Canada in the World: Canadian International Policy

Video Interview Stein Tønnesson Subscribe to our eNewsletter and/or Email Alerts and podcasts

Peacebuilding as Part of Development Strategies	5 min 20 sec	Windows Media l QuickTime
Energy and Conflict	6 min 21 sec	Windows Media l QuickTime
Drawings of the Prophet	5 min 30 sec	Windows Media l QuickTime

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

Transcript

Peacebuilding as Part of Development Strategies

My name is Stein Tønnesson. I am the Director of the International Peace Research Institute Olso, in abbreviation PRIO. PRIO is probably the world’s oldest peace research institute, founded in 1959 by Johan Galtung and a group of social scientists around him in Norway. It has gone through various periods. In the first period it was very critical towards the power in Norway: Norway was a NATO country aligned with the West in the Cold War; the Institute was a centre of criticism of that kind of alignment. After the Cold War, the Institute grew tremendously and has become much more active and also interacts much more with politicians, with the power. And now it’s sometimes criticized for being kind of mainstream in Norwegian politics. But then also Norwegian politics have changed—they are not that aligned with one party in the global struggle any longer. There is a lot more discussion and they also allow a lot of diverging views among diplomats and the ministries and even the Ministry of Defence.

Peacebuilding is a concept that was first developed in the United Nations under Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali. It has come more and more into use in designating those development projects that are clearly designed to prevent conflict, to overcome and prevent conflict. If a development project is only indirectly linked to that, so it’s not conscious, then it’s not really peacebuilding. But if you have a project run within a strategy of trying to build peace, then we call it peacebuilding. And we then try to promote the use of that term and to get more focus on it, by donor countries and recipient countries alike, so that they can have more conscious overall country-based peacebuilding strategies. And we try to build that into every peace agreement. When you have a peace agreement, you should think about the long-term peacebuilding period once the peace agreement has entered into force. In this endeavour, there is cooperation between several countries, and some of the countries that are the most interested in this are Germany, the Netherlands, the Scandinavian countries, Canada and Great Britain. Canada and Norway have been thinking very much alike when it comes to peacebuilding.

The thinking is that you must—when you are carrying out development projects in countries that either have been recently at war or had armed conflict, or that are at risk of getting an armed conflict—you must build peacebuilding into the strategy for development. So that you try to build peace by taking into consideration all four bases that you need, or the four walls that you need, to have a peaceful house. One is security, one is economic and social development, one is good governance and the fourth one is reconciliation. All these four aspects of peace need to be taken into consideration within a peacebuilding strategic framework.

Even the most conscious donor country or countries that engage in development cooperation tend to have very localized strategies and not to be able to build a larger framework for their development cooperation. So there is a lot that remains to be done in this respect in order to really build the concern for peace into development strategies. But on the other hand, more and more people realize how essential it is, because they see how armed conflict is one of the factors that do most to prevent development. It simply destroys the basis for investing in the future, not only for companies but for households as well. They don’t dare to invest in the necessary tools or seeds or what they need to have for long-term planning if they are in danger of getting into an armed conflict where someone is going to take it away from them or destroy it. I realized this when I visited Niger, which has had its share of armed conflict, although not on a very great scale: that certainly contributed to keeping the country down, on a low level of development.

Energy and Conflict

The topic of energy and conflict has lately come up and become, in a way, essential in understanding the world. During the Cold War, of course, energy was important and you had the oil crisis and all that, with some very strong concern for energy, but most of the security thinking was about arms, with nuclear arms as the ultimate arms. And then all the local conflicts that you had around the world, and which at that time were becoming more and more frequent, they were seen as part of the Cold War struggle between the superpowers.

Then after the Cold War, we entered into a period where competition for production, economic growth, trade, market share in exporting countries, where this became an essential part of the competition between the powers. And we saw in the 1990s that both the United States and China and the Asian Tiger economies were doing very well—at least for the Tiger economies up to the Asian crisis of 1997 to 1998. Then, after that, we have gotten into the period of terrorism, which has also become a period where energy is just mounting on the agenda, it is becoming so important. There are those who are concerned that there are no longer sufficient reserves of oil and that it is now extremely urgent to switch to other kinds of energy production, because we may have a serious competition or rivalry for the remaining oil resources.

There are those who say that this is simply a question of the market functioning. But they must also admit that if we have a major crisis on our hands in the Gulf, then suddenly you may get an acute oil crisis, where the question is: who can afford this enormously more expensive oil? And that is certainly not the poor developing countries who are oil consumers: they are the ones who lose out first.

