Evidence of meeting #137 for Foreign Affairs and International Development in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was liberal.
A recording is available from Parliament.
President, Central European University, As an Individual
That's the key issue.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Michael Levitt
you. I have to move to the next questioner.
MP Caron, s'il vous plaît.
NDP
Guy Caron NDP Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques, QC
Thank you.
I want to apologize to Mr. Chungong, because I'll be asking Mr. Ignatieff my questions, at least the first two.
Mr. Ignatieff, I want to address the issue of Canada's image around the world and of how Europeans may view Canada. You pointed out that this image was evolving and that the influence had diminished. I want to give you a possible explanation.
Canada's image had been relatively stable and consistent over the years. We've been increasingly seeing polarized images of Canada. For example, regarding the issue of migrants, at the start of the current government's mandate, we were talking about the intake of refugees and the fact that Canada was an open country.
This morning, I attended a breakfast organized by Amnesty International, where we were told about this vision of Canada as a welcoming country. We were told that now, at the end of the mandate, the discourse concerns issues such as asylum or political asylum shopping. This is completely contrary to the vision announced at the start of the mandate.
From your perspective, does this inconsistency in government positions lead to the diminished influence noticeable in Europe?
President, Central European University, As an Individual
Mr. Caron, with all due respect, I think that Europeans have very little awareness or knowledge of Canada's domestic policies. They still hold a very positive view of Canada as both a host country and a bilingual country, where two languages are spoken.
Despite all the internal controversies—you addressed some of them—I believe that Europeans still hold a very positive view of Canada. However, they insist that our model isn't their model. They're much more hesitant about multiculturalism, and they want to resist a future that follows the Canadian model. Of course, it depends on the country, but this is especially true in the Eastern countries.
Thank you for the question.
NDP
Guy Caron NDP Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques, QC
I mentioned the migrant issue, but we could have also talked about Canada's evolving role when it comes to our international commitments, particularly our peacekeeping forces. Perhaps domestic policies go unnoticed in Europe. However, we still have international commitments or an international presence, which is also evolving compared to what we used to know 15 or 20 years ago.
My second question concerns the models. You spoke about multiculturalism and how the principle has been implemented in Canada. This model may not be welcome—I don't know whether that's the right word—or accepted in Europe, for example. The model is less and less accepted.
Even in Canada, the model is evolving. Even though most provinces in the country still accept multiculturalism as the main value, in Quebec, for example, the principle of interculturalism has been gaining momentum for a number of years now. Multiculturalism was developed somewhat in opposition to the American melting pot. We could choose from the two models.
If Quebec adopts interculturalism, is there a chance that Europe will adopt neither a multiculturalism nor a melting pot model, but a more suitable model? If so, what model is emerging that could serve as a barrier to the rise of authoritarianism?
President, Central European University, As an Individual
Mr. Caron, still with all due respect, I've never understood what “interculturalism” means exactly. It's a little beyond me.
I know that a big discussion is being held across Canada, and not only in Quebec, on the right way to integrate newcomers to Canada. I think that a number of models are needed. I'm not attached to a single model. I think that integration is carried out one way in Vancouver and another way in Toronto, and that a third model exists in Montreal.
I think that we must encourage these differences and be confined only to the limits of a liberal democracy, which are the limits set out in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
NDP
Guy Caron NDP Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques, QC
The question has a second component.
How could a different model in Europe be developed in order to find common ground against the rise of authoritarianism in some countries, such as Hungary and Poland? Is it possible to do so?
President, Central European University, As an Individual
I hope so.
To turn the page here in Hungary, there needs to be an internal opposition. This depends on the Hungarians and the opposition forces in the current government. I don't have any lessons to share with them, since I'm not involved in politics in Canada and Hungary.
Obviously, the European authorities must get involved. These authorities include the European Court, European Commission and European Council, which are the only major organizations that can halt the descent into pure authoritarianism.
Liberal
Raj Saini Liberal Kitchener Centre, ON
Good morning, Mr. Ignatieff. It's a pleasure to have you here today with us.
I want to start with Hungary, since you are there and your experience there is quite vast.
There seems to be a conversion of Mr. Orbán from being someone who was a young activist to someone who has become an authoritarian. He was educated at Oxford under the auspices of a George Soros scholarship. Some of his cabinet members and his spokesperson are graduates of the CEU.
I'm wondering why there's no opposition within his party. Is it just that everybody's following him blindly? What's the situation?
Second of all, what's his appeal within the Visegrad Group of nations? Not only is he changing the fundamental democracy of Hungary, but he's also changing the democracy of the Visegrad nations.
