2004 O.D. Skelton Lecture
by Michael Ignatieff
http://www.international.gc.ca/department/skelton/lecture-2004-en.asp
I
I have three goals in this
lecture. The first is to assist in defining the intellectual task that a
foreign policy review needs to accomplish. The second is to identify core
values and interests that should drive our foreign policy. The third is to
propose that "peace, order and good government" should constitute the
organizing frame for Canadian foreign policy activity across the fields of
diplomacy, defence and development.i
A foreign policy review has to
bring three key elements together: our values and interests as a country, the
policies that best serve these values and interests and the challenges in the
external world that policy has to meet.
A review will fail if it proposes
values that contradict interests, policies that do not serve these interests or
fail to meet the challenges in the external world. A review succeeds when a
clearly articulated set of interests and values allow us to ration resources
and capabilities effectively and when the policies that result from these hard
choices address the challenges we face.
A fourth element is also
important. There is hardly a government department that does not have some
external exposure or involvement in the world beyond our borders. A policy
review has be a policy map, identifying who does what, where in
One reason why we cannot afford
to be nostalgic about the Pearson era is that it was the last period in which
foreign policy remained a monopoly of government. No longer. Nowadays some of
the best foreign policy research is done by NGO's; some of the best service
delivery in the aid and assistance fields is done by private organizations;
Canadian companies are foreign policy actors with huge effects on the country's
reputation and influence, for better or worse. So a review has to map all the
institutions, private and public, that shape the Canadian presence in the
external world. Having mapped these institutions, a review has to re-think
government's co-ordinating role: no longer the commanding sovereign, but the
networker, facilitator and legitimating authority in a highly decentralized
network of connections to the external world.
So to recap, the four key
questions in any foreign review have to be:
II
Let me begin with values and
interests. Human rights, tolerance, multiculturalism, human security have all
served as guiding values for Canadian foreign policy. There is nothing wrong
with these values, except that they don't mean very much unless we specify the
institutional or economic pre-requisites that make them sustainable in
societies overseas. The key institutional pre-requisite for these values is
good government. Human rights cannot be defended from the outside alone. They
need to be anchored in decent institutions at home. When we fail to specify
what human rights requires by way of real institutional support, we articulate
human rights policies that are little more than rhetoric. The other trouble
with these values is that they are guides to policy everywhere these days,
especially in
So what are our interests as a
country? It has been said Canadian foreign policy has only one true set of
interests-the relationship with the
Defence of our independence
should dictate the terms of our co-operation with the Americans on immigration,
border security and continental defence. Our independence cannot be defended by
anyone else: so we have to pay for it, with a national defence capability that
can secure our borders and protect our people, in alliance with others, but in
fundamental independence of their capabilities and capacities. We should not
sell our co-operation cheaply, but we can only strike the right bargain if we
have adequate capabilities. I line up squarely with those -- like Jack
Granatstein-- who have been saying for years that we do not spend enough on
intelligence, border security and national defence, and we do not know what to
spend it on. We need to spend with a vital interest in mind: maintaining,
securing and defending the territorial integrity of
Multilateral commitments are
rightly held to be essential for any mid-power like
It is an abiding Canadian
illusion to suppose that we can maintain influence without power, just as it is
an illusion to think that the sheer size of our economy will always guarantee
us a seat at the tables of influence. There are countries with large economies
that count for little in the world's counsels. Soft power is not a substitute
for the harder varieties. We will not have influence unless we have power, and
we will not have power unless we maintain capabilities. We cannot have the
capabilities we need -- and these range from a strong diplomatic service, an
effective intelligence service, and a combat-capable counter-terrorist and
peace-enforcement force -- unless we invest significantly greater resources
from our national budget. We will not be powerful and we will not have
influence, therefore, unless we have political leadership that is unafraid to
challenge the Canadian electoral preference for being nice on the cheap.
Canadians will only make these
investments for the sake of something vital. Our sovereignty is vital, and in a
globalizing world, it is more important than ever, since it is effective
government in
Why do we love our country? Why
should we care about its continued independence? Why should we place this
interest—and this value—at the centre of our foreign policy? Millions love this
country, as I do, because it gave their families refuge from tyranny and fear;
others love it because it is a land of opportunity; still others love it
because it is so astoundingly beautiful. For an older generation, it is worthy
of love because it has been a community of sacrifice. We are a country whose
young men and women have laid down their lives to secure the freedom of others.
