Canada and the challenges of globalization: a glass half empty, or half full?

ABSTRACT

This special issue on Canada and the challenges of globalization since 1968 arises from a conference held in Ottawa to mark the publication in 2017 of the third volume in the official history of Canada’s department of external affairs: innovation and adaptation, 1968–84 (U of Toronto Press). Technological change, trade liberalisation, and a steadily expanding international agenda after 1968 heralded the arrival of globalization and placed External Affairs under great stress during the 1970s as it struggled to adapt. This collection explores Canada’s experiences with some of the key political, economic, security, and social themes associated with globalization after 1968. Rooted in a long and deep fifty-year perspective, these articles suggest that the changes wrought by globalization will not be easily undone despite today’s raging torrents of nationalist populism and economic protectionism. The challenges that confront Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's government are hardly new, and will demand the same kind of frustrating and endless processes of innovation and adaptation that have characterized policymaking over the last fifty years.

RÉSUMÉ

Cette édition spéciale sur le Canada et les défis de la mondialisation depuis 1968 émerge d’une conférence qui s’est tenue à Ottawa pour célébrer la publication, en 2017, du troisième volume de l’histoire officielle du ministère canadien des Affaires extérieures : innovation et adaptation, 1968-84 (U of Toronto Press). L’évolution technologique, la libéralisation du commerce, et un ordre du jour international en constant développement après 1968, ont annoncé l’arrivée de la mondialisation et placé les Affaires extérieures sous une forte pression au cours des années 70, en raison de leurs efforts d’adaptation. Cette collection explore les expériences du Canada, relativement à des thèmes politiques, économiques, sécuritaires et sociaux majeurs, associés à la mondialisation d’après 1968. Ancrés dans une longue et profonde perspective de cinquante années, ces articles suggèrent que les changements apportés par la mondialisation ne seront pas facilement annulés malgré les torrents furieux du populisme nationaliste et du protectionnisme économique. Les défis auxquels est confronté le gouvernement du Premier ministre Justin Trudeau ne sont pas si nouveaux, et ils exigeront la même sorte de processus frustrants et interminables d’innovation et d’adaptation qui ont caractérisé l’élaboration des politiques ces cinquante dernières années.

KEYWORDS:

• Globalisation
• Canada
• Trudeau
• global order
• international institutions

Once an unstoppable juggernaut, globalization today is stalled. “Brexiteers” in Europe and Donald Trump in the White House are gumming up the machinery. “Globalization has made the financial elite who donate to politicians very, very wealthy,” Trump campaigned in a shuttered steel town in 2016, “but it has left millions of our workers with nothing but poverty and heartache” (Jackson 2016). Spurning transpacific trade and threatening to upend North American economic relations, the president promised to put “America First.” His xenophobic nationalism has plenty of imitators, in the Philippines, in Turkey, in Hungary. In Poland, once the poster-child for post-Cold War liberalism, government ministers from the conservative Law and Justice Party recently joined 60,000 marchers chanting “Pure Poland, white Poland” (Waldie 2017).

Unpersuaded and unimpressed, most Western liberal democracies, including Canada, are staying the course. In her first major speech as foreign minister in June 2017, Chrystia Freeland pointedly rallied in defense of the liberal and rules-based “globalized system” that has emerged since 1945 (Freeland 2016). In his speech to the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2018, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau echoed her repudiation of narrow nationalism in favor of programs and policies that advanced “progressive values in the context of globalization” (Trudeau 2018).

Globalization is an ambiguous and multi-dimensional concept and there is no consensus on its meaning. “In a broad sense,” one prominent theorist writes, “globalisation can be defined as a common term for the social, political, economic and cultural coalescence of the world. It stands as a collective term for numerous and complex processes in society, economy, politics and culture” (Wittmann 2014, p. 94). There are vigorous debates on precisely when the phenomenon first appeared (100, 200, 500 years ago, or even earlier), on what fields of human endeavor it should encompass, and on its varied effects (homogenization vs. fragmentation, collective wealth vs. growing inequality) (see Battistella et al. 2012, pp. 357–361).

