Justin Massie

In choosing not to free ride while the United States was in Afghani-stan, second-tier powers like Canada challenge conventional accounts of military burden sharing. To elucidate the puzzle posed by excessive military contributions, the article considers two explanatory factors: alliance value and status seeking. We pair them with insights on elite consensus to explain Canadas desire to have a large role in the war in Afghanistan. We argue that it is expected to support U.S.-led military operations and contributes more than its relative power if it seeks recognition of an elevated status by valued alliance members. Absent elite consensus, however, state executives may have difficulty implementing their status enhancement objectives. We further demonstrate the value of our reasoning by confronting it with the ever-increasing factor of threat perceptions. We conclude by stressing that ideational motivations for intra-alliance burden sharing pose a serious challenge to conventional accounts of state contributions to U.S.-led military interventions.

How do democratic allies manage their participation in U.S.-led coalition operations? This article compares the Canadian and Dutch management of domestic and international expectations of support to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. It argues that the decision whether to support coalition operations often does not amount to a simplistic “yes” or “no” answer. It entails a management process involving several strategies, as well as a wide range of mutually inclusive support options. Canadian and Dutch management of support to coalition operations reveals that similarly core U.S. allies misunderstood U.S. expectations, mismanaged their country's stance by sending confusing signals to both their domestic and international audiences, and adopted varied trade-off strategies. The study of multinational coalition operations should thus conceptualize political and military support separately, but examine their causal interrelationships and measure them on a qualitative, case-specific continuum, in order to properly understand the variations and trade-offs involved in the allied management of support to military coalitions.

This article attempts to counter the conventional wisdom surrounding Quebec's “undue” influence on Canada's international security policy. Focusing on the war in Afghanistan, it argues that this influence is substantially exaggerated and that if Quebec's distinct attitudes have had an influence on Canada's Afghan policy, they have actually contributed to strengthening rather than hampering its legitimacy. The article is divided into three parts. The first examines the long-standing debate surrounding Quebec's alleged “undue” influence on Canadian foreign and defense policy. It highlights that scapegoating Quebecers for making Canada's security policies less forceful tends to ignore the lack of public support elsewhere in Canada and thus marginalizes the policy responsiveness issue in Canadian foreign policy. The second part of the article maps and discusses Canadians' support and opposition toward their country's participation in the war in Afghanistan. It calls into question the existence of “two solitudes” as well as nuancing the common views pertaining to attitudes in Quebec. The third assesses the federal government's policy responsiveness toward Quebec's elite and popular opinion. It focuses on Harper's two principal decisions – the extension of the mission to February 2009 and later to December 2011 – while it considers Quebec's opinion in terms of public opinion polls, editorials in La Presse and Le Devoir, and political representation through the Bloc Québécois in the House of Commons. It shows that if Quebecers influence Canada's Afghan policy, they do so only because of ill-informed decision-makers convinced of the existence of a fictional distinct and pacifist Quebec.