bout de papier, Vol. 14, No. 1 (1997) — Spring 1997 // Printemps 1997, pp. 5–7
While my subject is a bit less difficult than the examination question that asked candidates to describe the universe and give three examples, it has its problems. I shall try to be highly selective, but not, I hope, incoherent. I want to concentrate on two aspects of the new international disorder: the risk of war, and the tension between the growth of the number of sovereign states on the one hand and the growth in the limitations on sovereignty on the other. Then I shall suggest what some of the implications of these two aspects may be for Canada.
First, the risk of war. We survived 40 years of Cold War. What has happened now that the Cold War is over? Go back to the beginning. A lesson of the thirties was that aggression must be stopped early; otherwise little, far-off wars of no apparent relationship to our interests would become big wars involving us directly which we were obliged to fight in unfavourable circumstances. If only we had faced down Japan over Manchuria in 1931, or Italy over Abyssinia in 1936, or Germany over the Rhineland, or the Anschluss or Munich, we would have spared ourselves going to war over Poland, a country we could do nothing to help. It seemed clear from this that little wars could not be ignored, nor the importance of securing an alliance with the United States before a dangerous situation deteriorated into war.
To this lesson of the thirties was added a lesson of the forties: that violence grows once force is used, so that more and more powerful conventional weapons are employed, and finally the atomic bomb is used. In short, to the idea of horizontal escalation was added that of vertical escalation: not only did little wars spread around the world as they became big wars, but conventional violence grew until it reached nuclear dimensions. Hence the conclusion that “peace is indivisible” — that violence anywhere carried an ultimate risk of the nuclear holocaust.
These were some of the ideas that underlay the Cold War at the outset. But as the Cold War progressed, they became attenuated. The wars in Korea and Vietnam showed that local violence could grow to very high levels and could involve one or more of the nuclear powers, yet show great resistance either to spreading geographically or “going nuclear”
Even in Europe — where it was evident that even minor incidents carried grave risks of escalation — it became increasingly clear with time that nuclear weapons were difficult to use either for military purposes or to support diplomacy. In a sense, the whole history of NATO during the Cold War was a struggle to find effective means within an alliance to share the political control of nuclear weapons. This was true during the earlier years of crisis over Berlin and the abortive Multilateral Force; it was true 20 years on, during the Euromissile crisis of the 1980s. By the time that — had we known it — the Cold War was shortly to end, the NATO Council, at the direction of ministers, was conducting exercises designed to play through the whole scenario of the initial and subsequent use of nuclear weapons in response to a major Soviet attack. Such exercises tended to show how difficult it would be, on any realistic assumptions, to threaten to use nuclear weapons and then actually to use them. The lesson seemed to be that the only sensible reason to have nuclear weapons was to deter their use by the other side.
Cold War was a This mutual deterrence could be accomplished expensively, at high levels of armament, or more cheaply, at lower levels. The negotiations of the last decade, which began before the Cold War ended, are designed to reduce the level of nuclear weapons held by the United States and Russia dramatically. Theoretical discussion has passed from considering concepts like “minimum deterrence” the lowest level of weapons capable of deterring effectively) to “virtual deterrence”
(the possibility that, while the knowledge of how to make nuclear weapons cannot be eliminated, deterrence would still be etfective even if no weapons, but only the unassembled components of weapons, actually existed).
To sum up this part of the argument, then:
• We began the Cold War with the idea that peace was indivisible, that little wars tended to become big wars and that conventional wars tended to become nuclear wars.
• We ended, even before the Cold War was actually over, believing that peace was highly divisible, that little wars didn’t necessarily become big wars, that wars far away didn’t necessarily come any nearer, and that conventional wars didn’t necessarily become nuclear wars. Then the Cold War ended. One of the Alliances disappeared. The nature of the problem radically altered, and our anxieties about the risk of nuclear war sharply diminished. I shall return to this point to consider some of the implications for Canada later.
The second striking aspect of the new international order is the odd contradiction between the growing number of sovereignties and the growing limits on sovereignty.
Take the limits first. We see on every hand the evidence that national sovereignty means less and less in practice — that for many purposes, the world is better understood by the measure of cultures or economic regions or simply as one world than it is by the measure of national sovereignty. There is the CNN world of instantaneous transmission of TV images of events around the world as they occur; there is the Internet, providing floods of information directly to users across the world instantaneously, in ways that escape the control of governments, flattening all hierarchies and ignoring their pretensions; there are world financial markets, mustering far greater resources swiftly than governments can assemble, and backing their own judgements against governments through massive, instantaneous transfers of funds; there are modern industrial processes, which rely on an increasingly complex exchange of ideas, technology, raw materials and components, so that clearly identifiable national industrial products are less and less characteristic of the world economy; there is the creation of regional trading blocs, bringing rules-based trading systems to vast areas covering many countries; and finally, there is the World Trade Organization, bringing a rules-based system, and thereby constraining sovereignty, all across the world.
