I saw part of Harper's question and answer session. He seemed to handle himself rather well, certainly much better than his close comrade Bush.
Of course we are leading by example by following or even leading the US. In Colombia we are leading the US in what Bush wants more trade relations with a regime that has a wretched human rights record. In climate change we are doing nothing to promote Kyoto and everything to take a third way consisting mostly of rhetorical hot air and little action, again a policy favored by the US as we play a crucial role in the US led Asia Pacific Partnership.
In Afghanistan again ,we along with other NATO countries, are helping out as junior partners in US imperialism. That internationally we are looked upon somewhat more kindly than the US makes us a perfect partner to help US foreign policy. In Afghanistan though Harper may face a tough sell in spite of his idealistic rhetoric since other NATO partners are sensible enough not to step up to the plate and put their forces in harm's way.
Canada leads by example on world stage, says PM
Last Updated: Tuesday, September 25, 2007 | 9:59 PM ET
CBC News
Prime Minister Stephen Harper praised Canada as a country with growing influence on the world stage Tuesday, saying it promotes democracy and economic opportunity by tackling tough issues such as climate change and Afghanistan.
Notice that Canada has not had anything to say about the military tribunals in Guantanamo. He is concerned about Candian citizens in China but not in Guantanamo or even in Somalia.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper answers questions following his speech at the Council on Foreign Relations on Tuesday in New York City.
(Tom Hanson/Canadian Press)
Harper made the comments during a speech to the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations, an international think-tank dedicated to foreign policy issues around the world.
He said no country working on its own, even a superpower, can resolve complex global issues such as terrorism, climate change, and the spread of nuclear and biological weapons.
"Success requires middle powers who can step up to the plate and do their part," said Harper.
"Success demands governments who are willing to assume responsibilities, seek practical do-able solutions to problems, and who have a voice, an influence in global affairs because they lead not by lecturing but by example."
Harper praised Canada's military contribution in Afghanistan, where about 2,500 soldiers are deployed as part of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force.
"The stark reality is that there can be no progress in Afghanistan without security," he said.
Improve trade within Americas
On the environment, Harper said his Conservative government will do all it can to lead the effort to create a post-Kyoto international framework on climate change that recognizes economic circumstances.
A day earlier, Harper announced that Canada had joined talks with the U.S.-led climate change group the Asia-Pacific Partnership. It has been criticized by environmentalists as not setting hard targets to cut greenhouse-gas emissions.
"The solution to climate change cannot and will not be one-size-fits-all, but neither can nations treat this issue as simply somebody else's responsibility," Harper said Tuesday.
Harper praised NAFTA and Canadian efforts to expand trade relationships within the Americas, despite concerns that some countries in the region are falling back into economic nationalism, protectionism and authoritarianism.
He cited Canada's recent trade deal with Colombia and urged Washington, which is considering a new pact with the South American nation, to follow Ottawa's example.
"If the U.S. turns its back on Colombia, this will set back our cause far more than any Latin American dictator can achieve," he said.
Harper said Canada and the U.S. must be able to balance their own security requirements with economic and trade issues before their relationship can deepen.
"The U.S. government, post-September 2001 … has very much become preoccupied with security … and I think that until we're able to couple that somewhat better, that the prospects of deepening our economic relationship are limited," he said.
PM tackles election chances
During a candid question and answer session following his speech, Harper addressed a number of issues, including how best to promote democracy.
Harper said the leaders of many non-democratic countries don't just aim to win elections, but aspire to wipe out their opposition for good.
"I'm concerned that as Western nations, we don't fully understand that, and I think we often rush in to certain types of democratic processes in non-democratic societies where the outcome will not be a free and democratic society," he said.
"All of us as Western countries need to think carefully about how we project and what we understand about our democratic values and how we project those abroad."
Harper also discussed his chances for re-election.
"Under the current political alignment — I'm probably not supposed to say this, my election strategist won't like it — I think the possibility of a minority government in any election, including one in the very near future, would loom very high," said Harper.
Won't be 'bullied' into ending seal hunt
When asked why Canada permits the seal hunt, Harper said anti-sealing groups present false information about the cull and that the clubbing of baby seals has been outlawed for 20 years.
"It's a small industry of animal husbandry. We will not be bullied or blackmailed based on allegations that are not true," he said.
When asked why Canada, despite having a culture similar to that in the U.S., is perceived with less hostility around the world, Harper acknowledged that the world sees the two neighbours differently.
"Canada has no history anywhere in the world of conquest or domination. It's hard to perceive of Canada in that kind of position," he said.
Harper also said Canada's nature as a "bicultural country" gives politicians an inherent understanding of cultural differences on the world stage
Showing posts with label Canadian foreign policy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Canadian foreign policy. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
Friday, September 21, 2007
Dion Launches Foreign Policy Attack
None of the three main parties have been blameless on Afghanistan. As the TOries point out it was the Liberals who got the Canadian involved in Kandahar. I expect that there were no objections by the Conservatives at the time. The NDP helped defeat a Liberal motion that would have forced the Conservatives to end the mission in 2009. The reason given was that the NDP wanted an immediate pullout. While it is true that is the NDP position the effect is to get the Conservatives off the hook.
The idea that the Conservatives blackmailed the opposition is hardly a proper description. It is simply that being elected rather than being principled is the aim of any mainstream party and that includes all of the four main Federal parties. Since none of the opposition parties wanted an election they simply would not do anything that would create an election call.
Dion is right that Harper and Bush are closer to being soul mates than Martin and Bush. Harper would have had Canadians dying in Iraq as well as Afghanistan. It is not just Harper though. Many on his team are just as bad.
Dion launches foreign-policy attack
Liberal Leader blasts Harper's 'ideological kinship' with Bush administration
CAMPBELL CLARK
From Friday's Globe and Mail
September 21, 2007 at 4:14 AM EDT
MONTREAL — Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion yesterday fired a series of sharp blasts at what he called the Conservative government's "mediocre," "simplistic," and "incompetent" handling of foreign affairs, as he outlined his own call for a staunchly made-in-Canada foreign policy less aligned with the U.S. course.
In an interview later, he insisted that it is up to Prime Minister Stephen Harper to propose a post-2009 role for Canada in Afghanistan if he wants opposition support for some kind of mission there - and that he is open to discussions of a non-combat peacekeeping role.
Mr. Dion's broad indictment of Conservative foreign policy came one day after he personally took up the cause of accused terrorist Omar Khadr - and he again attacked the Tories as the only Western government that has failed to fight for the rights of its citizens imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay.
This time, in a speech to a foreign-policy group in Montreal, Mr. Dion delivered a broader accusation that the Conservatives have drifted from the independent-minded, multilateral policies of previous governments to divisive U.S.-inspired actions that are not broadly supported by Canadians.
Dion takes the blame for by-election losses
"How can the Harper government's foreign policy have achieved such depths of mediocrity? Incompetence cannot be the only reason," he said.
"A deeper explanation seems to be an ideological kinship between the Harper government and the Bush administration. Mr. Harper has given Canada a foreign policy that draws its inspiration from the American right, a foreign policy that does little to advance Canada's interests."
Among his examples: that the Conservative government "insults China and absolves Colombia" of human-rights abuses "without doing anything whatsoever to advance the cause of human rights;" that it committed $30-billion for military-equipment spending that was often ordered without competitive bids and "was in many cases neither necessary nor wanted by the army;" and that it's a "government that plays no mediation role whatsoever, anywhere in the world."
Mr. Dion said that the government's decision to ignore the country's Kyoto Protocol obligations undermines Canada's credibility and will diminish its future influence in striking such a deal.
However, he said the Conservatives' worst blunder was its handling of the Afghanistan mission. The Tories "blackmailed" Parliament into extending the mission to 2009 under threat of an election before they obtained commitments from allies to play a greater role, and now the Tories are refusing to come clear on whether they want to extend the mission, he said.
"It's always worrisome when a politician constantly flip-flops, but when people's lives are at stake, it's inexcusable," Mr. Dion said.
The Conservatives responded that Mr. Dion was trying to distract from his own weak leadership, and charged that he did a flip-flop of his own because the Liberal cabinet he served in sent Canadian troops to Kandahar in the first place. "He helped put our troops in heavy combat," said Ottawa Tory MP Pierre Poilievre.
Mr. Dion said that if Mr. Harper notifies NATO allies that Canada will not extend its mission, then he can negotiate some other role and propose it to the other parties in the Commons.
"And it's for the government to come with leadership, and to say, this is what we have negotiated, with the premise that it's not a combat mission, and say this is what we are ready to do," Mr. Dion said in an interview.
All three opposition parties have threatened to vote against the Throne Speech that Mr. Harper's government is set to deliver Oct. 16 - which would defeat his government and trigger an election - over Canada's role in Afghanistan.
But Mr. Dion said that an appeal this week from Afghan President Hamid Karzai for Canadian troops to stay in the country shows that Mr. Harper has not been clear enough.
"The Prime Minister has not been clear, so we have President Karzai panicking, if I understand well," he said. "Replacement after three years in a military mission is normal practice in a multilateral body. And we need to know if NATO works."
With a report from The Canadian Press
The idea that the Conservatives blackmailed the opposition is hardly a proper description. It is simply that being elected rather than being principled is the aim of any mainstream party and that includes all of the four main Federal parties. Since none of the opposition parties wanted an election they simply would not do anything that would create an election call.
Dion is right that Harper and Bush are closer to being soul mates than Martin and Bush. Harper would have had Canadians dying in Iraq as well as Afghanistan. It is not just Harper though. Many on his team are just as bad.
Dion launches foreign-policy attack
Liberal Leader blasts Harper's 'ideological kinship' with Bush administration
CAMPBELL CLARK
From Friday's Globe and Mail
September 21, 2007 at 4:14 AM EDT
MONTREAL — Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion yesterday fired a series of sharp blasts at what he called the Conservative government's "mediocre," "simplistic," and "incompetent" handling of foreign affairs, as he outlined his own call for a staunchly made-in-Canada foreign policy less aligned with the U.S. course.
