Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It's a pleasure for me to be back here with former colleagues from, as one says, all sides of the House of Commons.
I want in my brief opening comments to deal with some observations about democratic development—if you like, a framework for a modern democratic state: what we should be doing as one of those modern democratic states who help facilitate the development of democracy.
I'll begin with a series, more or less, of assertions, for which I apologize, as opposed to developed arguments, in a sense. But then I hope we can discuss these points.
For me, in the last fifty years there have been two transformational developments in the democratic world and indeed in the globe. One is the post-1945 period in which the wartime leaders—Churchill, Roosevelt, and Attlee— launched a framework for global development to take place after Second World War, made the key decisions during the war, and set up the key institutional structure that held for many decades. This included the creation of the UN itself, the Bretton Woods agreements that in part were to deal with financial equity on a global basis, and third, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that was adopted in 1948. These were all considered to be part of a package, in a post-war period after the Second World War, that would hopefully avoid the tragedy of the 1930s and put in place, if you like, a framework for what we would now call global democratic development.
The other transformational period, I would say, began really at the end of the Cold War, and we're living with it. I want to pick up my specific suggestions, as a matter of fact, based on experience since the beginning of the end of the Cold War; that is to say, beginning with the 1990s.
I vividly remember the years immediately following the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the coming to an end of the Cold War. The heads of almost all democratic governments proclaimed at the time that the subsequent decade would see the global spread of democracy and of market-based economies.
Unlike the World War II democratic leaders, however, they put virtually exclusive emphasis on creating a global market. They didn't trouble themselves with these other major institutions I've already talked about that the wartime leaders put in place—that is, the major political dimension. In fact, many of the democratic leaders early in the 1990s who should have known better, and some who did, blithely asserted that human rights, the core values of a democratic civil society, could be relied upon to emerge willy-nilly on their own after the core institutions of a market-based economy were put in place.
Based on my six years of experience as head of Rights and Democracy, and a long time—some would say too long—in federal politics, I would like now to offer some suggestions on what can and should be done to further democratic development in a world in which the majority still live in authoritarian societies.
First, in addition to protecting narrowly defined national interests, our foreign policy must help foster the development of democracy, and this should be done by persuasion, trade, and aid, and by the development of globally enforceable international human rights law.
Second, this can best be achieved by a combination of bilateral and multilateral state-to-state democratic institution-building, and in particular through assistance to human rights-oriented NGOs in countries where they are allowed to exist. In 1970 there were only 55 international NGOs at a UN-organized conference in Tehran. There are now more than 2,000 such organizations. Preferably assistance to NGOs within a developing country should be funded by other international NGOs working at arm's length from any government.
Third, assistance in the peaceful development of democracy within any state by outsiders can only be provided when the government of that state allows it. This has happened in recent years in a number of quite diverse nations. I'm only going to give you some examples that as president of Rights and Democracy I happen to have been—not as a politician, but as the head of that institute—directly involved in: South Korea, Thailand, Tanzania, Pakistan, Guatemala, and Mexico.
Fourth, at no time should the priority of agendas for any category of rights implementation by a developing country be determined by outsiders, whether these outsiders be other NGOs or established democratic governments.
In the 1990s, we at Rights and Democracy, with, I want to emphasize, money provided by the Government of Canada and with the support of all parties then in the House of Commons, worked in developing countries with other NGOs from Sweden, Germany, Norway, and the U.S. and helped to implement the rights of women, indigenous peoples, workers, and human rights organizations themselves in Thailand, Guatemala, Mexico, El Salvador, Tanzania, Pakistan, Egypt, and Indonesia. At all times, specific rights, priorities, and agendas for these countries were set by the indigenous NGOs or the governments themselves, not by us.
For example, in supporting women's rights in Pakistan, we and our international partners did not propose an agenda appropriate for women either here in Canada or in Europe. Rather, we supported the priorities established by that country's leading women reformers, such as Asma Jahangir. By the way, that courageous woman describes herself as a Muslim, woman, lawyer, and human rights activist.
Similarly, work in recent years with Mexican NGOs--and the government, eventually--on election-related rights proceeded according to their priorities again, not ours. It helped to produce free and fair elections a few years ago and the legitimate transition of power earlier this year.
We worked for years in Tanzania and finally in partnership, in this case, with the Canadian high commissioner. Our high commissioner at that time was a remarkable woman, very imaginative. We cooperated with the then one-party government, other NGOs, other newly emerging parties, and a newly independent media to shape a practical agenda that led peacefully to a transition to a multi-party democracy in Tanzania.
The fifth point relates to how not to do it.
There is only one country I wanted to talk about in terms of how not to do these things.
Mr. Chrétien was right about Iraq. The imperial hubris of the present administrations in Washington and London may well have included a deeply believed in agenda for democratic reform. Even if this were the case, military invasion, whether here or elsewhere, to make it happen is a deeply mistaken court of action. As a consequence of this western violation of international law, thousands of lives have been lost, a nation's infrastructure has been ruined, terrorism has increased, and international and regional religious conflicts have worsened. Ironically, the major national beneficiary of this has been Iran.
If there is an emergent so-called parliamentary democracy in Iraq in the months ahead, it will be characterized by profound mistrust and deep religious and regional tensions. When it comes to tolerance and stability, Germany's Weimar Republic, in retrospect, would be seen as a model of civility and goodwill by comparison. There can be little doubt that the war in Iraq, waged predominantly by white Christians in the name of democracy and human rights, has besmirched the good name of each in the eyes of millions of Muslims and others throughout the world.
I'll go on to my sixth point.
We in the developed democracies need to remind ourselves of the multi-faceted and multi-partisan roots of our own rights. As I have noted, as a follow-up to one of Churchill's coalition cabinet decisions in the 1940s, following the war, he and Roosevelt ensured that a wide range of rights were to find their place as part of a new postwar order. These rights ultimately became an integral part of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. First drafted by a Canadian, John Humphrey, they ultimately became the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.
The crucial point here is that when added to the political and civil rights, the new social and economic rights became the core of the modern welfare states that flourished in the North Atlantic democracies for decades after the war. As Tony Judt, one of the world's leading historians, has recently and brilliantly argued in his book Postwar, such welfare states, with a mix of political and social rights, were largely responsible for the disappearance of parties on the extreme left and right and for the increasing degree of a sense of social justice and stability that came to characterize most of the advanced democracies.
It's then our own modern history that should guide us in understanding why economic globalization is a mixed blessing for democracy. As the World Bank has recently noted, amidst growing prosperity for many, there are also millions in abject poverty in Latin America, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. Large numbers of them believe that established democracies no longer care about social justice. They see our governments and elites as acting too often in collusion with their own elites, being more interested in their natural resources and property rights than in the civil and social rights of the vast majority.
The fact that the President of Venezuela could be applauded by many in the UN's General Assembly in September for calling President Bush the devil should be seen in part as symptomatic of a widespread sense of injustice and not merely as a rejection of Mr. Bush's invasion of Iraq.
The depth of inequality and the absence of social reform in so much of the world can and does produce romantic, extremist, and intolerant religious and secular movements. It happened in recent European history. It can repeat itself again, only this time globally.
I think I'll conclude there, Mr. Chairman. Thank you.
