The paradigm that dare not speak its name: Canadian Foreign Policy’s uneasy relationship with realist IR theory
| Author | David G. Haglund |
| DOI | 10.1177/0020702017709976 |
| Date | 01 June 2017 |
| Published date | 01 June 2017 |
| Subject Matter | Scholarly Essays |
Scholarly Essay
International Journal
2017, Vol. 72(2) 230–242
The paradigm that
! The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/0020702017709976
Canadian Foreign
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Policy’s uneasy
relationship with realist
IR theory
David G. Haglund
Queen’s University
Abstract
This article examines the place that ‘‘realism’’ occupies in the debates over International
Relations theory and Canadian Foreign Policy. Argued here is the claim that realism is
far from being a dominant paradigm in the Canadian academy, which in itself is hardly a
surprising finding. However, realism’s relative absence from the scholarship on Canadian
Foreign Policy disguises a more important finding: there has been a fairly longstanding
Canadian approach to foreign policy analysis bearing many of the hallmarks of struc-
tural-realist formulations, an approach that puts great emphasis on Canada’s ‘‘relative
capability’’ as a ‘‘middle power’’ in the international system. Although few in the country
would embrace the realist label explicitly, many have heeded the structural-realist
injunction that foreign policy analysis should start with an assessment of the country’s
relative standing in the international pecking order. In the Canadian case, this empirical
emphasis on relative capability has become suffused with normative significance of a
decidedly ‘‘non-realist’’ kidney, summed up in the disputed concept ‘‘middlepower-
manship.’’ The article concludes that, to the extent realism is to continue to be a
presence in Canadian Foreign Policy scholarship, it will likely be the non-structural
variant known today as ‘‘neoclassical realism,’’ in no small measure due to the logical
inconsistencies of the earlier, structuralist, paradigm.
Keywords
Realism, constructivism, middle power, soft balancing
Corresponding author:
David G. Haglund, Department of Political Studies, Queen’s University, Room C321, Mackintosh-Corry
Hall, 68 University Avenue, Kingston, ON K7L 3N6, Canada.
Email: david.haglund@queensu.ca
Haglund
231
It is not difficult to caricature International Relations (IR) realism, regarded by
many scholars (and not just in Canada) as representing the closest brush that any
member of the academy might ever have with devil worship.1 Judging from a recent
authoritative survey of political scientists in the IR/Canadian Foreign Policy (CFP)
community, realism—no matter how it happens to be packaged2—is in a distinctly
minoritarian position when it comes to the stated paradigmatic orientations of this
country’s professors. Data periodically assembled by the Teaching, Research, and
International Policy (TRIP) survey testify to the non-dominance of what, not so
long ago, was believed by some to be a ‘‘hegemonic’’ if not totemic fixture on the
international (though never the Canadian) epistemological scene.3 The most recent
TRIP data, from 2014, reveal slightly more than 12 percent of Canadian respond-
ents self-identifying as realist, a figure substantially lower than the share (more than
25 percent) professing to be constructivists. Nor is it only in Canada that con-
structivism beats out realism as paradigm of choice for scholarly practitioners; even
in the US, the erstwhile hearthstead of realism, its adherents (at 17.7 percent) have
been in retreat, and are now in the clear minority, albeit not as far behind con-
structivists as they are in Canada.4 This is nothing new; a decade or so ago, TRIP
analysts found only 15 percent of self-identified realists teaching in Canada’s uni-
versities, and not that much greater a percentage at US universities.5
This retreat from realism also shows up when Canada-based scholars are asked
to list names of those they consider to be ‘‘influential world scholars’’: only two of
the 10 names reported by IR professors in Canada, and this irrespective of whether
one samples the so-called ‘‘BMT’’ cohort alone (for UBC, McGill, and Toronto) or
the entire set of the country’s universities, are known to be realists of one stripe or
other: for the BMT cohort, the selected pair were Stephen Walt and Kenneth
Waltz, while for their ‘‘non-BMT’’ colleagues, the duo were John Mearsheimer
and Kenneth Waltz. By contrast, twice that number of realists populated the top 10
of US-based IR professors (Mearsheimer, Waltz, Walt, and Samuel Huntington),
although even in the US sample realists are still in the minority—a minority that
would be smaller yet if Huntington were classified as what he really was, a
1.