All these powerful developments make nonsense of the pretensions of national sovereignty — so much so that you would expect people to be prepared to scrap the very notion of the sovereign state. Yet they aren’t. The opposite is happening. The number of states claiming to be sovereign and recognized as such has risen from 55 to 185 in forty years. Why? Basically, because this was the age of the end of empires and of decolonization. The process began with the First World War, which brought down the German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman and Russian empires, and was completed with the aftermath of the Second World War, which saw the disappearance of the British, French, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, remaining Spanish, and at last, with the end of the Cold War, the Soviet Empire.
Most of the new states in the world are the result of this process. This suggests an important conclusion: while obviously there are links between the trebling of sovereignties and the limitations on sovereignty, they are not causal links; the simultaneous existence of these two contradictory trends is largely a coincidence.
Not only the number of states, but their range and variety has increased: from very small to very large; from authoritarian to free; from institutionally sound and economically viable to institutionally chaotic and economically marginal; from highly centralized to loosely federated. Think, for example, of the difference between the Stalinist carbon copies of the Soviet state imposed on Central and Eastern Europe by the Russians in the late 1940s, and the vanety of states now existing in the same area, even where in many instances there have been no changes of frontier.
We have at the back of our minds some notion of an ideal nation-state: it would have clearly defined and recognized frontiers, based on geography and easily defensible; it would have a viable economy; its people would be ethnically uniform rather than diverse, sharing a common history, culture and language. Few states in the past ever approached this ideal. Many strong and successful states departed widely from it. Indeed it is hard to think of states that ever came close to meeting all the qualifications of the ideal: Iceland, maybe. All this is even truer today. Because of artificial frontiers, or weak economies, or ethnic tensions, or constitutional incoherence or administrative incompetence or civic irresponsibility or some combination, departures from the ideal are more marked today than in the past.
So much could be said against the concept of the nation-state. And much could be said against particular states. Yet nation-states are plainly not headed to the garbage can of history; on the contrary. Why? Presumably because, for all their defects, peoples are not yet prepared — even in Europe — to transfer their loyalties to some international structure. In particular, the notion that economic union leads swiftly and inevitably to political union needs to be examined skeptically.
What do these two aspects of international life — the diminished threat of nuclear war and the contradictory tendencies towards greater world economic unity and greater world political diversity mean for Canada? How does our country fit into this kind of world?
On the security point: although many Canadians during the Cold War found it hard to accept, Canada was then, and is even more now, one of the most secure countries in the world. We were, and are, defended by the United States in the act of defending itself, whether we choose to defend ourselves or not. With the end of the Cold War especially, we no longer feel threatened by fears of little wars becoming big wars or conventional wars becoming nuclear wars. Canadians can enjoy an immense sense of security compared to many people in the world. They will not feel that their security interests are inevitably threatened by small, far-off crises.
If nevertheless Canadians decide to involve themselves in small, far-off crises, it will not be because of national security, but for other reasons – disinterested humanitarian reasons, the defence of human rights, the relief of human suffering, or objections of principle to aggression. Canadians have shown they are capable of supporting involvement of this kind. The limits have not been tested. But that there are limits shows up from time to time, for example in the sense of shame and disgust over the action of a few servicemen in Somalia; the increasing impatience that led to withdrawal from Cyprus; the insistence on improving the UN’s security machinery; the frustration when others won’t pay their peace-keeping bills; and so on. The limits would show even more clearly if Canadian involvement were ever to lead to heavy casualties. A debate unresolved at the time of the Gulf War, and which continues over Bosnia, divides those who believe that substantial risks, including risk of casualties, must be run to preserve peace, and those who believe peace-keeping Canadian style must be largely risk free. It is by no means clear what Canadians mean when they say they support peace-keeping. At what risk? How far up the scale of enforcement? At the moment we are participating in IFOR, which goes beyond what many would see as the limits of classic peace-keeping. This raises not only issues of principle but practical questions. What kind of forces do we want? How should they be organized, trained and equipped? How much are we prepared to spend on them and on the organizations, the UN and NATO, under which they operate?