In an interview later, he insisted that it is up to Prime Minister Stephen Harper to propose a post-2009 role for Canada in Afghanistan if he wants opposition support for some kind of mission there - and that he is open to discussions of a non-combat peacekeeping role.
Mr. Dion's broad indictment of Conservative foreign policy came one day after he personally took up the cause of accused terrorist Omar Khadr - and he again attacked the Tories as the only Western government that has failed to fight for the rights of its citizens imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay.
This time, in a speech to a foreign-policy group in Montreal, Mr. Dion delivered a broader accusation that the Conservatives have drifted from the independent-minded, multilateral policies of previous governments to divisive U.S.-inspired actions that are not broadly supported by Canadians.
Dion takes the blame for by-election losses
"How can the Harper government's foreign policy have achieved such depths of mediocrity? Incompetence cannot be the only reason," he said.
"A deeper explanation seems to be an ideological kinship between the Harper government and the Bush administration. Mr. Harper has given Canada a foreign policy that draws its inspiration from the American right, a foreign policy that does little to advance Canada's interests."
Among his examples: that the Conservative government "insults China and absolves Colombia" of human-rights abuses "without doing anything whatsoever to advance the cause of human rights;" that it committed $30-billion for military-equipment spending that was often ordered without competitive bids and "was in many cases neither necessary nor wanted by the army;" and that it's a "government that plays no mediation role whatsoever, anywhere in the world."
Mr. Dion said that the government's decision to ignore the country's Kyoto Protocol obligations undermines Canada's credibility and will diminish its future influence in striking such a deal.
However, he said the Conservatives' worst blunder was its handling of the Afghanistan mission. The Tories "blackmailed" Parliament into extending the mission to 2009 under threat of an election before they obtained commitments from allies to play a greater role, and now the Tories are refusing to come clear on whether they want to extend the mission, he said.
"It's always worrisome when a politician constantly flip-flops, but when people's lives are at stake, it's inexcusable," Mr. Dion said.
The Conservatives responded that Mr. Dion was trying to distract from his own weak leadership, and charged that he did a flip-flop of his own because the Liberal cabinet he served in sent Canadian troops to Kandahar in the first place. "He helped put our troops in heavy combat," said Ottawa Tory MP Pierre Poilievre.
Mr. Dion said that if Mr. Harper notifies NATO allies that Canada will not extend its mission, then he can negotiate some other role and propose it to the other parties in the Commons.
"And it's for the government to come with leadership, and to say, this is what we have negotiated, with the premise that it's not a combat mission, and say this is what we are ready to do," Mr. Dion said in an interview.
All three opposition parties have threatened to vote against the Throne Speech that Mr. Harper's government is set to deliver Oct. 16 - which would defeat his government and trigger an election - over Canada's role in Afghanistan.
But Mr. Dion said that an appeal this week from Afghan President Hamid Karzai for Canadian troops to stay in the country shows that Mr. Harper has not been clear enough.
"The Prime Minister has not been clear, so we have President Karzai panicking, if I understand well," he said. "Replacement after three years in a military mission is normal practice in a multilateral body. And we need to know if NATO works."
With a report from The Canadian Press
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
Harper says Canada must be more assertive Globally
Because of shared values such as democracy and close ties to the US we are to become more assertive in defending global security in such places as Afghanistan.
Translation: Because we buy into the US rhetoric of spreading democracy (by pre-emptive invasions)and the war against terror we are uniquely positioned to gain more world influence by sucking up to the US and providing aid to them in maintaining global hegemony. In return the US will continue to buy our natural resources at firesale prices and ensure that Harper wins the battle against the big bad monopoly Wheat Board. We will build up our military so as to help ease the military burden on the US. Where possible we will do this through the UN and NATO despite our close ties with the US. We need to appear independent.
Harper Says Canada Must Be More Assertive Globally (Update1)
By Theophilos Argitis
Sept. 11 (Bloomberg) -- Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said Australia and Canada must become more assertive in defending global security in places such as Afghanistan.
Harper said the two middle powers are ``uniquely able'' to act as a force for positive change because of shared values such as democracy and close ties to the U.S. In the first speech by a Canadian leader to Australian lawmakers, Harper called Australia and the U.S. his nation's ``strategic cousins.''
``If we abandon our fellow human beings to lives of poverty, brutality and ignorance, in today's global village their misery will eventually and inevitably become ours,'' Harper told a joint sitting of the House of Representatives and Senate. ``We should underestimate neither our capacity to influence events nor to influence others.''
The speech today comes on the sixth anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, an event Harper has evoked to justify his efforts to extend Canada's mission in Afghanistan and raise the country's defense capabilities. Both countries have been ``bloodied'' by terrorism, Harper said, including two dozen Canadians who were killed in the Sept. 11 attacks.
Harper on Sept. 9 said he is in no ``rush'' to hold a vote in Canada's Parliament that may force him to withdraw troops from Afghanistan. The governing Conservatives have promised to seek approval from lawmakers before extending the mission past the February 2009 deadline. All three opposition parties, who combined hold a majority of seats in the legislature, have called for an end to the military mission.
Canadian Troops
Canada has about 2,500 soldiers in Afghanistan's southern Kandahar region as part of NATO's 37,000-troop mission to fight the former Taliban regime and hunt al-Qaeda terrorists.
Harper told reporters after his address that Canada needs to stop debating when to withdraw and focus discussions on the mission's objectives, adding the country has undertaken ``obligations'' in Afghanistan. Canada and Australia also have scope to cooperate in the Asian country, Harper said.
The two countries announced three joint initiatives in Afghanistan, including an agreement to help strengthen security along the border with Pakistan.
``In Afghanistan and elsewhere, both our countries are committed to working together,'' Harper said in his speech.
Australian troops in Afghanistan and Iraq have become a central issue for Prime Minister John Howard, who heads to an election by the end of this year and trails in the polls. Australia has about 1,500 soldiers in Iraq serving with U.S.-led coalition forces, and about 900 in Afghanistan.
To contact the report on this story: Theophilos Argitis in Sydney at targitis@bloomberg.net .
Last Updated: September 11, 2007 07:00 EDT
Translation: Because we buy into the US rhetoric of spreading democracy (by pre-emptive invasions)and the war against terror we are uniquely positioned to gain more world influence by sucking up to the US and providing aid to them in maintaining global hegemony. In return the US will continue to buy our natural resources at firesale prices and ensure that Harper wins the battle against the big bad monopoly Wheat Board. We will build up our military so as to help ease the military burden on the US. Where possible we will do this through the UN and NATO despite our close ties with the US. We need to appear independent.
Harper Says Canada Must Be More Assertive Globally (Update1)
By Theophilos Argitis
Sept. 11 (Bloomberg) -- Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said Australia and Canada must become more assertive in defending global security in places such as Afghanistan.
Harper said the two middle powers are ``uniquely able'' to act as a force for positive change because of shared values such as democracy and close ties to the U.S. In the first speech by a Canadian leader to Australian lawmakers, Harper called Australia and the U.S. his nation's ``strategic cousins.''
``If we abandon our fellow human beings to lives of poverty, brutality and ignorance, in today's global village their misery will eventually and inevitably become ours,'' Harper told a joint sitting of the House of Representatives and Senate. ``We should underestimate neither our capacity to influence events nor to influence others.''
The speech today comes on the sixth anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, an event Harper has evoked to justify his efforts to extend Canada's mission in Afghanistan and raise the country's defense capabilities. Both countries have been ``bloodied'' by terrorism, Harper said, including two dozen Canadians who were killed in the Sept. 11 attacks.
Harper on Sept. 9 said he is in no ``rush'' to hold a vote in Canada's Parliament that may force him to withdraw troops from Afghanistan. The governing Conservatives have promised to seek approval from lawmakers before extending the mission past the February 2009 deadline. All three opposition parties, who combined hold a majority of seats in the legislature, have called for an end to the military mission.
Canadian Troops
Canada has about 2,500 soldiers in Afghanistan's southern Kandahar region as part of NATO's 37,000-troop mission to fight the former Taliban regime and hunt al-Qaeda terrorists.
Harper told reporters after his address that Canada needs to stop debating when to withdraw and focus discussions on the mission's objectives, adding the country has undertaken ``obligations'' in Afghanistan. Canada and Australia also have scope to cooperate in the Asian country, Harper said.
The two countries announced three joint initiatives in Afghanistan, including an agreement to help strengthen security along the border with Pakistan.
``In Afghanistan and elsewhere, both our countries are committed to working together,'' Harper said in his speech.
Australian troops in Afghanistan and Iraq have become a central issue for Prime Minister John Howard, who heads to an election by the end of this year and trails in the polls. Australia has about 1,500 soldiers in Iraq serving with U.S.-led coalition forces, and about 900 in Afghanistan.
To contact the report on this story: Theophilos Argitis in Sydney at targitis@bloomberg.net .
Last Updated: September 11, 2007 07:00 EDT
Monday, July 16, 2007
Afghanistan: Looking for Canadian Sovereignty
This is part of a much longer series that is available at Rabble. Laxer is usually quite interesting and makes many good points but I find this selection wanders a bit and sometimes is vague. There is not the bite that there was in his earlier work during the time of the Waffle movement. There isn't even a whiff of socialism in this portion of his commentary.
Afghanistan: Looking for Canadian sovereignty
>by James Laxer
July 16, 2007
(Mission of Folly: Part ten —2) In this new age, while Canadians have had very little leadership on this score from political leaders or intellectuals, they have moved in the same direction as other peoples in cherishing the survival of their state. Canadians have had a curious history on the question of national sovereignty in recent years.
From the political right, once a strong source of support for a sovereign Canada distinct from the United States, Canadians now receive continentalist rhetoric, buoyed up by neo-conservative notions that the strong state is anathema to a free people. Neo-conservative ideas propel Canada toward descent into a series of regional extensions of the United States, tethered together by a weak federal government.
