Reinventing diplomacy

It's been called the new diplomacy, the new internationalism, the new institutionalism, and cooperative multilateralism. It is marked by a focus on the interests of humanity rather than national interests. Its primary method is in mobilizing citizens groups to rally public opinion within and between nation-states. It's reshaping the basic architecture of global politics.

In rapid succession, the new diplomacy has racked up such recent victories as the Ottawa Landmines Treaty, the International Criminal Court, the emergence of the "responsibility to protect" doctrine at the United Nations, and most recently, the Convention on Cultural Diversity adopted by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) last October. The Kyoto Protocol was a version of it. The 1987 Montreal protocol on ozone-depleting substances was an early example.

As an alternative to traditional statecraft, and as an effective challenge to America's post-9/11 unilateralism, the new diplomacy's implications are world-changing. It's practically a Canadian invention. And Vancouver is emerging as an important source of its ideas.

It's all the more odd, then, how quiet it is out there. Way back last April, the federal government unveiled its long-awaited International Policy Statement, the "first comprehensive framework on Canada's role in the world in a decade". The policy draws heavily on the new diplomacy. Across Canada, it was greeted with a flurry of silence. Now we're in the middle of an election that could determine whether this country goes on flexing its newfound muscle in the world or retreats further into the comfortable orbit of the United States. Still silence.

"It's partly the media," says Michael Byers, the Canada Research Chair in Global Politics and International Law at the University of British Columbia. "It's partly that we're still in the shadow of the United States, actually."

It's also because the new diplomacy is based on ideas that tend to defy the conventional categories of left and right in global politics, so it's hard to discuss the phenomenon in the handy clichés that journalists are so fond of.

One of its central notions, for instance, is that individual human security should come before national sovereignty. After the horrors of Rwanda, Bosnia, and Kosovo, new-diplomacy advocates, unlike their '60s-era pacifist predecessors, don't necessarily wince at the idea of invading countries to protect civilians from harm. "Liberal internationalists" drawn to the new diplomacy are happy to support Canada's interventions in Haiti and Afghanistan, for instance, and can be quite hawkish about the need to rein in the Islamist government in Sudan, too.

But, at the same time, the new diplomacy's greatest successes have landed well-placed blows against unilateralist American foreign policy. The 2002 treaty establishing the International Criminal Court was coauthored by Canada despite stiff U.S. opposition. Lauded as the most important event in global governance since the founding of the UN itself in 1945, the vote creating the court left the United States in the losing camp with six allies, while Canada arrayed 128 nations on its side. Similarly, the Convention on Cultural Diversity, also a Canadian initiative, pitted 148 votes at UNESCO against just two votes: the United States and Israel.

One reason vancouver figures so prominently in foreign-policy debates these days is UBC's Liu Institute for Global Issues, where Byers, author of War Law: Understanding International Law and Armed Conflict (Douglas & McIntyre), serves as academic director. The Liu Institute's senior advisor is Lloyd Axworthy, the former foreign-affairs minister who was a key architect of the new diplomacy's philosophy and method.

Axworthy was a driving force in the development of the "responsibility to protect" doctrine, which sets out to determine when mass suffering, say, justifies toppling a regime in those cases where the UN's 15-member Security Council is unwilling or unable to act. Two years ago, Axworthy's International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty laid the groundwork for just such a process. Prime Minister Paul Martin, however, left the matter in the hands of the Security Council, and there, for now, it sits.

The Liu Institute has also managed to recruit Andrew Mack, former director of strategic planning for UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. Last October, the institute released Mack's first Human Security Report, which confidently flayed myths cherished by both the left and the right in global politics.

The world is actually becoming a more peaceful place, the report asserts, at least as far as conventional warfare and insurrection are concerned. It isn't true that wars are becoming more frequent or more deadly, the report concludes. Neither is it true that the gravest threat to human security is terrorism. In fact, the gravest current threats of armed conflict arise in known trouble spots where the UN is not making clear and sustained commitments to conflict prevention, peacemaking, and peacebuilding.

"Something really interesting is starting to happen here," Byers says of the Liu Institute's work. "It has something to do with being a long way from Ottawa and Toronto, and having a more international perspective than cities in the East. We're becoming a more Asian city, and we're not as preoccupied with our powerful neighbour to the south."

Byers, 39, was raised in Saskatchewan and went on to receive law degrees from McGill and Oxford. With the occasional visiting-professor gig in Tel Aviv and Cape Town, Byers was settling into a cozy post as a tenured professor at venerable Duke University in North Carolina when two things convinced him that he should come home. The first was Canada's 2003 decision to abstain from the Anglo-American enterprise in Iraq. The second was Canada's decision to take a pass on the U.S. continental missile-defence shield.

