Canadian foreign policy has long organized itself around big ideas. In the 1940s, functionalism held that the country could not lead on every file but could achieve broader status by focusing on areas where it had real ability. More recently, Justin Trudeau’s government advanced a feminist approach, applying gender equality across aid, trade, diplomacy, and defence. These concepts offered principles, frameworks, and even a myth or two from which to build the comforting fiction of coherence in a messy and confused world.
Few ideas have been more enduring in Canadian foreign policy than the “middle power.” It gave purpose and calling to a country that understood it was not a great player but still believed itself as capable of exerting influence beyond what its military or economy might suggest. This belief was central to our identity throughout the Cold War. Canada was part of the Western alliance, but it also belonged to a more enlightened club of states that used diplomacy, peacekeeping, and multilateralism to stand apart from the grubbier aspects of superpower rivalry.
The middle power mindset retreated from Canadian foreign policy after the Berlin Wall fell and was even emphatically rejected in some quarters as a geopolitical relic. It has since come roaring back under Prime Minister Mark Carney. In his now-famous Davos speech, Carney associates the concept with the idea that a certain group of nations should join forces to respond to the economic, political, and security challenges posed by rapacious hegemons such as Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Xi Jinping. “Middle powers must act together,” Carney said in Davos, “because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.”
But what exactly is a middle power? Who qualifies and why? Definitions have swung wildly over the decades and continue to do so. The concept has prospered repeatedly in Canada’s foreign-policy circles, and in the broader public consciousness, precisely because it is elastic and able to adapt to many different circumstances and causes.
As the middle power idea undergoes its latest metamorphosis in the hands of Carney, it is useful to look back at where the concept came from and how it has been understood over the years. Most importantly, we should avoid succumbing to the mythmaking the idea has unleashed in the past if we are to avoid policy decisions based more on wishful thinking than reality.
Italian historian Gabriele Abbondanza, in a 2020 paper, traced the origins of the middle power concept to sixteenth-century Italy, where political thinker Giovanni Botero divided city states into three types: grandissime (great powers), mezano (middle powers), and piccioli (minor powers). These designations were tied to a state’s ability to survive and prosper in a cutthroat world. Great powers could do so on their own, weak powers not at all, while middle powers could influence their surroundings—if they played their cards right.
What counts as a middle power depends entirely on what you mean by “middle.” The idea became synonymous, at least for Canadians, with the Cold War. Though a North Atlantic Treaty Organization member, Canada carved out a role as a country that could bridge international divides. We may not have been in the middle regarding East–West ideological disputes, but we cultivated the idea that we were indispensably at the centre of the world’s hardest diplomatic problems by quietly brokering deals here and there. From the 1940s to 1960s, when decolonization dominated international politics, Canada’s “middleness” rested on the claim it had never joined the scramble for colonies—we were neither colonized nor colonizer. (Of course, no one ever asked the Indigenous peoples in Canada what they thought of this claim.)
One of the first figures to give coherent expression to this idea was then secretary of state for external affairs—and future prime minister—Louis St. Laurent. In a 1947 speech, he proclaimed that Canada had a very special place in the international order. We were a major economy and a particularly close friend of the United States and United Kingdom but also a country without historical baggage which could talk in a different way to newly decolonized states. Canada would work at places like the United Nations to help emerging countries get their fair share.
Though he did not use the term middle power (he elsewhere referred to Canada as “a power of the middle rank”), he laid out the essential points, or pillars, which largely revolved around a belief in “international responsibility”—namely, supporting the rule of law and working closely with like-minded allies. He also noted the role would “make demands upon our financial resources” (something subsequent Canadian governments lost sight of as middle-power speechifying often became a substitute for expensive commitments).
Over time, the idea of “middle powers” came to describe a group of second-tier Western nations—Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, the Nordics—that championed multilateralism and a rules-based international order as the best way to address problems no country could solve alone, from poverty to conflict. Scholars later dismissed much of this as a self-serving fable to inflate Canada’s standing beyond what was warranted. But it played well with the public. Lester B. Pearson’s role in defusing the 1956 Suez Crisis, the country’s reputation as a “helpful fixer,” and its embrace of peacekeeping all seemed to confirm that Canada occupied a distinctive place between the great powers.