On the political left, the tradition of left nationalism has been strong and has had a major cultural impact. Left nationalism propelled the campaigns against the supine acceptance of American corporate ownership of the Canadian economy and played a seminal role in the resistance to free trade.
In recent years, however, other voices on the left have been far less concerned with national sovereignty. Some of these voices have been highly derivative of the ideas of the American-centred anti-globalization movement. For them, the compelling questions in the world turn on the relationship of the rich nations of the north to the poor nations of the world.
Canada's struggles to maintain its sovereignty vis-a-vis the United States have meant little to those with this point of view. Intellectually, in any case, they remained enamoured of the liberal anti-state ideologies that flourished during the brief post-Cold War era. Ironically, where the state is concerned, they shared much in common with neo-conservatives.
Those who believe that Canadian sovereignty needs to be sustained and extended should establish a set of goals.
If a major objective of Canadian foreign policy should be to foster a sustainable global environment, Canada will have to reacquire sovereignty in the critical area of the petroleum industry. Under the terms of NAFTA, Canada must continue to maintain petroleum exports to the U.S. at the level they have reached over the preceding three years. As conventional Canadian oil production declines, Canada is becoming ever more reliant on oil sands production to sustain and increase overall petroleum output.
Using present production methods, which involve the use of enormous quantities of fresh water, large scale strip mining, the injection of clean natural gas to produce oil from the sands, and the emission of a huge volume of greenhouse gases, increasing oil sands production condemns Canada to a dirty global environmental role.
For Canada to achieve its environmental objectives, at home and abroad, the present American lock on the oil sands has to be broken. This will require either an amendment to the NAFTA Treaty, to remove the Canadian requirement to supply the United States with petroleum, or the abrogation by Canada of its place in NAFTA. Withdrawing from NAFTA would position Canada within the trade regulations of the World Trade Organization. For those who fear that leaving NAFTA would place Canada in the line of fire for U.S. retaliation, the backup of the regulations of the WTO should be kept in mind.
There are other crucial goals that need to be addressed as elements of Canada's bilateral foreign policy with the U.S. Recognized as important by successive Conservative and Liberal governments, but with little action to back it up, is the need to sustain Canada's claim to its Arctic territorial waters. Both the United States and the European Union refuse to accept Canada's claim to the Northwest Passage as Canadian waters. The Harper government has now announced plans to spend money on the acquisition of ships to patrol our Arctic waters. An Arctic patrol fleet should be the first new military undertaking in line with a new foreign policy.
Sovereignty also requires Canada to halt and reverse steps toward the concept of a Fortress North America alongside the United States. Canadian refugee and immigration policies should be de-linked from those of Washington. In the past, linking refugee policies to those of the U.S. would have resulted in consequences most Canadians would have lamented. After the U.S. backed coup in Chile in 1973, thousands of refugees were admitted to Canada. A refugee policy linked to that of Washington would have prevented those Chileans from reaching solace and a new life in Canada.
Canada should also halt the move toward interoperability of Canadian with U.S. military units. Interoperability is not a technical matter, although it is often portrayed that way. It is a political choice. The assumption underlying it is that Canada's main military operations will be alongside the Americans, or more accurately, under U.S. command.
The premise of the alternative foreign policy, outlined here, is that Canada's first military priority should be to patrol the nation's territorial waters, especially those in the Arctic. It flies in the face of elementary logic for a country to integrate its armed forces with those of a country with which it has an ongoing, indeed deepening, dispute over territorial sovereignty. Would the Americans integrate their armed forces with those of a state that disputes Washington's claim to an important portion of U.S. territory?
The second priority of the Canadian military which also does not require interoperability with U.S. forces, should be to prepare for participation in international missions that fall under the heading of the “Responsibility to Protect.” The Responsibility to Protect, recognized by the United Nations as an international obligation, arises when peoples face catastrophes, whether natural or man made. The tsunami in south Asia in December 1995 is an example of the former. The Rwandan genocide and the ethnic cleansing in Sudan are examples of the latter.
Is it possible in a world dominated by the United States, and its potential challengers, most notably China, to find ways to address humanitarian catastrophes that are not bound to end up simply opening the way for the achievement of imperial aims? In the 21st century, is humanitarian intervention nothing more than the equivalent of missionary efforts in the 19th and early 20th centuries that provide a fig leaf for imperial aggression? Must we face the hard truth that humanitarian interventions cannot be conceived in good faith until empires have been reconciled with nation states and international law? And will this predicament become worse as the American Empire faces increasing challenges from China and other actors over the next 20 or 30 years?
If those such as Michael Ignatieff, who would rely on the American Empire to deliver aid to suffering people do not have the answer, two other possibilities remain: reform of the global system from above; or transformation of the system from below. Should reform from above, to which we will return, prove a failure, as well it may, that leaves transformation from below as the road ahead. Uncertain, uneven, and explosive, upheaval from below will erupt in those cases where poverty, exploitation and authoritarianism, as well as ethnic and religious oppression, can be effectively countered by force.
Where and when such volcanic eruptions may occur in Latin America, and parts of Africa and Asia, the one certainty is that the consequences will not be those that warm the hearts of liberal democrats, with their preference for pluralism, the rule of law, civil liberties and fair elections. But where liberals have made themselves the allies of global corporations and obscene income and wealth inequality, the pale light of their abstract quest for justice will scarcely bring warmth to those who suffer. Liberals could well end as sponsors of justice the way medieval churchmen were sponsors of charity.
What then of reform from above?
Efforts at transforming the UN have been undertaken many times in the past, and almost always, with meagre results. More often than not what has stood in the way of reform is the unwillingness of member states to cede power so as to make the UN more of a supranational authority and less of an intergovernmental organization. The five permanent members of the Security Council (P5), armed with vetoes, have always been, and remain today, jealous of the clout this gives them. On top of this, the United States, with its unique power, has shown its unwillingness to submit to any international regime or regulation that it sees as threatening its right to control its security and retain its full sovereignty.
One could conclude that that is the end of the matter.
At present, initiatives to reform the UN to enable it to be much more effective in delivering humanitarian aid are being seriously pursued in a number of places. Let us explore one possible way forward.
As potential actors, hope lies with a number of countries that are relatively wealthy, but that lack the capacity, military and economic, to vie for global power. What is needed is a system for undertaking humanitarian interventions that is as insulated as possible from imperial power rivalries. Of course, perfection in this regard is unattainable. Let's concede, at once, some of the limitations. Humanitarian interventions are not possible in regions that are directly controlled by great imperial states (for example, Tibet, or Panama or Colombia.) And they are not likely to be possible in zones in which rival imperial powers are in active contention with each other.
In other cases, however, it could be possible to launch a system, under the auspices of the United Nations, in which the notion of the Responsibility to Protect can be acted on in clearly defined cases of humanitarian catastrophe. Second tier countries, while often closely tied to imperial powers — as Canada is to the U.S. — also have their own interests and aspirations which include a desire not to be completely subsumed within the weltanschauung of the world power.
It is worth investigating the proposition that an international role for such countries as purveyors of humanitarian interventions, acting through UN mandates under the rubric of the “Responsibility to Protect” could be established. For such countries to invest their treasure and their manpower in these missions would carve out a significant global role for them. Further, it would, in many cases at least, remove the taint of imperial aggression from such interventions.
No one ought to contend that such missions would much reduce the spheres of imperial power in the world. Indeed, such a role for second tier states would deal with situations the U.S. and the other imperial powers would rather avoid. This point is crucial, because it means that a space could be found for action that does not imply a direct confrontation with the power of the United States and its major competitors.
What countries could fall under the heading of second tier countries that could be recruited to play such a role? The criteria for inclusion could be rather broad. First, there ought to be a crucial restriction. The list should not include powers that possess nuclear weapons. Obvious candidates for the list would include Canada, the Scandinavian countries, the Netherlands, Belgium and Spain, Australia and New Zealand. Poland, the Czech Republic, Italy, Mexico, Brazil, South Korea and South Africa could qualify. More controversial would be Germany and Japan.
What could emerge from this sort of initiative could be a new layer of power directed at alleviating humanitarian crises. This international mission could reduce human suffering, and arguably, could contribute to a safer world.
In conjunction with a Canadian commitment to enlarging the capacity of this country and others to act under the UN rubric of the Responsibility to Protect, Canada ought to move swiftly to providing 0.7 per cent of its Gross Domestic Product for Official Development Assistance. This goal, first included in 1970 in a UN General Assembly resolution as a target toward which developed countries should move, has for far too long been evaded by successive Canadian governments.
Canada's Afghanistan mission, conceived with little thought, has taught an important, if costly, lesson about the falseness of seeking to enhance Canada's global position through participation in the armed struggles of the Anglo-Sphere. Even though Canadians have paid a disproportionately high price in blood in Afghanistan in relation to that paid by our allies, there has been no increase in the influence of Canada on other nations. In the wider world, the effect of the Harper government's foreign policy has been to reinforce one perception of Canadians that is already strongly held — that we amount to little more than an extension of the United States in thought and in action.
That is highly unfortunate because another perception of Canada has been taking hold in the wider world in recent decades. That perception is of a country that is genuinely a refuge of liberty and tolerance, a human space where the world's travails can be addressed in a calm and compassionate way.
In the narrower world of the Anglo-Sphere, the consequences of the Harper government's foreign policy have been telling, and not a little ironic. In Afghanistan, Canada measured up to the standards of sacrifice of the Americans and the British, but the impact on Washington and London has been negligible.
On softwood lumber, Washington pushed a completely self-interested bargain on Canada, taking no account at all of the fact that “Steve” was at the helm in Ottawa. On the Mahar Arar case, the Bush administration refused to take the Syrian-born Canadian off their watch list despite the request from the Harper government that they do so in the aftermath of an exhaustive Canadian investigation. The much touted friendship between Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay meant nothing when the chips were down.
