The Mark 2010

Canadian foreign policy is becoming more militarized, just when it should be becoming more diplomatic.

It has been a week now since I returned from ForeignPolicyCamp in Vancouver – an amazing enterprise largely ignored by the mainstream media.

What to make of the Camp?

The event was superbly organized, innovatively delivered, and very well attended by a diverse selection of Canadians from across the country – students, teachers, NGO representatives, business-people, and other interested individuals. CIDA and the DND had several delegates each, and all participants were eligible to contribute to a survey of government performance, the findings of which are now available.

DFAIT was not represented. The absence was noted.

One might wonder what kind of factors might have combined to keep Canada’s foreign ministry from attending a major national conference on foreign policy? Have the budget cuts been so deep that travel by anyone is now impossible? Was the Department under instruction not to attend? Or were officials just too busy dealing with urgent issues – such as rising waters around several officials associated with the Richard Colvin affair – to spare time for issues which would merely qualify as important?

I don’t have these answers.

But being on a book tour and engaging audiences on both sides of the Atlantic has nonetheless given me some useful perspectives. With that experience in mind, I can offer a few observations related to DFAIT’s unprecedented predicament and the challenges facing Canadian international policy generally.

Despite serial attempts at reform, the department has mainly failed to adapt to the imperatives of globalization. It remains overly state-centric, rigid in structure, and risk-averse in culture. At a time when it might be focused on managing the clusters of cross-cutting issues that are not the responsibility of other departments or levels of government – public administration and policy development, international science and technology issues, the rule of law, rights and democracy, and governance to name a few – the department must instead devote its energies to identifying further cuts.

Nor has DFAIT been able to resist the continuing militarization of Canadian foreign policy. Its influence was reportedly near invisible in high-level discussions on Afghanistan held during the crucial period of 2005-07, when arguments favouring the move to aggressive counter-insurgency in Kandahar trumped the case for peace-support.

The DND-driven decision to depart from ISAF and join Operation Enduring Freedom, aka the GWOT, was hugely consequential, yet the larger implications for Canada’s security and the management of its overseas brand apparently received scant attention. War has since come to dominate competing international policy priorities.

On these points and others, some of the commentary ventured at ForeignPolicyCamp was insightful, and a number of the prescriptions refreshingly forward looking and strategic. But to know where to go in international policy, you must know where you have been. How did this country arrive at such a low tide?

• *By default*. That is, the inevitability of a relative decline post-1947 in Canada’s power and influence as other countries rebuilt or emerged; the generally shrinking place of the state in the overall globalization mix; and the movement of the locus of activity upwards, outwards, and downwards to supranational, transnational, and sub-national actors, respectively.
• *By design*. That is, the deliberate reductions in DFAIT resources; the ascendance of micro-management and centralized control; the nature of recent ministerial appointments; and the agglomeration of decision-making function at the executive level.
• *As a result of long-term trends*. That is, the fragmenting of the old middle class, non-partisan consensus which used to exist around a suite of widely-held notions (Pearsonian internationalism, middle power role, generous aid donor, conflict resolver, helpful fixer, peacekeeper, provider of good offices) in favour of highly particularistic special interests (climate change, aboriginal issues, weapons of mass destruction, rain forests, terrorism, women’s rights, pandemic disease, genomics, etc.)

This splintering – for better or worse – of international policy values and interests makes it difficult to catalyze public opinion around broad Canadian objectives. That said, public diplomacy, or PD, as a technique for delivering international policy results through dialogue plays directly to Canada’s soft power strengths. Equally significant, it minimizes the weaknesses associated with diminished hard power, ongoing capacity limitations, and this country’s generally shrinking space in the planetary scheme of things.

With an admirable reputation and positive image, public diplomacy is Canada’s strongest comparative advantage in international relations. It is almost incomprehensible that this function has been among the hardest hit in the recent round of resource reductions. Not only is this akin to shooting yourself in the foot while in the middle of a race, it forces even greater distortions and misallocations throughout the diplomatic network.

When public diplomacy officers assigned to Canadian missions abroad have their budgets for programming, travel, and representation cut, and in some cases removed, the cost of keeping these people in place becomes difficult to justify when, in many cases, no real work can be done.

How might a compelling value proposition be rebuilt?

The solution, I believe, will involve restoring DFAIT in general, and PD in particular, to the centre of a whole-of-country, whole-of-government Canadian grand strategy for international policy re-engagement. In this, diplomacy and development would displace defence as the policy instruments of choice.

This strategy would be crafted in explicit response to key contemporary developments in the world political economy:

• The power shift in favour of the (re)emerging Asia-Pacific region.
• The rise of a new suite of global challenges, distinct from the Cold War threat set in that most of these transnational issues are rooted in science and driven by technology.
• The rise of heteropolarity as the basis for world order.

Canada has a unique position in this highly competitive world in that it bridges to Europe, through its history; to the USA and the Americas, through its present priorities and orientation; and across the Pacific to Asia, the largest source of new Canadians and the dynamic centre of the new global economy.

It is long past time for this country to use those bridges, diplomatically, as conduits to a brighter international policy future. The Copenhagen Climate Change Conference – dealing now with one of the foremost issues, among many, which is rooted in science and driven by technology – will offer manifold opportunities to engage constructively.