Envy, eh?

Julian Ku, resident conservative at the international law blog Opinio Juris, has commented on Michael Byers new book, questioning whether it is sustainable or coherent for Canada's intellectual and political classes to pursue internationalism by appealing to nationalism. This follows a piece where he suggests a kind of penis envy may be at the heart of Canada's third way politics.

"What's Canada For?" To Do Good in the World, Says Michael Byers

by Julian Ku

"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?

To start, I will say I disagree with Julian's characterisation that anti-Americanism drives Canada’s pride in internationalism. It is, of course, entirely plausible that Canadian politicians try to galvanise support for internationalist approaches by clothing them in the politics of differentiation. However, that is to say nothing of the public's enduring faith in international institutions and universalism. It is surely a gross simplification to reduce such entrenched attitudes about power and legitimacy down to petty envy.

Nor is it likely that Canada's outlook can be adequately explained by the desire to seek power horizontally. For whatever the gains in prestige, credible promise-making, or bureaucratic control, which might be feasibly linked to spearheading multilateral projects, it is doubtful the public could measure the tangibles of such arrangements, in a sophisticated way, and support it on that basis. Not in a way which explains their sustained beliefs anyway. This is an especially unconvincing explanation for ongoing public sentiment when you contrast it with the concrete metrics of hard-power. For if it is power that is desired, why is hard-power deliberately sidelined, despite its comprehensible metrics, in favour of the wooden spoon of "multilateral glory," with its harder to quantify ones?

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 neo-classical political economy strips the individual of its temporal and behavioural complexity in order to achieve a workable economic model of man: homo economicus. A process such as this yields wonderful certainties, and opportunities for calculation and utility optimisation, however, its explanatory horizons are always limited by the original assumptions of the basic unit, no matter how unrealistic.

In this case, the elephant in the room is the role that may be played by internalised norms in the Canadian zeitgeist, for want of a better word. Here, I’m talking about the general acceptance of the post-Atlantic Charter consensus, combined with the rich liberal and communitarian philosophical tradition which is associated with modern Canada. Remember, this is the home of such important public intellectuals as John Ralston Saul, Will Kymlicka and Charles Taylor. They've each contributed important bodies of work in the modern liberal and communitarian traditions, all of which reject, or at least modify, the standard assumptions of methodological individualism. Whilst in the US, the free-market system tends to be seen as a natural phenomenon, always in danger of the state, their views never decouple the market's success from its constituent social and institutional arrangements: ie. a civil society, courts, the rule of law, and contract and private property, etc. So as intellectual approaches, they each share in common the affirmation of a certain idea of positive freedom, which happens to be naturally well suited to the idea of collective politics on the international plane.

Notwithstanding Julian's failure of imagination, then, it is entirely reasonable to suppose Canada may have struck a different balance than the US. That is, a different set of intellectual elites seed a different political discourse and public sphere, which creates a rather different set of goalposts to those found in the US. What can appear to many Americans as idiosyncratic and reactionary, against the 'norm' of rugged individualism, is actually the expression of a genuine and independent corpus of beliefs, manifesting in support of international institutions and the like.

This may sound like it's all just fuzzy concepts, but it's well to remember that shared norms can shape us in profound ways. Norms are not only capable of moving Mum and Pop to vote, they can also determine the very spectrum of acceptable opinions in a society. This means they inevitably become part of the background culture which informs decision-makers within the state apparatus directly. One only need look at how freedom of expression is treated in the United States, compared to other liberal democracies, to see how entrenched norms can have a significant impact of the fabric of a nation. So, there is no real mystery here. When enough belief is manifested in the legal and political culture of a nation, it is possible to do as Canada has done, and achieve some degree of inertia in favour of multilateral solutions.

So while Julian is well within rights to question the jump from national justifications to international ones, in this case he is ignoring the fact that good international citizenship can go hand-in-hand with patriotic virtue, if the underlying philosophy is universalist. Here, it is certain that universalist aspirations and values are central to Canada's evolving identity, and the outcome isn't just the result of contrarianism.