The Business of Spying
Governments aren’t the only ones deploying spies these days. David Robillard explains.

Thatcher’s Wars
Jennifer Welsh on the great and costly legacy of Thatcher’s forceful, visionary leadership.

Proxy Proxies
Steve Saidemanargues that focusing only on national armies in conflict-ridden states promotes bias against foreign troop training.

Democracy in Retreat
Josh Kurlantzick talked to OpenCanada on the worldwide decline of democracy.

An Unequal Partnership
Fraser Reilly-King on why the post-2015 framework still misses the meaning of ‘partnership’ in ‘global partnership’.

Wanted: A Real Global Partnership
John Sinclair on why the most recent model for a Global Partnership on development is failing to reach its potential.

Canada-China Opportunities In Transition
Content from the conference organized by the CIC’s National Capital Branch.

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Roland Paris considers the common view at the time that staying out of the war would damage Canada-U.S. relations and finds that nothing of the sort happened. And it’s a good thing we did stay out, says Michael Bell, because the invasion was doomed to failure from the beginning. Attempting to find a silver lining, Steve Saideman says the invasion was a bad idea, but not the “Single Worst Decision In The History of American Foreign Policy”. That honour instead goes to the decision to disband the Iraqi army in 2003. Bessma Momani thinks that the most important lesson can be drawn from the massive human cost of the war. Jennifer Welsh looks at how the war changed how we think about the connection human rights and armed conflict. And Paul Sedra sees a historical parallel between the American occupation of Iraq and the British occupation of Egypt in 1882.

A Lost Decade?: Debating the Lessons of the Iraq War Ten Years On
Ten years on, Baghdad and Washington are still feeling the ripple effects of the Iraq War, as insurgent attacks continue and sequestration kicks in. But should the period of the Iraq war be considered “a lost decade”? Have we learned anything from the deaths of over 100,000 Iraqi civilians and 6,630 U.S. soldiers? Is it still to early to tell? OpenCanada asked our experts to reflect on the lessons learned (and not) from ten years of conflict. We also selected essays and longform pieces that highlight changing perceptions of the war from 2003 to 2013. With contributions from Roland Paris, Michael Bell, Steve Saideman, Bessma Momani, Jennifer Welsh, Paul Sedra.

Untapped Value: Why We Don’t Appreciate the Value of Water and What Could Change If We Did
Human societies cannot survive, much less thrive, in the absence of reliable sources of fresh water. This reality makes water a resource of immense value. But rarely do we see water being used in a way that reflects that value, particularly in relatively water-rich countries like Canada. On this World Water Day, OpenCanada asked three experts whether the attitudes of Canadians  toward water are changing for the better; whether the way we think about water will affect our ability to adapt to climate change-related impacts on supply and demand; and whether Canada can be a global leader on water-related issues. With contributions from Tony Maas, Diane Dupont, Bernadette Connant, and Bob Sandford.

CIDA Merger Is Fine, But Fundamental Questions of Policy Remain Unresolved
Roland Paris on the Canadian International Development Agency being folded into the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade.

Responding to China’s Military Buildup
Elinor Sloan on what China’s new military capability means for both the U.S. and Canada.

Kenyatta’s Challenge to the ICC
The International Criminal Court should give Kenya’s new president a chance say Laszlo Sarkany and Asim Ali.

Canada’s Food Fortune
Canada is well-positioned to profit from the growing market for food, but policymakers must enable Canadian food exports to seize this opportunity argue Michael Bloom and Michael Grant.

Maritime Security and the Canada-China Relationship
James Manicommakes the case for maritime security to be part of Canada’s China strategy.

The Spectre of Sinophobia
As Chinese investment in Canada grows, we should take care not to repeat the mistakes of the past says Hugh Stephens.

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In Rome, the conclave chose Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina to be the new Pope. We talked to Andrew Preston, the award-winning author of Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith, about the role of the Vatican in international relations today.

In this week’s other ‘election’, Xi Jinping was appointed president of China. Jinping is a world leader Canadians will likely get to know a lot better as China becomes more and more of a global force argues David Dyment.

And I consider the psychological impact of living in drone-prone regions like Pakistan, Yemen, or Gaza, where the these flying robots have become omnipresent.

Canada and Climate: From Leader to Threat
Henry Shue on why burning through our limited carbon budget is going to cost us dearly.

