Changing the Metaphor: a potential Canadian contribution to the human future
(A Citizen Brief to the Dialogue on Foreign Policy)
My dear Minister of Foreign Affairs,
I would like to suggest that it is time to change the metaphor for Canada, and with it, the way we think about foreign policy.
While in one perspective Canada is a nation state, in a more significant perspective it is an intentional community with its own nation state. Moreover, its existence as a community is becoming increasingly intentional.
A friend has remarked that Canada's decision to remain outside the "coalition of the willing" invading Iraq has done as much for our image of ourselves as did Vimy Ridge. Also, while the SARS episode - and at this stage it can only be hoped that it is an episode - has unfortunately been met by our responding as a "victim" rather than as a "good citizen of the world helping to bring SARS under control," SARS too has contributed to our image as distinctive. In the coming months we should build on these opportunities to strengthen the community bonds among us and to present a distinctive new image of ourselves to the world.
This image would be of a national community in the emerging global community of humankind. It would open conceptual space beyond "inter-national" affairs into "global" affairs. At the same time of course it would subsume "foreign" policy (conceived as "outside" Canada or "external") to a new kind of policy based on global relations and global policy development within which the Canadian community was conceived as part of the larger global community - a "neighbourhood" if you like, in the "global village." While "foreignness" might still be "not of one's own land," the global issues that predominate within today's "foreign" policy would be understood as "of one's own world," i.e. not "foreign."
As you will gather, I am proposing moving some of what have been the "techtonic plates" of Canadian policy development since our inception as a nation. I think the conditions of the world have changed and we need to change with them. Nation states can no longer pretend to be sovereign entities: we are all, as persons and through our institutions, participants now in global affairs.
I have suggested that we perceived Canada as predominantly a community of Canadians, not predominantly as a nation state with its citizens. The distinctive character of community relations is that interests in common are understood to subsume divisive interests. It is not that competition cannot thrive within the cooperative forces of community -- indeed it can often be carried further than would be dared outside the bonds of community - but that today too much of international relations subsumes global and national community to mere inter- and intra-state affairs and that these affairs to often subsume cooperation to competition. Competition is a good tool but a bad master - which I think is what many of the "anti"-globalization forces are trying to say as they globalize their own networks. What is at issue is a concern that where competitive economic globalization precedes cooperative social globalization, there will be suffering - suffering unalleviated by cooperative community arrangements for the common welfare.
Now to make this new omelet - to change the very basis of the Canadian nation state and Canadian policy in co-evolution with the new "common future" world that is emerging, perhaps even for Canada to assume some leadership toward this world - a number of eggs would have to be broken. But surely such a change in the conceptual framework of national and international policy is the coming item on the menu for humankind. A new national and international, indeed global, architecture is needed. In pioneering this approach - beginning to rethink our domestic and foreign policies and bring them together in the framework of Canada as a community within a global community, we could begin to make much more sense of the major items that are now on the human agenda - to say nothing of those that are on the foreign policy agenda.
These major items are, in my view, and in this order (I'm replacing your three pillars with my own three)
1) Environmental affairs
We need, first of all, to understand that we live on a planet where human life support conditions are fragile. The shortest route to this realization is a shift in perspective from an understanding of nature and the environment as "out there" to an understanding of ourselves as within it. Our relations with the environment are not external, i.e. "foreign," affairs, with the environment perceived as "out there." They are global affairs in which we participate and within which we are elements: the processes of the biosphere. Canadians and their government of Canada should be promoting this emerging understanding here at home and in the larger human community. The outlook, which can be called a "biosphere perspective," needs to be adopted in every local, national, international, and global forum.
Such an understanding of our situation within "the thin skin of a spinning planet" is not only crucial to human survival, it will also strengthen the appreciation of the world's people as a single community, a "global village," and thus facilitate acceptance of other needed policy options. This means changing the present policy-making approach of sequential hierarchical priority being given to first to economic, social and then environmental policy. Agendas at all levels (including of course Cabinet), need to change to a nested approach in which environmental policies embrace social policy which embraces economic policy, with the three being considered concurrently. Of course this will mean changes in the procedures and structures of government but knowing where we need to go should help us in getting there. New cabinet and departmental structures will need to emerge in which some ministries become embraced by others until all become accustomed to a more integrative and differently sequenced approach to policy-making.
