Québec’s promotion of its own culture abroad. In the aftermath of the 1995 Referendum, Québec increasingly started to seek international legitimacy through planning independent international business and foreign policy trips, and promoting its own cultural and educational programs abroad. From the perspective of the federal government, these initiatives of Québec were an explicit threat to the ‘united Canada’ image abroad. As a response, it was suggested that a strategy of using Canadian embassies as showcases for Canadian culture would not only be a
80 L Axworthy, Notes for an Address by the Honourable Lloyd Axworthy at a Luncheon on the Occasion of a Roundtable on International Cooperation in Cultural Policy, Ottawa, June 30, 1998, viewed 08 May 2006,
counterattack to the promotion of Quebec’s provincial interests abroad, but also it would provide a symbol of “the survival of a strong and distinctive Canada”.84
In particular the early stages of Canada’s human security policy—in other words Axworthy years—became a platform in which the ‘third pillar’ was promoted. The positive and peaceful image of Canadian identity was vigorously cultivated through the human security agenda. Targeting the domestic audience, from Axworthy’s perspective, international accomplishments would reinforce Canadian values and enhance a national pride, which in turn could contribute to a unique and distinctive Canadian identity and national unity.85 It can be also argued that a declaration to the rest of the world on how Canada promotes the principles of ‘a people-centred approach’ to security—such as human rights, social equity, women and minority rights—could make Québécois and Aboriginal claims of an oppressive Canadian Government appear irrational and unfounded. Therefore, human security was portrayed as an agenda which transcends the narrow politics of national interests, and was framed in terms of ‘Canadian values’. For instance, Canada in the World emphasizes the importance of a value-driven foreign policy agenda and introduces the human security policy as a manifestation of Canadian values. It states:
… the concerns of Canadians about security issues are broader than those of self-interest. The desire to help others to build peace reflects some of the most deeply held and widely shared Canadian values. Our security policy must reflect this spirit.86
Representation of human security as a reflection of Canadian ‘desire to help others’ injects a “humanitarian impulse” into Canadian identity and shows that Canada’s world view transcends “cold-blooded calculations of realpolitics”, which makes it different from other countries.87
84 HA Eggleton, Notes for an Address by The Honourable Art Eggleton Minister For International Trade, on the Occasion of a Panel Discussion, ‘ Can Canada Maintain Its Cultural Identity in the Face of Globalization’, North York, January 27, 1997, viewed 10 August 2006,
4.2 Promoting the myth of ‘shared values’
The discourse on shared values can be traced back to the constitutional debates after the failure of the Meech Lake Accord in 1990. Several reports published in the early 1990s had an enormous impact on popularizing the idea of shared values. The first one was The Report on Citizen’s Forum which identified a list of core values that are “intrinsic to Canadianness”.88 After the public consultation with huge numbers of Canadians, the Forum concluded that Canadians are united by their shared commitment to belief in equality,diversity and fairness in a democratic society; in consultation and dialogue; in accommodation and tolerance; an abiding compassion and generosity; and Canada’s world image of being committed to freedom, peace and non-violent change.89 The federal government’s 1991 proposal paper Shaping Canada’s Future, which set the Canadian citizenship as the basis of the united Canada, portrayed the same values as universal and argued that these values show the ‘Canadian way’ in building a distinctive political society.90 Similarly, in a very provocative way, the 1992 Report of Beaudoin–Dobbie Committee recommended the inclusion of a statement on Canada’s identity and values in the Constitution and argued that these fundamental values were also shared by Québécois.91 The main metaphor constructed through these initiatives was ‘unifying commons’ that are supposed to be shared by all Canadians including First Nations and Québécois. As Eva Mackey argues, these populist initiatives reveal that a constant reproduction of identity crisis makes possible the regulation and state intervention in identity at national as well as local levels.92
The human security agenda plays an important role in revitalizing the discourse on shared values. An analysis of Axworthy’s statements reveals that the human security agenda was constantly represented not simply as a policy determined by Canadian bureaucrats, but as “tangible expression” of Canadian values defined as
88 K Spicer, ‘Canada: Values in Search of a Vision’, in JD Wirth & RL Earle (eds.), Identities in North America, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1995, p.18; Citizen’s Forum on Canada’s Future , Report to the People and Government of Canada, Supply and Services, Ottawa, 1991. 89 Citizens’ Forum on Canada’s Future, pp 33-44. 90 Government of Canada, Shaping Canada’s Future Together—Proposals, Supply and Services, Ottawa, 1991. 91 Parliament of Canada, A Renewed Canada: The Report of the Special Joint Committee of the Senate and the House of Commons, Ottawa, Queen’s, 1992, p. 9, 22-23. 92 Mackey, p.107 55 Chapter Two: Governing Canadians
“liberal minded and socially responsible”.93 According to Axworthy, “human security directly expresses the international usefulness of the Canadian experience of using talents of accommodation, negotiation and good will to overcome differences—leading to a unified, tolerant Canada . 94 Similarly, the 2003 Human Security Evaluation Report emphasizes that the rationale of human security agenda derives from Canada’s desire to project Canadian values such as tolerance, democracy, rule of law, and respect for human rights.95 In former minister of foreign affairs, Bill Graham’s words:
Canada’s foreign policy must reflect the nation we are: a multicultural, bilingual society that is free, open, prosperous and democratic. The experiences of immigrants from around the world and cultures of Aboriginal peoples are woven into the fabric of our national identity … Public diplomacy has become an integral part of how we promote our values, share our experience and influence others abroad, we are advancing humanitarian concerns that Canadians have long cherished …96
It is constantly argued that these values that are embedded in Canada’s political institutions and practices make Canada a model citizen: a model of governance which can inspire the rest of the world towards the “solution for melding diversity and difference with common purpose”.97
Perhaps, this ‘value-promotion project’ was most articulated by Steve Lee, the former executive director of the Canadian Centre for Foreign Policy Development, who came up with a concrete list of Canadian values based on the results of the World Values Survey. According to Lee, the Canadian ideals—such as respect for the environment, commitment to democracy, defence of human rights, a
93 Axworthy, Navigating a New World, pp. 31-32. 94 L Axworthy, Notes for an Address by The Honourable Lloyd Axworthy Minister of Foreign Affairs to The Société Des Relations Internationales De Québec ‘Human Security and Canada’s Security Council Agenda’, Quebec, February 25, 1999, viewed 11 October 2005,
desire to encourage fairness in developing societies, a recognition of tolerance and diversity, and a strong attachment to the idea of an engaged civil society both at home and abroad—is an expression of the Canadian nation as being a postmaterialist nation which gives priority to personal freedom, a society based on humanism rather than material values.98
Further, as Alison Howell suggests, the discourse on ‘Canadian values’ is not only constructed by government.99 It is a more dispersed discourse in a way that it is (re)constructed and propagated by various non-state actors, civil society and various scholars. In other words, the discourse on Canadian values works at more of a micro- level which constitutes the ‘political economy of truth’ on Canadian identity. The discourse on Canadian values takes its power through the circulation of ‘self- evident Canadian values’ within Canadian society by academic researches supported by statistical evidences, public opinion polls, commercials, and national celebrations and elections. For instance, the International Development Research and Policy Task Force states that Canadian humanitarian intervention in other countries derives from historical values such as ‘peace, order and good government’—one of the foundational myths of Canada that narrates it as a ‘peaceful kingdom’ established on counter-revolutionary principles in opposition to the US’s revolutionary ideas of ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’.100
Moreover, a brief review of the literature on Canadian political culture and values reveals how ‘identity knowledge’ contributes to the ontological claims of Canadian identity. For instance, based on his quantitative work, Canadian author Michael Adams writes that “tolerance for difference is probably Canada’s most admirable contribution to global civilization … the issue of tolerance, explains much of what is unique about us”.101 Similarly, Michael Ignatieff, one of the leading authors in promoting the progressive and civilized nature of Canadian values, states that Canada’s “rights culture” that embraces the marginalized and excluded is what
98 S Lee, ‘Canadian Values in Canadian Foreign Policy’, Canadian Foreign Policy, vol. 10, no. 1, fall 2002, p. 1. 99 A Howell, ‘Peaceful, Tolerant and Orderly? A Feminist Analysis of Discourses of ‘ Canadian Values’ in Canadian Foreign Policy’, Canadian Foreign Policy, vol. 12, no. 1, Spring 2005, p. 54. 100 M Strong, ‘Connecting With the World: Priorities for Canadian Internationalism in the 21st Century’, A Report by the International Development Research and Policy Task Force, International Development Research Centre, International Institute for Sustainable Development, North-South Institute, 1996, viewed 20 November 2005,
makes Canada distinctive in the world.102 Canadian values are also much documented in various public polls. For instance, a recent poll on Canadian values suggests that multiculturalism continues to be a major defining feature of how Canadians see themselves.103 In the same vein, another study shows that 71% of Canadians strongly hold a view that “people from different cultural groups in Canada get along and live in peace” making them very proud to be Canadian.104 Finally, the articulation of Canadian values is also evident in election documents. As a recent example, a Liberal Party 2004 election document states that “when you cast a vote for a Liberal government, you vote for a united Canada defined by respect, generosity and fairness.”105
The promotion of shared Canadian values through the human security agenda significantly supports the nation-building and unity efforts of the Canadian Government. The discourse on Canadian values makes the Canadian identity self- evident, so that it is immune from any contestation. The identification of a set of Canadian values shared by all Canadians makes them a more cohesive group, and diminishes the danger of divisions within the nation.106 However, the articulation of a set of values implies contested representations. The common message circulated through all these statements is that ‘we’ as Canadians have more in common than differences, ‘we’ as Canadians are tolerant, peaceful, generous, and altruistic; ‘we’ as the model for the rest of the world are more civilized and morally superior than ‘others’. These assertions construct a totalising image of Canadian identity that endorses an essential exclusion and multiple otherness in a way that it conceals the differences at home and renders the idea of homogeneity within Canada.107 In other
102 M Ignatieff, The Rights Revolution, Anansi, Toronto, 2000. 103 P Evans, ‘Diversity, Freedom make us unique’, National Post, Sep 24, 2005, A22. The Canadian Value Study was a joint project of the National Post, Dominion Institute and Innovative Research 104 A Parkin & M Mendelsohn, A New Canada: An Identity Shaped by Diversity, Centre for Research and Information on Canada, Ottawa, October 2003. 105 Liberal Party of Canada, Securing Canada’s Success, Liberal Party of Canada, Ottawa, 2004. 106 W Kymlicka, Finding Our Way Rethinking Ethnocultural Relations in Canada, Oxford University Press, Toronto, 1998, p. 150. 107 This point was also raised by Bloc Québécois in the Dissenting Report for the SJC Reviewing Canada’s Foreign Policy. The report writes that the Canadian Government’s projection of culture and values is based on the theory of a single nation and a single culture, ignoring the different values of Quebec. However, the language of the report of Bloc Québécois is also exclusionary in a sense that they reduced the discourse on values to ‘two different cultures and values’ and does not articulate the different values of First Nations and immigrants. Therefore, rather than highlighting the silences, the report of Bloc Québécois maintains the political marginalization in Canada. Parliament of Canada, Toward a Different Foreign Policy: Dissenting Report by the Members of the Bloc Québécois Special 58 Chapter Two: Governing Canadians
words, as Howell argues the projection of Canadian values attributes an essential sameness and unity to the whole Canadian population that masks all sorts of domestic cleavages.108
The project on Canadian values is also contested in a sense that it obscures the inconsistencies in Canada’s domestic and foreign policy. For instance, in relation to Canadian values of ‘peace, order and good government’, it is widely argued that the absence of revolutionary tradition led Canada to embrace a non-military tradition and a strong belief in non-violent change.109 Seymour Martin Lipset suggests that counter-revolution made Canada a more European nation that sees international conflicts simply as a reflection of differences in the perception of interests and, thereby, subject to compromise and negotiation.110 However, Canada’s aggressive fisheries actions, for example, show that when Canada’s economic interests are threatened, rather than ‘compromise’, Canada is reluctant to pursue negotiations. Moreover, Canada’s ‘non-military tradition’ is problematic, if one considers that in 2004 Canada was ranked as the sixth largest global arms exporter by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) and Washington-based Congressional Research Service.111 Undoubtedly, Canada’s military exports and unreported exports to the US raise questions about its campaign on prohibition of small arms which is one of the main agendas in its human security policy.
The other commonly articulated, and perhaps the most contested value, is pluralism, tolerance of diversity and multiculturalism, which masks the initial aim of the multiculturalism policy. As it is now well documented, multiculturalism was adopted to build a pan-Canadian identity and to respond to sovereignty claims of Québec. As Will Kymlicka writes in this regard, at the first place multiculturalism was not initially intended for non-European immigrants or First Nations; rather it was a demand of ‘non-threatening’ white ethnic groups who were perceived as
Joint Committee of the Senate and The House of Commons Reviewing Canada’s Foreign Policy, Ottawa, November 1994, p. 1. 108 Howell, pp. 61-62. 109 Tucker, p. 3. 110 Lipset, p. 220 111 K Epps, ‘Canada ranked 6th largest weapons exporter in 2004’, The Ploughshares Monitor, vol. 26, no. 3, autumn 2005, viewed 11 December 2006,
sharing the ‘Canadian way of life’ defined in terms of ‘Western’ and ‘Judeo- Christian civilization’.112
Moreover, the ongoing practices of othering and exclusion of refuges and migrants that is reflected in Canada’s post-September 11 national security legislation—such as the Anti-Terrorism Act 2001 (Bill C-36), the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, 2001, the Safe Third Country Agreement (2002), the Public Safety Act 2002 (Bill C- 17), and Canada’s National Security Policy (2004)— disputes the utterances like Canada “celebrates difference manifest in our official policy of bilingualism, our two legal systems, and our open immigration and refugee policy”.113 Both the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA) and Public Safety Act include provisions which prevent many genuine refugees from arriving in Canada. As many critics note, IRPA perceives refugees as a threat to national security and reinforces the notion that asylum seekers abuse the system, exploit Canada’s welfare programs, spread pandemic diseases, and increase the rate of criminal activities in Canada.114 The practices of othering are also evident in the Canada’s National Security Policy paper. In the words of the authors of Securing an Open Society:
Our commitment to include all Canadians in the ongoing building of this country must be extended to our approach to protecting it. No one better appreciates the need to protect our society than those who chose this country as a place to build a better life or who fled the consequences of instability and intolerance in other parts of the world.115
The language of Securing an Open Society locates the non-Canadian other, such as refugees and immigrants, not only as potential sources of extremism in Canadian society, but also, as Colleen Bell argues, it constructs them as appreciative subjects of Canadian values.116 In this context, it is not surprising to find that recent polls reveal a dominant view within Canadian society that sees immigrants as the cause of
112 W Kymlicka, ‘Marketing Canadian pluralism in the international arena’, International Journal, vol. 59, no. 4, autumn 2004, pp. 840-843. 113 Government of Canada, Canada’s International Policy Statement: A Role of Pride and Influence in the World, Overview, Government of Canada, Ottawa, 2005, p. 4. 114 For example see M Lowry, ‘Creating Human Insecurity: national security focus in Canada’s immigration system’, Refugee, vol. 20, no. 1, November 2002, pp. 28-40. 115 Privy Council Office, Securing an Open Society: Canada’s National Security Policy, Privy Council Office, Ottawa, April 2004, p. 2, viewed 17 May 2005,
Canada’s social problems. The polls show that many Canadians support stricter immigration standards and believe that ethnic migrants are bringing problems from their home country to Canada.117 Further, the arrival of ‘Chinese Boat People’ in 1999 and the construction of Chinese asylum seekers as a threat to the well-being of Canadians demonstrates that differences can only be tolerated if they are not seen as ‘risks’ to Canada.118 These examples not only demonstrate the gap between the government’s rhetoric of human security and its practices of downgrading it within Canada, but they also raise questions on the unproblematized articulation of Canadian values.
4.3. (Re)Invoking the myth of ‘peacekeeping nation’
In re-constructing Canadian identity, the human security agenda also calls upon the myth of peacekeeping which historically plays an important role in bolstering national pride and unity. Undoubtedly, peacekeeping is an indispensable area of Canadian foreign policy; because, on the domestic front, it constitutes one of the few foreign policy areas in which all Canadians show a constant consensus. Various public opinion polls reveal that most Canadians see peacekeeping as Canada’s greatest contribution to the world. The 1999 Department of National Defence (DND) survey finds that Canadians view peacekeeping as the most important role for the Canadian Forces.119 Similarly, a 2004 Ipsos Reid poll suggests that the high majority of Canadians agreed with the statement that “Canada’s military spending should be used to enhance [Canada’s] abilities in peacekeeping and conflict resolution rather than trying to maintain multipurpose forces intended for heavy combat alongside US military forces”.120 It could be argued that peacekeeping is the only area that legitimizes the use of Canadian armed forces. Because of the role it
117 Innovative Research Group, The Word In Canada, Demographics and Diversity in Canadian Foreign Policy, prepared for 2005 CDFAI Annual Conference, October 31, 2005, pp. 30-31. 118 For public opinion on Chinese asylum seekers see J Greenberg, ‘Opinion Discourse and Canadian Newspapers: The Case of the Chinese “Boat People”, Canadian Journal of Communication, vol. 25, no. 4, January 1, 2000, viewed 15 April 2005,
plays in bridging domestic differences, the images and narratives of Canadian peacekeepers are continuously invoked during unity debates and national celebrations.
