Okay.
Ladies and gentlemen, let me begin. The committee is to be applauded for undertaking a study of Canada's role in international democracy promotion. The subject of democracy promotion--its relation to traditional foreign and development policy goals, the push-back by autocrats like President Putin, the recent crackdown on dissent by powerful dictatorships like China, and most of all the anarchy in Afghanistan and Iraq, where democracy-building faces violent opposition--is now one of the core issues in international relations.
Canada has always paid lip service to the value of democracy promotion--what democracy has not?--but unlike trade promotion, or the responsibility-to-protect principle, it has never been a fundamental of Canadian foreign policy. Individual Canadians work abroad for democracy promotion, and many of them work for institutions created by other states or international organizations. The National Democratic Institute, one of the best known in the world, has over 30 Canadians in senior positions. The IDEA multilateral foundation, when I spoke there recently, had Canadians from Saskatchewan. So Canadians everywhere are working for democracy promotion.
The organizational vacuum in our foreign policy machinery, however, means that these people do not work directly for an organized centre of democracy promotion in Canada. As in so many other areas of international policy, on democracy we talk a good game, but the Government of Canada has very limited capacity.
This committee has put out three excellent areas of inquiry that your witnesses and you will be studying, so I'm going to address all three of them too briefly. The first question is “why democracy?” and international comparisons. Then I'll spend a little more time on the Canadian role with the particular institution, Democracy Canada, which our institute has been promoting. On “why democracy?”, you asked how democracy promotion, within the wider context of foreign policy itself, fits into a general foreign policy, as opposed to the intrinsic merits of democracy.
Until recently, the priority of democracy for foreign policy decision-makers has never been high. In 1648, in the treaty of Westphalia, the European powers made state sovereignty the centrepiece of international relations. Kings could be beastly to their own populations, but the nature of the regime was of little concern to other states. What mattered was the balance of power between states, not the internal characteristics of the regime.
From Richelieu in the age of Westphalia to Kissinger in our own age, the realist school in foreign policy looks primarily at the determinants of power and how it is used. Such a calculus gives very short shrift to morality and, until very recently, to democracy. As Franklin Roosevelt once said about a local dictator: “He may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch.”
This overwhelming realist consensus, however, has occasionally been challenged, usually from the liberal or radical side of the political divide. The philosopher Immanuel Kant first made the critical point in his famous 1795 essay Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch that the nature of regimes, whether they were monarchies or republics, empires or local municipalities, did make a critical difference. Republics were less likely to go to war than monarchies, since citizens knew they were the ones who would die on the battlefield. As the previous witnesses have talked about, in international relations one of the few inviolable rules we have is that democracies do not go to war against each other.
In the 19th century, English liberals like John Bright attacked the amorality of realpolitik masters such as Palmerston or Bismarck, and called for internal changes to the monarchies across Europe. Bright explained:
We have the unchangeable and eternal principles of the moral law to guide us, and only so far as we walk by that guidance can we permanently be a great nation
Gladstone, in his famous Midlothian campaign against Disraeli, one of the great realpolitik practitioners, attacked Turkey's abuses against its own subjects, and argued that morality should trump state sovereignty.
In 1917 Woodrow Wilson led the United States into World War I to “make the world safe for democracy”. Lester Pearson led the fight within NATO in 1948 and 1949 on article 2, the so-called Canadian clause, to make the alliance into more than an old-fashioned military pact by emphasizing the cultural, social, and economic links between the North American democracies. What was important for Pearson was that NATO was a pact of freedom-loving democracies, not merely a military pact. That began to change with the accession of Turkey and Greece and other countries in that early Cold War era.
The liberal idealist perspective butted against the predominant realist tradition throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. But in 1982 a new champion emerged and the debate was literally transformed. Ronald Reagan was a dedicated anti-communist, but instead of just containing the Soviet Union, he wanted to transform it by promoting democracy as a fundamental proposition of American foreign policy.
In 1982 Reagan, the most important conservative in American history, gave a speech worthy of Woodrow Wilson. He told the British Parliament, and I quote:
The objective I promise is quite simple to state: to foster infrastructure of democracy, the systems of free press, unions, political parties, universities, which allows a people to choose their own way to develop their own culture, to reconcile their own differences through peaceful means.
The Reagan administration created the National Endowment for Democracy. The British created the Westminster Foundation. The Germans have long had their Stiftungs, as we have just heard from previous witnesses, or party research institutes with very active international programs; and multilateral organizations like the Stockholm-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance--IDEA--spread the best practices around the world.
In looking at the United States today, total yearly U.S. democracy funding exceeds $1 billion. Now, the literature on democracy is enormous. Do we aim for deep, deliberative, transformative democracy where citizens are themselves engaged in policy debate? That was the question in a point raised by Ms. McDonough to the previous witnesses on what kind of democracy we are addressing. Or is it enough to have procedural democracy, a system that allows citizens only to have the ultimate sway during elections?
