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Liberals at the Border: We Stand on Guard for Whom?

2004; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 59; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/40204001

2052-465X

Thomas G. Barnes, Lloyd Axworthy,

Canadian Policy and Governance

LIBERALS AT THE BORDER We Stand on Guard for Whom? Lloyd Axworthy Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. viii, 52pp, $11.95 paper (ISBN 0-8020-8593-8)Frederick the Great of Prussia remarked, who defends everything, defends nothing. It is sound advice and Lloyd Axworthy ought to have heeded it. In delivering the sixth annual Senator Keith Davey lecture, 11 March 2002, the former minister of foreign affairs took his stand at the border (the longest indefensible cliche in the world). Then, in answering the question posed in the title, he seemed prepared to defend everyone, everywhere, against a perceived enemy: the United States, variously described and limned in the rest of the lecture with all the derisory and denigratory adjectives that America's real enemies customarily use, made nastier by characterizing the present administration as a wrecking crew dedicated to dismantling [the international] architecture. He began with what ought to have been a defining, even determinative, observation:Six months ago today, terrorists attacked the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon, near Washington, DC. Shock waves from that assault are still reverberating in most corners of the world. The hijacked planes. . . shook the foundation of many hallowed beliefs, undermined accepted wisdoms, and shattered accustomed ways of thinking and acting.But the danger he perceived is that prospects of expanded military action threaten division in the global community. Force, not resolution, is too often the atbitet of disputes. While that concern might carry weight at the University of Victoria or the University of Toronto, at one remove from the horrors of New York, Washington, and Shanksville, PA, it leaves Americans unmoved. Certainly it would not teach al Qaeda anything it did not already know and had acted upon.Axworthy's solution to the American threat is to fashion a long-term Canadian approach to global security comprised of four elements: 1) advancing multilateralism; 2) looking to within the North American framework; 3) developing made-in-Canada strategies; and 4) acting as a global catalyst for change. Multilateralism would employ the usual candidates: the UN, NGOs, and international legal conventions of the feel-good-be-nice sort in which he specialized as foreign minister, premised on the almost mythopoeic globalizing instincts of Canadians to establish presence and position abroad. He excels at totalling the many past Canadian initiatives for multilateral global good-works, but he offers nothing as to how that effort can combat universal terrorism. Terrorism remains for him a criminal problem, not a military imperative, and he does not suggest how to make the terrorists amenable to any jurisdiction. Looking to Mexico assumes security necessities are no different than economic needs. All the quotidian abrasions-water, energy, the environment-seem his principal concern. Though he does make useful suggestions for creating trinational North American security arrangements, in the two years since the lecture was delivered those mutually satisfactory safeguards have perforce had to meet American criteria for efficacy.Developing made-in-Canada strategies would, in Axworthy's rendering, start with a North American trilateral procedure that respects the autonomy of each partner as a way of addressing security issues. …