"It's what brought me back to Canada," Byers said. "It convinced me that we were not a colony, and that we were capable of making our own decisions."

When he got to UBC, Byers was pleased to find students blessed with a surfeit of curiosity about the way the world works, and most of his students were immigrants. It wasn't at all like Oxford or Duke. "The first- and second-generation immigrant students I've got at UBC-they're the best students I've ever taught," he says.

But Canada's sense of its international opportunities turned out to be nowhere near as well-developed as one might have imagined from Axworthy's whirlwind foreign-affairs legacy, or Prime Minister Jean Chrétien's polite but bold insistence that the U.S. take a more multilateral approach to the problem of Iraq. Canadians could proudly claim Stephen Lewis, the United Nations special envoy for AIDS in Africa, as one of their own. But there is a stark contrast between the promise and the reality of Canada's global citizenship.

During the 1980s, with Brian Mulroney at the helm, Canada turned increasingly to the White House for foreign-policy guidance, and neoconservative economists wielded ever-greater influence. Ottawa beggared the military, scaled way back on Canada's contributions to UN peacekeeping missions, and still found the callousness to slash more than $5 billion in foreign aid.

The first half of Jean Chrétien's 10-year Liberal reign trundled along in more or less the same style, with little effective opposition. The Conservatives had been replaced by a backwash of Reform Party isolationists who weren't even certain that Canada should have something as extravagant as a foreign policy. New Democrats could always be counted on to raise the cry for more foreign aid, but when it came to military matters they tended to prefer sitting around in their socks listening to old Joan Baez records.

During the late 1990s, Axworthy made some astonishing headway in restoring Canada's lost reputation in the world. But in 2000, Chrétien called a snap election, Axworthy withdrew to private life, and born-again creationist Stockwell Day emerged as the head of the Alliance Party. Day vowed to slash Canada's foreign-aid budgets even further, and declared a particular eagerness to take an axe to the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA).

And that's why, today, the Minister for Western Economic Diversification, who is also the Minister of State for Sport, is a guy named Stephen Owen. "I heard that [Day's plans to dismember CIDA], and that was it," says Owen. "I really got scared." So Owen joined the Liberal Party of Canada, and he ran, and won, in Vancouver Quadra. Owen's running again in this election. So is Day-he's the Conservative Party's foreign-affairs critic.

With Canada's leadership role in the world again hanging in the balance, Owen, like Byers, finds the muted public discourse rather disconcerting, and he reckons the problem is at least partly Canada's media monopolies. "It's convergence and concentration in the media," Owen says, but also: "We're rich. We're complacent. We're self-absorbed."

Also like Byers, Owen has spent a lot of time thinking about these things. He has been a schoolteacher in Nigeria, an adviser to CIDA on war-affected children in Uganda, and an adviser to peace negotiations in Sudan and Israel. He's worked in Peru, Cambodia, Eastern Europe, and Vietnam. He's monitored elections in Nicaragua, and worked as legal adviser to the Canadian military in Somalia.

Back in 1993, when he was best known as B.C.'s Commissioner on Resources and Environment, Owen wrote an opinion-page piece for the Vancouver Sun setting out some of his foreign-policy ideas. His essay was eerily prescient of the International Policy Statement that Ottawa unveiled last April, which calls for a new paradigm that integrates domestic and foreign policy, and links aid and trade to human rights and other values close to Canada's heart.

"As Canadians," Owen wrote back then, "we are unsure of our own identity in part because we have not defined our place in the world. If we are to know ourselves as a nation, it will be through the mirror of our international experience, rather than through the comfortable angst of our introspection."

I spent some time in comfortable introspection with Owen over coffee on West 4th Avenue the other day. He said he wouldn't change a word of what he wrote, but there was another observation he was willing to make: "We embarrass ourselves into action."

Owen was referring to the way Prime Minister Paul Martin, at the Montreal "COP 11" Kyoto Protocol conference in December, had just chastised the White House for failing to sign on to the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gas emissions, only to take a drubbing himself over the U.S. actually having done a better job of curbing its greenhouse gases than Canada has. Owen might just as well have been referring to Irish rock star Bono's public skewering of Martin for not setting out a clear timetable for meeting his commitment to the G8 goal of contributing 0.7 percent of the gross national product to foreign aid.

