The Price of Prestige

a contest of beneficence 115

and have to protect their position from pressures from both above and

below. A sort of international Gulliver, middle powers are at home nei-

ther among the Lilliputians nor among the giants of Brobdingnag. This

makes them a restless and inventive lot. They adopt new status symbols

with eagerness and abandon them with similar zeal. They constantly seek

new prestige markets in which they can gain a first- mover advantage. The

fluid world of international prosociality offers many opportunities for this

type of entrepreneurship. Canada’s promotion of the concept of human

security under the guidance of its foreign minister, Lloyd Axworthy, is a

good example of such entrepreneurship (Axworthy 1996 ). This Canadian

leadership initiative came at a time when Canada was abandoning its tradi-

tional support for peacekeepers and reducing its aid commitments. It was

therefore looking for a new way to purchase prestige, and this prosocial

leadership initiative seemed to fit the bill (see also Wylie 2009 ). Chapnick

( 2000 , 205 – 6 ) was quick to proclaim that with this human- security initia-

tive, Canada finally found middle powerhood’s Holy Grail.

The declared expert or leader on human security, Canada would finally be jus-

tified in its demands for middle- power status in the international community;

now it would sit on a different tier of the international community — one with

spaces for powers that exercise influence over parts of international affairs.

The promotion of the human security agenda is designed to increase Canada’s

status in the international community and allow it to climb into that higher

group of powers that has eluded it since the failure to achieve true middle-

power status at the end of the Second World War.

A decade later, Chapnick’s assertion regarding the utility of the human-

security agenda as a status symbol seems overly optimistic. Canada is still

searching for a reliable and effective venue for conspicuous consumption.

Regardless of the empirical merit of the middle- power category, the

claim that middle powers behave differently than other classes of interna-

tional actors supports the argument that certain patterns of international

consumption are correlated with class and therefore with prestige. This

correlation can in itself create a motivation for actors to try to emulate

these consumption patterns. This is especially true when advocating a

functional definition of middle powerhood: if middle powers are peace-

keepers and peacekeepers are therefore middle powers, lower- status ac-

tors may quickly develop a keen interest in peacekeeping as a cheap in-

strument for improving their rank. The conspicuous consumption model