The peacekeeping goes beyond public policy. It is not simply a foreign policy practice that attracts a strong public support. Rather, it is one of the national myths that contributes to the Canadian imagination. Canadians devote a poetic nuance and a romanticized attachment to peacekeepers which is not shown by other states that contribute to the UN operations. The myth of peacekeeping locates Canada “as friendly, commonsense folk who would rather mediate than fight”.121 For Canadians, peacekeepers are “role models on how to build peace, not propagate the glories of war”.122 The myth of peacekeeping secures the image of peacefulness at home and reinforces the idea of ‘Canadian mosaic’ that finds a middle ground in the solutions of conflicts. Moreover, peacekeeping is firmly embedded in national self-image in a sense that it is seen as a natural continuum of Canadian history. Tracing the heritage of peacekeeping back to Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP or Mounties) who have been historically narrated as ‘peace-loving heroes’ who brought justice and order to the Canadian west, Erin Carrière et al. argue that “it is clearly no accident of history that many conceptions of international peacekeeping have their origins in Canada”.123 Indeed the Mounties and the Canadian peacekeepers have much in common, not in terms of being a true reflection of Canadian nature or talents, but in terms of the role they play in constructing Canadian identity. The narratives of both Mounties and Canadian peacekeepers picture Canadian heroes as impartial and caring for the helpless, the voiceless and the uncivilized. They are both ascribed as ‘miracles of Canada’. The symbol of peace they both represent ascribes a female innocence in Canadian identity in opposition to a warlike maleness of the US. The narratives of both Mounties and peacekeepers brand Canada as a boy scout and a “non-colonial power”124 and, ironically, both myths mask the history of “internal
121 G Hayes, ‘Canada as a Middle Power: The Case of Peacekeeping’, in A Cooper (ed.), Niche Diplomacy: Middle Powers after the Cold War, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1997, p. 73. Quoted in S Razack, Dark Threats and White Knights: The Somalia Affair, Peacekeeping, and the New Imperialism, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 2004, p. 32 122 L Axworthy, ‘Making a difference’, Winnipeg Free Press, 24 October 2004, B4. 123 E Carriérre et al. 124 Canada in the World states that Canada being a non-colonial power fits the peacekeeping role. Government of Canada, Canada in the World, p. i. Also, in the same report, the non-imperial and non- colonial history is seen as a comparative advantage for Canada in promoting the human security agenda abroad. 62 Chapter Two: Governing Canadians
colonization”125 and coercive power that was used by the Canadian state against First Nations.
In addition to the contested metaphors of peacekeeping myth, it can be argued that Canada’s commitment to peacekeeping forces is overstated. In 2002, Canada is ranked 34th in the world in its contribution to world peacekeeping missions, supplying less than 1% of international peacekeepers in the world.126 Further, Canada’s increased reluctance in sending troops to East Timor, Rwanda and various conflicts when it does not have any political and economic interest negates the rhetoric of committed peacekeeper. Moreover, the images of Canadian soldiers killing a Somali teenager in 1993 reveal a more disturbing contradiction with the narratives propagated through the myth of peacekeeping.127
4.4 Branding Canada as ‘soft power’: (Re)Finding the American ‘other’
In order to be unified and distinctive, national identity is always written in reference to something that is not. As Kienan Keohane writes, Canada is realized by its reflection from various forms of otherness.128 ‘Being non-American’ is one of these forms that create the ideal Canada. Throughout Canadian history, the Canadian ‘self’ has been constructed by representing the US as ‘external other’. Canadian uniqueness and superiority has been celebrated through the negative symbols, stereotypes and images attached to Americans.129 It can be argued that the US is ‘the
125 Razack, Dark Threats and White Knights, p. 33; HA Smith, ‘Disrupting Internationalism and Finding Others’, in CT Sjolander, HA Smith & D Stienstra (eds.), Feminist Perspective on Canadian Foreign Policy, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004, p. 31. For in-depth analysis of the myth of Mounties and how its narratives obscure the practices of the Canadian state see D Francis, National Dreams: myth, memory, and Canadian history, Arsenal Pulp Press, Vancouver, 1997, pp. 29-51. 126 B Cooper, M Stephenson & R Szeto, ‘Canada’s Military Posture An Analysis of Recent Civilian Report’, The Fraser Institute Critical Issues Bulletin, January 2004, viewed 10 November 2006,
founding nation’ of Canada in the sense that non-Americanness has always played a dominant role in nation-building projects.
The ascribed differences between Canada and the US are dominantly traced back to the American Revolution and Canada’s counter-revolution. In this regard, George Grant, in his seminal work Lament for a Nation, writes that “To be a Canadian was to build, along with the French, a more ordered and stable society than the liberal experiment in the United States”.130 Moreover, the Canada First Movement, the first nationalist movement in Canada during Confederation was underpinned with a strong anti-Americanism. It embraced a belief in racial superiority of Canadians as a Northern race, and depicted a stronger and more hard- working nation than the Americans.131 Reflecting the ‘northernness’ embedded in Canadian identity, Canadian historian William Morton writes:
Canadian history is not a parody of American, as Canada is not a second-rate United States … [Canadian history] is a unique human endeavour, the civilization of the northern and arctic lands. From its deepest origins and remotest beginnings, Canadian history has been separate and distinct in America.132
This geographical determinism that identified the Canadian identity has been replaced by other contrasting symbols such as Canada’s communitarism versus American individualism; Canadian values of post-materialism versus American values of materialism; Canadian mosaic versus American melting pot; Canada’s multiculturalism versus assimilationist policies of the US.133 The different values and diversity, not assimilation, and that the beaver is a truly proud and noble animal. //A toque is a hat, a chesterfield is a couch, and it is pronounced ‘zed’ not ‘zee’, ‘zed’!!! // Canada is the second largest landmass! The first nation of hockey!//And the best part of North America!!!// My name is Joe!!! 130 G Grant, Lament for a Nation The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism, McClelland & Stewart, Toronto, 1965, p. 4. 131 C Berger, ‘The True North Strong and Free’, in P Russell (ed.), Nationalism in Canada, McGraw- Hill, Toronto, 1966, pp. 3-26. 132 WL Morton, The Canadian Identity, The University of Wisconsin Press, Wisconsin, 1961, p. 93. 133 It is important to note that the historical construction of northernness still dominates the definition of Canadian identity and is promoted in recent foreign policy statements. For instance, Pierre Pettigrew, former Foreign Affairs Minister, locates the northern character of Canadian identity as one of the two features of ‘Canadian exceptionalism’. Almost identical with Margaret Atwood’s Survival, Pettigrew enunciates that solidarity and cooperation—defining characteristics of Canadian exceptionalism—derive from a truly northern character of Canadians. Pettigrew states, “Solidarity is at the heart of our identity as much as winter is. When it is minus 25 degrees, and minus 35 degrees with the wind-chill factor, even the strongest, most independent individuals learn very quickly that to 64 Chapter Two: Governing Canadians
policies are also reflected in official speeches. For instance, in the words of Lloyd Axworthy:
As much as we share geography, values and many common interests, we also cherish quite different views about the nature of our society, the way we do business and what we believe to be the appropriate role of government. A public health system, gun-control laws, producer controlled marketing boards, a CBC, public support for bilingual education and multicultural groups all these are examples … protecting our distinctive institutions and keeping in check those Canadians belonging to the Team America cheerleading squad who push for greater integration is a never ending task…134
Indeed this ‘never ending task’ became particularly important in the context of the 1990s. As previously noted, during most of the Cold War, Canadian internationalism played an important role in constructing the Canadian distinctiveness against the US. However, the strong continentalist agenda of the Mulroney government eroded the function of Canadian internationalism in emphasizing the differences between two countries. Therefore, the Liberal government’s human security agenda emerged as a critique of the growing dependence on the US. Deriving from the foreign policy tradition of Trudeau’s government, the Liberal Party election document in 1993 rejected a “camp-follower approach” and emphasized that “Liberals will cooperate with the US administration in areas where their ideas are particularly suited to [Canada’s] goals”.135 Various human security initiatives such as establishment of the Human Security Network with like-minded states, Security Council reform, the ICC, and the Landmines Treaty
survive requires solidarity”. First, a closer reading of this statement suggests that geographical determinism grants a rationale for national cohesion. In other words, the utterance of the northern and harsh quality of the Canadian climate locates the national cohesion not simply as political or social necessity, but as a physical one—a very natural form imposed by the features of geography. Second, according to Pettigrew, many positive attributes of Canadian identity such as “passion for balance … discomfort with radical ideologies and … active concern to ensure our institutions play a key role in helping to correct imbalances”, “fairness”, and “generosity”, stem from the northern character of Canadians. P Pettigrew, Notes for an Address by the Honourable Pierre Pettigrew, Minister of Foreign Affairs, at the 2004 Scotiabank- AUCC. Awards for Excellence in Internationalization ‘Playing To Our Strength: Diversity and Canadian Foreign Policy”’, Quebec, October 27, 2004, viewed 20 April 2006,
(which were strongly opposed by the US) were an explicit symbol of Canada’s independent activist international agenda that showed Canada is neither simply a “deputy sheriff to the actions of the US marshal”, 136 nor “anyone else’s foot soldiers in imperial adventures”.137
In terms of the symbolic meaning, the human security agenda grants a moral superiority vis-a-vis the US. As former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien put forward, “Canada may not be a superpower, but [it is] a nation that speaks on the international scene with great moral authority”.138 This ‘humanist activism’ perpetuates the belief that while Americans tend to view international politics in narrowly defined geopolitical terms, Canada has a constructive role, which is demonstrated through its leadership in setting out the global norms for the protection of marginalized people. This ‘norm-entrepreneur’ image has been promoted through branding Canada as ‘soft power’, as opposed to the ‘hard power’ of the US. By shifting the emphasis from Canada’s middle power identity to soft power, from the perspective of Axworthy, Canada is well-placed as a soft power because of its “unrivalled” role in bridge building and active membership in global and regional forums.139 Inspired by the American scholar Joseph Nye, in many speeches Axworthy emphasized that the implementation of ‘soft power’ tools—Canadian values, ideas and knowledge— makes Canada a ‘value-added’ nation in opposition to the destructive role of the US. While the US promotes a ‘muscular multilateralism’ through its unchallenged military power, Canada’s assets in implementing soft power, in Ignatieff’s words, shows that “Canada is a moral authority as a good citizen” which, in turn, gives it a legitimate role on the world scene that is not granted for the US.140
However, the assertion of moral superiority vis-à-vis the US reveals a number of inconsistencies between rhetoric and practice. The rhetoric of soft power blends Canada’s economic and strategic interests with Canadian humanitarianism. For
136 Axworthy, Navigating a New World, p. 75. 137 B Rae, Speaking notes for an Address by Honourable Bob Rae Canada needs to find its voice again in foreign policy, University of Toronto, August 10, 2006, viewed 01 January 2007,
instance, admiring the soft and hard power of the US, one government report suggests that the soft power of Canada is the key to promoting the country’s talents for foreign investors.141 From this perspective, soft power constitutes a key marketing strategy for Canadian exports. Further, the promotion of ‘hard power’ is also a significant rhetoric in Canada’s human security language. In particular, after Canada’s participation to the NATO’s Kosovo intervention in 1999, it was argued that the human security agenda does not exclude the military force used genuinely for humanitarian purposes.142 From this perspective, one may argue that the role of hard power in sustaining human security was promoted to justify NATO’s controversial intervention to Kosovo. Perhaps more importantly, as will be discussed in the next chapter, in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, the increase in defence spending and the merger of Canada’s development and defence policies disrupt the role of soft power in Canada’s human security agenda.
5. Framing Human Security: The Spheres of Liberal Subjectivity
5.1 Freedom from Fear: Introducing the niche diplomacy
In the Canadian context, the concept of human security first appeared in the Report of Citizen’s Inquiry entitled Transformation Moment published in the early 1990s.143 Rejecting elite discourses that define security through ‘real-politik’ lenses, this ‘counter-consensus’ movement outlined various threats to human security such as violence in society, sexism and racism, political oppression, poverty and other
141 ADM Sub-Committee, Canada 2005: Global Challenges and Opportunities, The Report of the ADM Sub-Committee, draft interim report, Policy Research Initiative, February 25, 1997, pp. 9-10. The same report also recommends further research on how soft power can be deployed in areas such as Canadian unity. 142 See for example, L Axworthy, Notes for an Address by the Honourable Lloyd Axworthy, Minister of Foreign Affairs, to the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Relations, Princeton University, “ Kosovo and Human Security Agenda”, New Jersey, April 7, 1999, viewed 12 October 2006,
aspects of economic insecurity.144 The Citizen’s Inquiry highlighted the social and economic insecurities within Canada and abroad. Axworthy’s first articulation of human security reflects the spirit of the Citizen’s Inquiry. At the 1995 World Summit, Axworthy underlined the human deficit of development programs.145 Further, after human security entered into official language, Axworthy emphasized developmental aspects of human security by naming it as ‘sustainable human security’. By capturing both freedom from fear and want, Axworthy outlined the threats to sustainable human security as poverty, human rights violations, threats to health and livelihood through depletion or pollution of natural resources, and incidences of conflict.146 Further, Axworthy stressed that human security is not only an international security issue, but also the concern of the Canadian Government in regards to the social and political conditions of people living in Canada.
However, the framework of Canada’s human security agenda underwent a major transition with the release of Human Security: Safety for People in a Changing World in 1999. In this document the Canadian Government criticized the UNDP emphasis on economic aspects of human security, and argued that, although threats associated with economic underdevelopment is important, human insecurity is greatest during violent conflicts.147 In order confront the criticisms against the government’s narrow approach to human security, Axworthy emphasized:
Others argue that the promotion of human security diverts attention and funds from the more basic priority of development. But far from being mutually
144 Cranford Pratt defines these civil society movements as ‘counter-consensus’. C Pratt, ‘Dominant Class Theory and Canadian Foreign Policy: the case of counter-consensus’, International Journal, vol. 39, winter 1983-1984, pp. 99- 135. 145 L Axworthy, Statement by the Honourable Lloyd Axworthy, Minister for Human Resources Development to the World Summit for Social Development, Copenhagen, Denmark, March 6-12, 1995, viewed 02 May 2005,
exclusive, human security and human development are just opposite sides of the same coin. It is hard to devote resources to improving GDP when they are being spent to repair the ravages of war. Freedom from fear is an indispensable precursor to freedom from want.148
In particular after Axworthy and the release of the report Freedom From Fear, developmental aspects of human security—mainly discussions of poverty, economic and social equity—have become invisible in Canada’s human security agenda. Moreover, losing the ethos of human security promoted by the Citizen’s Inquiry, the government has started to de-emphasize the insecurities within Canada in its discussions of human security. In other words, human security is framed as a foreign policy issue which demarcates the inside and outside boundaries of the Canadian state leading to a silence on what Canada does within its own boundaries.
Exclusion of developmental issues and limiting the meaning of human security with to the threats emerging from violent conflicts reflects the Canadian Government’s retreat from emphasizing poverty mitigation as a major domestic policy goal. Since the mid-1990s, the federal government has been increasingly preoccupied with budgetary concerns, inflation control, and economic growth understood in terms of GDP. The overriding concern of sustaining Canada’s economic competitiveness in the global scene has marked a shift from welfare state to a neoliberal state that downgrades long-established concerns of avoiding social and economic inequalities in Canada. In the mid-1990s, the priority of ‘fiscal management’ led to the elimination of various social programs, including reduced social and economic support of families; tighter eligibility requirements for social assistance payments; the federal government’s withdrawal from funding post- secondary education, housing and immigration settlement programs; and a substantial change in employment insurance. As many critics argue, the federal government’s retrenchment of social programs has not only intensified poverty rates,
148 L Axworthy, Notes for an Address by the Honourable Lloyd Axworthy Minister of Foreign Affairs to the United Nations Security Council on the Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict, New York, April 19, 2000, viewed 16 May 2005,
69 Chapter Two: Governing Canadians
but also resulted in an economic and social polarization within Canada.149 In 2002, the child poverty rates were 18.5% just showing a slight decrease to 17.7% in 2006.150 Further, as a result of chronic problems of hunger, and inadequate income and shelter, the usage of food banks increased 90% throughout the 1990s.151 The poverty rates affect mostly more vulnerable groups such as Aborginal communities and recent migrants more than Canadian-born citizens.152 Despite of the growth in the Canadian economy and the decrease in unemployment rates by the late 1990s, the low-income rate continued to increase which shows that the gains associated with economic performance went mainly to the higher income individuals and families.153
Seen in this light, framing human security with violent threats is a political project which discursively excludes certain problems from the security domain, and in turn legitimatizes the some forms of silence. If human security means security from certain types of violence, such as landmines, and protection of civilians during conflicts, Canadians enjoy ‘security’. To be more precise, as Kyle Grayson argues, by focusing on particular forms of violence which are neither contentious issues in Canada nor relevant to the Canadian context, the Canadian state limits the discursive space for legitimately asking questions about issues of poverty, inequality and economic development at home as human security problems.154 Further, by excluding these issues from the meaning of human security, the Canadian state asserts that the ‘human security deficit’ is the problem of ‘ineffectively governed states’ such as failed or underdeveloped ones which are irresponsible towards their own citizens, not the developed ones such as Canada. In doing so, the Canadian state not only perpetuates role of the Government programmes in economic and social
149 Osberg, pp. 213-226; A Yalnizyon, Canada’s Great Divide: The Politics of the growing gap between rich and poor in the 1990s, January 2000, Center for Social Justice, Toronto, 2000, viewed 10 December 2006,
marginalization within Canada, but also empowers the new federal system which aims to promote self-governance of the Canadian population.
5.2 Ethnic nationalism as a source of insecurity: Human security and liberal governmentality
By the end of the Cold War, the emergence of new states has generated a great concern in Canada. Because of the domestic context and fragility of national unity issues, the government emphasizes the destabilizing and violence-prone effects of new states and promotes the idea of territorial integrity in its human security agenda. For instance, in its 1994 report, the Special Joint Committee (SJC) Reviewing Canadian Foreign Policy argued that the disintegration of states in Eastern Europe and former Soviet Union are sources of ‘instability’ and ‘disunity’ fuelled by nationalist rivalries, ethnic tensions, undemocratic forms of governance and civil conflicts.155 Similarly, reflecting the government’s perspective, Paul Heinbecker underlines that authority can only be exercised on behalf of people by states, and disintegration of states is as dangerous to human security as tyrannies.156
Perhaps one of the most important aspects of the government’s approach to human security is to frame the discourse on newly emerged states and the root causes of conflicts in terms of the dichotomy between ethnic and civic nationalism, which has also great prominence within the contemporary literature on nationalism. Many scholars employ analytical distinction between two forms of nationalism. For instance, Ignatieff, argues that the intra-state conflicts have their basis in ethnic
155 Parliament of Canada, Canada’s Foreign Policy: Principles and Priorities for the Future, Report of the Special Joint Committee Reviewing Canadian Foreign Policy, Senate/House of Commons, Ottawa, November 1994. p. 3. It is important to note in the Dissenting Report, Bloc Québécois framed the discourse on emergence on new states in opposite terms. From the perspective of Québécois, the emergence of new states signifies the prominence of ‘national emancipation’ movements leading to the international recognition of cultural and ethnic differences within states. Bloc Québécois emphasizes the examples of Czech and Slovak Republics and argues that “the emergence of new states has not necessarily been accompanied with a turmoil of civil conflict” rather, these examples demonstrate “positive side of this reality” on how recognition of sovereignty could be gained through respecting rules and democracy. In other words, the discourse on emergence of new states is framed by Bloc Québécois in terms of Quebec’s demands on territorial sovereignty, and the Report goes on to say that “Canada cannot remain indifferent to the rise of a movement of self-affirmation of people”. See, Parliament of Canada, Toward a Different Foreign Policy, p.1. 156 Heinbecker, p. 6. 71 Chapter Two: Governing Canadians
nationalism rather than the ‘civic’ one.157 Ignatieff and Anthony Smith define civic nationalism as territorial, focusing on legal citizenship and civic culture which upholds the idea that the nation is composed of equal, right-bearing citizens transcending the differences of race, colour, religion, language and most importantly ethnicity.158 Ethnic nationalism, in contrast, is repressive and authoritarian, as it aims to promote the homogenous state. It is argued that ethnic nationalism is non- democratic, because “it is the national community that defines the individual, not the individual who defines national community”.159 For Ignatieff, the liberal political culture of Western countries, like Canada, has its roots in civic nationalism.
