|
|
|
|
The Americas In Transition: The Contours of Regionalism, by Gordon Mace, Louis Bélanger, and contributors
8. Building Role and Region:
Middle States and Regionalism
in the Americas
During the Cold War, a certain number of states defined themselves and were defined by others as middle powers. These states were said to possess certain characteristics: sufficient power, when skillfully used, to maintain a certain level of independence from their major or superpower allies; the leeway this independence provided to perform such stabilizing functions in the international system as peace mediation, institution building, and the denunciation of injustice; and the benefits of an international reputation based on a solid, ethical record in domestic and foreign policy. Clearly, this category and the status that goes with it are linked to much more than the classical attributes of power. That is why scholars increasingly prefer to use, as we have here, the term “middle state” instead of “middle power” to define this type of actor in the international system. Australia, Canada, Norway, and Sweden are frequently cited examples of middle states, but, depending on the period and the definition, Mexico, Nigeria, Turkey, Malaysia, and many others—even Algeria—may also fit the description (Cooper 1997).
The difficulty of determining which countries are middle states and which are not is largely due to the fact that, as Robert W. Cox has remarked, the role of middle states is inextricably linked to the configuration of the international system during a given period and to the conception of the international order that is dominant at the time (Cox 1989). In a world no longer characterized by the East-West divide but rather by increasing multipolarity and regionalization, middle-state roles and identities are inevitably changing. Inversely, as Cox points out, the choice made by states capable of embracing or rejecting middle stateness in a period of transformation also has an impact on the future world order. In this chapter we seek to evaluate this impact at the regional level within the inter-American system. Is there room in the Americas for middle states to act as such? Who are the candidates for middle statehood? And more important for this book, how does middle-state behavior affect the construction of regionalism?
Before addressing these questions, it is important to recognize that middle stateness and regionalism are both complex and problematic international realities, which makes them hard to study together. They don’t have the same kind of empirical weight and conceptual clarity that scholars and practitioners have invested in other systemic- or unit-level features of the international system. Middle stateness, as we have said, is not characterized by a clearly determined position in the international hierarchy of power but by vague locational parameters—somewhere between the major powers and the small states—and role conceptions. And regionalism, as mentioned in Chapter 1 of this book, has yet to inscribe its logic in the deep structure of international society, especially outside Europe. This leaves us with two disputed realities that are highly dependent on state efforts for their very instantiation.
Viewed from this angle, the study of the relationship between middle states and the regionalist project in the Americas may appear adventurous. But rather than rejecting the concept of middle statehood or even regionalism as overly ambiguous, we have adopted the opposite attitude in this chapter and asked ourselves what these ambiguities can teach us about the interaction between the two phenomena. We will argue that for some states, middle stateness, like regionalism, is a policy option as well as a framework for action. It is therefore possible, using a foreign policy approach, to look at how the two phenomena influence each other.
Middle States as Parties to Regionalism
Laura Neack (1991, 1995) has empirically demonstrated that the countries political scientists have identified as middle states or middle powers do not share a clearly defined position within the international system in terms of their attributes or relative capacities. We are thus forced to deduce that states accorded the diplomatic and scientific status of middle state are those demonstrating not only the capacity but also the will to conform to the behavioral model associated with this category, that is, good international citizenship, multilateral activism, peacekeeping and peacemaking, institution building, and mediation. In fact, the very ability of middle states to do more than accommodate themselves to their structural position in the system seems to be characteristic of middle statehood (Cooper, Higgott, and Nossal 1993: 19–27). Such manifestations of autonomy toward structural positioning depend on state agents’ perceptions of the international environment as a source of opportunities for action rather than as strictly a source of constraint (Breuning 1995: 237). They also depend on the intensity of societal and technical interactions in the system (Buzan, Jones, and Little 1993: 66–80), which give middle states opportunities to exercise a typical form of leadership that stems more from skills of a technical or entrepreneurial nature than from a structural or purely attributive order (Cooper, Higgott, and Nossal 1993: 19–27).
Andrew F. Cooper, Richard A. Higgott, and Kim Richard Nossal detail these skills—which they qualify as “diplomatic”—as a mixture of entrepreneurship, diplomatic know-how, and the ability to manage knowledge of sectorial issues that are the object of international cooperation or litigation. In the post–Cold War period, these skills may prove particularly significant as the weight of structural leadership diminishes and the international agenda is increasingly given over to political questions that accord middle states greater room to maneuver (Higgott, Cooper, and Nossal 1993: 21–22). This shift gives middle states the opportunity to exercise a particularly active form of leadership and exert influence at the systemic level by effectively contributing to coalition and institution building, agenda setting, and policy coordination (Cooper, Higgott, and Nossal 1993: 26). To the extent that these activities are significant to the construction of American regionalism, we can hypothesize that middle-state foreign policies not only are acted upon by regionalism but should also be acting regionalists.
If middle stateness, by definition, involves a certain degree of autonomy from superpowers and structural positioning, it is in turn a constraining model of behavior for the states adopting it. This is what foreign policy analysts refer to as a national role conception on the basis of which states define their interests and preferences (Holsti 1970; Breuning 1997; Chafetz, Abramson, and Guillot 1997). If certain states have acquired national role conceptions forged on the middle-state model, it is because they echo basic and closely interconnected external and internal strategic issues.
