The Politics of Linkage: Power, Interdependence, and Ideas in Canada-US Relations (review)

Partisanship, fragmentation, and gridlock are common descriptors of the current domestic policymaking landscape in Washington, DC; readers of Brian Bow’s admirable study will find that these circumstances are not new, nor are their effects contained within American borders. The Politics of Linkage provides a survey of some of the more fractious episodes in Canada-United States relations since the Second World War, and concludes that a once-productive relationship built on shared norms, personal relationships, and “quiet diplomacy” has in recent decades been subverted by the disintegration, primarily on the American side of the border, of the diplomatic culture that marked the first years of the Cold War.

Bow provides a close reading of four bilateral controversies over the past 50 years: disagreements over nuclear weapons (1959–63), maritime claims in the Arctic (1969–71), Canada’s National Energy Program (1980–83), and war in Iraq (2002–04). For the author, a refusal to link unrelated bilateral matters to a dispute in order to gain bargaining advantage represents the litmus test for the existence of a “special relationship” between the two nations. Bow claims that such a relationship did indeed exist in the middle years of the twentieth century; he calls this era the “golden age” of Canada-US relations, a period when, despite the asymmetry rooted in the partnership, Canada was able to prevail in a number of important cross-border deliberations. Thus, the clashes over nuclear weapons and Arctic sovereignty, while heated, produced no calls among American diplomats for the deployment of coercive linkages to force the Prime Minister’s hand (despite a US inclination to employ linkage in contemporaneous disputes with other close allies such as Britain and France).

Beginning in the 1970s, however, American foreign policy-making grew more politicized and fragmented, the result of a more assertive presidential office, a Congress incited by the excesses of Vietnam and Watergate, and the emergence of a wide range of domestic interest groups that pressed the government on various foreign policy issues. The losers in this new and more complex policy-making nexus included the State Department, whose authority over foreign relations receded dramatically, and Canadian diplomats and politicians, who no longer dealt with American actors who understood Canada or the “tacit understandings” that had heretofore governed bilateral negotiations. By the 1980s, it was evident that Canada was no longer special (the jollity of the Shamrock Summit notwithstanding), but merely a US ally and trading partner like all the others, subject to the same, often rough treatment in negotiations with the United States. Linkage was now on the table.

Bow provides a strong case for the value of constructivist models of international relations, which stress the importance of culture and ideology to the field. Realist interpretations, which maintain that nations will demonstrate greater assertiveness as threats to their interests and security increase, cannot account for the absence of linkage over nuclear weapons and Arctic sovereignty disputes. As the author correctly points out, he has chosen difficult cases for his interpretive schema—cases in which realists would expect the United States to utilize every mechanism at its disposal to advance its cause. Moreover, studies that ascribe the absence of linkage to the high level of interdependence between the two nations cannot explain why linkage became an option only late in the century, as interdependence intensified. For Bow, the explanation for the rise of the special relationship lies in the “powerful sense of common purpose” (p. 7) shared by diplomats at mid-century, one forged by linguistic and cultural bonds, the close coordination necessitated by the Second World War, the strategic importance of Canada to the United States in the early Cold War, and American sensitivities to Canada’s vulnerability in an asymmetrical relationship. As long as American negotiations were led by those who appreciated the rules of the game, the relationship flourished. The author should also be praised for providing concise historical...