Global Brief #15 by Louis Fishauf Design Ltd.

The strong force unites. The weak force attracts.

EDITORS’ BRIEF

Some of today’s most attractive states and societies will not survive the century. Their internal constitution will be too complex, or their external foes too ferocious.

COVER ILLUSTRATION: THOM SEVALRUD

heart of the EU. Finally, Frédéric Charillon of the École Militaire’s Institute of Strategic Research in France’s Ministry of Defence waxes sceptically about the future of conventional state power in the face of unusual and motivated enemies. In Tête à Tête, GB assesses the state of Africa postMandela with Ngaire Woods, the newly minted dean of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government. GB asks former federal opposition leader and Ontario premier Bob Rae about the ties that bind and ought to bind citizens in Canada, the UK (the Scottish question oblige), Sri Lanka and other theatres. In Query, Irvin Studin explains what happened in Ukraine’s revolution, and suggests possible Ukrainian futures. Sciences Po’s Zaki Laïdi, for his part, explains why the idea of a proper European grand strategy must finally be put to rest, and why France is today Europe’s most credible power. In Nez à Nez, James Radner of the School of Public Policy and Governance, University of Toronto, tussles with Fred Lazar of the Schulich School of Business, York University (Toronto), on the vexed question of whether inequality is truly a drag on global growth. In The Definition, we return to Africa’s postMandela futures with international jurist Daniel Didier Preira, the University of the Witwatersrand’s law dean Vinodh Jaichand, and Ababacar Mbengue of Rheims University. GB asks who will win the upcoming World Cup in Brazil in Strategic Futures. In Situ reports come to us from Khadir Has University’s Lerna K. Yanik in Ankara, where Turkey’s (negative) exceptionalism picks up steam, and from Mexico City, where Universidad Iberoamericana’s César Velázquez Guadarrama counsels on improvements to President Pena Nieto’s impressive legislative reforms. GB watches Kiev’s revolving revolutions and revolutionaries from the comfort of Bulgaria’s Cabinet Room. George Elliott Clarke, Toronto’s poet laureate, closes the book in Epigram. Enjoy your Brief. | GB

GLOBAL BRIEF • WINTER | SPRING 2014

he concepts are from physics, but they are compelling for geopolitics, strategy, history and politics too. That humanity, which will approach 10 billion in number by midcentury, must live in a great variety and mixity of governing units across the territory of the planet seems a constant in world-historical time. The identities, arguments and practical compacts within these governing units and the societies that they house will, in this complex century, test the internal coherence and solidarity of these units, just as the units attempt to advance interests and projects and ideas in the broader world – often in contest with other units. It is not manifest that a unit should continue to exist where it proves incapable of negotiating the tension between the constitutional sphere (internal unity – the strong force) and the strategic one (projecting influence, changing minds, and indeed changing the world – the weak force, or gravity). Ailish Campbell launches this number in One Pager, arguing that agriculture has exposed the limits of global trading rules, resulting in the need for more modest, flexible and opportunistic types of agreements between countries. In the lead Feature, the University of Toronto’s Joseph Heath decodes Canadian multiculturalism and divines the policy logic and political strategy behind Quebec’s Charter of Values. Timur Atnashev of the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration takes on the curious case of Russian nationalism and the destabilizing contradictions that it poses for choices between blood and territory. GB Editor-in-Chief Irvin Studin repositions the Aboriginal question in Canada as fundamentally a psychological-spiritual one stemming from strategic defeat, and therefore requiring psychologicalspiritual resuscitation of the Aboriginal people into political co-equals in the governance of the country. GB Associate Editor Michael Barutciski sees the seemingly insoluble problem of Lampedusa’s refugees as symptomatic of a larger malaise at the

N O .1 5

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF & PUBLISHER Irvin Studin

WINTER • SPRING 2014 | YEAR

D E PA R T M E N T S

MANAGING EDITOR Sam Sasan Shoamanesh ART DIRECTOR Louis Fishauf ASSOCIATE EDITOR Michael Barutciski ASSISTANT EDITOR Marie Lavoie

EDITORS’ BRIEF. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

SENIOR EDITOR & ASSISTANT PUBLISHER

ONE PAGER

Jaclyn Volkhammer SENIOR EDITOR Milos Jankovic

Ailish Campbell | Trading in food futures. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

JUNIOR EDITORS

Carly Barefoot, Becky Carpenter, Dylan Franks, Roxanne Hamel, Saad Khan, Jolie Lemmon, Misha Munim, Adina M. Unguras WEB MANAGER Aladin Alaily VIDEOGRAPHER Duncan Appleton WEB DESIGN Dolce Publishing PRINTING RJM Print Group ADVISORY COUNCIL

Kenneth McRoberts (Chair), Sam Mizrahi, André Beaulieu, Tim Coates, David Dewitt, Paul Evans, Drew Fagan, Dan Fata, Margaret MacMillan, Tom Quiggin Mailing Address Global Brief Magazine Glendon Hall, Room 301 Glendon Campus, York University 2275 Bayview Avenue Toronto, ON M4N 3M6, Canada Tel: 416-736-2100 ext. 88253 Fax: 416-487-6786 General Enquiries, Feedback & Suggestions globalbrief@glendon.yorku.ca Subscriptions globalbriefsubscriptions@glendon.yorku.ca Advertising globalbriefadvertising@glendon.yorku.ca Article Submissions: globalbriefsubmissions@glendon.yorku.ca

IN SITU

Lerna K. Yanik | Turkish exceptionalism and its critics. . . . . . . . . . . 6 César Velázquez Guadarrama | A president’s political capital . . . 28 TÊTE À TÊTE Ngaire Woods | Africa post-Mandela and beyond. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Bob Rae | Reasons for staying together. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 QUERY Irvin Studin | Ukraine: What happened? Whither? What next? . . . . . . 24 Zaki Laïdi | Quel avenir pour la défense européenne?. . . . . . . . . . . . 52 IN THE CABINET ROOM Dusan Petricic | Bulgaria assesses Ukraine’s revolutions. . . . . . . . 35 NEZ À NEZ James Radner vs. Fred Lazar Inequality is a drag on global economic growth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 THE DEFINITION “Post-Mandela Africa…. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60

Global Brief® is published quarterly in Toronto, Canada by the Global Brief Society in partnership with the Glendon School of Public and International Affairs. The contents are copyrighted.

STRATEGIC FUTURES

Subscription Rates One year (four issues) for CDN $38. Two years (eight issues) for CDN $72. HST or GST applies only to purchases in Canada. Shipping and handling charges apply only to purchases outside of Canada. PM Agreement No. 41914044 ISSN: 1920-6909

EPIGRAM

“The winner of the 2014 World Cup in Brazil will be…. . . . . . . . . . 62

George Elliott Clarke | Mass versus force . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64

GLOBAL BRIEF • WINTER | SPRING 2014

Glendon School of Public and International Affairs The Glendon School is Canada’s first bilingual (English and French) graduate school of public and international affairs. It combines a comprehensive bilingualism with a focus on both public and international affairs. Adopting a global perspective, the School explores the relationship between public institutions and their larger environment. Its purpose is to advance research on public and international affairs; provide a high-quality bilingual master’s programme; and offer innovative professional development programming. L’École de Glendon est la première école bilingue d’affaires publiques et internationales au Canada. Établissement d’études supérieures unique en son genre, l’École est axée sur le bilinguisme anglais-français et spécialisée à la fois dans les affaires publiques et les affaires internationales. On y explore, dans une perspective mondiale, les relations entre les institutions publiques et le contexte général dans lequel elles fonctionnent. Le mandat principal de l’École consiste à faire progresser la recherche sur des questions d’affaires publiques et internationales, à offrir un programme de maîtrise bilingue de grande qualité ainsi qu’un programme de développement professionnel novateur.

www.glendon.yorku.ca/gspia

F E AT U RES

MISUNDERSTANDING CANADIAN MULTICULTURALISM Why Quebec should accommodate those who wish to integrate, but not those who refuse BY JOSEPH HEATH

THE STRANGE CASE OF RUSSIAN NATIONALISM Sochi played to the Russian soul, but it masked weaknesses and incoherence in today’s Russian nationalism BY TIMUR ATNASHEV

REFLECTIONS ON THE ABORIGINAL QUESTION The Canadian state’s answer must start with psychological-spiritual resuscitation of the Aboriginal people BY IRVIN STUDIN

LE DRAME DE LAMPEDUSA Les boat people désespérés exposent les difficultés de la solidarité européenne PAR MICHAEL BARUTCISKI

QU’EST-CE QUE LA PUISSANCE MODERNE? Face à autre chose qu’une armée d’État, la puissance d’État classique semble impuissante PAR FRÉDÉRIC CHARILLON

GLOBAL BRIEF • WINTER | SPRING 2014

Trading in Food Futures Variable geometry is not only inevitable, but a good thing besides BY AILISH CAMPBELL

now, this seems unlikely, despite the potential benefits to consumers. Only an agreement with large benefits for each state, or one including more states, would create the incentive structure necessary to include sensitive agricultural issues. The third type of negotiation offering policy innovation in agricultural trade is developing-to-developing country agreements. The Southern African Customs Union has opened up agricultural trade among its members – although it has been many years since its conclusion, and little has progressed since its signature. Domestic subsidies remain allowable, as in most bilateral agreements. These kinds of agreements serve as pilots, testing smaller amounts of liberalization. For individual countries, there can also be a to-andfro of policy improvements between the multilateral system and bilateral agreements: consider Mexico, where WTO membership, NAFTA and the EU trade agreement all removed layers of protectionism. Nevertheless, huge parts of the globe are likely to remain outside of any international push for agricultural liberalization for the foreseeable future: India, China, Russia and Saudi Arabia are all reluctant to conform to norms that they consider to have been created by advanced nations, and that are inconsistent with their domestic policies and interests. Each of these countries is large enough to set rules for its domestic economy, as well as influence others in its proximate region, albeit with the result of higher prices and diminished choice for consumers. Because of its significance to GDP, national identity and employment, agriculture will continue to dominate the economic and political fates of many of the world’s states. In the same breath, the lack of advanced food systems – storage and distribution – in many developing countries will mean that their populations will continue to experience a high degree of food insecurity. Such states will not be disposed to open their markets. The WTO will therefore not be the solution. Instead, trading nations will have to look to innovative ways to meet demand and improve domestic agricultural systems in less advanced partners via bilateral and regional agreements. Mega-regional agreements may also prove to be the most practical force for confronting regulatory fragmentation and the domestic and export supports that distort international markets. Variable geometry will, in short, mean that the bar of multilateral trade standards will be too high. In such a world, bilateral and regional free trade agreements are developments to be welcomed, not feared. | GB

Ailish Campbell is the Vice President, Policy – International, at the Canadian Council of Chief Executives. She is a former member of Canada’s negotiating team to the World Trade Organization Doha Round.

GLOBAL BRIEF • WINTER | SPRING 2014

he economic case for free trade in food is by now beyond reproach: open markets lead, on balance, to rising global incomes. And yet, in this early new century, in a multipolar world, trade liberalization in agriculture will come at different speeds for different countries. Fully open markets are unacceptable, socially or politically, for many states – developed and developing alike. This is all the more true in the context of escalating food prices and food insecurity. The WTO still sets the rules for global trade. However, as the 2013 Bali Ministerial demonstrated, the global legal regime for agriculture is conspicuously weak. The rules do not adequately cover domestic and export subsidies, or duties on sensitive products. So what’s to be done? Three more modest types of agreements suggest themselves. The first type is developed-to-developed country agreements. These agreements provide an excellent opportunity for reducing barriers, as the parties have similar levels of development, raising fewer concerns for their respective populations. The Canada-EU Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), for example, promises increased market access, including to the protected Canadian supply-managed sectors through the enlargement of quotas. The second type is developed-to-developing country agreements. Consider the 2008 New Zealand-China bilateral trade agreement. While criticized for not giving comprehensive treatment to services, investment and competition, the agreement contained significant improvements in market access for New Zealand farmers. Exports to China from New Zealand have increased fourfold since signature, providing the milk and meat sectors with millions of new customers in China’s growing middle class. As a subcategory of this second type, mega-regional agreements (MRA) or so-called ‘mega-preferential trade agreements’ can also include developed and developing nations. One of the largest MRAs currently under negotiation is the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which includes countries in Asia and the Americas, with the US at its core. Malaysia, Vietnam, Japan and others in the TPP could be exposed to more competition and discipline in agriculture. As a result, the TPP could build momentum for new global rules, much as NAFTA and European economic integration helped propel the WTO Uruguay Round outcome. A key question is whether the TPP will be sufficiently ambitious to address the ‘white goods’ issues of protected US sugar, Japanese rice and Canadian milk. For

ONE PAGER

Turkish Exceptionalism and its Critics

IN SITU

Harder times are triggering the baser instincts of the rulers of Asia Minor LERNA K. YANIK reports from Ankara

L Lerna K. Yanik is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at Kadir Has University in

GLOBAL BRIEF • WINTER | SPRING 2014

Istanbul.

ike most governments that have been in power more than a decade, the government of the Justice and Development Party (JDP) has started to show signs of fatigue. This was most apparent in the Gezi Park protests in May and June of last year, as well as in the corruption allegations levelled against the JDP government in late December. The recent protests against the government’s Internet laws have only solidified this general tendency. The fatigue has little to do with government inefficiency or slowdown – the typical consequences of many years in office. Rather, it has more to do with power hoarding – to wit, the wholesale exclusion from the political system, and in some cases punishment, of potential challengers for power. When criticized for power hoarding, the naming of ‘foreign agents and collaborators’ has become the standard deflection measure employed by the JDP, and in particular by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Indeed, the blaming of ‘foreign agents and collaborators’ is part and parcel of the ‘Turkey under siege’ mentality that has long been critical to the toolbox of Turkish politicians. This mentality, which may be seen as a form of Turkish ‘negative exceptionalism,’ involves insinuations about Turkey’s ‘uniqueness’ and the presence of ‘foreign agents’ trying to destabilize Turkey as a consequence of this ‘uniqueness.’ The JDP was established in August 2001 – during the worst economic crisis in the history of modern Turkey – by a splinter group that broke away from the Welfare Party. (The Welfare Party – an Islamist party – was ousted from power in 1997 and subsequently shut down in what has been called the February 28th Process.) Having tabled a pro-EU, liberal agenda, the JDP was brought to power in November 2002 by Turkish voters who were tired of continuous mismanagement of the country by coalition governments. Despite the resumption of ‘low-intensity conflict’ with Kurdish separatists in the summer of 2004, the JDP delivered what it had promised: relative political stability, improvement in public services, and stable economic growth – later marketed as the ‘Turkish miracle.’ In point of fact, this ‘Turkish (economic) miracle’ was due to meticulous application of the IMF programme initiated by the previous coalition government, liquidity in the global economy, and a

construction boom – that is, billions of dollars spent on public works, public housing, glitzy malls and residential complexes. Momentum and luck have, until now, been largely on the side of the JDP. The party won the general elections in 2007 and 2011. Abdullah Gul, also of the JDP, won the presidential election in 2007. By the time it emerged from the successful 2010 constitutional referendum, the JDP was sufficiently confident to be able to implement a vision based on a more assertive worldview internationally and a more conservative one domestically. Turkey began to position itself as a term-setter in regional affairs. Taking the cue from Minister of Foreign Affairs Ahmet Davutoglu’s ‘Strategic Depth Doctrine,’ the JDP government claimed for Ankara a primary role in international affairs based on Turkey’s supposed geographical and historical uniqueness. Davutoglu’s logic held that Turkey’s location between East and West and its Ottoman heritage automatically qualified Turkey as a power broker. On the domestic front, Erdogan announced that “those who are not in line with us will be pushed to the sidelines.” Media critical of the JDP government have been silenced. The military’s traditional involvement in national political life – originally curtailed as part of EU harmonization laws – has been turned on its head through allegations of conspiracy, with dozens of active and retired members of the Turkish armed forces, including several former chiefs of staff, having been tried and sent to prison for allegedly attempting to stage a coup. What came to be known as the Ergenekon and Balyoz trials effectively created a military that would nary have the teeth to challenge the JDP government. The reluctant alliance between the JDP and the Gulen community, a religious network with extensive business ties – brokered in April 2007 – began to show signs of stress. Following the Flotilla Incident in May 2010, which led to one of the worst ever diplomatic crises between Turkey and Israel, Fethullah Gulen, the leader of the Gulen community (who has been in self-imposed exile in the US since 1999), criticized Ankara by saying that “permission in advance should have been obtained from Israel.” In February 2012, media outlets close to the Gulen community leaked information about Turkey’s National Intelligence Organization holding talks with the PKK, tarnishing the uncompromising

image that the JDP had wanted to maintain against Kurdish separatists. The Gezi Park protests and the corruption scandal that came to be known as the December 17th Operation unfolded against this backdrop. The protests started when the authorities decided to replace the park with a 19th century artillary barrack in the form of a mall and a residential complex as part of the reorganization of Taksim Square. Faced with the use of excessive force by the police, the peaceful sit-in in the park quickly turned into antigovernment protests in Istanbul, spreading to other major Turkish cities. Quite independently of the logic driving the contemporaneous protests of the Arab Spring, these protests followed the introduction of a law regulating the sale of alcohol, as well as abortions and C-sections – all interpreted as clear moves by the JDP to push for a more Islamist way of life for Turks.

PHOTOGRAPH: THE CANADIAN PRESS / AP / AXEL SCHMIDT

Ricciardone, was accused of “getting involved in provocative actions,” and was threatened with persona non grata status. With three elections upcoming – municipal and presidential elections this year, and a general election in 2015 – what is clear is that there will be more power hoarding by exclusion; that is, more negative exceptionalism, perpetuating the ‘Turkey under siege mentality’ that will result in Ankara looking for more scapegoats within and outside of Turkey. Despite the JDP’s articulated plans to stay in power through 2023, despite all of this power hoarding, and given the current frailty of the Turkish economy, it might well be another economic crisis that undermines the JDP’s standing and sweeps it from power. After all, the JDP first came to power on the coattails of an economic crisis. This possibility, combined with the intensifying search for ‘foreign’ scapegoats, could mean that Turkey’s political class will increasingly flirt with conspicuous displays of nationalism. This bodes ill for an already polarized Turkey. And it will not leave the region unaffected. | GB

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, February 2014.

GLOBAL BRIEF • WINTER | SPRING 2014

uring the protests, while some cabinet members and President Gul stated that they had understood the protesters’ message, Erdogan’s attitude was largely uncompromising. He called the protesters “marginals” and “looters.” He called Twitter, which was crucial in the organization of the protests, a “malice,” and commended the police that had used force during the protests for “writing history.” He argued that, because the JDP had won 50 percent of the vote in the 2011 elections, those who did not vote for the JDP had to obey the “national will.” More importantly, Erdogan declared that the protesters had been organized by foreign agents, including foreign media organizations and “interest lobbies” that sought to make money from the destabilization of the national economy (thanks to the political protests). Erdogan and other members of the JDP used similar blame deflection when the December 17th corruption scandal broke last year. The first round of the scandal ended with the arrest of two of the sons of cabinet ministers, a Turkish businessman of Iranian origin, and the CEO of the state-owned Halkbank. The scandal became public when the minutes of a 2004 National Security Council meeting were leaked, suggesting that the JDP government had been planning a crackdown on the Gulen community, and was debating the closure of preparatory schools owned by networks close to Gulen. The initial response by Erdogan and the JDP to the scandal was a cabinet reshuffle. This was followed by the reappointment of hundreds of members of the police force, and an attempt to tighten the government’s grip on the judiciary. Erdogan and other members of the JDP called the scandal a conspiracy launched by a “parallel state” aiming to tarnish the JDP’s image. The US ambassador to Ankara, Francis

GLOBAL BRIEF • WINTER | SPRING 2014

The West African countries – Mali, Niger and others – have suffered directly from the fallout or spillover from the changing government in Libya, which led to highly armed groups marauding southward.

PHOTOGRAPH: COURTESY OF NGAIRE WOODS

Africa Post-Mandela and Beyond

TÊTE À TÊTE

GB discusses the spirit and challenges of the times with the head of Oxford’s newly minted Blavatnik School of Government NGAIRE WOODS

GB: What is the state of Africa, post-Mandela (see Definition at p. 60)?

NW: I would come at this differently. Everyone will always remember Nelson Mandela for ushering in a new South Africa, and for ushering in a model of alternating, democratically elected presidents. Those are two extraordinary feats. Again, it is simply extraordinary that he ushered in a majority government for South Africa – a government that flourished – and then agreed to step down and permit others to be elected president. Of course, the decade after Mandela stepped down from the presidency was very difficult for South Africa. In basic areas of public service – in education, in health care, in poverty reduction – the country and its leadership class have a long way to go. The rest of Africa has outpaced South Africa. In particular, high growth has started to emerge in East and West Africa – not least because of the discoveries of oil and gas. There has also been growth outside of the natural resource sectors, given the dramatic arrival of China across the whole of the African continent. China’s presence has created more policy space – that is, greater policy choice – for African governments.

GB: Has there been a spiritual change in African attitudes and governance in the aftermath of the death of Mandela?

cases, people eventually become more and more afraid of losing power and the privileges associated with power. As a result, these presidents are locked into a tight logic. They once lived so brilliantly, and now they are doing damage to their own legacy. Still, I think that the optimism about Africa over the last decade has come, first and foremost, from the said economic growth on the continent.

Ngaire Woods is the inaugural Dean of the Blavatnik School of Government and Professor of Global Economic Governance

GB: Does the persistence of conflict in Africa – in

at the University

Centrafrique, Mali, Democratic Republic of the Congo – spoil this optimism, or are these all different theatres with different dynamics and narratives?

of Oxford.

NW: I would certainly not presume any general persistence of conflict in Africa. These are all very different problems. The West African countries – Mali, Niger and others – have suffered directly from the fallout or spillover from the changing government in Libya, which led to highly armed groups marauding southward, creating conflict and exacerbating local cleavages. Those who see Africa as persistently plagued by conflict ignore the fact that, on every continent, there are specific conjunctures that lead to conflict. There is no culture or civilization in the world that is simply prone to conflict. There are huge parts of Africa that live in peace for long periods of time.

GB: What has been the net effect of the large NW: There was a wonderful demonstration effect

Chinese presence on African governance?

NW: There is still much alarm in Western reactions to China’s relationships across the continent. It is worth taking a measured, evidence-based approach to China’s presence. Naturally, one way of seeing things is through the lens of diminished Western influence – for instance, for Canada or the UK to fret about its aid agencies no longer getting meetings with an African minister of finance because he is too busy meeting with the Chinese. This approach has been overly presumptuous about the notion that Western efforts in Africa have always been aimed at – and conduced to – better governance. Clearly, every external actor in Africa is pursuing a specific agenda – whether we speak of a foundation

GLOBAL BRIEF • WINTER | SPRING 2014

in Mandela’s period in power – about how to use political power, how to bring a government together, and then how to step down and permit others to be elected to power. The more successful leaders in Africa are finding this last part extraordinarily difficult. Look at Museveni, or Mugabe, or Kagame: each of these presidents has transitioned his country from a very difficult period. Each became president at an extraordinarily difficult time in his country’s history – when his country was in ruins – and ruled extremely well for a period of time. However, each of these countries is suffering from what may be considered a royal court – that is, a system that has grown around the president, starting with family members, friends and close associates. In such

Recall that China, even at its poorest, had an ideological view of Africa that held that the Chinese had to do their share – that many Africans, regardless of how poor the Chinese were at the time, were even poorer.

pursuing the eradication of malaria, a development aid donor projecting a country’s influence and advancing specific aid goals, or indeed the Chinese government pursuing long-term access to resources, including through money invested into infrastructure in order to make that access feasible. On the African side of these transactions, it is preferable to have as many suitors as possible – that is, to have as many options as possible. This means that if an African government wishes to build, say, a power generation plant or roads, it can weigh up partnerships with the African Development Bank or China or the World Bank or DFID or USAID or the Canadians.

GB: If Israel grows by a clip of 10 percent a year,

GB: Has Chinese activity in Africa been for the

GB: What are Europe’s obligations today in and

good, in the net, for the continent?

toward Africa? What is China’s sense of its obligations in and toward Africa?