Just ask the Dutch how they remember the young Canadians who fought their way
into
But none of these reasons to love
our country -- for its land, its opportunities, for its history of sacrifice --
is distinctive. Other countries' forms of patriotism are rooted in many of the
same experiences. What is it about being a Canadian that is such a special
destiny? We need an answer to that question because we want a foreign policy
that does not just reflect cosmopolitan values -- human rights, tolerance, multiculturalism
-- but national values rooted in our soil and in our own history. National
values, by the way, are not the enemy of cosmopolitan ones, but their friend.
Liberal internationalism -- the passion to help others, to defend their rights
-- is best nurtured by a fierce desire to protect and defend our own.
So where should we look for these
anchoring national values? What makes Canadian values and identity distinctive
is our particular history as a political community. We are British North
America, a colonial fragment that remained loyal to the Crown, but which
secured "responsible government" first among all the colonies of the
crown, and which went on to create a transcontinental nation state, divided
into five regions and two language groups. We have reason to be proud of our
loyalty to British institutions, proud of our peaceful achievement of national
independence and proud, above all, that we have made a transcontinental union
of regions and languages cohere for over a hundred years, in the middle of a
world whose ethnic and religious groups too often believe that each nation
deserves its own state. We have proved that two nations can share a single
state; that two languages can share a single political community; and that
regions with powerful political traditions can work together to sustain a
common fabric of citizenship for all Canadians. In the last forty years, we
have also pioneered a hugely significant attempt to reconcile that common
fabric of citizenship with full self-government for aboriginal peoples.
This tradition gives a
significantly different inflection to our democratic values. Thus in the famous
words of the British North America Act, our first constitution, we define the
purpose of our political union as "peace, order and good government,"
in explicit contrast to the Jeffersonian vision of "life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness." All political traditions, including those to the
south of us, have to balance liberty and order, free enterprise and government action.
We balance with the belief that freedom without order risks violence and
liberty without government action risks injustice and inequality. These
commitments, first articulated in the BNA Act, remain anchored in our Charter.
There are deep historical reasons why we have chosen to give this weighting to
our primary political values. A heterogeneous population, without common myths
of origin, thinly spread across 5000 miles of inhospitable terrain, has good
reason to believe that what holds political community together is honest,
responsive, decentralized and democratic government. A country with a
relatively small domestic market has learned that it cannot leave the creation
of a common infrastructure to the market alone: government must work with
business to create the public goods that make a country cohere. Finally, a
people with two languages and a rich heritage of aboriginal and immigrant
tongues, knows that we are held together not by common myths of origin or
shared ethnic or religious roots, but by political institutions -- Parliaments,
provincial legislatures, courts, political parties and a free press -- and by
the political creed enshrined in our Charter.
What then is distinctive about
the Canadian political tradition is the idea that the state creates the nation,
that government action is a precondition both for economic development and the
creation of a political community. At the same time as we believe in
government, we are a free enterprise country. Social democracy has had a huge
influence on our politics, and so has the history of free trade unionism, but
we have never been socialist. We believe in markets because we know that they
are better at allocating capital and labour than government, and because free
markets make for free peoples. We also know that markets alone cannot
distribute equitably between classes and regions. Hence a political community
cannot cohere if it is not sustained by public provision of health care,
unemployment insurance and social security, along with federal redistribution
of revenues from rich provinces to poorer ones.
These values are not the property
of any particular political party, though some parties have embodied them more
successfully than others. They are the property of all our parties, and their
operative role in holding our country together explains why our politics is
ever so slightly, but decisively, to the left of center of our neighbours to
the south.
When we look for distinctive
Canadian values, in other words, we should look at the history of our
institutions and register the enduring commitments they represent. When we look
at our values and our institutions, we have reason to be proud. Their vitality
gives us reason to be patriotic. Yet patriotism of the heart should never still
the patriotism of the head. It is important to look the failings of our
tradition squarely in the eye. While peace, order and good government meant
that Western settlement proceeded under the aegis of the Mounties and we
avoided massacre in our encounter with aboriginal peoples, it did not stop the
federal government executing Louis Riel. It did not stop residential schools
and a century of ignoring clear statutory promises to the aboriginal nations
who signed treaties with us. Likewise, Canadians like to think their history of
good government has been corruption-free. This is not so. From the days of John
A. Macdonald to recent regimes, Canadian governments have not been as good or
as honest as we want them to be. Sometimes, as in our resort to the War
Measures Act in 1914 and again in 1970, we have sacrificed too much freedom for
the sake of order.
For better -- and sometimes for
worse -- peace, order and good government, and the institutions that anchor
this creed in our national life, have been the guarantors of our national
independence and our national distinctiveness. The success of this creed makes
our country one of the most sought-after destinations for migration in the
world. Our capacity to resolve our conflicts peacefully means that we have survived
where many other multinational, multi-ethnic, regionalized societies have
failed. For all our justified concerns about corruption in government, by the
standards of Transparency International,
III
If this way of reading our
national interest and our values is correct, what are the implications for the
public policy of our country overseas? How should these values and interests
drive our engagement with the external world?