Public embarrassment as a new-diplomacy lever? "But that's the kind of thing the public has to see," Owen said. "It's a bit like chemotherapy, but these are the kinds of things we need to see, so that the public demands more."

The new diplomacy's necessary glare of publicity doesn't always help, though. Says B.C. Senator Mobina Jaffer, Canada's special envoy to Sudan: "Everything I say here goes immediately to the government of Sudan. So I've got to be sure that Canada is playing a role that is honest, and that we're saying things as they are."

Canada is the third-largest contributor, after the European Union and the U.S., to the African Union's peacekeeping show in Sudan's Darfur region. But Canada had to be publicly shamed into taking special measures in Sudan in the first place, mainly by the efforts of the flamboyant Edmonton MP David Kilgour, who first ran as a Conservative, then switched to the Liberals, then resigned last spring.

Sudan is Africa's largest country-about one quarter the size of Canada, with roughly the same population. In the Darfur region, which by itself is roughly the size of France, one third of the six million inhabitants have been driven from their homes, with 400,000 of them slaughtered in what most observers consider a full-bore genocide waged by Khartoum and its mainly Arab janjaweed militias. In the final days of December, neighbouring Chad declared itself in a state of war with Sudanese bullyboy-president Omar al-Bashir, who has also incited Uganda by supporting a savage cult movement there known as the Lord's Resistance Army.

It's not as though Canadians aren't interested in mounting a more robust or generous defence of the Sudanese people. Canadians, generally, are becoming far more aware of their capacity for good in the world, Jaffer says: "The shift has come from Canadians. In the 30 years I have lived in this country, I have never seen such a real shift in the desire of Canadians to make their government do more. I have seen this especially in Vancouver."

But Sudan is a nightmare scenario of diplomatic and military complexity.

"The prime minister has been very committed to this, but he gets quite upset with me," Jaffer says. "He wants to know what more we can be doing to get things under control. But if we are going to be a serious international player, then we are going to have to focus, publicly focus, over a long period of time…it's a really tough message."

Finding a message that resonates with Canadians enough to mobilize and maintain public backing for bold international policy isn't easy. It's especially tough because of the divide between anglophone Canada and Quebec.

English-speaking Canadians tend to be especially prone to a kind of American-counterculture-left view that Ottawa is engaged in an "imperialist" adventure in Haiti, for instance. (Canada is a key player in the controversial UN mission there, which took over from the troubled regime of Jean-Bertrand Aristide.) But in Quebec, labour unions, human-rights organizations, feminists, and left-wing solidarity groups openly back Canada's efforts in Haiti and are working hand-in-hand with CIDA there.

Finding a message that resonated across Canada's French-English divide was a particular challenge in sustaining popular support for the landmark Convention on Cultural Diversity. Canada was the first country to ratify the convention. In English Canada, the convention had to be sold on its practical and commercial benefits: the public right to offer film-industry tax-credits, and the commercial spinoffs associated with Canadian-content quotas and the enormous economic contributions the arts industries make. Quebeckers, however, were already vested with an intuitive understanding of the convention's potential to safeguard cultural integrity in a world riven by free-market fundamentalism.

Vancouver publisher Scott McIntyre emerged as a key Canadian voice in the audacious international movement that produced the cultural-diversity convention, which mounted a new-diplomacy strategy of mobilizing nongovernmental organizations in a way that mirrored the successful land-mines-ban campaign of the 1990s.

A distinct feature of the cultural-diversity campaign was its solid alliance between Ottawa and Quebec, and between Quebec nationalists and English-Canadian cultural leaders. McIntyre describes the overall significance of the cultural-diversity victory this way: "It means that nation-states, or individual polities, have the ability to hear their own stories. It's about creating space, and about the right of nation-states to protect culture. The notion that cultural policy makes a difference has been established now on the world agenda."

For something so newsworthy, you'd think it would have been noticed more widely in Canada. McIntyre: "The press has gone so far to the right. There's this idea that if you're good at all, you can make it in the market. It's such a simplistic argument, but it's compelling."

And it's precisely the kind of simplistic thinking, says Byers, that's holding Canada back.

"The level of discussion in this country about international affairs is confined to small issues, small dreams," says Byers. "The public has no idea how influential Canada is. We're the second-largest country in the world. We've got one of the highest standards of living, a fully functioning public health system, and we're the largest source of oil and gas to the world's greatest superpower. We've got one of the largest economies on the planet, and we're the only G8 country with balanced books. We're a serious country. But our clout-we don't use it. Canada has the capacity to do truly great things, but we don't."