In The National Interest

Canada's role as world power and its sense of itself in the global landscape has been largely shaped and defined over the past 100 years by the changing policies and personalities in the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT). This engaging and provocative book brings together fifteen of the country's leading historians and political scientists to discuss a century of Canada's national interests and DFAIT's role in defining and pursuing them. Accomplished and influential analysts such as Jack Granatstein, Norman Hillmer, and Nelson Michaud, are joined by rising stars like Whitney Lackenbauer, Adam Chapnick, and Tammy Nemeth in commenting on the history and future implications of Canada's foreign policy. In the National Interest gives fresh insight into the Canada First concept in the 1920s, the North American security issues in the 1930s, Canada's vision for the United Nations, early security warnings in the Arctic, the rise of the international francophone community, conflicting continental visions over energy, and Canada/U.S. policy discussions. The impact of politicians and senior bureaucrats such as O D Skelton, Lester B Pearson, Marcel Cadieux, Jules Leger, Pierre Trudeau and Brian Mulroney are set against issues such as national defence, popular opinion, human rights, and energy production. In the National Interest also provides a platform for discussion about Canada's future role on the international stage. With its unique combination of administrative and policy history, In the National Interest is in a field of its own.

This is the first systematic and critical analysis of the concept of national interest from the perspective of contemporary theories of International Relations, including realist, Marxist, anarchist, liberal, English School and constructivist perspectives. Scott Burchill explains that although commonly used in diplomacy, the national interest is a highly problematic concept and a poor guide to understanding the motivations of foreign policy.

The United States has been marked by a highly politicized and divisive history of foreign policy-making. Why do the nation's leaders find it so difficult to define the national interest? Peter Trubowitz offers a new and compelling conception of American foreign policy and the domestic geopolitical forces that shape and animate it. Foreign policy conflict, he argues, is grounded in America's regional diversity. The uneven nature of America's integration into the world economy has made regionalism a potent force shaping fights over the national interest. As Trubowitz shows, politicians from different parts of the country have consistently sought to equate their region's interests with that of the nation. Domestic conflict over how to define the "national interest" is the result. Challenging dominant accounts of American foreign policy-making, Defining the National Interest exemplifies how interdisciplinary scholarship can yield a deeper understanding of the connections between domestic and international change in an era of globalization.

How do states know what they want? Asking how interests are defined and how changes in them are accommodated, Martha Finnemore shows the fruitfulness of a constructivist approach to international politics. She draws on insights from sociological institutionalism to develop a systemic approach to state interests and state behavior by investigating an international structure not of power but of meaning and social value. An understanding of what states want, she argues, requires insight into the international social structure of which they are a part. States are embedded in dense networks of transnational and international social relations that shape their perceptions and their preferences in consistent ways. Finnemore focuses on international organizations as one important component of social structure and investigates the ways in which they redefine state preferences. She details three examples in different issue areas. In state structure, she discusses UNESCO and the changing international organization of science. In security, she analyzes the role of the Red Cross and the acceptance of the Geneva Convention rules of war. Finally, she focuses on the World Bank and explores the changing definitions of development in the Third World. Each case shows how international organizations socialize states to accept new political goals and new social values in ways that have lasting impact on the conduct of war, the workings of the international political economy, and the structure of states themselves.

The concept of "identity" in international relations offers too many vague and imprecise definitions of the concepts that stand at its very core. This text offers clear definitions of the concept of identity and the concepts surrounding the term.

"Canadian Foreign Policy: Defining the National Interest will contribute greatly to intelligent democratic debate about what Canada should do globally." - Joseph Masciulli, St. Thomas University