Canada's role in international relations: through a triangular lens
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation seeks to contribute to the academic debate over the historical authenticity of the 'triangle' among Canada, Britain and the United States, as depicted by historian J. B. Brebner in his book, North Atlantic Triangle, published in 1945. Historians have since challenged the suitability of the 'triangle' metaphor, and have queried whether a 'triangle' actually existed at some points in history. David Haglund, the only political scientist that has ventured around the topic, defined the 'triangle' as a "cognitive reality" for Canadian policymakers from Confederation to the Cold War, and possibly beyond, in his book North Atlantic Triangle Revisited, publ ished in 2000; but the definition has not been validated by any study. This study seeks to address whether the 'triangle' was a 'cognitive reality', thereby seeking to get inside the minds of Canadian policymakers and view the world as they saw it. Drawing upon a Constructivist understan ding of international relations in which policymakers are believed to view the world through a lens of their making, the study gives ontological importance to their language uttered, to draw inferences in how they viewed the world, and Canada's position within it. Metaphors were frequently uttered by policymakers in describing Canada's role in the world as a "link", "bond", "linchpin", "interpreter", "bridge" or "helpful fixer" between the United States and Britain. As units of language, metaphors are not only constitutive but also causal in creating social reality so that the ·policymaker sees the world as it has been described. The metaphors are believed to provide policymakers with an action orientation, and the role conceptions, in tum, become self·fu lfil ling prophecies. In Foreign Policy Analysis, this study can be regarded as an attempt to get inside the 'black box' of the decision-making process, and draws upon the Poli heuristic Theory of foreign policy decision-making in which policymakers are understood to rely upon heuristics (cognitive shortcuts, for example metaphors) to narrow down the menu of policy options, before using a rational process of selecting the option that best maximizes gains. Discourse Analysis as a methodology accommodates_ the study's interest in examining language uttered in its historical context. Prime Ministers John A. Macdonald, Robert Borden, William Lyon Mackenzie King, Louis St. Laurent I lester Pearson, and Pierre Elliott Trudeau are examined, and it is inferred that they each saw the world through a 'triangular' lens, except Trudeau, who conscientiously made an effort to abandon old metaphors.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.011 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.027 | 0.040 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.025 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".