Middlepowers as Extra-Regional Balancer Powers

C ONVENTIONAL INTERPRETATIONS of Canadian and Indian foreign policy tend to view participation in peacekeeping exercises by these governments as essentially rather idealistic, or (less charitably) moralistic, expressions of their respective, self-selected roles in international affairs.' Indian leaders, as would-be exemplars of the non-aligned movement (particularly in the 1950s), and Canadian officials, as ubiquitous helpful fixers and mediators, both have been seen as spokesmen for the optimistic if not utopian belief that humanity can ultimately rise above its carnivorous and predatory heritage by pragmatically and incrementally constructing a sane and peaceful world order. The roles so selected by New Delhi and Ottawa have also tended to be dismissed by many commentators and analysts-especially in the years since 1965because they are thought to involve naive, perhaps soft-headed and sentimental assumptions about human nature in an age of totalitarian regimentation, mutual assured destruction and systematic terror. Genuinely disinterested mediation surely could not co-exist for long in the same political order which encompasses contingency planning for megadeath warfare. Many of these critics seem to assume that one set of concepts and their associated physical manifestations automatically render the other set of notions both irrelevant and absurd. With specific reference to India and Canada these critics have pointed to the SinoIndian border war in 1962 and the deteriorating situation in Indochina after 1961 as ample justification for recommending extreme scepticism about, if not abandonment of, the concepts of non-violence, nonalignment, international peacekeeping and conflict resolution through

Ancient history · Geography · Political science · Cambodian History and Society · History · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies