How are we to define a new place for Canada in the world? That requires only the identification of an alternative other than the only two alternatives that seem to be available to us ”” either to march in step with the US and thus to become invisible, or to march off by ourselves, and thus to become irrelevant. A more difficult task is to find some common foreign policy ground between Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin.
Adrift, loss of direction, decline in effectiveness and in influence. These are common descriptions of the general condition of our foreign policy. As well, it’s repeatedly sta- ted that we’ve botched our relations with the US.
In my judgement, both declarations are completely cor- rect. It’s time to stop living in a state of denial about them and about the magnitude of the foreign policy challenge that now confronts us.
Many explanations about how this could have hap- pened have been provided. Let me add a few thoughts about why we are now pushing our foreign policy rock uphill, or, as all good Marxists would say, why the ”œobjective correlative of forces” has turned against us.
Example: One of our defining niche activities in foreign affairs has vanished. Peacekeeping was once what Canada did better and more often than anyone else. No longer. There’s the contraction in our own capabilities. More signif- icant, many others are now occupying the same niche. Poor countries have realized that peacekeeping is an excellent way to earn hard currency. They provide the troops; we pro- vide the dollars. We can still contribute, as currently in Afghanistan. But peacekeeping will never again be a dis- tinctively Canadian international role. And the visible decline in our role as peacekeepers has caused us, and oth- ers, to look more critically at all our other activities, and so to spot the cracks, the worn patches, the loose mortar, the crumbling bricks, in our foreign policy edifice.
Another example: We’ve lost one of our principal foreign policy assets. We are no longer interpreters of the US to oth- ers, and in certain circumstances interlocutors between it and other nations. We’ve lost both much of our confident ”œknowiness” about the US and much of our entrée in Washington. And entrée there helped our entrée elsewhere. Regime change in Washington would improve things as will, more modestly, the impending regime change in Ottawa. But cosmet- ics, like better relations at the top, won’t alter the new fundamentals. American demography is moving away from Canada, toward the west and south. So is American culture becoming distant from us. It’s religious; we’re sec- ular. We cannot use the word ”œevil” in public discourse; to most Americans it’s entirely normal. They are at ease with moral absolutes; we are at ease with moral relativism. And of course their security trumps everything while to us it’s an afterthought.
To appreciate our difficulty in understanding contempo- rary America, consider the con- trast between the one-in-three Americans who describe them- selves as evangelical Christians and the number of evangelical Christians on the staffs of our embassy in Washington and of our consulates; that number is zero. Try to imagine our sending to Moscow diplomats who speak no Russian, or to Beijing those who speak no Chinese. To steal from Oscar Wilde, which is to steal from the best, Canada and the US are now two nations divided by a common language.
There is a more profound reason why cross-border cameraderie has declined. Here, a brilliant insight has been provided by British historian and journalist Timothy Garton Ash, writ- ing in an entirely different context. ”œThe problem with American power is not that it is American,” wrote Garton Ash in the New York Times. ”œThe prob- lem is simply the power. It would be dangerous even for an archangel to wield so much power.”
The US’s uninhibited power is a particular problem for Canada because we ourselves have so little experience in the exercise of raw power ”” the War Measures Act and the suppression of Riel’s rebellion as very rare exceptions ”” but rely instead on dialogue, accom- modation, compromise. These are now part of our national DNA, abroad as well as at home. But they are not qual- ities an America, at one and the same time omnipotent and besieged, is look- ing for. Which is why its post-Iraq atti- tude toward us isn’t so much disappointment or anger as, much more cuttingly, indifference.
In summary, the scale of the change in our circumstances, in the world and in our relations vis-aÌ€-vis the US, which a Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute report describes accurately as ”œthe only real imperative in Canadian foreign policy,” is far more radical than has been realized generally and there- fore will require change more radical than has been realized generally, cer- tainly far more than a Canadian prime minister prepared to smile southwards.
One obvious Canadian response to American unilateralism would be for us to march with it, and to acquire the ability to do this by spending sig- nificantly more on our defence forces. I have a lot of sympathy for this proposi- tion. Those advocating it have quick- ened the pace ”” still far too slow ”” of the financial repair of our forces and have ensured that they won’t be reduced all the way down to the mili- tary minimalism of the Inter-War years. But I don’t believe that this option is implementable. A national will to sacri- fice other objectives ”” health care, edu- cation, whatever ”” simply doesn’t exist. We are a post-modern nation.
Like others, especially in Europe where majorities in many countries recently told pollsters they oppose not just the war in Iraq but any war under any cir- cumstances, we are non-militarist, and a sizeable pacifist constituency now exists in Canada. Asking Paul Martin to commit himself to major funding increases in our forces would be to ask him to commit himself to apply a major share of his political credits to the predictable endless battles over MRIs for health care vs Strykker armoured vehicles for the army, rather than to use them to achieve his priori- ties of improving our productivity and competitiveness. As well, Martin would, de facto, be committing himself to marching with the Americans the next time they march because he would be severely criticized for having spent all that money on new military toys and then not using them. All that can be achieved, I believe, are incre- mental funding increases that would prevent our soldiers from being significantly disadvan- taged and prevent our politi- cians from continuing to be shamed.
What do we do? So far, our principal response has been that of act- ing as if little has changed in our world ”” as if there’d been no 1989 and the Cold War’s end, and no September 11, 2001 ”” the first to put distance between Europe and us, the second to put distance between the US and us. Increasingly a sub-text of commentaries on Canadian foreign policy, even in the otherwise excellent memoir by Lloyd Axworthy, is that all is well because our foreign policy is better than the US’s foreign policy. Which of course it is. So what? We don’t have to make existen- tial decisions about war and peace. We are nowhere in the front line. Nation- building in Iraq may fail. We, by con- trast, have never attempted any nation-building, anywhere. One reason our foreign aid program is one of the most expensive in the world is because, in the interests of ethnic politics, we parcel it out all over the globe so that nowhere are we actually responsible for the success or failure of a nation or of one of its provinces or regions or of any entity by which Canadian success or failure could actually be measured. By contrast, Australia, long relatively pas- sive in foreign policy, is now taking nation-building risks in East Timor and the Solomon Islands.
To repeat, what do we do? The start- ing point, surely, has to be to under- stand the nature of the world in which our foreign policy will have to operate.
In one instance for at least a couple of decades and in the other for many decades, the world is going to be shaped by the challenge of two brutally destructive pathologies. One is the chal- lenge of terrorism ”” of terrorism, this is to say, on a scale without historical precedent ”” global in its reach, moti- vated by and sustained by an ideology that is coherent, however evil, and that, as one of the dysfunctions of globaliza- tion, offers these terrorists the prospect of being able, one year, one decade, to acquire the technologies that will enable them to kill in the mass.
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To this challenge, which absorbs the US and of which the duration may well be as long as that of the Cold War, there is relatively little Canada can contribute, other than on secondary matters like information exchange, the suppression of illicit financing, and the tightening of our own borders, this last for the very good reason that it’s a pre- condition for keeping open our own border with our unilateral economic partner. This reality is the source of American indifference northwards.
A second pathology is disfiguring our world. Call it the axis of inequality. Income inequalities around the world have become obscene, disgusting, inhuman. One in two people on earth live on two dollars a day. One in five have no clean drinking water. Their lives are brutal, nasty, short. And they know it. This is the decisive difference from the past. Then, most of the world’s poor lived in the countryside. Today, they live in cities, with access to TV, films, tourists. Specifically, more and more live in urban slums. According to a recent United Nations report, in a quarter-century, one in three of all the people in the world will be living in vast, crime-ridden, disease- riddled, insanely over-crowded, vio- lent and unsanitary slums within which most systems of social and political control have long since col- lapsed. These human garbage dumps will be breeding grounds of hatred, violence, alienation, extremism, whether political or religious, and of course of an unlimited number of sui- cide bombers.