We argue that in acting upon and reacting to regionalism, middle states attempt to reproduce an existing middle-state status and role or develop a new model. This agent/structure kind of affirmation may seem simplistic and tautological in the sense that middle-state behavior is considered both a criterion to identify middle stateness and a predicted path of action. However, this approach takes on its full importance when the elective character of middle stateness and the sensitive nature of normative, cognitive, and functional dimensions inherent to each case become clear. For scholars studying the development of regionalism, the issue is to determine the impact that such primary middle-state goals—that is, producing or reproducing regional institutional forms of cooperation for their own status-seeking and position-seeking actions—will have on regionalism.
Because middle states must perform their role in the international system using specific attributes, we hypothesize that, to the extent that they attempt to reproduce or acquire middle-state status within the regional framework, the states studied here will seek to increase the social and technical capabilities of the regional system under construction. Here our agent/structure proposition takes a soft stand: We borrow from structural realism the idea of an interactional level of systemic attributes between structural and unit levels, and we make it the privileged locus of middle-state action on the system (Buzan, Jones, and Little 1993). In concrete terms, we posit that states will take action by initiating and supporting efforts aimed at institutionalizing regional cooperation, placing problems with high technical content on the cooperative agenda, and developing the normative content of the new regional reality. This proposition takes for granted that the regionalist projects, although often initiated and promoted by superpower action, must be studied not only as a source of constraint for middle states but also as a source of opportunity. In this respect, we echo the hypothesis of Cooper, Higgott, and Nossal: Even in cases where regionalism is imposed upon rather than initiated by a middle state, the middle state will try to orient regional construction in the direction of multilateral cooperation, a more appropriate terrain for middle-state activity. By acting to promote a higher level of societal interactive capability within the regional system, the middle state reproduces on a regional scale the level of systemic action that will allow it to put its particular capabilities to use.
One way to limit tautological reasoning about middle states is to bring in the domestic level of analysis. General literature on middle states assumes that in the absence of strong external determinants, domestic influences are a key element in explaining the willingness to shape foreign policy behavior in accordance with the middle-state model. This assumption explains why studies of Canadian foreign policy have been dominated by the idea that the idealism and mediatory efforts characteristic of Canada’s foreign policy behavior are international projections of domestic culture and political experience (Hawes 1984). Marijke Breuning (1997) has also convincingly argued that middle-state role modeling can be explained by national political culture and shared cognition, as in the case of Dutch and Belgian foreign aid policy. Although previous studies clearly demonstrate the close link between domestic political culture and the pursuit of a foreign policy modeled on the middle-state ideal type, it cannot be concluded, as several authors have automatically done, that this relation is univocal. It is certainly legitimate to suppose that political culture is externalized through the role modeling adopted by agents of foreign policy. It is just as legitimate to suggest, as Neack does (Neack 1995: 226), that middle-state foreign policy is not just the external manifestation of domestic political culture and experience but an integral part of that culture and experience that is often internalized by foreign policy agents. It can easily be argued that in Canada, for example, international peacekeeping has forged political culture just as much as it has been forged by it.
In sum, we can hypothesize that middle-state foreign policy is particularly embedded in the political culture of the societies concerned. Moreover, foreign policy agents, by reproducing and orienting the typical external behavior of middle states, are at the same time agents of domestic political culture. Knowing this, we can posit that in behaving as middle states, diplomatic agents are simultaneously constrained and empowered by their specific domestic political identity and culture and by the links that bind that identity and culture to middle-state role conceptions and role modeling. In using the regional context to reproduce, transform, or acquire middle-state status, state agents draw upon symbols, practices, and modes of state intervention that have resonance on the domestic scene. This resonance may limit their external action, but it may also push them to develop regional policies for domestic consumption. In both cases, political culture and identity can explain how regionalist foreign policies may be affected by the local reappropriation of the initial regionalist project. Once again, the embeddedness of middle stateness in the political culture of the domestic society should be studied in strategic rather than deterministic terms.
At this point, we must add another identitary dimension to our analysis to take into account the fact that being a regional middle state is not exactly the same as being a middle state acting regionally. We want to consider how a regional identity can be superimposed on a middle-state identity. We argue that in developing a regionally oriented foreign policy, middle-state foreign policy agents attempt to act upon the identitary and functional dimensions of state legitimacy. This can be verified through the analysis of the function of the external reference to regionalism in state agent discourse. The regional dimension is not instrumental here. States taking an active role in the development of regional systems necessarily participate in what Alexander Wendt (1994) calls “collective identity formation.” As Wendt notes, “social identities and interests are always in process during interaction” (Wendt 1994: 386). The regionalist project supposes a correlate evolution in state modes of identification and intervention. This has domestic implications and it can be presumed that the domestic political situation and even the strategic position of state agents themselves allow us to explain the particular direction that a regionalist foreign policy may take.
What we propose is to look at each of those domestic and external game levels simultaneously. The problematic character of middle stateness and its implications for the definition of political culture in middle-state societies result in a complex kind of double-edged diplomacy (Evans, Jacobson, and Putnam 1993). It is a multilevel game in which the external and internal interests at stake in the perpetual process of nation building itself—and not just those at issue in specific negotiations—are interlocked.
The Candidates for Middle Stateness in the Americas
The preceding review of the literature confronts us with a certain number of methodological and analytical difficulties, not the least of which is distinguishing a middle state from another state. Attempts to classify states quantitatively on the basis of their attributes or power have not allowed scholars to isolate an objective position within the international system for states whose behavior is associated with middleness (Neack 1991, 1992). This has led Neack (1995: 225) to argue that middle states have “elected” themselves to this position, a level of international status that has more to do with role modeling than with objective criteria. Definition and identification based on behavior should thus be more useful than those based on position or function (Cooper, Higgott, and Nossal 1993), but this approach poses certain problems as well. Indeed, it is far from evident that behaviors such as the search for multilateral solutions to international conflicts, the search for compromise, or “good international citizenship” (Cooper, Higgott, and Nossal 1993: 19) are sufficient criteria to describe middle states or that they can easily be made operational. For the moment, it appears preferable to characterize middle states according to three criteria dominating the literature: the first is positional, the second is relational, and the third is behavioral.
