bout de papier, Vol. 8, No. 2 (1991) — Spring 1991 // Printemps 1991, pp. 22–23
On January 30, 1990, the Right Honourable Pierre Elliott Trudeau was awarded the Jackson H. Ralston Prize in International Law at Stanford University Law School. The prize is awarded for original and distinguished contributions to the development of the role of law in international relations and the establishment of international peace and justice. On this occasion, the former Prime Minister delivered a lecture, excerpts from which are published below.
(In the opening portions of this lecture, Mr. Trudeau laments the apparent hypocrisy of recent administrations in the United States in its practice of international power politics and diplomacy, and refers frequently to the W.B. Yeats’ poem, “The Second Coming.” He notes that Mikhail Gorbachev, ironically, has become the world leader who is subordinating class interests to human interests and setting the agenda for the next century. He cites the expressions of faith in the free market economy that have been made recently by leaders in Communist and former-Communist countries, including China.)
I feel there is something quite touching about the abiding faith in the market system shown by all those reformers who are trying to free themselves from the dead hand of central planning. Yet I cannot help wondering how many of them realize that even in the best of circumstances our so-called free markets are not always free. And that even thought the market has proved to be the main condition for the efficient production and accumulation of the wealth of nations, it can hardly be claimed that its purpose and effect are to ensure that the distribution of that wealth is either fair or just. Nor can it be held that in our market societies the efficient production of goods and services will guarantee people’s health or the preservation of their environment. Or that the slogan “Let the consumer decide” produces beneficial choices in those who are manipulated by advertising and conditioned by a society dedicated to acquisitiveness. For example, a few decades ago, the dream of America was that of a reduced work week and increased pleasure, but in spite of computers and robots it’s estimated that over the past fifteen years leisure time for the average American family has fallen by 30 per cent.
It should be obvious to us by now that if the centrally planned economies have failed for having made too little use of the market, our Western capitalist societies are failing because of their too great a reliance on the market. The law of supply and demand is not an objective law like the law of gravity found in nature. It’s a law the operation of which is based on subjective variables such as human decisions and feelings.
Without a social contract whereby people direct their governments to define the conditions and limits of production, distribution, and consumption, the market will simply turn out more of everything desired by those wielding some form of power. More arms for the military, more profits for business, more goods and services for the consumer: to each according to his rank.
The market is not equipped to consider and report that, as by-products, it also produces more misery for the underclasses, more health hazards for the community, more drugs and crime for the cities, more COz for the greenhouse effect, more depletion of the ozone layer, more destruction of rain forests and loss of genetic-varieties. In some cases, costs can be internalized and be reflected in market decisions, but competition will prevent this from happening unless there is regulation by public authorities. Competition of the marketplace will also prevent newly empowered business elites from producing a fairer set of rules: for instance, entrepreneurship in the hands of women or of new minority groups seems incapable of moving values other than the sacrosanct bottom line. As Thomas More predicted four centuries ago in a book that we well know, “When I consider … all these commen wealthes … I can perceave nothing but a certein conspiracy of riche men procuringe their owne commodities under the name and title of the commen wealth.”
What is to be done? We are living in an age where the only constant factor is rapid change. The question is: can we harness change in order that our human societies now and in the future will be equitably governed? That is to say, so that every human being will be enabled to fulfill himself or herself to the utmost. In other words, can mankind develop the self-control and sense of fairness that would permit reason and justice to govern the earth? Or must we forever lament with Emerson that “things are in the saddle and ride mankind?”
To answer such questions, one would have to examine the role of ideologies in the governance of civil societies and that cannot be my purpose here and now. Suffice it to say that I have yet to be convinced by those who claim that the world is moving toward a convergence between socialism and capitalism and I strongly disagree that we are witnessing the end of history in the form of “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”
Even though I claim to be a liberal in the 20th century meaning of the word, it will be obvious from my earlier remarks that I believe that liberal democracies have a long way to go before they can claim to be victorious in many crucial areas, from arms control to controlling COz emissions.
