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An Analytical Assessment of the United States-Canadian Defense Issue Area

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 May 2009

Roger Frank Swanson
Roger Frank Swanson
Affiliation:
Roger Frank Swanson is with the Center of Canadian Studies at the School of Advanced International Studies, The Johns Hopkins University, in Washington, D.C.
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Extract

This article examines the United States-Canadian defense issue area from a transnational and transgovernmental perspective, and attempts to develop conceptually the transgovernmental dimension through empirical application. The first part delineates those factors that encourage transnational and transgovernmental activity in the defense issue area. The second part considers pure intergovernmental transactions, referring to United States-Canadian dealings in which there is no transnational or transgovernmental activity. Because we know so little about how these dealings occur, this section examines pure intergovernmental transactions as a three-stage issue flow: preprocess, process, and postprocess. The third section identifies and examines the dynamics of mixed transactions, referring to intergovernmental flows having transnational or transgovernmental activity that does not essentially alter the outcomes of the flows. The fourth part identifies transformative transactions, referring to intergovernmental flows that become transnational or transgovernmental flows (or the reverse) through the involvement of new actors that significantly alter the outcomes of the flows. In summation, the fifth section considers those factors militating against transnational and transgovernmental activity in the defense area.

Type
Part III. Issue Areas
Information
International Organization , Volume 28 , Issue 4 , Autumn 1974 , pp. 781 - 802
Copyright
Copyright © The IO Foundation 1974

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References

1 I use the US-Canadian defense issue area to test my structural paradigm which is applicable to other bilateral and multilateral transborder interactions in all issue areas. This wider applicability does not mean that the defense issue area, and especially the “special” US-Canadian interaction, has an illustrative universality. Rather, the wider applicability lies in the analytical properties of the paradigm itself, which permits empirically grounded consideration of differences both between different issue areas and the activities of actor combinations within these areas. This paradigm, which is being developed and extended, is but one way of approaching what are conventionally regarded as diplomatic exchanges. It may be added that the case studies and examples used in this article have been intentionally selected to cover a maximum historical time span while drawing upon easily available primary and secondary sources.

2 To cite one example of a possibly confusing case, Washington State's director of civil defense and British Columbia's civil defense coordinator formally signed a “Letter of Understanding” on 23 October 1968 dealing with civil emergency planning. Their authority for so doing can be found in the U.S. Office of Civil Defense Federal Civil Defense Guide (Part G, chapter 2, appendix 1), in the Canadian Emergency Measures Organization Bulletin (B68–2, International Co-ordination 5/23/68), and bilaterally in an 8 August 1967 federal Exchange of Notes (18 UST 1795) which encourages and facilitates “cooperative emergency arrangements between adjacent jurisdictions on matters falling within the competence of such jurisdictions.” This illustrates not a transgovernmental transaction but a sublevel intergovernmental transaction, because it is entirely integrated into the multileveled government processes of the two nations.

3 However, in the interests of uniformity, Keohane and Nye's definitions in the “Introduction,” with one major exception discussed in the third section, are used wherever possible.

4 According to my model, these SOPs consist of two dimensions: statutory legitimacy, which is written definitions of areas of responsibility and procedural rules of acceptable activity; and operational legitimacy, which is unwritten but consensurially defined areas of responsibility and procedures that are organizationally regarded as an acceptable extension of the written dimension. Taken together, they can be subsumed under the phrase organizational mandate. The operational salience of the organizational mandate is a function of the decisional resources (e.g., funding, number of personnel, degree of expertise) available to the actor. Transgovernmental transactions can therefore be defined as all transborder violations of a governmental actor's organizational mandate.

5 For example, it is legitimate and useful to ask if Prime Minister Diefenbaker was not himself a transgovernmental actor during the 1957–58 establishment of NORAD. This question can be answered by looking not at the policies of the Diefenbaker government but at the SOPs of the Canadian parliamentary system. Thus, if the Canadian processing of the North Atlantic Treaty is taken as a representative model of Canadian SOPs in such matters, Diefenbaker could be considered a transgovernmental actor. See McLin, Jon B., Canada's Changing Defense Policy 1957–1963 (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1967), pp. 38–49.Google Scholar

6 Structural refers to the organizational environs (i.e., organizational mandates and their execution through organizational roles), and interconnections between these environs, within which the actors function. Indeed, the significance of the transborder activities of individuals, and the transborder movement of tangible items, is also organizationally grounded. The former involves the organizational roles these individuals are performing (e.g., corporate executive, government official, or trade union representative); the latter, the organizational context in which movements of these tangible items take place (e.g., oil, defense materials, or money).

7 Even the 1817 Rush-Bagot “treaty,” the rhetorical touchstone of the “undefended border,” was not a treaty but an agreement implemented by a US-British exchange of notes, and subsequently confirmed by the US Senate. However, ratifications were not exchanged.