Faith and Foreign Policy
Andrew Preston, author of the award-winning book, Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith, on the role of religion in U.S. foreign policy.

Teeter-Tottering Between Contending Perceptions of China
David Dyment on why the country represents both a challenge and an opportunity for Canada.

Why NATO is the Worst Alliance (Except For All the Others)
Steve Saideman on why NATO is still a good deal for Canada, even if we don’t always need what we pay for.

Buzz Kill
What does being constantly watched sound like? Taylor Owen on the under-appreciated costs of living under drones.

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Of course, preventing accidental collisions is one thing. Preventing a belligerent foreign country from targeting your satellites is something altogether different. That’s why the EU has proposed a new “code of conduct” to reinforce the rules keeping weapons out of space. Other international actors, however, seem cool to the idea, says Paul Meyer.

Back on earth, the Canadian Forces brass seem less interested in boldly exploring new frontiers. Steve Saideman writes that trimming the budget, not preparing for the next war, has become the focus for the military.

But many Egyptians are keen to see their leader join the space race. Bessma Momani notes that an online campaign has begun to send Morsi to space. The president’s critics hope he will gain some perspective on Egypt’s many earthly troubles there.

And OpenCanada’s series on the future of sustainable development in partnership with the North-South Institute continues with Derek Evans arguing that we need new goals that better reflect the changing nature of global poverty, while John Sinclair thinks that different countries need different goals.

Failure to Launch?
Paul Meyer on why the European Union’s proposed International Code of Conduct for Outer Space is running low on diplomatic fuel.

New Development Goals For a New World
Derek Evans on how the nature of global poverty has changed, and why the post-2015 MDGs need to reflect that change.

One Size Only, One Global Customer?
John Sinclair on why universality and tiering should be part of the post-2015 Millennium Development Goal conversation.

Keystone Uber Alles?
Steve Saideman on why neither Canadian domestic policy nor Canadian-U.S. relations begin and end with the Keystone pipeline.

The Weight of History in the Arctic
Shelagh Grant on why the history of the Arctic is relevant to today’s debates over the future of Arctic sovereignty.

The Budget Military
Steve Saideman on how spending decisions may dictate the makeup of the Canadian Forces.

Why Egypt Needs Space from Morsi
Bessma Momani discusses the growing disconnect between President Mohamed Morsi and the Egyptian people.

David Souter on the Development-Technology Disconnect
OpenCanada talked to the Managing Director of ICT Development Associates about how the spread of new communication technologies are challenging understandings of sustainability.

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Meanwhile, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is in Washington today to meet with President Obama. Gerald Wright speculates on each leader’s priorities and political handicaps. Obama doesn’t want to send the wrong message to Beijing, although as John Hancock argues, the recently proposed U.S.-EU trade agreement could be interpreted as a move against China.

Disputes over sovereignty claims in the South China Sea are heating up again, but higher temperatures in waters further north are of more direct concern to Canada. As sea-ice melts and Arctic waterways open up, OpenCanada’s series, Cold Calculations: The Politics of Arctic Development continues. We asked representatives of Arctic peoples and states whether Canada should push the economic development of Arctic when it takes the chairmanship of the Arctic Council.

For All Mankind
Michael Van Pelt on why Canada’s new Office of Religious Freedom is an opportunity to build on Canada’s vibrant pluralist heritage.

Africa Needs NATO More Than It Needs the UN
African countries will need more help than the UN can offer to stop the spread of Islamist extremism argue Alexander Moens and Jimmy Peterson.

Mr. Abe Goes to Washington
This week, the Japanese Prime Minister met with President Obama. Gerald Wright explains what they need from each other, and why they may not get it.

Should Canada Push Arctic Development?
OpenCanada asked representatives of both Arctic peoples and states whether economic development is the right priority for Canada to advance in the North.

The Mother of All Trade Blocs
John Hancock on why the proposed U.S.-EU trade deal could revitalize global trade co-operation. Or end it.

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In Washington, Obama delivered the first State of the Union Address of his second term. The president made plenty of promises on the foreign policy front, but Steve Saideman isn’t holding his breath that he’ll keep many of them. While Obama didn’t specifically mention Canada by name during his speech, one of his policy announcements could have a big impact on us – the start of free-trade talks with the European Union. Canada and the EU are still in the process of hammering out a trade deal and Danielle Goldfarb wonders if a potential U.S.-EU deal could derail it.

