International Relations

C01 - Global Middle Powers in an Era of World Order Ferment

Date: Jun 3 | Time: 08:30am to 10:00am | Location:

Chair/Président/Présidente : Michael Murphy (Queen's University)

Discussant/Commentateur/Commentatrice : Michael Murphy (Queen's University)

Global “middle powers” are facing extraordinary challenges – of security, political economy, ecology, and identity - that are tightly bound to world order ferment. Traditionally, such states have relied on multilateral processes to navigate and ameliorate situations of deep uncertainty and have, in turn, been active supporters of these processes. But what happens when world order is in disarray, throwing multilateralism into question, and is linked to deep internal uncertainties? How can, will, and should middle powers respond? Although the role of ‘middlepowerism’ has been debated for decades, at least some middle-range states have played key order-building roles across history. These roles are not intrinsic to particular states, but rather adhere to a shifting cluster of political communities – ‘a role in search of an actor’. These communities may be more conservative, seeking to stabilize an existing order, or more reformist and even counter-hegemonic, seeking to reconfigure prevailing rules, norms, and practices. This distinction was linked by Jordaan to what he termed ‘established’ (Global North) and ‘emerging’ (Global South) middle powers respectively. This panel invites participants to reflect on how a range of historic middle powers, ‘established’ and ‘emerging’, are grappling with this contemporary moment of uncertainty, challenge, and change.

Status uncertainty and foreign policy: Brazil, Canada and the world "non-order": Jean Daudelin (Carleton University), Je Ho Cho (Carleton University)
Abstract: Building on Argentinian sociologist Gino Germani’s famous concept, this paper examines the way in which two Middle Powers deal with the opportunities and challenges that a decaying world order offers, and confronts them with. Canada, with a quickly shrinking demographic and economic weight in the world, and long used to having “uncles” –the UK, and then the US—smoothing its entry into global hierarchies, has to deal with those uncles’ decline or change of heart, leaving it very much groping for new friends. Brazil, whose extended “family” was never really there for it, reaches peak relative population and GDP at a time when there is no clear global political structure in which to “freeze” those assets (a-la-post-WWII France and UK). Both diplomacies desperately try to rejig old alliances and to build new ones, but without much success.

Self-Determination and Settler Coloniality in the Liberal International Era: Caroline Dunton (Queen's University), Liam Midzain-Gobin (Brock University)
Abstract: Throughout the history of the United Nations, there has always been tension between its liberal ideas of self-determination and sovereignty. This was especially so during the process of decolonization and changes in its membership, as well as its response to protracted conflicts and ongoing colonial occupations. As a middle power, Canada has been consistently engaged with the United Nations and a vocal proponent of the political ideology at its heart, liberal internationalism. As a settler colonial power, Canada too has a variety of tensions in its policies around both self-determination and sovereignty both domestically and internationally. This paper traces the ideational history of how Canada has operationalized the concept of self-determination by examining Canada’s voting patterns on Palestinian self-determination at the United Nations. We read the pattern through the context of broader concepts and logics of empire and settler colonialism, using this lens to make sense of both the continuity and change in Canada’s treatment of self-determination both for a Palestinian state and as a viable liberal principle in the current moment of uncertainty in international order.

Post-neoliberal Mexico and the Transforming World Order: Between Deeper Integration and Middlepowermanship: Laura Macdonald (Carleton University)
Abstract: The decline of the neoliberal order (Gertsle 2022), or Pax Americana (Cox 1989), poses real challenges to Mexico’s role in the shifting world order. The rise of economic protectionism in the United States (likely to continue under either a Trump or Harris presidency), represents a strong threat to the country which spent several decades turning away from its post-war nationalist economic model to pursue ever-deeper integration with the United States. Mexico is also undergoing a major domestic political realignment with the election of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) in 2018 and then Claudia Sheinbaum in 2024 from the post-neoliberal Morena party. It is also benefiting economically from the nearshoring boom that has returned investment to Mexico after it lost ground to China when the latter joined the WTO in 2005. Under his presidency, AMLO showed little interest in foreign policy, but his internationalist foreign minister, Marcelo Ebrard, adhered to many elements of middlepowermanship and Mexico played an important role in such areas as global climate policy and migration management as one of the architects of the Global Compact on Migration. Ebrard also committed Mexico to a feminist foreign policy, a direction that is likely to continue under the Sheinbaum presidency and which resembles a new middle power approach to world order. This paper will examine how Mexico is navigating the rocky and uncharted terrain of the current transformational moment in world order, and how domestic and international politics intersect in shaping the Mexican government’s recrafting of its middle power role.

Understanding the decine of "Middlepowerism" in Canadian International Policy: David Black (Dalhousie University), David Hornsby (Carleton University)
Abstract: The role of ‘middle power internationalism’, or ‘middlepowerism’, and the usefulness of this analytical frame have been hotly contested for decades. Yet at least some middle-range states have both identified with and been identified as fitting within this frame for prolonged periods. Canada has been one such actor. Understood in Robert Cox’s (1989) historicist terms however, such roles may be sustained but are ultimately transient. They adhere to actors with significant but not ‘architectural’ capacities and aspirations, who play key order-building or sustaining roles through distinct international eras. They are, in Cox’s terms, ‘a role in search of an actor’. Understood in these terms it may be disappointing, but is not surprising that some traditional middle powers, like Canada, will increasingly deviate from such roles. The question then becomes, what leads to this retreat and what are its consequences, within and beyond the political community in question? In the Canadian case, it is no longer controversial to suggest that Canada has been steadily retreating from the more multilateralist and activist proclivities that were associated with its post-World War II and post-Cold War middle power roles. But what were the essential features of these roles, and why have Canadian governments increasingly deviated from them? We argue that an inter-connected combination of contingent, agent-centric dynamics and changing structural conditions have shaped an international policy disposition that is increasingly parochial, performative, and defensive, with declining interest in or relevance to the international domain.