These descriptions are profoundly biased in a sense that they classify ‘bad’ and ‘good’ nationalism. The descriptions of two forms of nationalism construct an ethnocentric categorization and invest various othering practices locating ‘your’ nationalism against ‘our’ nationalism, ‘your’ model of governance against ‘ours’. From the descriptions of civic and ethnic nationalism, one might easily recognize how the pair of opposites is constructed. While ethnic nationalism is seen as illiberal, irrational, exclusionary, immoral, authoritarian, emotional, and violence-prone, civic nationalism is liberal, moral, rational, inclusive, universal, peaceful, and sensitive to individual identities. Ethnic nationalism, in that sense, is perceived as the ‘main enemy’ of human security. Canada’s human security discourse takes this dichotomy as granted and is driven by a political rationality that human security can only be maintained by replacing ethnic forms of nationalism with the civic model.
The discursive link between human security/insecurity and ethnic/civic nationalism shows how power and knowledge come together within the human security discourse, how the frameworks of this discourse produce its own truths and how it works as “schemes, strategies, and manoeuvres of authorities that seek to shape the beliefs and conduct of others in desired direction by acting upon their will, their circumstances or their environment”.160 In other words, the discursive constructions of ethnic/civic nationalism are deeply implicated with liberal ‘governmentality’. The discourse on civic/ethnic nationalism categorizes, frames and
157 M Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the new nationalism, Farrar, Straus and Girous, New York, 1994. 158 ibid; A Smith, ‘History and national destiny: responses and clarifications’, Nations and Nationalism, vol 10, 1/2, p. 198. 159 Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging , pp. 4-5 160 N Rose & P Miller, ‘Political Power beyond the State: Problematics of Government’, The British Journal of Sociology, vol. 23, no. 2, Jun 1992, p. 175. 72 Chapter Two: Governing Canadians
polices people, their identities, souls and dreams—not necessarily through repression, but through controlling them, demarcating normal from abnormal, and through investing its own institutions and technologies.
This dichotomy between civic and ethnic nationalism has a profound importance in Canada’s domestic context. It reveals how liberal notions of human security intertwined with continuous nation-building projects of the Canadian state, the governance of Canadians, their identifications as free members of Canadian society and the “regimes of rational–bureaucratic discipline” of the Canadian state.161 In Canadian domestic context, the discourse on civic nationalism is identified with pan-Canadian identity which transcends ethnic, language, regional and religious differences. Thereby, the discourse on civic nationalism is deeply related with how pan-Canadian identity or ‘a’ Canadian nationalism is constructed and represented by the Canadian state as a social ideal.
From the perspective of the Canadian state, ethnic and cultural nationalisms in Canada are seen as repressive to individual development and as a barrier to self- governing practices of Canadian citizens. Ethic nationalism is seen as tyranny that seeks to achieve particular identities through exclusion, classification and various othering practices. In contrast, Canadian nationalism is projected as universal. It does not create exclusion through the concepts of ethnic and cultural attachments. Rather it recognizes the existence of different groups and identities which are brought together under political citizenship. The construction of Canadian identity as a form of civic nationalism that is identified with political citizenship is best exemplified in former Foreign Affairs Minister Pierre Pettigrew’s statement. In Pettigrew’s words:
… Canada is truly original in that we long ago rejected the traditional nation- state model, which bases its citizenship on a common ethnicity or language … Instead of having the traditional nation-state ... we created a country with two languages, many cultures and religions, and two legal systems, represented in both common law and the civil code. Our founders determined that citizenship in Canada would not be based on language or other traditional trappings of the nation-state. Instead, we created a political citizenship that incites our citizens to abide by certain fundamental values, including respect for the individual, a common sense of justice and a sense of moderation in the use of power. I believe that is the heart of liberalism … Canada offers an identity built on political citizenship rather than ethnic citizenship.162
161 Day, p. 204. 162 P Pettigrew, Notes for an Address by the Honourable Pierre Pettigrew, Minister of Foreign Affairs, At the 2004 Scotiabank-AUCC. Awards for Excellence in Internationalization ‘Playing To Our 73 Chapter Two: Governing Canadians
Canadian identity as a bridging identity between different ethnic and cultural groups is seen as a moral one, as it addresses a “procedural inclusiveness” which recognizes the existence of all individual identities.163 The notion that underpins this procedural inclusiveness is that no ethnicity dominates the Canadian society, rather it is based on equal recognition and respect. The representation of civic Canadian identity as a moral liberal project is invoked in the Brighton Report which was later accepted by the government as a framework of its new Renewed Multiculturalism. The report states that,
The procedural notion of inclusion, while consistent with Western Liberal traditions of individual rights, it is probably not very satisfactory to those who argue for substantive collective goals such as the preservation of specific cultures. Those who wish to see the state preserve cultural groups by requiring their inclusion in institutions will not be very satisfied with a system that places more emphasis on individual rights than collective rights … But if it is primary collective of rights at the heart of claims of inclusion, one wonders whether in such a context, the recognition given to people’s cultural identities will take precedence over their identities as persons. One indication that some members of particular cultural groups have been tyrannized by their group membership …164
When Canadian identity is framed in this liberal notion of inclusiveness, it constitutes that pan-Canadian identity as a social ideal allows ‘individual emancipation’ of all people living in Canada regardless of their ethnicity and culture, while preserving their sense of attachment to Canada. As Mackey argues, the project of constructing a civil form of Canadian identity gains “its authority and reinforces its power through its ability to construct itself as not cultural (in that it is not
Strength: Diversity and Canadian Foreign Policy”’, Quebec, October 27, 2004, viewed 20 April 2006,
presented as the project of one cultural or ethnic group), but as universal and rational”. 165
This project simulates the previously mentioned ontological claims of Canadian identity promoted through the discourse on human security and affirms a particular form of power understood as a “productive network which runs through the social body”.166 It is the power which the conduct of individuals or groups might be directed by.167 This form of power is institutionalized through the new official multiculturalism policy, and creates an active Canadian citizen which is identified as ‘multicultural citizen’. The construction of the liberal Canadian citizen is best represented in the Renewed Multiculturalism Program which regards multiculturalism not as a program for special interests of particular ethnocultural sub- groups, but rather as a program for all Canadians bounded with a notion of ‘shared citizenship’.168 The Renewed Multiculturalism policy which aims to foster greater attachment to the larger community advances the notion of pan-Canadian identity not through assimilation, but through fostering an inclusive society which respects all ethnic groups and aims to provide the “fullest possible participation of all citizens in the life of the nation”.169 The liberal language of new multiculturalism emphasizes the civic participation that is identified as the capacity and opportunity of individuals regardless of their diverse ethno-cultural backgrounds to participate in shaping the country’s future. In these terms, promotion of civic society, or the emphasis of ‘domestication of foreign policy’ in human security discourse, is not accidental, but part of a larger project on how Canadian subjects are constructed as self-governing liberal individuals.
The paradoxical nature of the civic form of Canadian identity is that while it includes the various differences through “the inclusionary discourse around Canadian citizenship”, it limits and controls the proliferation of ethnic and cultural
165 Mackey, p. 162. [emphasis in original] 166 Foucault, Power/Knowledge, p. 119. 167 M Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society, Sage Publications, London, 1999, p. 47. 168 Department of Canadian Heritage, Strategic Evaluation of Multicultural Programs, p. 76. The Brighton Report recommends that in keeping with the value of universality which Canadians share in their social programs, the funding of ethno-specific organizations should be shifted to public agencies and organizations that shape the public life of Canadians. 169 Donaldson. [emphasis added] 75 Chapter Two: Governing Canadians
identities.170 It underpins the notion that if Aboriginals, visible migrants, Québecois and various forms of others see themselves as active Canadian citizens, there is no need for any sort of differentiation. Thereby, civic Canadian identity appears as a disposition of universal similarity within Canada, which in turn delineates various ethnocultural and linguistic identities as unattainable. As David Goldberg argues, “the liberal would assume away the difference in otherness, maintaining thereby the dominance of presumed sameness. Acceptance of otherness presupposes and at once necessitates the delegitimation of the other”.171 In short, while the Canadian discourse on human security aims to constrain practices of racism and othering, it is the very nature and language of human security that disseminates these practices within Canada. It empowers the problematique of the liberal state which preserves the difference in its “self-limiting pluralistic language”.172 The discourse on human security constructs ‘individual emancipation’ as an object to be promoted, but paradoxically by constructing ethnic and cultural identities as a problem to be confronted, it limits the realization of different forms of emancipation in Canada.
6. Conclusion
In order to form an imagined community, “we must tell the stories to make them real, to invest the identity with the force of fact and truth”.173 As this chapter has shown, the continuous identity crises in Canada enable the Canadian state to intervene into Canadian society and to control how Canadians define themselves. This chapter has suggested that human security discourse is a political technique of governmental power that aims to confront the dangers to Canada’s political order through moulding positive representations of Canada. It is agued that human security policy has an enormous role in making the nationhood, in enabling an ‘assertive national identity’, and in contributing to the Canadian imagination. This chapter has called into question how the truth effects of the discourse on human security work to maintain ‘national order’, and thereby conceal various forms of ‘human insecurities’
170 Y Abu-Laban, ‘Liberalism, Multiculturalism and the Problem of Essentialism’, Citizenship Studies, vol. 6, no. 4, 2002, p.459- 482. 171 Quoted in Mackey, p. 162. 172 Keohane, p. 4. 173 S Grace, V Strong-Boag, J Anderson & A Eisenbery, ‘Constructing Canada: An Introduction’, in S Grace, V Strong-Boag, J Anderson & A Eisenbery (eds.), Painting the Maple: Essays on Race, Gender, and the Construction of Canada, UBC Press, Vancouver, 1998, p. 11. 76 Chapter Two: Governing Canadians
within Canada, and the rhetoric and practice gap in its implementation of human security. The next chapter will show how the Canadian discourse on human security and its ‘production of truth’ in regards to the failed states problematique work to provide Canadian national security and aim to produce a ‘liberal international order’, and thereby conceal the silences on various sources of global ‘human insecurities’ and inconsistencies in human security language.
77 Chapter Three: Governing Failed States
CHAPTER THREE GOVERNING FAILED STATES: THE PROMOTION OF LIBERAL PEACE IN CANADA’S HUMAN SECURITY DISCOURSE
A principle-centred foreign policy reflects Canadian values but also serves Canadian interests. With trade, travel and communication linking countries more closely together than ever, each individual country has a growing stake in how other nations govern, or misgovern, their citizens. Mature democracies are less likely to go to war with each other, unleash waves of refuges, created environmental catastrophes, or engage in terrorism. 1
1. Introduction
In 1994, the two major parliamentary reviews on Canada’s foreign and defence policy called for the Canadian Government to broaden its international security agenda.2 These reviews, which set the foundations of Canada’s human security policy, argued that Canada’s new international security agenda should include new threats such as irregular migration, drug trafficking, terrorism, and environmental degradation. Underlying the spill-over effects of these novel threats, these reviews declared civil wars and underdevelopment as the main threats to human and Canadian security. More recently, Canada’s International Policy Statement (IPS)published in 2005 located ‘failed’, ‘weak’, or ‘ineffectively governed states’ as a main concern and described these states as root causes of the main
1 L Axworthy, Notes for an Address by The Honourable Lloyd Axworthy Minister of Foreign Affairs at McGill University “Human Rights and Canadian Foreign Policy: Principled Pragmatism”, Montreal, Quebec, October 16, 1997, viewed 12 October 2005,
dangers to Canadian and global security.3 The government statement reaffirmed Canada’s responsibility to maintain human security in these states on the grounds that “The food we eat, the air we breathe, and our health, safety, prosperity and quality of life are increasingly affected by what happens beyond our borders”. 4
The aim of this chapter is to show the discursive link between Canada’s human security and national security discourses. Drawing upon the securitization theory, it argues that human security discourse starts with a process of securitization that constructs state failure, poverty, and their associated threats as dangers to Canada’s borders, as well as to its societal and economic security. In line with the dominant global discourse on state failure, Canada conceives failed states as risks to global prosperity, propagators of pandemic diseases, and sources of refugee movements, illegal migrants, and various types of criminal activities. This chapter suggests that Canada’s human security discourse is not only driven by a utilitarian rationale, but also it naturalizes an increased merging of defence and human security policies.
An examination of Canada’s post-Cold War international security policy suggests that failed states are not simply seen as a humanitarian problem, but also as crises for ‘liberal peace’. Hence, human security policy aims to contain the risk and threat posed by failing and failed states by making them controllable, predictable and responsible sovereign states. This chapter argues that Canada’s human security discourse works as a liberal governmental practice, whose exercise seeks to emancipate these borderlands through transforming their internal economic, social and political structures. Human security aspires to make economically and politically deprived states self-governing ones through good governance interventions in these borderlands. By uncritically adopting the propositions of liberal peace, Canada’s human security policy draws rigid boundaries between liberal/democratic and illiberal/undemocratic states, and perpetuates the ethnocentric constructions of liberal peace. The emancipatory tone of human security not only obscures the Canadian subjectivity in its policy practices, but it also masks the role of Canadian state and business in creating various economic, political and social insecurities abroad.
3 Government of Canada, Canada’s International Policy Statement: A Role of Pride and Influence in the World: Diplomacy, Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, Ottawa, 2005 4 ibid., p. 1. 79 Chapter Three: Governing Failed States
In examining these arguments, this chapter first introduces the securitization theory and suggests some changes in its application. The second section will look at how various ‘human insecurities’ are called dangers to Canadian security. This section will first analyse how failed states and underdevelopment are discursively represented as security crises, and then it will discuss political implications of these securitizing practices. The final section will focus on Canada’s good governance discourse in its human security and development assistance agenda. The aim of this section is to show how Canada’s human security discourse endorses universalist and statist language of liberal peace and how it unproblematically aims to expand the liberal zone through the disciplinary techniques.
2. Securitization Theory
The securitization theory as developed by the Copenhagen School suggests that what constitutes security does not derive from an empirical context.5 In securitization theory, security is not regarded as an objective condition, but neither is it simply a subjective one. Rather, security is seen as an outcome of a specific condition; a social process, an interplay of social and political practices. For the Copenhagen School, security is a collective social accomplishment that reveals itself in “a process of constructing a shared understanding of what is to be considered and collectively responded as a threat”.6 The crucial question is not how much security, but “who can speak security, what security can be spoken about, and how one should
5 The main texts on securitization theory developed by Barry Buzan and Ole Wæver are O Wæver, ‘Securitization and Desecuritization’, in R Lipschutz (ed.), On Security, Columbia University Press, New York, 1995, pp. 46-86; B Buzan, O Wæver & J. De Wilde, Security: A New Framework for Analysis, Lynne Rienner, Boulder, 1998; B Buzan, O Wæver, M Kelstrup & P Lemaitre, Identity, Migration and the New Security Agenda in Europe, Pinter, London, 1993. For critical evaluation of securitization theory see J Huysmans, ‘Revisiting Copenhagen: Or, On the Creative Development of a Security Studies Agenda in Europe’, European Journal of International Relations, vol. 4 (4), 1998, pp. 479-505; J Huysmans, ‘Defining Social Constructivism in Security Studies: The Normative Dilemma of Writing Security’, Alternatives, 27, 2002, pp. 41-62, B McSweeney, ‘Identity and Security: Buzan and the Copenhagen School’, Review of International Studies, vol. 22, no. 1, 1996, pp. 81-93; B McSweeney, Security, Identity and Interests A Sociology of International Relations, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999, pp. 68-78; MC Williams, ‘Words, Images, Enemies : Securitization and International Politics’, International Studies Quarterly, vol. 47, 2003, pp. 511-531. 6 Buzan et al., Security: A New Framework for Analysis, p. 26. 80 Chapter Three: Governing Failed States
speak about security”.7 Put bluntly, the essential element of the securitization process is how securityness comes into being.
In securitization theory, the social construction of security is analysed through speech acts. Speech acts are not merely descriptions of what is out there. Rather, they have a performative function to make issues a security problem by successfully representing them as such. In Ole Wæver’s words:
What then is security?With the help of language theory, we can regard “security” as a speech act. In this usage, security is not of interest as a sign that refers to something more real; the utterance itself is the act. By saying it, something is done ... By uttering “security”, a state-representative moves a particular development into a specific area, and thereby claims a special right to use whatever means are necessary to block it.8
As Michael Williams argues, the securitization theory allows both unlimited expansion and a limitation of the security agenda and its analysis.9 On the one hand, by regarding speech acts as constitutive of the meaning of security, the Copenhagen School expands the realm of possible threats almost indefinitely. Not only possible threats are broadened, but also actors and objects that are threatened go beyond military security. However, the securitization theory also limits the security agenda by retaining a statist construction—and practice—of security. ‘Securitizing actors’ can attempt to securitize any issue or referent object. But not all security claims are accepted as a security issue; neither do all actors have the same status to make security claims.
First, while the securitization process is not reflective of the empirical context, successful speech acts are deeply sedimented rhetorically, discursively, culturally and institutionally.10 For the Copenhagen School, only state actors can speak about security. In other words, “by definition, something is a security problem when the elites declare it to be so”.11 Further, an issue is securitized only if and when the audience accepts it as such. However, by locating the state as the only securitizing actor and casting the audience in a passive role, the Copenhagen School overlooks how speech acts performed by different actors work in a more dispersed
7 Huysmans, Alternatives, p. 50. 8 Wæver, p. 55. 9 Williams, International Studies Quarterly, pp. 513-514. 10 ibid., p. 514. 11 Wæver, p. 55. 81 Chapter Three: Governing Failed States
way. Although the state is the main actor in constructing issues as security problems, it is not the only one. As will be discussed below, in failed state discourse not only the Canadian state, but also non-governmental organizations, and in particular, academic communities, play an important role in the securitization of state failure and underdevelopment.
