Canada in the World: Canadian International Policy

Video Interview Samantha Power Subscribe to eNewsletter and/or Email Alerts and Podcasts

Development and Democracy - Duration 4:20

Other video formats - Windows Media | QuickTime

Transcript:

Part of the challenge now with democracy promotion is that President Bush has been incredibly outspoken about that being a cornerstone of his foreign policy platform—which is fine on paper. But because, in the eyes of many, especially in the Islamic world, democracy promotion is associated with regime change, because we talked about promoting democracy in Iraq and it was done forcefully, but also because democracy promotion is associated with elections—because of the elections the United States pushed for in Palestine, in Egypt and elsewhere—someone needs to step up now, and maybe that’s Canada, and reclaim a “thicker” concept of democracy, dissociated certainly from the use of military force and the idea of imposing democracy by the barrel of a gun, but also dissociated from this narrow electioneering focus.

Ultimately, I think Canadians—Canadians in government, anyway—have long had a more holistic sense of what it is we are promoting abroad when we spend money on elections, on development and so on. And that is this uniquely Canadian concept of human security. And it seems to me that democracy, or if we define democracy as self-determination for a minute, elections are only one component of human security. And if you do, as some Western countries, including the United States, have been prone to do in the past, you kind of treat democracy as though it is elections... You know, look at Congo: huge amounts of money are being spent on the elections, but it is very unlikely that they will see even a fraction of those funds available when it really matters, when the stakeholders have been identified through an election, when people’s expectations are at their height, because there has been some kind of turnover in terms of who is in politics. And at just the moment you need to shore up institutions and render governors accountable, or enhance local mechanisms for accountability, we say “Sayonara!” You know, “We were there for the elections; what more do you want? You have democracy.”

The human security idea is that democracy is one sliver of it, and so we recognize in many of these communities, in many developing countries, that people view elections as a means to actually make it easier to feed their families and ensure there is less violence in their communities, by militia or by police—police are not a tool of enforcement but in fact a vehicle for spreading fear. And you know, there is an incredibly corrupt apparatus in most developing countries. If you think of human security as the end, then by having elections you are giving people the opportunity to effectively “throw the bastards out.” When you talk to people in advance of elections or as they go to the voting booth, part of it is about their dignity and their desire for self-expression, but a lot of it is, “We are not happy with where things are at; we are going to signal that.”

And so if we thicken it and think about material well-being, think about freedom from violence, basically we get back to Franklin Roosevelt’s four freedoms: freedom from want, freedom from fear, freedom of speech and freedom of association, and freedom of religion is the fourth. If you could somehow thicken your democratization strategies to look out for those mechanisms, that is so ambitious that obviously it can’t be done by Canada alone, it has to be done through international institutions.

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

Last Updated:2007-02-20

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