Naked Neoliberalism: Canadian Foreign Policy under Harper
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- Published on Tuesday, 13 October 2015 23:00
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 1173 .... October 14, 2015
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Naked Neoliberalism:
Canadian Foreign Policy under Harper
Jerome Klassen
Since the Conservative government of Stephen Harper came to power in 2006, shifts in Canadian foreign policy have been a flashpoint of debate in Parliament, the media, and civil society. There is general agreement that a "revolution in Canadian foreign policy" has occurred, to quote Canadian academic Alexander Moens.
For liberals, Harper's changes are simply a product of his right-wing ideology and domestic maneuvers, and thus are amenable to executive reform. For social democrats and left-nationalists, the same perspective holds, with the added concern of U.S. influence over Canadian state practices. As Marxists have pointed out, the limitation of these perspectives is the absence of any political-economic analysis of Canadian state power -- of any... theorization of Canadian foreign policy as an expression of economic, political, and social power dynamics at home and abroad.
In this article I provide such a theory of Canadian foreign policy under the Harper government. I examine, in particular, the global context in which Canadian foreign policy operates; the policies of Liberal governments before Harper; the strategy of armoured neoliberalism that Harper has advanced; and the implementation of this strategy in several case studies. I argue that the new Canadian foreign policy is a reflection of the internationalization of Canadian capital and the restructuring of the state as an institution of class domination locally and globally.