You really need to go country by country, because Chinese involvement and success differs according to the theatre. However, I would offer, in general terms, that there is a difference of perspective in respect of China’s involvement in Africa. The West seems to feel that it is losing influence to the Chinese. Some African governments, for their part, feel that the Chinese have too much influence on the continent. Granted, this is still a minority view among African states. Most African governments and communities seem to be enjoying the roads and schools and economic benefits that the Chinese relationship has brought to date. There are some obvious exceptions in this regard – like Zambia, where alongside the big Chinese investments came many Chinese traders, which led to conflict because they were pushing local traders out of business.

current conflicts, from Centrafrique to South Sudan?

NW: These conflicts are complicated when the

GLOBAL BRIEF • WINTER | SPRING 2014

NW: I am not an expert on that region, but I think that it is arguable that, after the Oslo Peace Accords – the last time that there was any deal on the table in which there was sincere belief among the parties – what destroyed the prospects for peace suggested by the accords was a collapse in GDP across the occupied territories. In other words, there is no part of the world where people will vote to continue or precipitate a collapse in their welfare and economic well-being.

NW: I do not deal in sweeping generalizations.

GB: Do you have a view about solutions to Africa’s

does that necessarily lead to peace with its neighbours?

context is one in which natural resources increase in value (see the One Pager by Ailish Campbell at p. 5) and geographically split a country, and also when you have a political system in which the winner gets all the spoils. Do I believe that the continent is on a trajectory toward peace and prosperity? Yes. What is happening across the continent is quite remarkable. Consider, by way of comparison with a conflict that is closer to home, the Irish conflict. There was nothing to beat 20 percent growth as a way to take people into a peace treaty (see the In Situ article by John de Chastelain in GB’s inaugural issue in 2009). Once the Northern Irish factions realized that Ireland proper was on a 20 percent growth trajectory, the peace negotiations became almost inevitable. Of course, now that growth is collapsing, there are fragilities that could re-emerge.

NW: There is a generational issue in China that is little understood. Recall that China, even at its poorest, had an ideological view of Africa that held that the Chinese had to do their share – that many Africans, regardless of how poor the Chinese were at the time, were even poorer. Even in its poorest years, therefore, China was giving aid to Africa. The Chinese get very annoyed when they are called a new donor to Africa. They rightly point out that the Tanzam Railway – not a great success, but a huge effort by China to help build infrastructure in Africa – was built between 1970 and 1975. The railway went from Dar es Salaam to Zambia’s central province. And so the Chinese do not at all consider themselves to be new donors or players in Africa. They say that they have been there a long time. As for Europe’s relations with Africa, they clearly need to modernize in order to really work. Europe’s colonial legacy with the continent has led it to want to deal country by country in Africa – indeed, much as the rest of the world does. However, as the African continent grows, it will be in increasing need of proper regional infrastructure and trade and investment agreements that permit intra-regional production and trade and investments (see the One Pager by Ailish Campbell at p. 5). Africa needs more regionalism and more regional interdependence – to link the land-locked countries with ports, and to distribute the fruits of natural resource wealth across a far greater number of people.

GB: How will the Ukraine situation play out in coming months and years (see the Query article by Irvin Studin at p. 24)?

NW: Ukraine is not my patch. But let me speak to Europe more broadly, post-financial crisis. The real challenge for Europe, post-financial crisis, is youth unemployment – particularly in the south.

Youth unemployment risks writing off an entire generation of Europeans. Youth unemployment in southern European countries is right up at 30-plus percent. We know from the data that if people are unemployed for the first decade after they leave school, then they are very likely to be unemployable thereafter. This is what is happening to a third of Europe’s working population today. What is the way out of this crisis? The obvious solution would be a currency devaluation for countries suffering massive unemployment in order to restore some competitiveness and create jobs. But these countries are locked into the Eurozone, and so they cannot pursue devaluation as their instrument of adjustment. Instead, they are doing the most costly possible thing – that is, hoping that the pressure of so many unemployed people will gradually change the labour market. The hope is that slow, long-term change in the labour market will help improve the competitiveness of these countries. That is plainly the most costly path forward.

growth therefore look very sombre (see the Tête à Tête interview with Martin Wolf in GB’s Fall 2012 issue). Add to this the youth unemployment that we discussed and you see that the challenges facing European governments are great indeed – first and foremost internally, let alone externally.

GB: Does the UK have a special vocation in Europe in helping it solve some of these problems (see the Query article by Zaki Laïdi at p. 52)?

GB: Is there a structural or logical contradiction between Europe working on internal challenges like youth unemployment and its ability to project either a hard influence or soft influence outside of its borders – in Ukraine, Turkey, the broader Middle East or other parts of the world (see the Feature article by Frédéric Charillon at p. 46)?

NW: The most powerful influence that the EU has

particularly within the Conservative party – Britain’s position in respect of the EU is usually pragmatic. Britain has benefited enormously from being seen as the English-speaking capital of Europe, and indeed as the only English-speaking capital of Europe. For Chinese investors, for Arab investors, for American investors, for Russian investors, there are clear attractions: schools, property, an English-speaking environment for families. These are advantages from which Britain profits only insofar as it remains part of the EU. There is, of course, a strong sense today that it was a good thing for the UK not to join the Eurozone. Still, I cannot see Britain exiting from the EU when I look at the economic interests that it has within and in relation to the EU. These interests pertain not just to trade in and with the EU, but also, as mentioned, to Britain’s capacity to attract investment from other parts of the world.

GB: How do you see the Scottish question playing out (see the Tête à Tête interview with Bob Rae at p. 36)?

NW: I do not know. I do not study Scottish politics enough to make a call. My hunch, however, is that the devolution project of the 1997 Labour Party was one that permitted Scotland to enjoy a fair degree of autonomy while profiting from being part of the UK. I suspect that the upcoming referendum is for this particular British government to lose, as long as London’s campaign does not play into the hands of the Scottish nationalists. | GB

GLOBAL BRIEF • WINTER | SPRING 2014

exerted externally has been on the countries on its immediate borders – that is, those that have wanted to apply to join. On those countries, the carrot of EU membership was an extraordinary incentive to strengthen and improve governance, to create rule-of-law systems, and to implement political and economic reforms. Since the financial crisis, however, many people are really questioning what they want their relationship with the EU to be. And the EU, far from being in a phase of perfecting the European model, is struggling to hold itself together. We are obviously seeing the rise of right-wing movements and groups across most countries in Europe. These movements and groups are opposed to the EU project. They are anti-immigration, and are pulling the mainstream debate away from the post-war consensus about European unity. This seems particularly true on the peripheries of the EU. Look at Hungary and Poland, for instance. The cosy consensus about the EU and the benign effect of countries on its borders wanting to join is today gone. Meanwhile, the financial repair project in Europe is still not consolidated, which means that there are very fragile banks at the core of Europe. And the countries of the south face a huge debt overhang because of the way in which the financial crisis was managed. The prospects for European

NW: Notwithstanding the loud debate in London –

These countries are locked into the Eurozone, and cannot pursue devaluation. They are doing the most costly possible thing – hoping that the pressure of many unemployed people will change the labour market.

It is reasonable to accommodate those who wish to integrate. But it is unreasonable to accommodate those who refuse to do so. Quebec’s Values Charter gets this logic wrong. BY JOSEPH HEATH

MISUNDERSTANDING

CANADIAN MULTICULTURALISM

Joseph Heath is Director of the Centre for Ethics and Professor of Philosophy at the University

GLOBAL BRIEF • WINTER | SPRING 2014

of Toronto.

ver the past three decades, a small number of Western countries have opened themselves up to very large-scale immigration flows. While the percentage of foreign-born residents in the US has increased from its historic lows in the 1970s, it remains little more than 13 percent. By contrast, in countries like Australia, New Zealand and Canada, it is now over 20 percent. Moreover, since these countries have all abolished ethnic preferences in immigrant selection, the result has been a dramatic increase in internal cultural and religious pluralism. This has, in turn, put pressure on each of these countries to develop policies for managing pluralism and for defining the types of ‘accommodations’ that immigrants can reasonably expect from the host country. None of this has been easy. Canada, which was the first country to adopt an official policy of ‘multiculturalism’ in the 1970s, was roiled by enormous controversy in the 1990s, as the demographic consequences of large-scale immigration began to be felt in earnest. There was, at the time, much concern that “the centre cannot hold.” In the end, though, the centre did hold: crime rates declined, immigrants continued to achieve impressive educational results, labour market participation rates were high, and immigrants chose to become Canadian citizens in large numbers. Over time, much of the anxiety about multiculturalism in Canada faded away. Or at least it seemed to fade away. In fact, problems were simmering in the province of Quebec. They came to a head in November 2013, with the introduction of a bill in Quebec’s Assemblée Nationale aimed at banning any display of “ostentatious” religious symbols by public sector employees. If history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce, then this bill seems to mark the second return of the great debate over multiculturalism that preoccupied Canadians throughout most the 1990s. The element of farce has been contributed by the rather unfortunate infographic, published by the Quebec government, showing the type of ornamentation

GLOBAL BRIEF • WINTER | SPRING 2014

ILLUSTRATION: THOM SEVALRUD

GLOBAL BRIEF • WINTER | SPRING 2014

that will no longer be tolerated among employees of the province: hijabs, niqabs, turbans, kippahs, as well as oversized crucifixes. It is, of course, very difficult to produce big posters showing the type of clothing that is no longer welcome without suggesting, at the same time, that the people who wear such clothing are no longer welcome. Thus the Quebec government’s own communications strategy has effectively framed the policy in ways that make it seem – to the world more generally – as an expression of the crudest species of xenophobia. The expressions of pained alarm and sullen resentment that have greeted these accusations, by representatives of the Quebec government charged with defending the policy, have lent a surreal, idiosyncratic quality to the entire debate. The underlying tragedy, however, is never far from the surface. In a country where almost the entire health care and education systems – including the universities – are squarely in the public sector, the ban may affect as much as 20 percent of the Quebec workforce. This puts many members of religious minority groups in the unenviable position of having to decide – should the ban actually be passed and implemented – whether they wish to yield and abide or else pack their bags and move to a more hospitable province (or indeed out of country). This is a particularly agonizing choice for many members of Quebec’s Jewish community, which has deep roots in the province – going back well over two centuries. All of this comes just a few short years after the Canadian federal government created an Office of Religious Freedom within the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, with a mandate to “protect, and advocate on behalf of religious minorities under threat” and to “promote Canadian values of pluralism and tolerance abroad.” This was all done on the assumption that Canada had its own house in order, and so could easily assume the moral authority to lecture other countries on these matters. In many ways, the creation of this office shows how unprepared Ottawa was for the recent move by Quebec. Most Canadians had come to regard the major debates over ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘reasonable accommodation’ as having been settled. Indeed,

the ‘Canadian model’ of multiculturalism has been widely touted internationally as the most successful approach to the management of cultural pluralism created by large-scale immigration flows. So what happened? Is the Canadian model of multiculturalism in crisis? The brief answer is no. But understanding why requires a deeper appreciation of both the political context in which Quebec has introduced the bill, as well as the history of the multiculturalism policy in Canada. Quebec’s proposed charter (officially the Charter Affirming the Values of State Secularism and Religious Neutrality and of Equality between Women and Men, and Providing a Framework for Accommodation Requests, but known more informally as the Charter of Values) does in fact raise important questions about how the concept of state neutrality is to be interpreted with respect to religious pluralism. At the same time, one must not overlook the element of raw political calculation involved in its introduction. The Charter was introduced by the separatist Parti Québécois (PQ), which currently holds a minority government in the Assemblée Nationale. The bill represents, on the one hand, a shift in strategy for the sovereignty movement, and at same time an important step on the road to securing the ‘winning conditions’ needed to hold another referendum on secession from Canada (see the Tête à Tête interview with Bob Rae at p. 36). Thus, beyond the substantive provisions of the Charter, there is also in the background a willingness to provoke a fight with the Canadian government, or at least to show that Francophone Quebecers have a vision for their society that is so incompatible with the one found in the rest of Canada that the two groups cannot coexist within a federal state. With respect to separatist strategy, the Charter is widely seen as a sign that the PQ is ‘going for broke.’ The party has, in effect, decided to write off the so-called ‘ethnic vote’ – in a way that it hopes will be more than offset by increased support among so-called pur laine Francophone Quebecers. This, of course, is all based on a relatively straightforward calculation. On two previous occasions, PQ governments have held referenda in Quebec in order to secure a mandate to negotiate secession from Canada. The most recent secession referendum – in 1995 – lost by less than 50,000 votes. Subsequent analysis suggested that approximately 60 percent of Francophones in the province had voted for secession, while non-Francophones had voted against it at a rate of over 90 percent. Historically, the PQ had gone to great lengths to present itself as an open movement (see the Feature article by Timur Atnashev at p. 18), claiming that its brand of ‘civic’ nationalism was inclusive toward both English speakers and immigrants (while hotly denying that it was just another ‘ethnic’ secession

movement). To be sure, this represented the openmindedness and liberalism of the founders, but it also betrayed a recognition that, with pur laine Quebecers deeply divided and uncertain about the sovereigntist project, it would be necessary to attract the support of at least a portion of the English-speaking and immigrant communities in order to overcome the 50 percent threshold in any referendum. (Constitutionally speaking, this 50 percent threshold for a secession referendum is highly contested; it may well be higher in Canada.) Furthermore, the combination of a declining provincial birth rate and a steady flow of new immigrants has been changing the calculus in a way that is increasingly unfavourable to secession – unless, of course, the PQ can attract significant support among immigrants.

The ‘Canadian model’ of multiculturalism has been touted internationally as the most successful approach to the management of cultural pluralism created by large-scale immigration flows. So what happened?

GLOBAL BRIEF • WINTER | SPRING 2014

he problem with open-minded cosmopolitanism is that it risks undermining the visceral sense of ‘blood and belonging’ that animates the political base of any separatist movement. The PQ eventually pushed it too far by electing a young, Americaneducated, telegenic gay man as its leader, then proceeding to lose, in the 2007 provincial election, a very high number of the rural ridings that had once constituted the party’s heartland. The current premier, Pauline Marois, was elected specifically to undo the damage done during this period – in effect, to reconquer the party’s own base. It is not an exaggeration, therefore, to say that the PQ is, with its Charter, courting the xenophobic vote. The calculation is that, with its policy of openness and tolerance, the party was losing more pur laine Francophone votes than it was gaining immigrant votes. As such, the party decided that it was time to cut its losses and focus on energizing the group that PQ leaders now refer to as “nous” – an intentionally ambiguous phrase that, in the way in which party members have been using it, can best be translated as “people like us.” The Charter of Values is, on this logic, not the product of earnest legislators getting together to develop and offer, in good faith, a solution to a pressing social problem. It is, instead, intended at least partly as a provocation – both to the other political parties in Quebec and to the Canadian government. Since the PQ has a minority government, there is no assurance that the Charter will be approved by the provincial legislature. And if it did pass, many experts consider it very unlikely to survive a constitutional challenge (although one former Supreme Court judge has publicly disagreed with this assessment). Neither of these outcomes would be unwelcome to the PQ. If the other parties refuse to pass the bill, it gives the PQ a strong wedge issue on which to fight a provincial election in order to secure

a majority government. And if the Supreme Court of Canada were eventually to strike down the Charter, this could easily be portrayed in Quebec as the sort of high-handed interference by outsiders that can only be avoided through secession. These subterranean political calculations are not the public face of the Charter of Values. Officially, the Charter is presented as a response to the failures of multiculturalism. However, none of the PQ leaders has been able to cite any conspicuous deficiencies in Canadian multiculturalism as a motivation for the policy, or indeed any evidence supporting the idea of the Charter as a remedy for such deficiencies. Instead, Marois has pointed to problems in the UK, while her officials have cited German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s pronouncement about multiculturalism having been a failure as evidence of the need for a new approach. The result has been somewhat baffling to Canadians outside of Quebec – that is, to see a debate that is ostensibly about Canadian multiculturalism being carried out with reference to events in Berlin, London, Paris and Istanbul (see the In Situ article by Lerna Yanik at p. 6), with no mention of Toronto or Vancouver. This may well reflect a studied indifference on the part of Quebec nationalists to what goes on in the rest of Canada. But it also reflects – to be sure – genuine confusion about the nature of the federal multiculturalism policy. The history of multiculturalism in Canada begins with the adoption of the Multiculturalism Act by the government of Pierre Trudeau in 1971. The impetus for the act was the change in Canada’s immigration policy in 1967, with the abolition of the ‘nationality preference system’ that had effectively excluded all non-white immigrants from the country. Soon afterward, Canada began to see large numbers of non-white, non-Christian immigrants. This made it obvious that the bilingualism-and-biculturalism framework, which was the official government position at the time, would need to be modified in order to recognize a changing reality. Trudeau made the seemingly sensible move of shifting the official position to one of bilingualismand-multiculturalism. Unfortunately, and for somewhat complicated reasons, this move was interpreted by many Quebec nationalists at the time as an attempt to demote the status of French Canadians to ‘just another ethnic group’ within the country – this despite the fact that the multiculturalism policy was clearly aimed at immigrants, and that Trudeau went on to aggressively promote the bilingualism framework in Canadian institutions outside Quebec. Regardless, the policy was subject to vituperative denunciation in Quebec. Since no one was willing to stand up and defend it, it came to be seen as a dead letter in the province. The official ideology of Canadian multiculturalism was that it promoted a ‘mosaic’ model of immigration, where people can come and keep their cultural

GLOBAL BRIEF • WINTER | SPRING 2014

The problem with openminded cosmopolitanism is that it risks undermining the visceral sense of ‘blood and belonging’ that animates the political base of any separatist movement.

practices, in contrast to the supposed ‘melting pot’ model in the US, where everyone is expected to arrive and become an ‘unhyphenated’ American. In actuality, over the last four decades, the two policy paradigms have had the exact opposite effect. The Canadian model, by being extremely accommodating toward cultural difference, was far more successful than the American (or the European) model at integrating new immigrants into mainstream national institutions. Indeed, the thrust of Canada’s multicultural legislation was always pro-integrationist. By generating the presumption of fair treatment in all public institutions (sometimes through exaggerated, bend-over-backwards gestures of accommodation), the multiculturalism policy encouraged immigrants to venture out of their communities – to join political parties, participate in mainstream institutions, and get jobs in places where everyone speaks the language of the majority. The defining debate for the Canadian policy was triggered in 1990, when a Sikh officer in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) requested a modification of the official uniform so that he could wear a turban instead of the traditional Stetson hat. While this created an enormous backlash in English Canada, observers were quick to point out the good news – to wit, that Sikhs in Canada wanted to join the national police force. The accommodation that was being requested – which the multiculturalism policy was broadly understood to license – was quite different from the type of accommodations requested by many Aboriginal groups (see the Feature article by Irvin Studin at p. 30), or indeed by the province of Quebec, which wanted to opt out of the RCMP entirely and create its own police force. This revealed an important ambiguity in the concept ‘reasonable accommodation.’ The kinds of accommodations requested by national minority groups, such as French Canadians and Aboriginals, were aimed at changing things so that they would not be required to integrate into majority institutions – that is, so that they could instead create their own, parallel set of institutions. The demand for modification of the RCMP uniform, however, was a sign of an immigrant group wanting very much to participate in majority institutions, and requesting a change in the dominant practices in order to remove a barrier – conscious or inadvertent – to their full integration. The fact that such demands were being made was a sign that the multiculturalism policy was in fact working. The results of granting such requests also proved salutary. As mentioned, Canada soon became, by several measures, the most successful country in the world in integrating immigrants and achieving peaceful management of cultural diversity. There was – to be sure – considerable hand-wringing along the way – particular in cities like Toronto, which un-

derwent massive changes in the 1990s as immigrants came close to outnumbering native-born Canadians. Still, over time, the obvious absence of any signs of social breakdown or disorder led to a sharp decline in the level of anxiety. In Quebec, however, the demographic changes were delayed because the province imposes a secondary ‘filtre’ on immigration, which results in the province accepting far less than its per-capita share of immigrants to Canada. As such, the big changes that could be felt in Toronto in 1990 only began to be felt in Montreal a decade later. But when they did start to happen, Quebecers arguably also began to discover the virtues of the basic approach underlying Canadian multiculturalism.

nfortunately, no Quebec politician was in a position to stand up in the Assemblée Nationale to say: “We were wrong, Trudeau was right. Multiculturalism turns out to be a great idea.” This is what led to the adoption in Quebec of what is called the ‘interculturalism’ policy – typically presented as an alternative to multiculturalism. Even though proponents of this policy make much noise about how different it is – on the grounds that interculturalism rejects the ‘mosaic’ model that supposedly underlies the Canadian approach – the two policies are, in practice, identical. Bref, the fact that Quebecers have settled on a different word has nothing to do with policy and everything to do with saving face. Thus the status quo ante (prior to tabling of the Quebec Charter of Values) was that all of Canada had roughly the same policy toward cultural pluralism, even if it was called something different in Quebec and many people in Quebec believed that their own policy was different. That might have been the end of the story, but for one little wrinkle, which reflects an important difference between Quebec and the rest of Canada. Unlike English Canada, which was never a religiously homogenous society, French Quebec was, until quite recently, both uniformly and publicly Catholic. The precipitous decline in religiosity in Quebec that occurred during the 1960s and 1970s was one of the most rapid secularization processes ever recorded. This extremely abrupt and radical change was experienced by many as a cultural trauma – not least because they felt that it was coercive, as if they had no choice but to abandon their religious heritage. As a consequence, many Quebecers latched on to France’s more aggressive ‘laïcité’ policy, which consists in enforced secularism in the public sphere rather than mere state neutrality. Part of this dynamic was motivated by nothing more than the persistent tendency, in colonial societies, to imitate the former métropole.

Quebecers look to Paris – more than to any other city – for guidance on a wide variety of intellectual, cultural and policy questions, from how to design their subways to how to manage immigrant affairs. In Quebec, however, laïcité has an extra edge to it. Secularism is not just about controlling the Catholic Church, but also about spreading the pain. “We weren’t able to keep our religion,” Quebecers say, “so why should you get to keep yours?” One can see this logic reflected in the backlash against demands for accommodation, where the outrage is being generated not by any actual concessions that have been made but by the mere fact that they are being requested in the first place. The reaction is clearly “Who do you think you are?” – as though immigrants should simply know better than to seek any public expression of their faith. It is not difficult to see the source of this anger. No visitor to Canada can fail to be impressed by, on the one hand, the vibrancy and enthusiasm of religious communities in immigrant groups – particularly Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus – and on the other hand, the obvious signs of decline in the traditional Christian churches. This is even more noticeable in Quebec, where evangelical Protestantism (the only form of Christianity that is not in long-term decline in North America) is practically non-existent. The province of Quebec is today littered with once-beautiful but now decrepit churches and convents being sold off to the highest bidder because no one can pay for their upkeep. The temptation to privilege Christianity, on the grounds that it is not religion but rather ‘patrimoine,’ is an expression of this sense of cultural loss. In such an environment, it is not surprising to find a certain measure of resentment directed against the enthusiastic religiosity of new immigrants.

It has been baffling to see a debate that is ostensibly about Canadian multiculturalism being carried out with reference to Berlin, London, Paris and Istanbul, with no mention of Toronto or Vancouver.