2) Governmental affairs
We need, second, to deepen and strengthen among ourselves an emergent understanding about governance, and to facilitate it elsewhere. By and large, governance among humankind has to date been a matter of a few leaders and a mass of people, "commoners." This is no longer a sensible way to think of governance. Perhaps it never was, but today's technology has now clearly made it obsolete. Governance today needs to be thought of in terms of self-organizing, self-governing persons in self-organizing, self governing groups (or "multiple sovereignties," as the late Dr. A. J. Corry called them, noting that the "negotiation of multiple sovereignties" was a well-developed skill of Canadians). As the current Minister of Foreign Affairs for Southeast Asia has said (and others may also have said - I just happened across his comment recently), " Democracy subordinates states to people; they own their government, not vice versa."
[A sidebar: I was recently charmed to see a comment that matches Dr. Corry's although approaching the matter from a rather different perspective! "I don't want to sing the praises of Canada, but if anything defines us, it's our historic ineptness at stamping each other out. ... we are as capable as anyone in harbouring prejudices and ancient grudges. But the point is that we were never able to exercise these very effectively." O dear Canada! The comment was by Ed Weick, Ottawa economist, on an e-mail list April 24, 2003.]
While groups may or may not choose to organize within themselves as hierarchies, we need to think of persons, both as individuals and in their various groupings, as being in a grand mesh of conversational interconnections - a global village in which everyone, however young or old, healthy or disabled, has dignity and merits the provision, from others and from all the world's institutions and ideologies, of a mutually achieved human security.
What is envisaged is of course a new role and structures for democratic self-governance and the public policies we pursue, as well as for the procedures of policy-making itself. Such changes, to be successful, need to involve both ourselves in our roles as increasingly responsible self-governing citizens and inhabitants of this country and in our informal and formal institutions of self-government as themselves maturing and responding to our growing maturity as citizens.
This current "dialogue" on foreign policy is surely a move in the right direction - but maybe next time it will be the citizenry convening it, discussing it among ourselves, able to call upon resource persons, and increasingly giving responsible direction to those we have elected to represent our interests through our formal institutions of self-government? I'm groping here for something that is not "direct representation" but also not of today's citizen-government relations. Canadians as responsible self-governing persons interested in developing our institutions of responsible self-government needs to be very much in our thinking at this time and we'll probably need to evolve new language. Certainly it won't be that of "subject citizens" and governments responsible for "peace, order and good government" but something closer (and here I'll draw upon Dr. Corry again), governments governing in such a way that peace, order and good government are maintained. By extension of course (as this is being written for a foreign policy dialogue), we need to share with and learn from the world not only the usual tenets of democracy - rule of law, human rights, elections, etc., but the new feelings and sensations of global, national and local community - not "distributive justice" perhaps but something more humanly defined: perhaps "affective justice?"
3) Social and economic affairs
We need, third, to understand the need for and deeply commit ourselves to sustained peace in the world. Sustained peace is the essential context, the sine qua non, of accomplishing a whole set of urgent and recognized (if not always acknowledged) global and national environmental, social and economic priorities. Sustained peace means deepening peace, not merely averting and resolving conflict. A sustainable peace movement and sustainable peace processes and agendas and indicators, including a caring attention to human experience from infancy to old age, needs to be helped to emerge from persons themselves (including parents), from schools and communities, local to national to global, and from all religions and peoples.
The hope for sustained peace exists: the values and the will need to be strengthened by an environment of supportive institutional structures and procedures and a redesigned architecture of international institutions. Peace is everybody's business (as Paul Chapin has so succinctly said) - especially so in a world in which death and ill-will toward others - martyrdom - still retains an appeal to some. Canada now needs and the world now needs Canada to take extraordinary steps to promote the concept, values, processes and structures toward sustained peace, both among ourselves and more globally. (A number of more detailed suggestions are available from persons who have considered this issue but this is not the place to broach them.)