Globalization, as we understand it, is a process of systemic global change that embraces more than just trade and the economy. It is a concept that acknowledges the reality that contemporary states the world over are increasingly bound together in a dense system of institutional networks and interdependent relationships that confront common global challenges. Thus, globalization includes the economy, but it also takes into account the spread of ideas and ideologies, the changing environment, migrant populations and mass communications, pandemia, civil society and social protection, development and security.

Though the concept can contain a range of meanings, including economic liberalization, Westernization, deterritorialization or supranationalization (Scholte 2001, pp. 14–15), they all share a recognition that states are less able to control their domestic and international environments than ever before (see the literature overview in Nordhaug 2002, Barrow 2005, pp. 126–130). In this context, governments have little choice but to adapt and innovate policies to cope with the global trends that buffet them, their states and their societies.

Amid the existential clash over the future of globalization, Global Affairs Canada (GAC) recently launched the third volume in its series of official histories, Canada’s Department of External Affairs: Innovation and Adaptation, 1968–84 (Hilliker et al. 2017). During the “long 1970s,” the department’s administrative and decision-making machinery encountered the pressures of globalization for the first time, and required frequent adjusting. The collapsing Bretton Woods system and strains in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) prompted experiments in economic policymaking. The department’s machinery also struggled with demands from the Global South and the People’s Republic of China to join the world economy. Similarly, the growing salience of civil society actors linked with transnational movements of people prompted External Affairs to create think tanks on the Asia-Pacific and disarmament to marshal civil society energy and expertise.

It seemed appropriate, then, to mark the volume’s publication with a symposium on Canada and the challenges of globalization in the 50 years since Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau came to power in April 1968. With support from David Carment of Canadian Foreign Policy Journal, we invited a handful of leading scholars to take a closer look at Canada’s experiences with globalization over the last 50 years. What, they were asked, were the key challenges posed by the globalizing world? How did Canadians and their policymakers perceive and understand those changes? And how well did Canada respond? On balance, the results assembled here make for encouraging reading: Canada’s engagement with the globalized world since 1968 has been imperfect and improvised, but purposeful. Far from being swept along in a reactionary process beyond its control, Canada often responded to the pressures of globalization in a liberal, measured and interest-based manner.

Globalization clearly demanded change in how the world works, not least at the United Nations (UN) Security Council. By the late 1960s, decolonization in Asia and Africa had added a host of states to the membership roster, upsetting the UN’s brittle equilibrium. Yet the tone-deaf great powers seemed impervious to the need for reform. Stints as a non-permanent member in 1977–1978, 1989–1990 and 2000–2001 gave Canada knowledge and access, making the temptation to reform overwhelming. The results, argues historian Adam Chapnick in our opening piece, were mixed. In the 1970s, Foreign Minister Donald Jamieson campaigned to engage Security Council foreign ministers more closely in UN affairs. Ill prepared and poorly managed, his initiative floundered. Later Canadian efforts to enlarge the Security Council were inconsistent and ineffective, products of a divided and unenthusiastic policymaking community.

Canada did much better in 2000–2001, eventually persuading the Security Council to broaden its definition of international security to embrace a wide range of threats to “human security.” Activist Liberal foreign minister Lloyd Axworthy personified the sustained campaign for an understanding of security fit for a globalizing, post-colonial world. But, Chapnick points out, Axworthy enjoyed strong bipartisan political, bureaucratic and civil society support at home. At the same time, Canadian diplomats in New York were backed by the UN Secretariat and the great powers, especially Britain. Reform in a global setting is hard work, indeed.

Globalization changed Canada’s security environment too. The rise and fall of the Soviet Union, the growth of China, and the insistent demands for recognition from other large states of the Global South have altered the distribution of global power, an important source of pressure on the decision-making processes of all states. Quebec political scientists Stéphane Roussel, Justin Massie and Jonathan Paquin review Canadian white papers on foreign affairs and defense since 1964 to explore how governments and policymakers in Ottawa have perceived their changing security context. They conclude that assessing the evolution of the distribution of power, as well as devising “roles” and “strategies” to handle change, is a very difficult task. More than the distribution of power per se, however, it is the nature of relations between the great powers, which can range from hostility to cooperation, that is the crucial variable, and the toughest for policymakers to grasp. (Understanding Canada’s place in the constellation of powers is an essential starting point for responding to globalization.)