And it’s not just Canada that should be worried. John Hancock thinks that a transatlantic agreement is clearly aimed at restoring the West’s dwindling leverage vis-à-vis China. And an escalating global trade war between rival regional blocs is definitely not what the global economy needs right now.

Meanwhile, the violence in Syria continues while the world does little – very unlike what happened in Libya and Mali. Kyle Matthews considers what this means for the future of R2P.  Of course, the West once made good use of the Assad regime’s brutality. Syria was one of many foreign governments complicit in the CIA’s secret detention and extraordinary rendition operations. We map out the full CIA torture network here.

And we sat down with Columbia University professor Saskia Sassen to talk about how to build a smarter city.

And finally, I look at the emerging surveillance arms race between technologies governments use to monitor communication and the tools citizens use to evade this tracking.

The Mother of All Trade Blocks
John Hancock on why the proposed U.S.-EU trade deal could revitalize global trade co-operation, or end it.

The Surveillance Arms Trade
Taylor Owen on how western technology companies are helping autocratic governments monitor and control their citizens.

Third Time’s An Alarm
North Korea’s most recent nuclear test is a serious provocation – to the West, but also to China. There’s a decent chance Kim Jong-un’s belligerency has cost him Xi Jinping’s support says Jennifer Welsh.

1930s Redux?
Sure, times are tough, but are they 1930s tough? John Hancock says that the parallels between the economy then and the economy today are becoming hard to ignore.

Did Obama Just Derail the Canada-EU Trade Deal?
Canada wasn’t mentioned during the State of the Union, but one policy announcement could jeopardize our trade negotiations with the EU says Danielle Goldfarb.

Promises Made
Steve Saideman on the many foreign policy promises Obama made this week in the State of the Union Address and the likelihood of him keeping those promises.

State of Disunion
Paul Quirk on what Obama’s State of the Union Address means for Canada – there’s both good news and bad news.

The End of Atrocity
With no end to the conflict in Syria in sight, do the promises of “never again” following the Rwandan genocide ring hollow? Yes and no says Kyle Matthews.

Open Systems, Smart Cities
OpenCanada talked to Columbia University Professor Saskia Sassen about building smarter cities out of smarter technology.

The CIA’s Torture Network
When the CIA began to torture suspected terrorists after 9/11, they did so with the help of numerous foreign governments.

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In the Roundtable, Bessma Momani takes a hard look at the latest round of protests in Egypt, the impact of continuing upheaval on Egyptian society and the collective influences of politics and soccer throughout the conflict. Meanwhile, Steve Saideman examines NATO’s staying power and explains why America’s ‘pivot’ towards Asia is an indicator of U.S. faith in the institution’s continuing success.

Safe Haven No More
The Kenyan government is set to impose drastic measures aimed at Somali refugees. Nicholas Bishop considers the ramifications.

The Plumpy’Nut Story
Heather Keachie on how one person’s emergency food aid can become another person’s candy bar.

A Crisis of Confidence
The latest round of protests reveal the continuing fragility of post-Mubarak Egypt, and the increasing frustration of Egyptians with the current regime, writes Bessma Momani.

Reports of NATO’s Demise…
Steve Saideman on why NATO continues to endure, despite endless predictions of its imminent collapse.

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In America, soon-to-be-former U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton was grilled by two congressional committees in one day over just how much the U.S. government knew about the who was behind the attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi. “With all due respect, the fact is we had four dead Americans. Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night decided they’d go kill some Americans? What difference, at this point, does it make? It is our job to figure out what happened and do everything we can to prevent it from ever happening again,” Clinton told Senator Ron Johnson.

Meanwhile, North Korea was once again rattling their saber at the world. The country said it would conduct further rocket launches and a nuclear test that would specifically target the United States. The threats were denounced by the White House as “needlessly provocative.”

In other nuclear news, warnings of a nuclear attack were sounded in Kashmir. Officials in the Indian-controlled region were encouraging residents to prepare shelters, food, and water in case of nuclear war. A number of deadly clashes between India and Pakistan over the disputed region heightened tensions between the nuclear-armed rivals.

In the U.K., Prime Minister David Cameron wants to renegotiate Britain’s EU membership, after which he promised to hold a referendum on said membership. “I’m not blackmailing anyone,” Cameron said.