Second, in securitization theory, security is not just any kind of threat, but an existential threat. For the Copenhagen School, speech acts constitute security acts only if an issue is presented as posing an existential threat to the survival of the political order. Securitization means that issues presented as an existential threat call for extraordinary measures that are beyond the norms and rules of the political procedure. As Buzan et al. argue, “security narratives takes politics beyond established rules of the game and frames the issue either as a specific kind of politics or as above politics. Securitization can thus be seen as a more extreme version of politicization”.12 Security discourses invest in a dual political dynamic; they not only warrant a legitimate power to undertake exceptional actions for those who perform security policies, but also construct those actors with particular responsibility for acting in a certain way.13 In order to justify power positions and invoke particular responsibility, contestants evoke certain interests, dramatic developments, political myths, common historical and cultural understandings or customary practices that are embedded to certain policies.14
As Rita Abrahemsen argues, when viewed positively, the act of defining underdevelopment, poverty, and poor governance as an ‘existential threat’ could be a weapon against marginalization of human security problems in global agendas and encourage positive policy responses such as an increase in development assistance. 15 However, the Canadian example suggests that the securitization practices have not necessarily led to an increase in the volume of Canadian foreign aid. Although Canada’s Official Development Assistance (ODA) has increased from 0.22% in 2001 to 0.34% in 2005–2006, it is still well below the 0.7% target set by the UN, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) average of
12 Buzan et al., Security: A New Framework for Analysis, p. 23. 13 L Hansen, Security as Practice: Discourse analysis and the Bosnian War, Routledge, London, 2006, p. 35. 14 J Huysmans, The Politics of Insecurity: Fear, migration and asylum in the EU, Routledge, Oxon, 2006, p. 153. 15 R Abrahamsen, ‘Blair’s Africa: The Politics of Securitization and Fear’, Alternatives, 30, 2005, p. 60. 82 Chapter Three: Governing Failed States
0.42%.16 Further, according to the current Harper government, there is a strong link between sub-Saharan Africa and global insecurity, including global terrorism.17 Despite ongoing securitization of sub-Saharan Africa, Harper government has abandoned the commitment to double the aid for Africa.18 More importantly, securitizing actors have a privilege to determine and justify the type of extraordinary measures. For example, while Canada’s 2006 Federal Budget provided no additional support for aid to Africa, it promised unprecedented increase in Canada’s military and security expenditure to underwrite security in Canada and the world.19 In short, securitization naturalizes contested policies; and, as Wæver suggests, “when a problem is 'securitized' the act tends to lead to specific ways of addressing it: threat, defense, and often state-centered solutions”.20
More importantly, the performative function of Canada’s securitizing practices work as a “system of meaning that constitutes institutions, practices and identities in a contradictory and disjunctive way”.21 Despite its poststructuralist orientation, the Copenhagen School is silent on meaning-producing effects of securitization practices; how they construct identities and landscapes; and how they function as a particular form of power.22 While the Copenhagen School analyses the process of how the issues are securitized, and what kind of policies that security discourses justify, it takes the identities and geopolitical maps as given. In other
16 Development Assistance Committee (DAC), Canada Development Co-operation Review, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), 2003, p. 11, viewed 30 October 2006,
words, the Copenhagen School does not question the contested nature of political and cultural meanings that are attached to people, societies and states, and it ignores the fact that these meanings are indeed an embedded element of the securitization processes. Understood in Foucauldian terms, securitizing practices work as a governmental practice that invests an exercise of power in the form of techniques of government and its rationalities. Rationalities are not simply rhetoric; rather, they are grounded on knowledge and make a particular domain intelligible under certain descriptions.23 The power of securitization becomes the way in which reality is represented as a series of problematizations which legitimatize and calls for governmental interventions. Further, securitizing practices as a network of institutions, procedures and techniques—as a political technology—produce and mobilize “totalising power … exercised by states over vast areas, economies and populations; and an individualising power, which works at the level of individuals and souls, on their bodies, and minds” confirming the very function of security as being performative of the political order.24 The analysis then is not about a normative question on how to maximize human security, but the power of the Canadian discourse on human insecurity/security.
3. Setting the Context: Practices of Securitization in Canadian Human Security Policy 3.1 ‘A world of anxiety’: The discursive construction of ‘insecure Canada’ and early stages of human security discourse
By the end of the Cold War, Canadian foreign policy underwent a significant review in relation to the nature and the extent of threats to international security. In the search for a security consensus, public consultations, forums and parliamentary reviews held in 1994 set the discursive foundations of Canada’s post-Cold War security discourse. By constructing a normative scheme on how Canada should conceptualize security and adapt rapidly to the changing international environment, the 1994 National Forum, Canada 21 Council and 1994 Foreign and Defence Policy
23 N Rise & P Miller, ‘Political Power beyond the State: Problematics of Government’, The British Journal of Sociology, vol. 43, no. 2, Jun. 1992, p. 178. 24 A Burke, Beyond Security, Ethics and Violence: War against the Other, Routledge, London, 2007, pp. 5-6. 84 Chapter Three: Governing Failed States
Reviews played a major role in shaping the policy objectives of Canada in the World —the first government report that recognized the human security agenda as one of government’s foreign policy priorities.25 The general consensus that emerged during these reviews and independent studies was that the world is in a state of flux and the old geopolitical maps and meanings no longer provide a rationale that guides Canadian international policy.
As Roxanne Doty argues, actors involved in foreign policy decisions function within a discursive space that imposes meanings on their world; and thus creates a reality.26 Reality is mediated by a mode of representation, and representations are not simply descriptions of the world, but are the ways of creating the meanings of what the world is, who and what our enemy is, in what ways we are threatened by them, and how we might best deal with those threats.27 The early stages of Canada’s human security agenda was constructed through a ritual representation of the world as ‘uncertain’, ‘unstable’, ‘ambiguous’, ‘complex’, and ‘unpredictable and fragmented’. In presenting this dominant view, for example, SJC reviewing Canada’s Defence Policy listed its findings in Security in a Changing World and argued that:
… if anything, we are in a more unstable and unpredictable international environment … Cold War stability has given way to instability and uncertainty … The present atmosphere of global instability is the product of many factors, most importantly, a more fragmented world community
25 These forums and reviews were the outcome of the Liberal Party’s election promises of ‘democratization of foreign policy’. The most prominent of these forums and independent reports were National Forum 1994 and CANADA 21 Council which brought together a range of representatives of NGOs, academics, media members, ex-officers from armed forces and foreign affairs. As a part of the Liberal government’s ‘democratization of foreign policy agenda’, these forums were highly influential in determining government’s foreign policy directions. The human security agenda emerged as a result of these public consultations. It can be argued that rather than a governmental agenda, human security emerged as a result of public consultations. However, the examination of Canada 21 Council, and Parliamentary Committees suggests that the membership of both the Council and Parliamentary Committees were highly selective, reflecting an elitist perspective. Therefore, it can be argued that rather than being completely autonomous, this public consultation process was reflective of the government’s discourse on security. For details see CANADA 21 Council, Canada 21 Canada and Common Security in the Twenty-First Century, Centre for International Studies University of Toronto, Ontario, 1994. For general discussion of these Committees and Forums see MA Cameron & MA Molot (eds.), Canada Among Nations 1995 Democracy and Foreign Policy, Carleton University Press, Ottawa 1995; D Stairs, ‘The Public Politics of the Canadian Defence and Foreign Policy Reviews’, Canadian Foreign Policy, vol. III, no. 1, Spring 1995, pp. 91-116. 26 RL Doty, ‘Foreign Policy as Social Construction: A Post-Positivist Analysis of U.S. Counterinsurgency Policy in the Philippines’, International Studies Quarterly, vol. 37, no. 3, September 1993, p. 303. [emphasis added] 27 MJ Shapiro, ‘Textualizing Global Politics’, in JD Derian & MJ Shapiro (eds.), International/Intertextual Relations, Lexington Books, Lexington, 1989, p. 14; J Weldes, ‘Constructing National Interest’, European Journal of International Relations, vol.2, no.3, p. 287. 85 Chapter Three: Governing Failed States
characterized by: the emergence of new centres of power; the creation and disintegration of states; growing regional and ethnic conflicts; the proliferation of military technology and weapons of mass destruction; environmental degradation and population pressures; new economic rivalries ...28
This narration of the new international context starkly juxtaposes the Cold War and post-Cold War era. The authors of Security in a Changing World depicted the Cold War era as ‘dangerous’, but ‘stable’ and ‘predictable’, whereas the post-Cold War era was represented as an ‘unstable’ and ‘unpredictable’ environment in which the future adversaries are elusive.29 Similarly in the 1994 White Paper, the post-Cold War era was represented as an “age of uncertainty” with a “pocket of chaos”.30
The reading of the post-Cold War era as being chaotic was later incorporated into Axworthy’s human security agenda. The post-Cold War world, in Lloyd Axworthy’s words, has swept away “all old certainties”31 giving rise to a “geopolitical shift”32, “grave new risks”33 and a “seismic upheaval in the
28Parliament of Canada, Security in a Changing World, p. 5. [emphasis in original ] 29 D Hooey, The South as a “Threat”? [Re]Assessing the North–South Dimensions of Canadian National Security’, Canadian Journal of Development Studies, vol. XIX, no. 3, 1998, pp. 464-473; RJ Lawson, ‘Construction of Consensus: The 1994 Canadian Defence Review’, in M. Cameron & M Molot (eds.), Democracy and Foreign Policy: Canada Among Nations 1995, Carleton University Press, Ottawa, 1995, pp. 99-117. 30 Department of National Defence, Review of Canadian Defence Policy: Minister of National Defence Guidance Document, Department of National Defence, Ottawa, 1994, viewed 30 August 2004,
international landscape”34 that has brought not “peace—but a new kind of war”.35 This discursive instability of the world suggests that the security crises can no longer be framed in terms of ideological conflict, but the breakdown of international law and political order which, in turn, would affect Canada’s security. The utterances relating to a chaotic world not only reveal elitist insecurities governing Canada’s foreign policy, but also limit the terrain of debate on what should be the future direction of Canada’s human security agenda. As Wæver argues, “a political order legitimatizes itself through a reference to an external threat and when the order is not organized against a specific country, it must be based on a legitimizing principle that will help to define which specific developments are to be opposed”.36 In the Canadian context, this new world disorder was constructed as an ‘enemy’ to be opposed.
Further, the discourse on the new world disorder was also naturalized by academic communities which played an important role in promoting and circulating the narratives of ‘dangerous world’. A brief review of the literature on the early post- Cold War Canadian foreign policy suggests that the knowledge produced by the Canadian academic community generated an incitement for the discursive construction of Canada’s security/insecurity nexus. For instance, according to Colin Gray, Canada’s policy success during the Cold War was in “seeing off the Soviet threat and the possibility of nuclear Armageddon”.37 However, in the post-Cold war era, dangers are more complex, and unknown. Gray suggests that a “realist” foreign policy should be based on the idea that “[history] will repeat itself in the kinds of challenges that it poses. Bad times will return and there will be ‘thugs’ and other ‘rogues’ in need of discipline”.38 Similarly, one of the leading Canadian foreign policy analysts, Janice Gross Stein, acknowledges that security thinking has been
34 L Axworthy, ‘Notes for an Address by the Honourable Lloyd Axworthy, Minister of Foreign Affairs to The Organization of American States Conference of The Americas, Washington, D.C., March 6, 1998, viewed 18 January 2006,
extended: “Disorder, chaos, degradation, and violence can no longer be walled off in local isolation wards, like dangerous epidemics; they must be treated early, at their sources, if they are not to become pandemic”.39 In an incredibly alarmist way, Denis Stairs, in his position paper to the 1994 SJC Report, invokes “unheralded threats imperilling Canadian security and survival” and argues that “the Horsemen of the Apocalypse are multiplying as the ancient affliction of War, Famine and Pestilence”.40 This scholarly discourse does not simply describe the post-Cold War international environment, but plays a performative role in creating a new domain of insecurity and maintains the endurance of political realism in Canada’s foreign policy.
The metaphors of chaos, uncertainty and complexity attached to the post- Cold War world represent the foundation of the securitizing practices in Canada’s human security discourse. In various policy papers and independent studies, the search for stability in an insecure word was linked to globalization. It was repeatedly argued that globalization is an emerging and irreversible fact which has profound implications on Canada’s security and economy. It was suggested that a prudent foreign policy should be based on the recognition of the elements of today’s landscape which is increasingly shaped by the forces of interdependence.41 In Axworthy’s words, in an age when foreign affairs are increasingly an “anachronism”, more and more developments outside Canada have direct impact inside Canada”.42 The reading of globalization as a double edged sword which presents risks and opportunities furthers the argument that if the risks posed by interdependence are not managed properly, it would have a direct impact on Canada’s survival.43 The rhetoric
39 JG Stein, ‘Ideas, even good ideas, are not enough: changing Canada’s foreign and defence policies’, International Journal, vol. 50, winter 1994-1995, p. 62. 40 D Stairs, ‘Contemporary Security Issues’, Canada’s Foreign Policy: Principles and Priorities For the Future The Position Papers, Special Joint Committee of the Senate and of the House of Commons Reviewing Canadian Foreign Policy, Canada Communication Group, Ottawa, November 1994, p. 4. 41 ADM Sub-Committee, Canada 2005 Global Challenges and Opportunities, The Report of the ADM Sub-Committee, Volumes I and II, Draft Interim Report, February 25, 1997. 42 L Axworthy, An Address by the Honorable Lloyd Axworhty Minister of Foreign Affairs, To The Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade “Foreign Policy at a Crossroad”’, Ottawa, April 16, 1996, viewed 18 January 2006,
on the impact of globalization and interdependence played a major role in the development of Canada’s human security agenda.
First, it is repeatedly argued that globalization has changed the nature of threats. In an age of growing interdependence, borders become more fluid, which makes threats “multifaceted and transnational … [that] respect no borders”.44 Underlying the complexity of the modern age and its impact on human insecurity, the 2003 Human Security Evaluation report suggests that the globalised world invites a whole range of threats including internal conflicts, organized crime, drug trafficking, alien smuggling, infections diseases, environmental degradation, overpopulation, and underdevelopment; all of which transcend national borders.45 The persistent view is that although human rights abuses, civil conflicts, and terrorism seem distant events for Canadians, in an interconnected world they have direct impact on Canada’s security. Linking human insecurity in other societies and states with the security of Canadians, Axworthy argues:
The impact is felt not just abroad but at home. Consider the consequences of the drug trade on our youth, the use of our shores by smugglers of human cargo, and the spectre of global terrorism in our midst. The human security agenda addresses these problems of direct concern to Canadians.46
The articulation of infectious diseases, environment degradation or mass poverty as the sources of global threats suggests that political and economic instability in certain societies and states that do not eliminate human insecurities within their borders are direct risks to Canadians. The contested nature of these utterances is that, as David Hooey argues, what ultimately matters in this broadened security agenda is whether
44 L Axworthy, Notes for an Address by the Honourable Lloyd Axworthy Minister of Foreign Affairs, at the Consultations with Non-Governmental Organizations in the Preparation for the 52nd Session of the United Nations Commissions on Human Rights, February 13, 1996, Ottawa, viewed 18 January 2006,
or not instability in the forms of drugs, crime and poverty will spill over into the ‘stable’ and ‘prosperous’ Canada, and weaken civility and order at home.47
Second, the government’s rhetoric on globalization reconciles human security discourse and Canada’s economic interests. As expressed in Canada in the World, which located prosperity and employment at the heart of the Liberal government’s agenda, globalization presents tremendous opportunities in terms of new markets for Canadian goods and services.48 However, Canada’s prosperity and economic growth—which is highly dependent on international trade and investment—requires a stable international environment where people are secure and globalization works. In emphasizing the disrupting effects of instability on Canada’s commercial activities, Axworthy states:
The ongoing political turmoil in other areas of the world, notably in Africa, also prevents local populations from developing and realizing their economic potential. This affects not only local populations but Canadians too, who pay a price for the insecurity through reduced opportunities and lost markets for our products and investments. In short, the human security agenda promotes Canadians' interests—including the Canadian corporate bottom line.49
These statements reveal the utilitarian language that is embedded in Canada’s human security discourse. They suggest that Canada’s economic interests are jeopardized by underdevelopment and poverty in the South; thus in former Prime Minister Jean Chretién’s words, “globalization must be made to work for the poor, not just the wealthy”.50 This statement clearly blends altruism and self-interest in a way that by helping the South, ‘we’ also assist in creating a more sustainable future for Canadians in the form of new markets, new trading partners, and new sources for Canadian investments. In this regard, both the 1994 Canada in the World and 2005
47 Hooey, p. 474. 48 Government of Canada, Canada in the World, pp. 3-4. 49 L Axworthy, Notes for an Address by the Honourable Lloyd Axworthy Minister of Foreign Affairs to the Empire Club, Toronto, June 28, 1999, viewed 25 February 2006,
IPS located the promotion of Canada’s prosperity as one of the objectives of Canada International Development Agency’s (CIDA) poverty elimination programs.51
It is important to note that the discourse of ‘globalization must be made to work for the poor’ is also vigorously promoted by non-governmental organizations in Canada. For example, in regards to Africa, the International Development Research and Policy Task Force suggests that, in the age of globalization, countries which are traditionally viewed as aid recipients are now potential trading partners for Canada, therefore “[Aid] is not charity. If [Africans] do well, so does Canada.”52 It clearly states that the continued Northern prosperity cannot prevail with the poverty, disease and despair in the South. Therefore, altruism and self-interest are different sides of the same coin; “their future is our future”. One may argue that these views represent a ‘common security’ mentality which promotes the idea that security cannot be achieved at the expense of others. Nevertheless this mindset reveals a very self- regarding vision of ‘common’ or ‘human’ security which directly links the prosperity of the South with Canada’s commercial gains. In short, as Heather Smith rightly argues, Canada’s human security discourse starts with a fear of disorder in the potentially turbulent and economically polarised Second and Third worlds. 53 Despite the claims to the contrary, Canada’s human security agenda has much in common with the language of national and economic security. This link becomes more explicit in Canadian discourse on failed states.
