Warrior Nation: Rebranding Canada in an Age of Anxiety by Ian McKay and Jamie Swift (review)

“Fight fear, fight distress, fight chaos”: so urges a recruitment commercial to encourage young Canadians to join their nation’s encounter with the War on Terror. Ian McKay and Jamie Swift’s new book, Warrior Nation: Rebranding Canada in An Age of Anxiety, is a clarion call to fight the fear mongering behind that message. According to McKay and Swift, these recruiting videos are part of a larger project, or what they call “a toxic rebranding by right wing elites” (xi), of Canadian identity that places soldiers and generals rather than citizens and social activists at the forefront of the emergence of Canada as a modern liberal democratic nation. This new image of Canada, they warn, is not simply a recasting of history in which Canadians’ traditional ambivalence towards war takes a back seat to more robust understandings of Canada’s role in ridding the world of fascist and terrorist scumbags. It is, they assert, part and parcel of a regime change that uses military metaphors to promote a vision of “ordered liberty” (16) where citizens effectively become spectators to, rather than agents of, their own destiny.

McKay and Swift’s argument begins with a number of biographical accounts of prominent Canadians, including explorer-cum-mercenary William Stairs, General E.L.M. “Tommy” Burns, diplomat and politician Lester Pearson, and peace activist Rev. James Endicott. The key message in these personal histories is that Canadians have always vacillated between warriors and peacekeepers. Indeed, they note that the image of Canada as the “peaceable kingdom” was “always something of an illusion because its many Anglo subjects were so often captivated by quite warlike visions of the White Man’s Burden.” (62) Using the example of William Stairs, McKay and Swift note that Canadians have long been a crucial part of the larger Anglosphere’s imperial project to extend the Victorian liberal values of peace, order, and good government to the deepest darkest regions of the globe. (62) But McKay and Swift note that not all Canadian soldiers have been eager crusaders of the cult of blood and soil. Tommy Burns, perhaps Canada’s brightest general, who led troops at Vimy, Ortona, and Suez, illustrates that not all soldiers drank the propaganda “moonshine” (82) that led to “Vimy Fever.” (74)

It is the chapter on Pearson and peacekeeping where the crux of their argument appears. Here McKay and Swift present Pearson not so much as Canada’s Prince of Peace, but as a loyal and eager Cold Warrior. Though they note that Pearson may have had his private misgivings about the rabid Cold War anticommunism, he “backed it solidly in public.” (121) Pearsonian internationalism, the authors argue, contained the potential for a more sophisticated analysis of Cold War realities (134), but not to the extent that it would imperil Canadians’ cozy relations with Washington and London. Thus, instead of a world without war, Pearson sold Canadians a militarized and partisan form of peacekeeping, which sought not only to maintain the dominance of West over East, but more importantly North over South. Indeed, as Des Morton claims, peacekeeping satisfied “a kind of benign imperialist urge among Canadians – how good the lesser breeds are being kept in order by our lads in blue berets.” (182)

The latter half of the book details how the new Warrior Nationalists have sought to dismantle what is left of the Pearsonian paradigm. According to the new warriors, peacekeeping was not only irrelevant in the post-Cold War world, but had always been a woolly headed distraction from real soldiering. More importantly, peacekeeping represents all that is wrong with the Liberal vision of Canada. Canadians have become too flaccid from peace and love permissiveness, so focused on individual rights and welfare state handouts that they have forgotten the duties they owe to their tribe. These corrosive attitudes were not limited to civilians, but by the time of the Somalia Affair had infected the Canadian Forces. Peacekeeping, these pundits...