Enemies of peace, allies of war

Marching Orders
How Canada abandoned peacekeeping – and why the UN needs us now more than ever

Enemies of peace, allies of war

The Embassy’s slogan on those billboards is particularly revealing, because the government has never promoted to a Canadian audience a connection between the war effort in Afghanistan and a desire to build stronger ties with the U.S. However, this is exactly the message that the Canadian government wants American power elites to hear.

Traditionally, the government has encouraged the idea of Canada as a global peacekeeper. The image is used on currency and stamps, and is featured in a peacekeeping monument that was erected in Ottawa in 1992. The federal government recently designated August 9 as national Peacekeeping Day. Many Canadians see the military’s involvement in peacekeeping as a source of national pride.

In fact, the accepted wisdom in Canada for many years was that without its image as a peacekeeper, the Canadian military would not have been able to bolster public support in the post-Cold War era. This seemed especially true in the wake of the terrible 1993 Somalia scandal (when soldiers tortured and killed Shidane Arone, a Somali boy).

In March 2001, the Department of National Defence convened a meeting with 65 defence experts to discuss the military’s peacekeeping image and its effect on the Forces. A report on the meeting revealed the state of the debate:

One participant raised the concern that the Canadian military is losing its character and war-fighting capability by becoming too involved in PSO [Peace Support Operations], and cautioned that the Canadian myth of the CF [Canadian Forces] as peacekeepers and not war-fighters has to be broken in order to salvage the primary purpose of the CF . . . . Yet another participant remarked that including phrases such as “war-fighting” in public communications results in reduced support from the public for such operations, even if the label is more accurate.14

Just a few years after this meeting was held, the Canadian military has completely changed course, virtually abandoning UN peacekeeping in the process. In 1992-93, participation in UN missions accounted for more than nine of every ten dollars spent on international operations. By 2004-05, the United Nations had been nearly abandoned, accounting for a mere 30 cents of every 10 dollars of Canada’s spending on military missions abroad.15

Before the mid-1990s, Canada was consistently among the top-10 contributors of UN troops. In 2005, Canada had dropped to 35th out of the 96 countries then contributing.

Today, Canada’s total contribution of troops to UN peacekeeping missions could fit on a single school bus: 56 soldiers, out of 66,786 international troops serving in UN peacekeeping operations worldwide. Canada now ranks a dismal 52nd out of the 97 contributing countries worldwide, on par with the tiny state of Mali.16

It is ironic that while the 1990s and the current post-Cold War period has marked a renaissance for the UN and its peacekeeping operations, Canada has been moving away from the UN, gradually contributing fewer troops to the UN, and engaging in missions that take up the slack behind the United States.

But it didn’t start this way. Despite some popular books with titles such as While Canada Slept that accuse Canada of slipping into international irrelevancy during the 1990s, Canada’s participation on the world stage was very relevant indeed.

According to Professor Joel Sokolsky, Dean of Arts at the Royal Military College:

In the first decade of the post-Cold War era, Ottawa dispatched forces to most of the hot spots in the newly turbulent world order, beginning with the first Gulf war and continuing on to, among others, Bosnia, Haiti, East Timor and Kosovo . . . . The Canadian Forces did so for a number of reasons: first, as a major industrial country Canada’s fundamental wellbeing is inseparable from the West; second, it is a strong supporter of the United Nations and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization [NATO]; third, and above all, Canada is an ally of the United States.

To be sure, this was also an era of the former foreign minister Lloyd Axworthy’s “human security agenda.” This approach to international relations placed an emphasis on the individual rather than the state; it drew criticism from the U.S. and within Canada. Nevertheless, Ottawa pressed ahead with what critics charged was nothing more than “pulpit diplomacy,” or moral posturing for the sake of antagonizing Washington and projecting an independent image abroad. [But] . . . Canada took the initiative of championing the Landmines treaty and the Rome statute that established the International Criminal Court.17

Sokolsky points out that many within Canada’s defence lobby are misrepresenting Canada’s track record. During the 1990s Canada played a major role on diplomatic and military fronts internationally, as the seminal achievement of the International Criminal Court over the opposition of the U.S. so clearly attests.

However, by the end of the decade, Canada was seriously slipping into the U.S. military orbit, and contributions of troops to the UN were on the decline.

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