These developments also contributed to poor decisions. Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s disastrous downgrading of Canada’s Armed Forces—marked by deep defence cuts, shrinking troop numbers, aging equipment, and a diminished NATO commitment—was linked to the perception that Canada had a higher calling than merely confronting the Soviets in Europe. Other, less enlightened nations could do that. Of course, all of this conveniently forgot how our Cold War peacekeeping was profoundly influenced by that East–West divide. Canada frequently provided the “Western” component while the Poles or the Czechs were “Eastern” counterparts in an endless series of missions designed to prevent regional tensions from boiling over from superpower meddling.
In practice, peacekeeping was hardly an escape from the Cold War. Rather, it was another venue where it played out. Indeed, scholars such as Kim Nossal argue that the middle powers were supporting players in an international system the superpowers created. In effect, Canada could play the middle power role because it was anchored on the US side of the world order. But Canadians embraced a more flattering story: we were above the geopolitical fray.
Not surprisingly, that story didn’t last long. Middle powerhood became contested. The idea that Canada’s role in resolving conflicts required it to reject taking sides was seen by foreign-policy realists as an abrogation of the country’s commitments to allies and even its values. One of its greatest critics was the government of Stephen Harper. Speaking in 2011, Harper said that Canada would ‘‘no longer [seek] to please every dictator with a vote at the United Nations.’’ John Baird, his foreign affairs minister, went even further. “After the Second World War,” Baird said, “some decision makers lost sight of our proud tradition to do what is just and right. Some decided it would be better to paint Canada as a so-called honest broker. I call it being afraid to take a clear position.”
By the Harper years, the middle-power idea was largely absent from our foreign-policy rhetoric. Even though Justin Trudeau came to office promising to “restore” Canada’s Pearsonian tradition of peacekeeping and peacemaking, actual action on any of these files was conspicuously lacking. For all its rhetoric, the Trudeau government did not have the stomach for messy conflicts.
Just as Canada was less and less inclined to act as a peacekeeper, the very idea of middle powerness was changing. The pillars holding up Canada’s special place in the international order started to wobble. Our relationship with the US is, today, increasingly strained, and we are deeply ambivalent about supporting Trump’s aggressive forays in remaking the international order. At the same time, Washington is dismantling the very multilateral institutions that gave countries like Canada the space to exercise middle-power influence. The rules of the game have changed.
In this new environment, scholars like Cliff Kupchan have redefined middle powerness to describe emerging countries which straddle the wealthy “Global North” and the more impoverished “South.” He identifies Brazil, India, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and Türkiye as “the six leading middle powers.” Kupchan calls them “swing states”: countries with enough agency to achieve an important degree of freedom in the face of the US–China rivalry; who can, in part, chart their own course in their regions and maybe even beyond.
The Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs expands the list to include Egypt, Kazakhstan, Nigeria, Pakistan, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, and Vietnam. It argues these countries are “carving out a consequential place in an increasingly divided world.” By leveraging coalitions and overlapping interests, Belfer Centre argues, these countries “challenge the notion of a purely unipolar or bipolar order.”
The new “middle” is thus a complex, even fuzzy axis which runs between China and the US but also intersects other countries in a myriad of different and highly fluid ways. In this view, middleness is a function of what one does as opposed to where one is situated.
You’ll notice, of course, that Canada is conspicuously absent in these groupings. Indeed, rather than buttressing the great powers, as Canada did during the Cold War, today’s middle powers are defined by their willingness to challenge them. Whether on sanctions against Russia following its invasion of Ukraine or other major geopolitical disputes, they are increasingly unwilling to fall into line.
No one in Canada had much noticed, or cared, that the definition of middle power was evolving away from us until Trump’s second term. Carney, in his search for a metaphor which would resonate, has resurrected Canada as a middle power in the context of Trump’s upending of the rules-based order. The middle-power phrase was used no less than seven times in the Davos speech, and it has frequently been heard since. Carney is using the idea to rally a group of wealthy, democratic nations to collectively withstand American aggression, to think of themselves as a group which must work together, or they will be taken apart individually.