To answer this question, we need
to identify the global trends that most deeply impinge upon our interests as a
country and to specify the particular skills we can bring to the solution of
the problems that threaten "peace, order and good government" in the
world at large.
Every country has to focus on
what it does best, where its comparative advantage lies. My suggestion is that
Canada needs to do something about the long-standing, but now decisive crisis
in state order that is sweeping the world, undermining "peace, order and
good government" in as many as thirty of the world's states.
The crisis of 'state order"
is a product of two waves of freedom that have swept the world since 1945: the
first began with the independence of
Burdened states are those without
the resources or the institutions to meet the needs of their people. Failing
states are those where the central government no longer controls all its
territory, and is battling insurgencies or separatist movements. Failed states
are those where law and order have broken down and basic service provision has
failed. Rogue states are those where government functions but where government
defies the obvious rules of the international community.
For Canadians, the crisis of
state order is not a distant issue. Our concern for it is not simply
humanitarian. It has direct impact on our interests. Three of our most
important recent immigration streams -- from
This does not exhaust the
symptoms of state crisis. Other peoples -- the Iraqis, the Libyans, the
Iranians and the North Koreans -- have lived in states where national wealth is
used, not to develop the country, but to develop weapons of mass destruction.
Canadians cannot live securely in a state order populated by rogue states. We
may or may not support coercive regime change, but we absolutely must insist on
a state order in which non-proliferation regimes are obeyed.
Other states -- and these include
Finally, there are states which
are so mismanaged and so corrupt that they cannot carry out any development
goals.
As long as ordinary people are
misruled -- whether in states collapsing into chaos or rigidifying into tyranny
-- they cannot benefit from globalization, technology, science and progress.
Without states that work, states that deliver real security and real services
to their people, the promise of globalization will remain a cruel sham. Without
capable states, global governance is a fiction.
IV
If this diagnosis of the vital
security challenge before
We are already putting this
institutional memory to work, helping a number of other countries on the path
to democracy, by monitoring elections, assisting in the design of courts, prosecution
services and police services, the creation of central banks, and the writing of
property and inheritance law. The Canadian intuition is that democracy without
rule of law is the tyranny of the majority and markets without regulation is
just the despotism of the wealthy and well-connected. Our intuition is that
human rights and tolerance have to be anchored in good institutions: separation
of powers, independence of the judiciary, a free press, entrenched minority
rights guarantees and rule of law.
The Canadian intuition about
development arises from our own experience as a developing nation in the 19th
century, when the national policy successfully linked government investment in
infrastructure, free immigration, protection of basic industries and a vigorous
private sector. It is second nature for Canadians to see government regulation
not as the enemy of market freedom but as its precondition; second nature for
us to see good government as the precondition for development that is equitable
between classes, religions and regions. Our own experience of development is
relevant to the democratic nations seeking development today and relevant to
the design of the policies that should guide Canadian attempts to make global
development more honest, more equitable and more long-lasting.
The focus of our foreign policy
should be to consolidate "peace, order and good government" as the
sine qua non for stable states, enduring democracy and equitable development.
Other countries will always have larger development budgets than we do, but few
countries know as much as we do about the intimate causal relation between good
government and good development. Just as other nations—like the Norwegians—have
specialized in peace-making, through the
I prefer "peace, order and
good government" to "governance" as an organizing frame for
Canadian activities simply because it articulates a specifically Canadian
expression of what governance ought to be about: democratic institutions,
federalism, minority rights guarantees, linguistic pluralism, aboriginal
self-government and a positive, enabling role for government in economic and
social development.
Such a proposal is more than a
slogan or marketing device. It implies, first, accepting an analytical priority
for the role of good government in promoting equitable development and
sustaining democratic development. It implies, second, that
Not all of this "good
government" work is done by government itself. Some of the most exciting
work is done by NGO's that receive some government support, for example, the
Forum of the Federations. Bob Rae and other members of the Forum have been
deeply involved in the Sri Lankan peace negotiations, attempting to flesh out
what a federalist solution to the Sri Lankan tragedy might look like. In
northern
At this point, a skeptic might
well ask whether our institutional experience can actually be transferred to
societies that have lacked our unique advantages: a history of benign colonial
rule, early independence, vast natural resource wealth, a wealthy and powerful
neighbour, and so on. History matters, our history has been different, and we
cannot assume that Canadian best practice, in federalism or any other field of
good government can simply be exported to very different societies. Moreover,
as a people who secured their freedom from an empire, we know that it is a form
of imperialism to base policy on the assumption that what worked for us must
work for everybody. Yet our history does entitle us to say that ethnic
multiplicity can be a source of strength rather than weakness; that linguistic
multiplicity does not necessitate secession; and that political dialogue can
avert the breakup of a nation. We have some authority in these matters, and we
should use it, not to lecture, but to listen, not to impose but to learn, adapt
and change our ideas as they encounter the different reality of other political
cultures.