The middle state relates to the others in the international system by virtue of its societal and technical capabilities rather than its purely structural attributes.
The middle state models its behavior in accordance with a role conception that includes an inclination toward good international citizenship, multilateral activism, coalition and institution building, and mediation.
The three states we have chosen to study—Argentina, Canada, and Mexico—satisfy the first criterion. In the measurement of the hierarchy of power in the Americas presented in Chapter 3, Argentina, Canada, and Mexico consistently appeared in the group of five states immediately following the United States and recording a decile rank superior to 1. 1 Argentina, Canada, and Mexico also commonly satisfy Carsten Holbraad’s neorealist classification of middle powers (Neack 1991: 115–118) and figure among the more frequently listed middle states according to Neack’s literature survey (Neack 1991: 119). Satisfying the positional criterion makes them at least candidates to middle stateness.
With regard to the second criterion, it is clear that, in the regional context, Brazil relates to the other states more by virtue of its structural (or counterstructural) leadership qualities than its societal or technical capabilities. Consequently, even if it qualifies for middle stateness on the basis of its position in the hierarchy of power, it cannot be treated as such here. To put it bluntly, Brazil is too powerful compared with other Latin American countries to consider itself or to be considered by these other countries a middle state (see Chapter 7 for a discussion of this issue).
We have also excluded Venezuela from our analysis. In the 1970s, Venezuela’s foreign policy behavior closely resembled that of a middle state, although Caracas adopted a low profile in diplomatic affairs after the debt crisis. However, access to oil revenues rather than technical capacities may better explain the prominent role assumed by Caracas in Latin America in the 1970s. That is why we have chosen to concentrate on Argentina, Canada, and Mexico. Argentina is presented as a middle state in relation to the dominant Brazilian power in South America. Canada and Mexico are in a similar position in relation to the United States in North America.
The situation is more problematic regarding the behavioral criterion. This aspect of the classification should be part of our investigation and treated more as hypothesis than as fact. Whereas Canada appears to be the archetypal middle state in general terms (Cooper, Higgott, and Nossal 1993), although this remains to be verified in the hemispheric context, Argentina and Mexico have in the past shown little evidence of middle-state role modeling. However, it could be hypothesized that their more traditional and narrow-minded form of diplomacy has shifted to one based on a more liberal and activist international citizenship parallel to the development of the new post–Cold War regionalism. Thus, a good part of our investigation should focus on determining whether Argentina, Canada, and Mexico, three serious candidates for middle stateness in the Americas, effectively perform a middle-state role.
Argentina
The end of the Cold War and the launch of the contemporary regionalist project in the Americas corresponded with a radical change in the orientation of Argentine foreign policy. After attempting to play a leadership role in the nonaligned movement and acting as a challenger of the established international order during the first years of democratic government, Buenos Aires adapted its behavior to the more conformist middle-state model in the early 1990s. This new orientation also corresponded with the arrival of Carlos Menem at the head of the Argentine state. Menem adopted a clearly pro-U.S. and pro-Western foreign policy, which led to, among other things, the involvement of Argentine troops in the Gulf War and Washington’s recent decision to grant the country major non–North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) ally status.
The Argentine state then took on the task of propagating the values of the new international order on a continent traditionally attached to established principles of noninterventionism and the people’s right to decide their own future. In 1992 it proposed and obtained the adoption by the Organization of American States (OAS) of the principles contained in the Protocol of Washington providing for the suspension of a member state that ceases to be democratically governed (Bloomfield 1994; Muñoz 1993a). Argentina also strove constantly for the reinforcement of OAS structures and normative obligations: it defended the idea of a convention on disappearances proposed by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (Human Rights Watch 1994: 73–74), was the most ardent advocate of an armed intervention in Haiti (“OAS Ministers” 1994: 1), and was responsible for the demand that resulted in Peru’s suspension from the Rio Group in the aftermath of the 1992 autogolpe (Vaky 1993: 25).
In the area of trade liberalization, Argentina sought to mediate between the Southern Cone Common Market (Mercosur) partners grouped around Brazil and advocating a distinct approach to integration and the states that wanted to see the extension of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to the continent as a whole (Menem 1990: 149–157; Saccone 1994). At the Denver conference, Argentine representatives proposed a first step in the latter direction in the form of a continental free trade agreement covering the agricultural sector (Jellinek 1995). Argentina also declared itself favorable to OAS involvement in the leveling of legal obstacles to integration (Organization of American States 1993). Active on two fronts—NAFTA extension and further development of the Mercosur experience—Argentina sought from 1992 to 1995 to gradually transform Mercosur into an organization more compatible with NAFTA. Considered by the United States as a credible partner in both regional economic and political spheres but equally intent on conserving privileged relations with the giant Brazil, Argentina has positioned itself at the intersection of the two continental currents of integrationist logic. Furthermore, the country has every intention of taking advantage of the strategic role that it has in large measure given itself.