It’s been very effective, at least rhetorically. Leaders in Europe, the United Kingdom, Australia, and elsewhere now regularly talk about the need for “middle powers” to act in concert on defence and trade against threats and coercion from the US and China. For example, a former Danish prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, has issued a call for the European Union, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and South Korea to band together in a new international grouping of “democratic middle powers.” He even has an acronym, obligatory for any proposed geopolitical clique: the D7.
Leaving aside the question as to whether these countries can ever cohere sufficiently to produce a credible counterweight to the US or China, economically or militarily, it is questionable as to whether they, Canada included, are really “middle” powers as many understand the term today.
They, and we, are amongst the wealthiest nations on the planet. What, exactly, are they in the middle of? During the Cold War, the idea described countries which, though firmly on the Western side, sought to play a role in the “middle” of multilateral institutions to calm some of that conflict’s troubled peripheral waters while trying to make the international system a bit more fair at the margins. But the logic of our time is more accurately captured by Kupchan’s and Belfer’s ideas of middleness: countries which genuinely span the North–South divide in international affairs, which play China and the US off each other, and which are both developed and still developing.
What must a citizen of an African nation think when they hear Canadians and Europeans describe themselves as being in the “middle” of the international pecking order? From their perspective, there’s not much in the lifestyle of the average Canadian or European citizen that puts us in the middle of the pack—we are squarely in the top 1 percent of those who live on this planet in terms of our wealth, health, security, and opportunity.
So, let us be clear-eyed, as Carney encouraged us to do in Davos: this is the club of the world’s richest, non-American, nations trying to take care of themselves. Put bluntly, the initiative to resist Trump which Carney launched in Davos is, in reality, a grouping of the world’s wealthiest nations trying to figure out the best deal for themselves in a new and difficult environment.
There is nothing wrong with that, and I would expect my government to be doing nothing less. And if these efforts go some way to preserving the “rules-based international order” that Trump is dismantling, or even to creating the beginnings of a new one that others may benefit from, that’s good. But that’s not why we’re doing it, and, besides, as Carney told us in Davos, that old “rules-based order” wasn’t always all that fair to begin with.
We’re doing this to protect ourselves in the face of an America which has gone rogue and a China which has yet to commit itself to playing by any rules when it comes to its own self-interest. And our efforts will require a bit of selfishness here and there. Building the pipeline required to sell liquefied natural gas to Germany and co-producing Swedish military aircraft here will help Canada to diversify its economy and defence away from the US.
But these actions won’t help meet our climate change commitments, nor will they benefit subsistence farmers who are scratching out a living in Africa or Latin America to stand up to bullying and intimidation from Beijing or Washington. We are not doing these things to create or support a rules-based multilateral system for the sake of the world’s emerging countries, as we tried to convince ourselves we were during our previous flirtation with the middle-power role.
And so, if Canadians start hearing from our leaders, as well we might, that this new middle power push is somehow for the benefit of the entire world, well, let’s be a little skeptical. We believed that peacekeeping was a role beyond the Cold War, one which allowed Canada to be a special and superior kind of country when it really wasn’t. We don’t need another middle-power myth to take hold, along with all of the self-congratulatory blather that comes with it.
The Davos speech began with a story about a shopkeeper who, every day, put a sign in his window with a Communist slogan on it that he didn’t really believe. By doing so, he was complicit in a system he knew to be a failure. It was the act of taking down the sign that signalled the end of the regime—the end of “living a lie.”
Maybe it’s time for us to gracefully retire the middle-power idea from Canadian foreign policy, to take that particular sign down from our window. It’s intellectually lazy to dredge up the terminologies of a previous era rather than trying to understand the realities of the era we now face. Whatever myths we may have woven around the role, Canada’s previous middle-power moment was possible because of an exceptionally close relationship with a US which was committed to upholding an international system within which the middle-power role, as we then understood it, could flourish. Neither of those things exist now.
This is a time to be honest with ourselves. We Canadians should wish the new middle powers well, collaborate with them where it suits our needs, but otherwise get on with our own business. To quote the Davos speech one last time, “Nostalgia is not a strategy.”
