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Is Canada's human security policy really the ‘Axworthy’ doctrine?

Since Lloyd Axworthy announced his retirement from Parliament, he has been praised for his fiveyear stint as Canada’s most activist, and most popular, Foreign Affairs Minister. The human security policy he championed has been credited with giving Canada the impetus needed to win a temporary seat on the UN Security Council. Axworthy has also been recognized for his role in the drive to ban anti-personnel land mines in 1997 as well as his efforts on the recent child soldier conference in Winnipeg. Human security is widely seen as a recent policy focus that began with Axworthy’s appointment to the position of Foreign Affairs Minister. Within weeks of taking the post in January 1996, Axworthy was using the term. Although, he never claimed to have invented it, the Minister emphasized the novelty of his approach that goes beyond purely military conceptions of security and he is widely seen as its creator. Even his critics have dubbed the human security agenda “the Axworthy doctrine” (Hampson and Oliver 1998:380). Why has no one questioned Axworthy’s parentage of human security? Do the concepts behind the agenda, the issues it identifies as “new” threats, and even the term itself, not sound familiar? The former Minister did an excellent job of promoting human security and putting it firmly in place as a policy priority. However, the intention of this paper is not to celebrate Axworthy’s outstanding work but, rather, to argue that human security became part and parcel of Canadian foreign policy as early as the 1980s. I will begin by outlining the central tenets of Canada’s human security agenda, as articulated in Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT) documents, so as to provide a clear definition of the policy. I will proceed to argue that the concept, the term, and the elaboration of human security into actual Canadian foreign policy took place in the late 1980s at a time when Joe Clark was Secretary of State for External Affairs (SSEA), and when Canadian public opinion and interest groups of all stripes were pressing the government to get more involved in the civil wars then raging in Central America. These existing policies have since been expanded and popularized by Lloyd Axworthy, under the name “human security”, to focus on the safety of the individual. I will show that the issues Axworthy addressed under the human security agenda are not new foci for Canadian foreign policy.1 75