Argentina had thus positioned itself up to the mid-1990s as an unavoidable strategic interlocutor on the chessboard of regional construction with regard to the two strategic elements that drive the new regionalist logic in the Americas: trade and democratic stability. Through diplomatic activism, it pushed for increased institutionalization of the regional reality and the extension of its normative content, elements that in return reinforced Argentina’s capacity for action as an emerging middle state. In sum, the new regional dynamic gave Argentina the opportunity to reshape its international role. Invested with the moral stature and diplomatic capacity of a middle state, Argentina in turn allowed regionalism to develop in a more liberal direction that would have been unimaginable without its participation. As we will discuss later, it was Argentina, and not Mexico, that tried to act as a diplomatic bridge builder of the new American regionalism.
This international role modeling on the part of the Argentine state corresponds with important changes in Argentine political culture. The defeat of Raul Alfonsín’s radicals at the hands of Menem’s neo-Peronists gave the signal for Argentina to align itself with the Western political and economic model. In Argentina, as in all countries of the southern part of the hemisphere, the democratic revolution took place on the basis of a shifting definition of democracy (Wiarda 1990, 1995b). Furthermore, references to the exterior—or the positioning of its own national experience in relation to external experiences—are both an instrument of legitimization for the government in power and an object of struggle over fundamental common values between different factions within political society. Although Argentina had stated its philosophical attachment to Western values under the Alfonsín government (Vacs 1989: 39), the diplomatic position adopted by Buenos Aires in favor of nonalignment and an independent course for nations of the South indicated a certain ambiguity in the foreign policy arena. The Menem regime continued to defend democracy but left the nonaligned movement and adopted a foreign policy that was more realistic and faithful to the principles of good international citizenship. This evolution can be understood as a search for external sources of legitimization in light of the Argentine state’s move to reform the values of the political culture and the socioeconomic foundations on which it was to base its political legitimacy and power during the 1990s. The economic reforms undertaken by Argentine authorities proceeded from a liberal logic that signified a rupture with the traditional protectionist mentalities and practices that had structured Argentina’s sociopolitical landscape in the past. By linking these domestic measures with the logic of international and regional integration through its new diplomatic orientation, the Menem regime effectively disqualified the alternative: a nationalist retreat inward associated with Argentine economic decline.
The Argentine case demonstrates that changes in diplomatic roles cannot simply be explained by the inevitably slow transformation of the national political culture. Instead, the rapidity with which Buenos Aires modified its international behavior suggests that the transformation of the Argentine political profile was also an intervening variable in the process of shaping a new political identity and consciousness for Argentines. Through its actions, Argentina acquired a new international prestige that reflected positively on the regime in power as well as on its political programs.
The essential point is that Argentina’s international role modeling is occurring through a new form of regional identification. At the same time that it was abandoning its position as a challenger of the established international order to defend the rules and institutions of the new international order, Argentina was actively redefining its exterior space: From membership in a peripheral world organized along a South-South axis, it took steps to become part of a space organized around a North-South axis of cooperation and trade. In doing so, it adopted a new region of reference, one no longer defined as essentially Latin American and opposed to North America but rather as hemispheric in scope.
This did not mean that Buenos Aires turned its back on the subregion of the Southern Cone. There again, the Argentine state did more than just follow the evolution of Argentine political culture. Relying on that culture for support, the state forced it beyond both its traditional, nationalist terms of reference and its rivalry with Brazil (Bartolome 1990; Child 1985), pushing it toward a more liberal form of nationalism. This form of nationalism was more favorable to the redeployment of the foundations of state legitimacy on the basis of the state’s new role as agent of Argentina’s insertion into the world economy and modernity (Roy 1995). By linking Argentine pride and self-identification to the state’s new position as model and defender of both democratic action and liberalization in a regional context, Argentina’s diplomacy contributed in turn to the consolidation of that new legitimacy.
The new regionalist impetus originating in the United States created an opportunity for the Argentine state. Buenos Aires took advantage of the new dynamic to redefine its international role to correspond with parallel domestic restructuring projects and to acquire the position of a middle state within the new international system. The strategic position Argentina acquired as a result of the new continental political dynamic allowed it to orient the development of regional cooperation in a direction favorable to its new role.
Since 1995, however, the Argentine government has been much less vocal in both its previous main fields of intervention, namely, democracy and free trade. Buenos Aires has said very little about the hemispheric regime for democracy, which is somewhat consistent with the level of attention given to the subject by the other countries in the region since that time. This low level of attention can probably be explained by the fact that, in contrast to the early 1990s, there have been no major occasions, like the coup in Haiti or the adoption of the Washington protocol, where the actors have had to articulate positions or engage in specific commitments. After the intense period of OAS-led region building in the field of democracy in the Americas, it seems that the second half of the 1990s is a period of more basic groundwork of policymaking and institution building. In such a context, governments like that of Argentina are probably still quite active but in a more discreet fashion.
Buenos Aires maintains a policy of strong support of the FTAA project but has not shown the kind of leadership that might have been expected. During the successive trade ministerials, the Argentine government has made propositions and pronouncements aimed above all at keeping the process on track, opposing maneuvers of dilution by Mexico and Brazil on the timetable and efficiency, but it has not suggested many original propositions.
Consequently, there is clearly a supportive but low-profile attitude on the part of Argentina toward the hemispheric regionalist project. This attitude is interesting, particularly when it is compared with that of Canada. This hemispheric foreign policy behavior of Buenos Aires and Ottawa were very similar during the first half of the 1990s. But Washington’s congressional difficulties and apparent lack of a consistent hemispheric policy made Canada more determined to assume a leadership role in the continental regionalist project. These matters seemed to have an opposite effect on Argentina.
