"Without regard to the interests of others": Canada and American Unilateralism in the Post-Cold War Era

• Published in: The American review of Canadian studies 1997-08, Vol.27 (2), p.179-197
• Main Author: Nossal, Kim Richard
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Canada; Commerce; Cuba; Economic relations; Finance; Foreign relations; Free trade and protection; International relations; United Nations; United States
• ISSN: 0272-2011; 1943-9954
• DOI: 10.1080/02722019709481496

From the outset, [Roy MacLaren], the minister for international trade from November 1993 to January 1996, committed the new Liberal government to the principles of a multilateral, rules-based trade order. Speaking in Vancouver merely two weeks after being sworn in, he asserted that the Liberals would try to ensure that "rules, rather than the unilateral projection of power or pressure politics, will rule in the Pacific trading relationship."(f.14) The necessity of building a rules-based order and the abandonment of "power politics" were themes to which both MacLaren and his successor, Art Eggleton, persistently returned over the ensuing years. For example, at the traditional "Canadian Luncheon" at the World Economic Summit in Davos, Switzerland, in January 1994, MacLaren criticized the "unilateral rule-making of others" in international trade. In March 1994, during a parliamentary debate on the review of foreign policy initiated by the Chretien government, MacLaren rededicated the government to a multilateral, rules-based, trading regime. He noted that more policy spheres -- previously the preserve of national governments -- were "increasingly subject to international negotiation and rule-making," and that "attempts on the part of national governments to shield themselves from these changes are not only illusory but fraught with danger." Moreover, pointing to the preoccupation by some Americans with the sizable trade surplus enjoyed by Japan, he noted that "Behind such cryptic phrases as 'freer trade' or 'levelling the playing field' often lurk notions of replacing open, rules-based competition with managed trade, restrictive quotas, and regulated trade balances."(f.15) Finally, as the reaction of its NATO allies on the expansion question demonstrated so vividly, the United States can engage in such presumptuousness because of its superordinate power. Other governments will grumble at American arrogance, but in the end they will fold. Unilateralism flows naturally from the power that the United States continues to exercise in world affairs. It is true that it has become fashionable to declare blithely that the power of the United States is in decline -- a perspective most often embraced by Americans themselves, perhaps because the idea of being imperial sits so uneasily with the anti-imperial origins and traditions of the American republic. But the portrait of declining American power ignores the fact that the United States still manages to prevail over ot