Canada in the World: Canadian International Policy

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Emerging Fault Lines	4 min 14 sec	Windows Media l QuickTime
Role of Middle Powers	3 min 43 sec	Windows Media l QuickTime
Institution Building	3 min 54 sec	Windows Media l QuickTime
The NPT: A Bargain of Unequals	6 min 02 sec	Windows Media l QuickTime

(Video players are available here: QuickTime | Windows Media)

Transcript

Emerging Fault Lines

At the end of the Cold War, American hegemony created a certain kind of structure for world affairs, whereas during the Cold War superpower rivalry meddled in lots of countries and established fault lines within countries. In a post-Cold War world, what you would expect is internal problems in various parts of the world to spill out, and that is what we have seen. And you would also expect the hegemonic power and its preferences regarding regions and states to play a very large role, which we have also seen. You would expect the asymmetries of power to drive how people do things and how they respond to adverse circumstances. I think terrorism is a product of the fact that you can’t have conventional attacks and you can’t have standard conflicts, given the asymmetries in power. If you were a typical small country concerned about what certain great powers were doing, you would probably create groups to raise the costs to those powers, but without attribution because the prospects for punishment are enormous. Finally, you would expect the fallout of globalization—the economic integration of the world and the consequences that that has—something that economists politely describe as adjustment, which we all know means a lot of people losing their jobs and tremendous social instability. You should expect a lot of fault lines and pressures there. My sense is that you are going to see it in the rich, industrial countries. In fact, I think the reactions to globalization are going to be in those sets of countries.

My main argument would be that we live in a world in which there are tremendous pressures—when you bring together the continuation of a sovereign-state system with globalization and with democratic rule, those three things together create tremendous tensions. There are pressures to undo each of them. There are pressures to limit the role of sovereignty and pressures to limit the role of globalization. There are pressures to limit democratic governance, because it spills over and constrains states in various ways. That, to me, is another emerging fault line. Otherwise, as long as the distribution of power looks the way it does, I think you can see what the structure of world affairs is going to be for the next few decades.

The U.S. defence budget—which interestingly enough hasn’t been restrained very much over the last decade and a half—now exceeds the defence budget of the next 15 countries in total. The kinds of investments that continue to be made, what it will take for societies to play catch-up, is a lot. Look at the Europeans. They have wanted to do various kinds of things, creating a separate European army at one point, talking about what kinds of things they could do on their own. They don’t have the lift capacity, they don’t have the intelligence capacity—they have to rely on U.S. satellite imagery and so on.

So whatever investments China is making—at one time we were worried about what investments Japan was going to make and had made—it’s very expensive. It’s extraordinarily expensive. And I think the world will look the way it does now at least for the next couple of decades, the next quarter-century easily.

Role of Middle Powers

Canada, particularly, but I think even other states have a certain kind of role because they have close relations with certain countries. For example, it is very clear that Australia has relationships in Southeast Asia that others don’t—a kind of “standing in” role. It’s clear, for example, that when the U.S. wants to deal with Iran it has to work through the Europeans, who have much closer and long-standing ties. And if you want to deal with North Korea, you have to go through the Chinese government, and so on. That is historically true and I think that it’s also true that middle-range powers who have certain kinds of values have historically played a role. For example, it’s striking that when the NATO charter was being created it was a security organization—it was about providing security, and states were allowed to join even independent of their domestic political systems. But it was at Canada’s insistence that Article 2 was put into the NATO founding document. It talks about maintaining free institutions and standards of living and the values of this grouping of societies.

I think the problem that great powers like the United States have is that they obviously pursue their interests, and when they want to speak in universal and moral terms they are seen either as hypocrites or as advancing some other agenda. What gives others the sense that that is not the case is the role of countries like Canada, Norway, Sweden: that there are a set of values at work and that it’s not about American imperialism, that there really are a set of concerns that have broad legitimacy.

We are having a set of exchanges about what roles are universal—what elements of liberalism hang together. What is required is economic liberalization without political liberalization, without certain kinds of individual freedoms possible. What kinds of social arrangements and sets of values can be instantiated? I think we are going to find out what universal values are. I think family constitutes a universal value, personal autonomy constitutes maybe less of a universal value—we are going to find out. That’s why this discourse is important, but what is essential is that this discourse can’t be seen as a mask for exercises of power politics. And it won’t be, to the extent that it’s engaged in by parties who aren’t great powers prepared to impose their will on others. The U.S. has had a tremendous problem, over an extended period of time, of saying, ”We’re for these values, these are universal values, but we know better than anyone else what makes these values universal.” It’s been the role of other countries that’s been essential in promoting those values and giving them a degree of broader legitimacy.

Institution Building

The last half-century has been a period of constructing international institutions. We have constructed a wide variety of them to deal with different issues. They look different from one another—some are global, some are regional. Sometimes we expand the scope of an existing institution when a new problem arises—so we find NATO in Afghanistan. Sometimes we create an entirely new arrangement—so for example, when it came to controlling missile technology we didn’t use the Non-Proliferation Treaty and the IAEA, we created the Missile Technology Control Regime. There are always choices as to whether to use extant institutions or create new arrangements. We see that on both the security side and on the political/economic side.