In democratic societies that are
stable and capable of development, Canadian policy can assist with improving
the institutional design and operation of governance. Where societies, in John
Rawls' phrase, are "burdened" with ethnic conflict, religious hatred,
or a bitter memory of civil war, we need to perfect a tool kit of preventive
intervention: conflict resolution at the village and community level, political
dialogue at the national level, constitutional change, in the form of
devolution to empower disenfranchised regions or groups, and minority rights
guarantees to end discrimination and injustice. No country has managed to put
all of these elements of prevention -- conflict resolution, political dialogue,
constitutional change, together with economic assistance -- into a coherent
stand-by capability, bringing together NGO, government and professional
capacities. That is a challenge we should seize as a country, since, as I have
argued, we have comparative advantage in the politics of managing divided
societies.
Finally, in societies where
conflict has reached the point of massacre and ethnic cleansing, we have a
"responsibility to protect," and, with that, a responsibility to
intervene, if necessary, with military force. "Responsibility to
protect" is a phrase that has entered the global lexicon thanks to the
Canadian initiative to support the International Commission on Intervention and
State Sovereignty. The ICISS is only the latest of a series of examples which
illustrate that one of
"Responsibility to
protect" is one such idea. Instead of conceiving sovereignty as a synonym
for territorial control, the Canadian idea sees sovereignty as entailing a
responsibility to provide a people basic protection. When the state is either
unwilling or unable to perform this duty, whether from incapacity or malignant
intention, the duty to protect the population falls on other states.
Responsibility to protect reconceives the world of states as a series of
interlocking duty holders towards the populations they are supposed to serve.
Where one state fails in its duties, other states must step in: to stop the
killing, feed the hungry, restore order and return sovereignty to those who can
fulfill their duties.
From a "peace, order and
good government" perspective, the "responsibility to protect"
entails, first, a responsibility to prevent ethnic and religious conflicts
before they destroy a state, second, a responsibility to react when states are
either unwilling or unable to protect their populations, and finally a
responsibility to follow through, with reconstruction assistance, stabilization
forces, and institutional reconstruction over the long-term. We should
understand "peace, order and good government" as entailing a
continuum of responsibilities that bring to bear all the expertise and
capabilities of the Canadian government, and the national community, up to and
including the use of military force. The "responsibility to protect"
identifies a policy continuum -- prevention, intervention and follow-through --
that would define the very core of a foreign policy organized around the
principle of promoting "peace, order and good government" in the
emerging state order of the 21st century.
V
The final question is how to
consolidate and adapt the existing capacities of the federal government to
serve the agenda I have proposed. Good government work is being done overseas
by private and public sector, federal and provincial, government and
non-government actors: diplomats, development officers, election officials,
revenue specialists, native rights experts, judges, policemen and women,
lawyers, doctors, teachers and activists. The federal government should try to
understand this vast, heartening web of overseas activity by Canadians, and it
should find clever ways to assist it, but it should not try to control it. Its
function is to confer authority -- to speak for
A "peace, order and good
government" program for
The agency could also serve as a
co-ordinating forum for the most difficult task of all: to respond to emerging
crises, like
Most of this capability is
already located either in the private sector or in existing agencies of
government. A peace, order and good government agency has to find these people,
work with their departments and employers to create a secondment strategy and
then establish training regimens that work through various deployment scenarios
and test capabilities against reality.
This is muscular multilateralism.
Developing these capabilities would help the UN raise its own capacity to deploy
to prevent conflict before it starts and rebuild after it is over. Such a
program would demonstrate that
Finally, a focus upon peace,
order and good governance helps us to meet a vital national interest. Just as
we want to maintain our own national independence, to safeguard the land we
care about, so we want to help others to do the same. If we love our own land,
we have good reasons to help others create political orders that deserve the
same fierce attachment. Finally, we need to shed the Canadian sense of immunity
and impunity, that deeply-rooted belief that we are safe from history's
dangers. Our sense of national interest could use a certain sobre measure of
fear. A global order in which states are no longer able to protect their own
people and their own territory presents
i I would like to gratefully acknowledge
the contribution to this paper of Michael Small, Fellow at the