8 A revealing example of this procedural informality occurred on 28 October 1946, when President Truman met with Prime Minister King in Washington to discuss joint defense. Immediately thereafter King recounted the meeting to Canadian Ambassador Designate Hume Wrong. Wrong sent a telegram summarizing the meeting to Lester Pearson, undersecretary of state for external affairs in Ottawa. In a conversation with US Ambassador Ray Atherton, Pearson recounted the Truman-King meeting in detail. Atherton then reported its content in a dispatch to J. Graham Parsons, assistant chief of the State Department's Division of Commonwealth Affairs, who recorded it in a top-secret memorandum. This memorandum served as the State Department's record of the Truman-King meeting, a record the department obtained from Canadian sources (Roger Frank Swanson, Canadian-American Summit Diplomacy: 1923–1973 [Toronto: McCleland and Stewart, forthcoming]).

9 This phenomenon is illustrated by the case studies and examples cited in this article.

10 For example, Canadian General Maurice A. Pope, appointed to PJBD in 1941, remained on this body as he professionally advanced in the following sequence: assistant chief of the General Staff, vice chief of the General Staff, representative of the Cabinet War Committee in Washington and chairman of the Joint Staff, and the prime minister's military staff officer and military secretary to the War Committee.

11 For example, one recent case involved a US military officer who was a member of one of the joint US-Canadian defense organizations. To help meet a US shortage of barbed wire needed for the protection of village-manned self-defense forces in Vietnam, the US officer, acting in his service rather than joint organizational capacity, telephoned his Canadian organizational counterpart about getting the wire from plentiful Canadian sources. The Canadian official then, acting in his service capacity, helped acquire the wire for the United States.

12 Keenleyside, H. L., “The Canada-U.S. PJBD,” International Journal 16 (Winter 1960–1961): 55.Google Scholar

13 Stacey, C. P., “The Canadian-American PJBD: 1940–1945,” International Journal 9 (Spring 1954): 115.Google Scholar

14 To abstract a current example concerning a procurement issue, the Canadian cabinet approved a Department of National Defence proposal to replace the aging Argus with a long-range patrol aircraft for antisubmarine warfare. Given cabinet concern with the replacement's multiple role capability, the three leading candidates are an adapted version of the US Boeing 707, the US Lockheed P-3 ASW aircraft currently in service with the US Navy, and the more specialized UK Nimrod, currently in service with the Royal Air Force. Canadian maritime force officials agree with US naval officials that the Canadian purchase of the P-3 would be mutually desirable for professional and budgetary reasons. Defense Department officials responsible for the defense production sharing agreements (DPSA) informally state to their Canadian counterparts the importance of purchasing a US model, and in view of a cumulative US DPSA $500 million deficit, they express reservations about DPSA's continuance should this not be done. US Treasury officials strongly concur. After a cursory study requested by the Department of Defense, systems analysts who are aware of Ottawa's concern with the larger political and economic aspects arrive at neutral conclusions between the two US alternatives. Canadian officials of several departments then decide to institute a fly-off between the alternative models, with strong indications that the final decision will be determined by more than purely military rationales.

15 Analyses of the production sharing agreements have failed to make the case that the agreements are a discrete unit of analysis. These studies have not systematically considered the interrelationships between these agreements and the other facets of the larger US-Canadian economic-scientific defense relationship. Because the definitional boundaries are unspecified, it is never clear as to precisely what we are dealing with (e.g., an issue area, the subcomponent of an issue area, a sectoral phenomenon, or a crosscutting sectoral phenomenon). This lack of definitional precision causes analytical distortions when these discussions consider the agreements as an integrative process. Moreover, these analyses of the production sharing agreements are unduly restrictive in that even though they acknowledge the origins of the agreements, they ignore the utility of the historical dimension as a reference point for comparative measurement of integrative and disintegrative processes.

16 To implement the Roosevelt-King 1941 Hyde Park Agreement, a series of joint committees were established during the war—Materiel Coordinating Committee, Joint Economic Committee, Joint War Production Committee, Joint Agriculture Committee, and Joint War Aid Committee. In addition, Canada joined two US-UK combined boards—Combined Production and Resources Board, and Combined Food Board.

17 Canada, House of Commons, Debates, 28 April 1941, pp. 2288, 2289.

18 Dougall, Richardson, “Economic Cooperation With Canada: 1941–1947,” Department of State Bulletin 16 (22 June 1947Google Scholar): 1185. For example, the Combined Production and Resources Board recommended that a proposed war plant in Canada not be constructed because United States productive facilities were already sufficient for US and Canadian needs; the Combined Food Board reduced competitive bidding on foodstuffs that were shortage items; a 1942 US-Canadian agreement facilitated the transborder movement of agricultural labor and machinery; and according to a May 1942 US executive order, emergency purchases of war materiels could be imported without duty. Moreover, three major joint agreements were concluded regarding exemption of military construction from taxation. (Dougall, pp. 1186–89).

19 Skilling, H.Gordon, Canadian Representation Abroad (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1945), p. 315.Google Scholar

20 Skilling, p. 315.

21 It should be noted that the definitional base has been shifted somewhat between determining the preprocess/process stage boundary and the process/postprocess stage boundary; the first is based on behavior whereas the second is based on perception. If the behaviorally oriented definition were used for consistency to determine the boundaries of both stages, this would shift the emphasis in analysis away from the significant questions about the differences between issue resolution and implementation as well as the concomitant differing utility of transgovernmental and transnational activity in the resolution and implementation phases. Although this alternative is still conceptually possible, at this point in my research using the behaviorally oriented definition for both cases would have few theoretical advantages, except perhaps in making it easier to identify the process/postprocess stage boundary. But since the perceptual definition is also organizationally based, it has also proven empirically applicable.