See my article with Tudor Onea, ‘‘Sympathy for the devil: Neoclassical realism and myth in
Canadian Foreign Policy,’’ Canadian Foreign Policy 14, no. 2 (Spring 2008): 53–66.
2.
For a succinct catalogue of the many faces of realism, see Tim Dunne and Brian C. Schmidt,
‘‘Realism,’’ in John Baylis, Steve Smith, and Patricia Owens, eds., The Globalization of World
Politics: An Introduction to International Relations, 6th ed., 99–112 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2014). Curiously, this same source insists that ‘‘[r]ealism is the dominant theory of inter-
national relations’’ (99), notwithstanding much evidence to the contrary.
3.
These surveys are conducted under the auspices of the Institute for the Theory and Practice of
International Relations, at the College of William & Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia.
4.
See Stephen M. Saideman, ‘‘Canadian scholarship on international relations: Unified, divided or
diverse?’’ International Journal 71, no. 2 (June 2016): 193–213, citing from Table 3, 200.
5.
See Michael Lipson, Daniel Maliniak, Amy Oakes, Susan Peterson, and Michael J. Tierney,
‘‘Divided discipline? Comparing views of US and Canadian IR scholars,’’ International Journal
62, no. 2 (Spring 2007): 327–343, at 332.
232
International Journal 72(2)
comparativist rather than an IR specialist.6 Remarking on this trend, John
Mearsheimer was heard to lament wryly at the Toronto International Studies
Association conference in March 2014 that he considered himself to be a member
of an endangered species just about everywhere on earth—with the important
exception of China. Of that country’s inhabitants, and especially of its IR commu-
nity, Mearsheimer exclaimed, not entirely facetiously, ‘‘those are my people!’’7
Truth to tell, as my colleague Kim Nossal and others have demonstrated so well,
the Canadian academy had never really been chock-full of self-declared realists, not
even when the Cold War was raging and when it might have been assumed that, as
was the case in the neighbouring US, realism would be given a respectful place in
the halls of academe. For sure, policy analysts working in government in Ottawa,
then as well as now, could be found to harbour a favourable sentiment or two
about realism, if only because one of the paradigm’s variants, classical realism, had
for some time been seen to vaunt as its raison d’eˆtre the identification of something
known as the ‘‘national interest,’’ and since it was and remains the business of
policy analysts working in certain state entities (e.g. defence and foreign affairs
ministries) to discern and to promote that interest, it followed that a paradigm
promising to make their jobs easier could hardly be an unwelcome one.8 But in the
academy, things were different, and those scholars (not inconsiderable in number)
whose psychological and intellectual profiles might otherwise have inclined them in
the direction of classical realism, chose instead to self-identify with cognate para-
digms such as the ‘‘English school’’9 or to skip pigeon-holing themselves altogether,
this latter coming more easily to diplomatic historians (who have made up a sub-
stantial, if now diminishing, share of the CFP scholarly community) than it did to
political scientists.
So how is it that I came to find intellectual succour in realism, so much so that I
can without evident embarrassment confess, in these pages and elsewhere, to being
a realist? Since the editors of this special issue have invited contributors to reflect
on matters biographical, and since in my case one of the salient features of my
biography is that I am from the US originally (though more of my life has been
passed in Canada than there), and—to continue this conjunctional thread—since it
is so widely and stubbornly (but ultimately erroneously) believed that realism is an
American concoction, it would follow that this introspective portion of my article
should be a short one. Why? Well, what else needs to be said to explain the failings
6.
Saideman, ‘‘Canadian scholarship,’’ Table 5, 203.
7.
Author’s notes, roundtable on Mearsheimer’s contributions to the discipline, 55th Annual
Convention of the International Studies Association, Toronto, 27 March 2014.
8.
Old habits die hard, in this case fortunately. To see how intellectual practices formed in the policy
community can make their way into the scholarly one, we need go no...
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