This study examines whether Canada’s military’s interoperability with the United States affects Canadian sovereignty. The literature dealing with this subject is highly polarized arguing that such interoperability either significantly reduces our sovereignty or that it is necessary to maintain it. Successive Canadian governments, for example, have traditionally supported the military view that high levels of interoperability with our allies are needed for operations to proceed safely and effectively and that this poses no cost to Canadian sovereignty. The interoperability critics strongly disagree, arguing that increased interoperability, especially if it is with the United States, will diminish our foreign policy independence, our ability to refuse US military adventures, and our domestic sovereignty. In a limited sense this division in the literature allows one to comprehend the broad contours of the issue. Otherwise, recent works are marked by shifting definitions and unclear methodologies. These shortcomings have led to a reliance on conjecture, with the critics predicting damaging “future implications” as a result of Canada’s interoperability policies while governments promise outright gains. As a result, the Canadian public that underwrites the financial costs of such multi-billion dollar investments as the new F-35 fighter have little to guide them in assessing the widely claimed interoperability and sovereignty benefits or costs of the purchase. This thesis set about correcting these shortcomings by examining Canada’s interoperability history, defining the terms, developing clear hypotheses, and then testing them against recent issues and events. These included Canada's response to 9/11 and our decisions to participate, or not, in the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the war in Afghanistan. These produced six case studies within which events were assessed against the hypotheses that test for sovereignty gains or losses. The subsequent evaluation concluded that Canadian sovereignty was rarely at risk from Canada's military interoperability policy and Canada was normally able to enjoy an independent foreign policy. The only area where there were successive sovereignty costs was when Canada became overly dependent on US capabilities. This thesis also argued that the methodology would be useful in gauging the sovereignty implications of future cooperative projects.

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This thesis examines US protectionism in the 1980s from Canadian and American perspectives, and its role in Canada’s pursuit of the historic 1988 Canada-US Free Trade Agreement. It analyzes the perceived “threat” of protectionism and evaluates the agreement’s provisions against Canada’s goal of securing access to the US market. It contends that US protectionism was crucial in the Mulroney government’s decision to negotiate a bilateral agreement and was a contentious issue for the agreement’s critics. US sources, unexamined in existing historiography, confirm the increased threat of American protectionism, but emphasize a distinction between the threat and implementation of protectionist trade law. Although the agreement did not shield Canada from US trade remedies, Canada gained important presence in the trade dispute process. These conclusions are drawn from Canadian and American media and government documents, 1980s academic and think-tank commentary, legal documents, the memoirs and diaries of major players, and select archival sources.

This thesis examines US protectionism in the 1980s from Canadian and American perspectives, and its role in Canada’s pursuit of the historic 1988 Canada-US Free Trade Agreement. It analyzes the perceived “threat” of protectionism and evaluates the agreement’s provisions against Canada’s goal of securing access to the US market. It contends that US protectionism was crucial in the Mulroney government’s decision to negotiate a bilateral agreement and was a contentious issue for the agreement’s critics. US sources, unexamined in existing historiography, confirm the increased threat of American protectionism, but emphasize a distinction between the threat and implementation of protectionist trade law. Although the agreement did not shield Canada from US trade remedies, Canada gained important presence in the trade dispute process. These conclusions are drawn from Canadian and American media and government documents, 1980s academic and think-tank commentary, legal documents, the memoirs and diaries of major players, and select archival sources.

While not uncontested, the finding that liberal democracies rarely, if ever, fight wars against each other represents one of the seminal discoveries of international relations (IR) scholarship. Nevertheless, 'democratic peace theory' (DPT) – the body of scholarship that seeks to explain the democratic peace finding – still lacks a satisfactory explanation for this phenomenon. In this thesis, I argue that a primary source of this failure has been DPT's failure to recognize the importance of collective identification and trust for the eventuation of the 'liberal peace'. Building on existing DPT scholarship, most of it Realist or Rationalist in its inspiration, but also employing insights from Constructivist and Cognitivist scholarship, I develop a new model of how specific forms of collective identification can produce specific forms of trust. On this basis, I elaborate a new explanation of the liberal peace which sees it as arising out of a network of trusting liberal security communities. I then elaborate a new research design that enables a more rigorous and replicable empirical investigation of these ideas through the analysis of three historical cases studies, namely the Canada-USA, India-Pakistan, and France-Germany relationships. The results of this analysis support the plausibility of my theoretical framework, and also illuminate four additional findings. Specifically, I find that (1) IR scholarship needs a more nuanced understanding of the interaction between agents and structures; (2) 'institutionalized collaboration' is especially important for promoting collective identification; (3) DPT scholarship needs to focus more attention on the content of the narratives around which collective identification takes place; and (4) dramatic events play an important role in collective identification by triggering what I term catharses and epiphanies. I close the thesis by reviewing the implications of my findings for IR and for policymakers and by suggesting some areas worthy of additional research.