Mr. Speaker, I congratulate the hon. member for Hochelaga for a sparkling address which had the added advantage of reminding me that I have been there before. My colleague, the hon. member for Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, also brought me back to time past.
I advise the hon. member opposite to beware of experts and especially people who claim the title of expert. I was also invited and gave evidence as an expert before l'Assemblée nationale de Quebec on these and related issues. I admire and respect the five experts who have been cited very often by the Quebec government and others for their different interpretations. They are experts but I would have thought in other domains than those in which they gave their opinions which might suggest that perhaps l'Assemblée nationale did not do its homework.
I have little difficulty in returning to the point made by my colleague, the hon. member for Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, in international law. There is no explicit joining of the right of self-determination which is a comparatively recent principle of international law with the fission or break-up of existing states or with the outright entry into independence.
If we trace the history of this principle, it is related, as so many things in contemporary constitutionalism are, to Emperor Napoleon and the liberating ideas of the French Revolution which sometimes are put forward without necessarily the intentions of the founders.
The spirit of liberalism, the spirit of nationalism and the spirit of independence are somewhat antinomic and conflicting principles of the heritage of the 19th century, the 19th century of the French Revolution, and carried through into the 20th century in Woodrow Wilson's 14 points. I suppose the apogee of the concept of self-determination as a historical imperative, not a legal one, meaning the break-up of large multinational states, was reached in the Treaty of Versailles.
The tragedy is that it was a principle carried historically to its logical and perhaps foolish conclusion. Most historians today would trace as one of the causal factors of the conflict in World War II the creation of a vacuum in central Europe by the creation of a plethora of mini states, incapable of forming common economic policies and incapable of co-operating militarily to resist the larger threats from the east and west, from Nazi Germany and from the Soviet Union.
This is one of the reasons why in San Francisco in 1945 the principle of self-determination represented a learning from the lessons of history and less enthusiasm for the categorical imperative that some had asserted: that every time one is identify as a nation or a people-the terms in the UN have been used interchangeably and somewhat confusedly-one did not have to break up a state to assert one's right of self-determination.
The classic demonstration of this is the principle that the hon. member for Notre-Dame-de-Grâce referred to, friendly relation and co-operation among states. It was a symbolic ending of the cold war. It is the last great act of east-west relations. It supplements the United Nations charter. It is a code of conduct between communist Russia and the west when the cold war is still on.
It contains this very important historical exception. It was agreed by all parties that there was nothing in the principle of self-determination put in the declaration of friendly relations requiring the break-up of existing multinational states, specifically federal states like Canada and the claimed federal state, the Soviet Union, which specifically were adverted to in the friendly relations conference agenda.
One can find it over the whole 10 years of the history of this. It was pleasant to be reminded of it. I wrote several books that I thought were persuasive on this some years ago and it is nice to have them brought back.
Let me come back to present reality. If members look at the situation in Bosnia, at Yugoslavia, I suppose some might even argue that what has happened there is worse than what existed before, a centralized authority imposing unity on a multinational society.
If self-determination led to the break away, members can see the rule of reason emerging in the current settlements. One saw immediately with the Vance-Owen plan for Bosnia 11 cantons on the Swiss model, and one said it will not work. There is no legal imperative requiring it. It historically does not make sense.
As one follows, as Secretary General Boutros-Ghali has, the trend away from Vance-Owen to Owen-Stoltenberg to what we could call the Clinton or the Dayton plan, there is the 11, now down to 3. The implicit element in it is that two of the three may rejoin their neighbouring states, their so-called mother states.
What we are really saying is we live in a period of historical transition where the main historical currents are contradictory. The trend to supra-nationalism, the imperative of larger and larger regional supra-national associations, economic, political, replacing the old military one, is accompanied by a fragmentation which most historians would regard as a pathological condition today.
The future of the world community is not a series of little Basutolands, enclaves within larger states; nor is it breaking up viable economic political units into a plethora of smaller units. It is basically in recognizing that the lesson of today is constitutional pluralism. People can work together. A state that can successfully combine several different peoples or nations, if one wants to use those terms interchangeably, is a stronger state.
The unity comes from the diversity in the original sense of the term used by the great Austro-Hungarian and late Israeli philosopher who coined the term community of communities. It is that larger concept.
To a certain extent when self-determination is preached there is the false statement that international law requires it. It does not. International law is neutral. In a certain sense it is running counter to the preferred view of how history is unfolding: an interdependent world community and larger and larger associations transcending national frontiers, rendering nationalism in its pathological sense out of date, and making Bosnia-Hercegovina and the conflicts there an absurd survival at the end of the 20th century of an anarchic past that is better left behind. The nation state has been the master institution of western European thinking for the last 300 years, but it is out of date.
This is the biggest lesson. There is no international law imperative here. There are lessons of history but there are good historical trends, trends that rest upon sound scientific evaluation of the past, and there are the bad lessons. It is for us to choose on this basis.