05 Aug “What’s Canada For?” To Do Good in the World, Says Michael Byers
“What’s Canada for?” This may seem like an odd question, but one to which Michael Byers, a lawprof at the University of British Columbia and director of the Liu Center for Global Policy there, has a clear answer. Canada should exist in order to pursue a progressive, international-law abiding foreign policy. So says his new book entitled: Intent for a Nation: What’s Canada For, A Relentlessly Optimistic Manifesto for Canada’s Role in the World.
I haven’t got the book, but this summary seems to capture the flavor of Byers’ recommendations: join international treaties and organizations (and push other countries to do so), act in accordance with international law, and resist “bad” countries (mainly, it appears, the United States) who tempt Canada into doing things like building missile defenses and laying landmines.
I’m not exactly enamored of Byers’ views, but that what I find really interesting is that Byers seems to be using Canadian nationalism to bolster Canadian internationalism. This is a novel rhetorical trick, but one that I think Canada is particularly susceptible to (as I observed in a post here). In the long run, though, I wonder whether this tactic is really sustainable. Surely, Canadians can be convinced on the merits of Byers’ arguments rather than by resorting to the trope that it is Canadians’ nationalistic duty to join the Kyoto Protocol?
I disagree with the characterisation that Canada’s internationalism is driven primarily by anti-Americanism. It is, of course, a plausible notion that Canadian politicians try to galvanise support for internationalist approaches through the politics of differentiation. However, it is surely a gross simplification to reduce their public’s penchant for universalism down to petty envy. Nor can it be entirely explained by power seeking. For whatever the gains in prestige, believable promise-making, or bureaucratic control which might be said to incentivise Canada spearheading multilateralism, it is doubtful the public could understand the level of detail sufficiently to explain such sustained beliefs, especially in comparison to the real allure of hard-power. Julian himself believes multilateral power is mostly illusory, so power can scarcely be said to explain Canada’s position. The problem, I think, is substantially to do with the Realist view which is assumed here. Realists aggregate the state in a similar fashion to how libertarianism’s political economy strips the individual of its temporal and behavioural complexity to achieve the homo economus. A process such as this yields wonderful certainties, and opportunities for calculation and optimisation, however, its explanatory horizons are truncated by those unrealistic assumptions at the beginning. In this case, the… Read more »
Norway provides one of the most interesting examples of a country that has given itself a mission in the world that relies on gaining a prominent role in negotiations on the basis of not having a great deal of raw power with which to clobber people.
Jan Egeland played the most widely-noted role in defining this mission and making it happen. See this article:
Many peace processes and treaties later, it seems clear that regardless whether it was a “great work of academe”, it certainly worked in practice.