Volume 18, Number 3, 1987

EN:

This article reports on the findings of what appears to be the first content analysis of all aspects of Canadian press coverage of Canadian foreign relations. Six major/newspapers were chosen on the basis of national significance and linguistic and regional considerations: the Halifax Chronicle-Herald, Le Devoir (Montréal), La Presse (Montréal), the Ottawa Citizen, the Toronto Globe and Mail and the Vancouver Sun. During the period studied (the last quarter of 1982), these newspapers averaged nearly nine items per issue on Canadian foreign relations and relied predominantly on Canadian sources for their material. However, there was a relative lack of analytic coverage and only a limited number of items that adopted supportive or critical positions on the various issues in Canadian foreign policy. Commercial matters received both the most extensive and the most sophisticated treatment, while the reporting of political subjects was generally less detailed and often superficial. In terms of relationships, that with the United States was arguably the only one to receive adequate coverage, while from the standpoint of issues there were several that received insufficient attention, such an environmental problems in relations with the United States, Canadian concerns at the United Nations, and international developmental matters. One of the most notable differences in coverage among the papers studied was the variation found in the attention paid to the international role of Quebec, which received only scant attention in the English-language press but was the single most frequently coded theme in the Quebec newspapers. While analytic coverage was found to be more extensive and profound in the Globe and Mail, Le Devoir and La Presse than in the other three papers, the authors in general agree with De Montigny Marchand that Canadian newspapers are "an uncertain intellectual force in the definition and interpretation of Canadian foreign policy".

EN:

The purpose of this paper is to examine this assumption — that size and power makes a difference to the definition of the utility of economic sanctions. It examines as a case study the employment of Canadian sanctions against Vietnam. The paper will argue that this case demonstrates that, for a non-great power, the utility of economic sanctions is rarely limited to the usual objectives attributed to, and derived from the experience of, great power s: exercising power against the 'targef' state or signalling one's power to other states in the system. Instead, it will argue that for a middle power like Canada, the use of sanctions becomes inextricably bound to foreign policy-maker s perceptions of the politics of coalition obligations ; and of the imperatives and constraints of bilateral relations with the major power s.

EN:

To attack the rules is to outmaneuver the friends and foes at the lower level of the game of policies and alliances. The rules are at the higher level of the context of that game, the historical and cultural context of warring Viet Nam. What makes Viet Nam unique is its social organization based on a loosely knitted network of villages through deep and strong relations capable of repelling intruders and invading neighbors, both moving and still like the moon underneath. Here, the chinese civilization has made a new nation assimilating the model and resisting the domination. Elsewhere, the be same chinese civilisation has made another chinese provinces.

History of Viet Nam is written by an advancing front of modest and primitive villages from a delta to the next, from the gulf of Tonkin to the gulf of Siam, « vietnamizing » the nature and the peoples on its passage by the plow and the sword. South Viet Nam was cambodian land a century ago and the french colonial administration put an end to the siamese-vietnamese « condominium » over Cambodia after a short 0 to 0 fight between Siam and Viet Nam, the first claiming its western part of the vietnamese colony de facto and de jure. Cambodia was then ruled by a vietnamese general governor assisted by two lieutenant governors. The present vietnamese occupation of Cambodia, in this perspective, may be both a « prelude » to the continuation of this advancing front of villages, the confrontation between Viet Nam and Thailand (fancy and hegemonostic name for Siam since 1939) for the leadership of South East Asia and a « fugue » for warring Viet Nam to solve its political and economical problems, a country and people forged in war and for war during these four decades. The vietnamese claim of the Mekong river as a link may be translated in german word as « Anschluss » or reunification.