As for wider public opinion in the U.S. and Britain, Canadian casualties were simply not noticed by the American and British media. They were no more inclined to cover Canada after the sacrifices than before. As it has turned out, the supposed realism preached by Canadian neo-conservatives has produced no tangible benefits for this country.
It is time to turn the page and move on, to stake out a foreign policy that is rooted in self-interest and the quest for a better world, the combination that is needed in a country whose best days are in the future.
James Laxer is a professor of political science at York University in Toronto. This is the last part of a multi-part series on Afghanistan that has run regularly on rabble.ca. The complete work, Mission of Folly, with appendices, sources and acknowledgments is available to download in PDF.
Afghanistan: Looking for Canadian sovereignty
>by James Laxer
July 16, 2007
(Mission of Folly: Part ten —2) In this new age, while Canadians have had very little leadership on this score from political leaders or intellectuals, they have moved in the same direction as other peoples in cherishing the survival of their state. Canadians have had a curious history on the question of national sovereignty in recent years.
From the political right, once a strong source of support for a sovereign Canada distinct from the United States, Canadians now receive continentalist rhetoric, buoyed up by neo-conservative notions that the strong state is anathema to a free people. Neo-conservative ideas propel Canada toward descent into a series of regional extensions of the United States, tethered together by a weak federal government.
On the political left, the tradition of left nationalism has been strong and has had a major cultural impact. Left nationalism propelled the campaigns against the supine acceptance of American corporate ownership of the Canadian economy and played a seminal role in the resistance to free trade.
In recent years, however, other voices on the left have been far less concerned with national sovereignty. Some of these voices have been highly derivative of the ideas of the American-centred anti-globalization movement. For them, the compelling questions in the world turn on the relationship of the rich nations of the north to the poor nations of the world.
Canada's struggles to maintain its sovereignty vis-a-vis the United States have meant little to those with this point of view. Intellectually, in any case, they remained enamoured of the liberal anti-state ideologies that flourished during the brief post-Cold War era. Ironically, where the state is concerned, they shared much in common with neo-conservatives.
Those who believe that Canadian sovereignty needs to be sustained and extended should establish a set of goals.
If a major objective of Canadian foreign policy should be to foster a sustainable global environment, Canada will have to reacquire sovereignty in the critical area of the petroleum industry. Under the terms of NAFTA, Canada must continue to maintain petroleum exports to the U.S. at the level they have reached over the preceding three years. As conventional Canadian oil production declines, Canada is becoming ever more reliant on oil sands production to sustain and increase overall petroleum output.
Using present production methods, which involve the use of enormous quantities of fresh water, large scale strip mining, the injection of clean natural gas to produce oil from the sands, and the emission of a huge volume of greenhouse gases, increasing oil sands production condemns Canada to a dirty global environmental role.
For Canada to achieve its environmental objectives, at home and abroad, the present American lock on the oil sands has to be broken. This will require either an amendment to the NAFTA Treaty, to remove the Canadian requirement to supply the United States with petroleum, or the abrogation by Canada of its place in NAFTA. Withdrawing from NAFTA would position Canada within the trade regulations of the World Trade Organization. For those who fear that leaving NAFTA would place Canada in the line of fire for U.S. retaliation, the backup of the regulations of the WTO should be kept in mind.
There are other crucial goals that need to be addressed as elements of Canada's bilateral foreign policy with the U.S. Recognized as important by successive Conservative and Liberal governments, but with little action to back it up, is the need to sustain Canada's claim to its Arctic territorial waters. Both the United States and the European Union refuse to accept Canada's claim to the Northwest Passage as Canadian waters. The Harper government has now announced plans to spend money on the acquisition of ships to patrol our Arctic waters. An Arctic patrol fleet should be the first new military undertaking in line with a new foreign policy.
Sovereignty also requires Canada to halt and reverse steps toward the concept of a Fortress North America alongside the United States. Canadian refugee and immigration policies should be de-linked from those of Washington. In the past, linking refugee policies to those of the U.S. would have resulted in consequences most Canadians would have lamented. After the U.S. backed coup in Chile in 1973, thousands of refugees were admitted to Canada. A refugee policy linked to that of Washington would have prevented those Chileans from reaching solace and a new life in Canada.
Canada should also halt the move toward interoperability of Canadian with U.S. military units. Interoperability is not a technical matter, although it is often portrayed that way. It is a political choice. The assumption underlying it is that Canada's main military operations will be alongside the Americans, or more accurately, under U.S. command.
The premise of the alternative foreign policy, outlined here, is that Canada's first military priority should be to patrol the nation's territorial waters, especially those in the Arctic. It flies in the face of elementary logic for a country to integrate its armed forces with those of a country with which it has an ongoing, indeed deepening, dispute over territorial sovereignty. Would the Americans integrate their armed forces with those of a state that disputes Washington's claim to an important portion of U.S. territory?
The second priority of the Canadian military which also does not require interoperability with U.S. forces, should be to prepare for participation in international missions that fall under the heading of the “Responsibility to Protect.” The Responsibility to Protect, recognized by the United Nations as an international obligation, arises when peoples face catastrophes, whether natural or man made. The tsunami in south Asia in December 1995 is an example of the former. The Rwandan genocide and the ethnic cleansing in Sudan are examples of the latter.
Is it possible in a world dominated by the United States, and its potential challengers, most notably China, to find ways to address humanitarian catastrophes that are not bound to end up simply opening the way for the achievement of imperial aims? In the 21st century, is humanitarian intervention nothing more than the equivalent of missionary efforts in the 19th and early 20th centuries that provide a fig leaf for imperial aggression? Must we face the hard truth that humanitarian interventions cannot be conceived in good faith until empires have been reconciled with nation states and international law? And will this predicament become worse as the American Empire faces increasing challenges from China and other actors over the next 20 or 30 years?
If those such as Michael Ignatieff, who would rely on the American Empire to deliver aid to suffering people do not have the answer, two other possibilities remain: reform of the global system from above; or transformation of the system from below. Should reform from above, to which we will return, prove a failure, as well it may, that leaves transformation from below as the road ahead. Uncertain, uneven, and explosive, upheaval from below will erupt in those cases where poverty, exploitation and authoritarianism, as well as ethnic and religious oppression, can be effectively countered by force.
Where and when such volcanic eruptions may occur in Latin America, and parts of Africa and Asia, the one certainty is that the consequences will not be those that warm the hearts of liberal democrats, with their preference for pluralism, the rule of law, civil liberties and fair elections. But where liberals have made themselves the allies of global corporations and obscene income and wealth inequality, the pale light of their abstract quest for justice will scarcely bring warmth to those who suffer. Liberals could well end as sponsors of justice the way medieval churchmen were sponsors of charity.
What then of reform from above?
Efforts at transforming the UN have been undertaken many times in the past, and almost always, with meagre results. More often than not what has stood in the way of reform is the unwillingness of member states to cede power so as to make the UN more of a supranational authority and less of an intergovernmental organization. The five permanent members of the Security Council (P5), armed with vetoes, have always been, and remain today, jealous of the clout this gives them. On top of this, the United States, with its unique power, has shown its unwillingness to submit to any international regime or regulation that it sees as threatening its right to control its security and retain its full sovereignty.
One could conclude that that is the end of the matter.
At present, initiatives to reform the UN to enable it to be much more effective in delivering humanitarian aid are being seriously pursued in a number of places. Let us explore one possible way forward.
As potential actors, hope lies with a number of countries that are relatively wealthy, but that lack the capacity, military and economic, to vie for global power. What is needed is a system for undertaking humanitarian interventions that is as insulated as possible from imperial power rivalries. Of course, perfection in this regard is unattainable. Let's concede, at once, some of the limitations. Humanitarian interventions are not possible in regions that are directly controlled by great imperial states (for example, Tibet, or Panama or Colombia.) And they are not likely to be possible in zones in which rival imperial powers are in active contention with each other.
In other cases, however, it could be possible to launch a system, under the auspices of the United Nations, in which the notion of the Responsibility to Protect can be acted on in clearly defined cases of humanitarian catastrophe. Second tier countries, while often closely tied to imperial powers — as Canada is to the U.S. — also have their own interests and aspirations which include a desire not to be completely subsumed within the weltanschauung of the world power.
It is worth investigating the proposition that an international role for such countries as purveyors of humanitarian interventions, acting through UN mandates under the rubric of the “Responsibility to Protect” could be established. For such countries to invest their treasure and their manpower in these missions would carve out a significant global role for them. Further, it would, in many cases at least, remove the taint of imperial aggression from such interventions.
No one ought to contend that such missions would much reduce the spheres of imperial power in the world. Indeed, such a role for second tier states would deal with situations the U.S. and the other imperial powers would rather avoid. This point is crucial, because it means that a space could be found for action that does not imply a direct confrontation with the power of the United States and its major competitors.
What countries could fall under the heading of second tier countries that could be recruited to play such a role? The criteria for inclusion could be rather broad. First, there ought to be a crucial restriction. The list should not include powers that possess nuclear weapons. Obvious candidates for the list would include Canada, the Scandinavian countries, the Netherlands, Belgium and Spain, Australia and New Zealand. Poland, the Czech Republic, Italy, Mexico, Brazil, South Korea and South Africa could qualify. More controversial would be Germany and Japan.
What could emerge from this sort of initiative could be a new layer of power directed at alleviating humanitarian crises. This international mission could reduce human suffering, and arguably, could contribute to a safer world.
In conjunction with a Canadian commitment to enlarging the capacity of this country and others to act under the UN rubric of the Responsibility to Protect, Canada ought to move swiftly to providing 0.7 per cent of its Gross Domestic Product for Official Development Assistance. This goal, first included in 1970 in a UN General Assembly resolution as a target toward which developed countries should move, has for far too long been evaded by successive Canadian governments.