Summing up, then, in henceforth putting our public policy development (including "foreign" policy development), in a global framework for the human future; in valuing and deepening the great human asset of the community goodwill that we Canadians bear toward each other and toward others; and in moving immediately in practical ways to implement a new framework of understanding about our situation "in community" both within this country and on the planet, we Canadians and our government can do much to shape not only our own future but help to shape a peaceful and productive future for all humankind. It is no longer idealistic to talk of these matters: it has now become immensely practical and in many respects urgent. (Some work has and is being done of course on all these issues but, like paradigm shifts always, it remains marginal to the dominant environmental, social, economic and - let it be said - foreign policy paradigms at this time.)
I hope therefore, my dear Minister of Foreign Affairs, that you will be able to give some attention to the ideas I have expressed and that our forthcoming political discussions around the next election will see the development of a refreshed, engaging and facilitative Canadian agenda. I have scanned the bulletins that your people have been issuing on the Dialogue and am confident that I am far from alone among Canadians in wishing to see such national strategy developed - although there seem to be few participants expressing themselves in quite such comprehensive terms as I have chosen to do here.
To me at least the world has changed and the old paths to a secure, peaceful and prosperous future no longer appear to point the way. To me it appears that we in Canada are now in a remarkable position to help secure and develop our own future in constructive ways - if we but seize the moment and reconceptualize our situation.
Further, we are now in a position where such a reconceptualization could be participated in and facilitated by our governments. The fostering of diversity within a strengthened cooperation now needs to characterize our situation in common in Canada and with others globally. We need to develop public policies in the new context of national and global community that meet the minimal evaluation criteria for public policy - that it be intellectually respectable, morally acceptable, administratively feasible and intuitively sound.
Thus, so blessed by good fortune is Canada in the world, I am confident that our now so-called "foreign policy" - were it to be developed in the broader metaphor of national and global community - could make a significant contribution to the human future. With Keynes, I tend to believe that the world is much shaped by ideas. Canada, in supporting, developing and sharing some of the ideas that are now emerging about our needed cooperative relationships with our natural and constructed environments and with each other, and with new understandings of the natural endowments of humankind and how these can be developed, could do much to help shape a civil future for humanity.
Yours sincerely,
Gail Ward Stewart
Ottawa
April 27, 2003
My dear Minister of Foreign Affairs,
Please regard the following as supplementary to or illustrative of some of the points made in my previously-filed brief, Changing the Metaphor.
I had occasion to describe the contents of "Changing the Metaphor" at the Town Hall meeting sponsored by our member of Parliament for Ottawa Centre, Mac Harb, on Monday April 28, also to have been in subsequent conversations on some of the issues in that paper. I've also had occasion to hear David Kilgour, Minister for Foreign Affairs (Southeast Asia) speak at the CACOR (Canadian Association for the Club of Rome) meeting on Monday noon, April 28 and have continued to note ideas in the media and elsewhere that might relate constructively to our foreign policy development.
1) I am impressed that the distiction made in Changing the Metaphor between a nation state with subject citizens and an intentional community in which the members are responsible for their governments (and by implication need to become well-informed, responsible, and have ready opportunities for dialogue together and not merely to respond to government-structured questions) is important. I was pleasantly surprised by its reception in several circumstances recently.
2) At Mac Harb's Town Hall meeting on Monday evening, Penny Collinette was introduced, coming currently from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. In response to my mention of the need to conceive Canada as an intentional community with its own nation state, Ms. Collinette supposed that I was talking about the currently fashionable idea of "civil society." (I didn't have opportunity to correct her in the meeting nor did the time seem appropriate afterward.) Lest in this foreign policy dialogue process I should be similarly miscontrued, I was of course not speaking of civil society, which is commonly defined as exclusive of government and even exclusive sometimes of the business sector. (It is sometimes even equated with the so-called "voluntary" sector.) Intentional commmunity, in distinction, is a concept inclusive of all Canadians and our institutions.
