Kim Nossal

• PhD
• Professor at Queen's University

Engaging China: Myth, Aspiration, and Strategy in Canadian Policy from Trudeau to Harper. By Evans Paul . Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014. 144 pp. $31.50 (cloth); $11.97 (paper); $11.95 (e-book). - Volume 15 Issue 2 - Kim Richard Nossal

Revisiting Canadian Foreign Policy: Old Habits and New Directions, Andrew Cooper's 1997 textbook on Canadian foreign policy, in 2014 makes for compelling reading, not least because the subtitle is the perfect leitmotif to describe the considerable differences in Canada's foreign policy between then and now. This review article argues that the main...

From the “strategic partnership” of the mid-2000s, the Canada-China relationship deteriorated rapidly after the election of the Conservative government of Stephen Harper in January 2006. The Harper government left no doubt that it had little desire to cooperate with the government in Beijing, and the Chinese government reciprocated with a series of...

There are two problems with the claim by Miguel de Larrinaga and Mark B. Salter that Canadian critical security studies is ‘at the heart of the international relations community in Canada’. The first is empirical: the international relations community in Canada is in fact marked by a diversity of intellectual approaches, with no approach that comes...

Beginning in the early 1990s, just as the Cold War was coming to an end, the Canadian government began to embrace an active — and activist — foreign policy agenda, marked by an embrace of multilateralism that went well beyond Canada’s traditional and historical attachment to international cooperation.1 During this period Canada made a sustained eff...

In the heated debate that has emerged over whether the Libyan intervention of 2011 advanced the entrenchment of the norm of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), there is one facet of the Libyan case that both R2P celebrationists like Alex Bellamy and Paul Williams (2011; also Bellamy 2011), Thomas Weiss (2011), and Ramesh Thakur (2011c) and sceptic...

In the Spring 1998 edition of CFP, Mark Neufeld provided a critical review of Kim Richard Nossal's The Politics of Canadian Foreign Policy (1997) and Andrew F. Cooper's Canadian Foreign Policy.’ Old Habits and New Directions (1997), texts that are destined to be central to the teaching of Canada's foreign policy. In this edition, Nossal, Cooper and...

Despite the importance of regional politics in the Afghanistan conflict, Canadian policy-makershave remained almost entirely silent about the crucial role that countries in the region have played in the conflict. Canadian political discourse about the Afghanistan mission has beenalmost exclusively fixed on what is happening within Afghanistan itsel...

Anti-Americanism, sometimes called the “last acceptable prejudice”, is a common phenomenon in the modern era. This paper explores the ebb and flow of anti-Americanism in the Australian Labor Party in the post-Second World War period and argues that while at times it was reasonable or proportionate, at others such criticism became unreasonable, disp...

According to the bureaucratic politics approach to policy making, an appreciation of competition and conflict among bureaucrats is considered to be critical for an understanding of decision outcomes. In this paper, we employ the bureaucratic politics model to assess the outcomes of the initial phase of the Canadian government's new fighter aircraft...

The major proponents of the bureaucratic politics approach to the study of foreign policy making — Graham T. Allison and Morton H. Halperin — contend that the paradigm developed from the United States foreign policy making system can be applied in other national contexts. This article assesses this contention. Despite indications that both the cont...

Strategic culture remains a highly contested but potentially vital concept in the analysis of security policy. This paper contributes to the strategic culture debate by using the cases of Australia and Canada to assess the utility of strategic culture as an explanatory tool. Much of the debate over strategic culture hinges on the proper relationshi...

Harper's first year of governance suggested the possibility of improving the "atmospherics" of the Canada-US relationship without having to change the policy. The defense policy of Canada is somewhat similar to the defense policy of the Liberal government before it showing that is not so much of the content of policy but the context that determines...

In 1998, Tom Pocklington's presidential address examined what he believed was a progressive displacement of teaching by research in Canadian political science departments. The purpose of this address is to examine Pocklington's contentions eight years on, after dramatic increases in research funds flowing to Canadian universities. As research funds...

In 1998, Toni Pocklington's presidential address examined what lie believed was a progressive displacement of teaching by research in Canadian political science departments. The purpose of this address is to examine Pocklington's contentions eight years on, after dramatic increases in research funds flowing to Canadian universities. As research fun...

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) gave unprecedented rights to private investors. These provisions quickly became entrenched in policy and practice, appearing in most multilateral and bilateral trade agreements in the 1990s as American investors began to bring Canada and Mexico to arbitration. However, the Australia–U.S. Free Trade Ag...

Enthusiasts of human security argue that what is needed in the post‐Cold‐War period is a foreign policy agenda that is more ‘people‐centred’ than the state‐centred focus of security policy during the Cold War period. Among the most enthusiastic proponents of the human security paradigm in the 1990s was the Canadian government, which, in partnership...

The Canadian Historical Review 85.2 (2004) 393-394 As a result of sensational but shoddy story-telling by journalists pretending to be historians, Canadians tend to remember but one facet of Canadian-American relations during the five years that Lester B. Pearson was prime minister: President Lyndon B. Johnson's rude treatment of him after Pearson...

There is little agreement about the degree to which parliamentary institutions can help overcome the democratic deficit in global governance. While much of the literature on the European Union's democratic deficit focuses on reforming parliament, most commentary on the subject in global governance and foreign policy holds out little hope that natio...

Edited collections usually have relatively clear provenance. Most often they are brought to life by colleagues who are intrigued by an issue or a question; they then organize a conference (or a collection) around that theme and seek a publisher for the resulting collection. Such works are commonly marked by the putative expectations associated with...