3.2 Finding the ‘fearscapes’: Securitization of failed states
With the end of the Cold War, failed and fragile states have been cast as the main threat to international security and stability. The various internal conflicts, from
51 Government of Canada, Canada in the World, p. 40; Government of Canada, Canada’s International Policy Statement: A Role of Pride and Influence In the World, Development, Canadian International Development Agency, Ottawa, 2005, p. 2; For criticisms on Canada’s economic interests in framing the objectives of its development assistance see C Pratt, ‘The impact of Ethical Values on Canadian Foreign Aid Policy’, Canadian Foreign Policy, vol. 9, no. 1, fall 2001, pp. 43-53. 52 M Strong, ‘Connecting With the World: Priorities for Canadian Internationalism in the 21st Century’, A Report by the International Development Research and Policy Task Force, International Development Research Centre, International Institute for Sustainable Development, North-South Institute, 1996, viewed 20 November 2005,
Somalia to Rwanda, have marked the failed states as the greatest developmental and humanitarian concern. Despite the growing interest on internal conflicts, during the 1990s failed states were treated with relative neglect.54 However, in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, failed and weak states have become the object of a heightened discourse. The events of September 11, 2001 renewed an enormous policy interest on failed states on the grounds that many problems associated with state failure would have detrimental effects on global security. The revealed link between terrorism and the failed state of Afghanistan has given rise to a taken-for-granted argument that stateless or ineffectively governed areas are ‘zones of chaos’, which makes them safe havens for terrorists, drug and people smugglers, criminal organizations, and arms trafficking. During the 1990s internal conflicts were largely considered as a humanitarian issue that had an impact on regional instability; however, now, there is a consensus that failed states not only pose a danger for themselves or their neighbours, but they also constitute major breeding grounds for global insecurity. Failed states are now seen as an imminent danger to the security of developed nations. With the growing emphasis on the interconnectedness between national security in developed nations and human insecurity in failed states, state failure is now regarded as an ‘existential threat’ which is to be averted by all means.
The emerging securitizing discourse on failed states is evident in the policies of many Western states. For example, the Bush Administration, in its 2002 National Security Strategy, locates failed states as one of the greatest dangers to its national security, and declares that “America is now threatened less by conquering states than we are by failing ones.”55 In the same vein, within its Countries at Risk of Instability (CRI) programme, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Strategy Unit sets out the rationale for Britain’s responsibility to save failing states. Although the Strategy Unit expresses some humanitarian concerns, it regards the human tragedy in the Sudan and Democratic Republic of Congo as a threat to Britain’s security and stability.56 It
54 M Duffield, ‘Human Security” Linking Development and Security in an Age of Terror’, paper presented for the GDI panel New Interfaces between Security and Development, 11th General Conference of the EADI Bonn, 21-24 September 2005, p. 12, viewed 18 May 2006,
concludes that a failed states strategy is a crucial element of Britain’s foreign policy objectives in fighting terrorism, managing migration flows, reducing the threat of international organized crime, and improving energy security.57 Similarly, despite the humanitarian and moral language of the Barcelona Report, which introduces the European Union (EU) human security agenda, the Report defines weak states as “black holes” which generate new sources of threats that have an impact directly on the security of EU citizens.58 Finally, the same ‘speech acts’ can be found in Australian foreign policy. In the words of Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer, failed states can be exploited by “money launderers, drug traffickers, people traffickers, possibly even terrorists” as evident in Afghanistan and Somalia.59 Therefore, according to Downer, Australia’s responsibility to protect the Solomon Islands, for instance, derives not only from a humanitarian imperative, but also a strategic one. 60
The securitization of failed states is also an embedded part of the academic literature. The article by Gerald Helman and Steven Rather, which is regarded as one of the first examples of the discourse of state failure, presents failed states as “a disturbing new phenomenon”.61 For Helman and Rather, the need to help those states is critical as ‘their problems tend to spread’.62 More recently, Robert Rotberg argues that state weakness could not be isolated and ‘kept distant’ in an interconnected world.63 Rotberg’s reasoning for intervention in failed states is based on more strategic calculations than humanitarian ones. He argues that failed states are “breeding grounds of instability, mass migration, and murder as well as reservoirs
and exporters of terror”.64 In Rotberg’s argument, the Western world is represented as the victim of the instability proliferated by weak states; thus to protect the West from the “cancerous spread of anarchy” constitutes the imperative for saving those who fail.65 Even for more cosmopolitan perspectives, state failure poses the greatest risk to developed nations. According to Michael Ignatieff, for instance, failed states are more than problems for themselves; they are “bad neighbourhoods”.66 While Ignatieff strongly endorses the responsibility to protect of those who cannot protect themselves, his moral reasoning of intervention has similarities with Rotberg’s argument. Ignatieff does not see using force morally problematic; rather it is a moral necessity. He argues that the fundamental duty of democratic governments is to protect the lives of their citizens, therefore they must respond these threats, if necessary by force; “if force is not used … there is no future for law”.67 In short, there is now a problematic consensus that failed states are viruses undermining order; they are ‘basket cases’ and exporters of various types of criminal activities and pandemic diseases.
This global discourse is evident in Canada’s approach to failed states which manifests similar securitizing practices. An examination of how failed states are portrayed in official rhetoric reveals that there has been a similar discursive shift in Canadian discourse on failed and weak states. The problem of state failure is not a new discourse in Canadian foreign policy. Since the inception of the human security agenda, failed states have been the nodal point of Canada’s security discourse. Although during the 1990s state failure was largely seen as a humanitarian or human rights issue, in the post-9/11 era failed states have become an explicit national security problem in Canadian foreign and defence policy.
As previously mentioned, in the early stages of the human security agenda, both official and non-official rhetoric constructed a link between civil wars and their possible detrimental impact on Canada’s national and economic security. Further, during the 1990s, many statements were made on how Canadian societal security was being affected by state failure. Much of the rationale for Canada’s interventions in civil conflicts was presented in reference to Canadian interests. For example, in
64 Rotberg, p. 128. 65 ibid., p. 128, 130. 66 M Ignatieff, ‘Intervention and State Failure’, Dissent, winter 2002, vol. 49:1, p. 101. 67 Quoted in MC Morgan, ‘Michael Ignatieff Idealism a challenge of the “lesser evil”’, International Journal, autumn 2006, p. 981. 94 Chapter Three: Governing Failed States
the late 1990s, the Haitian migrants and refugees constituted one of the main concerns of the Canadian Government in regards to instability in Haiti. The construction of Haitian migrants as a risk to Canadian society showed up in one Liberal MP’s statement:
If we don’t continue to help Haiti, we will increasingly have immigrants coming from that country who, because of the great social and economic disparities between their country and ours, will be difficult to integrate into Canada.68
Further, in regards to Kosovo, Axworthy did not hesitate to make a short reference as to how Canada’s economic interests were at risk, if not particularly in Kosovo, but in the region.69 Although these statements established the beginning of securitization of failed states in Canadian foreign policy, before September 11, 2001 the problem of the failed states was predominantly placed within the debate of a humanitarian agenda. In particular, the Department of Foreign Affairs focused on regional impacts and humanitarian costs of internal conflicts. Therefore, while speech acts, which constructed failed states as a risk to Canadian national security, were evident before September 11, 2001, the problem of state failure was not represented as an existential threat to Canada’s national security. The discursive shift in the discourse on failed states shows, as Williams argues, how security language works on a continuum running from risk to existential threat, from uncertainty to danger.70
This discursive shift in Canada’s approach to failed states came about with its pledge to provide troops to Afghanistan in support of the US-led campaign against terrorism and the first deployment of Canadian forces in January, 2002. Despite being the fourth largest contributor to the forces in Afghanistan, Canadian officials have repeatedly emphasized the differences between the American and Canadian approaches in addressing the root causes of terrorism, and continuously supported a multilateral legal framework for a UN-led operation. However, in common with the
68 Quoted in T Keating, ‘Promoting Democracy in Haiti: Assessing the Practice and Ethical Implications’, in R Irwin (ed.), Ethics and security in Canadian foreign policy, UBC Press, Vancouver, 2001, p. 219. 69 L Axworthy, Notes for an Address by the Honourable Lloyd Axworthy, Minister of Foreign Affairs, to the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Relations Princeton University “Kosovo and the Human Security Agenda”, Princeton, New Jersey, April 7, 1999, viewed 26 April 2006,
changes in US security discourse on state failure, Canada’s official rhetoric has slowly started to place the failed states problem into its national and international security policy. The former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien’s various speeches in 2002 can be shown as the government’s first securitizing move. Chrétien, in his many statements, made direct references to the link between terrorism and failed states. He said in his speech to the UN that “we have seen right here in New York the tragic consequences that can result from failed states in a far away place”.71
These speech acts turned into a more concrete agenda in the 2004 National Security strategy. Written in a very state-centric tone, the authors of Securing an Open Society elevated national security to the central goal of Canada’s international policy with a sense of urgency that called for government’s “responsibility for action”.72 The report identified the foundations of its national security strategy by identifying the interconnectedness between “personal”, “international” and “national” security, and argued that the international and personal security threats impact directly on the state and society. The document perceived failed and failing states as one of the most disturbing security developments which contribute to international instability. Hence, according to the document, they constitute a major threat to “the safety of Canadians and … the effective functioning of [Canadian] society”.73 The document made no reference to the humanitarian costs of internal conflicts. Rather, assisting failed and failing states derived from a clear national security logic which is represented as an assurance for Canadian prosperity and the “very qualities that make [Canada] a place of hope in a troubled world”.74
Similarly, the 2005 IPS delineates failed and failing states as “dangerous states” and “hot spots” in the landscape, “creating despair and regional instability”.75 In contrast to the National Security Strategy, IPS deals with the failed states problem in its Responsibilities Agenda which provides more nuance on human catastrophe in
71 J Chrétien, Address by Prime Minister Jean Chrétien on the occasion of the United Nations General Assembly High-Level Plenary Debate on the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), September 16, 2002, New York, viewed 2 April 2007,
state failures. However, despite the repeated references to moral obligations, failed states are placed within the same logic of national in/security echoing Canada’s invasion anxiety. The IPS concludes that ineffectively governed states are imminent threats for Canada, because their governing structures make them potential breeding grounds or safe havens for terrorists: and criminal organizations “who would attack [Canada] directly”.76 Approaching the failed states problem from a purely strategic perspective is more evident in a recent paper of the Operational Research Division of DND which strongly recommends the government to abandon geostrategic considerations when deciding where to intervene.77 This recommendation is not based on a reason that geostrategic or geopolitical considerations may obscure the humanitarian imperatives of the future interventions. Rather, it derives from a more strategic rationale that even if a failed state does not have a geopolitical significance for Canada, it may take on greater strategic importance in the future by virtue of the potential base it offers to terrorist and criminal groups.
In the failed state discourse, what becomes dangerous is interconnectedness that magnifies the threat of the internationalization of instability.78 As former Prime Minister Paul Martin puts it:
Once protected by oceans, today’s front line stretches from the streets of Kabul, to cities in the United States, from the rail lines in Madrid, to cities across Canada. Our adversary could be operating in the mountains of Afghanistan, in the cities of Europe, or within our own borders. There is no home front. The conflict is not ‘over there’. Our approach to security must reflect this reality.79
It can be argued that these utterances reinvoke the Cold War discourse of domino theory.80 They produce a common belief that failed states should be contained as the threats they produce will eventually reach the shores of Canada. More importantly,
76 Government of Canada, Canada’s International Policy Statement, p. 1. 77 P Johston & M Roi, Future Security Environment 2025, Department of National Defence Operational Research Division, Directorate of Operational Research (CORP), DOR (CORP) Project Report PR 2003/14, September 2003,Ottawa, viewed 13 April 2007,
the discourse on internationalization of instability has given rise to various geopolitical databases that specify the countries under the risk of instability.81 By producing risk assessment schemes, these databases classify and rank countries in the order of their potential to fail. While the various indexes on state failure aim to increase the preventive methods, they also draw a map of states that should be monitored and contained. These databases identify and assemble statistical information on state failure and on links between criminal activities in unstable and stable states.82 From a Foucauldian perspective, these databases make the sources of threats visible and knowledgeable, so that they provide background knowledge for ‘surveillance regimes’. In this regard, it can be argued that the failed state discourse reproduces the Cold War language which represents the world as ‘dangerous’ but ‘predictable’. In other words, the failed states discourse replaces the 1990s rhetoric of ‘uncertainty’ and ‘unpredictability’ in determining the sources of danger with the Cold War ‘certainty’ when the producers of danger were known, and could be named and located geographically in a ‘dangerous world’.
One of the policy implications of the failed states discourse is that the Canadian Government’s human security rhetoric has now become a part of its national security agenda, blurring the distinctions between national and human security programs. The government’s preoccupation with failed and failing states has constructed a policy common sense both in DFAIT and DND which has abolished the differences between two departments’ perspectives on security. In the 1990s, while DFAIT promoted a more internationalist outlook for security, DND continued to sustain its traditional focus on national security which retained the division of labour in Canada’s foreign and national security policy-making. By the end of the Cold War, there was a skepticism on the need to retain the military capability of Canadian forces, which resulted in the decreased authority of the DND. However, the failed states discourse, as Rob Huebert argues, has provided a basis to re-
81 See for instance, Third Annual Failed Index of Foreign Policy Journal and The Fund for Peace, ‘Failed States Index 2007’, Foreign Policy, July/August 2007, Issue 161, pp. 54-64; Country Indicators for Foreign Policy (CIFP). Since 1997, the CIFP project is operated under the guidance of Carleton University and has received funding from DFAIT and CIDA. See
maintain the political authority of DND in deciding the hallmarks of Canada’s international policy.83
Further, the convergence of human and national security programs is evident in the allocation of resources. For example, in September 2005, former Foreign Affairs Minister Pettigrew announced $500 million for the Global Peace and Security Fund, which can be interpreted as a commitment to human security.84 However, he also stated that all of the Stabilization and Reconstruction Taskforce initiatives (START) in countries such as Sudan, Haiti, and Afghanistan will be funded through this fund, in addition to the defence spending in the same area.85 Similarly, although after 9/11 extra Human Security Program (HSP) funding was dedicated towards anti- terrorism projects, the 2003 and 2004 HSP Evaluation Reports recommended more funding in the area.86 In response to the criticisms on insufficient funds in anti- terrorism projects in HSP, the Program argued that projects in other sub-areas (such as peace support operations) are also designed to reduce the factors that lead to terrorism.87 This change reflects that ‘anti-terrorism’ now constitutes a general framework for other projects funded under the HSP.
3.3 In fear of underdevelopment: The political implications of merging security and development
The failed state discourse is closely associated with how underdevelopment is presented as dangerous.88 Mark Duffield has observed that since the end of the Cold War, development and security are in the process of merging. He points out that when it comes to recognize the root causes of international instability, the political
83 R Huebert, ‘Failed and Failing States: The Core Threat to Canadian Security?’, in DJ Bercuson & D Stairs (eds.), In The Canadian Interest? Assessing Canada’s International Policy Statement, Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute, October 2005, p. 72, viewed 12 July 2006,
consensus is constructed from a viewpoint that sees causes of new wars as “development in reverse”.89 In these common approaches, there is a mutually reinforcing insecurity imaginary that sees underdevelopment as dangerous: underdevelopment and poverty can lead to conflict, and conflict itself can deepen underdevelopment and its associated pathologies of crime and terrorism.90 Duffield persuasively argues that the fear of underdevelopment as sources of multiple threats, which have an impact on the North, has allowed the radicalization of development as a tool of conflict prevention. In this radicalized form, development takes security as the main societal objective, which perceives poverty elimination as a form of containing the sources of insecurity posing a danger to the societal stability of the ‘liberal zone’.
This security/development nexus is evident in Canada’s approach to conflict prevention and post-conflict reconciliation activities. In various contexts the Canadian Government has recognized the symbiotic relationship between security and development with respect to fragile states, and placed poverty reduction as the fundamental phase of Canada’s conflict prevention policies.91 The linkage between security and development has been mainstreamed in Canada’s operations in Afghanistan and Haiti. A recent report of the Standing Committee, Canada’s International Policy in Haiti, conceives development and poverty assistance as an entrenched part of security interventions.92 According to the authors of the Report, the greatest barrier to security is poverty; because violence and insecurity in Haiti originates from a chronic inability to deal with underdevelopment. Therefore, the Report suggests that ‘complex emergencies’ require Canada to adopt a strategy that should improve the situation of Haiti’s poor, in particular the poor in the rural areas.93
89 Duffield, Global Governance and the New Wars, pp. 113-115. 90 ibid., pp. 37-38. 91 See, for example, Government of Canada, Government Response to the Fourth Report of the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development Canada’s International Policy Put to the Test in Haiti, Ottawa, April 16, 2007, viewed 15 May 2007,
In the post-9/11 era, the fear of poverty has been intensified. Underdevelopment is now regarded as the root cause of terrorism in both academic literature and policy making. The threat of failed states and its interconnection with terrorism has reinvoked the importance of development in a way that poverty reduction has now a broader strategic significance. James Wolfensohn, former World Bank president, argues that terrorism prevention measures should address “economic exclusion, poverty and underdevelopment”.94 Similarly, in a Development Assistance Committee (DAC) paper, development assistance is regarded as vital in terrorism prevention strategy. 95 Therefore the paper suggests that poverty-reduction strategies should aim to make globalization an inclusive process, in particular for poor countries. According to the DAC, “terrorism is a form of violent conflict and conflict prevention is an integral part of the quest to reduce poverty”.96
Much the same language has been incorporated into Canada’s security and development policy. In the words of Jean Chrétien, Canada’s approach to the war on terrorism goes beyond military strategy. In many speeches, Chrétien linked underdevelopment and terrorism, and showed poverty as the main cause of the September 11, 2001 attacks. He stated:
You have to look at the reality. When you have economic growth in a society, when you have social justice and good institutions, you don't have these problems. Very often it is coming out of the poverty. It is a reality that has to be faced.97
Chretien’s emphasis on direct connection between terrorist networks and poverty has attracted much criticism.98 Yet the issue of how through these statements poverty was constructed as a danger to Canada has received little attention. While these
94 Quoted in D Carment, JJ Gazo & S Prest, ‘Risk Assessment and State Failure’, Global Society, vol. 21, no. 1, January 2007, p. 47. 95 Development Assistance Committee, A Development Co-operation Lens on Terrorism Prevention: Key Entry Points For Action, OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC), Paris, 2003, viewed 15 March 2006,
statements heightened the importance of poverty reduction, at the same time they set out a discursive strategy to re-structure Canada’s development assistance as a part of its national security agenda. More importantly, this discursive connection was made in particular contexts in which Chrétien announced Canada’s commitment to double its development assistance to Africa, its support of the G8 Africa Action Plan, and eliminate tariffs and quotas on almost all products from least-developed countries in Africa.99 In this regard, it can be argued that the discursive link between poverty and terrorism constructed Canada’s “enlightened self-interest” in a way that Canada’s pledge to Africa is not only a moral responsibility, but can be justified on the basis of keeping poverty and its associated threats away from Canada.100
The securitization of underdevelopment has contributed to the extreme politicization of Canadian development assistance and a problematic conflation of poverty reduction and security/defence policies. As a result of the increased emphasis on the link between poverty and homeland security, the mandate of CIDA has been revised to support international efforts to reduce the threats to international and Canadian security.101 Eric Simpson and Brian Tomlinson argue that in line with the changes in Western donors' perception of foreign aid, Canada’s development assistance is increasingly implemented as a risk management of Canada’s national and international security.102 This security objective in development assistance has also enormous impact on allocation of resources. For instance, up to one-third of CIDA’s bilateral funding has been reserved for failed and fragile states, and
99 J Chrétien, Address by Prime Minister Jean Chrétien on the occasion of the United Nations General Assembly High-Level Plenary Debate on the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD); J. Chrétien, Address by Prime Minister Jean Chrétien to the Appeal of Conscience Foundation, October 1st, 2002, New York, viewed 12 January 2007
Afghanistan and Iraq now constitute the largest recipients of Canadian aid.103 In short, Canada’s development assistance is increasingly started to be seen as “defence by other means”.104 Canada’s national security concerns now dominate the aims of its development assistance programs.