President, Central European University, As an Individual
This the story of what has happened to the European transition from communism to liberal democracy in general.
Orbán's story is the story, in a way, of the whole region. He begins, as you quite rightly say, as an anti-communist insurgent, and has—all credit to him—a very courageous role in calling for the withdrawal of Russian troops in 1989.
I think he then begins to see that there's a space on the right that is not occupied by the liberal transition elite and, like a clever politician, begins to flow into that space. I think he's influenced by international tendencies. He starts as a CSU Christian democrat conservative on the German model, and then begins to move steadily to the right.
The question of how far right he will go is a question of how far the European institutions step in to restrain him.
I think he's trying to perfect a kind of Christian democracy mark 2—not the Christian democracy of Adenauer or De Gasperi in the post-war period, but a Christian democracy in which Christianity is really a symbol for hostility to Muslims and foreigners. Whatever else Christianity is, it's also a language of mercy, but you don't hear that very much.
As for your question about Visegrad, I think he is a model for the Poles; they have adopted some of his actions on the Constitutional Court of Hungary very directly. I think the Czechs are much more reticent. I think the Austrians like his immigration policy, but don't like some other aspects of his illiberalism.
I would not overemphasize his impact in the Visegrad Group.
Liberal
Raj Saini Liberal Kitchener Centre, ON
Just following up on that, you know that article 7 was triggered against Poland.
Liberal
Raj Saini Liberal Kitchener Centre, ON
Article 7 was triggered against Hungary. Is there not a weakening, because this story with Orbán is not new? It's been going on since 2011-12 when the European Parliament first noticed that. Now, six or seven years later, Poland and Hungary have had article 7 triggered against them. What has been the response of the European Parliament?
President, Central European University, As an Individual
It's very slow. Europe proceeds by kind of an elephantine consensus formation because it's 27 people. Canada will recognize how this is because we're a federation. Everything happens slowly in Canada in that way for good reasons, but I think we're coming to a crunch point. For example, the European People's Party, the largest bloc in the parliament, has said to Victor Orbán, "You either make a deal to allow my university, ECU, to stay or we're throwing you out of the EPP”. At that point, real consequences start to come into play. If he's thrown out of the EPP, then he won't have the power, the access or the resources he has had from being in the dominant group in Parliament. That might be the first time, in a way, that things start to happen.
The other avenue, of course, is the European Court of Justice.
The mills of European politics grind very, very slowly, and people like me are impatient at how slow they are.
Liberal
Raj Saini Liberal Kitchener Centre, ON
Whatever remaining time I have, I'll give to my colleague Ms. Vandenbeld.
Liberal
Anita Vandenbeld Liberal Ottawa West—Nepean, ON
Thank you very much. It's very good to see you again, Professor Ignatieff.
I'm very pleased to have you here and very happy that you mentioned that we should not forget about the Balkans, and particularly the former Yugoslavia, which is a scenario that I know you've written extensively on.
When we talk about the distance between North America and Europe, there is within the public memory the more recent intervention in the former Yugoslavia, followed by a significant period of Canadians' going through OSCE and multilateral institutions to provide expertise on democratic transitions. I think at that time there was a tremendous amount of hope, and the idea of democracy brought with it great expectation.
I'm wondering whether or not the resurgence of nationalist impulses and authoritarianism, anti-pluralism, and even in many cases a backsliding on gender equality.... In many transition countries, women were more economically empowered, educated and involved in political institutions, such as they were, before the democratic transition. In some ways the high expectations, the inability to meet those expectations, the corruption and a number of other forces are perhaps the reasons why there is a backsliding. Does that mean that for a country like Canada, there may be an opportunity through OSCE and other institutions to provide that kind of expertise, not to export our democratic model, but to be able to provide that kind of expertise for institutions?
I do want to bring Mr. Chungong into the conversation as well, because parliamentary institutions.... I was a senior adviser to the parliament of Kosovo when Kosovo declared independence, and overnight it had to be a modern parliament. There were many, many Canadians involved in that.
Could both of you, perhaps, comment on what Canada's role might be in that regard?
President, Central European University, As an Individual
I pay tribute to your years of experience in the Balkans. As you know, it's a frozen conflict. As you know, the phenomenon of this consolidation into a single party state is very advanced in Serbia. It's not great in lots of other parts. These are countries that have not made a transition even to democracy, really, let alone liberal democracy.