Argentina’s domestic factors may provide a probable explanation. The years 1994–1999 have been a very intense political period in Argentina. President Menem sought and obtained a constitutional revision permitting his reelection in 1994. He tried the same procedure again for the 1999 presidential election, this time without success. Therefore, the domestic political maneuvering for the electoral deadline of 1999 and after may have turned the attention of the political elite in Argentina away from the foreign policy agenda.
But the most probable explanation of Argentina’s lower profile is the state’s perception of the fragility of the regionalist project. Continental integration increases Argentina’s room to maneuver in relation to Brazil, and Buenos Aires was an active player in the hemispheric project when it was convinced that the project would materialize. But when the Menem government became less certain about the success of the FTAA and the regionalist project, an uncertainty due in good part to the inability of the U.S. executive to obtain fast-track legislation from Congress, it became less aggressive.
It is possible that this attitude of the Argentine government is only temporary. But in the absence of U.S. leadership in hemispheric affairs, Argentina will not take a leading role to sustain a process about which its principal ally, Brazil, has significant reservations. Brazil has already expressed some dissatisfaction toward certain Argentine positions—for example, its new status as a major U.S. non-NATO ally—and thus it is logical that Buenos Aires does not want to antagonize its neighbor regarding a project that might never become a reality. Should the project fail, Argentina would be left with its bilateral relation with Brazil as a major foreign policy constraint.
Mexico
Because of its participation in NAFTA, Mexico appears to be a key actor in the American regionalization process. For Mexico, however, NAFTA may have been more important for securing its bilateral relations with the United States than for supporting regional construction. Mexico’s geopolitical situation suggests that it would be to the country’s advantage to take on the role of diplomatic bridge builder between North America and Latin America. The evidence says otherwise: Mexico has resisted the regionalist project as much as its partnership with the United States allows. We argue that Mexico is resisting the development of the societal and technical capacities of the inter-American system because it cannot fill the role of middle state that it would have to occupy within such a system to conserve the equivalent level of international status it currently possesses for simple geostrategic reasons.
Let us first look at the direction in which Mexican foreign policy has taken the regionalization process. On the trade front, Mexico is not an ardent promoter of regional integration. Public declarations aside (“Zedillo” 1994: 1), the country appears cold to the idea of NAFTA expansion, a position confirmed in the spring of 1994 by the publication of a White House diplomatic report (González and Chabat 1996: 83–84). On a hemispheric scale, Mexico would rather look into much less restrictive liberalization measures, within the OAS framework, for example (Organization of American States 1993: 13).
The country’s stance is much clearer on questions unrelated to trade. Mexico is fiercely opposed to an institutional and normative reinforcement of the inter-American system. This opposition is particularly evident with regard to the democratization process, an important element of the regionalization process envisaged at the Miami summit (Summit of the Americas 1994). In 1992 Mexico was the only state to vote against the Protocol of Washington, which allows the OAS to expel countries no longer conforming to the principles of representative democracy (González and Chabat 1996: 83). In the preceding year, heavy pressure was required to secure in extremis Mexico’s vote in favor of OAS Resolution 1080, which obliges member states to consult each other when the democratic process is disrupted within the boundaries of a member country (Bloomfield 1994: 162ff). Mexico also opposed OAS interventions to reestablish democracy in Haiti (Brooke 1994), Peru (“Mexico Rejects” 1992), and Guatemala (“Guatemala” 1993) and rejected the creation of a multinational force to protect democracy (Cevallos 1995), all in the name of the principle of nonintervention in the internal affairs of a foreign country. In doing so, Mexico positioned itself alongside Brazil as one of the most conservative states in the hemisphere (Gosselin, Mace, and Bélanger 1995).
In contrast, Mexico has been prepared to support certain state groupings such as the Group of Eight—born in 1987 out of the fusion of the Contadora Group and the Contadora Support Group—and the Group of Three (Colombia, Mexico, and Venezuela). However, these groupings have so far served more as fora for the discussion of economic and political questions than as veritable tools for cooperation (González and Chabat 1996: 82).
This portrait clearly illustrates that Mexico has not adopted a foreign policy profile corresponding with the middle-state model. Unlike Argentina, it has not pushed its objective of reinsertion into the international order to the point of radically questioning traditional isolationism and its principles of noninterventionism and self-determination (Abella 1992: 69–70). Mexico’s new foreign policy doctrine, which Guadalupe González and Jorge Chabat (1996) call “participative realism,” aims to connect the Mexican economy to the poles of world development without modifying its diplomatic profile. The goal is first to increase Mexico’s relative economic capabilities and to base its political power on future economic attributes rather than to seek political dividends through immediate diplomatic involvement in a regionalization process that would permit others to benefit from the comparative advantages it now enjoys. In other words, Mexico is not ready to share with its Latin American neighbors the current advantage given to it by privileged access to the U.S. market.
In the final analysis, this dichotomy between the economic and the political accurately reflects Mexico’s internal evolution and the orientations of the Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI) regime that controls the Mexican state. By pursuing its present policy and refusing the middle-state role that it has been offered, Mexico is not just responding to the constraints of a political culture that could perhaps be qualified as unconducive to the development of qualities attributed to this diplomatic role (idealism, pacifism, and liberalism). It constitutes, through its diplomacy, an important agent for the reproduction of the characteristics that distinguish the political culture in question.