GLOBAL BRIEF • WINTER | SPRING 2014

t this juncture, the prospects for the Quebec Charter of Values are uncertain. Perhaps the best that can be said is that its future will be determined by politics – in the most raw or pejorative sense of the term. Since the proposed policy is not a response to any pressing social problem, but is rather a part of a broader political strategy, much will depend on the way in which that strategy plays out. Nevertheless, it is important not to lose sight of the underlying reality: Canada as a whole benefits from a number of highly fortuitous conditions that contribute to its capacity to successfully integrate large numbers of immigrants. First of all, Canada draws immigrants from all over the world, with no one ethnic, linguistic or religious group predominating. This dramatically increases the incentive to integrate and learn the language of the majority, since no ethnic ‘ghetto’

is large enough to serve as a plausible basin of attraction. This makes the situation confronted by immigrants in Canada completely different from that faced by, say, Turks in Germany, or Mahgrebians in France. Second, Canada has no problem with illegal immigration, because its only land border is with the US, while its maritime borders are remote from any populated areas. Thus it is in a very different situation than, say, the US in its relations with Mexico, or Australia vis-à-vis Indonesia. The near-total absence of illegal immigrants makes it more difficult for xenophobic nativism to gain political traction, as there is no credible basis for casting the aspersion that foreigners are ‘breaking the rules’ or somehow illegitimately taking advantage of the country. Third, there is the fact that non-Aboriginal Canadians cannot claim to have been in the country for very long, since most can trace their ancestry back to a group of immigrants often only one or two generations removed. This makes it difficult for non-Aboriginal Canadians to claim the moral high ground when demanding that immigrants conform to the folkways that happen to have been established by early European settlers. Finally, there is the fact that Canada has been binational (French-English) since its modern founding in 1867. It has therefore never been able to develop political institutions that presuppose a ‘thick’ shared culture, much less a shared religion. It follows that the country was already much closer to the ideal of liberal neutrality than any European country, given that it had to provide an institutional framework within which English and French could coexist; and coexist they have. These factors no doubt contribute to the fact that even Quebecers retain very positive attitudes toward immigration, despite being up in arms about the issue of religious accommodation. But they also suggest that the structural factors all lean in the direction of a more relaxed attitude toward religious pluralism. There are some problems that, if ignored, will actually go away, and there is reason to think that, in the Canadian context, certain kinds of religious tensions are among them. The fate of the Charter of Values will be determined by the next Quebec election. If the PQ is able to use the issue to get itself a majority government, then it is difficult to imagine circumstances in which it would let this issue go. The ball will then be in the court of the federal government, which despite having shown extreme timidity on the issue so far, is very unlikely to accept the Quebec government’s extraordinary and surprising claim that questions of minority rights should be decided by simple majority rule. If this happens, then we will be hearing about the Charter for a very long time to come.| GB

ILLUSTRATION: PETER RYAN

GLOBAL BRIEF • WINTER | SPRING 2014

Sochi and Crimea play to the Russian soul, but they mask weakness and incoherence in today’s Russian nationalism. The country will accept ethnic diversity, but its people will fight to the death for territory. BY TIMUR ATNASHEV

oday’s Russian state – the Russian Federation – is plagued by complex, world-historical tensions around the question of national identity. Although Westerners typically presume the existence of a strong, even aggressive Russian nationalism, explicit Russian nationalism is today politically weak. To be sure, Russian nationalism has greater growth potential than its two competing post-Soviet ideologies – communism and liberalism. But this nationalism is diluted and undermined by contradictory dynamics issuing from two historical-strategic logics: first, the imperial logic of pre-Soviet Russia; and second, the grammar of Soviet federalism. Both Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union bequeathed to the Russian Federation a kaleidoscopic legacy of different ‘nations’ with ethno-territorial enclaves, juxtaposed with a popular aspiration for a more homogeneous, united Russian nation. And so while most states in the EU in general – and Western Europe in particular – have learned to negotiate the tension between the legitimacy of central government across vast spaces and competing ethnic claims to chunks of national territory, Russia’s challenges in this respect are far from resolved. As the Russian historian Alexei Miller has argued, Russian state-building has historically been dominated by imperial and federal principles. Russian nationbuilding was typically at best implicit – even underground – in character. With the exception of the Russification policies that took hold at the end of the 19th century through to the start of the Soviet period in the second and third decades of the 20th century, the Russians did not, as a general rule, undertake to Russify, through force or repression, most of the other ethnic groups on their territory – as did, say, the French. Au contraire: Russians lived alongside other religions and cultures for centuries, fully integrating non-Russian elites into the common state hierarchy. Indeed, under the Soviets, the central government in Moscow even stimulated ethnic and cultural diversity across the country. In the same breath, however, the Russians have seldom been, and today are nary, prepared to lose territories controlled by Russia but otherwise populated by non-Russians. Therein lies the curious character of Russian nationalism in this early new century: largely porous in respect of majority-minority relations (except in a few spheres of public life), but strongly identifying with, and committed to, the defence of the entirety of the territory of Russia. The

Timur Atnashev is a lecturer and programme director at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA).

THE STRANGE CASE OF

RUSSIAN NATIONALISM

GLOBAL BRIEF • WINTER | SPRING 2014

issue of the relatively small Kuril Islands, integrated into Russia after WW2 and disputed to this day by Japan, is a case in point: Russian public opinion is nervous about any hint of negotiations between Moscow and Tokyo in respect of a compromise solution. And yet the question of the Kuril Islands is nearly never explicitly discussed in public – that is, there is no political force or politician promoting the maximalist stance in respect of these islands and Japan. Rather, what seems to prevail is a collective taboo setting very firm psychological and behavioural boundaries for political elites. These boundaries were confirmed in the curious context of the otherwise pragmatic and largely technical border agreement brokered by President Vladimir Putin with China in 2004. That agreement deprived Russia of a tiny island and part of another island on the Amur River. Although these islands were little known by the Russian public, the agreement was used as ammunition against Putin even by those who had previously supported him on most issues. Why, then, do we say that Russian nationalism is politically weak? Answer: The dominant political figures and major political parties of the two postSoviet decades have outright refused to make, or have been very cautious about making, any explicit nationalist claims that could alienate non-Russians inside Russia. The Liberal Democratic Party of Vladimir Zhirinovsky, once considered the most nationalist of all Russian parties, is headed by a leader who has publicly stated that his “mother was Russian, and [his] father was a lawyer.” (Russians understood right away that Zhirinovsky’s father was in fact Jewish.) His rhetoric swings between allusions to imperial greatness and ethnic Russian claims, while his own persona contradicts his bona fides as an ethnic nationalist. More importantly, all three Russian presidents of the post-Soviet era carefully avoided explicit statements or speeches in favour of a Russian nation-state. Instead, they spoke (and continue to speak) of a multinational people in Russia and about Rossyane – a political neologism denoting, since 1991, all of the citizens of the Russian state, but a term largely bereft of emotional resonance. The majority ethnic group of the modern Russian state – Russkye – does not today have a proper political name. An implicit nationalistic mood is therefore carefully contained and managed – granted, sometimes with difficulty – by Russia’s political elites. The rhetoric of the greatness and independence of the new Russia under Putin on the global stage – including in the recent Sochi Olympics – certainly

plays with these Russian national feelings, and may be used as a proxy for Russian nationalism, but it quite conspicuously never gives them their name. This is a key omission, even if on some scenarios – including in respect of the future of Crimea and the Ukrainian question – this nationalism may very well intensify and become less susceptible to self-limitation, control or channelling. The Russian Federation is today composed of some 80 political-territorial units, including regular territorial entities (regions, oblasts, krais, etc.) – mostly in Russia’s West – and more than 20 national or ethnic republics or ‘autonomous oblasts’ – including Dagestan, Chechnya, Tuva and Yakutia – in Russia’s South and East. Some 160 different ethnic groups live on the territory of Russia. Still, ethnic Russians account for some 82 to 85 percent of the total population. No other ethnic group accounts for more than five percent of the population: according to the 2010 census (never very reliable), Tatars make up nearly four percent of the population, and Ukrainians just under two percent. Defenders of the current ethno-territorial structure of the Russian Federation in the 1990s and 2000s used to stress the number of different ethnic groups and nations living in Russia. By contrast, most nationalists note the high proportion of ethnic Russians as proof of the country’s relative homogeneity. Two contradictory claims about the country therefore emerge: a) Russia is a traditional, homogeneous nation-state, with a small proportion of minorities; and b) Russia is a highly diverse, multinational country. For their part, the Russian constitution and founding documents refer only to “the multinational people of Russia,” and never to the “Russian nation” – effectively in support of the multinational idiom.

xternal observers often underestimate the import and dominance of the post-Soviet multinational framework in Russia. Indeed, they often misunderstand the fact that, over the centuries, Russian nationalism has rarely been the dominant ideology in respect of the evolution of the relationship between the territory of Russia and the symbolic community of the Russian state; that is, they fail to appreciate that the Russian public project was, for the most part, never driven by a nation-statebuilding imperative, logic or vector. The nucleus of the Russian regular state was born in the 15th century under the rule of Ivan III. Thereafter, throughout its history, the state constantly increased its size from its nucleus in Moscow to the culturally and ethnically proximate Russian regionstates, gradually incorporating distinct populations with their own religions, customs and languages.

– imposing strict discipline and obedience, but otherwise flirting with many species of national pride through symbols of independence and the recognition of various nations. As part of this policy, each Soviet citizen had an ascribed ‘nationality’ – that is, an ethnic association symbolically connected to a specific territory within the USSR. At its apogee, the Soviet Union was composed of 15 republics, each bearing a different national label: Russian, Ukrainian, Uzbek, und so weiter. And within the Russian Soviet republic itself, there were numerous territorial enclaves still, each with a distinct ethnic title. These enclaves were inherited almost without change by today’s Russia. In the Soviet period, the heads of these national entities, appointed by the centralized party-state network, were usually non-Russians. They represented the entitled ethnic population or group. The party structure also reflected this ethno-territorial division, with each republic having its national party. The ethnic Russians, for their part, had no right to such symbolic privilege, even though Russians

Putin’s project has been that of a highly centralized and autocratic state that otherwise respects its internal ethnic diversity. It is not – to be sure – a nation-building project along ethnic Russian lines. were often portrayed through official propaganda as the ‘big brother’ of the other Soviet nations. In other words, while Russians had no ‘entitled’ political representation in the USSR, they nevertheless provided the backbone of Soviet identity in the form of a secondary or supra level of identification hovering over and above the ethno-territorial entities. This supervening Soviet identity was understood as ‘universal,’ but drew conspicuously on some of the highest cultural achievements of the Russian culture. A Russian ethnic and cultural superstructure therefore served as the basis for an ever-expanding world Union of Soviet Republics, bringing in new nations and using Russian as the lingua franca. If the Russian-Soviet melting pot used Russian nationality as a cultural vehicle for a higher nonnational identity, it did so at the price of banning explicit public claims to Russian national identity. The apparent contradiction between a universal Russian identity and ethno-territorial policies favouring non-Russian nations generated tensions for Russians and non-Russians alike. Where it occurred,

GLOBAL BRIEF • WINTER | SPRING 2014

The first block in the future federal structure was put in place by Ivan IV through the conquest of the Kaganate of Kazan in 1552, and one of the last and hardest conquests took place in the 19th century: Chechnya. This prolonged territorial expansion was reversed only at the end of the 20th century. (Such expansion proved impossible in Central or Western Europe, where the density of population and the level of civilization were already very high.) In Russia, the great socioeconomic, religious and ethnic diversity of the new territories was embedded in the larger physical and spiritual context of great geographic contiguity and continuity. Conquered or attached territories did not become bona fide colonies; rather, they preserved essential differences from the metropolis or centre. Religion, rather than ethnic origin, was the main social marker distinguishing peoples, and religious diversity was tolerated and even protected by the Imperial Crown. On this score, political allegiance in the Russian Empire was directed toward the Emperor (the Tsar), to a lesser degree to the Russian Orthodox faith, and finally to the Fatherland (understood as the empire). Tatars or Germans adopting the Russian Orthodox faith would become ‘Russians’ in a generation or two. Different terms were used interchangeably to denominate this group: Russians, Great Russians, Rossyane. However, across the vast territory of the empire, the formation of a distinct Russian national identity and the Russification of the non-Russian population took place relatively late – to wit, in the second half of 19th century. Indeed, Russification policies predominantly touched Russia’s Western provinces, triggering rejectionist movements in the well-established national communities of Poland and Finland. Russification pushes also generated competing nationalist movements in Ukraine and Byelorussia, which were previously seen as variations of the Great Russian community of Slav and Orthodox peoples of the Russian Empire. Russian nationalism started to play a key role in Russian governance only under Alexander III (after the assassination of Alexander II by anarchists). This new nationalistic state logic later contributed to the breakup of the empire, creating more tensions than unity. By contrast, the Bolsheviks who overthrew the Tsarist order sought to win the support of the emerging non-Russian nationalist and anti-imperial movements in order to reunite the territory of the Russian Empire within a new symbolic order. To this end, borrowing from the Austro-Hungarian social democrats, the Bolsheviks mobilized such terms and formulae as ‘national-territorial division,’ ‘nationalcultural autonomy,’ ‘right of self-determination,’ ‘nation,’ ‘small peoples,’ and ‘entitled nation.’ Of course, national-territorial autonomy was granted on the strict condition of loyalty and subordination to the central political body – the Communist Party

violence or repression against non-Russians was often seen as a manifestation of Russian nationalism, while ethnic Russians themselves gradually started to feel deprived of clear political representation, as the Russian nation fused into the general, anational Soviet. By the start of perestroika under Gorbachev, acute nationalistic claims were on the rise in more than half of the 15 republics, while up to 30 percent of the population of the USSR arguably already considered itself to be primarily Soviet (rather than Russian, Ukrainian, Armenian or Moldovan). This means that, in the net, and in the long run, the experiment of forging a new Soviet identity side by side with the promotion of ethno-territorial diversity contributed slightly more to the development of ethnic nationalism than to the building of an overarching political community. Russian nationalism famously grew after WW2. Still, it never had political articulation until perestroika. Stalin’s anti-Semitic policies, launched in the 1930s, were part of his flirtation with Russian nationalistic moods. His relegitimation of the

GLOBAL BRIEF • WINTER | SPRING 2014

The rhetoric of the greatness and independence of the new Russia under Putin on the global stage – including in the recent Sochi Olympics – certainly plays with these Russian national feelings, but it never gives them their name.

Russian Orthodox Church in 1943 was specifically aimed at boosting patriotic feelings during the war against the Germans. (Consider the irony that a Georgian leader who spoke Russian with a strong accent was the most dramatic face of 20th century Russian imperialism coopting Russian nationalism.) A thicker Russian patriotic posture predominated in the military command and in the secret services. It had some practical implications: Jews, Tatars and Lithuanians were not allowed to populate the upper ranks of the KGB from the 1960s; and several top mathematical and scientific universities had tacit quotas on Jews in order to limit their presence in the sensitive military technology sectors, as they were considered likely future émigrés. In the first decade after the dissolution of the USSR, a federal framework seemed to be the only plausible solution for integrating national-territorial enclaves – many of which were making claims to sovereignty – in the ambit of a new Russia. Federalism was also associated with democracy and liberalism (the dominant Russian ideology of the

1990s), with the electoral programme of Boris Yeltsin stating in 1996: “[Federalism] is a territorial form of democracy.” This post-Soviet federal approach to internal diversity was conceptually close to Soviet multinational federalism but, crucially, lacked the ideological glue of the old Communist and Soviet communities. Russian nationalism, through the federal logic, ceded political and symbolic weight to non-Russian republics, thereby becoming intellectually marginal. And the lack of a positive imagined community common to the entire country led to an official search for a new ‘national idea.’ This search – in its positive and negative manifestations alike – has to date yielded little fruit. (The Sochi Olympics were doubtless part of this search.) In the 1990s, the weakening of the federal centre – the Kremlin – led to the atomization of Russia’s regions, including new and renewed ‘asks’ and bids for regional autonomy. By historical accident, the national and autonomous republics were the parts of the country richest in natural resources. As such, local ethnic elites controlled the natural resources, while ethnic Russians were often discriminated against and had limited access to power within local political, economic and cultural networks. As Russia entered the new century and its second post-Soviet decade, the intellectual irritation of Russian nationalist authors with the multinational diversity of Russian federalism rose. This supported Vladimir Putin’s push for the realignment of the regional barons to the new centre. After Putin’s 2005 amendment allowing the President of Russia to nominate the leaders of federal units without elections (reinstating, after the 2004 Beslan massacre, a muscular ‘power vertical’ from the Kremlin), the federal idea in Russia lost its constitutional sense – even while still maintaining, to some extent, the symbolic multinational framework. Let us note, however: Putin’s project has been that of a highly centralized and autocratic state that otherwise respects its internal ethnic diversity. It is not – to be sure – a nation-building project along ethnic Russian lines. A new political nation encompassing various nationalities and ethnic groups under one common Russian identity is an alternative conception of the Russian state recently advanced by Mikhail Khodorkovsky (who also has insisted on the defence of Russia’s territorial integrity, including in respect of Chechnya). This new community would require imagining a much more open definition of ‘Russianness’ than the current post-Soviet idiom, which forces Russians to choose between ethnic homogeneity and territory. However, the purely ethnic (rather than cultural) identification of each individual inculcated by the Bolsheviks still makes most ethnic Russians reluctant to recognize as ‘Russians’ those who are ethnically not – even if the extant cultural codes are quite porous. This deeply

Faculty of Graduate Studies

Master of Arts (MA) with internship

If you are considering a career in government or the public service and are looking for a competitive edge, this program is for you.

Rigorous, Enriching Program Our academically rigorous program will provide you with the chance to earn your MA degree through coursework and benefit from a paid internship option that combines first-class academic work with practical employment experience to give you an advantage in the workplace. Students in this graduate program will: • Participate in a paid internship • Become a paid teaching assistant • Secure automatic entry to an MPP program at the University of Michigan-Dearborn • Have the opportunity of securing a research position • Be eligible for exceptional entrance scholarships The department is committed to providing funding packages that match or beat those of other MA programs. We encourage you to apply to join our program.

For more information, please contact us: Department of Political Science University of Windsor Windsor, Ontario, N9B 3P4 Phone: 519-253-3000, Ext. 2348 E-mail: polsci@uwindsor.ca

www.uwindsor.ca/polsci

GLOBAL BRIEF • WINTER | SPRING 2014

entrenched ethnic identification among Russian citizens would appear to militate against the project of a new, postethnic Russian community. And yet the vast non-Russian territories of Russia make ethno-political nationalism plainly incompatible with the preservation over the long run of the entire expanse of Russia’s geography. In other words, only the promotion of new political and cultural forms of symbolic unity can help Russia get out of this box. If these new forms of unity do not emerge, then the tension between the logic of blood and that of territory will before long destabilize Russia (see the Feature article by Leonid Kosals in GB’s Fall 2012 issue). The growing number of Muslim migrants – many of them Russian citizens from various ethnic republics – in Russia’s largest cities constitutes a new challenge and trigger for more active Russian nationalist rhetoric – in some cases, even riots. Will the children of these immigrants from the Russian South one day feel themselves to be, and be recognized by others as, Russians? This is not an easy bet. The mood of Russian nationalist authors in this regard is deeply sceptical. Some of these writers, as well as the prominent opposition politician and blogger Alexey Navalny, have argued that, instead of “feeding the Caucasus” (especially in the form of military subsidies from the centre), letting Chechnya go would, in the net, be a better option for the Russian state. By way of reaction, a special law was recently passed by the Duma making it a crime to question or impugn “Russia’s territorial integrity.” Of course, the majority of Russia’s nationalist commentators recognize full well that explicit Russian political nationalism endangers Russia’s territorial integrity, and as such that the potential price of such nationalism is high indeed. In other words, in trying to define the Russian nation, nationalists have to choose between national territory and national homogeneity. Thus far, the majority has chosen territory. This seems to be ‘in the blood,’ as it were, or otherwise in the cultural code – even if Navalny’s arguments about Chechnya suggest that the preference for territory (including in the case of Crimea) will increasingly need to withstand greater intellectual scrutiny than in the past. The absence of a politically recognized Russian nation in Russia makes the state weaker and increases the symbolic role of the political leader, who must in turn personalize the unity of the implicit nation, while publicly defending the multiethnic character of the country. But this personification of Russian unity inevitably reduces to incoherence and inconsistency. It also ties Russian unity dangerously to the quality and fortunes of the leader. Russia’s political evolution will certainly have to move beyond this state of affairs and attempt to draw a more coherent and positive ‘imagined community’ linking the territory and its people. This will not be easy, and success is not guaranteed: Europe’s long and arduous history of ethnic conflict and nationalistic wars serves as a warning. But the wager is certainly worth making if the new Russia and its Russians are to invent the new content and psychological grammar that they so desperately seek. | GB

QUERY

New acting Prime Minister of Ukraine, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, speaks to lawmakers during a session of the Verkhovna Rada in Kiev, Feb. 27, 2014.

Ukraine: What happened? Where’s it going? What’s to be done? The Ukrainian revolution was caused by gross policy incompetence at a time when Kiev needed heroic leadership. It will take even greater heroic leadership – and luck – to stitch the country back together BY IRVIN STUDIN Irvin Studin is Editor-in-Chief and Publisher

GLOBAL BRIEF • WINTER | SPRING 2014

of Global Brief.

n the Fall 2013 issue of GB, prior to the start of the Maidan protests in Kiev, I wrote the following: “Having enjoyed little more than a year of true selfgovernment – in the event, between 1918 and 1919, under history professor-turned-president Mikhail Grushevsky – before its independence at the fall of the USSR, it is by no means manifest that Ukraine will or should continue to exist as a self-governing state in the decades to come. Its survival dance is exceedingly delicate. The Ukrainian state must still be stood up, and the country’s future must be secured. Whether this happens will depend to a great extent on the skill and luck of Kiev’s governing classes.” I went on to argue: “As such, the relevant question or ‘frame’ for gauging the future of Ukraine is not democracy versus non-democracy – but rather pioneering competence versus the absence thereof. [...] Can Kiev project strategic-constitutional legitimacy across the entire territory of a state the coherence of which, in identity terms, is not yet affirmed, and the material well-being of which remains unimpressive and vulnerable? Or will the country [...] reduce to a strategic cripple, buffeted between larger powers

and perhaps even seeking refuge with one of these (most likely Russia)?” The demise of the government of Viktor Yanukovych was indeed the result of rank incompetence. It was patently not, as some overzealous or otherwise naïve Western commentators and practitioners would like to believe, a victory of Ukrainian democratic or popular will over a brutal dictatorship. This is a distorted frame that only succeeds in ascribing legitimacy to new authorities in Kiev who are largely representative of the same inept and corrupt governing class as that of the Yanukovych team (as I wrote, Yushchenko was even more inept, while Tymoshenko – a darling reborn – was arguably more corrupt), and partly representative of extreme nationalist forces in the country that are the very antithesis of the values at the heart of the European Union in particular and Western civilization in general. Meanwhile, armed militias – led by Pravy Sektor, the highly organized, motivated and violent network at the sharp end of the uprising against Yanukovych – patrol Kiev and other cities in place of any legitimate police force, threatening PHOTOGRAPH: THE CANADIAN PRESS / AP / SERGEI CHUZAVKOV

in Ukraine and consequences from the Kremlin. The central policy challenge for Yanukovych and his government over the three years since election was to found, build and consolidate the national institutions, material well-being, national psychology and single, unified conception of Ukraine that would allow this fragile state to pivot toward Europe without alienating Russia, and indeed to prepare to resist the inevitable pressure – deliberate and inadvertent – that would be exerted from Moscow and from within Ukraine as Kiev attempted to pry itself even partially from the general Russian gravity. In this central policy challenge, Yanukovych and his team failed abysmally – a failure caused by indecision, distraction, corruption and a signal incapacity to think systematically and strategically about Ukraine and its structure and interests. This failure was compounded by the erstwhile inability of the Yushchenko-Tymoshenko government – paralyzed by internal conflict – to meaningfully move the yardsticks of Ukrainian state-building.

anukovych’s reversal on the EU association agreement at the eleventh hour was the move that collapsed a pyramid of almost a score of failed proposed reforms by his government – from pensions to the public service. These reforms did not succeed in creating a national Ukrainian bulwark – geopolitically, economically and psychologically – that would consolidate the Ukrainian state across its significant territory and across the internal divisions and contradictions among its citizens. However, the reforms did succeed in driving the expectations of many, if not most, Ukrainians to the effect that the country was moving inexorably toward Europe. Yanukovych’s volte-face on the European agreement flew in the face of the great expectations that he and his team had set, and led immediately to the mass protests on the Maidan – protests lubricated by a general national frustration with the quality of life in Ukraine and with the obviously poor and crooked character of the country’s political classes. On top of the patent absence of adequate national preparation to meet the terms of the EU agreement, two factors would have obviously precipitated the volte-face – a volte-face that would have incensed even the properly patriotic members of Yanukovych’s own team: first, analysis from Ukraine’s bureaucracy to the effect that, in order to meet the stipulations and standards outlined in the EU agreement, the near- and medium-term cost to Ukraine would be in the dozens of billions of dollars (discounted net benefit aside) – a point driven home by Ukraine’s Russia-leaning oligarchs; and second, threatened sanctions and a large financial package from Moscow. Between the costly requirements of the European pivot and the opportunity costs brutally imposed by

Poor analytics and a fervent attachment to simplistic narrative will lead these countries to irrelevance in the resolution of the Ukrainian question or, worse still, improper calculation about what is to be done for such resolution.