Canada's Afghanistan mission, conceived with little thought, has taught an important, if costly, lesson about the falseness of seeking to enhance Canada's global position through participation in the armed struggles of the Anglo-Sphere. Even though Canadians have paid a disproportionately high price in blood in Afghanistan in relation to that paid by our allies, there has been no increase in the influence of Canada on other nations. In the wider world, the effect of the Harper government's foreign policy has been to reinforce one perception of Canadians that is already strongly held — that we amount to little more than an extension of the United States in thought and in action.
That is highly unfortunate because another perception of Canada has been taking hold in the wider world in recent decades. That perception is of a country that is genuinely a refuge of liberty and tolerance, a human space where the world's travails can be addressed in a calm and compassionate way.
In the narrower world of the Anglo-Sphere, the consequences of the Harper government's foreign policy have been telling, and not a little ironic. In Afghanistan, Canada measured up to the standards of sacrifice of the Americans and the British, but the impact on Washington and London has been negligible.
On softwood lumber, Washington pushed a completely self-interested bargain on Canada, taking no account at all of the fact that “Steve” was at the helm in Ottawa. On the Mahar Arar case, the Bush administration refused to take the Syrian-born Canadian off their watch list despite the request from the Harper government that they do so in the aftermath of an exhaustive Canadian investigation. The much touted friendship between Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay meant nothing when the chips were down.
As for wider public opinion in the U.S. and Britain, Canadian casualties were simply not noticed by the American and British media. They were no more inclined to cover Canada after the sacrifices than before. As it has turned out, the supposed realism preached by Canadian neo-conservatives has produced no tangible benefits for this country.
It is time to turn the page and move on, to stake out a foreign policy that is rooted in self-interest and the quest for a better world, the combination that is needed in a country whose best days are in the future.
James Laxer is a professor of political science at York University in Toronto. This is the last part of a multi-part series on Afghanistan that has run regularly on rabble.ca. The complete work, Mission of Folly, with appendices, sources and acknowledgments is available to download in PDF.
Monday, June 25, 2007
James Laxer: Toward a New Canadian Foreign Policy
Laxer was one of the key figures in the Waffle movement in the NDP years ago. The Waffle Manifesto was also quite nationalist but there was much more socialism than anything here in this article. Although Laxer's analysis and criticism of continentalism seems quite convincing his positive Canadian alternative seems quite undeveloped. Perhaps in his next article he will flesh it out more.
Afghanistan: Toward a new Canadian foreign policy
Nationalist conservatism has remained a significant sentiment in Canada, but as neo-conservatism grew, it lost its place in the Progressive Conservative Party. Today's Conservative Party of Canada is firmly locked within the logic of the Continentalist School of Canadian Foreign policy.
>by James Laxer
June 22, 2007
(Mission of Folly: Part ten — 1) For Canadians, the Afghanistan operation has been a mission of folly. Canada blindly followed the United States into a war that is not winnable, a war from which no positive results can be anticipated. Now that American public opinion has turned sharply against the war in Iraq, U.S. involvement in Afghanistan will not long endure. Americans will move on to other engagements, other power struggles and new priorities. By the time the Bush administration is out of office, the chances are that the Afghanistan mission, if not finished, will be on its last legs.
As Americans pursue a modified foreign policy, the opportunity opens for Canada to chart its own course in the world. In recent years, it has become commonplace for critics on the political right to decry Canada's waning global influence. Those critics have called on Canada to rearm and to reassert itself alongside its military allies.
What these critics really wanted was for Canada to line up solidly with the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia to make a fourth in the “Anglo-Sphere.” In Afghanistan, these critics got their way. Canada took its place in the Anglo-Sphere in a shooting war and Canadians suffered their most serious military casualties since the Korean conflict. For Stephen Harper, who observed that these casualties were the price of greater global influence, this made sense.
In truth, however, Canada's global influence has not been increasing. If anything, it has been diminishing. In Afghanistan, Canada has been engaged in a hopeless American adventure. In the Middle East, Canada has aligned itself so closely with Israel as to strip our country of whatever small influence it formerly had. The pursuit of influence in the military adventures of the Anglo-Sphere has proved to be a dead end for Canada.
Canadians need to think through the principles on which a new Canadian foreign policy should rest. Although discussions of Canadian foreign policy often skirt around this, the starting point for any foreign policy needs to be the furtherance of Canadian domestic interests in the international sphere. And while there is no necessary contradiction between the two, the second goal of Canadian foreign policy should be to advance the principles to which Canada is committed in the wider world.
Canada's vital national interests have always been much easier to spell out than to realize. That's what comes of living in a unique neighbourhood in which an otherwise potentially influential country is left feeling quite impotent because it is located next door to the world's only superpower. The power imbalance between Canada and its puissant neighbour has always made Canadian foreign policy a peculiar amalgam of resignation and utopianism.
On the resignation side, a species of lobbyists whom I would call “continentalists in realist clothing” have argued that Canada cannot challenge the wishes of the United States on fundamental issues and that its best course of action is to accommodate to the direction America is determined to take and to obtain the greatest influence and the best bargain in the process.
In 1964, a former U.S. ambassador to Ottawa and a former Canadian ambassador to Washington collaborated to write a report (the Merchant-Heeney Report) that set out this approach. The report called on Canada to negotiate vigorously with the United States on bilateral issues, but to recognize the special global role of the U.S.
On wider international questions, therefore, where Canada disagreed with American policies, Ottawa ought to pursue what the report called “quiet diplomacy.” Canada ought to refrain from public disagreements with the United States on global issues that did not directly concern Canadian interests. The Merchant-Heeney Report quickly became notorious because it recommended what most people saw as an unacceptable abandonment of Canadian sovereignty, an unnecessary acceptance of American suzerainty on global issues.
While the Report was not adopted by Ottawa, the approach it advocated has been advanced repeatedly in one form or another, by pro-American lobby groups over the past four decades. The C.D. Howe Institute, the Fraser Institute, the Canadian Council of Chief Executives (formerly the Business Council on National Issues) have tirelessly promoted the notion that Canadian foreign and defence policies should be closely coordinated with those of Washington.
In his maiden speech in the House of Commons as Leader of the Opposition in 2003, Stephen Harper, then leader of the Canadian Alliance, excoriated the record of the Liberal government on the issue of Canadian-American relations. He accused the Liberals of having undermined the relationship with Washington by taking holier-than-thou positions on issues such as the treaty banning the use of land mines. He concluded that anything that substantially harmed the United States would devastate Canada.
Adherents of this school of thought make the case that on important military questions Canada has no choice but to align itself with the United States. In a study for the C.D. Howe Institute several years ago, historian Jack Granatstein advanced this argument.
We can label this the Continentalist School of Canadian foreign policy. The essential tenet of this school is that Canada is an economic, political, cultural and military extension of the United States, a lesser power whose larger fate is bound up with that of its neighbour. This school of thought was enormously influential in its advocacy of the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement in the 1980s and NAFTA in the 1990s. The members of the Continentalist School have been the most consistent advocates of a coherent approach to Canadian foreign policy in recent decades.
Over the course of Canadian history, there have been other coherent approaches. From the time of Confederation in 1867 until the Second World War, the dominant school of Canadian foreign policy could be called Imperial-Nationalist. At the beginning of this historical period, of course, Canadian foreign and military policies were legally in the hands of Westminster, although Canada had control of its domestic affairs.
This makes the term foreign policy premature and indeed, for decades the Canadian foreign ministry was called the Department of External Affairs. The great architect of the Imperial-Nationalist school was John A. Macdonald, Canada's first Prime Minister, whose tory-nationalism was the ideology that suffused the Canadian state and its economic policies for many decades.
The Imperial-Nationalist approach to foreign or external affairs grew out of the proposition that the supreme threat to Canadian nationhood arose not from Canada's colonial relationship with Britain, but from Canada's uneasy position vis-a-vis the United States. Macdonald believed that Canada needed Britain to offset the threat from the south. During the Second World War, Winston Churchill's policy was to call on the power of the New World to redress the balance in the Old. Macdonald's policy was the reverse of that: he called on the power of the Old World to redress the balance in the New.
The Second World War destroyed the power relations in the North Atlantic on which the Imperial-Nationalist school was based. The British Empire disintegrated in the years following the war and the American Empire took its place. Canada could no longer seek a balance in its relationships with two great English speaking powers. Britain's decline spelt the end of the Imperial-Nationalist school of Canadian foreign policy. The sentiments on which the school had rested outlived the disappearance of the geo-political basis for the implementation of its policies, however.
Nationalist conservatism has remained a significant sentiment in Canada, but as neo-conservatism grew, it lost its place in the Progressive Conservative Party. Today's Conservative Party of Canada is firmly locked within the logic of the Continentalist School of Canadian Foreign policy.
Over the past four decades, as political and cultural movements have arisen to contest the degree of American domination of Canada, the basis for a new school of Canadian foreign policy has emerged. We can call it the Canadian School.
The Canadian School seeks to achieve two large goals. The first is to promote the survival of Canada as a sovereign power in North America. The second is to promote the values to which Canadians are committed in the wider world. The first goal grows directly out of Canadian domestic policies. As is appreciated by all Canadians who have embraced their country's potential as something far greater than the quest for immediate material gratification, Canada has the capacity to enlarge itself in human terms over the course of this century.
Americans in the 19th century perceived their country's potential to achieve more in the future than it had in the past. Canadians, who are not bounded by the limiting confines of neo-conservatism and the subservience of the Continentalist School of Canadian Foreign Policy, realize that they are creating a country that will be greater in the future than it is today. That gives the present generation of Canadians an immense responsibility to realistically pursue the interests of Canada today in such a way as not to foreclose on the potential of the country for the future.
For the present, Canada needs a foreign policy with one eye on the long-term future, and the other on the present. The mixture that is needed is one that combines realism with a dose of utopianism. The Canada to come over the course of this century can expect to play as large a role in the world as the United Kingdom or France.