The worry for Canada is that Europe, the OSCE and the EU have essentially departed from the Balkans. They're just not present. I think the only way that Canada can re-engage is if it convinces a kind of hockey team of Canadians, Nordics, and Dutch folk and maybe some Germans to re-engage as a team and to say that this thing is stuck and that the reason we need to engage is not for Boy Scout humanitarian stuff, but to stop the possibility of war. Canada needs to say that we were there in the 1990s—exactly what you're saying—and did our best to stop people being killed and that we want to stop people being killed again.
I'm a little pessimistic about the Balkans and do hope that, in your report, you make the Balkans front and centre. It's the one place in this part of the world where there is a danger of conflict, in addition, needless to say, to eastern Ukraine, which is a—
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Michael Levitt
Thank you, Professor Ignatieff.
I'm sorry. I want to get to MP Kusie for a final question because we're starting to run over time.
MP Kusie, please go ahead.
Conservative
Stephanie Kusie Conservative Calgary Midnapore, AB
Thank you very much, Mr. Ignatieff. I've never met you, but I have read your book, Fire and Ashes. Two stories really stood out for me. One was when your father was passed over for.... I know he went on to be ambassador to Yugoslavia, but the one posting was the only time you saw him cry. That was very significant for me, as well as when Bob Rae's brother said, "Back!" to you at the leadership convention. Those were very powerful moments for me.
My question is for Secretary General Chungong.
Sir, what has been the impact of your being the first non-European IPU secretary general? What unique perspective has that brought to your perspective on democracy in Europe? Have the Europeans recognized your unique perspective in regard to this challenge as the first non-European IPU secretary general?
Secretary General, Inter-Parliamentary Union
Thank you very much for that question.
I [Technical difficulty—Editor] general, but I was elected as the secretary general of a global organization that embraces a variety of political systems and democratic experiences. That is how we have been promoting diversity within the organization.
[Technical difficulty—Editor]
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Michael Levitt
I'm sorry. We've lost the secretary general.
With that, we will ask if he can send us a briefing note on that so we can add it.
Thank you for your question, Ms. Kusie.
We are going to suspend briefly while we get our next panel of witnesses into place.
Professor Ignatieff, thank you very much for joining us this morning. In absentia, thank you also to Secretary General Chungong.
With that, we shall suspend.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Michael Levitt
Members, if I can ask you to please take your seats, we will resume.
We're now going to have our second panel of witnesses this morning as we continue our study on threats to liberal democracy in Europe.
I would like to welcome, first of all, Dr. Jason Stanley. He is the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University and the author of five books. Professor Stanley's most recent book is entitled How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. It explores the ideology of fascism and the various techniques that fascists adopt to gain and maintain power.
I would also like to welcome Dr. Timothy Snyder, the Richard C. Levin Professor of History from Yale University, who is joining us by video conference from Vienna, Austria. Dr. Snyder's research and writing focus on modern eastern European political history and on the dynamics of international crisis in European political history. He published the book The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America in 2018, and On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century in 2017.
We can begin with you, please, Professor Stanley. Then we will move to Professor Snyder. You can take around 10 to 12 minutes for your testimony. Then we will open it up for members' questions.
Professor Stanley.
Professor Jason Stanley Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy, Yale University, As an Individual
I'm going to start by answering a question that arose in the previous panel, about how I think about liberal democracy.
I'm a philosopher. We think of liberal democracy as based on two values, liberty and equality. Core to both of these values is truth. You can't have liberty without truth. Nobody thinks the people of North Korea are free, if they're going to vote for their leader each time, because they've been lied to.
You can, then, have a majority vote and not have liberal democracy, because if you don't have access to truth, then you're not going to have any sense of who to vote for or what to do. You're not going to be free; you're going to be operating on lies. You can't have equality without truth, because political equality is speaking truth to power. Liberal democracy is a system designed to preserve these two values, liberty and equality, that we cherish so much.
Thank you to the committee for having me here, because I think of Canada as representing these values to the world right now.
It's characteristic for political philosophers to divide democracy into a voting system, a set of institutions, and a culture. We can think of the attack on liberal democracy that's happening right now as an attack on the institutions and the culture. Illiberal democracy is the idea that you can attack the institutions and the culture and let the majority voting system remain.
We learned of the attack on liberal democracy and what the key institutions are. Jair Bolsonaro just announced that he's going to cut funding to philosophy and sociology departments in universities; CEU is attacked in Hungary; universities are attacked. The education system is central to liberal democracy. This method of dismantling the institutions of liberal democracy focuses on courts and universities. We pay attention to courts, but we need to pay attention to universities as well. This method involves these politicians who exploit this method, trying to transform universities into job training centres instead of places where people learn their citizenship. We need to pay attention to this.