GLOBAL BRIEF • WINTER | SPRING 2014

and forcing at gunpoint officials affiliated – closely and loosely alike – with the deposed government to resign or flee. (The entire leadership team of the prestigious Higher School of Public Administration in Kiev – meant to develop the future public leaders of Ukraine, and one of the sole important reforms of the Yanukovych period – was forced at gunpoint to resign, in front of the students of the School. Half of this leadership team was appointed not by Yanukovych, but by Yushchenko.) In their frenzy, these militias are crippling and destroying the very national institutions – from ministries to universities – that Ukraine so desperately needs if it is to survive in any recognizable form as a self-governing state. Commentators who have turned the Ukrainian revolution into a facile morality play in which Yanukovych is easily vilified as a regressive puppet of Russia and those who have deposed him as Westernoriented democrats or progressives misrepresent a revolution that is, on the ground, consuming its children. These commentators misunderstand the causes of the revolution and, as a painful result, fail to appreciate its consequences both for Ukraine and for its neighbours in Russia and the EU – and ultimately for other strategic theatres around the world. Poor analytics and a fervent attachment to simplistic narrative will lead these countries either to irrelevance in the resolution of the Ukrainian question or, worse still, improper calculation in respect of what is to be done for such resolution. To repeat, the principal cause of the fall of the Yanukovych regime was policy and administrative incompetence. His regime was just as democratic (or non-democratic) as those of prior Ukrainian presidents in the post-Soviet era – only his incompetence came at a far more critical point in the historical arc of Ukraine’s improbable state-building project. As such, it is important to observe that Yanukovych’s government was, for the majority of its life, guiding Ukraine toward European integration: the school and university curricula across Ukraine reflected this, with European integration classes and full academic departments laying the intellectual and cultural groundwork; contacts and relationships with EU officials and leaders were close and regular, with many EU line programmes proliferating across Ukrainian territory; and, most importantly, there was very respectable policy and political space and light between Yanukovych’s team and that of Vladimir Putin – that is, the former was very consciously not aligning with the latter, even if this team recognized the critical nature of productive relations between Kiev with Moscow. The initialling by Kiev of an association agreement with the EU was certainly part of this general vector or European pivot, as it were – even if, by this time, Yanukovych doubtless already knew that full signature of the agreement would be met with resistance from business interests

GLOBAL BRIEF • WINTER | SPRING 2014

These militias may have already ushered in a new era of politicalconstitutional relevance for extreme nationalist forces in Eastern and Central Europe – a relevance that may consolidate depending on the evolution of Russia’s intervention into Ukraine.

the Kremlin, Kiev was ultimately unable to extract the rents that, were it playing its strategic game properly, should be Ukraine’s as it pivots promiscuously between Brussels and Moscow – with perhaps Beijing added for good measure – all for the advantage and benefit of the Ukrainian state and its people. But then again, it would have taken a heroically talented class of political leaders and pioneers to effectuate these promiscuous pivots between major powers in the extremely short window of world-historical time that was given to Ukraine to build and solidify a bona fide state where there never was one. Even at 46 million, 24 oblasts (along with an autonomous Crimea) and sizeable geography (larger than that of Germany), Ukraine is far less complex to govern, internally, than, say, a federation like Canada. Its constitutional structure is unitary, its population – far more than that of the Russian Federation – is ethnically largely homogeneous (albeit with religious differences) and the command-and-control ‘power vertical’ from the Presidential Administration (the cabinet office) down through to the governors of the oblasts is taut. The linguistic, religious and mentality differences that split the east and west of the country are far less profound than those that have historically divided the French- and English-speaking populations of Canada, not to mention Canada’s Aboriginal people (see the Feature article by Joseph Heath at p. 12, and also the Tête à Tête interview with Bob Rae at p. 36). With a highly educated and cultured population, the essential ingredients were in place for talented leaders to steer the country and its citizens to prosperous, independent statehood. Of course, as mentioned, the window of opportunity for Ukraine was small, and it may not return. States over the last two centuries have tended to last no longer than 60 years – after which they have tended to collapse or change constitutionally, through combinations of internal or external forces; that is, through constitutional or strategic upheaval. This means that statehood is never foreordained, and that its continuation is not inevitable; in other words, statecraft requires skill and, to be sure, luck. If Ukraine was to succeed beyond its current two decades of post-Soviet statehood where it only enjoyed one or two years of statehood in all of its history, then the skill requirement would presumably supersede that of good fortune. And the standard of performance of Ukraine’s political elites was, on this score, inadequate. In the vacuum created by political-constitutional collapse, Moscow has intervened militarily – likely in breach of international law – to secure its naval interests and broader symbolic attachment in Crimea. This intervention will, by design, apply significant pressure on Kiev and, most importantly, the eastern regions of Ukraine, where the large populations of major cities like Kharkov, Donetsk, Odessa and

Dnipropetrovsk are in great part sceptical about, if not outright hostile to, the new authorities in Kiev. In the meantime, these authorities, of dubious legality and limited technical talent, are struggling to assert some degree of constitutional-strategic legitimacy across the territory and population of the country – this in the absence of functional national institutions, and in the face of the said marauding militias who, hardened by the Maidan protests, have become an authority unto themselves. Note: These extreme militias will not be assimilated easily into mainstream Ukrainian institutions – even in the medium term. They may before long turn on the new authorities in Kiev. And, most importantly, they may have already ushered in a new era of politicalconstitutional relevance for extreme nationalist forces in Eastern and Central Europe – a relevance that may consolidate depending on the evolution of Russia’s military intervention into Ukraine.

hat’s to be done? It is far from certain – indeed improbable – that Ukraine will be stitched back together in its erstwhile form. But a newly elected president and a heroic team could perhaps, with great luck and indulgence from Russia (and Western states, to a lesser extent), begin the long and arduous mission of restoring central government legitimacy over a country that may by then have new borders and a revised constitutional structure – including greater degrees of autonomy for a number of regions or oblasts. Russia will have a near-veto on the prospects for such legitimacy and the erection of sustainable, credible, whole-ofUkraine institutions, but it will need to be sure that it does not engage in la surenchère parisienne – overreaching into Ukrainian territory and expending its military, economic and strategic resources in a way that ultimately compromises the always-precarious internal stability of the Russian Federation. Finally, the EU and North America will also have to continue to calibrate their interventions in Ukraine and the former Soviet space in a way that is perpetually mindful of the need to avoid direct military clashes with Russia and to return Moscow to a diplomatic and economic logic without, paradoxically, altogether destabilizing Russia internally – something that would surely be disastrous for the stability of the world entire. Finally, for a number of Western states – and in particular for Canada – there will have to be a sobre realization that Russia is no longer to the east, as it were, but due north across the Arctic. Strategy in the Ukraine theatre cannot be delinked from critical interests in the far more important Arctic theatre, and the fiction of an interminable Pax Arctica that should guide the settlement of the numerous, complex claims and interests in this new theatre should finally be put to rest. | GB

Master’s in Development Practice: Indigenous Development

Do development differently. FULL PAGE, FULL BLEED

Trim size:Interdisciplinary. 8.5” wide x 10.875”Unique. high Indigenous. Global.

Program features:

Bleed size:

8.75” wide x 11.125” high

• First year orientation • Interdisciplinary and course-based • Practical skill development • Career counselling • Two field placements (Canadian & international) • Global network of MDP universities and collaborating organizations

Visit mdp.uwinnipeg.ca or call 204.258.2998 to find out more. MDP FounDing Partners:

MacArthur Foundation

GLOBAL BRIEF • WINTER | SPRING 2014

A President’s Political Capital

IN SITU

Pena Nieto has had a whirlwind first year of reforms in all areas of Mexican life. Now he must change the reality on the ground CÉSAR VELÁZQUEZ GUADARRAMA reports from Mexico City

César Velázquez Guadarrama is a professor in the Department of Economics, Universidad Iberoamericana,

GLOBAL BRIEF • WINTER | SPRING 2014

in Mexico City.

n his first year as president, Enrique Pena Nieto expended much of his political capital to push through an impressive number of ‘structural reforms.’ In 2013, the Mexican Congress passed a constitutional reform that will allow the private sector to participate in the national oil, gas and electricity markets. It also passed a fiscal reform package, an education reform bill, a telecommunications reform bill, a finance reform bill, an antitrust reform bill, and a political and electoral reform package. The government having had the political acumen to convince the main opposition parties – the PAN and PRD – to support these reforms, the totality of Pena Nieto’s reform push would appear to be a great achievement after nearly two decades of legislative gridlock. And yet these reforms are, on their own, highly unlikely to increase economic growth or produce a safer and more politically stable Mexico. While the Pena Nieto government has been successful in selling the reforms – within and especially outside of the country – far more is needed for the social and economic advancement of Mexican society and the Mexican state. Here are some of the most urgent issues that must be addressed.

middle classes (see the Nez à Nez debate between James Radner and Fred Lazar at p. 56). The political reforms, for their part, have led to the creation of a body of confusing rules that, among other things, grant the new federal institute for the organization of federal elections (Instituto Nacional Electoral, or INE) powers to remove control of state and local elections from the state electoral institutes. There being little clarity about when exactly the INE can so act, it is easy to foresee significant conflict among the political parties and candidates in state elections, challenging decisions of the INE as circumstances and interests warrant.

Quality of the reforms. Public opinion and aca-

Implementation. Mexico is a country that excels in

demic specialists have been highly critical of the fiscal and political reforms in particular. The fiscal reform increased federal marginal corporate income tax rates, changed the way in which business depreciation and losses and profits are calculated and, among many other things, introduced a special tax on sodas and high-fat food. However, the reform did not broaden the tax base or give any incentive to ‘micro’ firms and small firms to abandon the informality at the heart of Mexican business culture. Consider also the obesity tax: few believe that a tax alone will credibly tackle this major Mexican health problem, given that obesity has multiple causes, and given that a large proportion of food in Mexico is sold in informal markets. Although it is too early to assess the impact of these changes, some private firms have already announced withdrawals of investment on the argument that the new tax system has diminished their expected rate of return. Consumption may also fall, since disposable income will diminish – especially for the middle and upper

creating laws that are simply not followed. Consider events surrounding the new education law. For most of last year, teachers in the CNTE, a teachers’ union that opposes the law, suspended classes in several states – for starters, in Oaxaca, Michoacan and Mexico City – leaving thousands of children out of school for as long as three months. Most of these teachers faced no consequences in respect of their job status or pay. And in January of this year, the minister of education announced the cancellation of ENLACE, a standardized test for all Mexican students up to grade nine. These two episodes contradict the objectives of the government’s education reform – to wit, the evaluation of student and teacher performance, and the introduction of rewards and sanctions for the actions of the players in Mexico’s educational system.

Secondary Laws. The success of the reforms will, to be sure, ultimately depend on details. For now, critical details are lacking for the energy, telecommunications and antitrust reforms. For example, the energy reform bill only changed a few sentences in the Constitution, while more substantive changes will be settled through specific or secondary laws. The certainty and clarity of these rules will define how the private sector will participate, and with what intensity of investment.

Public spending. Structural reforms may well improve conditions for economic growth, but to sustain such growth over the medium and long term public spending will need to be more efficient. Billions of

pesos are spent annually on social programmes with little measurable impact on the welfare of Mexicans. Spending on infrastructure fails to pass any credible cost-benefit analysis. Of course, there is considerable anecdotal evidence of waste in public resources – federally, as well as at the state and municipal levels – but we can also rely on programme evaluations conducted by the National Council for the Evaluation of Social Development Policy (CONEVAL) and analysis done by serious Mexican think tanks, including Mexico Evalua and Fundar.

Basic public services may not, for purposes of political optics, generate the same excitement as structural reforms. However, an efficient public transportation system, readily available drinking water, a stable urban development plan, and an efficient local judicial system are crucial factors in reducing crime. And, of course, these are among the first things that entrepreneurs consider when deciding where to invest. As most of these basic services fall into state areas of constitutional competence, it seems

Crime. Security remains a major concern for all Mexicans. Pena Nieto’s two initial policies on crime involved diminishing the presence of crime-related news in the media, and improving cooperation between the federal, state and local authorities. One year later, however, public perceptions of Mexico’s crime rates have not improved. Although homicides have declined, extortion and kidnappings are on the rise. The capture of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, the country’s most wanted drug baron, is a major coup, but is not in itself expected to dramatically reduce the aggregate level of drug-related violence.

Federalism. Another issue that has

PHOTOGRAPH: THE CANADIAN PRESS / AP / EDUARDO VERDUGO

manifest that Mexico’s states need to be empowered and capacitated to succeed in delivering them. Pena Nieto’s recent appearance on the cover of Time magazine is good news: Mexico is much more than its crime indicators. Still, after a magnificent legislative push in Year One, there is little room for complacency. What next, then? The new administration must recognize that it needs to monitor all areas of government – horizontally across the federal ministries, and vertically into the states and municipalities. Feedback loops from the ground back to the centre must be improved. And the centre must carefully evaluate and assess the effects of its reforms and have the political courage to modify these, as the evidence requires. It must be prepared to discuss the future of Mexican federalism. The economic recovery may be slower than predicted: in 2013, the Mexican economy grew 1.1 percent, as against original forecasts of over three percent. The consumer confidence index is decreasing. Crime rates are still very high; internationally, they are perceived to be higher still. Reality may soon bite if Pena Nieto does not quickly move beyond structural reforms, and beyond Mexico City, to address the complex and crooked timber of the Mexican condition. | GB

US President Barack Obama, Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto, and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper shake hands at the end of a news conference concluding the North American Leaders’ Summit in Toluca, Mexico, February 2014.

GLOBAL BRIEF • WINTER | SPRING 2014

received little attention is the role of Mexico’s 31 states (and the Federal District) and more than 2,000 municipal governments in the future of Mexican governance. Over the last 15 years, state governors have gained considerable economic and political power. These changes have not, in the net, issued in better public policy. On the contrary, with fewer checks and balances than at the federal level, state governments have been responsible for some of the most notable and widely reported cases of financial mismanagement and corruption. The response from the centre has been to establish more public expenditure controls and to remove some administrative functions – such as teachers’ payroll – from the states. Such public spending controls are not new. Over the medium to long term, however, given that Mexico is a big and heterogeneous country, what is really needed is a new design for Mexican federalism in toto – a design that incentivizes state and local authorities to generate innovative and sound public policies. This new design must be based on two principal elements: a clear definition of the responsibilities of each level of government (federal, state and municipal), and expanded capacity for states to collect taxes (something that does not require any constitutional changes, but only changes to taxation laws). The taxation reform would reduce the states’ dependence on federal transfers.

The Canadian state’s answer must start with psychological-spiritual resuscitation of the Aboriginal people, but cannot overshoot to the point of emasculating the strategic centre BY IRVIN STUDIN

REFLECTIONS ON THE

ABORIGINAL QUESTION Irvin Studin is Editor-in-Chief and Publisher

GLOBAL BRIEF • WINTER | SPRING 2014

of Global Brief.

f the Quebec question will remain, for the foreseeable future, central to the constitutional survival of Canada, then the Aboriginal question is by far the most important moral question of Canada’s 21st century. No other public question in Canada has its historical weight, inertia and complexity, and no other public tragedy has affected as many generations of Canadians through the vectors of economic destitution, social dysfunction and spiritual disorientation. Indeed, on virtually no other public question can commentators and analysts outside of Canada point, with considerable credibility, to the country as having failed abysmally in reversing indicators of well-being that in many cases rival those of developing countries. But what is the Aboriginal question this century? Over the last four or five decades – and particularly since the advent of the first series of important Supreme Court decisions in respect of Aboriginal people in the 1970s (starting with the 1973 Calder case, and accelerating after the constitutionalization of section 35 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms) – as Canadian policy-making has migrated away from the assimilationist paradigm, the question has been framed variously as one of social justice for oppressed or colonized peoples, reconciliation between First Nations and white Canadians, fiduciary duty and honour of the Canadian Crown (or government), and self-government tout court. The result of this intellectual evolution is that there is in Canada today a reasonably consensual endpoint among policy-makers to the effect that the ‘good life’ should be far more attainable for Ab-

GLOBAL BRIEF • WINTER | SPRING 2014

ILLUSTRATION: ANITA KUNZ

GLOBAL BRIEF • WINTER | SPRING 2014

original people – individually and collectively – this century; and also that Aboriginal people ought to have far more capacity to define that ‘good life’ on their own terms, as they see fit. Whatever its precise trappings, in general terms it seems to be presumed that this ‘good life’ for Aboriginal people should include some mix of material assets (housing and a living wage), social status, professional opportunity (including through high-quality education), legal rights and, in the collective, title to land, where history so warrants. At the same time, what may be highly underappreciated in its centrality to the Aboriginal condition is one basic fact: the Aboriginal people in Canada continue to live as history’s loser; that is, most of the Aboriginal people in Canada are descended, most recently, from people who, in their legal, social, economic, organizational and geopolitical interactions with non-Aboriginals – principally European settlers and their own descendants – were, over time, for a great variety of reasons, stripped of territory, prestige, and the underpinnings of social and material wellbeing. In some cases, they were plainly outmanoeuvred; in others they were tricked; and in others still they were assimilated, killed or sickened by newly come diseases. The aggregate effect of these blows was historical defeat for the majority of the First Nations to the white man – a defeat that has, ever since, mercilessly conditioned the logic of the relationship between First Nations people and what would become Canadian governments and Canadian society. To this very day, the Aboriginal people have not been relieved – in their own minds or in those of the winning majority – of the status of Canadian history’s losing people. This is not a merely formal status – it is, instead, a properly psychologicalspiritual one. It means that, to a large extent, the negative drag of the Aboriginal question today continues to be psychological-spiritual in nature, and that a good part of the answer to the Aboriginal question – that is, to the transformation of the Aboriginal condition in Canada – must deal frontally with this psychological-spiritual reality. The creation over time in Canada of a properly bilingual, bicultural and binational state – in the constitutional and political senses – points the way forward on the Aboriginal question in this early new

century. By design (and, to be sure, some serendipity), Canada’s great success in responding to the challenge to internal unity and cohesion posed by the linguistic, cultural and ideational differences between the English-speaking majority and the French-speaking minority – itself descended from the losers of the decisive Seven Years’ War – has been premised on the idea that the endgame consists not in perfect harmony or amity among the tribes, but rather depends on how a historically victorious majority can rehabilitate and resuscitate defeated minorities as political and even cultural co-equals – co-equals who are equally invested in the continued existence of the state. Historically defeated («Je me souviens»), the French Canadian in Canada – and in Quebec especially – today walks with his or her head held high, properly self-respecting and in turn respected by the English-speaking majority as politically equal and as hailing from a culture that is just as prestigious as the Anglo-Saxon culture of the historical victors in North America. The French language is today not only studied in all of the schools of English-speaking Canada, but is held in equally high regard in official national institutions and, just as importantly, in the minds of most Canadians. An Anglophone can therefore become prime minister of Canada while being a rank naïf in international affairs and strategy, but not – to be sure – without more or less mastering (and respecting) the French language. The rehabilitation or resuscitation of the French Canadians in Canada from historical losers to political and cultural co-equals did not happen overnight. It took decades and at least a few generations of conspicuous pushes in policy and constitutional reform – doubtless propelled also by the heroism of many intellectuals and political actors from French Canada in general and Quebec in particular. And, as mentioned, while there evidently continues to be (and likely always will be) great debate in Canada and in Quebec about degrees of respect and dignity and constitutional power and division of responsibilities (see the Tête à Tête interview with Bob Rae at p. 36), the character of the French Canadian or Quebec question by now has precious little to do with historical tragedy and the extremes of basic material and social well-being for French Canadians and Quebecers. Instead, it is, in its sweet spot, a purely first world question about how to govern between centre and region, or between the general and the local or specific. Let us continue with this logic. Of the four major Anglo-Saxon democracies with large Aboriginal or indigenous populations – Canada, the US, Australia and New Zealand – it is surely New Zealand that has enjoyed the greatest success in the relationship between its indigenous peoples (mostly the Maori) and the white majority. Unlike indigenous people in

the other three countries, the Maori in New Zealand are highly represented in the professions, in the national army, in sports (most famously dominating the All Blacks rugby union team, and inspiring its magical haka) and, to be sure, in politics, where the national parliament affords a designated number of seats exclusively for Maori representation. To be sure, the Maori also suffer from many of the social dislocations of indigenous people in the other three countries; however, in no case do the indigenous populations of these countries have anything resembling the upside suggested for New Zealand’s Maori on the score of most indicators of socioeconomic well-being. There would seem to be one signal reason for this difference: gross modo, the Maori, uniquely among the indigenous people of the four countries in question, fought the colonizing white man more or less to a strategic draw in the mid-19th century. While its just interpretation (and implementation) remains hotly contested, the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi, the founding constitutional document of the New Zealand state, reflects this broad logic of strategic parity between settler and native at time zero. As such, the constitutionalpolitical development of the New Zealand state has, in the main, been in the direction of making the Maori the constitutional-political equal of the white man in New Zealand – that is, self-respecting and, to be sure, respected by New Zealand’s majority, including linguistically and in national rituals and symbology.

