bout de papier, Vol. 8, No. 4 (1991) — Fall 1991 // Automne 1991, pp. 13–15
Some Canadian governments consider it desirable to encapsulate the thrust of their foreign policy in code words or phrases. Mackenzie King was anxious that his government should be recognized internationally, after the Second World War, as enjoying authority as well as status. A senior Canadian diplomat, R.G. Riddell, was assigned to work out something that would be helpful to Canadian interests and consistent with the United Nations. The concept was publicized by the prime minister in the House of Commons in 1944, with Riddell’s definition appearing later: “Middle powers are those which by reason of their size, their material resources, their willingness and ability to accept responsibility, their influence and stability are close to being great powers.” Canada became a middle power, and in the mid-1980s continued to be so described by journalists and politicians more often than alternative designations suggested by academics, civil servants, or the new prime minister.
Pierre Trudeau wished to be associated with a deliberate and planned set of goals rather than with a pragmatic and reactive foreign policy. Civil servants came up with “A Foreign Policy for Canadians,” and parliament was presented with a hexagon chart which divided the foreign policy spectrum into six separate themes. There was little said that Canada or any other country might do that could not be accommodated in one of these six: sovereignty and independence; peace and security; social justice; quality of life; harmonious natural environment; or economic growth. For some years thereafter, it was obligatory to choose from the hexagon whichever theme or themes embraced a proposed policy initiative.
When a book is published in the Mulroney years entitled Canada and the New Internationalism (Centre of International Studies, University of Toronto, 1988), replete with ministerial and diplomatic contributions from External Affairs, it is necessary to ask whether the New Internationalism is a rhetorical instrument comparable to the King and Trudeau versions or simply a trendy title. The book is the published version of a conference in which all the presenters were either active or former participants in the policy process in Ottawa, although, it includes three papers later written by academics. No one beyond the Secretary of State for External Affairs acknowledged that he was speaking officially, but the participants’ papers may be examined to assess whether semi-official messages may have been conveyed.
It was long apparent that middle powers existed within the international system, and Trudeau’s policy themes were less innovative than was implied. It is not clear from the present title whether the emphasis is on the particular or on the universal. Why, for example, was Joe Clark’s conference address, “Canada’s Stake in the New Internationalism,” changed in the published version to “Canada’s New Internationalism”? Content is about neither, but articulates a commitment to Canada’s “best foreign policy traditions” sometimes characterized by others as Pearsonian internationalism. So one turns to the preface and the promotion flyer. These refer to “those international institutions and groupings that have sprung to life, within or outside the United Nations galaxy, during the past decade and a half.” A non-exclusive list includes “the seven power economic summit, the London Suppliers Group on nuclear materials, the Namibia Contact Group, the Grain Exporters Club, the Contadora Process, the Francophone Summit, and much more. This is the new internationalism.” Canada is involved in all, but in none is she the leading player. The New Internationalism is presumably not dependent upon Canada, therefore, although Canada may contribute to or benefit from it, what do we learn from the contributors?
Sylvia Ostry, the prime minister’s former personal representative at the G-7, looks back to the institution in the 1970s as a response to the breakdown of the fixed exchange rate system and the crisis of the first oil shock, but suggests that policy convergence dominated summitry in the 1980s. She sees a “new multilateralism” in the summit and its relationship to the GATT, but says nothing of a New Internationalism. There is no paper on the London Suppliers Group on nuclear materials. Gary Smith, a former director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Division of External Affairs, finds that on arms control and disarmament issues the UN was the most frustrating and least cost-effective forum. The real breakthrough would come as a result of an agreement between the Soviet Union and the United States, he guardedly anticipated, though without developing its implications for an emergent internationalism.
No paper on the Grain Exporters Group is included in the collection, and no section of any other paper touches on it. There is a paper on the Namibia Contact Group, authored by a Canadian intimately involved in the period of its greatest diplomatic activity. Bill Barton, Canadian representative on the Security Council in 1977 and 1978, appropriately attributes the initiative to President Carter’s ambassador to the United Nations, and implies that the leverage of the Contact Group was only as strong as President Carter’s coat-tails. He admits that the Contact Group was the kind of initiative that western powers would not have taken earlier, accepting that others might regard it as a form of New Internationalism, but makes no attempt to hide his own scepticism. The paper on the Contadora Process is by John Graham, at the time Director General of External’s Caribbean and Central American Bureau. He volunteers that Contadora was not expected to resolve the root causes of instability, but merely to establish agreed mechanisms for reconciliation. As to what the relevance of the Contadora Process is to the New Internationalism, there is not a hint.
