Minerva’s Moment: Japan, Canada and the EU in Global Institution-Building

A two-day conference hosted at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, Canada to examine the role of ambitious middle powers in the generation of international norms and international institutions. Robert Kagan put forth a stark dichotomy between the U.S. and Europe, characterizing U.S. policies as being based in strength and willingness to consider military options, and European preferences as leaning toward “soft” solutions. In this project, we focus on a third way between Mars and Venus: Minerva, namely “the wise use of force”, or the construction of meaningful positive institutions as an alternative to the use of force.

This conference will bring together scholars from several disciplines and with a multitude of areas of expertise to explain the growing commitment to global institution-building of middle powers like Japan, Canada and the European Union across four issue areas that have seen some recent attempts at international institution-building: the environment, human security, human rights and culture, and financial and trade regulation. The conference will be the crowning achievement of a three-year project and will result in the publication of an edited volume that will speak to academics as well as to policy-makers.

The conference aims at assessing the degree of this concordance and the origins of this pattern. Issue-area by issue-area, we examine the role of the three actors, individually and collectively, and the degree to which they concurred on goals and strategies during and after the process. Through such examinations we hope to explain by actor, by issue-area support for the generation of international institutions (treaties) or international norms (codes of conduct) in areas of institution-building that have achieved at least some minimum relevance for actual behaviour. We are therefore concerned both with the development of international codes and with some degree of implementation of these codes.

This conference succesfully brought together scholars and policy makers for an exciting two days of dialogue and discussion. The organizers are grateful to the participants and the many supporters who enabled this project to come to fruition.