Furthermore, Mexican foreign policy has always been a privileged instrument of legitimization for both the regime in power and what has proven to be a largely statist form of nationalism. More particularly, it has been put to the service of PRI nationalist and revolutionary ideology. This resulted in the exacerbation of a defensive policy orientation, especially toward the United States, and toward a certain isolationism. During the 1970s, this orientation expressed itself in a pro–Third World policy that challenged the international economic order. Mexico even attempted to take a leadership role among reform-minded states by proposing a Charter of State Economic Rights and Responsibilities (Chabat 1990). This doctrinaire line was intended to provide support for a form of strong state nationalism that found its justification in the hostile characterization of the external environment. In turn, this state nationalism permitted the reproduction of an authoritarian development model, based on protected national industry and a quasi one-party regime.
When Mexico decided to reorient its foreign economic policy in the wake of the 1982 financial crisis and the failure of the trade diversification policy (Villegas 1988), it had to do so without contradicting too openly the traditional diplomatic doctrine that helped legitimize the regime in power. Increased Mexican openness and a more participative diplomatic profile have been limited to the economic dimensions of Mexican foreign policy. Even so, the change is still major. By adopting a liberal form of discourse and practice, the Mexican state is attacking an entire political culture of domestic interventionism and calling into question some of its fundamental characteristics. These include state ownership and the state’s subsidiary and protectionist roles; the sacred character of national sovereignty; traditional challenges to the dominant liberal economic order; and the characterization of the outside world as a source of threat (Abella 1992). In contrast, these unifying aspects of Mexican political culture and of the legitimizing action of the state are reaffirmed in the more political realm, particularly in Mexican regional policy. Therefore, although the United States is no longer viewed solely as a symbol of external threat, the Mexican state—trade aside—uses the regional diplomatic scene to affirm its independence with regard to its big northern neighbor and to revive revolutionary themes still important in Mexican political culture (E. Ferris 1984).
It is clear, then, that the ambivalence that prevents Mexico from behaving as a middle state has both an internal and external explanation. By positioning itself on the margins of the regionalist project with regard to a political issue as central as that of democratization, Mexico has reproduced the role modeling that legitimizes the maintenance of a still centralized and authoritarian domestic policy dominated by nationalist state discourse. This discourse flies in the face of the new international order embraced by the middle states. Mexico, thus, has not followed the Argentine course, which radically altered the material and ideological foundations on which the state bases its power. Clearly, the PRI elites who initiated the liberalization of both Mexican domestic and foreign policy encountered much greater internal resistance than their Argentine counterparts.
Mexico’s actions have slowed the development of the societal capacities of the inter-American system and prevented states that have chosen the path of middle stateness from benefiting from the advantages they could otherwise expect. By reacting as it has to the regionalist project—that is to say, by maintaining a relatively conservative policy on regionalism—Mexico has revealed that it does not posit itself as a middle state within the inter-American system. This conservative attitude allows the reproduction of certain strategic features of both the internal and external political environments that might otherwise be threatened, but it gives the regionalization process a less ambitious orientation in terms of its societal and institutional capabilities.
Canada
The concept of middle power has long been associated with Canada’s behavior as an international actor (King Gordon 1966; Holmes 1976; Pratt 1990; Wood 1990; Cooper, Higgott, and Nossal 1993). At its inception, it was more a political concept than an analytical one. Ideology for some (Painchaud 1966), doctrine for others (Mackay 1969), the notion was developed by the architects of Canadian foreign policy in the immediate post–World War II period.
Between 1945 and the mid-1960s, Canada played a far greater international role than it would normally have been expected to solely on the basis of economic power or diplomatic tradition. In effect, Ottawa partly filled a vacuum in international affairs resulting from the world conflict of 1939–1945 and in so doing achieved a position and status that it would not have obtained under normal circumstances.
For Lester Pearson, John Holmes, Escott Reid, and the other architects of Canada’s foreign policy at the time, the use of the term “middle power” was to some extent a means of securing Canada’s status on the world scene. It was also part of a vision of what Canada’s conduct in world affairs should be. This vision or doctrine came to be known as the internationalist tradition of Canadian foreign policy. Middle-power internationalism essentially implied two basic elements: the promotion of the principle of functionalism—which meant constantly supporting the multilateral organizations seen as vital to the functioning of the world system—and the promotion of world peace through the collective security and, more recently, cooperative security frameworks within which Canada has developed considerable expertise in mediation and peacekeeping (Hawes 1984: 3–6). These elements contributed to molding a specific role for Canada as an “honest broker” and a “helpful fixer.”
If Canada acts as a middle state in the context of the regional system of the Americas, we should be able to identify elements of behavior consistent with the doctrine of middle-power internationalism. As outlined in the first part of the chapter, the challenge for a middle state in the context of the regional system of the Americas is to develop or reproduce middle-state status in that context. The benefits are tangible and involve substantial participation in the process of agenda building so that the regional agenda will enable a country to advance its national interests. In the case of Canada, this takes two forms: multilateral institution building and peace and stability through cooperative security.
Historically, Canada was never a major actor in the Americas; it traditionally neglected the countries south of the Rio Grande in the conduct of its foreign policy. A period of discovery occurred in the 1970s (Ogelsby 1976; Mace 1989: 412–424; Rochlin 1993: 65–92), followed by several years of relative neglect that was due to the world economic crisis of 1981–1982 and the external debt crisis that affected Latin America for most of the 1980s. The turning point came with the 1989 announcement of a new Latin American strategy for Canada, a major component of which was the decision to seek formal membership in the Organization of American States (Clark 1989).