And this week’s election in Israel left Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a significantly weakened position, launching much speculation over what kind of coalition might emerge to run the country.

The post This Week: Algeria, Clinton, and North Korea appeared first on Canadian International Council - Canada's hub for international affairs.

It is a critical point in American history: the country’s first African-American president was sworn in Monday for a second term in the midst of deep political dysfunction and a floundering economic recovery. A perfect occasion for some cheeky Canadians to brag a little… On the key issues that President Barack Obama pledged to dedicate his second term to in his inaugural address, Canada has already made substantive progress: on supporting democracy around the world; on providing equal rights to gays and lesbians; on creating an aspirational immigration system.

The editors of Foreign Policy’s Passport blog thought otherwise, saying:

 The president’s inaugural address was a chance for Canadians to pat themselves on the back, the Ottawa Citizen snarkily reports.

While other countries took the opportunity to comment on relevant policy areas and offer constructive dialogue on the state of affairs, the Citizen piece broadcasted an unfortunate Canadian tendency: smugness, particularly in relation to our American neighbours, on issues like gun control, immigration, and healthcare. Fortunately, not all Canadian pundits took the inauguration as an opportunity for self-congratulation.  John Ibbitson at the Globe and Mail contemplated the impact of Obama’s climate change rhetoric on the Keystone Pipeline project:

Simply put: Anyone who believes that approval of the Keystone XL pipeline will be a slam dunk should read the speech carefully. Because every flag it raises is red. If Mr. Obama meant what he said in his inaugural address about taking action on climate change and on renewable energy, then those initiatives will have major implications for the Conservative government.

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Unfortunately, there is something that we must, as Canadians, recognize – that these sort of activities [go on], there [are] these kinds of cells operating out of Montreal… we have a long list of individuals [who have] operated out of Montreal for a long time, who have been suspected or linked to terrorist activities, terrorist groups.

Canadian involvement in the planning of the attack has not been confirmed by the Canadian government, nor has any other country backed Algeria’s statement. Regardless, the possible linkage will almost certainly have an impact on Canadian-American border security cooperation. The Fraser Institute has observed and tracked ‘border thickening’ in recent years, and indicators suggest this trend will continue.  According to The Globe and Mail,

[I]t is beyond dispute that Canada produces its share of violent fanatics. The director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service last year told Parliament that between 45 and 60 Canadian citizens had recently “travelled or attempted to travel from Canada to Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen to join al-Qaeda-affiliated organizations … Ottawa officials are scrambling to investigate these claims, amid ongoing worries that any perceptions of Canada being a haven for al-Qaeda-inspired jihadists could lead to added scrutiny – and ultimately might curb the flow of goods and people across the U.S. border.

In June 2012, the US Dept of Homeland Security, the US Dept. of Justice, Public Safety Canada, and Justice Canada announced a joint initiative entitled ‘Statement of Privacy Principles’ that aims to deepen intelligence and information sharing on common security goals. In the wake of the current crisis, the critical importance of this type of initiative is clear.

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If Belmokhtar is indeed responsible, it wouldn’t be the first time he has taken captives. A former commander with al-Qaida in Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), Belmokhtar has been connected to numerous kidnappings where individuals were held for ransom.

It was Belmokhtar who took Canadian diplomat Robert Fowler hostage in 2008. Fowler, who was working with the UN at the time, was held by the AQIM for 130 days in the Sahara before his release was negotiated. Watch the video below to hear Fowler describe his ordeal in an interview with OpenCanada.org in 2011.

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This problem is pervasive across the Gulf States. In Karen Elliot House’s 2012 monograph On Saudi Arabia, the professor, who spent time embedded in the Gulf’s most dictatorial monarchy, discusses the imbalance that emerges in a society whose economy runs almost entirely on the productivity of foreign workers. Divisions fester between the local and foreign population, and increasingly, migrant workers are targeted by government crackdowns. These workers lack the network, connections, and ability to navigate the local bureaucracy necessary to mounting an effective defense of their rights. Across the region, migrants face limits on freedom of travel, speech, and access to due process in criminal convictions. HRW describes the history and extent of these violations:

Despite years of criticism, the UAE has failed to address the shortcomings in its legal and regulatory framework that facilitate the serious exploitation of migrant workers… The UAE’s crackdown on domestic critics and their right to free expression began in March 2011, when 132 Emiratis signed a petition requesting full election by universal suffrage and law-making powers for a key branch of the UAE government, the Federal National Council. This led to a number of high-profile arrests and prosecutions in 2011 for “insulting” the country’s rulers.