Consider the course of the past century. At the beginning of the 20th century, with a population of five million, Canada was five per cent as populous as the United States. When the century closed, Canada was more than ten per cent as populous as its southern neighbour. Laurier's boast that the “20th century belongs to Canada” has always seemed more than a little over the top, but he was not entirely wrong.
Not only did Canada's population more than double relative to that of the U.S., its economy more than doubled in size in relation to that of the United States during the 20th century. Reluctant and non-visionary though the country's leadership has often been, Canada has thrived over the course of the past hundred years.
Like the British Empire of the 19th century, Canada has grown in a fit of absence of mind. For our good fortune to continue, however, a more concerted approach is needed. The Canadian School needs to drive home the point that the Continentalist School is guilty of taking an extremely short-term approach and not even doing a good job of that.
The curious thing about the Canadian business lobbyists, for whom the Continentalist School speaks, is how lacking in serious ambition they are. Living as they do on a piece of real estate that is among the greatest on earth, and that is inhabited by a population that is highly motivated and well educated, you would think that Canadian business lobbyists would aspire to more than playing second fiddle to the Americans. One might imagine that Canadian business would want real power for itself, willing to engage in commerce with whomever, but always realizing that they could occupy a larger place in the global scheme of things.
In the 19th century, American business moguls had that sense of themselves. John D. Rockefeller, the founder of Standard Oil, and the world's first billionaire, built his global petroleum empire through a peculiar combination of cutthroat competition and Christian piety. He was seriously religious and believed in a social Darwinist business ethic in which the stronger prevailed and the weak perished. Standard Oil set its sights on the domination, not only on the American petroleum market, but the global market.
The Rockefeller story has been repeated many times over in the annals of American business, right down to the present epics of the Waltons and Bill Gates. By contrast, Canadian business moguls have usually been full of bluster, but highly derivative in their ambitions, wanting little more for themselves than acceptance from their British and American counterparts. The consequence is that they have been quite prepared to concede the genuine power that could have been theirs in return for a comfortable seat in someone else's vehicle.
Under the circumstances, an alternative vision of Canada's place in world and its foreign policy will have to be based on other social forces. At first glance, this may seem to be a rather dim prospect. There are reasons for hope, however. For several decades, Canada has been that odd case, a country whose population has grown ever more committed to its survival in the face of business spokespersons who have largely abandoned this cause.
The collapse of the Bush administration's strategy in the Middle East and Central Asia makes the prospects for a shift in Canadian foreign policy brighter. Those who have been most inclined to follow the Bush line in Canada — the Harper Conservatives and the business lobbyists — have damaged their cause immeasurably in their stolid adherence to the lost cause. Theirs will be the fate of spear carriers through the ages who have wound up on the wrong side.
The new Canadian foreign policy should aim at preserving Canadian sovereignty and on lending Canada's weight in the world to greater political and economic justice and environmental sustainability. Canadians need to recognize that in the world of the 21st century national sovereignty is an immeasurably valuable asset.
The American novelist Mark Twain once advised people to buy land on the grounds that “they're not making any more of that.” The same thing is basically true when it comes to sovereign nations. It is true that a rash of them became sovereign in the great age of decolonization in the several decades following the Second World War. Then there was a second rash that followed the break-up of the Soviet Union. And Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia were severed into pieces.
But the point stands. Not many new sovereign states will be created over the course of the present century. Those that exist will prize their sovereignty as an asset that gives them admission to international decision making bodies and that allows them to shape affairs on their own territory to a considerable extent.
These assertions fly in the face of much received wisdom in the so-called age of globalization. With the fall of the Soviet Empire, the world entered the brief era of the supposed End of History and the Borderless World. The curtain rang down on that brief epoch on September 11, 2001.
The terror attacks were followed by the rediscovery of the state — in fact, it had never gone away. The American state, which presided over the greatest empire of our time, under the direction of the Bush administration, staked its claim to remaining the world's paramount military power in permanence. The contradiction at the heart of the American Empire was that while it was able to shape the course of politics, the economy and society in many countries, it relied on the state in each country to administer affairs locally.
The great fact of our age is that we live in a world dominated by the American Empire, but a world in which the sovereign state is increasingly valued as a priceless asset by peoples everywhere. Empire and nationalism co-exist today as they co-existed in the age of the great European empires.
James Laxer is a professor of political science at York University in Toronto. This is part 10.1 of a 10.2-part series that has run regularly on rabble.ca.
Afghanistan: Toward a new Canadian foreign policy
Nationalist conservatism has remained a significant sentiment in Canada, but as neo-conservatism grew, it lost its place in the Progressive Conservative Party. Today's Conservative Party of Canada is firmly locked within the logic of the Continentalist School of Canadian Foreign policy.
>by James Laxer
June 22, 2007
(Mission of Folly: Part ten — 1) For Canadians, the Afghanistan operation has been a mission of folly. Canada blindly followed the United States into a war that is not winnable, a war from which no positive results can be anticipated. Now that American public opinion has turned sharply against the war in Iraq, U.S. involvement in Afghanistan will not long endure. Americans will move on to other engagements, other power struggles and new priorities. By the time the Bush administration is out of office, the chances are that the Afghanistan mission, if not finished, will be on its last legs.
As Americans pursue a modified foreign policy, the opportunity opens for Canada to chart its own course in the world. In recent years, it has become commonplace for critics on the political right to decry Canada's waning global influence. Those critics have called on Canada to rearm and to reassert itself alongside its military allies.
What these critics really wanted was for Canada to line up solidly with the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia to make a fourth in the “Anglo-Sphere.” In Afghanistan, these critics got their way. Canada took its place in the Anglo-Sphere in a shooting war and Canadians suffered their most serious military casualties since the Korean conflict. For Stephen Harper, who observed that these casualties were the price of greater global influence, this made sense.
In truth, however, Canada's global influence has not been increasing. If anything, it has been diminishing. In Afghanistan, Canada has been engaged in a hopeless American adventure. In the Middle East, Canada has aligned itself so closely with Israel as to strip our country of whatever small influence it formerly had. The pursuit of influence in the military adventures of the Anglo-Sphere has proved to be a dead end for Canada.
Canadians need to think through the principles on which a new Canadian foreign policy should rest. Although discussions of Canadian foreign policy often skirt around this, the starting point for any foreign policy needs to be the furtherance of Canadian domestic interests in the international sphere. And while there is no necessary contradiction between the two, the second goal of Canadian foreign policy should be to advance the principles to which Canada is committed in the wider world.
Canada's vital national interests have always been much easier to spell out than to realize. That's what comes of living in a unique neighbourhood in which an otherwise potentially influential country is left feeling quite impotent because it is located next door to the world's only superpower. The power imbalance between Canada and its puissant neighbour has always made Canadian foreign policy a peculiar amalgam of resignation and utopianism.
On the resignation side, a species of lobbyists whom I would call “continentalists in realist clothing” have argued that Canada cannot challenge the wishes of the United States on fundamental issues and that its best course of action is to accommodate to the direction America is determined to take and to obtain the greatest influence and the best bargain in the process.
In 1964, a former U.S. ambassador to Ottawa and a former Canadian ambassador to Washington collaborated to write a report (the Merchant-Heeney Report) that set out this approach. The report called on Canada to negotiate vigorously with the United States on bilateral issues, but to recognize the special global role of the U.S.
On wider international questions, therefore, where Canada disagreed with American policies, Ottawa ought to pursue what the report called “quiet diplomacy.” Canada ought to refrain from public disagreements with the United States on global issues that did not directly concern Canadian interests. The Merchant-Heeney Report quickly became notorious because it recommended what most people saw as an unacceptable abandonment of Canadian sovereignty, an unnecessary acceptance of American suzerainty on global issues.
While the Report was not adopted by Ottawa, the approach it advocated has been advanced repeatedly in one form or another, by pro-American lobby groups over the past four decades. The C.D. Howe Institute, the Fraser Institute, the Canadian Council of Chief Executives (formerly the Business Council on National Issues) have tirelessly promoted the notion that Canadian foreign and defence policies should be closely coordinated with those of Washington.
In his maiden speech in the House of Commons as Leader of the Opposition in 2003, Stephen Harper, then leader of the Canadian Alliance, excoriated the record of the Liberal government on the issue of Canadian-American relations. He accused the Liberals of having undermined the relationship with Washington by taking holier-than-thou positions on issues such as the treaty banning the use of land mines. He concluded that anything that substantially harmed the United States would devastate Canada.
Adherents of this school of thought make the case that on important military questions Canada has no choice but to align itself with the United States. In a study for the C.D. Howe Institute several years ago, historian Jack Granatstein advanced this argument.
We can label this the Continentalist School of Canadian foreign policy. The essential tenet of this school is that Canada is an economic, political, cultural and military extension of the United States, a lesser power whose larger fate is bound up with that of its neighbour. This school of thought was enormously influential in its advocacy of the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement in the 1980s and NAFTA in the 1990s. The members of the Continentalist School have been the most consistent advocates of a coherent approach to Canadian foreign policy in recent decades.
Over the course of Canadian history, there have been other coherent approaches. From the time of Confederation in 1867 until the Second World War, the dominant school of Canadian foreign policy could be called Imperial-Nationalist. At the beginning of this historical period, of course, Canadian foreign and military policies were legally in the hands of Westminster, although Canada had control of its domestic affairs.
This makes the term foreign policy premature and indeed, for decades the Canadian foreign ministry was called the Department of External Affairs. The great architect of the Imperial-Nationalist school was John A. Macdonald, Canada's first Prime Minister, whose tory-nationalism was the ideology that suffused the Canadian state and its economic policies for many decades.