The aggregate effect of these blows was historical defeat for the majority of the First Nations to the white man – a defeat that has mercilessly conditioned the logic of the relationship between First Nations people and Canadian governments and Canadian society. Sanderson wrote about this rework of Canadian federalism this century, in the Spring/Summer 2013 issue of GB, in terms far more informed than I could muster. But I would humbly add, for good measure, that, if we accept the diagnostic of psycho-spiritual disorientation and anomie at the heart of the condition of Canada’s Aboriginal people, then a key vector in the resuscitation of the Aboriginal people must be not legal or socioeconomic, but rather cultural in character. A pivotal aspect of this cultural game surely must be the stimulation, revival and mainstreaming of Aboriginal languages. Renewed study across Canada in provincial schools of, say, Cree, Ojibwe, Inuktitut and Michif – to take but four major Aboriginal tongues – would not only give Canadians a better appreciation, if not understanding, of Aboriginal realities – and mentalities – but would also lend prestige to the more general Aboriginal cultures that were brutally relegated to the peripheries of Canadian society. Aboriginals, in turn, would be given an opening and an audience for the prolif-

GLOBAL BRIEF • WINTER | SPRING 2014

y contrast, a deep spiritual and psychological disorientation prevails today, foundationally, among many members of Canada’s First Nations. This disorientation – indeed, spiritual anomie – stems from strategic loss in history. It conduces to a deep-seated insufficiency of self-belief and selfconfidence, reinforced by a general and painful disrespect or outright misapprehension (at best, indifference) by and from the white majority. If we accept this premise, then the grammar of the challenge for Canada must be to appreciate this spiritual-cultural disorientation and indeed, over the medium and long term, launch a process that aims to consciously rehabilitate and resuscitate the Aboriginal people into co-equals in the political stewardship of the country. Indigenous history and tradition themselves arguably anticipate, if not suggest, this path for Canada. Brutal and not infrequent wars took place among the many powerful indigenous confederacies prior to contact with the Europeans. These wars indubitably yielded winners and losers – changing but, critically, still preserving the relationships between

the belligerent nations. The victor nations became the ‘big brothers’ in the relationship, assuming a responsibility to look out for the ‘younger brothers’ – that is, to protect them from their remaining enemies, and to rebuild or reconstitute them so that they could become allies of equal consequence. In other words, victory led to protection and resuscitation of the defeated, which led, for purposes of survival, to reasonable co-equality in alliance. Clearly, part of this push to co-equal status in Canada for the Aboriginal people will involve making the binational logic at the heart of Canadian constitutionalism far more porous for purposes of Aboriginal representation, control of territory, and governing responsibilities. This would involve reimagining the internal borders and identities of Canada in ways that are more eclectic and indeed promiscuous than the very Cartesian 10 provinces-plus-three territories paradigm that predominates in most school textbooks and therefore in the psyche of most Canadians. Douglas

eration of books, magazines, blogs, films, radio and television shows across Canada and internationally in tongues that have renewed currency and credibility. We might then imagine a Canadian prime minister, in the year 2030, easily mastering English, French and Cree. (As I wrote in the Spring/Summer 2012 issue of GB, Canada’s internal dynamics and dominant international strategic game commend to it a national languages strategy involving the generalization of fluency or competence in English, French, and a key third international tongue – Mandarin, Russian, Spanish or Arabic – and/or a key Aboriginal language.)

o we have established the central structure of the Aboriginal question in Canada in this early new century: how to make the Aboriginal people political-constitutional co-equals in the governance of Canada – resuscitated from the spiritual anomie caused by strategic defeat, but loyal to, or invested in, the continued existence of the Canadian state. This psycho-spiritual question seems to inexorably beg a fundamentally strategic question that is fraternal in logic to the notion of securing the said interest and investment – or even loyalty – of Aboriginal people vis-à-vis the Canadian state. This

GLOBAL BRIEF • WINTER | SPRING 2014

The victor nations became the ‘big brothers’ in the relationship, assuming a responsibility to look out for the ‘younger brothers’ – that is, to protect them from their remaining enemies, and to rebuild or reconstitute them.

strategic question involves the very governability, efficacy or coherence of Canadian governance in the context of proliferating Aboriginal land claims and rights to resources and rents on treaty lands. Of course, as mentioned above, if the framing of the Aboriginal question has undergone intense evolution over the last four or five decades, it has still never been framed in strategic terms – more precisely, in relation to the capacity of the Canadian state to achieve basic strategic interests or ends given the dynamics and imperatives related to the Aboriginal people. The landmark 1997 Delgamuukw case came close to suggesting such logic when Chief Justice Lamer stated that the scope of constitutional validity or justifiability for state objectives that infringed section 35(1) Charter rights was broad, and that most of these objectives

related to the “reconciliation of the prior occupation of North America by aboriginal peoples with the assertion of Crown sovereignty.” Unfortunately, given the absence of a deep strategic culture in the Canadian judicature – as with much of Canadian public life, for reasons that I have discussed in past issues of GB – most of the Crown objectives listed by the Chief Justice were patently domestic in character. And yet, in the context of a strategically more difficult century for Canada (again, discussed in past issues of GB), and in the context of a Canada that may wish to, or indeed may be forced to, become one of the world’s major states, there is great medium- and long-term potential for friction and contradiction between the emerging constitutional capacity of Canada to efficiently, decisively and credibly move in ways that advance strategic interests and the legitimate claims and purposes of the Aboriginal people. Whether this friction is mitigated or exacerbated by a move to make Aboriginal people co-equals in Canadian governance remains to be seen. The verdict in this regard surely is not indifferent to the talents and temperament of Canada’s governing classes this century. Still, it is increasingly clear that extant and emerging legal-constitutional strictures being put on the Canadian Crown – in respect of the honour of the Crown, the Crown’s fiduciary duty and consultation obligations vis-à-vis First Nations, and also in respect of control of huge chunks of Canadian territory tout court (the case of Roger William v. British Columbia, currently being litigated at the Supreme Court, is a key one to watch) – will tend to blunt the capability of the federal government to move directly and independently on a host of strategic fronts. (Provincial governments, although less strategic actors than Ottawa, will also be handicapped.) The combination of accumulated jurisprudential wins and a move to become co-equals in Canadian governance could have the paradoxical effect of increasing Aboriginal expectations to the point where the centrifugal pulls and asks or demands on the Canadian state become extremely difficult to manage or resist. These demands will not always assume a peaceful form. From Arctic sovereignty to the exploitation of natural resources, the building of cross-Canadian infrastructure, and even the national capacity to plan and mobilize for war (certainly not excluded in a continental theatre the territory of which will be more hotly contested) are all national strategic projects that will bump up against Aboriginal considerations with great regularity and increasing intensity. The federation, with Aboriginal people more than ever at its core as equals, will become internally more grand and complex, and, from the external vantage point, more difficult to steer with great purpose and for great purposes. If this dance is to be negotiated, the federation will require greater public men and women at its helm. | GB

IN THE CABINET ROOM

GLOBAL BRIEF • WINTER | SPRING 2014

ILLUSTRATION: DUSAN PETRICIC

TÊTE À TÊTE

GLOBAL BRIEF • WINTER | SPRING 2014

There are many arguments as to why power should be devolved to the Welsh or Scottish parliaments. Those all make sense, but the notion of breaking away entirely from London makes a lot less sense.

Reasons for Staying Together GB sits down with the former federal opposition leader and Ontario premier to discuss Quebec, Scotland, Sri Lanka, statecraft and all that Conversation with BOB RAE GB: If there is a secession referendum in Quebec next year or the year after – something that is not impossible – what would be the key arguments for keeping Quebec within Canada (see the Feature article by Joseph Heath at p. 12)? BR: My view has always been that we need to present the federal option to Quebecers as giving them all of the advantages of a very high degree of autonomy – something that they already enjoy within the federation – and all of the advantages of a powerful association with the rest of the country. That is the best argument. Nehru used to refer to the Commonwealth as ‘independence plus.’ Canadian federalism is exceptionally devolved. The provinces have a great deal of responsibility for key areas of public policy, and Quebecers have a lot of room to manoeuvre within that federal structure. Absent that federal structure, Quebec becomes a diminished place – a more closed society; more impoverished economically, fiscally and financially. There is no economic argument favouring independence for Quebec. Of course, we cannot predict what the reaction and feelings will be in the rest of the country in the event of a referendum – or in the event of secession. That is always something that people should not underestimate. For instance, there is no reason why Quebec, post-secession, should enjoy the advantages of Canadian currency. I have been arguing in Ottawa and elsewhere, for a long time, that the Quebec dynamic is simply not something of which we can ever lose sight. As a country, we have certainly taken our eye off of this issue, and such absence of attention always allows mischief to flourish.

BR: The first one is that Quebecers are part of a great country called Canada. I think that the benefits and pride of being Canadian are very strongly embraced by Quebecers. I do not believe for a moment that the idea of Canada or that the emotional arguments about Canada are without considerable strength. Second, there are countless practical advantages for Quebec and Quebecers. There is plainly the PHOTOGRAPH: THE CANADIAN PRESS / FRED LUM

Bob Rae is the former Premier of Ontario, former leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, and a professor in

GB: What is the import of the upcoming Scottish referendum for a possible Quebec referendum?

the School of Public Policy and Governance,

BR: Scotland is just one case in point in the steady rise of local nationalisms in Europe. This, broadly speaking, is a cause for concern. I always think that the return to ethnic identity as the basis for citizenship is problematic. I am a big believer in the reality of pluralism. Every society is plural, in some sense. Countries that think of themselves as being made up of only one language or one identity are really not – that is, people are always more diverse (see the Feature article by Timur Atnashev at p. 18). I think that the borders and boundaries between countries, with some great exceptions, are becoming more and more artificial, and sovereignty much less of an absolute than it has ever been. Still, one of the reasons for which Canadians and Quebecers need to take an interest in what is happening in the UK is that, given our connections with Scotland and the United Kingdom, we have much at stake in reinforcing the advantages of association and unity and connection. Britain is becoming a more devolved society. It is not yet a truly federal country, but it will get there. There are many arguments as to why power should be devolved to local legislatures or to the Scottish parliament or Welsh parliament. Those all make sense to me, but the notion of breaking away entirely from London makes a lot less sense. GB: What is the nature of the Aboriginal question in Canada in this early new century (see the Feature article by Irvin Studin at p. 30)? How would you frame it? BR: The issue is: how do we build institutions that are based on respect? (See the Tête à Tête interview with Jean Charest in the Fall 2013 issue of GB.)

University of Toronto.

GLOBAL BRIEF • WINTER | SPRING 2014

GB: What are the key advantages from which Quebec profits within the federation?

advantage of being part of a bigger group – a bigger economic and geopolitical unit – that, at the same time, allows for a great deal of autonomy within the federation. There is no need to apologize or improvise at the last minute in respect of the arguments for unity. We simply need to talk much more directly about the real advantages of the federation.

Canada is not there yet. Our institutional base and our constitutional base doff their cap to respect, but there are many other very powerful historical forces at work that are not respectful and have not been respectful; in fact, they are based on conquest and racism. They have been based on an attempt to belittle or simply assimilate, and have ultimately proven to be disastrous. They will continue to be disastrous as long as they are embraced. As such, it is going to take some fundamental changes at the federal and provincial levels in terms of governance in order to make sure that the dignity of First Na-

There is no question, then, that Deng was a great leader. He was a communist – a member of the Communist Party of China – and worked within that structure. He made no apologies for that. tions people is recognized, and that their desire for self-government and greater autonomy and greater control over their own lives is met. If these aspirations are met, I am certain that there will be greater opportunities for general prosperity and for personal success for Canada’s Aboriginal people.

GLOBAL BRIEF • WINTER | SPRING 2014

GB: What would be some of the basic moves that federal and provincial governments would need to make?

BR: We have treaty structures that are partially negotiated by province and partially negotiated by the federal government, based on the 19th century and pre-19th century premise that we needed to limit and assimilate First Nations people. Those treaties have to be revisited and renovated in a major way. This is the story across a large part of Canada today. At the federal level, we have to embrace more clearly what devolution and greater responsibility for First Nations will look like. We have to send unconditional signals to the effect that the sharing of power and the creation of economic and social partnerships have to be the way forward – replacing what is essentially a colonial structure. There are three central pieces to this colonial structure and heritage. The first is the Indian Act. The second is the treaties. The third is the institutional base, at the heart of which is the Department of Aboriginal Affairs (now Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada), which really should not exist in the 21st century. There must be a complete rethink

about how these governance relationships work. GB: Is there a tension – short-term or long-term – between devolving respect or authority or resources to individual Aboriginal nations – big or small – and the ability to preserve a coherent, operational Canadian federation? BR: No. Canada’s federal structure has nothing to fear from its current devolved structure. This is actually quite an effective form of governance for a country that is as big as ours – as geographically large and as diverse in demography. The historical price that we have paid for paternalism and a lack of accountability and responsibility in relation to the Aboriginal people has been very high indeed. We are continuing to pay it. No one, in assessing the state of the relationships between Canadian governments and Aboriginal people, can seriously argue that what we have done over the last 200 years has been a success. GB: What does the path to success on this issue look like in coming decades? BR: It must involve much more effective regional government, just as we are seeing in Quebec. Ironically, the two provinces that had not originally signed treaties with First Nations – Quebec and British Columbia – have made the most progress on new models of effective governance. The Nisga’a Treaty and the James Bay Treaty, for instance, are modern treaties that are based on respect, economic partnership and self-government – that is, on a real sense of how things are supposed to work. However, if you look at the map of Northern Ontario, First Nations people have exceedingly little responsibility and very little say in what goes on. In other words, they have very little capacity to govern themselves. The result has been quite disastrous from the point of view of social development. GB: You have done much governance work in, on and for Sri Lanka. What is the state of affairs in Colombo and the rest of the country today? Does the country have a federal future? BR: It is difficult to assess what is happening on the ground. The government in Colombo is largely tied to the sentiments of the majority ethnic group. It is a Sinhalese nationalist government. It is an authoritarian government. It does not brook dissent or difference of opinion. It has used military conquest as a substitute for creating institutions based on respect. It won a civil war. It succeeded in achieving a military victory over a guerrilla army. But it has not succeeded in uniting the country in a way that is based on mutual respect. As such, the

government will continue to have problems convincing the world that positive change is underway. Despite the military victory, the government is going to find that the fundamental problems have not disappeared – that is, that there remains the basic fact that, in the north and the east of the country, there is a group of people who speak a different language and practice a different religion and are looking for institutional presence in the country. At present, this group does not see or feel such institutional presence and representation. On the contrary, it sees the national symbols that have been created by the new government as symbols of conquest. This just creates huge hardship for the losing minority, and will be a drag on the prospects for the country as a whole. GB: Who are the two or three most impressive leaders – globally, democratic or other – in this early new century? BR: Two leaders have been outstanding in the early part of the 21st century. We have lost them both: Vaclav Havel and Nelson Mandela (see the Tête à Tête interview with Ngaire Woods at p. 8 and Definition at p. 60). Both established a standard of understanding, lucidity, eloquence and inspiring leadership that has been quite phenomenal in transforming the politics – or at least the ideals – of Eastern Europe and Southern Africa, and indeed the world. Both of their leaderships are based on a powerful commitment to open societies and to really understanding the forces at play in complex theatres. In the case of Havel, he understood that the national and social structures in Stalinist, communist societies could never withstand scrutiny or become sustainable because of the repression and corruption on which they were based. In the case of Mandela, he was speaking out against a system of institutionalized racism that simply was not sustainable in the modern world. However, in so doing, he certainly was part of broader, more radical thinking – a rethink even for himself – that was essential in coming to terms with differences in society and the idea that one could not simply impose a kind of black nationalism on a country as diverse and complex as South Africa.

BR: If you look back at recent history, you can say that the greatest revolutionary figure in China was not Mao Zedong, but rather Deng Xiaoping. Deng understood that if China’s economy did not become more open and China did not more generally embrace the need to be more open to the rest of world, then Chinese society would become chaotic

GB: What about great leaders among the living? BR: In the US, President Obama has shown an extraordinary capacity for eloquence, for setting a tone, and for trying to set a direction for his society and his country. It is too early to tell whether he has been or will be a great president. Nevertheless,

Despite the military victory, the Sri Lankan government is going to find that the fundamental problems have not disappeared. People who speak a different language and practice a different religion are looking for institutional presence in the country. I do not think it too early to say that his election and his approach to governing are a testament to the general openness and dynamism of American society. Having said all of this, if you look at politics in much of Western Europe and North America – in democratic countries – this is not a time in which great leaders have stood out. We cannot say that. GB: Is there a reason for this dearth of greatness? BR: There are many reasons. The context in which politics happens today is extremely complex. The 24/7 news cycle, the power of money in political contests, and, among other things, the difficulty of making decisions that will last, make it harder. | GB

GLOBAL BRIEF • WINTER | SPRING 2014

GB: Is it possible to have great leadership in a non-democratic or less-than-democratic context?

– even more chaotic than in the last years of Mao and during the Cultural Revolution. There is no question, then, that Deng was a great leader. He was a communist – a member of the Communist Party of China – and worked within that structure. He made no apologies for that – that is, he knew who he was and what he stood for. Still, he understood that things needed to really change in China. Within authoritarian or communist or dictatorial societies, there are degrees of openness that, fostered by great leadership, can sometimes create the basis for significant change. On the other hand, if you take somebody like Vladimir Putin, I think that he has become a huge disappointment. Although he started off in the post-communist period in Russian history, he shows all of the signs of reverting to a very authoritarian and top-down style of thinking and governance. That is very worrisome for Russia and indeed possibly for Europe (see the Query article by Irvin Studin at p. 24).

Michael Barutciski est directeur des études supérieures à l’École des affaires publiques et internationales de Glendon, ainsi que membre de la rédaction de Global Brief.

LE DRAME DE LAMPEDUSA Les boat people désespérés exposent les difficultés de la solidarité européenne

GLOBAL BRIEF • WINTER | SPRING 2014

PAR MICHAEL BARUTCISKI

a Isola di Lampedusa, cette petite île italienne située près de la côte africaine, continue de faire la une des informations. Suite à la mort de plusieurs centaines de boat people l’automne dernier, les différents gouvernements européens semblent avoir mobilisé (encore une fois!) leurs efforts afin de «régler» le problème des migrants clandestins qui fuient les côtes libyennes et tunisiennes à bord d’embarcations de fortune bondées et impropres à la navigation. Le problème n’est pourtant pas nouveau: depuis de nombreuses années des jeunes hommes de l’Afrique ou de l’Asie fuient les conditions misérables et/ou dangereuses dans leur pays d’origine, pour tenter leur chance dans l’une des régions les plus attrayantes du monde. La réaction de l’Italie, ainsi que celles de l’Union européenne et de ses États membres, trahit certaines faiblesses du projet européen. Tandis que la crise de la zone euro a attiré l’attention des observateurs sceptiques de la solidarité entre l’Europe «disciplinée» du nord et ses partenaires méditerranéens, ces migrants en situation irrégulière suscitent plutôt une réaction émotive soulignant la dichotomie superficielle entre l’ouverture des frontières et la politique de fermeté. Si l’on veut aborder leur sort de manière réaliste, il faut éviter

PHOTOGRAPHIE: LA PRESSE CANADIENNE / AP / LUCA BRUNO

Nord et l’île de Lampedusa est devenue récemment l’une des plus fréquentées. On estime que plus de 40 000 migrants clandestins y sont passés en 2013, souvent avec des bateaux mal adaptés pour les eaux houleuses du canal de Sicile. Plusieurs organisations suggèrent que des milliers de personnes soient mortes en tentant ce trajet périlleux depuis la chute de Mouammar Kadhafi en 2011. Le drame humanitaire est tel que les gouvernements européens comprennent que le refoulement systématique des migrants serait scandaleux. Pourtant le problème est compliqué par le fait que les origines et les motivations des migrants varient considérablement (par exemple des jeunes

Un hangar de l’aéroport de Lampedusa abrite les cercueils des naufragés ayant péri près de l’île italienne le 3 octobre 2013. Les migrants ont été enterrés dans diverses communes en Sicile.

GLOBAL BRIEF • WINTER | SPRING 2014

ces positions vaguement fondées sur des convictions politico-éthiques et les remplacer par ce que Max Weber appellerait la Verantwortungsethik. Autrement dit, une solution éventuelle s’inscrirait forcément dans un esprit de compromis entre la responsabilité de protéger (les migrants) et la préservation de la souveraineté territoriale des membres de l’UE. Comme le révèle la situation de Lampedusa, l’absence de politique migratoire cohérente peut remettre en question l’un des principes primordiaux pour les citoyens européens – à savoir la liberté de circulation des personnes. Parmi les routes clandestines pour entrer dans l’UE, celle qui passe entre la côte de l’Afrique du

GLOBAL BRIEF • WINTER | SPRING 2014

On estime que plus de 40 000 migrants clandestins y sont passés en 2013, souvent avec des bateaux mal adaptés pour le canal de Sicile. Il se peut que des milliers de personnes soient mortes en tentant ce trajet depuis la chute de Kadhafi en 2011.

Érythréens fuyant le service militaire, des jeunes Ghanéens fuyant la misère, des familles syriennes échappant à la guerre), créant ainsi des difficultés en ce qui concerne leur statut juridique. À toutes fins pratiques, on pourrait dire que l’Italie se retrouve avec le gros des responsabilités (accueillir les migrants, examiner leurs demandes d’asile, etc.), les autres membres de l’UE ne voulant pas partager le fardeau. Dans cette optique, il y a au moins deux problèmes potentiels pour Rome: les forces navales italiennes ne seront pas en mesure de secourir les nombreux naufragés et le gouvernement devra composer avec une perception populaire selon laquelle le pays risque d’être submergé par un flux d’étrangers. Il s’agit évidemment de deux problèmes distincts. Les contrôles frontaliers affectent le nombre de migrants qui vont arriver en Europe, tandis que les conditions d’accueil affectent le séjour de ceux qui arrivent à pénétrer la périphérie de l’UE. Nous reviendrons sur le premier problème des contrôles frontaliers, car c’est à ce niveau qu’une solution éventuelle pourra émerger. En attendant cette solution, qui sera nécessairement le résultat d’efforts diplomatiques considérables, il faut également penser à la communauté d’accueil si l’on veut s’assurer de conditions d’accueil raisonnables pour les migrants. En d’autres mots, il faut prendre en compte la situation de la population locale si l’on veut promouvoir la protection d’étrangers qui cherchent un refuge. Pourtant, il ne s’agit pas de la façon typique d’aborder la protection, celle-ci étant d’habitude inscrite dans une perspective de droits individuels à caractère universel où les revendications des migrants et la condamnation du gouvernement d’accueil sont les moyens de pression utilisés par les associations militantes. Par exemple, lors d’une visite récente à Lampedusa, on m’a souvent demandé si j’étais journaliste. La plupart des villageois soupçonnaient initialement que j’étais à la recherche d’un scandale pour un scoop médiatique. Ils sont bien conscients que les visiteurs cherchent à les critiquer et les condamner pour le drame humanitaire des migrants. En effet, le scandale médiatisé est arrivé en décembre dernier quand une vidéo a été diffusée afin de dénoncer les conditions supposément inhumaines dans le centre d’accueil de l’île. Les images montrent des Africains aspergés à l’extérieur dans une procédure de traitement contre la gale. Les médias ont souligné que les migrants étaient publiquement déshabillés malgré le froid et que les conditions étaient comparables à celles d’un camp de concentration. Certains reportages ont combiné ces images avec de vieilles images pour suggérer que le centre ressemblait à une prison surpeuplée. Étant l’une des seules personnes de l’extérieur à avoir visité le centre de Lampedusa pendant la période

durant laquelle ces images de migrants «désinfectés» ont étés filmées (les journalistes sont interdits), je dois avertir qu’il y a eu une manipulation médiatique et que celle-ci ne sert pas les intérêts des migrants à long terme. Plusieurs d’entre eux manifestaient des symptômes typiques de la gale. En fait, ils étaient rassemblés dans un endroit désigné lors d’une journée ensoleillée où il faisait 16-17 degrés Celsius. Bien que le traitement en plein air ne soit pas l’idéal, l’irritation provoquée par cette maladie contagieuse est telle que les jeunes Africains étaient sans doute contents d’être traités. La vidéo filmée en cachette représentait clairement une tentative de provoquer une réaction publique quelques jours avant la «journée internationale des migrants» et les réunions du Conseil européen. Ces tactiques de choc semblent a priori avoir fonctionné dans la mesure où de nombreuses figures politiques en Italie et à Bruxelles se sont immédiatement indignées. Cependant si l’on s’intéresse à la protection des migrants et si l’on cherche à augmenter la transparence, il est clair que les autorités sur le terrain vont percevoir ce montage médiatique comme une simple manipulation qui justifie leur attitude envers les journalistes et les limitations sur le flux d’informations. Contrairement à de nombreux centres similaires à travers le monde, les migrants pouvaient sortir librement du centre de Lampedusa quand la vidéo a été tournée car les gardiens toléraient une brèche existante dans la clôture. L’hypocrisie est flagrante dans la mesure où les leaders qui se sont indignés sont les mêmes individus qui ont formulé les politiques de sécurité frontalière. Ces dernières sont remarquables car ambigües quant à leur objectif: est-ce empêcher les entrées illégales sur les côtes ou aider les pays de premier asile comme l’Italie? Il est plus facile pour les ministres et commissaires de se présenter comme «humanitaires» plutôt que de s’expliquer de manière nuancée à la population. Par la suite ils peuvent discrètement permettre des restrictions plus sévères afin d’éviter ces situations dans l’avenir. La fermeture annoncée du centre de Lampedusa devrait être perçue sous cet angle sceptique puisqu’elle détourne simplement l’attention du problème réel et de la politique régionale qui a un impact déterminant sur les migrants venant de l’Afrique. Cela n’a pas été suffisamment mentionné par les médias internationaux, mais en réalité l’accueil des migrants à Lampedusa est relativement généreux par rapport à d’autres régions affectées par les réfugiés. «L’Europe des riches» a beaucoup à apprendre de la générosité et l’ouverture de ces villageois. Comme disait le propriétaire d’une boulangerie locale: «On connaît la pauvreté, on comprend la raison pour laquelle ils fuient». Les discussions sur les migrants tournent vite vers des discussions sur leur propre misère et les problèmes économiques:

prix de pétrole élevé, nécessité de transport aérien pour recevoir des traitements médicaux, infrastructure déficiente, isolement aggravé par la corruption politique locale, etc. Ce sont les frustrations et les préoccupations de tout territoire périphérique négligé par le pouvoir central. Le problème des habitants de Lampedusa n’est pas tant la situation des migrants clandestins que le vieux problème de leur situation géographique et des relations avec le gouvernement à Rome. Les mouvements migratoires actuels qui attirent les médias internationaux s’inscrivent dans ce contexte local. Après avoir expliqué leurs propres problèmes économiques, y compris le désir d’émigrer vers des pays riches comme le Canada, les hommes d’un café local expriment une sympathie envers les migrants qui est palpable partout sur l’île: «Ils sont pauvres, et ils viennent ici pour essayer de gagner de l’argent. On comprend ça».