Punishments migrant workers face in the Gulf States range from warrantless detainment to execution. Last week, the New Yorker highlighted the case of a Sri Lankan maid, implicated in the death of an infant charge. The maid faced penalty of death. Bashrat Peer, who profiled the young woman, elaborates on the plight of foreign nationals working in the Saudi Kingdom and neighboring states:

Although their remittances lift their societies from stark poverty, a foreign maid steps into a world of abuse, overwork, and suspicion. Migrant workers enter Saudi Arabia and most other oil-rich Middle Eastern countries through a system known as kafala, or sponsorship. Kafala has happier roots; it is the Bedouin tradition of granting a stranger temporary refuge and feeding him as long as he wishes. In the modern Arab world, kafala has become an oppressive, non-transferable visa regime, which ensures that a foreign worker can only work for the kafeel, the employer who sponsored his/her visa. On a worker’s arrival, the kafeel generally confiscates his or her passport, and the worker is left with little protection.

These governments are now attempting to keep up with the rate of change in an era of enhanced and expanded communication. The UAE has begun to legislate against perceived cybercrime, and for the first time, has issued a sweeping decree limiting Internet activity. Joe Stork, HRW’s Deputy Middle East director, says that, “the UAE’s cybercrimes decree reflects an attempt to ban even the most tempered criticism… the new cybercrime law is the act of a government out of step and out of touch with international norms.” Another report from the rights watchdog’s Middle East offices describes the restrictive nature of the decree, which bans online critique of government officials, advocating for democratic reforms, or attempting to use social media as a tool to facilitate the organization of protests or political assembly.

This ban has a great impact on migrant workers, whose monitored internet communications are subject to major scrutiny, and who lack the political representation to defend their online activity.

HRW’s report urged French President Hollande to pressure the UAE on these issues, as he arrives for his first official visit to the Gulf State this week. Kenneth Roth, the organization’s Executive Director, has used Twitter to express his opposition to France’s further integration with a regime that is ‘intensifying repression.’

In spite of this, Hollande has chosen to deepen security ties and address shared energy issues, hoping to secure the Emirates’ support for France’s Mali intervention.  Support from the Emirates may prove critical to resolving that crisis, but the UAE seems unlikely to begin promoting the protection of humans rights more broadly, for fear of exposing their domestic policies to further criticism.

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The problem is, the jury is in on whether torture played an instrumental role in the CIA’s hunt for bin Laden: it didn’t. Last month CIA Acting Director Michael Morrell released a statement to employees in which he made clear that “the film creates the strong impression that the enhanced interrogation techniques that were part of our former detention and interrogation program were the key to finding Bin Ladin. That impression is false.” Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Senator Dianne Feinstein, and John McCain and Carl Levin, top representatives of the Senate Armed Services Committee, have also weighed in to that effect. For informed viewers, the question Zero Dark Thirty raises is not, “Did torture help the CIA to find Bin Laden?” but rather, “Why does the movie misrepresent torture as a crucial CIA tactic?”

Feinstein, McCain, and Levin have posed this question to the CIA in two letters to Morrell. Their outrage at reports that Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal, the makers of Zero Dark Thirty, received special government access as they developed the film, is clear:

Given the discrepancy between the facts above and what is depicted in the film, previous misstatements by retired CIA officials, as well as what appears to be the CIA’s unprecedented cooperation with the filmmakers, we request that you provide the Committee with all information and documents provided to the filmmakers by CIA officials, former officials, or contractors, including talking points prepared for use in those meetings. Furthermore, we request copies of all relevant records discussing the cooperation between CIA officials, former officials, or contractors and the filmmakers, including records of the meetings that occurred, notes, internal emails, Sametime communications, and other documentation describing CIA interactions with the filmmakers.

Peter Maass views Bigelow’s and Boal’s special access as a particularly unsettling example of “embedded or invitation-only reporting”:

If the access that Boal and Bigelow received was in addition to access that nonfiction writers and documentarians received, I would be a bit less troubled, because at least the quotes in history’s first draft would be reliable, and that means a lot. But as it stands, we’re getting the myth of history before getting the actual history.

The extent to which the CIA authored this myth of history remains to be seen.