Changes in the international distribution of power forced Canadian policymakers to revisit their approach to the Global South, which suddenly loomed much closer to Canada after 1968. The governments of Pierre Trudeau and his successors re-imagined global geography, making space for the South on their mental maps and promising engagement on its terms. The reality was messy, and the fruits of contact sour. Critical historian David Webster uses Cuba and China as case studies of Canadian interaction with the South, where interests and values clashed, constraining genuine dialogue on both sides. Where Canada might really have mattered, in questions of decolonization, it remained largely absent. Deeply enmeshed in historical imperial structures stretching back to the nineteenth century, Canada clung to the middle ground. Prioritizing trade, stability and national unity, both at home and abroad, Ottawa favored evolution, not revolution. Globalization was not for the faint-hearted.

Though far from perfect, Canada did better on the environmental front, concludes political scientist Peter Stoett. His article weighs Ottawa’s experiences with global environmentalism, which spread across the planet in the 1970s alongside the expanding (and polluting) world economy. No “guiding arc” shaped Canadian policy, which reflected competing and contradictory pressures from two sources. On the one hand, Canadian environmental diplomacy was naturally constrained by the proximity of the United States and its priorities. On the other hand, Canadians and their political leaders were acutely aware of environmental threats and their own self-interest in effective reform. The resulting tension generated bouts of Canadian multilateral leadership – during the 1970s, in the early 1990s and, recently, on climate change – and periods of retreat. In sum, Stoett concludes, retreat should not obscure Canada’s important past contributions to UN environmental architecture or its future potential. Globalization has shaped a policy landscape where transnational and sub-national policymaking are possible, allowing Canada to continue its contributions even as prospects for success fade.

Similarly, Canada’s contributions to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the country’s most important politico-military alliance, have remained relatively robust. The end of the Cold War confrontation with the Soviet Union and the rise of terrorism, especially along the periphery in Asia and Africa, changed the Alliance’s role. Yet the Alliance (and its members) continue to weigh contributions by member states against a scale – percentage of gross domestic production spent on defense – crafted for another era, giving rise to frequent charges that Canada is a “free rider.” Political scientists Sara Greco and Stéfanie von Hlatky challenge this view by introducing a typology of burden-sharing commitments inspired by the conceptual literature on power – hard, soft and smart. Their typology allows them to argue that Canada’s Alliance contributions are more consistent than usually acknowledged, and that Ottawa can aspire to be a “smarter” contributor by considering the full range of contribution types and reframing the very nature of its Alliance commitments.

Globalization changed migration too. Cheap phones and jet travel encouraged sprawling diasporas, which governments hastened to regulate and control. Canada was no exception. Laura Madokoro’s article uses the history of the Woman at Risk Refugee Program, created in 1987, as a lens to examine Canada’s response to “globalized movement.” There is little doubt that federal bureaucrats and politicians embraced innovation on this front: the program built upon the novel arrangements for public–private refugee sponsorship introduced in the Immigration Act of 1976, and specifically targeted women refugees, whose gender rendered them uniquely vulnerable to violence and exploitation in refugee camps and countries of first asylum. But innovation brings its own challenges. The cooperative program soon laid bare tensions between government and civil society over their shared responsibility for refugee issues. The tensions, in turn, shaped the program’s evolution, subtly changing its focus from providing urgent protection to resettling hard-core cases.

Civil society matters in a globalized world. Popular and stakeholder engagement in the policymaking process are acknowledged by most contributors, but they are encountered head-on in Laura Macdonald’s article. A long-time activist-scholar, Macdonald challenges the dominant view that societal influences on Canadian foreign policy are limited. The most theoretical of our contributors, she draws on the global literature to illustrate how globalization itself encourages the kinds of transnational linkages that promote engagement in some areas of foreign policy decision-making. To make her case, Macdonald presents a series of case studies on Canadian trade, development and security policy since 1984, demonstrating how civil society inputs have evolved over time, tracing how they vary depending on issue, and exploring the power imbalances among civil society actors. Civil society stakeholders, she concludes, hold enormous potential to improve foreign-policy outcomes in the context of continuing globalization of Canadian society and its economy.

