Canada in the World: Canadian International Policy

Video Interview David Held Subscribe to eNewsletter and/or Email Alerts and Podcasts

Democracy Building  - Duration: 2:50
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My name is David Held, and I come from the London School of Economics. I am the Graham Wallace Professor of Economics at the LSE and I am also a director of a publishing company, so I have two lives: one as an academic and one as a publisher.

I don’t think there is a single answer to the question of where you should help support democracy. In the first instance, I think it is a noble ambition to help encourage self-determination across the world. The ideas of government that are representative, democracies, self-determination, these notions are not just Western ideas. They also have roots in other cultures and they are absolutely crucial to respond to something which is near universal in nature. That is to say, there is no country in the world without a woman that doesn’t want equal respect and equal dignity; there is no country in the world without men who also want to refuse the right to demand deference; and there is no country in the world where people don’t want to escape from the drudgery of poverty. So the concepts of self-determination, democracy, democratic agency are absolutely fundamental.

I think we can see, though, that in the last several years, encouraging these on the basis of a top-down foreign policy approach can be not just counterproductive, it can be disastrous. The American administration—the Bush administration—strongly supported by my Prime Minister, Tony Blair, have thought it possible to create democracies from the top down in a country like Iraq. I think this is a gross misunderstanding of the historical frailty and the cultural frailty of democracy, and it has hugely negative consequences. The consequences in Iraq are all there to see. Not only is Iraq not a democracy, but it is on the edge of civil war. Democracy takes generations to nurture; it takes generations to build. It did so in our countries—and we must not forget that—and therefore it will take generations elsewhere.

So if Canada is engaged in the encouragement of democratic nation-state building, in principle that seems sound and satisfactory, but the way to do that is through the encouragement of independent civil societies. The way to do that is to encourage freedom of expression and association; the way to do that is to strengthen the autonomy of civil society and the agents of civil society, rather than to simply seek a one-blueprint model for all countries to follow that is exactly the same.

Obstacles to Global Democractic Governance - Duration: 4:20

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I think the crisis of effectiveness is a problem of a failure of institutional division of labour, is a failure of the adequate funding of international bodies, is all sorts of things, actually. It’s a very complex scenario, but broadly, I think, there are four problems with our multilateral governance: overlapping and insufficiently clear jurisdictions among multilaterals; inadequate funding of them so they can’t deliver public goods even if they wanted to; responsibility falling between stools because nobody knows exactly who is responsible for an issue—climate change, for example, or the Millennium Development Goals; and lack of accountability of representatives.

Democracy is a way of trying to make institutions more accountable. My own view is that the traditional geopolitical basis of existing multilaterals has done a bad job of making them effective. We should try something that works well in our own countries, democracy, and try it at the global level. Why? Democracy is about open information, it’s about open access, it’s about auditing, it’s about lines of responsibility, it’s about accountability, it’s about tossing out people you don’t like. At the very least, this would establish certain lines of accountability, which don’t exist in the closed-club world of geopolitical politics.

Our multilaterals are governed by chaos, different principles of decision making, linked to different sorts of political principles. The WTO is one person, one vote. But the IMF and the World Bank have complex voting structures which reflect their shareholders—the dominant economic interests in them. The UN has a General Assembly which is largely a talking shop, which is one person, one vote, and the Security Council is driven by the club, the club of big powers.

So actually, on the ground, somewhere over there as it were, we have an array of decision-making procedures that have all emerged historically for different reasons, for different compromises. One person, one vote is actually more atypical than typical. One person, one vote is typical in the powerless General Assembly, but actually it exists in the WTO. And the WTO has become… the issues of trade and negotiation have become terribly complicated, and in the WTO you have the difficult position of some of the most powerful countries in the world having the same voting power as the least powerful countries in the world.

But I don’t think the principle of one country, one vote alone is the problem. The problem with one country, one vote in the WTO—the WTO is the clearest instance of it, at any rate—the problem is not that the voting structure has made the WTO ineffective. The problem is the defence of vested interests. The world is used to the West writing the trade rules according to its own interests, the West’s interests. Suddenly now, as the result of political tectonic plates and economic tectonic plates shifting across the globe, we have the rise of China, of India, of Brazil and so on, and they’re saying, “Hey, we don’t want this package anymore!” They have strong negative power to say no, but not yet the positive power to put things in their place. So we have deadlock. And as I speak today, on the 18th of October, 2006, we have deadlock in the WTO. But I think actually it has nothing to do with the decision-making procedures of the WTO, it is to do with the war among special interests and the fact that the West is now in the uncomfortable position of discovering that it can’t just do what it used to do. Is that a good or a bad thing? Well, it depends how it pans out, but in the short term it’s probably a very good thing.

The Importance of Democracy  Duration: 2:16

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In my view, the importance of democracy is this: democracy depends on certain liberal and democratic principles which create the possibility of dialogue, the mediation of conflicts of interest, and the minimum commitment by all citizens and interests to a non-coercive political process. In other words, its opposite is coercion: that those who have, shall hold, that those with the most power will determine the rules. Democracy is committed to the equal moral status of each and every human being, the equal political status of each and every human being, the importance of political responsibility and accountability, the importance of consent, and so on. These ideas are at the heart, not of a simple universal process that posits democracy for its own sake, but one of the reasons democracy is important is because it offers the vehicle to channel and mediate conflict. It creates a minimum culture that accepts that citizens who are parties to democracy will find pacific ways of resolving their disputes, outside the struggle of coercive forces. That is what democracy brings to our table; that is what the pacification of nation-states in the name of democracy has actually succeeded in doing.

So yes, democracy is a risk, it is a problem. But it is open, it is public, we can all participate in it, we can publicize it, we can hold rulers to account. It is a better bet than the market by itself, with its own self-interest and externalities, with leaving it to the existing geopolitical interests who will—my goodness, one thing we know above all—look after their own interests. So what is the alternative? The alternative is, and works within, nation-states by and large, although many democracies are of course deeply flawed, and it suggests to me that a more representative multilateral order is potentially a more stable order than the one that we have.

Democracy and Human Security - Duration: 2:38

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I think actually, in many cases, Canada has got its heart and head in the right place. You have been championing, for instance, a human security agenda, as opposed to let’s say the Washington security agenda. The deployment of forces within the framework of human security is the effective way of defusing conflict situations. And I think the work that Canada has done in this area has been exemplary and terribly important, and in my view would be in many areas of foreign policy. Because you are not, as it were, one of the central players, you have the capacity for reflective intervention; you have the capacity to pursue important ideas.

So I would say to Canada, the first thing I would say is, do more of what you’ve done. But you need, in order to make that effective, to build coalitions with countries that are like-minded. And of course, sometimes you have done this successfully, with the Nordic countries for instance, or with the European Union, with the office of Javier Solana. And I think some of the best interventions in the developing world or in conflict situations have been done where we mobilized ourselves, built a coalition for intervention of this kind.

But when it comes to developing democracy… I am a democrat; I write about democratic politics and so on. I am a great champion, obviously, of universal suffrage and emancipation of all special groups. But I think we need a little humility and a little sense of patience. The humility we need must come from self-knowledge, must come from the recognition that our democratic cultures evolved, as I said already, over very long periods of time. And in many cases, our countries were liberal first, before they were democratic. And what does that mean? That means they were committed, to begin with, to the autonomy of the individual, to the freedom of the individual to move, to the freedom of the individual to enter into associations, to freedom of expression—a whole range of civil and economic liberties—before this, as it were, became a culture that generated political freedom and political liberty, and democracy.

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Last Updated:2007-02-02

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