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The #cdnfp Twitterati is the all-Canadian version. And like all of these lists, it inevitably leaves people out. While women are better represented in the list, most of the #cdnfp Twitterati are male. They’re also mostly white and Ontario-based. These demographics might reflect lingering institutional biases in the international relations field, but there’s also room for some crowdsourcing to fill in the gaps. Still, the list, as it stands, represents a spectrum of foreign affairs voices in Canada, reflecting and raising questions about the current state of Canadian foreign policy.

Like many of us, the #cdnfp Twitterati were U.S.-election-obsessed in 2012. But when they weren’t counting the number of Canada mentions during the debates, many of them – specialists and non-specialists alike – were tweeting about the Middle East. The #cdnfp Twitterati’s Middle East and North Africa experts and watchers, including Hadeel Al-Shalchi, Dalia Ezzat, Lisa Goldman, Mark Sedra, Nahlah Ayed, and Citizen Lab, continue to collectively portray a complex picture of the region, allowing Canadians to engage with the full roster of MENA states.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s hashtag for his 2012 fall tour of Asia, #pmasia, is his second-most-used hashtag to date, and this renewed interest in the region on and off Twitter seems to resonate with the #cdnfp Twitterati. The list includes the Asia-Pacific Foundation and no fewer than two experts on Mongolia, a country that relies on Canada as its second-largest source of foreign investment after China. There are also several full-time Asia-based correspondents listed, like The Globe and Mail’s Twitter-savvy Mark MacKinnon and Stephanie Nolen – a sign of the Canadian media’s own investment in Asia.

Some of the #cdnfp Twitterati’s blind spots mirror those in Canada’s foreign policy. The Canadian government’s much-hyped 2007 turn to Latin America, at Africa’s expense, has largely fallen short, leaving Canada relatively disengaged with both continents. This disengagement shows through in the #cdnfp Twitterati list. While there is some Africa coverage, mostly through the lens of development, there are no authoritative voices on Latin America listed, but I encourage you to follow the CIC’s own Latin America expert, Jennifer Jeffs).

There are a number of other noteworthy Canadian foreign policy names missing. Louise Arbour, Lloyd Axworthy, and Michael Ignatieff are all on Twitter, but they either tweet infrequently, are too formal in their tweets, or rarely interact with other Twitter users directly. Stephen Lewis, Janice Stein, and Jennifer Welsh don’t seem to have Twitter accounts yet. They may all have good reasons to go Twitter-light or Twitter-less, but their influential voices on issues of human rights, international conflict, and humanitarian aid are missing in (at least, Twitter) debates ranging from Canada’s human rights record to the Canadian International Development Agency’s shifting aid priorities to whether Canada should intervene in Syria.

Canadian public servants are a growing presence on Twitter. For the most part, though, Canadian ministers with foreign affairs portfolios still put policy before personality, and the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT) continues to mostly follow its own kind. Playing it safe on Twitter might make sense when the state of digital diplomacy is, as Brian Fung puts it, “messy,” and its effects still unclear. However, there are a few DFAIT employees experimenting more openly with twiplomacy, and it will be interesting to see if their risks pay off in 2013.

One noticeably absent public servant is the Bank of Canada’s soon-to-be ex-governor. For now, we’ll have to make do with the fake @GovernorCarney. When there’s a void like this, the Twitterverse often serves up a timely parody account, sometimes to deliver sharp commentary, and sometimes just to remind us not to take Twitter too seriously.

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This past year, the CIC undertook a major research project on foreign policy and natural resources, asking how Canadians can be smart about developing our abundant energy, mineral, and forest resources, and extracting maximum current and future value from our unique resource endowments. Madelaine Drohan, The Economist’s Canada correspondent, wrote the report and co-directed the project with me, conducting more than 160 interviews with experts around the world. The report was released in October – complemented by an interactive online release that involved a variety of media outlets – and our findings have already begun to play an important role in shaping policy discussions on this subject. We have been discussing our report widely with government, academic, and business communities, along with members of our OpenCanada.org and CIC communities inside and outside of Canada.

This year, OpenCanada.org has truly become Canada’s hub for international affairs. Building on the CIC’s mandate to promote discussion on international affairs, the platform has become a venue for those discussions. In 2012, we published over 270 articles, produced 90 videos, and hosted 13 live chats. Our articles were re-printed in numerous national publications, including The Globe and Mail and Maclean’s. Our editorial and design team experimented with a wide range of content forms and styles, including infographics and online series, and we led the social media conversation on international affairs in Canada, with an audience of over 20,000 on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and YouTube.

