"""We are the blue berets:"" problematizing peacekeeping in postwar Canada"

"This dissertation highlights some of the innumerable ways that participation in UN peacekeeping efforts became one of the central symbols employed in Canadian self-identification from 1956 to 1997. What emerges is a web encompassing forty or so years of continuity and change in how messages about peacekeeping and Canada were produced, disseminated, and received by Canadians. The strands which comprise this web are: the political rhetoric of peacekeeping, the use of peacekeeping in high school textbooks, National Film Board [NFB] documentaries about peacekeeping, newspaper coverage of peacekeeping, and editorial cartoons about peacekeeping.

Peacekeeping's growing adoption as a national symbol in Canada depended considerably on writers' and artists' abilities to discuss more than the successes and failures of individual missions or peacekeeping as a governmental policy. UN peacekeeping operations have not been universally successful; Canadians, therefore, did not become attached to peacekeeping through the actual achievements of their peacekeepers. Rather, what largely determined the content of each medium's messages were persistent discussions which foregrounded Canada's participation in peacekeeping operations, as well as the existence of three parallel discourses about peacekeeping which referred to the past, the present, or the future for audiences. The nostalgic and progressive discourses encouraged Canadians to see peacekeeping as a symbolic activity. The words and images associated with these temporal understandings of peacekeeping helped blunt the impact of any criticisms which were made using functional criteria in the present.

While internationalist in emphasis, peacekeeping was seen through domestic frames far more often. Individual missions mattered less than the idea of peacekeeping and Canada's part in its perpetuation. When missions went awry, the impact on Canada was discussed far more than the effects on the host nations. The domestic production and reception of messages about peacekeeping was therefore influenced by internationalism, but remained centred on the Canadian experience of peacekeeping. This domestic emphasis problematizes the Canadian attachment to peacekeeping while also providing answers to why so many Canadians strongly associate with peacekeeping. Or feel, as Stompin' Tom Connors put it, that ""we are the Blue Berets."""