Canada Among Nations 1995: Democracy and Foreign Policy

David A. Lenarcic is an assistant professor of history at Wilfrid
Laurier University.

This latest collection of articles in the Canada Among Nations series,
which annually examines Canada’s role in international affairs,
comprises two parts. Part 1 analyzes the extent to which Canadian
external policies are democratically formulated and implemented; the
chapters focus primarily on the amount of influence various segments of
Canadian society exerted on the foreign- and defence-policy reviews
conducted by the Chrétien government in 1994. Part 2 considers the
question of the promotion of democracy abroad as a foreign-policy
objective of states; the chapters describe the status of democracy
within specific countries such as China, Russia, and South Africa, as
well as in Latin America. Both sections offer various policy
prescriptions. The book’s overall argument is that “democracy
matters as a principle and a process in foreign policy; democracies make
foreign policy differently, and they make different foreign policies.”

It is often difficult for editors to bring cohesion to a collection,
and that problem is evident here, especially in the uneven amount of
attention given to Canadian policy in Part 2. Nevertheless, the book
succeeds mainly because the editors have cast their net widely; in lieu
of consensus, they have opted to provide competing perspectives,
including some that oppose the book’s central premise. In this regard,
Canada Among Nations 1995 is a useful aid to discussion of the topical
question that it poses at the outset: “Does democracy matter in the
conduct of foreign

policy?”