The Politics of Self‐righteousness: Canadaʹs Foreign Policy and the Human Security Agenda

‘Human security ’ has become a buzzword of post‐Cold War global security governance. By subscribing to the human security leitmotif, Canada has actively participated in the construction of meaning that is attached to and associated with the term. However, it has done so primarily on a rhetorical level by appealing to the myth of Canada’s ‘golden era ’ in the 1950s and its self‐ understanding as a ‘peacekeeper’, ‘do‐gooder’, ‘honest broker ’ and ‘helpful fixer’. It is through this emotionally appealing character that the Canadian human security agenda successfully reconstructed a common national identity notwithstanding the agenda’s inconsistencies and severe cuts of its foreign policy budget. Canada’s Foreign Policy Myth Canada’s largest book retailer, Indigo, has recently been running a campaign arguing that “the world needs more Canada”. The ingredient of Canada that the world needs – and, hence, currently lacks – is in that case: books. Unsurprisingly, however, the slogan also resonates perfectly with a broader Canadian self‐perception of its role in the world1 and especially its appraisal of the so‐called ‘golden era’, the time when the Canadian diplomatic corps was regarded the finest in the world and the country was doing good all over the globe, as a peacekeeper, a generous donor, a brave soldier or an honest broker (Cohen 2003, Welsh 2005). At least, so does the official myth go. It would need too much time and space here to evaluate how close to reality this self‐image comes. Nonetheless this self‐perception nicely serves as a starting point for locating Canada’s foreign policy under Lloyd Axworthy, subsumed under the label of human security, and for placing it in the broader context of Canada’s external relations since the end of World War II. Since that time two issues have been crucial for the formulation of the country’s foreign policy, namely (a) its relationship with its Southern neighbour, and (b) the question of national unity and a common national identity (Keating 2002: 1, Stevenson 2000: 91). However, these two linkages cannot be illustrated without briefly elaborating on human security as a – at least rhetorical – new form of foreign policy (also see Bosold and von Bredow 2006).

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