Macrosecuritization and the securitization dilemma in the Canadian Arctic

Abstract

This article explores the process of macrosecuritization in reference to overlapping security claims in the Canadian Arctic. It identifies how macrosecuritizing frames, such as the Cold War, emerge and hierarchically order other security frames (Canadian sovereignty, environmental security) and, in doing so, enable securitizing actors to portray these measures as threatening in another sector of security – what the article refers to as the securitizing dilemma. The article argues that Canadian political elites employed a number of discursive strategies to alleviate the securitizing dilemma, including reinforcing hierarchy, linking security sectors, and ‘desecuritization’ – calling into question the normative preference for desecuritization as a strategy to resist securitization.

Keywords:

• securitization
• macrosecuritization
• Arctic
• security dilemma

Acknowledgements

The author acknowledges the generous support of the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. He thanks the anonymous reviewers and editors for their helpful suggestions, and also Juha Vuori, Whitney Lackenbauer and Elizabeth DeSombre for their comments on earlier drafts of this article.

Notes

1. For example, in 2006, the Toronto Star declared that the protection of the Arctic was a key national interest (Granatstein 2006), while more recently, a Globe and Mail headline read, “In the Arctic, Canada is willing to fight to keep the true north free” (Mahoney 2010).

2. In 2009, the Canadian Prime Minister asserted, “I have expressed at various times the deep concern our government has with increasingly aggressive Russian actions around the globe and Russian intrusions into our airspace. We will defend our airspace; we also have obligations of continental defence with the United States. We will fulfill those obligations” (Harper 2009). In July 2010, Canadian Defence Minister Peter McKay, announced that Canadian jets had “repelled Russian bombers, which had come closer than we have seen in recent times” (MacKay 2010).

3. This is not to suggest a dichotomous distinction between these sectors, a number of initiatives and investments in the Canadian Arctic are multiple-use – they enhance military security, sovereignty claims, environmental monitoring and protection and the interests of indigenous peoples.

4. I employ the term desecuritize to refer to speech acts and discursive practices that deny the connection between a development and a postulated existential threat. This is consistent with the existing literature, but does not alleviate the very real problem noted by Behnke (2006), that the denial of “a connection maintains the potentiality of that connection” (65).

5. Elliot-Meisel suggests the number of American forces in Canada numbered around 33,000 (2009, 206), while the US operated over 95 military bases in Canada over the Cold War (Clearwater 1999, 254–261).

6. This involved the highly contentious decisions to scrap the Avro Arrow project and accept the American BOMARC system, and to permit US nuclear weapons on Canadian territory.

7. For depictions of the Arctic environment as an enemy depicted in militaristic terms and whose degradation is necessary and justified, see Lackenbauer and Farish (2007).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Scott Watson

Scott Watson is an Associate Professor of International Relations in the Department of Political Science at the University of Victoria. He is the author of The Securitisation of Humanitarian Migration (Routledge, 2009), and has published in Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Security Dialogue, International Political Sociology and International Migration, among others.