The Imperial-Nationalist approach to foreign or external affairs grew out of the proposition that the supreme threat to Canadian nationhood arose not from Canada's colonial relationship with Britain, but from Canada's uneasy position vis-a-vis the United States. Macdonald believed that Canada needed Britain to offset the threat from the south. During the Second World War, Winston Churchill's policy was to call on the power of the New World to redress the balance in the Old. Macdonald's policy was the reverse of that: he called on the power of the Old World to redress the balance in the New.
The Second World War destroyed the power relations in the North Atlantic on which the Imperial-Nationalist school was based. The British Empire disintegrated in the years following the war and the American Empire took its place. Canada could no longer seek a balance in its relationships with two great English speaking powers. Britain's decline spelt the end of the Imperial-Nationalist school of Canadian foreign policy. The sentiments on which the school had rested outlived the disappearance of the geo-political basis for the implementation of its policies, however.
Nationalist conservatism has remained a significant sentiment in Canada, but as neo-conservatism grew, it lost its place in the Progressive Conservative Party. Today's Conservative Party of Canada is firmly locked within the logic of the Continentalist School of Canadian Foreign policy.
Over the past four decades, as political and cultural movements have arisen to contest the degree of American domination of Canada, the basis for a new school of Canadian foreign policy has emerged. We can call it the Canadian School.
The Canadian School seeks to achieve two large goals. The first is to promote the survival of Canada as a sovereign power in North America. The second is to promote the values to which Canadians are committed in the wider world. The first goal grows directly out of Canadian domestic policies. As is appreciated by all Canadians who have embraced their country's potential as something far greater than the quest for immediate material gratification, Canada has the capacity to enlarge itself in human terms over the course of this century.
Americans in the 19th century perceived their country's potential to achieve more in the future than it had in the past. Canadians, who are not bounded by the limiting confines of neo-conservatism and the subservience of the Continentalist School of Canadian Foreign Policy, realize that they are creating a country that will be greater in the future than it is today. That gives the present generation of Canadians an immense responsibility to realistically pursue the interests of Canada today in such a way as not to foreclose on the potential of the country for the future.
For the present, Canada needs a foreign policy with one eye on the long-term future, and the other on the present. The mixture that is needed is one that combines realism with a dose of utopianism. The Canada to come over the course of this century can expect to play as large a role in the world as the United Kingdom or France.
Consider the course of the past century. At the beginning of the 20th century, with a population of five million, Canada was five per cent as populous as the United States. When the century closed, Canada was more than ten per cent as populous as its southern neighbour. Laurier's boast that the “20th century belongs to Canada” has always seemed more than a little over the top, but he was not entirely wrong.
Not only did Canada's population more than double relative to that of the U.S., its economy more than doubled in size in relation to that of the United States during the 20th century. Reluctant and non-visionary though the country's leadership has often been, Canada has thrived over the course of the past hundred years.
Like the British Empire of the 19th century, Canada has grown in a fit of absence of mind. For our good fortune to continue, however, a more concerted approach is needed. The Canadian School needs to drive home the point that the Continentalist School is guilty of taking an extremely short-term approach and not even doing a good job of that.
The curious thing about the Canadian business lobbyists, for whom the Continentalist School speaks, is how lacking in serious ambition they are. Living as they do on a piece of real estate that is among the greatest on earth, and that is inhabited by a population that is highly motivated and well educated, you would think that Canadian business lobbyists would aspire to more than playing second fiddle to the Americans. One might imagine that Canadian business would want real power for itself, willing to engage in commerce with whomever, but always realizing that they could occupy a larger place in the global scheme of things.
In the 19th century, American business moguls had that sense of themselves. John D. Rockefeller, the founder of Standard Oil, and the world's first billionaire, built his global petroleum empire through a peculiar combination of cutthroat competition and Christian piety. He was seriously religious and believed in a social Darwinist business ethic in which the stronger prevailed and the weak perished. Standard Oil set its sights on the domination, not only on the American petroleum market, but the global market.
The Rockefeller story has been repeated many times over in the annals of American business, right down to the present epics of the Waltons and Bill Gates. By contrast, Canadian business moguls have usually been full of bluster, but highly derivative in their ambitions, wanting little more for themselves than acceptance from their British and American counterparts. The consequence is that they have been quite prepared to concede the genuine power that could have been theirs in return for a comfortable seat in someone else's vehicle.
Under the circumstances, an alternative vision of Canada's place in world and its foreign policy will have to be based on other social forces. At first glance, this may seem to be a rather dim prospect. There are reasons for hope, however. For several decades, Canada has been that odd case, a country whose population has grown ever more committed to its survival in the face of business spokespersons who have largely abandoned this cause.
The collapse of the Bush administration's strategy in the Middle East and Central Asia makes the prospects for a shift in Canadian foreign policy brighter. Those who have been most inclined to follow the Bush line in Canada — the Harper Conservatives and the business lobbyists — have damaged their cause immeasurably in their stolid adherence to the lost cause. Theirs will be the fate of spear carriers through the ages who have wound up on the wrong side.
The new Canadian foreign policy should aim at preserving Canadian sovereignty and on lending Canada's weight in the world to greater political and economic justice and environmental sustainability. Canadians need to recognize that in the world of the 21st century national sovereignty is an immeasurably valuable asset.
The American novelist Mark Twain once advised people to buy land on the grounds that “they're not making any more of that.” The same thing is basically true when it comes to sovereign nations. It is true that a rash of them became sovereign in the great age of decolonization in the several decades following the Second World War. Then there was a second rash that followed the break-up of the Soviet Union. And Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia were severed into pieces.
But the point stands. Not many new sovereign states will be created over the course of the present century. Those that exist will prize their sovereignty as an asset that gives them admission to international decision making bodies and that allows them to shape affairs on their own territory to a considerable extent.
These assertions fly in the face of much received wisdom in the so-called age of globalization. With the fall of the Soviet Empire, the world entered the brief era of the supposed End of History and the Borderless World. The curtain rang down on that brief epoch on September 11, 2001.
The terror attacks were followed by the rediscovery of the state — in fact, it had never gone away. The American state, which presided over the greatest empire of our time, under the direction of the Bush administration, staked its claim to remaining the world's paramount military power in permanence. The contradiction at the heart of the American Empire was that while it was able to shape the course of politics, the economy and society in many countries, it relied on the state in each country to administer affairs locally.
The great fact of our age is that we live in a world dominated by the American Empire, but a world in which the sovereign state is increasingly valued as a priceless asset by peoples everywhere. Empire and nationalism co-exist today as they co-existed in the age of the great European empires.
James Laxer is a professor of political science at York University in Toronto. This is part 10.1 of a 10.2-part series that has run regularly on rabble.ca.
Friday, March 16, 2007
Setting Limits on Canada's Afghan Commitment
This article is no doubt correct that perhaps there is too much focus on Canadian involvement in Afghanistan but there is also too little focus in that the role of Canada as handmaiden to imperial US policy is completely missing. Kinsman speaks of the Canadian (ISAF) role being sanctioned by the UN. That is true but after the fact and there is no mention that this is in effect a case where the US used NATO as an agent of its policy rather than the UN since it could not get the UN originally to sanction an invasion led by the US--and in which Canada participated. There is no mention in this article that Afghanistan represents a watershed in which the traditional peacekeeping role of Canada is replaced by a junior military role that takes some of the burden off the US.
Jeremy Kinsman: Diplomatically Speaking
Setting limits on our Afghan commitment
March 15, 2007
"The old order changeth, yielding to the new …"
So it goes. Power is again shifting in the world today, making the managing of change the enduring challenge of foreign policy.
Some argue that under the strains of big tectonic shifts — America bogged down, the rise of China — the golden age of multilateralism is winding down. Others maintain that the period ahead represents its best chance for recovery.
Whichever the case, Canada has interests at stake and values to uphold, such as human rights, and an international trade and payments system that is reliable.
But the danger for us that we may be losing our ability to focus on enough of our real priorities and that we are becoming increasingly consumed by one overriding concern — our escalating commitment to Afghanistan.
From a foreign policy standpoint, the project has important merit — provided it can strengthen our broader international capacity and not reduce it.
But we have to be able to chase several goals simultaneously. And this probably means we should set limits on our Afghan engagement.
Planning for change
In governments, the avatars of change are policy planners. Internationally, they inhabit a special zone, talking to each other under the convention of "planners' rules," which permits them to speculate independently of the positions of their political masters.
Often, their trial balloons become reality when the timing is right, such as Washington's steps at the moment to engage such George W. Bush pariahs as Iran and Syria, a policy shift presaged by the Iraq Study Group report, among others.
In Ottawa, the notion of trying to talk with moderate Taliban is on the planners' table.
Whether this will come to pass of course remains to be seen. The main role of ever-fretful planners is to serve as a "get-ready corps" to prepare governments at least intellectually for change.
Arthur J. Schlesinger Jr. (John Kennedy's favourite historian), set the tone in 1948 when he described "Western man in the middle of the 20th century," as "tense, uncertain, adrift."
Under this scenario, surprise would always be the norm. But who could have foreseen so many of the shocking events that followed, Kennedy's assassination among them.
Predictable or not, though, nations must be able to adapt to the great sea changes in world affairs like the Iranian revolution in 1979, which signalled a huge upheaval in the Muslim world; the advent of Soviet glasnost and perestroika in the late 1980s, which would end the bitter Cold War; or today's over-arching dynamic of globalization.
Globalization and its discontents
The rise of China and India, slated to be the world's number two and number four economies by 2025, greatly alters the global landscape. The so-called emerging economies now account for over 50 per cent of world industrial production, though in general their per capita incomes have not increased much, outside of China.
Planners hoped that the globalization of financial, trade and information would be matched by a corresponding convergence of political and cultural values. Instead, identity-based backlash is occurring.
What this means, in part, is that the rigid assumptions of international financial institutions and the World Trade Organization are consequently in for changes, particularly in the aftermath of the collapse of the Doha Round of trade negotiations, which turned out to be about very little of consequence to anybody.
In partial reaction, regional blocs are emerging.