Two principles certainly apply: rule of the people, and rights of the people. As theorist Larry Diamon writes in Squandered Victory,
“Democracy is a system of government in which the people choose their leaders--and replace their leaders--in regular, free, and fair elections. Democracies are governments of laws, not individual men and women, in which the people are sovereign and government functions with the consent of the governed.”
To achieve such consent of the governed, there must be, according to Challenge of Democratic Development, a very good and early study by the North-South Institute, 1991-92,
...universal adult suffrage in free elections; the right to run for office; freedom of expression, association, political organization and dissent; alternate sources ofinformation and genuine policy choice; and the accountability of government to voters.
Democracy requires a culture of liberty that endorses and envelopes the mechanism of voting as the means to express choice. Liberty, in turn, requires independent courts, equality before the law, and protection for minorities. Citizens must respect the rights of others even as they exercise their own rights. Rule of the people and rights of the people are the basic democratic minimum.
As we then move to transformative democracy, the participatory element of democracy allows human capacity to flourish, so we have a minimum and a maximum. The minimum we can attain, the procedural rules; the maximum, which is each of us achieving our human capacity, is an ongoing and never-changing goal.
Lessons learned from the work on democratic transitions.... There's no magic bullet or surefire formula for democracy promotion. Promoting democracy requires attention to specific circumstances and to the limitations of outside intervention. Change agents must proceed by interaction, not imposition.
There are few straight lines in history. As Kant, the original enlightenment liberal, wrote, “From such warped wood as is man, nothing straight can ever be fashioned”.
Drawing on the democratic case studies of the Queen's University Centre for the Study of Democracy, which are here before you, the following lessons appear to be relevant. First, there is nothing harder than attempting to develop democratic norms when there is no state and anarchy reigns. Since Plato, we have known that there must be order before there is liberty. A functioning state must precede a functioning democracy.
In Afghanistan, a critical initial decision was to hold a Loya Jirga, or traditional assembly of Afghanistan notables, to create Afghan ownership of the democratic process rather than dictate some of the occupying power. The Afghan transition began well, but shortages of troops, or boots on the ground, to ensure security now threaten the whole enterprise.
The ratio of international soldiers to inhabitants in places like Bosnia was about one soldier for every fifty citizens. Such a figure has never been reached in Afghanistan or Iraq. In a word, the EU and NATO took the security dimension of Bosnia far more seriously than they have taken it in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Secondly, militias must be disarmed. In the forthcoming Queen's University study of Israeli democracy, which is another study we will have out by the spring, a key tipping point was the decision of Ben-Gurion to disarm rival militias and to create the Israeli armed forces. Ben-Gurion went so far as to fire upon the Altalena, an armed ship designed for the Irgun militia of Menachem Begin. Even as Israel fought for its existence in the 1948 war, even as Israel was at war with its Arab neighbours, Ben-Gurion refused to allow private internal militias. Allowing militias to continue to be private armies has likely been the single greatest mistake made in Iraq; there are many of them, but that's probably the largest.
Third: local government, municipalities, is the building block of democracy. In Taiwan, the immediate post-war decision by the KMT to continue with the Japanese innovation of local elections for municipalities allowed the arts of democracy to grow and gave a non-threatening outlet for dissenting citizens. In democracy transition, we tend to almost instantly race towards national elections. In virtually every study I have looked at, I'm convinced that the investment in local municipalities, local government, and local elections is the way to allow the arts of democracy to foster and build. Taiwan is an enormously important example of that. The investment in Taiwan both allowed the KMT to get used to democracy, and it gave an outlet to the dissidents to learn the mutual tolerance that was required. Eventually, the KMT, an authoritarian party on its own, brought in its own democracy. The learning process was a generation of that.
Fourth, democracy takes time to take root. There are no quick fixes. Outside interveners must be prepared for years of effort and substantial investment. The European Union, the United States, and Canada all made a major commitment to rebuilding Bosnia after the civil war. Bosnia was Canada's first experiment with its three-D policy of defence, diplomacy, and development. It must be understood that each of these elements is necessary if real rebuilding is to occur. With nation-building or democracy-building, we should not go in unless we are prepared for a long and costly commitment. I regret that with the enormous expenditure and the lives of several of our soldiers in the 1990s, we are now moving out of Bosnia after having made that large initial investment and with many problems still in eastern central Europe.
Lastly, five, democratic values are universal. Asian autocrats have promoted Asian values as a counterpoint to democracy, and they have implied that democracy is a western invention. The Queen's University case studies on both Hong Kong and Taiwan show the self-serving nature of this argument. Taiwan is the first Chinese society in 5,000 years to become a sustained, consolidated democracy. In Hong Kong, up to half a million citizens have taken to the streets to demand and to defend their democratic rights.
Amartya Sen, in Development and Freedom, puts it well: “Freedoms are not only the primary ends of development, they are also among its principal means”.
