Over the past decade, the language of empire and imperialism has returned with a vengeance to world politics. The attacks of 9/11, and the US response to them, made empire and imperialism, as John Hobson ([1902] 1972, xvii) once put it, the words on “everybody’s lips.” These terms have shaped many perceptions of US global power, and given meaning to a variety of political projects, both in favour of and against, US statecraft abroad.

The “global war on terror” led by George W. Bush sparked this new discourse of empire. The strategies and tactics of the “global war on terror”...

Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has led the international political economy as an uncontested superpower. The demise of the Soviet Union and the collapse of various forms of Third World nationalism allowed the United States to operate as a de facto hegemon. For the Canadian state, the imperative to work closely with the economic, political, and military structures of US global power thus became even stronger.

In this context, it became common to speak of a “unipolar moment” in world politics. This term was coined by American journalist Charles Krauthammer (1990/91, 23), who argued that...

For more than two decades, the foreign economic policy of the Canadian state has been driven by a strategy ofcontinental neoliberalism(Carroll 1990, 1993).¹ This strategy has encompassed a twofold attempt at reorganizing the Canadian economy within regional structures of accumulation and restructuring the state along neoliberal or free market lines. This strategy was first pursued through the Canadian-American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) of 1988, and then advanced through the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) of 1994. Through these agreements, Canadian governments embedded the national economy in a continental system of production and exchange, and established an external...

Over the past three decades, the Canadian economy has been restructured in two important ways. First, as discussed in the previous chapter, it has been rescaled through a capitalist class project of continental neoliberalism. Second, as I discuss in this chapter, it has been enmeshed in a wider process oftransnational neoliberalism– in a broader structure of “transnational circulating capital” (Overbeek and van der Pijl 1993, 15). By connecting the Canadian economy to global circuits of production and exchange, the Canadian state has sought to maintain itself as a competitive space of accumulation and to support the expansion of...

The issue of transnational class formation has figured centrally in recent debates on globalization and the world economy. These debates revolve around the question of whether or not new patterns of cross-border trade and investment have established global circuits of capital out of which a transnational capitalist class has emerged. For Stephen Hymer (1979, 262), who first observed this trend in the 1970s, “an international capitalist class is emerging whose interests lie in the world economy as a whole.” At the time, Hymer noticed “a strong tendency for the most powerful segments of the capitalist class … to see their...

The transformation of the state during the period of neoliberalism has been a key issue of debate in the social sciences. The globalization of the world economy through new patterns of trade, investment, and production has challenged, or upended, the national systems of governance that regulated post-war economies. In this context, new concerns have arisen regarding the balance of power between states and markets, and between politics and economics. In particular, new debates have emerged around the question of the changing form and function of the state in light of globalizing processes.

In the early stages of these debates, the...

In his 1993 book on Canadian foreign policy, Tom Keating concluded with an unusual warning. “Policy-makers,” he argued, “[will] have to make a difficult choice in the future between their desire to be part of the [global] elite and the need to protect the institutions and norms that the vast majority of nations must rely on.” As Keating observed, Canadian foreign policy-makers had begun “to move in more elite circles,” and were increasingly aligned with US priorities in North America and around the world. For Keating, this new alignment “raise[d] questions about the future direction of Canada’s multilateralist orientation” (Keating...