No contributor focuses exclusively on the Francophone Summit. Joe Clark claims that Canada played a role in the Francophone Summit of 1986 that would prove a milestone in its development. Had he been interested in making a partisan attack on Trudeau, he might have claimed that an important stage in laying a milestone is removing a roadblock. He avoids the temptation. The Minister of External Relations, Mme Landry, in another context, charged that one of the obstacles to a meeting of Francophone countries had always been the difficulty of having the federal government and Quebec sit down at the same table in the spirit of respect for each other’s legitimate powers. The prime minister announced at Quebec in September 1987 that he would seek common positions in the second Francophone Summit on issues like third-world debt and apartheid in South Africa. The activity of Francophone Summits has been intensified, but whether consulues anoner comercone da ve nternationalism is debatabl
Of the official conference participants, the one subscribing to the New Internationalism most readily was the then Assistant Deputy Minister (Legal Affairs) of External Affairs, Len Legault. He considers that the New Internationalism manifests itself in common recognition of the threat to the sea, and common determination to respond to it effectively. Yet the feature of the 1982 Law of the Sea Convention (LOS) with which he is most satisfied is the “Arctic exception, Article 234. Whether this article ratifies Canada’s control of commercial navigation in the Arctic as much as Canadian negotiators might wish remains to be seen. Should a future Canadian government attempt a rigorous regulation of the Arctic navigation in suggested conformity with Article 234, it would be fortunate to have its regulations go unchallenged. Still, despite the long delayed ratification process, LOS III seems at least as eligible an example of a New Internationalism as any other.
John Higginbotham, former Director General of the Policy Development Bureau, treats the New Internationalism as a phrase requiring polite mention, not something to be justified and expounded. Max Cohen, sometime panellist of the International Court of Justice, gives the rubric equally cursory notice. More attention to the supposed theme is provided in the briefest contribution, that of the North-South Institute’s former director and current head of the Canadian Institute for International Peace and Security, Bernard Wood. There are differences in the substance of international relations, differences in the scale and differences in the responses, he counters, but the elements of the picture are not entirely new.
That appears to have been a perspective shared by one of the co-editors, the late diplomat and academic, John Holmes. “Is there a New Internationalism?” he dutifully asks, but proceeds to discuss the evolving international system without addressing his own question. Only his co-editor, John Kirton, appears committed to the supposed theme. He appears satisfied that the disappearance of some groupings and the emergence of other ones provide sufficient indication of newness.
A contribution by Kirton to this magazine (vol. 6, no. 4) provides a different perspective for, in his bout de papier article, he turns to prescription. The linkage of foreign policy with defence in the PCO is depicted as an albatross left over from the cold war, and its linkage with international trade in External Affairs and in the House of Commons Standing Committee as a product of the materialistic 1980s; in the 1990s, he suggests, the environment would be a preferred partner. The foreign service is encouraged to look beyond North America to become “a major player around the world”; the foreign policy consensus had been undermined, but “Pearsonian internationalism endures.” The New Internationalism endures too in the article’s title, but the phrase thereafter receives Holmesian treatment.
The terminological commitment to a New Internationalism does not appear to have been widespread, deep or enduring. It was neither a ministerial nor a bureaucratic addition to Ottawa’s in-house jargon, but the product of some creative academic entrepreneurship. Presented as a verbal tool implying change, the New Internationalism enjoyed the discreet support of those diplomats favouring a revision of the predominantly North American and NATO orientation of policy. Had the phraseology been launched with greater preliminary backing, it might have had a better chance of ministerial support. But its catch-all appeal was at the cost of substantive precision, and the minister declined to endorse it by public usage.
Following the transitional years 1986-88, international co-operation experienced a wonderful transformation. The winding-up of the Soviet empire in eastern Europe, Afghanistan, Indochina and in the USSR itself has had repercussions in China, Africa, the Middle East, the Caribbean, and arms reduction. Canada’s two years on the UN Security Council in 1989 and 1990 coincided with the greatest degree of conciliatory accommodation on the part of veto-bearing Security Council members since Riddell’s labours on the drafting of the Charter. The world wanted us on the Security Council — so the prime minister told us prior to the November 1988 general election. But it was another year before the walls of communism came tumbling down while he was in Moscow, and it was at that later period that his government chose to accept the interpretation that the cold war was over.
Some Canadian diplomats may have wished the government had spoken sooner. Canada was hardly a leader in accepting the immensity of Soviet change. If there proves to be a continuing willingness of the veto-bearing powers to utilize the Security Council machinery to foster international peace and security, some might equate the phenomena with a New Internationalism. The Council can only function effectively where there is respect and tolerance for diverse viewpoints, a quality in limited supply on some Middle Eastern and other questions. Without tolerable harmony at the heart of the UN system, it is difficult to give content to a New Internationalism. By the time these words are read, the reader may have become convinced that the phase of movement through accommodation is over. If not, it could be years before the historian can verify that there has been sufficient continuity in the process of major-power accommodation that the turn of the 1990s marked the ripening of that phase.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 8, No. 4 (1991) — Fall 1991 // Automne 1991, pp. 13–15. Read the rest of this issue →
