The Domestic Politics of Quebec's Quest for External Distinctiveness

For more than forty years now, the Quebec government has conducted a distinct diplomatic activity, taking advantage of all the room for maneuver given by the Canadian constitution and using its political leverage inside the federation. The goal of this article is to examine the internal motivating factors for Quebec's international actions and, as it does so, it attempts to respond to the following questions: To what can we attribute the specific character of Quebec's case with respect to other manifestations of international involvement by noncentral governments? What are the most important international objectives pursued by Quebec? What methods and strategies are used in order to attain these objectives? Are these strategies proving to be effective; that is, are these objectives being attained? Such an exercise could not be accomplished without raking into consideration the highly intersubjective nature of Quebec's international presence and status--a fact underscored by the content and structure of this special issue. In the first place, there would obviously be no call for truly international dealings on the part of Quebec if there were no foreign partners available to undertake such relations with its official representatives, sometimes at the highest levels. More importantly perhaps, Quebec's foreign policy makers, who are well aware of the situation, are primordially concerned by the interpretation that will be made outside Quebec of the ultimate purpose of this policy, and they integrate this information into their strategies. Therefore, Quebec's objectives of international assertion are adapted to different registers of meaning from which foreign actors would interpret its foreign policy behavior. Thus, from the decolonization era of the 1960s to our current postmodern period, and depending o n the sensitivity of their interlocutors, Quebec officials have tried to craft their interventions in order to be considered as representatives of a nation, a province, a homeland, an economy, a people, a state. Similarly, Quebec's identity itself, on whose behalf this autonomous foreign policy is pursued, is the object of constant negotiation between the way in which Quebeckers perceive themselves and how this corresponds to the types of legitimate expression of identity emerging within the world order. (1) The task I have been assigned in this special issue leads me to explore the domestic side of these matters. An Identity-Based Paradiplomacy Recent works on the international involvement of noncentral governments (NCGs) have shown the importance of distinguishing between two manifestations of this phenomenon, widely referred to as paradiplomacy. (2) On the one hand, in most cases, paradiplomacy is triggered by functional interests--that is, interests of local governments as agents of economic development and managers of the human and environmental resources of a given territory. In such cases, the development of paradiplomatic activities will generally be decentralized, strongly associated with specific transnational issues, and erratic. In Canada, the Alberta government is a good example of functional interest-based paradiplomatic activity; its activities are strongly linked to the state of Canada-U.S. relations in the area of energy policies. On the other hand, some NCGs are pursuing a paradiplomacy in the name of identity-based interests. In those cases, the existence of a common identity and of a certain kind of national interest gives coherence and continuity to the involvement in international affairs, while subjecting it to the politics of identity and nation-building. In her analysis of the foreign policy of the Belgian federated entities, which most closely approach Quebec in their form and level of development, Francoise Massart-Pierard clearly demonstrates that this identity aspect makes all the difference. (3) This leads her to consider the Belgian Communities and Regions as hybrid international actors, half nation-state and half regional authority, where the task of reinforcing identity is superimposed on that of responding to the functional needs (for example, economic, environmental) of the region they govern. …

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