The increased convergence of development and security is more evident in Canada’s new whole-of-government approach (WGA) towards failed and fragile states. The IPS which set out Canada’s WGA strategy defines the 3-D approach as “combat operations against well armed militia forces in one city block, stabilization operations in the next block; and humanitarian relief and reconstruction two blocks over”.105 According to the IPS, “complex and chaotic” operational environments in fragile and failed states require DFAIT, DND and CIDA to work in tandem from planning through to the execution of programs. As put by DAC, the main rationale behind the WGA approach is the interconnectedness between economic, political, social, and security spheres which necessitates a close coordination between humanitarian and security programs, because the failure in one area risks the failure of all others.106
Although the effectiveness of WGA is currently unclear, many concerns are raised in regards to its nature and implementation. On policy grounds, the main challenges are to balance the different rationales and perspectives of different governmental departments, to clarify the roles of actors, and to bridge cultural differences between defence, development and foreign affairs departments.107 More importantly, many critics and NGOs have argued that the WGA approach deteriorates the neutrality and independence of humanitarian operations which are
103 Simpson & Tomlinson. 104 Stairs, Canada’s Foreign Policy, p. 4. 105 Government of Canada, Canada’s International Policy Statement, Defence, Department of National Defence, Ottawa, 2005, p. 8. As set out in IPS, in order to coordinate the WGA approach, START and the Global Peace and Security Fund (GPSF) were created. Canada’s WGA approach was implemented in Kandahar, Afghanistan; Haiti; and Darfur, Sudan. 106 Development Assistance Committee, Whole of Government Approaches to Fragile States, Governance, Peace and Security, OECD Development Assistance Committee, Paris, 2006, viewed 22 March 2007,
increasingly tending to be reduced to a ‘security first’ logic.108 As a result, in these operations CIDA’s development projects are increasingly deployed for strategic purposes. This is evident in Canada’s WGA strategy in Kandahar, Afghanistan. According to the Interim Report of the Standing Committee, Canada’s Forces in Afghanistan, development and aid can make a difference only if and when Kandahar is militarily stabilized.109 Hence the Committee recommends that CIDA should be funnelling significant amounts of development money through the military. The overwhelming perception, which regards military security as a pre-condition for development, induces military responses to receive priority in resource allocation.110 Therefore, rather than poverty elimination, CIDA’s programs in Kandahar now focus on stabilizing central institutions such as parliament, the justice system, and the healthcare system—which is believed to support military operations. As a result, CIDA’s development assistance in Kandahar has started to be seen as a part of the strategic planning of ‘winning hearts and minds’. Reflecting this view, the authors of the Interim Report state:
Unless Canada can gain credit for some useful and prominently-seen development efforts in Kandahar, it will remain difficult to gain the support of Afghans in that province, and therefore to stabilize the region. If our troops are to be seen as liberators rather than invaders, their image needs all the help it can get.111
Many NGOs feel that the integration of humanitarian assistance within military and foreign policy threatens the neutrality of independent development workers in the field, as local citizens increasingly perceive humanitarian work as part of the military
108 The Reality of Aid Network, The Reality of Aid 2006: The Focus on Conflict, Security and Development Cooperation, 23 June 2006, viewed 10 April 2007,
operations.112 There is now a concern among various NGOs regarding the effectiveness of independent humanitarian work on the ground, which is challenged because of the blurred lines between development assistance strategies and military operations in the WGA approach. To conclude, the examination of the discourse on failed states and underdevelopment shows that ‘security’ is not an innocent language; it has profound political and humanitarian implications.
4. The Contested Tools of Soft Power: The Discourse on Good Governance
4.1 The good governance agenda
Since the early 1990s, the notion of good governance has penetrated into development, peacekeeping and the post-conflict rebuilding agenda. The increased merger of security and development has set out good governance as the key approach in the activities of many international organisations and Western donors. The emergence of good governance doctrines is traced back to the growing dissatisfaction with structural adjustment programs of the 1980s. In response to the growing criticism of the traditional approaches—that saw economic factors as the main component of development—the emphasis has shifted from a minimalist state to an efficient and strong state.113 By the mid-1990s, both scholars and practitioners started to agree that reinvigorating effective and accountable state institutions ranging from legal, judiciary, public security sectors to electoral management bodies, local governments and civil society plays a vital role in post-conflict rebuilding management.
112 The Reality of Aid Network; Canadian Council on International Cooperation, ‘The Whole-of- Government Approach in “Fragile States”. 113 TG Weiss, ‘Governance, good governance and global governance: conceptual and actual challenges’, Third World Quarterly, vol. 21, no. 5, 2000, pp. 803-804. For the emergence of good governance agenda, see also N Woods, ‘Good Governance in International Organizations’, Global Governance, vol. 5, 1999, pp. 39-61. The detailed discussion of how good governance discourse works in the activities of international organizations, such as the UN and World Bank, is beyond the scope of this thesis. For a critical discussion of good governance discourse see: R Abrahamsen, Disciplining Democracy: Development Discourse and Good Governance in Africa, Zed Books, London, 2000; OR Richmond, The Transformation of Peace, Palgrave Macmillian, New York, 2005; M. Duffield, ‘Governing The Borderlands Decoding the Power of Aid’, paper presented at seminar Politics and Humanitarian Aid: Debates, Dilemmas and Dissension, Commonwealth Institute, London, 1 February 2001; L Zanotti, ‘Governmentalizing the Post-Cold War International Regime: The UN Debate on Democratization and Good Governance’, Alternatives, 30, 2005, pp. 461-487. 105 Chapter Three: Governing Failed States
Since 1989, the World Bank has played the key role in promoting the good governance agenda.114 The Bank acknowledges that there is a strong relationship between good governance and better development outcomes, such as higher per- capita income, lower infant mortality and higher literacy.115 In contrast to narrow economic reform programs of the 1980s, the World Bank started to give emphasis to democracy, human rights, rule of law, and access to justice and basic freedoms.116 Seeing ineffective states as an obstacle to economic growth and social development, the World Bank increasingly adopted a strategy targeted at strengthening public institutions, political accountability, public security management, and participation, decentralization and a competitive private sector.
In the same vein, the greater emphasis on the ‘changing nature of sovereignty’ has located democratization and good governance within UN peace, security and disarmament debates.117 According to the UNDP, good governance— defined as effective, transparent, accountable, and equitable governance based on the rule of law—is critical for sustaining human development.118 For the UNDP, the changing role of the state requires governments to provide an enabling environment for private sector and civil society initiatives; conditions for laws to be applied effectively; and development of capacity of parliamentarians to represent and express the wants and needs of the people. Similarly, in the UN Millennium Declaration good governance has become one of the UN objectives.119 More recently, the Road map towards Implementation of the United Nations Millennium Declaration has affirmed the UN's role in strengthening legal mechanisms and policies for
114 The emergence of the notion of good governance in the World Bank’s agenda is traced back to the Bank’s report entitled Sub-Saharan Africa: From Crisis to Sustainable Growth which identified poor governance as the main cause of Africa’s development problem. World Bank, Sub-Saharan Africa: From Crises to Sustainable Growth, World Bank, Washington, D.C., 1989. 115 D Kaufmann, A Kray & P Zoido-Lobatón, Governance Matters, World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 2196, The World Bank Development Research Group Macroeconomics and Growth and World Bank Institute Governance, Regulation and Finance, Washington, D.C., October 1999. 116 Weiss, pp. 795-814; Woods, Global Governance, pp. 39-61. For a detailed outline of the World Bank's strategy on good governance, see World Bank, Reforming Public Institutions and Strengthening Governance A World Bank Strategy, Public Sector Group Poverty Reduction and Economic Network (PREN), The World Bank, Washington, D.C., November 2000. 117 For a detailed analysis on the emergence of good governance in the UN agenda and how democratization discourse has provided a political rationale for the UN activities, see Zanotti, pp. 461- 487. 118 United Nations Development Programme, Governance for Sustainable Growth and Equity , The Report of International Conference, United Nations Development Programme, New York, 28-30 July 1997, viewed 14 May 2006,
democratic governance; building human rights institutions and conflict resolution mechanisms; encouraging local government and civil society participation in decision-making processes; strengthening public sector management; combating corruption; and enhancing the role of the independent media in developing and fragile states.120
In line with the emergence of good governance discourse in the global agenda, Canada’s development assistance underwent a significant change by the mid-1980s. Although good governance as a concept was not postulated before the mid-1990s, in 1986 the SJC Report entitled Independence and Internationalism presented the first official commitment to promote human rights in Canadian development assistance.121 In its response to the Report, the Mulroney government acknowledged the link between human rights and development, and affirmed that the human rights performance assessments will be a determining factor in the allocation of Canadian development assistance.122 Accordingly in 1987, human rights promotion became one of CIDA’s mandates. In its strategy paper Sharing Our Future, the government established poverty alleviation, structural adjustment, participation of women, and environmentally-sound development as Canada’s development assistance priorities, and confirmed that human rights will be one of the aid eligibility criteria.123
Similar themes were incorporated into the Liberal government’s development assistance program. In 1995, Canada in the World noted that human rights was not only a fundamental universal value, but a “crucial element in the development of stable, democratic and prosperous societies at peace with each other”.124 In announcing its “people-centred development” strategy, the government introduced human rights, democracy and good governance—to increase respect for human rights; to promote democracy and better governance; and to strengthen both civil
120 UN General Assembly, Road map towards the implementation of the United Nations Millennium Declaration, Report of the Secretary General, A/56/326, September, 6, 2001. 121 Parliament of Canada, ‘Independence and Internationalism’, Report of the Special Joint Committee of the Senate and of the House of Commons on Canada’s International Relations, Senate/ House of Commons, Ottawa, June 1986, pp. 15-17. 122 Government of Canada, ‘Canada’s International Relations’, Response of the Government of Canada to the Report of the Special Joint Committee of the Senate and the House of Commons, Department of External Affairs Ottawa, December 1986, p. 25. 123 Canadian International Development Agency, Sharing Our Future, Minister of Supply and Services Canada, Ottawa, 1987. 124 Government of Canada, Canada in the World, p. 34. 107 Chapter Three: Governing Failed States
society and the security of the individual—as one of the six priorities of Canadian Official Development Assistance (ODA).125 Moreover, in parallel with the changes in the WB’s development strategy, the 1994 Report of the SJC Reviewing Canadian foreign policy and Canada in the World changed the Sharing Our Future emphasis on promoting structural adjustment programs with a strategy of paying attention to government institutions and practices—such as reduction of excessive military expenditures and increased transparency of government operations, and providing a necessary environment for private sector development.126 The Report of the SJC also reaffirmed that in the case of countries whose governments are responsible for serious human rights violations, Canada will resort to all necessary measures including the termination of bilateral aid.127
The promotion of good governance in Canada’s development strategy has become a more concrete agenda with the CIDA’s report entitled Government of Canada Policy for CIDA on Human Rights, Democratization and Good Governance.128 Reflecting the overall framework of the government’s foreign policy priorities, CIDA outlined good governance as a crucial element in promoting human security societies. The report gives a detailed list of good governance interventions that Canada will support through its development programs.129 Finally, in 2002, CIDA’s programs on gender, human rights, democratic development and rule of law were included under the heading of governance.130
It is important to note that since the early 1990s, good governance has also been a framework in DFAIT’s failed and fragile states agenda. The concept paper
125 Government of Canada, Canada in the World, p. 42. The other priorities in Canadian ODA were basic human needs, women in development, infrastructure services, private sector development and the environment. 126 ibid., pp. 42-43; Parliament of Canada, Canada’s Foreign Policy, pp. 48-77. 127 Parliament of Canada, Canada’s Foreign Policy, p. 76. 128 Canadian International Development Agency, Government of Canada Policy for CIDA on Human Rights, Democratization and Good Governance, Communications Branch CIDA, Quebec, 1996. 129 These interventions include building civil society through education and outreach programs; strengthening the role of an independent, responsible media; improving the functioning of the legal system and electoral processes; assisting in the creation and strengthening of national human rights institutions; supporting the security sector reforms; encouraging law reforms; and assisting demobilization of ex-combatants in support of peace/reconciliation initiatives. 130 N Thede ‘Human Rights and Democracy: Issues for Canadian Policy in Democracy Promotion’, IRPP Policy Matters, vol. 6, no. 3, May 2005, p. 25, viewed 9 February 2006,
Human Security: Safety for a Changing World establishes a link between governance, state stability and human security. The paper argues that human security declines without effective governance, which in turn undermines state stability and legitimacy.131 Moreover, “Governance and Accountability” constitutes one of the major thematic priorities in HSP which mostly focuses on security sector reform, corruption and transparency, and democratic governance.
4.2 What failed ‘failed states’? Embedded statism in good governance discourse
The rationale of good governance discourse is closely associated with the way in which the state failure is represented and problematized. In the current failed state discourse, there is a strong tendency to regard civil conflicts and state failure as a consequence of poor governance, lack of effective control over one’s territory, poor capacity or unwillingness to assure the provision of public services.132 From this perspective, state failure is a governance crisis. This view is highly supported within the scholarly community. According to Lawrence Freedman, for instance, a weak state defined in terms of having inefficient institutional structures that are unable to contain political tensions, poverty and the problems of economic adjustment.133 Similarly, for Rotberg, today’s failed states are “incapable of projecting power and asserting authority within their borders, leaving their territories governmentally empty”.134 In these descriptions, representation of failed states is framed in terms of one simple functional criterion: governments’ poor capacity to govern its territory both in economic and security terms. The assessment of state failure is based on the characteristics of strong states which meet the Weberian criteria of statehood. There is now a consensus that ‘failed’, ‘weak’, and ‘fragile’ states represent lawlessness, the Hobbesian ‘state of nature’. From this perspective, in Ignatieff’s words, the Hobbesian situations in these states “teach the message of the Leviathan itself that
131 Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, Human Security: Safety for a Changing World, Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, Ottawa, 1999. 132 See, for instance, US Agency for International Development, Fragile States Strategy, USAID, January, 2005, viewed 10 April 2007,
consolidated state power is the very condition for any regime of rights”.135 The fundamental problem is not the Leviathan itself, but the lack of it. The problematique of these representations is that state is regarded both as a problem and a solution. Since the problem of state failure is represented simply as a collapse of Hobbesian contract, the solution ultimately becomes how to strengthen statism. These views reflect the problematic nature of modern politics that, as Michael Dillon argues, envisages no security without the state, which in turn legitimatizes disciplinary politics of Hobbesian thought.136
Perhaps this statist framework is the most dominant feature of Canada’s human security and good governance agenda. The main idea that underpins Canada’s human security discourse is not to downgrade the national security of states, or weaken sovereignty, but to strengthen states’ legitimacy and capacity by making governments open, tolerant and responsive to the safety and democratic demands of their populations.137 As it is constantly emphasized in the recently launched DFAIT- funded Human Security Cities project, state failure is a “governance void” that undermines citizens’ attachment to state, which in turn breeds violence and criminal networks.138 Such representations conceive state failure purely as an internal problem that originates from the failed state itself. In a recent report on sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, “poor government and poor leadership within Africa itself” is seen as the main obstacle in achieving stability in the region.139 This persistent view is also evident in Canada’s approach to Haiti’s political crises. The root cause of Haiti’s fragility is largely perceived as ‘Haiti’s own problem of corruption’ which requires external governance and externally imposed reforms in the form of aid conditionality that could correct the ongoing wrongs in the country. As it is put directly in a Standing Committee Report:
If the country cannot impose the discipline on itself … one of the conditions to providing foreign aid is that there needs to be a systematic program of anti- corruption … one of the reasons Haiti has never developed and basically
135 Ignatieff, Dissent, p. 119. 136 M Dillon, Politics of Security: Towards a political philosophy of continental thought, Routledge, London, 1996, p. 14. 137 Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, Freedom From Fear, p. 2. 138 D Lewis, ‘Why do cities matter on the global stage?’, in Human Security for an Urban Century Local Challenges, Global Perspectives, Human Security-cities.org, Ottawa, p. 22, viewed 13 May 2007,
stayed behind most other countries in Central America and the Caribbean is precisely corruption. If you go back to the 1950s, Haiti was at the same level of economic development as, and perhaps more advanced than, a lot of these countries. Today they might be 100 years ahead of us. The whole thing can be traced to corruption.140
Internalization of the failed state problem and the statist language is reflected in the Canadian sponsored Responsibility to Protect (R2P) project and in IPS’s ‘responsibilities agenda’ which perceive good governance as an ultimate goal of human security discourse. In its final report, the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) perceives sovereignty not simply as a right, but as a responsibility towards one’s own population and international community.141 By casting ‘good governance’ as the primary duty of the sovereign power, the report argues that state authorities and institutions are responsible to protect human rights, to promote social and economic development, and to ensure a fair distribution of resources. The R2P establishes human security as a public good and asserts that the foremost duty of state as a ‘moral agent’ is to provide this public good. To put it more bluntly, from the perspective of ICISS, good governance constitutes the foremost performance criterion in assessing whether states are capable of acting as responsible agents. If the state fails to provide it, the argument goes, the international community has a ‘moral duty’ in restoring good governance, human rights, and rule of law through developmental or military interventions. In other words, the promotion of good governance is not simply a national responsibility, but also an international one: the depreciation of good governance at national level requires and calls for an external solution.