Up to now, what regional governance exists in the Americas occurs under the auspices of four organizations: the oas, the Inter-American Development Bank (idB), the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (eclac), and the Rio Group. Although a longtime member of idb and eclac, Canada and indeed most American countries seem to view the oas as the main forum for discussing hemispheric affairs in the years to come despite its past shortcomings (Canadian Foundation for the Americas 1994: 19–20).
Consequently, it is in the oas setting that Canada has been most active in promoting multilateral cooperation since the beginning of the 1990s. Under the able stewardship of Jean-Paul Hubert, Canada’s first ambassador of and permanent representative to the organization, the Canadian government has been heavily involved in the process of oas administrative and financial reform instituted prior to Canada’s officially becoming a member. The Canadian delegation pressed for technical and administrative reforms so that the oas could better respond to problems at hand and increase its credibility in the eyes of its members. This same rationale lay behind Canada’s calls for payment of past and present membership dues.
From the beginning, Canada has been an oas activist, regularly participating in various committees and commissions, such as the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, to name but one. Canada was also instrumental in the adoption of the Santiago Commitment and played a central role in the establishment of the Unit for the Promotion of Democracy (Mackenzie 1994: 4–6; McKenna 1995). In fact, Canada was so proactive in the oas that longtime observers such as Edgar Dosman, former director of the Canadian Foundation for the Americas, were afraid that such an attitude might be counterproductive. In Dosman’s view, the Canadian delegation to the oas was too aggressive in pursuing matters related mainly to Canada’s interests to the detriment of issues with greater relevance to the other members of the organization (Dosman 1992: 546–547).
Evidently, Canada has not been afraid to reproduce its traditional middle-state behavior in the context of the Americas, particularly with regard to the promotion of multilateral cooperation. It has primarily done so in the oas framework, where it has most recently been active on the Cuban issue. At the June 1994 oas meeting in Brazil, Secretary of State for Latin America and Africa Christine Stewart made an indirect appeal for Cuban rapprochement with the oas (Stewart 1994) by announcing that Canada would resume aid to Havana after a sixteen-year suspension (Vincent 1994). But Canada is also active in promoting regional cooperation outside the oas, as witnessed by the recent joint declaration establishing high-level political consultations between Canada and the members of the Rio Group (Canada 1995).
Canada has also been quite active with regard to peace and stability, the second major component of middle-state internationalism. It promoted the concept of cooperative security involving multilateral and multidimensional cooperation to reduce or eliminate threats to stability originating outside and inside countries of the region (Gosselin, Mace, and Bélanger 1995: 800). Cooperative security, in the Canadian case, took essentially three forms: participation in the monitoring of electoral processes in Haiti, Nicaragua, and elsewhere to help promote democracy and internal stability; condemnation of antidemocratic conduct such as the 1992 autogolpe in Peru (Ottawa did not impose sanctions but suspended direct support to the Peruvian government) (Nash 1992); and mediation and peacekeeping in Central America and Haiti. Canada was an important actor in UN Observer Mission in Central America, the UN peacekeeping mission in Central America, and also agreed to lead the UN mission in Haiti (“Le Canada” 1994).
Mediation and peacekeeping have long been associated with Canada’s conduct in international affairs. They are major components of the middle-state internationalist doctrine developed in Canada, and it is clear that this model will also be applied in the framework of the Americas, as the Haitian case indicates. Ottawa was one of the first governments to condemn the military coup in Haiti in September 1991. Canada suspended its bilateral cooperation program with Haiti after the coup and pushed for oas mediation of the situation. After the failure of oas diplomatic efforts, the Canadian government consistently supported UN resolutions demanding a return to democratic rule and finally agreed to participate in the United Nations Mission in Haiti (Mackenzie 1994: 6–9). Canada was closely associated with all developments in the Haitian crisis. Ottawa preferred sanctions to military intervention but was forced to recognize that sanctions were slow in bringing results. Although the Canadian government declined to take part in the U.S.-led military intervention in September 1994, it intervened in the reconstruction process and also agreed to lead the UN mission in Haiti.
In terms of the external issues, it is clear that Canada has applied to the Americas a foreign policy based on the main tenets of middle-state internationalism, namely, multilateral cooperation and promotion of peace and stability. Let us now examine the internal issues by looking at the relationship between foreign policy behavior and Canadian political culture and by trying to assess the impact of this relationship on the legitimacy and identity of the Canadian federation.
Because of its long tradition of middle-state behavior and recognition as a middle state by other actors in the international system, the Canadian government, unlike Argentina and, up to a point, Mexico, felt less pressure to adapt its behavior in the Americas for internal consumption or to reflect Canadian political culture. After all, this behavior has always been more or less a constant of Canadian foreign policy (Hockin 1978).
But Ottawa uses its foreign policy in the Americas as it does the rest of its foreign policy. Although the means employed are multilateral cooperation and cooperative security, the ends pursued are democracy, respect for human rights, promotion of women, social justice, equitable distribution of wealth in a framework of economic liberalism, and so on. These values are presented as key components of the Canadian social fabric and as representing a Canadian societal model that is more gentle, more accommodating, and more compassionate with regard to the disadvantaged. By promoting such values in the context of the regional system of the Americas, the Canadian government is naturally contributing to the development of an environment consistent with the Canadian vision of society and, in so doing, to a reinforcement of these values inside the Canadian community. In the present Canadian political context, a foreign policy of this nature also serves to legitimize the federal government as a central actor in the federation inasmuch as it is seen by the Canadian public as the main channel for Canada’s action in the world, as well as the main filter through which external pressures affect Canadian society. Consequently, Canada’s behavior as a middle state of the Americas is essentially oriented toward the reinforcement of regional multilateral institutions, behavior that is intimately linked with the promotion of Canadian culture and values at home.