Now with the tremendous growth of China and the surplus that China has had in its trade balance for many, many years, China has actually built a tremendous amount of currency and also of papers that they had invested in shares in American companies, and also obligations that they have bought. In this world, where energy has become more and more crucial, China has grown enormously. Its economy has grown enormously and also its surplus, so it has been able to acquire a lot of U.S. currency—dollars—and also bonds in the United States. So that China actually today has a very high purchasing power, whereas the United States has had a deficit in its budgets and in its trade balance. So the United States economy has been able to go on growing mainly because American households have borrowed more and more money. Much of that money ultimately comes either from China or from the Middle East, from the income of the oil-producing countries like Saudi Arabia.

So that means that today if we get an acute oil crisis, it may very well be that the American economy will be more vulnerable to such a crisis than the Chinese. This means that the energy question has very much to do with the question of whether we are going to keep a unipolar world with a dominating United States, or whether perhaps we are going to see a much more rapid rise of China as a power than anyone would expect. This is very much the framework—the background—for the Iran crisis that we are seeing developing in 2006, and which I must say really scares me.

For Canada, one immediate implication of this focus on energy and rising oil prices is that suddenly it becomes profitable to produce oil from the tar sands, so there we will probably see major investments if the price keeps on a really high level. That, again, leads to a shift of balance inside Canada from the east to the west coast.

For Norway, it means above all an absolutely incredible and enormous income, because Norway is an oil-producing, oil-exporting country and a major oil-exporting country for being so small. The oil that we can find in the North Sea is now diminishing, but with current prices we have never gotten as much income before. So Norway is becoming enormously rich, with a big petroleum fund that is being kept aside in order to keep the value for future generations. But it also means that now Norway owns shares in most of the important companies around the world, and it also lets Norway develop a discussion about the ethics of financial investments. So here from PRIO one of our philosophers, Henrik Syse, who used to lead our ethics, norms and identity program, has now joined the Norwegian National Bank to develop an ethical policy for how to invest abroad and to find out where can you not invest? What questions is it legitimate to ask of a company before buying shares in it? For instance, we don’t want to invest in companies that produce weapons that are used in armed conflicts.

Drawings of the Prophet

You visit me in Oslo just at a time where we have had a surprising and mind-shattering conflict concerning drawings of the Prophet, which were first published in a Danish newspaper. (I am half-Danish, by the way: my mother is Danish and my father is Norwegian.) Then later it was reproduced also in a small Norwegian journal and by some of the bigger journals as well on an informative basis. This caused a campaign throughout the Muslim world against Denmark primarily, but also Norway. We have seen that embassies that normally are used for conflict management or mediation efforts and to promote innocent Norwegian and Danish interests—these have been targeted as enemies. So we suddenly have to try to imagine that we are seen as some of the worst enemies by Muslim activists, or Islamist activists, in the Middle East and elsewhere, throughout the Muslim world. This has become an enormous challenge for us, to try to prevent this from destroying both our self-image and our ideas about being someone who can broker and deal with anyone.

And we also have to see it as a challenge to prevent this from destroying the image that others have of us. Because if we Norwegians, as I just said, if we have become so extremely rich because of the oil high prices, and at the same time we should be seen as enemies by adherents to one of the world’s greatest religions, then we would become a spoiled little rich country, and it would be in a way unbearable for morally thinking Norwegians to have that kind of self-image.

So we are very much trying to prevent Norwegians from feeling the need to strike back and instead seek reconciliation through contact with the Muslims who live in Norway and through joint efforts to promote reconciliation internationally between Norwegians of ethnic Norwegian origin and Norwegians who are not of ethnic Norwegian origin. Those of the Muslim faith are not always of another ethnic origin, either. For instance, I have an uncle who has the same kind of racial, ethnic background as myself but who is a dedicated Muslim.

One of the lessons, I think, of this conflict over the drawings of the Prophet is that we must not exaggerate freedom of expression. Freedom of expression is a basic value and we should not prohibit things under any laws, but we must also feel some kind of responsibility within freedom of expression to avoid offending others when it is something that is really holy to them.

That is one lesson, but another lesson of the recent events is actually not related to the drawings in the Danish journal Jyllands-Posten at all. It is that when you have a world crisis related to hard issues such as oil, nuclear power, nuclear weapons and power—the power nations—then often such crises are preceded by some kind of noise related to cultural issues. I think that what we have seen in this campaign against Denmark and Norway because of the drawings of the Prophet is a kind of noise before the storm. Because what is really going on now is a crisis in the Middle East that relates to the Iranian nuclear power program: Iran as an oil-producing country, the power relations within Iran, the power relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia (the biggest oil-exporting country in the world and the one with the greatest oil reserves) and the access of the great powers—the United States, China, Japan, European countries, India, and much lower down the scale to the smaller countries—to oil. So what we are seeing is noise that is in a way hiding the reality of the conflict, which is about oil, atoms and power

Last Updated:2006-10-18

Top of Page

Important Notices