Part of Palgrave's Canada and International Affairs series, this book offers a fresh theoretical approach to Canadian foreign policy and identity alongside timely reflections on the future of the country within an increasingly tumultuous international order. You can order the book here.

 

In the early days of the so-called "Global War on Terror," the Canadian government made two decisions that would define Canadian foreign policy for nearly two decades: to formally join the Afghanistan War in 2001 and abstain from the Iraq War in 2003. Explaining why the government made these decisions has been a fixture within studies on Canadian Foreign Policy for decades. In light of the disastrous and deadly events surrounding the hasty NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021, it is time to re-visit these marquee foreign policy decisions from a new perspective.

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This book examines how popular narratives of Canadian identity became implicated in Canada’s foreign policy in the Global War on Terror. While traditional approaches look to the causal role of alliance obligations, international law, and terrorist threats to explain these decisions, few have accounted for the unique ways these factors manifested in Canadian Parliamentary discussions over foreign policy: each was made an issue of Canadian identity.

 

I argue that Canada’s decisions to join the 2001 Afghanistan War yet abstain from the 2003 Iraq War became politically possible because parliamentarians linked these policies to similar narratives of an enduring Canadian identity - even while re-imagining their meanings. These decisions are explored through politicians’ mobilization of three discourses: Canada as America’s neighbour, Canada as protector of foreign civilians, and Canada as a champion of multilateralism.  This book challenges conceptions of national identity as entirely stable or fluid and contests predominant arguments that downplay the role of identity discourses in Canadian foreign policy. Furthermore, while the relevance of debates within the Canadian House of Commons have traditionally been downplayed, I argue that parliamentary discussions draw together historical and contemporary identity discourses in unique arrangements that not only formulate the terms of foreign policy debate, but debate over who Canada is in arguing what Canada must do. In the latter part of the book, the relevance of these identity narratives is assessed by exploring the rhetoric of Canadian foreign policy in light of contemporary international challenges, including the Donald Trump presidency, the COVID-19 pandemic, and Russia’s War in Ukraine.

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