‘Secondary foreign policy’ through the prism of cross-border governance in the US–Canada Pacific Northwest border region

ABSTRACT

This paper seeks to revisit the notion of ‘secondary foreign policy’ through the analysis of cross-border governance in the US–Canada Pacific Northwest border region. Although pro-open border organizations in this borderland support secondary foreign policy principles, they collectively need to adjust them, due to the increasing border securitization on the Canada–US border. In other words, the militarization of the border should not affect mutually beneficial cross-border interactions and relations. Using Neil Fligstein and Doug McAdam’s ‘field theory’, this paper analyses how the field of cross-border governance in the Pacific Northwest tends to evolve in a new geopolitical context after 9/11, in which free trade and cross-border flows are subjected to growing ‘primary foreign policy’ security imperatives. The specific focus on two cross-border organizations reveals how primary and secondary foreign policy actors seek to work on joint cross-border projects, in spite of contrasting interests and steady blind spots.

KEYWORDS:

• Governance
• cross-border region
• Pacific Northwest
• US–Canada relations
• secondary foreign policy

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the blind reviewers and the guest editors of this special issue, Martin Klatt and Birte Wassenberg, who made countless valuable comments to strengthen this article. Moreover, special thanks to Don Alper, Laurie Trautman, and David Davidson with whom I have had extremely fruitful conversations and suggestions, when I was at the Border Policy Research Institute, Western Washington University, in 2014, as a Fulbright scholar. Finally, I am indebted to Daniel Hiatt who supported notably this research project and conducted the semi-structured interviews via Skype. As usual, digressions and errors in this paper remain mine.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Bruno Dupeyron http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2075-1365

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, under the Partnership Development Grant entitled ‘The transformations of cross-border governance: North America and Europe in comparative perspectives’ (2012–17).