Indeed, if ideas are the stuff of which history is made, governments in the Western world seem singularly unprepared to shape their own destinies.
In the field of disarmament, Gorbachev has dominated the negotiations by basing defence on the concept of sufficiency, an idea which had been around a long time in the West but which had been rejected earlier by NATO with its mind-set on flexible response and possible first use of nuclear weapons.
In terms of East-West relations, the Soviets have set their former satellites free, whereas the United States — in utter contempt for the international law of nations — continues to determine which governments have its leave to stay in office in the Western hemisphere and elsewhere in the world. Events in Central America seem to demonstrate fairly clearly that “containment of communism” was only a gambit in the policy of empire. In the defence of its rationale for containment, the State Department has now returned to the justification it had been using in Latin America since the turn of the century: the punishment of bad guys, in this case, the drug barons.
In terms of diplomacy, the Soviet group of countries are busily establishing commercial and diplomatic relations with Asian countries. North America looks helplessly at events in Eastern Europe, while the governments of the European Community debate whether upheavals in the East should cause the speeding up or the slowing down of European integration.
On the economic front in the West, the private sector rather than the government continues to determine the pace and direction of change. In the European Community, big business has taken the lead in the march toward integration by 1992, just as in the Canada-USA Trade Accord (sic) it was big business that decided what was good for the people of Canada. As things now stand, it is also big business who will decide whether competitive forces will oblige the Canadian government to trim down its social legislation. On that score, I must say that the European countries at least envisioned some structures to protect their people and their social welfare legislation. You will know Jacques Delors’ social charter.
More important still, market economies have yet to make a choice between: (a) untrammelled economic growth of the kind that had prevailed until now; (b) sustainable growth as advocated by the Brundtland Commission; or (c) rejection of the entire growth mystique as advocated by Ivan Illich and Wolfgang Sachs.
If our democracies are enlightened enough to go for choices (b) or (c), the art of government will entail a different kind of planning than that presently practised on the people’s behalf by transnational corporations. It will certainly necessitate a return to a more regulated economy where the public interest would have priority over private profit. Thus, true equality of opportunity for all, regardless of the condition of their birth of the size of their bank account, might some day become the goal of life in civilized societies.
So the contest between political systems, if not ideologies, is bound to continue.
On the one hand, capitalist countries are still far from having resolved their internal contradictions; and if this be true in the United States of America, it is even more so in the Koreas, the Brazils, the Chiles, and the South Africas of this world.
On the other hand, the centrally-planned economies, having at last discovered that progress is no longer possible under totalitarian state planning, must ponder their choices. No doubt some of them will opt for Western-style democracies with free markets; but others will certainly strive to preserve the egalitarian aspirations of collectivism, reconciling the virtues of a freer market with some form of democratic planning.
So there is hope that we will continue to live in a pluralistic world for a while yet. And we will continue to struggle with problems raised by Plato and Aristotle, by Rousseau and Locke: how can individuals remain free, yet be restrained by the State?
How can the exercise of liberty lead to a society of equals?
Yet many dangers will continue to lurk. Horizontal and vertical nuclear proliferation, though presently subdued, has not ceased. Ecological threats continue to grow relentlessly. The Third World is a cauldron, more ready than ever to boil over now that official development assistance is being redirected from there to Eastern Europe. And no exorcist has yet appeared to protect political stability, East or West, North or South, from the demons of tribalism forever in search of an ideological or spiritual void.
Only if statecraft and public law are diligent in the constant reshaping of social contracts to the rapidly changing times will our crowded world feel secure from the terrible vision of Yeats. Now I read you the end of his poem.
The Second Coming! Hardly are these
words out
when a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight; somewhere in sands
of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of a stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking
cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come
round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 8, No. 2 (1991) — Spring 1991 // Printemps 1991, pp. 22–23. Read the rest of this issue →
