The Politics of Fair Share: Canadian Contribution Strategies in NATO’s Formative Years

Burden-sharing has traditionally been an object of heated debates between the US and Europe in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The objective of this paper is to understand contribution strategies of 'the other' North American ally. It goes back to the moment when the burden-sharing problem first emerged in 1949-51 and asks why did Canada contribute to NATO? The research reconstructs archival material to make the Canadian political elite speak. It combines a theory-as-thought method and interpretive policy analysis to distill the Canadian discourse into categories, metaphors, and arguments and explore the links between purpose, burden, contribution and sharing. The paper argues that the geopolitics of middle power and fair share can better explain how Canada made sense of her contribution strategies. Furthermore, this interpretive analysis reveals that sharing a burden was not a mere technicality and points to the interpretive gap between Canada, the US and Europe.