Generations: The sources of our ideas about Canadian Foreign Policy

Date01 June 2017
Published date01 June 2017
DOI10.1177/0020702017712672
Subject MatterEditors’ Introduction
Editors’ Introduction
Generations: The
sources of our ideas
about Canadian
Foreign Policy
Canada is home to a large and diverse community of academic experts on various
aspects of international politics, but only a small subset of these scholars is actively
engaged with Canadian Foreign Policy per se, and even fewer think of themselves
as specialists working in Canadian Foreign Policy (CFP) as an academic subf‌ield.
This is strikingly dif‌ferent from the way things were during the Cold War years,
when most Canadian scholars working on international af‌fairs recognized an obli-
gation to relate their work to Canadian Foreign Policy debates, and many thought
of themselves as CFP specialists. Some would welcome these post-Cold War devel-
opments, as an indication that Canadian scholarship is now less parochial and
more ‘‘worldly’’ than it once was. But we should be concerned about the apparent
unravelling of CFP as an academic project, because without that project we lose
decades’ worth of shared insights and concepts and the broader perspective gained
over time and across issue areas.
The 2015 federal election stirred up some lively conversations in the hallways of
the Political Science Department at Dalhousie, about continuities and disjunctures
in Canadian Foreign Policy. But, as interesting and enthusiastic as those conver-
sations were, we couldn’t help noticing how few of us were engaged in them, and
how disconnected they were from the core research and teaching concerns of most
members of the department—and this was at Dalhousie, which has historically
been a leading centre for CFP and continues to have some enduring strengths in
this area. On other campuses, there is still debate on the content and practice of
Canadian Foreign Policy, but virtually no one comes to the debate with a broader
grounding in CFP. What has happened to CFP, and why? Previous laments have
emphasized historical developments, like the end of the Cold War, which have
made Canada itself less important as an international actor, or shifting intellectual
currents and professional incentives, which have drawn scholars away to other
f‌ields of study. These things are of course important, but there are still senior
scholars that stick doggedly to CFP, and junior scholars that choose—sometimes
against the advice of their supervisory committees—to pursue it. Our own conver-
sations about these things kept coming back to political and professional social-
ization, and more particularly to the time and circumstances of an academic’s
‘‘coming of age,’’ politically. Informally comparing notes with colleagues, it
seemed that whether and how an individual scholar thought about Canadian
International Journal
2017, Vol. 72(2) 158–165
!The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/0020702017712672
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