| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 53

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Stephen Clarkson, Uncle Sam and Us: Globalization, Neoconservatism, and the Canadian State (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2002).

STEPHEN CLARKSON's Uncle Sam and Us is, without a doubt, an important contribution to Canadian political economy. Proceeding with theoretical sophistication and impressive empirical detail, Clarkson aims to clarify how, and to what extent, external forces associated with globalization and transnational integration have affected the Canadian state. Examining both the structural changes that have transformed the political framework of the Canadian state and the paradigm shift from postwar Keynesianism to neoconservative governance, Clarkson provides a comprehensive and insightful analysis of the often greater causal importance of the choices and policy decision made by domestic political actors during the period when economic globalization was accelerating.

Uncle Sam and Us confronts simplistic versions of the now popular "globalization thesis" by rejecting the suggestion that the demise of Keynesian welfarism and the transformation of advanced capitalist states was the inevitable consequence of external forces associated with economic globalization. Clarkson reveals just how important domestic political and ideological choices have been to the transformation of the Canadian state over the past two decades. External causation is not denied. Indeed, Clarkson contends that institutions of continental and global governance, such as NAFTA and the WTO, now serve as a "supraconstitution" that is at the very heart of structural changes to the Canadian state's political framework. All the same, the book's principal message is that the functional changes associated with the neoconservative turn in state policies and governing practices are best explained endogenously, with reference to the decisions of domestic political actors.

Stephen Clarkson is a well-known University of Toronto political economist with a history of political commitment to Canadian nationalism and the motivating ideals of Just Society liberalism and social democracy. While he forswears nostalgia for the Keynesian welfare state (KWS) and claims to reject the notion that there are certain roles the state "should" play, he is explicit about using the KWS as the standard by which he measures and assesses the neoconservative turn. Indeed, the numerous personal anecdotes offered in Uncle Sam and Us suggest that it is precisely Clarkson's nostalgia that has led him to ask whether Canada is losing control of its destiny in the face of globalization. Clarkson is troubled by the extent to which the Chrétien Liberals embraced neoconservative policy prescriptions. As such, the real purpose of his effort to understand recent history lies in his desire for a better future. By clarifying the relative importance of the external versus the domestic roots of the neoconservative state in Canada, Clarkson hopes to determine whether it is possible to save the Canada that he and others were committed to building during the heyday of the KWS. If the neoconservative paradigm shift was domestically determined and the social achievements and sense of national identity associated with Canada's KWS have not been completely eviscerated, then domestic politics really do matter and there is hope for a progressive response to globalization.

Few treatments of the rise of the neoconservative state in Canada are anywhere near as comprehensive as Uncle Sam and Us. With no fewer than twenty discrete chapters, the range of political and policy changes that Clarkson ably analyses is quite impressive. The first section of the book explores several dimensions of recent structural changes to the political framework of the Canadian state. In these chapters Clarkson weaves together an understanding of the emergence of institutions of continental and global governance with a longer-term historical perspective on the Canadian-American relationship as a "constitutional order" and an understanding of how many recent changes in Canadian federalism — such as the Agreement on Internal Trade — constitute the domestic ingestion of globalizing principles. By examining the growing significance of global governance and its impact on the structure of the Canadian state, and then exploring the redistribution of federal, provincial, and municipal powers within the Canadian state, Clarkson builds a convincing case for embracing the notion of the state as a "five-tiered governing structure" in which the character and extent of state activity at the municipal, provincial, federal, continental, and global levels change over time in an interrelated manner. It is from this perspective that Clarkson understands recent structural changes to the Canadian state. While he discusses Canada's participation in the construction of the new forms of continental and global governance, Clarkson purposefully highlights the role of these institutions of global governance as "external" sources of structural change to the Canadian state.

Fully two-thirds of Uncle Sam and Us focuses on dissecting postwar developments in major areas of Canadian public policy. Concerned as he is with the rise of neoconservatism, Clarkson puts his energy into revealing, and then understanding, policy changes associated with the functional workings of the Canadian state. With the postwar KWS as his reference, he explores how the state in the Mulroney/Chrétien era fulfills functions that came to be expected of it in the Diefenbaker/Pearson/Trudeau era. The economic policies Clarkson examines include macroeconomic policies such as taxation and monetary policy, the regulation of sectors such as banking and telecommunications, trade and investment policy, and interventionism in the form of industrial policy. But he does not stop there. Uncle Sam and Us goes on to examine the neoconservative paradigm shift in social, labour, environment, cultural, and foreign policy. The general conclusion that flows from these detailed and insightful chapters is that is was the embrace of neoconservatism by Canadian politicians and bureaucrats that explains the substantial, and often parallel, policy changes that ushered in a dramatically altered approach to governance beginning in the early 1980s.

Clarkson's theoretical starting point is a Weberian notion of the sovereign territorial state. In keeping with the traditions of Canadian political economy, he notes that even before the current era of accelerated globalization, the broader "constitutional order" of the Canadian state was determined by our position in the international and continental political economy. Analytically, Clarkson embraces the significance of distinctions between structure and agency, as well as between the causal processes associated with large external forces and the decisions of domestic political actors. One of his overriding goals is to highlight the causal significance of the agency of domestic decision-makers. In doing so, he hopes to convince readers that a way forward toward a more progressive and democratic political order can be imagined and realized. By advancing this analysis he does a service. Clarkson reminds us that politics and the state do, indeed, matter, and the way we are governed is determined by agents that the public ultimately controls. This is a politically powerful and important message.

At times Clarkson's focus on determining the relative importance of globalization as an external force versus neoconservatism as a domestic force has the effect of overstating the extent of the distinction between external and internal causal forces. To argue in favour of emphasizing the ideological decisions associated with the rise of domestic neoconservatism is to ignore the "global character" of the neoconservative turn. Clarkson's own introductory discussion of the empirical realities of globalization draws attention to "globalism" as the justifying ideological corollary of globalization, and he often uses the phrase "neoconservative globalism." With this in mind, more could be made of the "relationship" between globalization and domestic neoconservatism. Neoconservative globalism is a globalized paradigm that can be understood as both a domestic and an external expression, depending on how we identify its ideational roots and social base. The Canadian political elite are increasingly influenced by globalized epistemic networks. Thus, even as we emphasize domestic political choices, the distinction between domestic and external is blurred. Even apparently domestic institutional changes, such as the increasing control of the Department of Finance over social policy during the 1980s, are a part of a global trend. It is for this reason that some observers identify Clarkson's neoconservative turn as the emergence of a "globalized state form."

Uncle Sam and Us is a compelling book with a message of some political importance. It is deeply analytical, impressively comprehensive, and highly readable. It deserves the attention of all those who wish to understand, or influence, the character of the Canadian state.


Steve Patten University of Alberta

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