To the amelioration of this impend- ing gigantic human tragedy, and, surely inevitably, of an explosion of unre- strained rage, Canada is contributing what? Precious little. This at the same time we keep telling our-
selves our foreign policy isbetter than the US’s.
Jean Chrétien once seemed to understand this. Soon after 9/11 he observed that one of the prime causes of terrorism was poverty. He was severely criticized, within this country as well south of the border. He deserved to be: his tim- ing was terrible. And in the case of the September 11 terrorists, so were his facts. Most of them came from affluent backgrounds. Nor was Canada well- positioned to preach. By then our for- eign aid program had been reduced by one-half over the decade. But Chrétien was on to something. Terrorism must be fought. So must income inequality.
Enter now Paul Martin. During the interviews he gave his biographer John Gray, Martin only really once dropped his guard to speak with can- did enthusiasm rather than with cali- brated calculation. This occurred when the subject was foreign affairs. Martin remarked that, ”œCanada has an oppor- tunity ”” not to follow the States, not to follow Europe ”” to play the most important role in leading the world to the way in which it’s going to govern itself.” He talked about how if the US tries to run the world unilaterally, it would exhaust itself. The alternative had to be multilateralism. But it had to be effective multilateralism so that the US could see the advantages to its national self-interest.
Martin went on to tell Gray that any time he discussed this possibility with ordinary Canadians, they too became enthusiastic. ”œThis is really going to excite Canadians,” he said. ”œI believe it has to do with a sense of pur- pose, that the country wants to feel and it’s looking for someone to express.”
Martin’s interest here wasn’t global income inequalities but global gover- nance, a subject that has fascinated him ever since he chaired the G-20 financial group. That’s an important issue. But it’s not an inspirational issue. And it does not address either of the pathologies now shaping our world. But Martin, like Chrétien before him, had a point about the potential of foreign policy to ”œexcite” Canadians and to give us col- lectively a ”œsense of purpose.”
The issue of global income inequal- ities is, I believe, the kind of challenge that Canada could and should address. We of course couldn’t solve the prob- lem. Maybe it’s insoluble. But we can start trying to make a real difference, by developing expertise that’s truly world class, by determinedly enlisting others in the mission, and by doing our bit with major projects that will make us, as is so rare, visibly responsible for fail- ures as well as for successes.
Some say, or at any rate may feel without caring to say so out loud, that development is ”œsoft”. They couldn’t be more wrong. In today’s world where they are no longer any borders nor any front lines, aid workers are as much at risk as soldiers. Words like warrior and peace keeper and nation-builder need to be re-defined. One of the functions of our military will become increas- ingly to protect Canadian aid workers, and missionaries and businessmen.
Some may also say, or at any rate may feel, that nation-building has nothing to do with fighting terrorism. They couldn’t be more wrong. Imagine political leaders in vast urban slums ”” in Lagos, say, or in Rio de Janeiro ”” far from the terrorist scenes and so, today, of little concern to us. These leaders (assume they are secular) will have noted that, in one sense, the terrorists have already won a huge and an irre- versible victory. They have won for the Arabs, and to an extent for all Muslims, more attention ”” and atten- tion is a surrogate for respect ”” than in decades, if not in centuries. It’s not hard to imagine these leaders of the dispossessed slum-dwellers deciding that the way to attract attention to their plight is to blow up some embassies, or local head offices of multinationals, or to send ”œstudents” or ”œrefugees” north to do the same in North America or Europe.
This then is the place where we could take our stand. Unquestionably, we must take it somewhere. We can no longer hang back from the front lines of dealing with the world’s pathologies by being, quite deliberately, everywhere at all times. Nor, despite that sense of drift, decline, loss of direction, is our foreign policy potential in any way diminished from the past. Our economy is strong. So is national unity. Our dollar may soon be too strong. Above all, there is a palpable sense of confidence, almost of cockiness, among Canadians, especially among the young. So we can be daring, and we must be daring.
This article is adapted from a speech given to the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute in Ottawa on October 31.
