Beer wars: A theoretical examination of the epistemic community in the Canada-United States trade disputes on beer.

摘要

This dissertation seeks to assess whether the concept of epistemic communities provides a useful supplement to a statist explanation of events that occurred in the Canada-US beer wars. The Canada-US beer dispute began in the latter half of the 1980s and ended with the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding between Ottawa and Washington in 1993.; A review of the literature on Canadian foreign policy reveals that if theory is deployed at all in the literature, it tends to be the statist perspective. The position of this dissertation is that while the statist perspective tells analysts a great deal about how Canada's foreign policy decisions are ultimately derived, people and ideas are important determinants in this area of decision-making as well.; Such an approach hazards a number of formidable ontological, epistemological and methodological barriers that lie at the core of the 'inter-paradigm' debate in the literature on international relations. To help overcome some of these hurdles, this dissertation employs an approach characterized in international relations literature as methodological pluralism.; The statist focus on rational calculations of material interests is advanced as the null hypothesis in this examination. Should the null hypothesis prove inadequate to explain events, it will be supplemented by two further hypotheses designed to test the efficacy of an epistemic communities' explanation. These hypotheses are, first, that an epistemic community comprised of trade officials from Canada's Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade and the Office of the United States Trade Representative was operating during this dispute; and second, this epistemic community had a determinative impact on the dispute's outcome.; Following a brief examination of the brewing industries' development in Canada and the United States, as well as the regulatory practices of both countries, the hypotheses are deployed to examine the events of the disputes launched, first by the European Economic Community, and then, the US, under the trade dispute settlement provisions of the GATT, over the commercial practices of Canada's provincial liquor boards.; The dissertation concludes that the epistemic community was a key driver of events when it was permitted the 'political space' by elected officials.