La logique du système actuel suggère qu’un jour ou l’autre il faudra se pencher sérieusement sur la question du rôle que les ambassades et les consulats pourraient jouer dans le développement de procédures administratives extraterritoriales.

GLOBAL BRIEF • WINTER | SPRING 2014

ait révélateur lors de mon séjour: le prêtre local qui dirige l’association caritative ne savait pas que des centaines de nouveaux migrants avaient été interceptés en mer quelques heures avant notre rencontre. Il s’agit du problème de transparence souvent évoqué par les habitants de l’île. Depuis les centaines de morts en octobre dernier, Rome a réagi avec un dispositif militaire imposant qui a effectivement pris le contrôle de la situation. La militarisation semble avoir permis l’interception d’environ 8 000 migrants en haute mer vers la fin de 2013, mais la population locale est encore une fois oubliée par Rome. Selon les rumeurs et les différentes sources médiatiques, il est difficile de savoir si tous ces clandestins ont été transférés en Sicile ou si plusieurs ont été renvoyés directement à Tripoli. Veut-on vraiment trouver une solution au problème général des boat people qui convergent vers l’Europe? La question n’est pas rhétorique. Il est bien possible que nos dirigeants considèrent qu’il n’y ait pas de solution possible. La force militaire serait ainsi déployée principalement pour donner l’apparence que la situation est maîtrisée et afin d’appaiser les populations en Italie et en Europe. Pour certains observateurs qui craignent une Europe assiégée, une réponse légitime de la part de l’UE serait même de bloquer et d’intercepter les boat people afin d’empêcher qu’ils puissent pénétrer le territoire des États membres. Cette position irait manifestement à l’encontre des principes humanistes qui sous-tendent le projet européen, surtout ses structures concernant les droits humains. Le message général serait trop contradictoire pour les populations des membres de l’UE. Donc, s’il est inacceptable de ne rien faire

d’exceptionnel pour aider les pauvres migrants clandestins qui arrivent dans les endroits périphériques comme Lampedusa, il faut explorer des solutions qui seront forcément novatrices. Il faudrait ainsi maintenir une distinction importante afin de préserver la cohérence du système de gestion migratoire. Les demandes économiques (par exemple travailleurs temporaires ou immigrants) peuvent être examinées de manière discrétionnaire par chaque État membre, tandis que les demandes politiques (par exemple réfugiés selon la Convention de 1951) obligent les gouvernements à examiner chaque cas selon des critères humanitaires et à proposer une forme de protection le cas échéant. Si les migrants ne remplissent pas les critères préétablis pour ces deux catégories générales, leur présence serait illégale et ils devraient dès lors normalement être renvoyés dans leurs pays d’origine. Pour des raisons économiques et démographiques, la situation actuelle en Europe milite en faveur d’une immigration sélectionnée et contrôlée. L’Allemagne, qui reçoit aujourd’hui un nombre d’immigrants comparable à celui du Canada, est reconnue par l’Organisation de Coopération et de Développement Économiques comme ayant l’un des systèmes d’immigration les «plus ouverts de l’Europe». Comme l’illustre la réaction britannique à l’ouverture récente du marché du travail aux Bulgares et aux Roumains, on ne peut pas pourtant cacher la tension réelle entre «l’Europe des riches» et celle des «pauvres». Il reste à espérer que le problème des boat people va être atténué par de nouvelles voies de migration légale pour les étrangers, et que celles-ci soient conçues de manière à contribuer à la construction d’un véritable système de gestion migratoire. Cependant, l’expérience des dernières années nous oblige à confronter plusieurs problèmes pratiques concernant les demandes à caractère humanitaire. Même si le statut de réfugié n’est pas accordé, les renvois sont souvent difficiles vers certains pays troublés, particulièrement quand les migrants refusent de collaborer. Un système appuyé par des renvois fréquents doit inclure des garanties de la part des pays d’origine, lesquels ne sont pas toujours en position d’assurer une protection effective des droits humains. Cela nécessiterait également des resources considérables de la part des gouvernements européens – un développement que les contribuables ne sont peut-être pas prêts à accepter de bon cœur. Nonobstant les tentatives d’harmonisation, certains gouvernements appliquent des critères sévères, créant ainsi des variations importantes dans les taux de reconnaissance. Les migrants vont évidemment tout tenter pour augmenter leurs chances d’obtenir un meilleur statut dans le pays qui offre les meilleures conditions, d’où le phénomène d’asylum shopping. Ce dernier, bien que

GLOBAL BRIEF • WINTER | SPRING 2014

L’hypocrisie est flagrante dans la mesure où les leaders qui se sont indignés sont les mêmes individus qui ont formulé les politiques de sécurité frontalière. Ces dernières sont remarquables car ambigües quant à leur objectif.

compréhensible de la part des migrants, contribue à saper les politiques et les efforts de protection des droits humains dans la mesure où il se heurte directement aux préoccupations des populations d’accueil. Le dogmatisme des rêveurs qui aimeraient que les frontières soient ouvertes, ainsi que la xénophobie des souverainistes qui aimeraient fermer les frontières, ne contribuent ni l’un ni l’autre à trouver une solution qui devra passer par un compromis entre divers intérêts. En gros, le mécanisme européen pour ce genre de situation est manifestement remis en question par le drame de Lampedusa. Normalement, le système basé sur les accords de Schengen et Dublin prévoit que les pays de premier contact assument la gestion et le traitement des demandes déposées par les migrants. Afin de ne pas pénaliser les pays méditerranéens par rapport aux pays riches du nord de l’Europe, ces derniers sont encouragés à «partager le fardeau» en offrant une aide technique ou financière. Mais il s’agit d’une aide discrétionnaire. Toute tentative d’imposer des obligations de solidarité aux pays du nord se solde par un échec car ils répliquent que la grande majorité de migrants clandestins se retrouvent de facto chez eux. L’Afghan qui passe par la Turquie pour arriver en Grèce se rendra au Royaume-Uni, de la même manière que le Libyen à Lampedusa n’avait pas l’Italie comme destination finale. Les autorités sur l’île italienne en sont bien conscientes, ce qui expliquerait un certain laxisme dans l’enregistrement des migrants interceptés par la marine. Cette dynamique était parfaitement claire il y a presque trois ans quand le ministre de l’Intérieur Roberto Maroni menaçait son homologue français Claude Guéant en disant que les boat people allaient être envoyés par train vers Marseille. La réplique: une fermeture temporaire de la frontière commune a été invoquée comme mesure exceptionnelle dans le cadre Schengen. Le drame humain de Lampedusa se transformait en confrontation politique de haut niveau qui remettait en question un aspect fondamental du projet européen. Malgré ses problèmes internes, l’UE a intégré, en 2013, la Croatie comme 28e État membre, et la monnaie unique a été adoptée par la Lettonie. Mais même si l’Union a tenu bon, il est impossible d’ignorer les problèmes socioéconomiques qui risquent de pousser les électeurs à se défouler lors des élections européennes ce printemps. Dans ce contexte délicat, certains sujets brûlants ont une influence disproportionnée. L’immigration en est un, et Lampedusa en représente une dimension hautement symbolique. Bien que le nombre des boat people méditerranéens soit faible par rapport aux millions de réfugiés à travers le monde, il représente une situation difficile et distincte de celle des centaines de milliers de demandeurs d’asile qui débarquent dans les aéroports

européens ou qui arrivent par voie terrestre. Les boat people arrivent de manière visible et dramatique qui nécessite une réponse humanitaire immédiate. Par conséquent, ils représentent symboliquement un défi politique considérable pour tout dirigeant voulant aborder la question de façon équilibrée. Compte tenu de l’aggravation de la situation en Afrique du Nord, ainsi qu’en Syrie, il demeure difficile de voir une solution aux problèmes liés au drame de Lampedusa qui pourrait préserver la crédibilité du système de contrôle frontalier. La Grèce, l’Italie et Malte assument toutes la présidence de l’UE au cours des prochaines années. Il faut donc espérer que ces pays directement affectés aborderont le problème dans un esprit de réalisme. La logique du système actuel suggère qu’un jour ou l’autre il faudra se pencher sérieusement sur la question du rôle que les ambassades et les consulats pourraient jouer dans le développement de procédures administratives extraterritoriales. Dans le cadre des institutions européennes, ceci permettrait de replacer le problème dans une perspective qui tient compte de la protection des droits humains avant que les migrants tentent leur traversée dangereuse en Méditerranée, l’objectif premier étant d’éviter les naufrages et les tragédies humaines au large du Vieux Continent. Les gouvernements européens pourraient ainsi élargir leurs programmes de sélection des migrants à l’étranger afin de garder l’apparence de préservation de la souveraineté territoriale sur cette question fondamentale.

e n’est pas la première fois que l’on aurait abordé de cette manière une gestion migratoire difficile depuis la création de la Société des Nations. De l’émigration russe des années 1920 jusqu’aux réfugiés du Kosovo il y a une décennie, en passant par les Hongrois en 1956-1957 et les boat people vietnamiens des années 1970, les gouvernements occidentaux ont adopté des programmes de réinstallation afin d’atténuer certaines crises humanitaires. Compte tenu du fait que les migrants clandestins à Lampedusa soient tous passés par la Libye et la Tunisie, il faudrait que les Occidentaux rouvrent les missions diplomatiques récemment fermées en Afrique du Nord. Comme la crise de la zone euro, qui a exposé certaines faiblesses du projet européen, le drame de Lampedusa démontre comment il est difficile d’instaurer une véritable solidarité entre pays qui continuent à défendre leurs intérêts nationaux. Le jour où les responsabilités concernant les boat people de la Méditerranée seront abordées et partagées dans leur ensemble, on aura franchi un grand pas dans la maturité politique de l’UE. | GB

University of Ottawa

Graduate studies in public and international affairs

It starts here.

FULL PAGE, FULL BLEED Trim size:

8.5” wide x 10.875” high

Bleed size:

8.75” wide x 11.125” high

The Graduate School of Public and International Affairs is one of a kind! • An innovative program where public policy and international affairs come together • Cutting-edge research and high quality teaching by world class scholars and on-site practitioners bringing exceptional experience • The only bilingual program of its kind where you can study in either of Canada’s two official languages • Located in the heart of the national capital, an ideal place for theory and practice to come together in preparation for a career in public and international affairs GLOBAL BRIEF • WINTER | SPRING 2014

Submit your application today: www.socialsciences.uOttawa.ca/api

ILLUSTRATION: SONIA ROY

GLOBAL BRIEF • WINTER | SPRING 2014

Les conflits au Mali et en Centrafrique démontrent que l’asymétrie n’a pas trouvé son remède doctrinal: face à autre chose qu’une armée, la puissance d’État classique semble impuissante. PAR FRÉDÉRIC CHARILLON

es conflits récents – Afghanistan, Irak, mais aussi Liban en 2006, demain peut-être Mali ou Centrafrique – ont montré les difficultés des grandes puissances militaires, le plus souvent occidentales, à s’imposer face à des adversaires plus faibles. Au-delà de «l’asymétrie» régulièrement invoquée, c’est à une redéfinition de la puissance que nous sommes conviés, à une nouvelle typologie de ses détenteurs, à une nouvelle pratique de celle-ci enfin, qui doit combiner plusieurs types d’atouts. Les conflits à venir ne seront plus «symétriques». Ils mettront aux prises des forces disparates, cherchant toutes à combiner leurs forces avec des acteurs sociaux, à tirer partie du terrain, à gagner la guerre du récit. Autant s’y préparer. Les dernières années ont considérablement remis en cause le concept de puissance. D’abord par une actualité internationale qui a montré les limites des acteurs traditionnellement considérés comme les plus «puissants», en particulier après les aventures américaines en Irak et en Afghanistan. Ensuite du fait d’une contrainte budgétaire qui, à partir de la crise de 2008, a touché les appareils militaires les plus performants, c’est-àdire occidentaux, tandis qu’au «Sud», des grands acteurs émergents comme la Chine démontraient souveraineté de l’État. C’est en quelque sorte à une volonté nouvelle de peser sur les affaires une conversion à une puissance modernisée et mondiales. Enfin, parce que la puissance semble réinventée que les principaux acteurs étatiques s’exercer désormais par d’autres modalités, sur de la scène mondiale sont conviés en ce milieu d’autres registres d’action, qui permettent à des des années 2010. acteurs nouveaux – micro-États, acteurs non La fin de la Guerre froide (voir l’article Feature étatiques… – de jouer un rôle dans le processus de Timur Atnashev à la page 18), pourtant grandepolitique global. ment perturbatrice pour l’analyse d’un système Au final, l’opposition classique entre hard power international revisité de fond en comble, n’avait et soft power, même réconciliée autour du «smart pas entièrement remis en cause le concept de power» de Joseph Nye, paraît avoir laissé place à puissance. Si le débat portait sur les raisons qui un clivage nouveau, qui oppose les pratiques anciavaient provoqué la fin du système soviétique, ennes de la puissance et ses pratiques modernes. ou sur la nature de la supériorité du camp libéral Les premières continuent de miser sur la quantité (qui avait survécu) sur le camp socialiste (qui avait des ressources (forces armées, budgets engagés, y disparu), la problématique de relations internacompris pour le soft power…), les secondes misent tionales demeurait classique. Elle était de savoir davantage sur des formes qualitatives nouvelles, si et comment le hard power (incarné dans la qui intègrent aussi bien les nouvelles technologies course aux armements) s’était articulé avec le soft que les solidarités traditionnelles, réunies dans une power (qui s’est manifesté par l’attractivité d’un combinaison où la priorité est donnée à l’efficacité modèle de société sur un autre). Les attentats du de l’action, et non plus à la démonstration de 11 septembre 2001 et les guerres américaines qui

QU’EST-CE QUE

LA PUISSANCE

MODERNE? Frédéric Charillon est directeur de l’Institut de recherches stratégiques de l’École Militaire (Paris).

GLOBAL BRIEF • WINTER | SPRING 2014

Le terrain symbolique enfin, où la capacité d’entraînement du discours insurgé, fondé sur une rhétorique de conviction et d’appartenance, se montre souvent plus efficace qu’un discours d’État fondé sur une rhétorique de responsabilité politique.

ont suivi, en revanche, ont enclenché le mécanisme d’un doute profond sur la validité de ce concept de puissance. Les attentats eux-mêmes montraient d’abord la vulnérabilité de l’acteur vainqueur de la Guerre froide: toujours imbattable militairement «à la régulière» – c’est-à-dire par une autre armée d’État – mais nullement à l’abri d’autres registres d’action. Ensuite, les forces engagées en Afghanistan et en Irak par la première armée du monde (100 000 en Afghanistan dans la période 2010-2011, et 166 000 en Irak en octobre 2007), qui bénéficiait de près de la moitié des dépenses de défense mondiales, ont abouti au double échec d’un Irak en proie à la violence et à l’éclatement communautaire, et d’un Afghanistan où le retour des Talibans après le retrait américain apparaît comme un scénario probable. La configuration asymétrique n’a toujours pas trouvé son remède doctrinal: face à autre chose qu’une armée d’État, la puissance d’État classique semble impuissante. Sa combinaison de force militaire sophistiquée, de discours soutenu par des relais médiatiques importants, et de moyens budgétaires importants, s’est trouvée en difficulté. Avant même leurs guerres au «Grand Moyen-Orient», les ÉtatsUnis avaient rencontré cet obstacle en Somalie dans les années 1992-1993. D’autres qu’eux l’ont rencontré plus tard, comme Israël au Liban contre le Hezbollah en 2006. Dans ces situations, le discours ou le storytelling des acteurs supposé inférieurs, se montre plus mobilisateur. En faisant jouer la force du lien faible (mais le lien communautaire est-il si faible?), en assumant un discours militant voire violent pour prôner localement une sortie du politique liée à la contestation d’un ordre global, véhiculé par des médias communautairement spécifiques mais de portée globale (comme la chaîne Al Manar pour le Hezbollah, ou les sites Internet), les acteurs insurrectionnels semblent être en mesure de bousculer les grandes armées étatiques. La nuisance semble tenir tête à la puissance sur trois terrains. Le terrain militaire d’abord, où les expériences de contre-insurrection (ou «COIN»), antiguérilla, ou de «surge» n’ont pu convaincre entièrement. Le terrain social ensuite, où la proximité des populations, le réflexe d’opposition à l’armée étrangère d’occupation et les ressorts communautaires complexes ont favorisé les dynamiques identitaires face aux dynamiques géopolitiques. Le terrain symbolique enfin, où la capacité d’entraînement du discours insurgé, fondé sur une rhétorique de conviction et d’appartenance, se montre souvent plus efficace qu’un discours d’État fondé sur une rhétorique de responsabilité politique. Il en ressort inévitablement que les puissants ne sont plus toujours ceux que l’on croyait, au moins à un moment donné et sur un terrain donné. Au Moyen-Orient et sur la dernière décennie par exemple, l’Iran et ses alliés ont atteint davantage

leurs objectifs que les États-Unis. Cette remise en cause du concept de puissance, qui se conjugue dorénavant à la lumière d’une capacité à atteindre ses objectifs davantage qu’il ne se mesure en capacités matérielles disponibles, provoque inévitablement une redistribution des cartes. Y at-il aujourd’hui transition de puissance (ou power shift selon l’expression anglo-saxonne), et si oui en faveur de qui? Lorsqu’on évoque la relativisation de la puissance au sens traditionnel du terme, il s’agit d’une dynamique qui affecte d’abord les acteurs qui en détenaient historiquement les attributs. Depuis la formulation des règles principales du jeu international au sortir de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, les États-Unis et leurs alliés occidentaux, à l’origine de la plupart des initiatives interventionnistes, se sont ainsi exposés davantage que d’autres à ce problème. L’ex-URSS, qui s’y est essayée elle aussi, soit directement (en Afghanistan, après plusieurs coups de force dans les démocraties populaires d’Europe de l’Est), soit par alliés interposés (Corée, Vietnam, Angola…), eut également son lot de déboires. Présenter le problème sous cette forme revient à assimiler la crise de la puissance à celle de l’intervention militaire. L’équation n’est pas totalement fausse dans la mesure où l’intervention révèle la réalité de la puissance, ainsi mise à l’épreuve des réalités internationales du moment. On peut ainsi supposer que si la Chine limite le plus possible les interventions militaires (y compris multilatérales) dans les années 2010 en dépit d’une affirmation de puissance croissante, c’est entre autres pour repousser cette heure de vérité. L’intervention révèle la puissance dans la mesure où elle met en œuvre bien plus que des moyens militaires: une capacité diplomatique à recueillir des soutiens politiques, économiques ou logistiques, une réputation, une influence à long terme. Pour autant, la puissance ne se réduit pas à l’intervention. À partir du moment où elle peut être définie comme la capacité d’un acteur à atteindre ses objectifs dans le sens d’un renforcement de sa position, tous les instruments en mesure d’y concourir y participent. C’est d’ailleurs bien dans ce sens que sont allées les déclinaisons successives du concept de puissance (hard, soft, smart power…), qui s’est élargi, y compris dans la définition qu’en a donné spectre l’approche réaliste. Qui sont alors les puissances d’aujourd’hui? Un premier cercle reste composé, quoi qu’on en dise, des grands interventionnistes occidentaux, qui se battent désormais pour conserver un rang, un savoir-faire, un poids dans les affaires mondiales. États-Unis, France et Royaume-Uni sont au premier plan de ce groupe, eux que l’on retrouve du Golfe (1991 et 2003-) à la Libye (2011) en passant par l’ex-Yougoslavie (1995-1999) ou l’Afghanistan (2001-), après les avoir déjà rencontrés du temps

de la bipolarité en Indochine puis au Vietnam, à Suez, en Afrique et ailleurs. Ces États continuent de disposer d’un outil militaire efficace (bien que soumis à des rationalisations), un réseau diplomatique de premier ordre, une influence forte dans les enceintes multilatérales et leurs systèmes décisionnels. Ils ne peuvent être balayés d’un revers de main dans l’analyse de la puissance, tant leurs ressources matérielles d’une part, symboliques d’autre part, et en termes de savoir-faire enfin, demeurent structurantes, au sens où Susan Strange entendait jadis, dans son livre States and Markets, la puissance structurelle.

Dans le monde bipolaire, la puissance, pour être réelle, devait être également perçue, ressentie, reconnue par les autres acteurs. Dans le monde actuel, la puissance effective est peut-être la puissance discrète ou sous-estimée: revanche de Sun Tzu sur Clausewitz…

GLOBAL BRIEF • WINTER | SPRING 2014

ais un deuxième groupe d’acteurs vient s’imposer dans ce qui a longtemps été une diplomatie de club. En assumant pleinement un droit à un profil haut en matière de politique étrangère, des intérêts à défendre et même des solutions à proposer, les grands et moyens émergents revendiquent bien la puissance. Qui sont-ils? Si l’on met de côté le cas du «ré-émergent» russe (voir l’article Query d'Irvin Studin à la page 24), qui aspire à retrouver un rang acquis après 1945 par l’Union soviétique et perdu en 1991, les trois géants du Sud que sont la Chine, l’Inde et le Brésil s’imposent désormais par leurs ressources matérielles comme par leur poids politique. À la géographie et aux matières premières sont venus s’ajouter, grâce à la forte croissance d’une économie globalisée, un effort militaire important et une affirmation politique souverainiste voire nationaliste. Forte de 166 milliards de dollars américains de dépenses militaires annuelles (2013), la Chine est également devenue le deuxième réseau diplomatique mondial (derrière les États-Unis et devant la France). L’Inde est le huitième budget militaire au monde (46 milliards de dollars américains), mais compte presque autant de soldats que les États-Unis. Régler les grands problèmes internationaux sans eux devient difficile (on l’a vu avec la Chine sur la situation syrienne ou le réchauffement climatique), et rejeter avec dédain les solutions qu’ils proposent (comme lors de l’initiative turco-brésilienne sur le nucléaire iranien en 2010) ne sera plus tenable longtemps. Ces géants démographiques, géographiques et économiques sont aujourd’hui rejoints par d’autres, de moindre envergure, mais imposants néanmoins: Turquie (voir l’article In Situ de Lerna Yanik à la page 6), Indonésie, Pakistan, Corée du Sud, Afrique du Sud, demain Mexique (voir l’article In Situ de César Velázquez Guadarrama à la page 28), Iran, Arabie Saoudite et bien d’autres. Ces nouveaux venus ont un point commun: leur ascension était prévue. Leur histoire, leur culture,

leur taille, leur démographie ou leur économie, font que tout observateur averti des relations internationales admet qu’une place leur revient tôt ou tard dans le concert des nations. Il n’en va pas de même pour une troisième catégorie d’États dont la revendication même d’un rôle de premier plan témoigne d’une véritable dissémination de la puissance. Israël, marqué pourtant par l’exiguïté territoriale ainsi que par l’absence de ressources majeures, s’était imposé peu après sa création comme puissance militaire et politique, d’abord par ses succès sur les pays arabes dans plusieurs guerres consécutives, puis par le soutien dont il a bénéficié de la part des États-Unis. Le Vietnam, en infligeant des défaites militaires à la puissance coloniale française puis à la superpuissance américaine, en intervenant au Cambodge en décembre 1978 avant de résister aux attaques «punitives» chinoises en 1979, a surpris. Mais l’interrogation porte maintenant sur la possibilité pour un État de s’imposer comme puissance sans outil militaire. Depuis le début des années 2010 les spéculations ont fleuri sur l’influence internationale acquise par le minuscule Qatar sous le règne du Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani (1995-2013), dont la prospérité a permis de financer à la fois d’importantes acquisitions et prises de participation dans différents secteurs, une chaîne de télévision globale (Al Jazeera) à forte attractivité pour les publics arabophones, et enfin des réseaux religieux éventuellement capables d’accéder au pouvoir dans d’autres États. Peut-on qualifier de puissance un pays dont les atouts sont si clairement ancrés dans le soft power et si peu dans le hard power, qu’il en devient extrêmement vulnérable militairement? La question s’était posée jadis pour la Suisse ou le Vatican, disposant tous deux – et pour des raisons évidemment fort différentes – de réseaux influents, mais jamais elle n’avait été posée avec tant d’acuité que par le Qatar dans un monde post-Guerre froide marqué par une société mondiale en réseau. Évoquer le transnational, les intermédiaires financiers ou religieux, revient naturellement à s’interroger sur le rapport à la puissance des acteurs non étatiques. Ces derniers, s’ils ne revendiquent pas l’équivalent de la puissance d’État, démontrent régulièrement leur capacité à faire échec à cette dernière, en lui opposant la nuisance. Les mouvements armés, religieux (Hezbollah, Hamas ou Al Qaïda), ou pas (les FARC en Colombie), le terrorisme international, les mafias, disposent-ils d’une «puissance»? Revenons dans le monde légal: Amazon, Google, Facebook, les agences de notation, sont-ils des «puissances»? Les non-acteurs, c’est-à-dire les entités sans leaders et sans centre décisionnel, comme «le marché», «la blogosphère», «l’opinion», sont-ils des puissances? Nous ne retiendrons pas cette option ici, considérant qu’elle nous fait passer du constat de la dissémina-