The Canadian role--your third area. The committee has asked witnesses to comment on three broad areas: democracy assistance as an objective, comparative lessons, and the Canadian role. My response to these questions is as follows.
On democratic assistance, the nature of regimes is important. If Kant is right, and republics are less likely to go to war against fellow democracies, spreading democracy is in the security interest. If Amartya Sen is right, spreading freedom is a vital component in development policy. If Lester Pearson is right, democratic advancement must go forward at the same time as military engagement in any alliance.
For all these reasons of security, development, and morality, democracy promotion should become a key component rather than an afterthought of Canadian foreign policy. But the lessons drawn from successful transitions to democracy show that the democracy road is long and arduous. It cannot be done on the cheap, and it cannot be done without clarity and commitment.
In the third area of Canadian policies and activities, the main point is that Canada lacks a central democracy assistance organization. Canada has a wealth of knowledge and professional expertise grounded in Canadian values that could make a real and meaningful contribution to democracy assistance initiatives abroad.
A Canadian-based democracy institution--we've called it Democracy Canada--grounded in a federal, ethnically diverse, multilateral, and bilingual country would be welcomed by the international democracy promotion community. This new institution should have the following features.
Democracy Canada should be an independent organization reporting to and accountable to Parliament and a minister. It should not be part of any department.
The mission of Democracy Canada would be to promote and enhance democracy abroad. Democracy Canada would employ a network of experts to provide practical experience and assistance in areas of democratic development to their counterparts in partner countries.
Democracy Canada's activities would focus on political party assistance, including training in campaigns, electioneering, and media relations, which would introduce a tool largely absent from Canadian foreign policy, and that is, concentrating on party-building in democracy, also a question raised with earlier witnesses.
The program should also include, as Mr. Perlin has talked about, investment in civic education, democratic transparency, election monitoring, participation, especially among women, and assisting in the general building of democratic institutions in legislatures and public services.
The focus on political party assistance, election preparation, training, and mechanics would distinguish the institute from the legislative mission of the Parliamentary Centre, one of our best NGOs in this area, and the civic education mission of the International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development, which does a wonderful job on human rights and on civic education.
The board of such a Democracy Canada should consist of 12 to 15 members, drawn from nominees of parties now sitting in Parliament, international partners, and experts in democracy promotion. Replicating a successful aspect of the International Development Research Council, one-third of Democracy Canada's board should come from international partners. The board would have fiduciary responsibility for Democracy Canada.
The institute would also be governed by an advisory Democracy Canada council, consisting of members from the democracy and governance community of Canada as a whole.
An annual Democracy Canada conference would be held to bring together the Canadian and international democracy community to promote mutual learning, the dissemination of best practices, and to help coordinate Democracy Canada's future objectives and priorities.
We have many people working on this area in Canada, but they very rarely talk to each other. The institute would develop its own programs and staff, but it would also partner with others.
We have suggested an annual budget of $50 million, about half of the IDRC budget, both to fund worthwhile projects by its partners and to undertake its own activities.
Democracy Canada would also be allowed to fund proposals for international work submitted by Canada's political parties, as happens in the U.K. with the Westminster Foundation. But it would not automatically allocate a portion of its funding to the existing party structure.
Democracy Canada's permanent bureau staff, in addition to program coordination, would undertake a research function to gain an understanding of the local context of Democracy Canada's partner countries. To enhance its effectiveness, Democracy Canada would work with existing Canadian and international organizations such as the IDRC, as well as organizations within partner countries.
Lastly, Democracy Canada would coordinate team Canada democracy delegations around key Canadian foreign policy objectives. With Democracy Canada, coordinated assistance could be provided to a partner country, including elements of political party assistance provided by the parties, legislative assistance from the Parliamentary Centre, electoral assistance from Elections Canada, civic education as by International Human Rights and Democracy. That is, bringing together several organizations, each with their own piece, and going on a coordinated democracy mission in a country that we think is worthy of such help. Democracy Canada would maintain the overall focus of the delegation and would be responsible for democratization programs in the partner country.
While in the Ukraine studying the Orange Revolution, I met a young Ukrainian woman who told me the story of why, flying from Ukraine to Washington, she waited for hours to file past the tomb of Ronald Reagan as he lay in state in Washington after his death. His call, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall”, had resonated across eastern and central Europe and had allowed young people there to dream that Soviet tyranny did not have to be permanent. She wanted to pay her respects to the man who had once given her hope.
Natan Sharansky, in The Case for Democracy, similarly recounts how the example of his teacher, Andrei Sakharov, taught him, and I quote him: “The world cannot depend on leaders who do not depend on their own people”. Sharansky further writes that “Those who seek to move the earth must first, as Archimedes explained, have a place to stand.”
Canada must stand with the world's democrats. We enjoy the blessings of democracy at home. We owe it to ourselves and to those who share our values to make a serious effort to promote democracy abroad.