Finally, in the Americas as elsewhere in the world, the federal government uses its foreign policy as much as possible to reinforce the Canadian identity. Considering the centrifugal forces at work in Canada and the fact that the country’s survival depends on the continued coexistence of the two major linguistic groups that built it, Canadian foreign policy must reflect this reality and at the same time play a special role in this respect. The development of Canadian relations with Francophone Africa in the 1960s can be explained in large measure by Ottawa’s desire to have its foreign policy more accurately reflect the reality of Canadian politics and simultaneously discourage the secessionist movement in Quebec (Sabourin 1976). Canada’s involvement in the Haitian crisis and its constant preoccupation with Haiti plays a somewhat similar role. Canada without Quebec would certainly have been less preoccupied by the Haitian crisis and would have devoted fewer resources to its resolution. In this sense, Canada’s involvement with Haiti exemplifies how, in the context of the Americas, Ottawa uses middle-state diplomacy to strengthen Canadian identity.
But Canadian identity is not just a reflection of the internal dynamics of the federation. It also has to do with Canada-U.S. relationships, which became that much closer with the signing of the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (FTA). Because of the FTA and the United States’ enormous influence on inter-American affairs, Canada’s consistent efforts to reinforce multilateral institutions in the Americas must also be seen as a means to strengthen the Canadian identity with regard to U.S. influence. This seems to be the attitude in the trade sector, where Ottawa is creating a web of trade agreements with countries such as Chile and with Mercosur, the rationale being to keep up regionalist momentum when the United States seems to hesitate.
In short, this brief presentation demonstrates that even though Canada is a newcomer to the regional system of the Americas, it has already adopted behavior consistent with its status as a middle state. We have tried to show that the Canadian government also seeks to strengthen Canadian political culture and the Canadian identity through its behavior as a middle state.
Conclusion
Until now, the literature on middle states or middle powers has been hampered by two essential shortcomings. Notwithstanding notable contributions by Neack and Cooper, Higgott, and Nossal, the literature has failed to propose an operational concept that could be used for the purpose of comparative analysis. Furthermore, the literature has focused almost exclusively on the behavior of industrialized middle states such as Australia, Canada, and Sweden in a Cold War context of global politics.
In our exploratory study we have sought to offer a modest contribution to the analysis of middle-state behavior in regional politics at a theoretical and empirical level. In the first instance, we propose to operationalize the concept of middle state by incorporating three main attributes referred to as positional, relational, and behavioral. We also suggest that middle-state foreign policy behavior, and indeed all foreign policy behavior, must not be seen exclusively as the result of an essentially outward-looking policy process. We accept the long-standing notion that foreign policy is both action and reaction, but we propose that the action component of the process has two specific functions. Externally oriented national role conceptions of middle stateness are social constructs that seek to mold or structure the external environments of states in a bilateral, multilateral, or, in this case, regional context. In the case of middle states, the privileged locus of such action on the system lies at the interaction level in the societal and technical capabilities of the system. But the foreign policy initiatives of middle states also fulfill a second, internally oriented function. They participate in structuring the internal milieu so as to reinforce national identity and sustain or develop the legitimacy of the state itself.
At the empirical level, we have tried to follow Cooper’s suggestion (Hayes 1994: 11) that with the world system now shifting from a bipolar to a multipolar structure and the world agenda more focused on issues of low politics, scholars should examine the behavior of states that were not traditionally referred to as middle states but that may be called upon to play that role in the future.
Inside the American regional system, we have selected three countries that qualified or had the potential to act as middle states. The results of the exploratory study show that since the late 1980s, Canada has effectively reproduced at the regional level the middle-state behavior that Canadian governments have perfected on the world scene since the end of World War II. President Menem’s Argentina also managed to behave in a manner surprisingly consistent with anticipated patterns of middle-state behavior, at least up to 1995. Such behavior was probably made possible by the tight control that President Menem maintains over the state apparatus and by Argentina’s previous experience in middle-state diplomacy, such as its participation in the Cairns Group. Mexico, in contrast, has not behaved as a middle state at all. One possible reason for this behavior is that the Mexican government prefers to consolidate the economic gains from its participation in nafta before seeing NAFTA benefits extended to the rest of the region and before becoming involved in the promotion of a hemisphere-wide regional system. This explanation is consistent with neorealist expectations about the cooperative behavior of intermediate powers (see Chapter 3). Given Mexico’s behavior, general middle-state theory should perhaps be readjusted to take into account the fact that states that are candidates for middle stateness on the basis of their position are less likely to adopt the cooperative attitudes one might expect from them if they find themselves in a competitive situation that renders them sensitive to relative gains competitors could make. This consideration should be added to the fact that Mexico may also face stronger internal political resistance than Argentina with regard to middle-state behavior in the present regional context and its consequences for the political system.
These preliminary results are extremely interesting for the study of the dynamics of regionalism and international relations in the Americas. A regional system like the one being developed in the Americas cannot be determined solely by the action or interplay of two major actors, such as the United States and Brazil. Middle states of the region must and will intervene to fashion a system not exclusively limited to free trade but also capable of managing more complex issues without which regional capability will remain an empty notion and an unfulfilled reality.
Endnotes
*: This chapter is part of a research project funded by the Fonds pour la formation des chercheurs et l’aide à la recherche of the government of Quebec and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. We would like to thank Joël Monfils and Martin Roy for research assistance. Back.
Note 1: Along with Brazil and Venezuela. Back.
Email this citation