The good governance discourse reveals the hegemonic dimension of Canada’s foreign policy in particular and global politics in general, which is inextricably linked to representational practices that seek to create the fixedness of meaning.142 The good governance discourse perceives failed states as “perennial
140 Parliament of Canada, Canada’s International Policy Put to the Test in Haiti, p.3. 141 International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), The Responsibility to Protect, ICISS, Ottawa, 2001. See D Chandler, ‘The Responsibility to protect? Imposing the “Liberal Peace”’, International Peacekeeping, vol. 11(1), 2004, pp. 59-81. 142 Roxanne Doty argues that the hegemonic practices of global politics are linked with representational practices that seek to fix and naturalize the contested meanings, identities, and differences. R Doty, Imperial Encounters The Politics of Representation in North-South Relations, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1996, pp. 8-9. 111 Chapter Three: Governing Failed States
underachievers”,143 “dysfunctional states”,144 and “tears in the ozone layer”.145 The general policy-making and academic literature conceive the conditions in these states as characterized by deviance, aberration and breakdown from the norms of Western statehood.146 Their performance of statehood is considered to be an abnormal, backward, and invalid style of governance. In this respect, what fails in failed states is the Western “modern social imaginaries” that maintain the traditional norms of the Western world on its ideal social and political surroundings, the expectations of ‘normal’ statehood, and images of internal stability and peace within the Western world that holds these expectations valid, natural and ideal.147 As Jennifer Milliken and Keith Krause argue, failed states tarnish the image of classical narratives of the modern state, its functional and institutional performance: providing security, legitimate representation, welfare and national attachment to state.148 These narratives, as they argue, constitute a modern imagination that rendered statehood, the Westphalian nation state, as the only possible mode of governance which provides the most rational solution to the problem of political disorder. Therefore, in the current failed state discourse, to cite from Milliken and Krause directly, “what has collapsed is more the vision (or dream) of the progressive, developmental state that sustained generations of academics, activists and policy-makers, than any real existing state”.149
Seen in this light, the good governance discourse predicates upon the liberal peace theory and shows its statist framework and functional definition of liberal
143 J Gros, ‘Towards a taxonomy of failed states in the New World Order: decaying Somalia, Liberia, Rwanda, and Haiti’, Third World Quarterly, vol. 17, no.3, 1996, p. 462. 144 S Mallaby, ‘The Reluctant Imperialist Terrorism, Failed States, and the Case for American Empire’, Foreign Affairs, vol. 81:2, 2002, p. 3. 145 Ignatieff, Dissent, p. 117. 146 AD Morton, ‘The ‘Failed State’ of International Relations’, New Political Economy, vol. 10, no. 3, September 2005, pp. 371-379. 147 I borrowed the term “modern social imaginary” from Charles Taylor. By modern social imaginary, Taylor means the way the people imagine their social existence, their relations with friends and enemies, the expectations that are normally met, the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations, common understanding that makes common practices possible, and a widely shared sense of legitimacy. C Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, Duke University Press, Durham, 2004, p. 23. 148 J Milliken & K Krause, ‘State Failure, State Collapse, and State Reconstruction: Concepts, Lessons, and Strategies, Development and Change, 33(5), 2002, pp. 753-774. Seen in this perspective, it can be argued that, although ICISS re-defines the norm of non-intervention, its approach of ‘sovereignty as responsibility’ is not a redefinition of sovereignty. ICISS does not recast the idea of the modern state. Rather, by defining state as the main provider of security, and by de-linking intervention from strategic interests, ICISS naturalizes the role of sovereign as being the provider of security both inside the state and abroad. 149 ibid., p. 762. 112 Chapter Three: Governing Failed States
democracy unproblematically. Like liberal peace theory, good governance discourse assumes that international peace and security can only be sustained through the domestic institutional structures within states and through promoting market democracies. Tarak Barkawi and Mark Laffey argue that the democratic peace debate is caught in a “territorial trap” in a way that the (liberal democratic) sovereign territorial state is located at the core of the theory.150 It not only conceives democracy as an observable fact regardless of its historical and social context, but also fixes its meaning as to a particular set of electoral institutions and political and civil rights within the boundaries of a sovereign state.
This is not to say that governments in failed and fragile states do not constitute a problem, or to advance the idea of turning a blind eye towards the human suffering in civil wars. It is unquestionable that in many parts of Africa, for instance, the weak democratic institutions, corruption, violent treatment of citizens and repressive governments are responsible for creating human insecurity. Yet, framing the failed states problem as a domestic problem is a ‘problem-solving’ approach which maintains the silence on the current social and power relations, and institutions. Such an approach obscures the role of colonisation/decolonisation, modernization, the arms production and exports of Western countries, and externally-imposed economic and political liberalisation in creating the foundations of weaknesses in these states.
Furthermore such a problem-solving approach masks the role of the Canadian state in contributing to state fragility. Some examples are worth emphasizing. For instance, representing Haiti’s political crises as arising from internal corruption leaves Canada’s support of International Monetary Fund (IMF) policies and their detrimental impact in Haiti unquestioned. As it is widely argued, neo-liberal reforms in Haiti that required reducing tariffs, laying-off state employees, and selling the most profitable state-run industries to foreign corporations not only contributed to Haiti’s political crises, but also made the Haitian poorest the main victims.151 Furthermore, while the instability in sub-Saharan Africa is merely named as ‘Africa’s problem’, despite the continuous pledges of the Canadian Government to
150 T Barkawi & M Laffey, ‘The Imperial Peace: Democracy, Force and Globalization’, European Journal of International Relations, vol. 5(4), 1999, pp. 412- 413. 151 For Canadian foreign policy towards Haiti and detrimental impact of IMF policies in Haiti, see Keating, Ethics and security in Canadian foreign policy, pp. 208-226. 113 Chapter Three: Governing Failed States
untie the Canadian aid, half of its aid is still tied.152 As it is argued, tied aid for goods and services distorts local priorities, and denies local contractors the opportunity of using aid money to boost employment, development, and their own skills and capacity.153 It can be argued that the interests of Canadian business dominate aid policies. Reflecting the priorities of Canadian business, almost half of the Canadian Fund for Africa, which was created to support the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) and G8 Africa Action Plan, is allocated for initiatives that directly support Canadian private-sector interests.154 The 43% of the Fund goes to furthering an investment and external trade-oriented growth strategy in Africa.155 The consequences of the integration of African countries into an inequitable global economic system is absent in these debates.
Perhaps more importantly, while Canada promotes a good governance agenda abroad, the Canadian Government shows an inability and reluctance to regulate the overseas activities of Canadian corporations, or to cease government assistance to Canadian corporations whose large projects have detrimental impacts in some developing countries. It is claimed that the overseas activities of some Canadian corporations—in particular mining and other resource companies—contribute to serious environmental, social and economic risks—such as land alienation and degradation, ecosystem destruction, health deterioration, damaging the locally-
152 According to DAC statistics in 2000, 75% of Canadian bilateral aid was tied, which was one the highest rates among DAC members. Development Assistance Committee, Canada Development Co- operation Review, p. 48. Despite the policy on aid untying announced in 2002, by 2003, 47.4% of Canadian ODA was tied. For details see Canadian International Development Agency, Implementation of the Policy on Tied–Untied Aid Audit Report, CIDA Internal Audit Division Performance and Knowledge Management Branch, Quebec, July 2005, viewed 09 April 2007,
owned companies, political unrest, and huge debt burdens in some developing countries.156
As it is now largely documented, some of the Canadian corporations play a role in exacerbating the civil wars. The Talisman Energy case and the Canadian Government’s inaction and silence still remain contested. According to the final report of John Harker (who was asked by DFAIT to investigate the acquisitions against Talisman), Talisman Energy Inc was involved in the forced relocation of civilian populations in the oil development fields of Sudan to preserve a more secure environment for oil extraction.157 However, despite the findings of the Harper Report, the Canadian Government chose not to apply economic or trade restrictions against Talisman. Rather, Axworthy announced that the Canadian Government would pursue ‘constructive engagement’ as a policy option.158 As promoted by Axworthy, ‘constructive engagement’ promotes the idea that trade relations and human rights are not ‘antithetical’; rather, close trade relations and agreements can influence others in terms of their policies on human rights, and democratic government structures.159 The Canadian Government’s inaction against Talisman ultimately raises questions about Canada’s R2P agenda and people-centred dimension of human security. To conclude, seeing state failure as arising from internal inability is a “selective transnationalism” which provides a basis for an organized forgetting or political ignorance of Canada’s role in perpetuating the status quo that renders people insecure.160
156 NGO Working Group on the Export Development Canada (EDC), Seven Deadly Secrets: What the Export Development Canada does not want you to know, January 2003, viewed 12 March 2007,
4.3 Cartographies of human security: Contested identities and landscapes of good governance discourse
Canada’s good governance discourse reinforces the universalist claims and ethnocentric representations of liberal peace. The good governance discourse projects its universalising values through presenting the liberal model of governance as the universal form of political organization. As Katherine Smith argues, the rhetoric of liberal peace presents the liberal subject as the only rational one.161 Liberal peace theory constructs illiberal/undemocratic as different and dangerous. Hence it projects the idea that ‘the Perpetual Peace’ can only be attained by bringing the illiberal states into the ‘zone of peace’.162 Drawing upon liberal peace theory, good governance discourse categorises and hierarchizes territorial spaces on the basis of the ontological claim that constructs liberal states as inherently peaceful. It establishes the ‘“standard of civilization”—a set of global cultural (and political) norms that specify the qualifications for gaining the status and privilege of being considered a “civilized nation.”’163 In doing so, it delegitimatizes illiberal states, naturalizes the boundaries between liberal/democratic and nonliberal/nondemocratic states, and aims to expand liberal spaces and their social, political and economic institutions. In short, the discourse on good governance delineates how liberal ‘self’ and illiberal ‘other’ are perceived in liberal peace, and how their relations are understood.
First, Canada’s good governance discourse predicates upon an ontological claim that represents Canadian values and political systems as the most reliable and rational form of governance which makes Canada a “model citizen”.164 Deriving from a Canadian myth of ‘peace, order and good government’, good governance is
161 K Smith, ‘International Identity Construction and the Liberal Peace’, Pacifica Review, vol. 7, no. 1, 1995, pp. 47-60. 162 John Macmillian argues that democratic peace theory reinforces the opposition between liberal and non-liberal states. In doing so it normalizes the war between them. J Macmillian, ‘A Kantian Protest Against the Peculiar Discourse of Inter-Liberal State Peace’, Millennium, Winter 1995, vol. 25, no. 3, pp. 549-563. 163 AA Lantham, ‘Theorizing the Landmine Campaign: Ethics, Global Cultural Scripts, and the Laws of War’, in R. Irwin (ed.), Ethics and Security in Canadian Foreign Policy, UBC Press, Vancouver, p. 162. 164 In Canadian foreign policy, the ‘model citizen’ approach is developed and promoted by Jennifer Welsh. J Welsh, At home in the World: Canada’s Global Vision for the 21st Century, Harper Collins, Toronto, 2004, pp. 187- 234. 116 Chapter Three: Governing Failed States
not simply seen as a foreign policy agenda, but as “Canadian expression of what governance ought to be about: democratic institutions, federalism, minority rights guarantees, linguistic pluralism, aboriginal self-government and a positive, enabling role for government in economic and social development”.165 This model approach is promoted by government, Canadian non-state organizations and the academic community. For instance, according to Jennifer Welsh, the highly successful model of liberal democracy which values pluralism, free markets, robust human rights, culture, and civic models of governance positions Canada as a model in failed and fragile states.166 According to Welsh, Canadian values are extremely attractive and would create a “magnetic effect” in other societies. This model approach constitutes a general framework in the IPS’s responsibilities agenda that locates good governance as an area in which Canada has a comparative advantage. The IPS suggests that:
For those in countries where violence threatens to overtake political accommodation … Canada’s long history of accommodation of linguistic, ethnic, and cultural differences … offers a glimmer of hope. Our system of governance represents a laboratory full of intriguing experiments that can assist others engaged in the complex task of institutional building. This understanding of “DNA” of governance is an important resource Canada can use to make a difference.167
Similarly, according to former Prime Minister Paul Martin, Canada, being one of the first ‘post-modern’ states which set the example of practicing multiculturalism, can be a model in ethnically divided countries. He argues:
Perhaps, that is why Sri Lanka has turned to Canadian experts for help in developing a federal solution to its inter-communal strife. Thus, as a major industrialized nation, but never a colonial nor a super power, we have certain unique advantages, as we focus much more than we have in the past on institution building as the essential foundation of a secure, modern state.168
165 M Ignatieff, ‘Peace, Order and Good Government: A Foreign Policy Agenda for Canada’, Skelton Memorial Lecture, Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, 12 March 2004, viewed 10 December 2006,
As discussed in Chapter Two, such utterances on Canadian values work as a discursive practice that constructs the ‘Canadian self’. They not only mask the social and political inequalities within Canada, but they also naturalize Canadian values and its political system by representing them as ‘best practice’ that could be exported as a universal model.169 The ‘model citizen’ approach endorses an inside/outside dichotomy in a sense that while Canada is imagined as a nation of ‘peace, order and good government’ and a “prototype of the kind of society … [of] diversity [and] tolerance”, failed or weak states are constructed as other which are less civilized and morally inferior.170
This construction of otherness can be found in various official speeches and reports which empower ‘two worlds’ of liberal peace. For instance, the former Foreign Affairs Minister Bill Graham uncritically acknowledges Robert Copper’s categorization of pre-modern, modern and post-modern world.171 Similarly, a study of the DND Research Division endorses Ralph Peter’s ethnocentric spatialization of the world that is conceived as divided between open and traditional-bound societies.172 The cognitive maps of liberal peace are also evident in the representations of Afghanistan and Somalia. In a report on Canadian troops in Afghanistan, Afghanistan and the Afghani population are depicted as a failure of modernism, a “medieval society” which is “only remotely connected to the modern world”.173 Further, Sherene Razack examines the reports on Canada’s Somalia inquiry, and the related stories in the media, and argues that, in these texts, Somalia and Somalis were represented in racialized terms such as “primitive people”, “polluted people” , a country living in a “chaos of tribal warfare”, and “caught in a
169 The identity-producing effects of the model citizen discourse are two-fold: it constructs Canadian self not only as a part liberal zone, but also as the most enlightened nation that presents best practice of governance within the liberal zone. 170 L Axworthy, Notes for an Address by The Honourable Lloyd Axworthy, Minister of Foreign Affairs, at the John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies ‘Partners in Progress’ Canada and the United States in World Affairs’, Washington, D.C., March 27, 1996, viewed 20 January 2006,
destructive spiral of tradition”.174 Robert Kaplan’s legacy is visible in these representations, which suggests that knowledge creates truth and produces practice, which in turn naturalizes the knowledge.175 What makes these representations so natural and unproblematic is that, in Foucault’s words, their “political economy of truth” is centred on and circulated through academic discourse, media, and governmental institutions and practices. These representations mimic the old scripts of Orientalist constructions of ‘self’ and ‘other’ which conceived the Oriental as irrational, depraved, and childlike, and the European as rational, peaceful, logical, mature, and “normal”.176 These binary oppositions, as Edward Said argues, construct arbitrary boundaries between territorial spaces and their surroundings: they form an “imaginative geography of ‘our land-barbarian land’”, which conceives ‘their’ territory and mentality as different from ‘ours’.177 These perpetuated constructions not only secure the superiority of Canadian/Western self, but also invest an “ethical identity” that implies Canadian/Western ‘self’ has an extraterritorial moral and ethical responsibility to advance the inferior ‘other’.178
Second, as Roxanne Doty argues, it is important to grasp the productive aspects of these representational practices, which enable tactical and positive interventions of regulation, surveillance, monitoring and control.179 Hence, from a Foucauldian perspective, the power of the discourse on good governance is not repressive, but productive. It does not aim to conquer, but to emancipate the violent spaces and to protect people from the repressive power of the sovereign, by generating liberal subjects which can govern themselves according to the established norms of the modern and liberal state. The good governance interventions in
174 S Razack, ‘From the “Clean Snows of Petawawa”: The Violence of Canadian Peacekeepers in Somalia’, Cultural Anthropology, February 2005, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 127-164. 175 RD Kaplan, ‘The Coming Anarchy’, The Atlantic Monthly, 273, 2, Feb 1994, pp 44-76. Perhaps Kaplan’s ‘Coming Anarchy’ constitutes one of the first examples of how failed and weak states are represented in ethnocentric terms. According to Kaplan, scarcity, crime, overpopulation, tribalism and explosion of HIV, which are believed to arise from the cities of the South, are destroying “the social fabric of our planet” and “our civilization”. For Kaplan the “pastoral way of life”, “polygamy”, “communalism”, and “animism” represent the life of the cities of the South. Therefore, for Kaplan, failed and weak states (and more generally ‘the South’) present abnormality and deviancy from modern life. 176 EW Said, Orientalism Western Conceptions of the Orient, Penguin Books, New Delhi, 2001, p. 40, 49. 177 ibid., p. 54. 178 According to Lene Hansen, foreign policy practices enable three dimension of identity construction: spatial, temporal and ethnical. Hansen argues that development discourse, human rights and human security by the end of the Cold War were powerful discursive moves that invested the ethnical identity of the West. Hansen, pp. 46-51. 179 Doty, Imperial Encounters, p. 128. 119 Chapter Three: Governing Failed States
borderlands aim to transform these states from within by ‘helping them to help themselves’. In other words, good governance discourse works as a governmental practice, which aims to generate new life-forms, reformation of these countries through making them function as governments—as responsible social international citizens, instead of uncontrolled sovereigns—and through transforming them into manageable, visible, and predictable actors in a normalized international arena.180
The good governance discourse does not only target the reformation of state institutions. It penetrates into populations and aims to transform these societies from the bottom-up by promoting a civil society. As Foucault suggests, liberalism is a rationality of power that promotes a specific form of governance that operates through forming the autonomy of citizens, who are expected to be active in their own government and responsible for their own welfare and security.181 Seen in this light, the extensive focus on promoting civil society, building capacity at local level, decentralization in Canada’s human security programs and development assistance is not accidental, but a tactical intervention at the level of population which aims to remake these borderlands as liberal civic spaces.
