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C anada’s image in the Middle East reflects the perception that Canadians themselves commonly hold of their country’s foreign policy: a staunch multilateralist middle power and norm promoter. This image derives from the history of Canada’s involvement in the Arab-Israeli conflict: the role of Lester Pearson in the establishment of the Blue Helmets, Ottawa’s role in the Middle East peace process, especially with regard to the question of Palestinian refugees in the 1990s as well as Canada’s leadership role in the promotion of human security at the turn of the 21st century. This image, shared by Middle Eastern governments and populations alike, is helped along by the Canadian record of perceived fair-mindedness in voting at the United Nations on the Arab-Israeli conflict and by Canada’s reception of an increasingly large Middle Eastern immigrant population. This chapter argues that Canada’s Middle Eastern foreign policy fails in practice to match these perceptions. Over the past decade of Canadian involvement in and reaction to events in the Middle East, a gap has grown between discourse and actions. That gap can be traced using the concept of the Responsibility to Protect (r2p), a norm that earned Canada much praise on the international scene. Whereas analysts usually account for such disparities by invoking the capabilities-commitment gap that has severely curtailed Canadian foreign policy since the early 1990s, this chapter argues that the divergences between Canada’s discourse on the international stage and its specific attitudes and declarations regarding Middle Eastern events are best explained by the constraints brought about by changes in the international environment and in the relationship between Canada and the United States since the events of September 11, 2001. Moreover, the gap has broadened further with the arrival in power in Ottawa of a Conservative government ideologically much closer to the Bush administration than its Liberal predecessor was. In conclusion, the Marie-Joëlle Zahar 4 Talking One Talk,Walking Another: Norm Entrepreneurship and Canada’s Foreign Policy in the Middle East 45 chapter offers some thoughts about the potential advantages and pitfalls of current Canadian foreign policy in the Middle East not only for the relationship between Ottawa and regional capitals but also for the achievement of Canada’s overarching foreign policy objectives—security, prosperity, and the promotion of Canadian values and expertise. Talk Is Not Cheap: Discourse and Canadian Foreign Policy Since the End of the Cold War In Canadian foreign policy, discourse matters. While it is naive to assume that countries always do what they say or say what they do, since the early 1990s talk and normative innovations have, for lack of money, sometimes substituted for Canadian action. “The end of the Cold War in the late 1980s was followed by a [decade of] reckoning on Canada’s government deficits (federal and provincial). The long march towards fiscal recovery, strongly supported by Canadians and undertaken as of 1994, cut deeply into the Government’s domestic and foreign policy instruments” (Malone 2003, 4). Faced with severe economic constraints that drastically reduced its capability in the realm of foreign policy, Canada embarked on what Allan Gotlieb (2005,17) described as a new mission “to create new norms of international behaviour which, in turn, reflect our values.” This was most clearly expressed in the 1995 review of Canada’s foreign policy, which called for the realization of an international system ruled by law, not power (Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade [dfait] 1995).1 Human Security: Canadian Norm Entrepreneurship in the 1990s The concept of human security has been the centrepiece of Canadian foreign policy discourse since the end of the Cold War. This people-focused approach was the hallmark of the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (dfait) under the stewardship of Lloyd Axworthy, who “soon after his appointment in 1996, began to carve out what Robin Jeffrey Hay described as ‘arguably the most ambitious agenda of any foreign minister in history’” (Gotlieb 2005, 22–23). Since his first speech in front of the UN General Assembly (unga) in 1996, Axworthy has promoted human security as a “common thread to tie together conceptually a string of single issues, including landmines and the protection of civilians in conflict” (Kenkel 2004, 7; see also Axworthy 1997). At its core, the concept of human security makes two intimately linked assertions : (1) that the theory and practice of international relations during the Cold War...

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