GLOBAL BRIEF • WINTER | SPRING 2014

Pour s’adapter aux réalités du moment, il faut se faire doublement «puissance de différence»: «faire la différence» par une volonté politique d’assumer une action que d’autres n’assument plus, et «être différent» politiquement en prenant le contre-pied des positions majoritaires.

tion de la puissance (qui est réelle) à la dilution du concept (qu’il faut éviter). Mais le fait même de poser ces questions impose une réflexion sur les attributs dont les États qui souhaitent demeurer «puissants» doivent disposer aujourd’hui. À quoi peut ressembler la puissance du 21e siècle? Plusieurs travaux de relations internationales nous fournissent des pistes intéressantes. La première d’entre elles serait une distinction entre «underachievers» (puissances ayant les capacités de jouer un rôle déterminant, sans que ce statut leur soit reconnu par la communauté internationale) et «overachievers» (puissances qui à l’inverse bénéficient de ce statut, mais n’en ont pas ou plus, en réalité, tous les instruments) (voir Major Powers and the Quest for Status in International Politics: Global and Regional Perspectives par Thomas J. Volgy et al.). L’intérêt de cette approche est de nous rappeler que le rapport puissance/réputation a changé de nature avec la fin de la Guerre froide. Dans le monde bipolaire, la puissance, pour être réelle, devait être également perçue, ressentie, reconnue par les autres acteurs. Dans le monde actuel, la puissance effective est peut-être la puissance discrète ou sous-estimée: revanche de Sun Tzu sur Clausewitz… Deuxième piste: la puissance d’aujourd’hui est une puissance combinée et originale. À titre d’exemple, la France, qui dispose d’un outil militaire toujours performant mais non illimité, doit désormais agir en articulation avec des partenaires ou alliés, s’appuyer pour cela sur la capacité d’entraînement politique d’une diplomatie efficace, grâce à un message convaincant. Elle est pour cela en quête d’un «smart hard power», c’est-à-dire d’une puissance dont l’outil de puissance fonctionne à condition: a) de gérer convenablement ses limites par une articulation avec d’autres registres d’action et d’autres partenaires, et b) de doter son action d’une légitimité internationale fondée sur le droit, les Nations unies, et le soutien d’une large partie de la société mondiale. Pour ce faire, et pour s’adapter aux réalités du moment, il faut se faire doublement «puissance de différence»: «faire la différence» par une volonté politique d’assumer une action que d’autres n’assument plus, et «être différent» politiquement en prenant le contre-pied des positions majoritaires (refuser la guerre américaine en Irak quand d’autres s’y résignent, vouloir frapper la Syrie quand d’autres hésitent, bloquer un accord sur le nucléaire iranien pourtant salué comme une avancée, etc.). Avec ce pari: seule la puissance combinée, originale et attractive, compensera la relativisation de la puissance matérielle. Troisième piste enfin, qui conclut les deux précédentes: la puissance doit se moderniser. Elle ne se mesure plus en nombre de missiles, en capacité expéditionnaire, ni même en nombre d’ambassades dans le monde. Mais plutôt en capacité à mobiliser

des instruments nouveaux, à adapter son message et à le rendre attractif, à accepter d’intégrer dans son action extérieure les opportunités offertes par l’évolution technologique et par son impact sur l’information et la communication, plutôt qu’à tenter de leur échapper. C’est probablement dans cette direction qu’il faut chercher les nouvelles typologies de la puissance, entre «modernes» et «anciens», entre ceux qui tentent de se doter d’un instrument d’avance et ceux qui font preuve d’aversion à la mutation. Dans le premier camp: la diplomatie publique et la diplomatie d’influence, l’utilisation pragmatique et décentralisée des instruments culturels et informatifs, l’intégration décrispée et libérale de l’outil Internet à l’action extérieure, le pari des acteurs transnationaux non contrôlés par l’État comme atout in fine pour l’État… Le mot d’ordre «Rebranding Britain» du premier Tony Blair, les autoroutes de l’information de Bill Clinton et Al Gore, les grandes fondations allemandes (Adenauer ou Ebert), Al Jazeera, mais aussi – sous un autre jour – les diplomaties religieuses de certains pays musulmans, participent de cette dynamique de modernisation de la puissance. L’interdiction des réseaux sociaux, la tentative de contrôler l’expression sur les blogs, la tentation de mesurer son influence en comptant ses «clients», participe davantage d’une tradition ancienne (imagine-t-on ce que serait l’impact d’une «Al Jazeera» taïwanaise s’adressant aux diasporas chinoises, plutôt que de voir Taipei choyer les 22 pays qui le reconnaissent encore?). La puissance ne sera jamais plus comme avant, et la course est engagée pour savoir qui le comprendra le premier, et osera en tirer toutes les conséquences. Dès lors, la différence se fera entre les «Modernes» et les «Anciens». Chercher à survivre par l’obtention d’un rang, la reconnaissance de la communauté internationale et une comptabilité quantitative et matérielle de la puissance, signifiera s’exposer à des déconvenues ou à de nouvelles «étranges défaites». À l’inverse, cultiver l’adaptabilité de sa présence, la variété, voire la sous-traitance, de son influence (bien au-delà du seul réseau diplomatique), permettra d’accompagner le monde qui vient, d’y redéployer régulièrement ses atouts et surtout de trouver par un discours plus convaincant la «capacité d’entraînement» diplomatique indispensable aujourd’hui à toute action internationale d’envergure. À cet égard, les exemples malien et centrafricain pour la France sont riches de leçons: autant que la performance de son outil militaire dans un premier temps, c’est l’aptitude française à convaincre des partenaires (d’abord européens en l’occurrence) de venir en appui de l’initiative prise, qui déterminera le succès à long terme de ces engagements. S’adapter, rester mobile et convaincre semblent plus que jamais les trois mots clés de l’exercice de la puissance au 21e siècle. | GB

GB is online for the world

www.GLOBALBRIEF.ca HYPERMULTILINGUAL DAILY BLOGS IN ENGLISH, FRENCH, SPANISH, RUSSIAN, ARABIC, GERMAN, MANDARIN & HEBREW

WEB EXCLUSIVES (IN ENGLISH AND FRENCH)

GB VIDEOS

FACEBOOK AND

Read the Geo-Blog of

Roméo Dallaire

SUBSCRIBE ONLINE TODAY!

Senator, author humanitarian, and retired Canadian Forces general

GLOBAL BRIEF • WINTER | SPRING 2014

TWITTER

Quel avenir pour la défense européenne?

QUERY

Il faut enfin se débarrasser de l’illusion de pouvoir définir une grande stratégie européenne en matière de défense PAR ZAKI LAÏDI

Zaki Laïdi est professeur à Sciences Po et auteur de La norme sans la force, l’énigme de la puissance européenne (2008) et de Le monde selon

GLOBAL BRIEF • WINTER | SPRING 2014

Obama (2012).

ourquoi, alors que la France se trouve de nouveau engagée en Afrique, les Européens se désintéressent plus que jamais de l’Europe de la défense, comme l’ont montré les conclusions décevantes du Conseil européen de décembre 2013? Cette question mérite d’autant plus d’être posée que lorsque l’on regarde les études d’opinions européennes, on constate que dans leur immense majorité les citoyens européens se montrent tout à fait favorables à l’émergence d’une politique européenne de sécurité et de défense. À ce paradoxe, il existe deux explications possibles. La première consiste à penser que les gouvernements européens n’ont aujourd’hui ni les moyens, ni la volonté de répondre aux attentes de leurs opinions en raison notamment de l’extrême sévérité du contexte budgétaire. Mais si cette explication a le mérite du bon sens, elle ne saurait convaincre totalement. D’une part, parce que le problème se posait en termes à peu près identiques il y a de cela 30 ans, lorsque la contrainte budgétaire était encore faible. D’autre part, parce que l’on pourrait précisément arguer du fait que la rigueur des temps devrait au contraire stimuler la construction d’une Europe de la défense sur la base d’une mutualisation des moyens, d’une rationalisation des coûts et d’une harmonisation des programmes. Or, rien n’indique que l’Europe soit prête à emprunter une telle voie. D’ailleurs, depuis la publication en 2003 du rapport Solana sur la sécurité de l’Europe, cette dernière s’est montrée incapable de produire un document stratégique commun, car il n’y a aucune volonté à parvenir à une vision stratégique commune. Certes les Européens peuvent toujours se mettre d’accord sur des idées générales et estimer, par exemple, qu’ils sont soumis à des menaces comparables. Mais une fois sortis des généralités, on bute sur l’opérationnalisation des concepts. Au demeurant, pourquoi voudrait-on que les Baltes aient le même rapport à la Russie que les Portugais? Le fait d’appartenir à un même ensemble ne saurait estomper la résilience des cultures stratégiques nationales. En fait, si les Européens sont majoritairement favorables à l’émergence d’une Europe plus active et plus forte sur le plan de la sécurité, ils donnent à cette idée et à cet objectif des significations extrêmement contrastées. Et tout le problème est

là. Schématiquement, on distingue en Europe trois grandes perceptions du rapport à l’usage de la force. La première, très minoritaire et représentée presque exclusivement par la France, n’envisage l’Europe que comme une sorte de superpuissance dotée des attributs classiques de la souveraineté des grands États. Pour les Français, l’outil militaire est une condition fondamentale de la puissance, comme cela est le cas pour les États-Unis ou la Russie (voir l’article Feature de Timur Atnashev à la page 18). Cette vision est le produit de l’héritage de la France, qui fut une grande puissance politique et militaire. Mais c’est également l’expression de ses intérêts actuels. Étant aujourd’hui la plus importante puissance militaire européenne, elle sait que toute action européenne d’envergure sur le plan militaire passera forcément par elle, et lui garantira ainsi un leadership politique presque naturel sur la conduite des opérations. Les forces françaises sont aujourd’hui en bien meilleur état que les forces britanniques, bien que le budget britannique soit plus important. C’est un élément non négligeable qui explique aussi bien l’engouement français pour l’Europe de la défense que les réticences de ses partenaires à l’entériner. Il existe une deuxième manière d’aborder le rapport de l’Europe à la défense. C’est celle que l’on trouve chez les Britanniques (voir l’entrevue Tête à Tête avec Ngaire Woods à la page 8). Sur le fond, ces derniers partagent l’idée française d’une puissance militaire condition de l’exercice de la puissance en général. Mais à la différence des Français, les Britanniques s’opposent catégoriquement à voir émerger une Europe de la défense indépendante de l’OTAN, et donc des États-Unis. On peut se demander si cette explication n’est pas un pur et simple prétexte, car personne en Europe, y compris en France, ne songe sérieusement à se passer de l’OTAN, puisque même la France a rejoint l’alliance militaire intégrée. La seule modalité que les Britanniques acceptent et qu’ils pratiquent volontiers, comme on a pu le voir en Libye, est celle d’une coalition d’États européens agissant sous leurs propres couleurs et jamais sous le drapeau européen. Ils n’ont véritablement consenti à intervenir dans le cadre d’une opération européenne que dans le cas particulier de la lutte contre la piraterie dans la Corne de l’Afrique (voir l’article Feature de Michael Barutciski à la page 40).

Mais il s’agissait là plus d’une opération de police que d’une opération militaire. De surcroît, elle présente la caractéristique d’être guidée par un intérêt très précis: la protection des voies d’approvisionnement en provenance du Moyen-Orient et de l’Asie. Pour la Grande-Bretagne, l’Europe ne peut avoir vocation qu’à conduire des opérations de type humanitaire ou de maintien de la paix. La vision allemande est, pour sa part, à la fois très différente de la vision française et de la vision britannique. À la différence de Londres, Berlin affiche haut et fort son attachement intellectuel à l’existence d’une politique européenne en matière de sécurité de défense. Elle fait d’ailleurs valoir que son propre budget militaire n’a pas baissé, et qu’il y a aujourd’hui bien plus d’Allemands dans les missions européennes que de Français, qui en sont absents parce que surengagés dans les théâtres africains. (Pour Berlin, l’activisme français en Afrique n’est pas la marque d’un attachement à la défense européenne en soi, mais la volonté de défendre des intérêts nationaux – certes légitimes, mais pas forcément européens en soi. C’est bien sûr un point de vue très contestable car la menace djihadiste ne concerne objectivement pas que la France.) Cela dit, l’Allemagne a de l’engagement européen une vision très restrictive. D’une part, parce qu’elle considère comme la Grande-Bretagne que c’est à l’OTAN que revient la responsabilité première de protéger l’Europe. D’autre part, parce qu’elle considère que le champ d’intervention militaire de l’Europe doit fondamentalement être limité au continent et ne pas impliquer l’engagement de forces européennes dans des opérations de combat.

PHOTOGRAPHIE: LA PRESSE CANADIENNE / AP / FREDERIC LAFARGUE

une vision minimaliste et totalement insuffisante de l’Europe de la défense. Mais pour les Hongrois ou les Finlandais, qui n’ont, par exemple, aucune expérience africaine, le fait d’envoyer des missions de formation au Mali constitue pour eux un énorme progrès, et l’expression de ce qu’ils considèrent être une politique européenne de la défense. Ce fut la même chose au Tchad, où la Pologne envoya des troupes dans le cadre d’une mission européenne. Dès lors, ce qui se passe au Mali ou en Centrafrique est parfaitement compréhensible au regard de cette grille d’analyse. Certes, la France déplore l’insuffisance du soutien de l’Europe dans les opérations qu’elle a engagé dans ces deux pays. Le refus de l’Allemagne d’accepter la création d’un fonds de financement des opérations des États membres en témoigne. Mais pour Paris, ces inconvénients sont néanmoins moins grands que la consultation préalable des Européens à toute intervention militaire d’urgence. La France fait valoir le fait qu’en Libye, au

La présidente de transition de Centrafrique, Catherine Samba-Panza, et le président français François Hollande se sont rencontrés à Bangui le 28 février 2014. GLOBAL BRIEF • WINTER | SPRING 2014

L’

Allemagne approuve l’engagement de la France contre le djihadisme au Sahel, mais ne nous dit pas ce qu’il faudrait faire si la France n’était pas disponible. Il faut rappeler ici un fait essentiel – à savoir que ce n’est pas parce que l’on envoie des missions militaires que l’on conduit des opérations de combat. La quasitotalité des opérations militaires de l’UE ont été et restent encore aujourd’hui des opérations destinées à évacuer les ressortissants européens, à apporter

une assistance humanitaire ou à maintenir la paix dans un contexte post-conflit. L’UE n’a jamais engagé de forces dans des opérations de combat, et il y a peu de chances que cela change. Il faut admettre d’ailleurs que cette vision est largement partagée par la plupart des opinions européennes, pour qui déployer des forces militaires en dehors des frontières de l’Europe ne doit nullement s’inscrire dans une politique de puissance, mais répondre fondamentalement à des objectifs humanitaires. Pour les Français, c’est bien évidemment

Building linkages with Chinese academic institutions Conducting research on Canada-China relations, especially in the investment and energy sectors

GLOBAL BRIEF • WINTER | SPRING 2014

Fostering scholarship and joint research on China’s global role

www.china.ualberta.ca

china@ualberta.ca

Mali ou en Centrafrique, il était indispensable d’agir très vite, et donc très difficile d’entamer avec ses partenaires des consultations préalables aux résultats aléatoires. De surcroît, en n’étant pas redevable à l’Europe, la France garde toute latitude pour participer à des règlements politiques au Mali ou en Centrafrique. Il faut d’ailleurs admettre que, même s’ils évitent de les consulter, les Allemands n’auraient probablement pas approuvé l’idée d’une intervention militaire européenne en Libye, au Mali ou en Centrafrique. Cela explique pourquoi les fameux battle groups que les Européens ont mis en place sur le papier n’ont probablement guère de chance de voir le jour sur le plan opérationnel – c’est-àdire précisément en raison de la contradiction qui existe entre la nécessité d’agir vite et de se concerter lentement. Pour les autres Européens, la configuration actuelle n’est pas forcément négative. On voit mal l’Allemagne prendre ombrage du rôle de la France en Afrique, un continent sur lequel les intérêts de Berlin sont relativement modestes. Quant aux autres pays d’Europe, qui pour la plupart n’ont guère de liens historiques avec l’Afrique ou le monde arabe, le simple fait d’envoyer un avion ou de participer à des missions de formation constitue en soi une forme d’implication politique considérable au-delà de laquelle ils n’ont pas forcément envie d’aller. De cette réalité on peut tirer deux enseignements contradictoires. Une vision pessimiste consiste à dire que les Européens sont totalement incapables de penser leur défense de manière autonome, car la garantie ultime de leur sécurité est assurée par les États-Unis à travers l’OTAN – et cela à l’exception peut-être de la France, qui joue à la fois sur l’intégration atlantique et sur son autonomie d’action politique. Il existe toutefois une interprétation plus optimiste. Elle consiste à penser qu’en définitive, lorsque l’on parle d’Europe de la défense, il faut prendre en compte le rôle des États membres et pas simplement celui de l’UE in toto. Sous cet angle, l’Europe demeure militairement très présente. Elle le fut en Afghanistan et en Libye. Elle l’est également aujourd’hui au Mali et en Centrafrique. Si l’on s’attend donc à ce que l’Europe de la défense devienne une sorte de politique publique européenne comparable à la politique agricole commune, on s’expose à des déconvenues considérables. Il faut donc cesser d’attendre une définition par le haut de ce que serait une Europe de la défense, car celle-ci ne viendra pas. Il faut, au contraire, pragmatiquement partir de ce qui peut être fait en termes de solidarités concrètes – solidarités guidées non par un intérêt abstrait, mais par des contraintes communes. De ce point de vue, la mutualisation de certains moyens, ou le lancement de programmes militaires conjoints, reste la seule voie possible, même si là aussi les difficultés demeurent considérables en raison des traditions et des choix industriels nationaux très prégnants, et pas forcément toujours rationnels. Mais ce qui est sûr est qu’il faut définitivement se débarrasser de l’illusion de pouvoir définir une grande stratégie européenne en matière de défense. | GB

FULL PAGE, FULL BLEED Trim size:

8.5” wide x 10.875” high

Meet Dentons. The new global law firm created by Salans, FMC and SNR Denton.

Bleed size:

8.75” wide x 11.125” high

dentons.com

GLOBAL BRIEF • WINTER | SPRING 2014

Know the way.

NEZ À NEZ When some are more equal (and wealthy) than others PROPOSITION:

Inequality is a drag on economic growth

JAMES RADNER vs FRED LAZAR

James Radner (in favour): “That state is opulent

James Radner is Assistant Professor in the School of Public Policy and Governance, University of Toronto, where he also directs the Boreal Institute for Civil Society.

Fred Lazar is Associate Professor of Economics in the Schulich School of Business, York

GLOBAL BRIEF • WINTER | SPRING 2014

University (Toronto).

where the necessaries and conveniencies of life are easily come at,” wrote Adam Smith in his Lectures on Jurisprudence. In the nearly 250 years since then, humanity has generated an utterly unprecedented explosion of economic product – enough to transform, or even jeopardize, our very biosphere. How have we done against Smith’s criterion for economic success – that is, what he charmingly called “nothing else […] but this comeattibleness?” I wish to argue that inequality has been and remains a terrible drag on growth in comeattibleness. Start with food and water as two emblematic ‘necessaries of life.’ In this early new century, some 950 million people go to bed hungry each night, and 1.1 billion people have no access to safe drinking water. About half of our little children (under the age of five) are malnourished, such that millions of them die each year. Some 200 million young survivors are likely to suffer lifelong effects from disrupted brain development. Consider necessaries and conveniencies together: 1.2 billion people – a number roughly equal to the entire world population in Smith’s day – live in extreme poverty, with less ‘comeattibleness’ than our hunter-gatherer ancestors enjoyed 10,000 years ago. This huge, shocking shortfall in comeattibleness is a result of what Lant Pritchett called “divergence, big time” – to wit, the massive inequality of economic development over the two centuries since Smith. That development, with its enormous increases in production, has yielded far less growth in comeattibleness than it could or should have. But could we not solve this problem, and seemingly eliminate inequality’s drag, simply by producing more for everyone without changing the relative distribution of life’s necessaries and conveniencies? No. The basic reason is the law of diminishing returns. Those of us now benefiting from huge accumulations of capital and technology can indeed get richer through further investment and innovation, but the rate of increase in production available to us is far less than what is required and feasible in less

opulent places. The great escapes from poverty in our time, by hundreds of millions of people – first in Japan, then in the Asian ‘tiger’ economies, then in China – have all involved rapid ‘catch-up,’ as it were, with production rising far faster than in already opulent states. Achieve that where all of today’s poor people live, and world inequality must contract. Thus, whatever mix of production and distribution measures we may favour, we cannot achieve decent growth in comeattibleness without tackling inequality. We need convergence, big time.

Fred Lazar (against): If I knew what comeattibleness really meant and how this relates to economic concepts and values that I understand, I might be able to tackle the arguments head-on. Alas, I do not know what “decent growth in comeattibleness” implies in terms of aggregate economic growth, and indeed why reducing inequality across countries really matters. Why should less inequality enhance comeattibleness? And what really is the root cause of a “shortfall” in comeattibleness? Setting my ignorance aside, let me start with the observations regarding the extent of absolute poverty today. This poverty is concentrated in countries in Africa (see Definition at p. 60) and Central Asia, although large numbers can still be found in China. What lies behind the poverty? Answer: Squandered opportunities, resulting from corruption, democratic deficits, and petty tribalism. Will convergence help? Growth in these countries has, for the most part, been inhibited by internal problems. Will these internal problems be rectified over time? Perhaps, but not in all of these countries, and not within a 20-year timeframe. Will massive transfers of income and wealth from the ‘have’ countries accelerate the process? Unlikely. The ‘have’ countries do not have any obvious obligations to the ‘have not’ countries. Moreover, international bodies – the UN agencies at the top of the list – have proven themselves incapable of acting as the agents for transfers. They tend to be as corrupt and dysfunctional as the countries that

they supposedly try to help. Finally, throwing money at these countries will only increase the payoffs for corruption and kleptocracy, and thus encourage more such behaviour. One last observation: The law of diminishing returns has been disproved repeatedly since the days of Malthus.

JR: You pack a lot into a small space, with conci-

PHOTOGRAPH: THE CANADIAN PRESS / SHEHZAD NOORANI

A family in the West Point neighbourhood in Monrovia, Liberia.