The question of UN reform raises the issue of whether this is an institution that one has to fix, because clearly it has certain kinds of problems, or whether the concerns that we have suggest the construction of different kinds of arrangements. It seems to me that that has to be given a fair amount of thought. I think most of the recommendations for UN reform come from blue-ribbon panels or from the Secretary-General himself. To me, they don’t meet the most basic test of international arrangements, which requires that they be incentive compatible. The states that you are expecting to take part ought to have an interest in doing what it is the arrangement is set up to do. If you engage in social engineering without incentive compatibility, you’re inviting disaster. It’s the one thing economists taught us reasonably well.

I want to “punt” on the question of UN reform. I think there are things that can be done and I think there are things that are probably too much to expect. The one other thing that I think is interesting about the rise of new states and institutional reform is that new states come onto the scene—or new powers arise—in a world of existing institutions. They aren’t there at the creation. They can’t play the kind of role they might have played when you were writing the rules afresh. One of the places where we saw that was the Chinese entry into the WTO. The WTO was an extant institution, it functioned, it had a lot of players and a lot of rules. So the Chinese could negotiate the terms of entry, but there was an existing club. You weren’t going to rewrite and redo the club. That is one of the things that we’re going to see—when do you rewrite, how much do you get a chance to rewrite? How much does the rise of new players require new institutions that allow you to draw them in, in certain ways? Notice how the G8 can function separately from the Security Council and have different kinds of players who have a role.

I don’t know whether we are going to get an expanded Security Council and when and who’s going to join—or what other vehicles are going to be created to have global order in different domains. But I think a lot of thought has to be given to the institutions—their membership, their rules and how they function. If you look at the world, there are some institutions that have buildings in Geneva, that are very institutionalized—and some that aren’t. They just function differently, and it’s the way in which we’ve gone about constructing global order.

The NPT: A Bargain of Unequals

Sovereignty has always been a negotiated arrangement. From its inception and the way people talk about its inception and the Treaty of Westphalia, sovereignty involved a trade, a bargain, in which states granted one another’s rulers complete control in some territorial domain and treated those as the interlocutors for their relationship—but in exchange for some restraint on the exercise of power within some territories. The Treaty of Westphalia solved religious conflict, but it solved religious conflict in some sense by getting religion off the table. That norm of non-interference in internal religious practice and religious tolerance, didn’t reflect the values so much as a self-interested trade and a reciprocal bargain. Over time, more and more things have come onto the agenda. It’s a world in which people use sovereignty as a way of saying, “Don’t interfere in my internal sovereign affairs,” but in which we all lecture one another. We all intervene, we all have preferences about what countries do internally—how they treat ethnic groups, whether they suppress women and so on. It’s been an evolving bargain, and different things have come onto the table. And over time, more things may come onto the table, and some are still being negotiated now. We recognize that we have religious conflict off the table, but we haven’t got ethnic conflict off the table. It seems to me the norms about these things emerge out of universal reciprocal preferences. If everyone has a preference that everyone else acts a particular way, you have the basis for a norm and for sanctioning individual departures from the norm, because everyone has that preference about others’ behaviour.

The problem with the way the conversation arises about certain norms is that we don’t have that kind of mutual agreement. Disarmament and the NPT is one of those areas where I don’t see it, because I don’t see the aspects of that kind of reciprocal bargain. It’s been difficult enough to get in other areas, where you can see that there ought to be some reciprocity.

The problem with the NPT is that it was a very particularistic and almost odd arrangement. It was an arrangement about nuclear suppliers and prospective nuclear consumers. The deal that was struck was that the suppliers would provide nuclear technology to the non-nuclear states in exchange for oversight, control and the assurances that they weren’t going to develop nuclear weapons programs. It was a bargain of unequals—it was a set of nuclear weapons states and a set of states that hadn’t yet developed nuclear weapons—and you were instantiating that inequality, but at the same time you couldn’t really say so. So part of the bargain was that nuclear weapons states committed themselves to something they had no intention of fulfilling—and that everyone else knew they had no intention of fulfilling—namely disarmament. But it was a useful club, so that the non-nuclear states periodically would club the great powers over the inadequacy of their pursuit of disarmament. But no one really expected them to pursue disarmament and they were never intending to pursue disarmament.

The second problem is what Iran poses for the NPT. The NPT had a “first mover” problem. Like all international agreements, states could leave by providing—and the agreement actually says—six months’ notice. The dilemma for the nuclear weapons states that provided nuclear technology is that they provided nuclear technology under certain kinds of assurances and provisions, but then in effect were potentially stuck with the problem of the states who had obtained the nuclear technology saying, ”We’re leaving the regime.” Which was what North Korea threatened to do and what Iran threatened to do. We don’t know how close the Clinton administration was, but there was very serious talk in the Clinton administration of bombing North Korea if it actually left the regime. Yet you have to ask yourself the question of how you could possibly do that, since it’s fully within their rights to leave. The problem is the structure of the agreement in the first place. It was this odd agreement that changed the balance of incentives, because once certain states had been provided reactors, provided the technology, they were always in a position to simply throw the inspectors and others out and say, ”I’m leaving the regime” and be left with these facilities. There was never any provision that said, ”If you leave the regime, we blow up the facilities we gave you.”

The NPT is a very peculiar thing and to talk about norms in that setting... It has always been an agreement that had this strange shadow agreement—that everyone understood wasn’t for real—about disarmament. And it had this odd quality of the first movers being stuck if the recipients decided to leave. What do they do then? Which is our problem with Iran.

Last Updated:2006-10-20

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