Irrespective of their testy political relations, the economies of Japan and China are becoming increasingly joined at the hip.
Asian economies are consolidating according to what some commentators call "Asian values." So, too, are some of the larger Latin American countries through the trade agreement known as Mercosur.
The U.S. is now vigorously courting these trade blocs, witness Bush's recent five-day trip through the heart of Latin America, and corporate America's unrelenting pitch to sell clean-coal technology to China. It's also talking about more economic and regulatory convergence with the European Union, which raises the question: Why isn't Canada more active in these arenas as well?
A new New World Order?
The international political and security landscape is going through a similar shift in weights and opportunities.
With America's global influence on the wane because of the Iraq debacle, U.S. planners are now weighing the appeal of a more collective world leadership to co-manage key security issues, as briefly happened in 1990-92.
The question today: Will China participate as an important conservative stakeholder in stability? Will Russia join the team?
If so, the playbook is going to need adjustment to reflect the fact that, just as in economics, one size does not fit all.
Altogether, the strengthening of international institutions is very much in Canada's interests. Assuming we have the wherewithal to play our cards right.
Our (UN-sanctioned) role and experience in Afghanistan could enhance our influence, if we widen our diplomacy beyond the enclosure of the Afghan theatre itself.
No planner could have foreseen we would have been this engaged for so long with such an unlikely partner. Nor that it would be so costly.
When Gen. Rick Hillier sold then prime minister Paul Martin on Canada exchanging duty in Kabul for more ambitious tasks in the Kandahar region, Martin sought assurance that Canadian forces could still handle other peace-making duties abroad, having in mind a possible UN force in Sudan's Darfur.
Hillier said this could be the case but he had evidently not expected the Taliban would re-emerge in such force, with new equipment and tactics including suicide bombing.
Today, our military capacity is too absorbed by this intensified struggle to permit participation in another multinational military exercise. We've made our choice. But for how long can we keep it up?
Added priorities
Almost everyone acknowledges that military force alone won't help Afghanistan develop the economic, social and political stability it has never had, and the Harper government has really ramped up our development and other assistance.
In government, it is becoming an all-consuming and ever-widening cause. Public service managers have been told that if their foreign policy and aid activities aren't connected to Afghanistan they aren't on the agenda.
This may be a sound application of Stephen Harper's vaunted emphasis on focus.
But with a government agenda narrowed to a few goals, the effect is to deny political-level attention to international activity of probably greater relevance to direct Canadian interests, particularly in trade.
Prime Minister Harper has taken to referring to Canada as a "global leader." And from the foreshortened perspective of a minority government, it is hard not to see Afghanistan as the one essential statement of our international bona fides.
But we can't be a "global leader" without actively deploying our credit over a much wider agenda, especially in a time of great impending change.
Even though the modus operandi of his government is that not much from the past is of value, Harper could benefit from reflection on the perspectives of some of his predecessors.
Pierre Trudeau, for example, believed our important relationships all over the world were what made Canada a global power. We need to pursue them still.
For Brian Mulroney, these relationships and our multilateralist vocation allowed Canada to punch above her weight on several fronts.
This concentration on Afghanistan is welcome by many in the international community, but it does carry serious opportunity costs for us. Our planners need to get to work on keeping Canadian interests and values competitive across the board while at the same time making sure we succeed in Kandahar and get out when we said we would in 2009.
ABOUT THIS AUTHOR
Biography
Jeremy Kinsman was Canada's ambassador to the European Union from 2002 until his retirement earlier this year. Before that he was high commissioner to London as well as ambassador to Russia and Italy. He joined Canada's foreign service in 1966 and currently resides on Vancouver Island.
Jeremy Kinsman: Diplomatically Speaking
Setting limits on our Afghan commitment
March 15, 2007
"The old order changeth, yielding to the new …"
So it goes. Power is again shifting in the world today, making the managing of change the enduring challenge of foreign policy.
Some argue that under the strains of big tectonic shifts — America bogged down, the rise of China — the golden age of multilateralism is winding down. Others maintain that the period ahead represents its best chance for recovery.
Whichever the case, Canada has interests at stake and values to uphold, such as human rights, and an international trade and payments system that is reliable.
But the danger for us that we may be losing our ability to focus on enough of our real priorities and that we are becoming increasingly consumed by one overriding concern — our escalating commitment to Afghanistan.
From a foreign policy standpoint, the project has important merit — provided it can strengthen our broader international capacity and not reduce it.
But we have to be able to chase several goals simultaneously. And this probably means we should set limits on our Afghan engagement.
Planning for change
In governments, the avatars of change are policy planners. Internationally, they inhabit a special zone, talking to each other under the convention of "planners' rules," which permits them to speculate independently of the positions of their political masters.
Often, their trial balloons become reality when the timing is right, such as Washington's steps at the moment to engage such George W. Bush pariahs as Iran and Syria, a policy shift presaged by the Iraq Study Group report, among others.
In Ottawa, the notion of trying to talk with moderate Taliban is on the planners' table.
Whether this will come to pass of course remains to be seen. The main role of ever-fretful planners is to serve as a "get-ready corps" to prepare governments at least intellectually for change.
Arthur J. Schlesinger Jr. (John Kennedy's favourite historian), set the tone in 1948 when he described "Western man in the middle of the 20th century," as "tense, uncertain, adrift."
Under this scenario, surprise would always be the norm. But who could have foreseen so many of the shocking events that followed, Kennedy's assassination among them.
Predictable or not, though, nations must be able to adapt to the great sea changes in world affairs like the Iranian revolution in 1979, which signalled a huge upheaval in the Muslim world; the advent of Soviet glasnost and perestroika in the late 1980s, which would end the bitter Cold War; or today's over-arching dynamic of globalization.
Globalization and its discontents
The rise of China and India, slated to be the world's number two and number four economies by 2025, greatly alters the global landscape. The so-called emerging economies now account for over 50 per cent of world industrial production, though in general their per capita incomes have not increased much, outside of China.
Planners hoped that the globalization of financial, trade and information would be matched by a corresponding convergence of political and cultural values. Instead, identity-based backlash is occurring.
What this means, in part, is that the rigid assumptions of international financial institutions and the World Trade Organization are consequently in for changes, particularly in the aftermath of the collapse of the Doha Round of trade negotiations, which turned out to be about very little of consequence to anybody.
In partial reaction, regional blocs are emerging.
Irrespective of their testy political relations, the economies of Japan and China are becoming increasingly joined at the hip.
Asian economies are consolidating according to what some commentators call "Asian values." So, too, are some of the larger Latin American countries through the trade agreement known as Mercosur.
The U.S. is now vigorously courting these trade blocs, witness Bush's recent five-day trip through the heart of Latin America, and corporate America's unrelenting pitch to sell clean-coal technology to China. It's also talking about more economic and regulatory convergence with the European Union, which raises the question: Why isn't Canada more active in these arenas as well?
A new New World Order?
The international political and security landscape is going through a similar shift in weights and opportunities.
With America's global influence on the wane because of the Iraq debacle, U.S. planners are now weighing the appeal of a more collective world leadership to co-manage key security issues, as briefly happened in 1990-92.
The question today: Will China participate as an important conservative stakeholder in stability? Will Russia join the team?
If so, the playbook is going to need adjustment to reflect the fact that, just as in economics, one size does not fit all.
Altogether, the strengthening of international institutions is very much in Canada's interests. Assuming we have the wherewithal to play our cards right.
Our (UN-sanctioned) role and experience in Afghanistan could enhance our influence, if we widen our diplomacy beyond the enclosure of the Afghan theatre itself.
No planner could have foreseen we would have been this engaged for so long with such an unlikely partner. Nor that it would be so costly.
When Gen. Rick Hillier sold then prime minister Paul Martin on Canada exchanging duty in Kabul for more ambitious tasks in the Kandahar region, Martin sought assurance that Canadian forces could still handle other peace-making duties abroad, having in mind a possible UN force in Sudan's Darfur.
Hillier said this could be the case but he had evidently not expected the Taliban would re-emerge in such force, with new equipment and tactics including suicide bombing.
Today, our military capacity is too absorbed by this intensified struggle to permit participation in another multinational military exercise. We've made our choice. But for how long can we keep it up?
Added priorities
Almost everyone acknowledges that military force alone won't help Afghanistan develop the economic, social and political stability it has never had, and the Harper government has really ramped up our development and other assistance.
In government, it is becoming an all-consuming and ever-widening cause. Public service managers have been told that if their foreign policy and aid activities aren't connected to Afghanistan they aren't on the agenda.
This may be a sound application of Stephen Harper's vaunted emphasis on focus.
But with a government agenda narrowed to a few goals, the effect is to deny political-level attention to international activity of probably greater relevance to direct Canadian interests, particularly in trade.
Prime Minister Harper has taken to referring to Canada as a "global leader." And from the foreshortened perspective of a minority government, it is hard not to see Afghanistan as the one essential statement of our international bona fides.
But we can't be a "global leader" without actively deploying our credit over a much wider agenda, especially in a time of great impending change.
Even though the modus operandi of his government is that not much from the past is of value, Harper could benefit from reflection on the perspectives of some of his predecessors.
Pierre Trudeau, for example, believed our important relationships all over the world were what made Canada a global power. We need to pursue them still.
For Brian Mulroney, these relationships and our multilateralist vocation allowed Canada to punch above her weight on several fronts.
This concentration on Afghanistan is welcome by many in the international community, but it does carry serious opportunity costs for us. Our planners need to get to work on keeping Canadian interests and values competitive across the board while at the same time making sure we succeed in Kandahar and get out when we said we would in 2009.
ABOUT THIS AUTHOR
Biography
Jeremy Kinsman was Canada's ambassador to the European Union from 2002 until his retirement earlier this year. Before that he was high commissioner to London as well as ambassador to Russia and Italy. He joined Canada's foreign service in 1966 and currently resides on Vancouver Island.
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