Much of the analysis of the anti-globalization movement that has emerged in the last five years has focused on the degree to which the Internet has played a crucial role in contemporary social movements. It is commonly argued that the Internet helps create 'virtual communities' that use the medium to exchange information, coordinate activities, and...

Over the quarter-century since T.H.B. Symons issued his report on Canadian studies, the discipline of international relations (IR) and Canadian foreign policy studies-found to be so meagre and Americanized by Symons-has been transformed. In English-speaking universities, the discipline has been Canadianized in a number of ways, including the develo...

Sanctions might continue to be attractive. However, I will argue, sanctions remain as inappropriate an instrument for securing compliance with global rules in the post-Cold War era as they were in the immediate aftermath of World War I. By examining the structure of international sanctions, I will suggest that it would be difficult to justify using...

This book argues that community can exist at the international level, and that security politics is profoundly shaped by it, with states dwelling within an international community having the capacity to develop a pacific disposition. By investigating the relationship between international community and the possibility for peaceful change, this book...

Are we at a new and less conflictual stage in international relations, a post‐nationalist era marked by increasing democratisation and the effects of the ‘democratic peace proposition’? This article reports on two cases which cast some doubt on the propositions that nationalism is decreasing and that democratic societies are unlikely to develop ser...

Mercenaries are important non‐state transnational actors in contemporary world politics. However much they might be ignored by students of international politics, they can and do have an impact. The purpose of this article is to survey mercenaries and mercenary armies as transnational actors, both historically and in the contemporary international...

Even though a vibrant literature on gender in international relations has developed over the last decade, students of international sanctions have not explored sanctions from a gendered perspective: analyses tend to have been either gender-neutral or gender-blind. By the same token, however, feminist scholars of international politics have not incl...

Malaysia is commonly considered a small country in international affairs. Certainly, all of the statistical indicators would suggest relative smallness: it currently has a population of just over 18 million people,1 and Kuala Lumpur is one of the smallest capital cities in Asia. Moreover, it has not been commonly thought of as one of the leading li...

Canada's Department of External Affairs Vol. 2: Coming of Age, 1948–1968HillikerJohn and BarryDonaldMontreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1995, pp. xxxii, 496 - Volume 29 Issue 3 - Kim Richard Nossal

In the two and a half decades after the formation of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in 1967, Australian and Canadian attitudes and policies towards the Southeast Asian region underwent a considerable transformation. From a policy of relative detachment from the region, both of these middle powers moved to dramatically increase their eng...

Recently there have been a number of calls for the “democratization” of Canadian foreign policy, most insistently from Lloyd Axworthy, former Liberal External Affairs critic. Moreover, these calls are seemingly in line with the rise of populism in Canadian politics. This article suggests that we should be skeptical, however. While proposals to make...

Academic and political debates about international sanctions tend to focus on the instrumental purposes of these measures—their ability to hurt a target state sufficiently to cause it to change its behaviour. By contrast, the symbolic purposes of sanctions are commonly assumed not to be as important. Such assumptions are appropriate for states whic...

The case of Canadian policy towards South Africa in 1985-86 provides an example of the impact of political leaders on policy. The government of Brian Mulroney abandoned a policy that mixed rhetorical denunciation of apartheid with a “business as usual” approach, and adopted an activist and hard-line policy. This article reviews the extent to which...

Much of the contemporary literature on the utility of international sanctions approaches the apparent riddle of why sanctions are embraced so eagerly when they are supposedly such an “ineffective” tool of statecraft by focusing on the instrumental and rational purposes of sanctions. As a result, one purpose that does not always lend itself to a rat...

The heuristic model commonly used to explain Canada's interests in development assistance is the mixed-motives approach. These motives are assumed to be philanthropic, economic, and politico-strategic, though there is little agreement among students of Canadian development assistance about which of the three is the most important. The purpose of th...

Canada Among Nations 1984: A Time of TransitionTomlinBrian W. and MolotMaureen eds. Toronto: James Lorimer, 1985, pp. xi, 222. Canada Among Nations 1985: The Conservative AgendaMolotMaureen Appel and TomlinBrian W. eds. Toronto: James Lorimer, 1986, pp. x, 261. - Volume 20 Issue 1 - Kim Richard Nossal

It is often argued that one of the reasons why the Canadian-American relationship has remained essentially peaceable over the last 150 years is that both states have institutionalized the way in which they settle conflicts between them. The International Joint Commission, an institution created in 1909 to settle conflicts over boundary waters, usua...

The Shaping of Peace: Canada and the Search for World Order, 1943–1957, Vol. 2HolmesJohn W.Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982, pp. x, 443 - Volume 16 Issue 1 - Kim Richard Nossal

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L'étude des relations entre le pouvoir exécutif et le pouvoir législatif est souvent ardue parce qu'il est difficile d'évaluer le pouvoir ou l'influence. Nous pouvons contourner une telle difficulté en étudiant, par exemple, l'autorité de l'exécutif sur les nominations des parlementaires aux différents postes de cadres au sein du Parlement. Naturel...

Margaret Doxey has argued that there exists a "rhetoric gap" between the lofty pronouncements of Canadian governments on the question of human rights violations by other governments in the international System and the actions of the Canadian government. This paper argues that specific external constraints will hamper any attempt by governments in O...

Résumé Cet article retrace l'évolution de la politique canadienne vis-à-vis de la Chine nationaliste durant les années précédant 1949 en analysant l'élément principal de cette politique, soit, celui de la fourniture d'armes pendant et après la guerre contre le Japon. L'auteur examine d'abord brièvement les débuts de la mission canadienne à Chungkin...