Alberta political scientist and trade expert Chris Kukucha strikes a very different note. Alone among our contributors, he offers an especially grim reckoning of Canadian foreign trade policy over the past quarter century. Canada, he contends, has failed to fully embrace the transnationalized nature of the globalized world order and its possibilities. His article offers a litany of international and domestic limitations on Canada’s capacity to innovative and adapt to a more liberalized world economy. These range from the nature of the existing global trading order, which allowed Ottawa to cement defensive trade barriers into place, to rigid global supply chains, and path-dependent export and import relationships. At home, he locates barriers in the structure of federal–provincial relations, distorting industrial policies, and limited provincial bureaucratic capacity. Yet even Kukucha acknowledges that the glass is only half empty. Canada, he argues in conclusion, remains a normative innovator, framing new environment, labor and gender trade rules for a globalizing world.

This special issue concludes with reflections by diplomats-turned-scholars Lucie Edwards and Daryl Copeland. For Copeland, the glass is forever half-empty. With typical zest, he celebrates past Canadian diplomatic accomplishment, highlighting Trudeau’s North–South and East–West dialogues, Mulroney’s environmentalism and Axworthy’s human security agenda, all innovative responses to the challenges of globalization. But his present is grim, and growing grimmer. After a “decade of darkness” under Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Copeland judges Global Affairs Canada ill equipped to face the new challenges of globalization in 2015: the rise of reactionary populism, the crisis of faith in the post-war liberal order, and the coming triumph of data and artificial intelligence. Copeland offers an ambitious eight-point plan to revive the foreign policy bureaucracy, a plan inspired by a fond look backward to post-war “liberal internationalism.”

For Lucie Edwards, whose reflections on scholarship and diplomacy represent a response to Copeland, the glass is half-full. She is skeptical of viewing a mythical diplomatic past with rose-tinted glasses, a fabled era when Canada “punched above its weight.” Canadian historians and political scientists, she argues, have an obligation to engage those myths critically, clearing the way for contemporary policymakers to get down to work in a modest and realist fashion. Canada’s ability to make a difference in an increasingly globalized world, though real, is much less than many Canadians and their political leaders believe.

Taken together, these articles hint that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s attachment to progressive notions of “globalization with a human face” is not especially novel. Indeed, they suggest that Trudeau falls squarely within a Canadian diplomatic tradition, stretching back at least to the 1970s, when another Trudeau struggled to reconcile the pressures of early globalization with uniquely Canadian needs and interests. They also remind us how hard it is for smaller states like Canada to craft innovative policies to adapt to a rapidly changing global environment. Our eight articles highlight the wide variety of factors that add to the uncertainties inherent in a changing environment and make successful adaptation difficult: pressures from civil society and domestic stakeholders, (mis-)perceptions by political leaders, pressures from great powers, poor decision-making processes, and bureaucratic shortcomings. However progressive in origin, individual policies are always the products of compromise and bargaining, and too often fall short of their admirable objectives. In this, the incremental and incomplete Canadian response to globalization tracked here is also part of a long Canadian tradition. “So far as policy is in question,” wrote Deputy Under-Secretary Charles Ritchie in 1953,

I see policy as a balance, also a calculated risk, as the tortuous approach to an ill-defined objective. All-out decisions, unqualified statements, irreconcilable antagonism are foreign to my nature and to my training. In these ways I reflect my political masters, the inheritors of [Prime Minister] Mackenzie King. (Ritchie 1981, p. 56)

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Julien Chiasson-Lauzon (ENAP) for his help in preparing this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Greg Donaghy is co-author of Innovation and Adaption: Canada’s Department of External Affairs, 1968–84 (2017). He is also the author of the monograph, Tolerant Allies: Canada and the US (2008) and of the biography, Grit: The Life and Politics of Paul Martin Sr. (2015).

Stéphane Roussel is professor of political science at the École nationale d’administration publique. He is director of the Centre interuniversitaire de recherche sur les relations internationales du Canada et du Québec, and a co-author of The Politics of Canadian Foreign Policy (2015).