It is important to note that good governance interventions in non-Western societies do not work in the form of modern imperialism. Rather, good governance approach aims to enhance a ‘partnership’ approach. As Duffield argues, what makes liberal peace different from imperialism is that the former does not aim at direct territorial control or pacification.182 Rather, he argues, liberal peace seeks to secure stability within those countries through developmental strategies of self-management and participation.183 Indeed, there is a widely held perception surrounding Canada’s good governance rhetoric that Canada does not aim to impose a regime change in those countries, neither does it seek to transplant the Canadian model in other countries.184 Reflecting this view, Welsh asserts that Canada’s model citizen approach should not be seen as a form of imperialism or occupation; rather, Canada works as a “teacher, consultant” and a “partner”.185 Indeed, since Sharing Our Future, this partnership approach has become a rhetorical basis of CIDA’s aid
180 Zanotti, p. 480. 181 M Merlingen & R Ostrauskaite, ‘Power/Knowledge in International Building: The Case of the EU Police Mission in Bosnia’, Alternatives, 30, 2005, p. 302. 182 Duffield, Global Governance and The New Wars, pp. 31-34. 183 ibid., p. 34. 184 See, for instance, Welsh, p. 190. 185 ibid., p. 190. 120 Chapter Three: Governing Failed States
policies.186 In Strengthening Aid Effectiveness, CIDA defines its new concept of ‘enhanced partnership relationship’ as being based on principles of equality, shared rights, roles and responsibilities between Canada and aid recipient.187 It aims to advance good governance principles through shared objectives and agreed-upon responsibilities which seek to strengthen local ownership and local participation in aid recipient countries. By bringing Canadian Government, Canadian NGOs, and civil society together as a network, the partnership approach aims to build a humanitarian, moral, and political solidarity between agents in the North and South, joined together to pursue a common goal of social change.188 In short, the partnership approach reflects the view that, as Duffield suggests “people in the South are no longer ordered what to do—they are now expected to it willingly by themselves”. 189
For Welsh, Canada’s role in developing failed states as a teacher or consultant is an unproblematic approach. However, as Laura Macdonald argues, partnership rhetoric conceals and legitimatizes inequalities between partners in this relationship.190 Rather than being equal partners, it establishes a ‘teacher–pupil’ relationship which is inextricably linked with the hierarchical representation of Western ‘self’ and non-Western ‘other’. Failed and fragile states or developing countries are seen as a ‘child’ who has a lack of capacity for self-governance, and is therefore in need of Canadian expertise, knowledge, technology and technical assistance. Accordingly such perceptions aim to normalize these countries through the techniques of discipline: hierarchical observations, normalizing judgements, and examination.191 These perceptions legitimatise the monitoring systems in recent aid policies.
The technique of discipline in Canada’s good governance discourse reveals itself in the new form of aid selectivity which aspires to reward or punish countries
186 DR Black & R. Tiessen, ‘The Canadian International Development Agency: New Policies, Old Problems’, Canadian Journal of Development Studies, forthcoming 2007. For a historical evaluation and a discussion of Canadian partnership approach from a post-colonial perspective, also see L Macdonald, ‘Unequal Partnership: The Politics of Canada’s Relations with the Third World’, Studies in Political Economy, 47, summer 1995, pp. 111-141. 187 Canadian International Development Agency, Canada making a difference in the world, pp. 9-13. 188 Black & Tiessen 189 Duffield, Global Governance and the New Wars, p. 34. 190 Macdonald, p. 140. 191 M Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of Prison, Pantheon Books, New York, 1977, pp. 170-194. 121 Chapter Three: Governing Failed States
with regards to their performance in promoting good governance. Adopting the Monterrey Consensus uncritically, CIDA now aims to target countries exhibiting good governance and sound economic policies, when deciding the allocation of Canadian ODA.192 A recent report on increasing aid effectiveness in Africa suggests that three pre-conditions must be met before Canadian development aid can be received: aid recipients must now display good governance, make a real effort to achieve economic growth and create jobs, and must work hard to develop their private sectors and to establish a favourable investment climate.193 It is now believed that focusing on ‘good performers’ in the distribution of Canadian ODA will be an incentive for ‘bad performers’ to improve their economic and political governance.194 As Laura Zanotti argues, the increased focus on good governance performances of ‘disorderly countries’ aims to standardize behaviour of all states so that disorderly states are now placed within a mechanism of constant discipline through the creation of databases, standards, and indicators of performance.195 The paradoxical nature of the partnership approach is that while it aims to make development policies more sensitive to local needs and expectations, by homogenizing state policies in line with neo-liberal policies, it frames and limits the expectations of the people in the South.
5. Conclusion
This chapter called Canada’s activism on the international humanitarian agenda into question. It argued that despite its humanist language, Canada’s human security discourse reflects its national security and economic concerns. It starts with a fear that failed states and the associated threats of state failure pose a danger to the order of liberal peace. However, securitization is not simply a rhetorical act. As this chapter showed, it has enormous political and humanitarian implications. When human insecurity is framed in terms of danger to the Western world (or Canadian security), the imperative concern becomes to reduce or contain the danger posed by
192 For the discussion of the Monterrey Consensus and selectivity in foreign aid which targets countries that display good governance, see D Dollar & V. Levin, ‘The Increasing Selectivity of Foreign Aid, 1984–2003’, World Development, vol. 34, no. 12, 2006, pp. 2034- 2046. 193 Parliament of Canada, Overcoming 40 Years of Failure, p. 63. 194 ibid., p. 63 195 Zanotti, pp. 461-487. 122 Chapter Three: Governing Failed States
borderlands. Such frameworks not only downgrade the normative value of human security, but also mask how the new humanitarian and developmental language functions as constructive of liberal order. This chapter argued that Canada’s human security discourse is ultimately a liberal project which conceives “the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of government”.196 Such ontological claims not only deepen the self and other constructions of international politics, but also construct an emancipatory mission for the West in general and Canada in particular. Yet the examination of good governance discourse suggests that the liberal self does not exclude the ‘other’; rather, it aims to include the ‘different’ and ‘dangerous’ other into the ‘Pacific Union’ by transforming it into a liberal subject that is able to self-correct and self-govern. To conclude, what remains contested in the discourses on human security is that, as Anthony Burke argues, “whatever their critical values, they leave in place a key structural feature of the elite strategy they oppose: its claim to embody truth and to fix the contours of the real.” 197
196 F. Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, New York, Free Press, 1992, p. 2. 197 Burke, Beyond Security, p. 31. 123 Conclusion
CONCLUSION 1. Whose Security?
Michael Dillon argues that “security is a principle device for constituting political order and for confining political imagination within the laws of necessity of the specific rationalities thrown-up by their equally manifold discourses of danger”.1 The central argument of this thesis was that Canada’s human security discourse works to secure the Canadian imagination of a particular political order in Canada and abroad. The examination of the Canadian case demonstrated that despite the claims to the contrary, the human security discourse shares many aspects of a traditional understanding of security that locates the security of the nation as a central goal. Canada’s human security agenda predicates upon a traditional fear of national insecurity; thereby it works to imagine and contain dangers to the Canadian state. Based upon this central argument, this thesis revealed the ‘regime of truth’ of Canada’s human security discourse: its power of constructing and strengthening common-sense assumptions and representations, and its power of enabling certain political techniques which, ironically, conceal and marginalize various forms of ‘human insecurities’ within Canada and abroad.
This argument was put forward through the analysis of domestic and international dimension of Canada’s human security agenda. Chapter Two examined how the truth effects of the discourse on human security work to preserve ‘national political order’. It argued that Canada’s historical anxiety of political survival facilitates the Canadian state to intervene into Canadian society and to control how Canadians define themselves. The continuous crises of national unity enable the ensemble of techniques that are deployed for the constant surveillance of Canadian identity. Seen in this light, Chapter Two argued that foreign policy is not completely ‘foreign’, but one of these techniques of governmental power that penetrates into society through constructing, circulating and naturalizing the positive attributes attached to national identity. Historically, Canadian foreign policy plays an important role in making Canada and injecting a national goodness into the ‘imagined community’ of Canadians.
1 M Dillon, Politics of Security: Towards a political philosophy of continental thought, Routledge, London, 1996, p. 16. 124 Conclusion
The examination of both Canadian internationalism during the Cold War and its continuation of the human security agenda reveals how the positive representation of the ‘Canadian nation’ as being generous, peaceful, tolerant, and kind has been (re)produced continuously with an aim to defer the counter-narratives of First Nations, and in particular Quebecois. Chapter Two showed that the promotion of Canada’s human security agenda is not accidental, but is part of a nation-building project that was vigorously refined by the Canadian Government after the 1995 Referendum through various national unity strategies. By (re)invoking key narratives of shared values such as respect for democracy, diversity, multiculturalism, rule of law, and tolerance; the peacekeeping myth; and anti-American dimension of Canadian identity, human security discourse constructs and circulates the narrative of the ‘uniqueness of the Canadian way’. However, these representations are not self- evident. My contestation of ontological claims on Canadian identity showed that throughout Canadian history they have been used to make a ‘single identity’, to construct an idea of ‘we’, and to promote homogeneity within Canada that often resulted in various practices of exclusion of and discrimination against different identities. Further, the ongoing securitization practices of refuges and migration in Canada’s current national security strategy and the exclusion of poverty, and economic and social polarization within Canada from the definition of human security, are examples that demonstrate how the language of human security does not work for the security of ‘Canadian people’. Rather, it operates in the name of an elitist strategy that constructs the preservation of Canada’s political and social ‘integrity’ at the level of both each individual’s mind and soul and the Canadian population as a whole.
Chapter Three examined different dilemmas of Canada’s human security agenda in the discussion of the securitization of failed states. It showed how the Canadian discourse on human security and its ‘production of truth’ in regards to the ‘failed state’ problematique work to defend Canada’s national security and aim to produce a ‘liberal international order’. Canada’s human security discourse is constructed through a fear of how state failure and its associated threats constitute a danger to Canada’s economic, social, and political order. Chapter Three argued that, in Canadian foreign policy, failed states are represented as being the sources of various threats to the Canadian national security. However, security is not an
125 Conclusion
innocent language. It has enormous political implications that naturalize state-centric solutions and problematically merge Canada’s defence and development policies. Deriving from in/security logic, Canada’s development and human security policies now become an element of its defence strategy, and are thereby increasingly driven by a strategic rationale.
The examination of the discursive practices in Canada’s foreign policy demonstrated that the construction of failed states as being an ‘existential threat’ to global welfare and security represents state failure not simply as a humanitarian problem, but as crises for the order of the ‘liberal peace’. From this perspective, failed states are delegitimized; they are seen as irresponsible states that are incapable of governing their territory. The discussion of good governance discourse showed that rather than challenging ethnocentric constructions of international politics, Canada’s human security agenda perpetuates them through representations of failed states as irrational, childlike and—most importantly—as failures of modernity. As a consequence, Canada’s good governance discourse becomes an international technology of governmental power that aims to reform borderlands by penetrating into their social, political and economic life. However, Chapter Three argued that reducing the problem of state-failure into an ‘internal problem’ masks and strengthens the role of the Canadian state and business in contributing to ‘human insecurity’. The increased use of Canadian development assistance for the interests of Canadian business, tied aid, advocacy of neo-liberal reforms, and silences on the contested activities of Canadian corporations in conflict zones, raise questions on who the subject of human security is.
In short, this thesis posed a very simple, but an enormously important question. Who is secured through the language and implementation of the human security agenda? The Canadian example leaves the answer extremely problematic.
2. Human Security, Emancipation and the Possible Directions for Critical Security Studies
A similarly important question remains: Should any critical project on security advocate the concept of human security if its language and practice are so contested and problematic? In this regard, as a final note, it is important to discuss
126 Conclusion
the tensions between emancipatory-oriented and post-structuralist/post-positivist approaches, or “reconstructive” and “deconstructive” schools in the critical security studies.2 As previously mentioned, despite their resistance to the political usage of human security, emancipatory-oriented approaches strongly support a definite alternative definition of security. The ‘deconstructive’ approaches, on the other hand, often defer any normative claim, and mainly aim to reveal the contestability of political discourses. Undoubtedly, the political nature of common-sense assumptions, their “play of practice” and their impact on people’s security, are the common concerns which are shared by both schools. This thesis argued that, particularly in an analysis of the discourse on human security, while it is important to acknowledge the ideal of the concept that is promoted by the “reconstructive” school, it is also essential to recognize its limitations. Such a critical inquiry on the Critical Security Studies itself may facilitate a mode of analysis that emphasizes the normative ideals of human security without advocating them uncritically. Seen in this light, several limitations of the ideals and mode of analysis of the reconstructive school are worth mentioning.
The first question is whether, as Richard Wyn Jones argues, a critical/emancipatory-oriented project should indicate “immanent possibilities” for change in the current order to epistemologically justify the proposals on alternative versions of security.3 While Jones’s proposal is important to operationalize the transformative ideas in practice, the question remains as to how we proceed if what seems an ‘immanent possibility’ is not actually ‘immanent’ or self-evident? This thesis implies that the focus on ‘immanent possibility’ needs caution particularly in the analysis of policy practices that are derived from emancipatory or moral claims. A short example of Canada’s generous debt relief clarifies the argument made in this thesis. Canada is one of the leading countries in pressing for a comprehensive framework for debt relief. For example, in 1999, the Chretien government offered
2 A Burke & M McDonald, ‘Introduction: Asia-Pacific security legacies and futures’, in A Burke & M McDonald, Critical Security in the Asia Pacific, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2007, pp. 4-5. 3 RW Jones, ‘On Emancipation: Necessity, Capacity and Concrete Utopias’ in K Booth (ed.), Critical Security Studies and World Politics, Lynne Rienner, London, 2005, pp.218- 230; For the critique of Richard Wyn Jones’s proposal on bringing ‘immanent possibilities’ into analysis, see A Burke, Beyond Security, Ethics and Violence: War against the Other, Routledge, New York, 2007, p. 21. 127 Conclusion
100% cancellation of bilateral debt for 16 highly indebted poor countries.4 Moreover, after the Asian tsunami in 2004, Prime Minister Paul Martin announced an immediate moratorium on debt payments for those countries affected by the disaster. It may be argued that these developments reflect the moral changes in the conduct of international politics. However, when one reveals the conditionality in debt relief which is granted to the countries that complete their policy reforms set out in the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative (HIPC)—which uncritically endorses macro-economic conditions and liberalization policies set by the WB and the IMF—then the ‘immanent possibility’ becomes highly contested. This does not mean that a critical project should only focus on constant failures of state practices, or that there is no room for any possible progressive change in the discourses of international politics. As it is mentioned before, the meanings of discourses are not closed; they are open for change and struggles. Seen in this light, what is suggested in this study is that rather than simply focusing on explicit human wrongs, or acknowledging the ‘immanent possibilities’ uncritically for the sake of the practicability of normative values, uncovering the power-politics of “realizable utopias” may offer a more critical tool to challenge and change the dominant/hegemonic meanings of political discourses which is an ultimate goal of a critical project that is also sought by reconstructive school itself.5 Second is the problematique of emancipation. In particular, for the Welsh school, security is defined as emancipation. This definition closely associates with the UNDP definition of human security which undoubtedly brings an alternative, human-centric and not statist understanding of security. While it is important to acknowledge the emancipatory potential of human security as defined by reconstructive school or the UNDP, as this thesis showed, the language of emancipation also has problems. For example, Chapter Two, in its discussion of ethnic/civic nationalism suggested that the emancipatory claims of the Canadian Government emerge as a form of disciplinary/governmental technology which aspires to free all people from the oppressive nature of ethnic/cultural groups; thereby it imagines and preserves a homogeneity within Canada. Chapter Three
4 For the details and discussion of Canada’s debt relief efforts see B Tomlinson, The Politics of the Millennium Development Goals: Contributing to Strategies for Ending Poverty, Part Three, Canada and Global Partnership for Development, Canadian Council for International Co-operation, Ottawa, 31 May 2005, pp. 11-14, viewed 10 March 2007, < http://www.ccic.ca/e/docs/002_aid_2005- 05_politics_of_mdgs_part_3.pdf>. 5 Jones, p. 230. 128 Conclusion
made a similar argument and suggested that the good governance discourse aims to emancipate people from state structures through re-making failed/failing states as responsible and self-governing. The problematic nature of the Canadian good governance discourse is that it becomes disciplinary/governmental technology which manifests a homogenous transformation of people and states in the name of the political order of the liberal zone whose images and assumptions purport a pre-given superiority of Canadian values and Western liberal forms of governance. Therefore, this thesis suggests that for a critical project it is important not simply to acknowledge the progressive understandings of security that aim to emancipate people, but to deconstruct top-down emancipatory claims and to engage with a mode of analysis that emancipates the ‘emancipation’ from its politics.
Finally, a word on the politics of knowledge or, in Foucauldian terms, power/knowledge. As argued throughout this thesis, discourses are not simply top- down constructions, but are also bottom-up constructions through being grounded in academic research and NGO knowledge. In this regard, Chapter One showed how realist/institutional perspectives of human security form a self-legitimating system of power/knowledge. Chapter Two demonstrated how the hegemonic meaning of the Canadian identity is circulated through academic studies, polls and advertisements which constitute ‘identity knowledge’. Similarly, Chapter Three suggested how political realism in Canada’s foreign policy is perpetuated through academic studies and how ethnocentric or Orientalist representation of failed states is not simply utterances of state officials, but are also an embedded part of the academic literature. These examples reveal that knowledge—or theory—is not simply a scholarly enterprise, but is itself a political practice that constructs, defines, and frames the way we understand reality. It is thereby a contested feature of power relations. For this reason, it is important to refrain from any ‘truth claims’ on what security is. Any progressive and alternative, but prescriptive proposals on how security should be defined may end up with an imposition of certain understandings of reality and a Platonic reading of security that may become a contested ‘play of practice’ itself which the reconstructive school seeks to challenge. Further, for a critical project it is important to interrogate the power of discourses through the examination of the politics of the bottom-up approaches, rather than taking their transformative values as granted or just focusing on the contested nature of the top-down policy-practices.
129 Conclusion
In this regard, there is still a need for further research on the policy discourses of Canadian NGOs and civil society in developing countries, such as their policies on promotion of Canadian values and soft power.
To conclude, this thesis does not argue that a critical inquiry on security should refrain from advocating the progressive idea of human security. Rather, it suggests that human security still remains the only holistic security concept that inspires a transformation in policy-practices. However, this thesis refrains from offering a proposal on what human security should look like or how it should be turned into a concrete policy agenda. Rather, it simply argues that if the discourse of human security is to be meaningful, it has to be re-written not by the Canadian state, but primarily by people who are silenced and marginalized under dominant political and economic structures. If the discourse of human security is to be an ‘immanent possibility’, it has to dispute the cartographic anxieties and the narcissistic celebration of national imaginations.
130 Bibliography
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