22 To summarize and extend the concepts developed in this article, pure transactions are those transborder flows in which all the actors are of the same type. There are three categories: (1) pure intergovernmental, involving purely governmental actors acting in accordance with their organizational mandates (but including nongovernmental actors whose activities are entirely integrated into the organizational interfaces of the mandates of the governmental actors); (2) pure transnational, involving purely nongovernmental actors; and (3) pure transgovernmental, involving purely governmental actors acting outside their organizational mandates. Mixed transactions are those transborder flows involving more than one type of actor but in which the new actor (s) does not predominate. There are two categories. The first is intergovernmental, involving, in addition to predominate governmental actors acting within their mandates, transnational and/or transgovernmental actors. Thus, any flow involving governmental actors acting within their mandates at any point and at any level, regardless of salience, is considered a mixed intergovernmental flow. (It should be noted that any intergovernmental flow not termed pure refers to mixed intergovernmental flows). The second category of mixed transactions is transnational/transgovernmental, involving a combination of transnational and transgovernmental actors, but without any governmental actors acting within their mandates at any point, at any level, and to any extent in that flow.

23 For a definition of these three categories, see the preceding footnote.

24 Even in those limited instances in which there is no formal governmental interjection in some form, examinations of pure transnational, pure transgovernmental, or mixed transnational/transgovernmental flows still require the use of mandated governmental activities as a definitional base against which the fact of organizational deviation can be verified as a prelude to categorization.

25 More specifically, this illustrates the transborder activity of a representative of an international organization that deviated from the SOPs followed among the international organization and national governments. However, space limitations preclude a discussion of the interesting question of Norstad's empirical, and hence analytical, status.

26 This case study is abstracted from Lyon, Leyton, “The Norstad Press Conference,” in Canadian Foreign Policy Since 1945, ed. Granatstein, J. L. (Toronto: The Copp Clark Publishing Co., 1970), pp. 111–14.Google Scholar

27 This case study is abstracted from C. P. Stacey, p. 120. It illustrates transgovernmental activity that was encouraged by the joint organizational framework between the two nations in the defense area. In examining transnational and transgovernmental activity in this area, attention should be directed at all seven contemporary US-Canadian defense organizations, which are interesting because they are oriented toward formal political-military negotiation to a lesser extent than may be expected. Of the seven joint organizations, one is directly concerned with active strategic protection (NORAD); two perform planning-recommendatory functions (PJBD and MCC); one is concerned with the economics of defense (Senior Committee of DPSA); one with emergency planning (Civil Emergency Planning Committee); one with liaison (RPG/NATO); and one with cabinetlevel consultation (Ministerial Committee on Joint Defense).

28 This case study is abstracted from Eayrs, James, The Art of the Possible (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1961), pp. 82–85.Google Scholar

29 Eayrs, p. 84.

30 Eayrs, p. 84–85.

31 Eayrs, p. 85.

32 In the defense issue area, this transgovernmental activity can involve the most basic constitutional considerations of the two governments—the parameters set by civilian control of the military. Transnational activity is also sensitive, but here there is a tradition of harnessing these actors. For example, the chairman of the 1917 Canadian War Mission to the US was Lloyd Harris, director of MasseyHarris. The prevelance of “dollar-a-year” men in the Canadian government defense production effort during World War II and the career patterns of many corporation executives are in keeping with this tradition.

33 I have found it useful to distinguish between two hierarchical categories of issues: substantial issues, those that require resolution at the level of the assistant secretary/assistant deputy minister or above on the part of at least one government, and action issues, those that are processed below this level.

34 As background, Canadian curtailment of the CF-105 program suggested its future inability to develop major weapons systems independently, triggering concern about the viability of Canadian defense industry with all the domestic economic ramifications. The US government was concerned about the viability of Canadian defense industry in the overall strategic context of NORAD. However, caution must be exercised in attributing decisional motivation to US and Canadian officials, for it is tempting to oversimplify the dynamics of that period by juxtaposing a purely Canadian economic preoccupation against a purely US strategic one (e.g., US officials also perceived the agreements as having an economic dimension in holding down US procurement costs).

35 This of course points to the need for rigorous empirical investigation of an organizational and governmental unit's disassociation possibilities and costs as the originally different but convergent forces furthering integration lesson. It may also be noted that the problem with any alliance is that as those congruent threat perceptions that create and sustain it diminish, the alliance becomes less cohesive. But if rather than congruent threat perceptions perpetuating an alliance, there are fundamentally different assumed payoffs, alliance cohesiveness is a priori subject to lesser-order disturbances than those that stem from a perceived diminuation of the external threat. Obviously this is not an either/ or situation since all alliances involve both military and nonmilitary payoffs. However, the US-Canadian defense relationship, because of its bilateral isolation and disparity, might be especially characterized by a dichotomous payoff structure.