The culture of liberal democracy is a culture that values liberty and equality. The secretary general, in the previous panel, spoke of extreme rhetoric. Extreme rhetoric destroys the norm of equality—gender equality and equality of religious minorities, etc.
Since I'm a philosopher, it is my vocation to dissent from previous witnesses, so I will take that opportunity here. I've spoken of the method to attack liberal democracy. I think it's useful to think of it as a method, not an ideology. I think that, say, Viktor Orbán, is after power and he's using a method to achieve power. This is a method.
Previous witnesses have described this method as populism. I'm going to dissent from that. First, I think populism is ill-defined. I can think of no way of defining populism whereby it doesn't rule some people who are perfectly liberal. I also think it's unfair, because if we look at the crisis of liberal democracy, we have to look at the failure of elites, such as the Iraq war and the financial crisis. I'm reluctant to place the blame, in the attack on liberal democracy, on populism, when fake news was most prevalent in 2003 in my country and in the UK. The problems, then, have been caused by elites, and people are quite right to be suspicious of them.
Populism? Yes, Venezuela has terrible problems: it's a kleptocracy. If you want to describe what's happening, it's somewhat different from what's happening elsewhere, particularly in Europe. I think the problem we face is ethnonationalism—and indeed, as I've argued in my work and Professor Snyder has as well, neo-fascism.
Yascha Mounk in previous witness testimony tried to argue against this. He said, well, it's not islamophobia, because Erdogan is one of the people we have to think about, and Erdogan is clearly not islamophobic. But I think that's a wrong way to think about it. The problem is ultranationalism, and islamophobia is going to appear when the ultranationalism is Christian ultranationalism. White nationalism is going to be the form of ethnonationalism when it's my country, the United States—or, indeed, your country. Islamophobia and white nationalism are instances of the problem of ethnonationalism.
The problem is far-right ethnonationalism. That's the method that cynical politicians are using to distract people from the actual problems they face. I don't think it's a violation of law, because, as the case of Hungary and Poland, and increasingly my country, you can change the law.
We need to pay attention to the structure of these neo-fascist far-right ultranationalist movements. We need to understand them as they arise to identify them, and there are some core elements. They talk about a revitalization of some ultranationalist pride. They appeal to dominant group victimization, as in the loss of their culture in the face of minority groups and gender equality, the loss of male hegemony.
They're harshly anti-feminist. CEU was targeted for gender ideology. Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil has been targeting institutions for gender ideology and feminism. The European University of St. Petersburg was targeted for gender ideology. We have to pay attention to the way in which these movements centre feminism as a target. They centre institutions and the press, as was discussed in the previous panel, with these old tropes of anti-Semitism where dominant institutions, like the press and universities, are targeted as left-wing indoctrination centres run by shadowy anti-nationalist elites.
They seek a one-party state. They seek to represent the other party and minority groups as sort of betrayers and traitors. They portray immigrants and minority groups as criminals, as threats to law and order, as lazy and a drain on the state. You have this paradox in the United States where immigrants are both lazy drains on the state and here to steal jobs.
What Canada represents, given this attack on the norms of liberalism, is a country that has successfully absorbed minority groups and immigrants, and welcomes immigrants. Canada, more than my country, is struggling with the memories of its settler colonialist past and indigenous peoples, because a core part of this movement is trying to erase the problems of the past. It's trying to say we should be proud of the dominant group's victory and domination.
If you want to preserve liberal democracy, you want to preserve the memory of the problems, the memory of the history of the country, warts and sins and all. It's no surprise that Germany is a core liberal democratic nation, because its education system focuses very seriously on remembering the past.
Canada's increasing confrontation with indigenous issues is, in fact, part of Canada's liberal democratic culture, a culture that includes gender equality, tolerance of religious minorities and immigration, and support for universities—not transforming universities into job training centres but keeping them as places where you confront the past and have critical discussions of policy.
Finally, I'll end with the point that this is a method that's being used. We have cynical politicians. All these politicians run anti-corruption campaigns, which is funny. Putin ran an anti-corruption campaign in, I think, 2011. My president ran an anti-corruption campaign, but corruption doesn't mean corruption, right? It means that the wrong people are in charge.
Anti-corruption means that the wrong people are in charge, women, minority groups, etc. Anti-corruption means that the non-dominant group has been given a voice. These are signs, when terms mean the reverse of what they do, when anti-corruption is cynically used as a method to bring corrupt politicians into power.
We need to both make sure that institutions are not corrupt, of course, so they can't be used so cynically, and also need to be especially attentive to the cynical use of anti-corruption campaigns.
Thank you.