GLOBAL BRIEF • WINTER | SPRING 2014

sion that I am afraid I cannot match. For example, I am no expert on interpreting Adam Smith and ‘comeattibleness.’ But I do find an important warning in his insistence that “nothing else can deserve the name of opulence but this comeattibleness […] whether money or other things of that sort abound or not.” Our system of national accounts – summing money to get things like GDP – is a 20th century invention that certainly has instrumental value for macroeconomic management. Indeed, the concept of GDP emerged from the effort to understand the Great Depression. But as imprecise as Smith’s

“comeattibleness” may be, it is a far more plausible standard of economic success than GDP. One way of seeing why this is so is to consider what today’s economists call the marginal utility of wealth. If Bill Gates were gifted $200 a year, it would make no difference in his access to life’s necessaries and conveniencies. If I received such a gift, I could gain some small pleasure – some convenience – from it, but it would not change my life. Yet for the people whom I discussed in my initial comments, such a sum would be transformative. So helpful would it be at ‘coming at’ life’s necessaries that it could easily become the difference between life and death. Thus, while central bankers may appropriately use GDP to help them manage the business cycle, we cannot assess economic gain without considering distribution. Perhaps an example closer to home would help. From 1980 to 2005, Canada’s real GDP per person grew by nearly 50 percent. In that time, the median real income for the top quintile of full-time Cana-

dian workers grew from CDN $74,084 to $86,254; the figure for the middle quintile was virtually flat – $41,348 to $41,431 – while the bottom quintile saw a decline from $19,367 to $15,375. To be sure, six numbers (from a small Statistics Canada table) cannot summarize economic performance, but suppose just for illustration that the stylized story that these figures suggest becomes our future (or that of a hypothetical country), without mitigating factors. Is this economic growth? I think not. It amounts to a big increase in human suffering for poor people, and a future of drudgery without progress for middle class families in exchange for a little more comfort for the already comfortable. I interpret that as a chilling loss of comeattibleness in the life of the society as a whole. Let me also offer some shorter responses on additional points: Our escape from the Malthusian trap is a wonderful thing, but a look at country growth rates over recent centuries and today reveals, with striking consistency, decreasing returns at the level of national economies. As long as that

GLOBAL BRIEF • WINTER | SPRING 2014

This huge, shocking shortfall in comeattibleness is a result of what Lant Pritchett called “divergence, big time” – to wit, the massive inequality of economic development over the two centuries since Smith.

remains true, convergence is a simple necessity for comeattibleness. What to do? As I suggested, nothing here speaks to whether redistribution measures, growth policies, or other strategies are best. Yet I would not dismiss the effectiveness of at least some rich-to-poor transfers. Thanks in no small part to the transfer of medical goods, finance and technology, even the world’s poorest people have seen dramatic growth in child survival and life expectancy – a prima facie gain in ability to ‘come at’ life’s necessaries. Internationally supported education, for its part, has yielded very large gains in female literacy – another example of why we should not despair of our ability to help. Finally, I believe that I do have obligations to people in have-not countries. Every day I consume things produced through a worldwide value chain that includes many such countries. Meanwhile, my consumption pours greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere – a huge, life-and-death peril for the world’s poorest. That does not put me on the hook

for solving inequality and all its effects, but neither does it leave me free to ignore them.

FL: I will respond in two parts. GDP is a relatively objective measure. Anything else takes us into the realm of value or moral judgements. How do we define happiness, let alone measure it? Next, the marginal utility of income may decline if utility does not depend on one’s relative income, but only on one’s absolute income. As my thesis adviser pointed out many years ago, relative income matters – for better or for worse. Indeed, the world’s wealthiest individuals look forward to the annual rankings of the wealthiest people in the world in order to see where they stand in relation to their peers. They can never have too much. Consequently, for them, and for most people, marginal utility of income does not decline as their incomes increase. Even if this were not the case, redistribution – especially across borders – entails costs: the costs of setting up and administering the system. These costs represent a waste of resources. Furthermore, while some of the wealthiest may voluntarily choose to transfer some of their wealth to others (consider the Giving Pledge movement started by Gates and Buffett), it is unlikely that there would be any support within any of the ‘wealthy’ countries for an involuntary regime of redistribution. In respect of the data for Canada, would Canadians have been better off with lower growth rates and a more equitable distribution of the gains? Did inequality negatively impact growth in Canada or elsewhere? There is no evidence to suggest that this has been the case. China, which has even greater income inequality (and inequality of opportunity) than Canada, has experienced very strong growth over the past two decades. Would the country and its people have been better off with ‘Mao’ economic outcomes – slow growth and greater equality? I doubt it. I now turn to shorter responses on additional points. The evidence does not support the contention that there are decreasing returns. Productivity growth does fluctuate, and tends to be more rapid when a country transitions from an agrarian society to an industrialized one. However, there has not been any consistent downward trend in productivity growth rates among the wealthy countries during the past century. While I can agree that there may be some merit in promoting health and education initiatives in the poorest countries, the key question is: how to do this? Money can easily be wasted or worse, stolen, as has been the frequent case in the past. And redistribution does impact incentives and growth in the wealthy countries. Perhaps the poorer countries would be better off if they were more fully integrated into the global economy,

and if corruption were attacked more forcefully. As for female literacy and education: do we really wish to get into a debate about the role of religion and culture?

JR: I now worry that we are covering so much

This poverty is concentrated in countries in Africa and Central Asia, although large numbers can still be found in China. What lies behind the poverty? Squandered opportunities, resulting from corruption, democratic deficits, and petty tribalism. surviving to maturity? That is a far better proxy for the necessaries of life than GDP, with the advantage that it is easier to measure and no less ‘objective.’ North America comes out as no star on this metric. There is no single best measuring tool. I for one would include not just longevity, but also health, capabilities and opportunity. But a lens that is blind to our children’s survival is itself impoverished.

FL: Indeed – let us not spend more time on definitions and immeasurables. We can debate them endlessly. Yes, it would be wonderful if a rising tide raised all ships. Yes, it would be wonderful if we could achieve higher rates of growth without destroying our environment – and that, in the process, the greatest beneficiaries would be those at the lowest end of the income spectrum, both across countries and within each country. But the real question is: how can this be done, if at all? (continued online) For the rest of the Nez à Nez debate on

GLOBAL BRIEF • WINTER | SPRING 2014

ground so quickly that we may be talking past each other. This may in part be about differing scales and time horizons. The big growth out of poverty in Japan, East Asia and China involved gains of around eight to 10 percent per year. Is that a plausible rate for rich countries, the growth of which over the past century has been more in the two to three percent range? If not, then we do need more catch-up – that is, convergence – to achieve basic accesses to life’s “necessaries,” not to mention conveniencies. For what I called the striking consistency in the relevant convex production curves on this scale, see the wonderful empirical work of economic historian Robert Allen. I am not trying to say more than that about diminishing returns. Similarly, while I agree that relative income matters, an added $200 a year is not going to change the ranking of anyone in a list of the world’s wealthiest. In the hands of new parents on the Bangladesh delta, however, that $200 may save the baby’s life. There is no plausible equivalence between the value of $200 to Gates or Buffet (whose Giving Pledge I applaud) and its value to those parents. Our friend Adam Smith addressed both relative income and (what we call) decreasing marginal utility in his own 18th century context. Similar observations, grounded in his “necessaries and conveniencies” framework, led him to favour taxing the rich. The early March issue of The Economist included a summary article about recent research on inequality and GDP growth. There is indeed evidence associating inequality with slow GDP growth, but since we do not really understand what causes and sustains GDP growth I would take a cautious view about such evidence. I find the question that you pose before you raise this evidentiary point much easier. If Canada’s GDP over the generation that I cited had grown by, say, two-thirds of its actual gain, with the (still very large) aggregate benefit distributed equally to all Canadians, then I would certainly consider us better off: working class parents could expect better prospects for their children rather than drudgery with no gain; the poor would see – for them, hugely significant – gains as opposed to wrenching losses; while the wealthy would still be advancing apace with each other. This assessment brings me to your opening paragraph about definitions, measurement and judgement. Your question about Canada was easier for me to manage than The Economist’s question about GDP growth. This was so for a basic reason:

even without a precise measure of what makes the necessaries and conveniencies of life easily come at, the hypothetical Canadian scenario seems to me clearly superior on that score to what actually happened. Happiness – an alternative standard, and not my choice – is indeed hard to measure. That has not stopped smart people like Richard Easterlin from trying, with interesting results that are no less solid than the GDP-inequality literature that The Economist cited. But when we choose concepts and measures to evaluate economic performance, we cannot avoid value judgements. Adam Smith was a moral philosopher. If we choose per-capita GDP, we are choosing, contra Smith, to value Bill Gates’ marginal $200 as equivalent to that of a Bangladeshi family. If we choose the logarithm of per-capita GDP (as the Human Development Index does, as a rather standard, rough-and-ready quantification of diminishing utility), then we give more weight to that baby’s chance to live. En passant, why not choose as our measure, say, the percentage of children

inequality and growth, visit: www.globalbrief.ca

THE DEFINITION "Post-Mandela Africa... …doit définir une vision et stratégie

GLOBAL BRIEF • WINTER | SPRING 2014

The momentum of Africa’s population growth is such that the continent would not be able to even approximate the goal of effectively eliminating poverty by 2030, as envisioned in the post-2015 Millennium Development Goals.

collectives pour sortir du sous-développement, de l’instabilité, de l’état de guerre cyclique et de la dépendance économique qui entravent l’épanouissement des populations africaines. Les dirigeants africains, pour être fidèles à et dignes de l’héritage symboliquement fort de Nelson Mandela, ont ainsi un devoir d’union et une responsabilité d’unité effective pour assurer la paix, la stabilité et le bien-être du continent. Cela passera, entre autres, par le courage politique de renforcer l’Union africaine et la Commission de l’Union africaine pour en faire, au-delà d’une simple profession de foi, de véritables instruments d’intégration; la mise en place de mécanismes de coordination d’une monnaie africaine, d’une banque centrale africaine et d’un fonds monétaire africain au service du développement économique et de la diplomatie africaine; l’accélération de l’harmonisation effective de la liberté de circulation dans l’espace africain; le renforcement de l’État de droit et de la transparence; la priorisation de l’industrialisation et du développement des capacités productives des différents pays africains; le transfert des richesses tirées des matières premières vers l’amélioration du pouvoir d’achat et la création d’emplois décents dans tous les pays de l’espace africain afin d’inverser le flux migratoire vers les autres continents; et la réalisation de programmes de développement humain, de science et de technologie au diapason de la diversité culturelle, économique et technique de l’Afrique et du monde. Cela semble relever d’une utopie, mais n’oublions pas que Nelson Mandela a rendu l’impensable possible. Il reste alors à ses pairs héritiers de rendre réalisable cet espoir fabuleux de voir l’Afrique être une actrice véritable de la marche du monde, une puissance politique, diplomatique et économique, et non plus simplement un marché».

adage “a life worth living.” His death left large numbers mourning for their personal losses, with open outpouring of unbridled emotion in public where they gathered to celebrate his life. His capacity for forgiveness was astounding, and his death left us with the opportunity to re-evaluate ourselves, as well as the current calibre of leadership in Africa. A quick conclusion might be that few can measure up or currently indicate the potential to do so. It is ironic that his values were forged in the cauldron of unfair society. Yet, in far better times, our leadership regresses, and fails by paying homage to populism or demagoguery. The fact that 37 states on the African continent today have laws that discriminate against a person’s sexual preference – because it is ‘un-African’ – reminds us of Nelson Mandela’s trial speech where he reiterated his fight against domination, white or black. We can almost hear him including the domination of homophobia – in yet another example of lived leadership – if he were alive today. He would castigate that practice and call leaders to account. Few in history could do that without inviting a barbed response in return. He could do it because of the esteem in which everyone held him. Nelson Mandela was the world’s hero, and we responded to him because of the lifelong sacrifice that he made for a people – his people. As a result, we thought him to be the ultimate public servant. Today, African leadership is recognized through the cult of personalities who demand our respect, but never earn it. They take large advertisements in local and national newspapers to remind us of what they do for us, without any acknowledgement that this is their designated job. Long cavalcades of blue flashing lights remind us that someone important might be travelling on the same road as us, without any recollection that our taxes pay for that privilege. Framed pictures of government officials adorn most government offices that deliver few tangible results, except more corruption. The duty of public officials appears only in election manifestos, but is never practiced as service due to the people. Alas, low quality leadership is not just the feature of Africa, but a reality on every continent today (see the Tête à Tête interview with Bob Rae at p. 36). And so it will be some time yet before another Mandela arrives. Vinodh Jaichand is the Dean of the School of Law,

Daniel Didier Preira, Juriste principal au cabinet d’avocats

University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg.

Ferdi-Martin, est ancien Greffier adjoint de la Cour pénale

The views expressed herein are the author’s alone.

internationale et Chef de la Section des conseils de la Défense et de l’administration pénitentiaire du Tribunal pénal

…is at a crossroads. The question is no

…is searching for real leadership.

longer how far Africa has travelled since the days of slavery, colonialism and apartheid, but rather which strategic decisions it has to make.

One of the most inspirational leaders in the world has left us groping for a better understanding of the

Several international magazines have devoted their covers to the economic awakening of Africa,

international pour le Rwanda.

and predicted that seven of the 10 largest global economic growth stories for countries over the next five years will be in Africa. The IMF predicts growth of six percent in 2014 for the continent. However, Africa faces many challenges. First, its growth is mainly based on the export of its abundant raw materials, and the continent has proven incapable of creating sustainable jobs. More importantly, according to one UN screenplay, the African population could more than quadruple this century, from 800 million in 2000 to 3.6 billion in 2100. While one in seven people now lives in Africa, it will probably be one in four in 2050, and perhaps one in three in 2100. The increase will be particularly significant in Sub-Saharan Africa, where the population could grow from a little less than 700 million in 2000 to nearly 3.4 billion in 2100. This African demographic reality is almost always exclusively presented in the negative – poverty, conflict, insecurity, disease – obscuring the tremendous social, cultural, scientific, political, economic and commercial potential suggested by this population growth. By 2050, Africa will have the greatest potential among all continents in respect of its young and dynamic labour force. Ascribing proper value to this enormous potential is an imperative for Africa’s politicians. Africa’s collective responsibility, on this logic, involves a duty to educate and train the population so that it becomes a powerful lever for the emergence of sustainable prosperity leading to a larger middle class, higher standards of living, and enduring social peace and stability. Ababacar Mbengue is a professor of strategic management at the University of Rheims in France, and founder of the Society for African Management.

…is changing. Work done by the African Fu-

The forecast of generally higher rates of growth in Africa has, in recent years, received considerable public and analytical attention. The possible reasons for the improvements include Africa’s population dividend, evidence of more responsible macroeconomic management and reform, improved agricultural output and industrial management, more stable political frameworks, more effective aid, targeted debt relief and increased ILLUSTRATION: EDEL RODRIGUEZ

2010 to $3.5 trillion by 2030, and $11 trillion by 2050). Much as there is well-deserved excitement about the rise of Africa, it is important that these future growth prospects be placed in context, for the continent’s relative size as part of the global economy will continue to remain modest. Africa currently constitutes approximately 2.5 percent of the global economy, and this figure will have increased to roughly 3.8 percent by 2030 and 6.5 percent by 2050. Despite substantial reductions in the percentage of Africans living in extreme poverty – that is, Africans at income levels below US$1.25 per day – the momentum of Africa’s population growth is such that the continent would not be able to even approximate the goal of effectively eliminating poverty by 2030, as envisioned in the post-2015 Millennium Development Goals. While we expect democracy to expand and governance to improve, structural forces – such as the African youth bulge, high rates of urbanization and unemployment – imply continued advanced levels of turbulence. If they are able to make the best of their future, Africans in the post-Mandela era will require inspirational leadership, reconciliation and vision of the kind that Mandela and F.W. de Klerk were able to offer South Africa. Jakkie Cilliers is the Executive Director of the Institute for

Africans in the postMandela era will require inspirational leadership, reconciliation and vision of the kind that Mandela and F.W. de Klerk were able to offer South Africa. GLOBAL BRIEF • WINTER | SPRING 2014

tures project at the Institute for Security Studies in partnership with the Frederick S. Pardee Center at the University of Denver suggests that the African economy as a whole will grow at an average rate of 5.6 percent between 2010 and 2050. This will be significantly faster than our forecast of a global growth average of slightly below three percent per annum for that same period.

domestic revenues, growth in remittances and foreign direct investment, the rise of the South (China in particular), and the extent to which Africa has been able to benefit from the commodities boom. Except for Angola and, eventually, Ethiopia, growth will be faster in smaller economies and countries with smaller populations. Bref, during this period, the size of the African economy will increase almost nine-fold in market exchange rate terms (from around US$1.2 trillion in

Security Studies in Pretoria.

STRATEGIC FUTURES “The winner of this summer’s World Cup in Brazil will be... ...Mexico. Why? Because the opportunity to beat its regional rivals on their own turf is too good to be missed. Before this prediction is dismissed out of hand as patriotic lunacy, it is important to remind the world that Mexico is the current Olympic champion in football, having defeated Brazil in the final in London in 2012. A Mexican victory will rebalance the political equilibrium in Latin America. The emergence of Brazil in the international arena has challenged Mexico’s long-held perception of itself as the first among equals in the region (see the In Situ article by César Velázquez Guadarrama at p. 28). It is not hard to think that the two countries will clash in the coming years – on and off the pitch – as they assert their strategic, social and economic primacy among Latin American states. Witness, for instance, the recent declarations of the Brazilian Minister of External Relations, Antonio Patriota, criticizing the Pacific Alliance led by Mexico (and including Colombia, Chile and Peru). In strict football terms, Mexico does not have an easy path to the World Cup final. Being placed in Group A with the host nation is always difficult (especially when that host nation happens to be the five-time world champion). Moreover, in the round of 16, Mexico will likely face the 2010 World Cup champion or finalist – to wit, Spain or the Netherlands.” Alejandro García Magos is a Spanish-language Geo-Blogger with Global Brief.

GLOBAL BRIEF • WINTER | SPRING 2014

...improved soccer governance – some-

thing that may also apply for the 2022 tournament in Qatar. This is not because FIFA has suddenly opted for transparency and accountability, or because it feels less comfortable today with autocrats and authoritarian leaders than it did in the past. Instead, the primary reason for improved soccer governance is that international sports associations can no longer isolate themselves from the lack of confidence in institutions that is fuelling a decade of global defiance and dissent. Mass anti-government protests in soccer-crazy Brazil – questioning the country’s investment in, and spending on, the World Cup – alongside

mounting pressure on Qatar by trade union and human rights activists to abolish severe restrictions on workers’ rights already promise to significantly impact how future hosting rights for mega sporting events are awarded. These events and dynamics have put paid to the notion that sports – particularly soccer – and politics can be separated. The protests in Brazil drove home the fact that international sports associations – particularly those like FIFA, whose reputations have been tarnished by massive corruption scandals and controversial hosting decisions – have become a target. As a consequence, FIFA is likely to find its demands for extraterritorial and tax-free status, as well as its ability to impose its will on governments, increasingly challenged. The future awarding of mega events is likely to involve some species of consultation in order to assure the buy-in of local populations. FIFA and national governments will have to convince publics that massive infrastructure investments will not perpetuate longstanding urban problems, or come at the cost of badly needed investment in health care and education. By the same token, controversy over Qatar’s treatment of foreign labour is ensuring that, in future, respect for human rights will be factored into FIFA’s assessments of a country’s ability to host a World Cup. Fundamental social and legal changes in Qatar could also reverberate across the Gulf, where foreign workers often constitute a significant majority of the population.” James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University (Singapore), and co-director of the University of Würzburg’s Institute for Fan Culture. His blog is called “The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer.”

Spain or Germany. I personally fancy Brazil, for two reasons: first, Brazil is hosting; and second, Neymar, their star player, should have a breakout tournament. Of course, there will be considerable perils and risks for Brazil on the way to likely victory: an accidental loss; underestimating an opponent; or insufficient focus or preparation for the quarterfinal or semi-final match. To be sure, Spain, with its magnificent stars, cannot be counted out, and Germany, given that PHOTOGRAPH: AP / PAULO DUARTE

team’s discipline, must also be seen as a great contender. (I will be interested to see whether Miroslav Klose breaks the record currently held by Brazil’s Ronaldo for most goals in all World Cups played.) Finally, although I am certain that they will not win, the teams from Colombia, Mexico and Bosnia-Herzegovina will be interesting to watch in the group stage.” Yuri Kovbasiuk is President of Ukraine’s National Academy

Portugal’s Cristiano Ronaldo during a soccer match versus the Netherlands at Algarve stadium in Faro, Portugal, August 2013.

GLOBAL BRIEF • WINTER | SPRING 2014

...one of three serious teams – Brazil,

of Public Administration, in Kiev.

EPIGRAM

Mass versus Force Legitimacy loves the art of persuasion BY GEORGE ELLIOTT CLARKE

I George Elliott Clarke is the William Lyon Mackenzie King Visiting Chair in Canadian Studies at Harvard University, and the Poet Laureate of Toronto. His newest book of poetry is Lasso the Wind: Aurélia’s Verses

GLOBAL BRIEF • WINTER | SPRING 2014

and Other Poems.

n their conclaves in various enclaves (‘think tanks’ and spas), military strategists and policy wonks promote ‘force projection’ and/or ‘brute force’ – so as to obtain diplomatic purchase on some ‘posture’ or ‘front.’ An aircraft carrier here, a drone strike there, and peace and security, or trade and markets, are won – or so the ‘forceful’ gamble. Thus, China – the new banker and workforce to the world – has a yen to apply a Yankee-style Monroe Doctrine to its bordering seas and airspace, and directs its fleet and scrambles its jets to escort ‘interlopers.’ “Tut-tut,” cries the US, and “No, no,” says Japan. But neither party cares to recall the 1860 Anglo-French Expedition to Imperial China – an exercise in ‘force projection’ – to coerce Cathay to accept French, British and American trade and British-supplied opium, and permit the export of its citizens as ‘coolie’ labour. Rank gunboat diplomacy it was, and served to push China into a century of poverty, starvation, actual invasion (by Imperial Japan) and civil war, resolved by rebellions and revolution and, ultimately, governance by Scotch-sipping ‘Maoists.’ This account of current ‘force projection’ answering past ‘force projection’ is just one instance among countless multitudes. But the threat – or application – of brute force is not only an international experience. Domestically, too, governments seek to bully citizens. The fatal shooting in 1970 of anti-Vietnam War protesters at Kent State University in the US is one example. In 2010, in Toronto, forces deployed during the G20 Summit staged a ‘police Pride Parade,’ flexing leather and flashing chrome as they corralled moms and pops and babes-in-strollers, jailed many for shouting slogans, and others for walking down the wrong side of a street at the wrong time. Some constables even removed their nametags to make it more difficult for them to face prosecution. Following this affront to Canadian democracy, crocodile-tear regret was intoned. Yet, the police action was likely no aberration; arguably, it was rational – a real effort to cow the populace: to teach it that, contrary to the 1960s slogan, the people have no power. Deadlier events have unfolded in Egypt and now in Ukraine, with different governments, for different reasons, and allied with different ‘foreign interests,’ having conducted massacres of civilian protesters to communicate the same pointed message heard less violently in Canada: Dissent at your own risk – if not of life and limb, then certainly of liberty. Yet, a vicious irony afflicts most attempts at ‘forcefulness’; it almost always camouflages fundamental,

ideological weakness. Police and soldiers are set loose – like two-legged pit bulls – upon protesters, whose upraised fists are met with bullets, water cannon, tear gas, or all of the above. Cruelty is employed to offset the illegitimacy of the government – or the unpopularity of its policies. Beleaguered governors cast their opposition as ‘terrorists,’ but such folks often possess no arms – save stones, bricks, and/or Molotov cocktails – to contest the august Terror that the State may inflict, dispatching foes to gulags, Gitmos, and graves. The effective counter to irresponsible force or illegitimate governance is, as History has shown us, the massing of citizens around an ideal or a vision that dissolves State ‘resolve’ like ice on a summer sidewalk.Thus, mass movements have toppled potentates in Egypt and Ukraine, and, in decades past, swept away dictators in Iran, Nicaragua and Romania. The single irresistible force in politics is the mass popular will, expressed via rallies or at the ballot box or through boycotts or, now and then, the storming of a Bastille and the beheading of a ‘royal’ or two. Governors should always prefer persuasion to force. Persuasion suggests that the government believes in the rightness of its proposals. Force suggests that it doubts its own propositions. Democracy demands a constant commitment to fair and fearless debate – not police on every street corner and spies at every ISP address. The temptation to muzzle dissent by literally shooting down opponents is perhaps greatest in a global economy and an Internet-connected polity. Because only some ideas are deemed correct (open markets, targeted assassinations, mass incarceration, limited public spending, corporate stewardship, and total surveillance – itself a stealth war against free speech), governments attempt to stymie the people by denying them access to information, including objective, scientific research. The solution to the anti-democratic ‘displays of force’ and belligerence now prevalent, even in liberal societies, is a pronouncedly activist citizenry, demanding access to facts, public ownership of broadcasting and key industries, rigid environmental standards, civilian oversight of police, progressive taxation, mass education up to and including post-secondary institutions, and public spending of renminbi – i.e. ‘the people’s money’ – on projects serving the public good. Oh yes, and the strict regulation of finance so as to avoid the profligate theft of public – or private – resources to satisfy insatiable, private greed. | GB