3) The same Town Hall meeting was free of all but a brief opening statement and entirely free of the input of experts except as some of the participants spoke from having some expertise in certain matters (more as resource persons to the gathering than as experts having the answers). This I thought was a good example of the kind of dialogue forums needed by an intentional community. Much of the expertise currently on offer in international affairs is malstructured by being cast in the now eroding context of nation states with subject citizens who are not simultaneously conceived as citizens of the world -- members of the community of humankind. Such expertise also casts as "foreign" or merely "inter-national" policy much that is really "global" policy. Approaching such issues as, for example, climate change, trade, or security as "foreign" policy issues to be conceived exclusively through the lens of the foreign policies of "nation states" is to place them on a Procrustean bed and to distort what needs to be done to help assure our healthy survival, let alone human security.
4) Mr. Martin has now suggested that we have a Cabinet Committee on US relations: I would like to suggest it is even more important and urgent that we have a Cabinet Committee on global matters. We need gradually to place more and more policies in this context, reworking Ministerial responsibilities and departmental structures accordingly, leaving perhaps a residual Department of Internal Affairs....
5) In another brief paper circulated elsewhere, I was trying to address the problem of the tension between Pax Americana and the United Nations. My proposal was that a third major forum be encouraged to emerge, supportive of the UN and the UN but offering a somewhat different dialogue among nations. I suggested it be called a "Commons of the Democracies." (I'll attach the paper.) After writing it I became aware of the Huntley book entitled "Pax Democratica" and the creation of the "Community of the Democracies" (CD) in Warsaw in the year 2000. I also became aware of the interest of the Minister of Foreign Affairs for Southeast Asia in this institution and was glad to hear it mentioned in his talk at the meeting of the Canadian Association for Club of Rome (CACOR) Monday noon. He invited some of us to pursue our interest in the possibilities of the CD and to meet with him and we sall be following up on this invitation. It is possible that the Community of Democracies, somewhat changed in focus, might play a useful role at a global level but this remains for exploration with the Minister and others. I simply wish to flag it to attention here. Even today, in what seems to be its currently tentative condition, it is of course of interest beyond human security and peacebuilding concerns.
6) Do you know of "amphiktiony? I suspect it might prove a useful concept -- not least perhaps because of its unusual name! See http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/econ/int12.htm
7) Finally, the principle of "informed consent" being required for government activity in a democracy, as broached by Krugman in the New York Times yesterday, is interesting but not perhaps consistent with representative government. It nonetheless might bear some thought - moving toward the principles of "informed consent" might be useful in strengthening the "intentional community" of Canadians as we increasingly develop our role in the world.
I guess that the import of my original brief and this supplement is that we urgently need to develop a new relationship between Canadians and our governments. We need concurrently to reconceive the nature of Canada in the world as being less that of a nation state with "external" relations and more that of a community within a larger community. If my brief and this supplement have done nothing more than draw attention to the eroding techtonic plates on which our current foreign policy discourse is based -- including this (otherwise admirable) dialogue as it has been structured -- and to call for a new way of thinking about our relations with each other and in the world, then I think my purpose will have been accomplished. At thie point we may need questions more than answers, pursued among ourselves and with others, in what John Ralston Saul might think of in terms of Canada constituting an "experiment." Let's experiment further and more vigourously and see whether Canada can now support or open up some new perspectives and conversations in the world. Our present paradigm of discussions among nation states is clearly proving inadequate and even perhaps dangerous. While Ministers of Foreign Affairs may feel that they do not have many degrees of freedom in the larger world it is surely possible that domestic forums, task forces, research projects, Parliamentary Committees, conferences and the occasions offered by speeches, meetings with constituents, etc., could provide many opportunities to begin to address foreign policy issues in a new way, changing the metaphor.
Yours sincerely,
Gail Stewart |