What also about Canada’s place in the emerging world of the single money market and falling trade barriers across regions and across the world?
On the whole, Canadians are either in favour of falling trade barriers, or at least acquiescent: this seems to sum up attitudes on the transition from GATT to the WTO and the expansion of the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement into NAFTA. These developments have coincided with a period in which Canadian exports have performed better than any other economic indicator. We have had record exports and trade surpluses when consumer confidence and sectors like housing have been weak, interest rates high and the domestic economy sluggish.
Yet there is still a sense of vulnerability underlying our strong export performance. The idea of reducing our vulnerability by reducing our relative dependence on the US market is a recurring theme in trade policy debates. In Mr. Diefenbaker’s day, there was the 15% trade switch objective; in Mr Trudeau’s there was the “Third Option”. Yet we are no closer than we ever were to reducing our relative dependence on one overwhelmingly important market — the United States; and we have made only modest progress towards moving the balance of our exports up the scale from raw and semi-finished products to the high value-added, knowledge-based exports where Canada’s trading future is said to lie.
And at the same time, despite a recent levelling-off in foreign borrowing, we have continued for a generation to increase our vulnerability through increasing our debt to foreign lenders, so that 40% of Canada’s longterm debt is now held by foreigners and we have learned to twitch at every sign of displeasure from Standard and Poor or Moody’s.
These are manifestations of deep structural features of the Canadian economy, not easy to change quickly. The problem with the Team Canada approach to dealing with such difficulties is not the objective; it is with the risk that all the related publicity may cause us to mistake objectives for accomplishments. We are in danger of losing our perspective on just how far we still have to go before we become the strong, independent exporting nation we sometimes imagine ourselves to be already. As a form of reality check, then, let some of the basic facts of our situation be restated:
• The United States remains overwhelmingly our most important single export market. In our lifetime, it has gone from absorbing two-thirds to three-quarters to four-fifths of our exports (although here also, as with foreign borrowing, there has been a recent levelling-off). Nothing any government has done, nor any turn of the business cycle, has altered the apparently inexorable trend.
• The United States supplies two-thirds of our imports. More of our trade passes within the Canada-USA auto sector alone than with the entire European Union.
• In 1994, two-way trade between Canada and the United States was 15 times the value of two-way trade with Canada’s second largest trading partner, which is Japan. And yet Japan, in trade terms, is more important to us than our four largest European trading partners (Germany, Britain, France and Italy) together; and we trade more with Japan than with all the rest of Asia combined. These comparisons shed an interesting light on much that is said and written these days about Asian markets.
• As to the matter of high-tech, high value-added exports, it is interesting to note that Canada’s most important export to Japan is coal; that its most important export to Japan in the food and agriculture sector is oil seeds; and that about 60% of Canadian exports to Japan are resource products while only 40% could be classified as value-added – and even that includes many goods that are far from being technically sophisticated industrial products.
Thus when we hear yet more talk about Team Canada successfully selling high-tech Canadian goods in fast-growing Asian markets, we should keep two things in mind:
• it’s all true and we should rejoice in our export successes and build on them;
• but relatively, Canada is still, as a trading nation, heavily dependent on exports of resource materials and, for good or ill, overwhelmingly dependent on the US market.
Finally, what about ethnic nationalism and Canada’s relationship to it?
The connection with the national unity debate is obvious; I won’t belabour it. But three points can be made:
a) International comparisons of states can be illuminating. But nation states come in all shapes and sizes. No two are identical. Each is unique. The range of solutions that have been found in constitutions across the world to the problems of multiethnic states is enormous. Both federalists and separatists could find justification for their theses about what is best for Canada by judicious selection of foreign examples. All such example-seeking is tendentious and should be treated with skepticism. The hard truth for both ardent federalists and ardent separatists is that the world offers no particular solution to Canada’s problems of national unity; we have to find our own.
b) It is evident that ethnic nationalism has often been perverted and that it can degenerate into violence. Whatever the outcome of our national debate, we have so far avoided violence almost entirely. The civilized course would be to bear this in mind and continue to do so. Respect for the rule of law should be our guide. c) Finally, whatever advantages might be advanced as justification for breaking the existing Canada into two states, an inevitable disadvantage would be that two smaller, economically divided states will carry less weight individually in the international system and have to exert themselves even harder than the existing federation to protect their interests and make themselves heard.
This text is slightly modified from an address delivered to the Rideau Club, Ottawa, in 1996.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 14, No. 1 (1997) — Spring 1997 // Printemps 1997, pp. 5–7. Read the rest of this issue →