This spring, we hosted a series of online discussions in partnership with the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute (CDFAI) on “The Future of Fighting: How the Canadian Military must Adapt.” Experts from government, academia, and Canadian and international think-tanks provided op-ed length pieces to frame the main issues and appeared online to answer questions from the public. This series garnered significant international and Canadian attention, and won a Canadian Online Publishing Award for best online series of articles. More recently, we hosted a second major e-conference with CDFAI titled “Drone Week,” featuring contributions from the Council on Foreign Relations’ Micah Zenko, Brooking’s Peter Singer and former U.S. Ambassador on HIV-Aids Jack Chow, as well as American Security Project’s Joshua Foust, and other experts. The topic was controversial and engendered fierce debates through social media channels, particularly on Twitter.

Our 16 volunteer-run branches continue to host speakers and put on programs to educate and inform their local constituents on important issues in international affairs. This year, our branches hosted over 130 events, on topics ranging from food security, to the Arab Spring, to the geopolitics of the Arctic. I encourage you to connect with your local CIC branch to take advantage of the full range of activities and programs our branches have planned for 2013.

Looking ahead to 2012-2013, the CIC is undertaking a rigorous program of OpenCanada.org series and essays, conferences, seminars, workshops, and speaker events, both online and in person, to advance dialogue and debate on foreign policy. We are also in the stages of building a research lab for exploring the intersection between digital technology and international relations. In partnership with the University of British Columbia, we are working to lead a global conversation on how digital technology changes the ways in which we learn about, understand, and act in the world. We plan to launch the first components of this project publicly early in the New Year.

As a non-partisan, not-for-profit organization, the success of our programs at the national and branch levels depends on individual and corporate donations. As 2012 draws to a close, I invite you to make a tax-deductible charitable contribution to the CIC. Our mandate to foster discussion and debate of international issues would not be possible without your generous and continued support. Donations can be made online by clicking here, or by phone, credit card, or cheque payable to the Canadian International Council.

Along with the CIC board, staff, and volunteers, I extend my warmest wishes to you and your family for a happy and healthy holiday season. We look forward to engaging with you on international affairs in 2013!

The post Looking Back at 2012 appeared first on Canadian International Council - Canada's hub for international affairs.

We asked OpenCanada’s experts to share their favourite non-fiction reads over the past year. The result is an eclectic and inspiring list of history, memoir, and social and political science – there’s even a dash of fiction. Scroll through to see the books our Rapid Responders and Roundtablers felt were deserving of special mention in 2012.

Why Nations Fail

By Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson

Chosen by both Jack Austin and Jeremy Kinsman

Says Kinsman: “It should be memorized.”

Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet

By Julian Assange with Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Müller-Maguhn, and Jérémie Zimmermann 

Chosen by Kris Kotarski

Says Kotarski: “A captivating look at mass surveillance, encryption and power, and a handbook for anyone who wishes to maintain some privacy in the database age. Published in December 2012, a couple of months too late for General Petraeus.”

Strategic Vision

By Zbigniew Brezinzki

Time to Start Thinking

By Edward Luce

Both chosen by Don Newman

Says Newman: “Both deal with the changing world order and America’s response.”

Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict

By Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan

Chosen by Stephen Saideman

Says Saideman: “It changes the way people think about political change – not only that non-violence might be morally preferable but that civil resistance actually works better than violent efforts. It simply is going to be the most influential piece of political science for the next couple of decades, and it is accessible to non-academics.”

Bazaar Politics: Power and Pottery in an Afghan Market Town

By Noah Coburn

Chosen by Matthieu Aikins

Says Aikins: “This finely wrought, multi-year anthropological study of an Afghan town north of Kabul is just the kind of “lived-in” scholarship that the country has missed out on due to decades of war and the instrumentalization of most contemporary Western research for military and political ends.”

Our Divided Political Heart: The Battle for the American Idea in an Age of Discontent

By E.J. Dionne

Chosen by Pierre Martin

Says Martin: “From a liberal who understands and respects the conservative tradition in the United States, a thoughtful and comprehensive historical account of how American conservatism has drifted away from its communitarian roots and contributed to the current climate of political polarization in Washington and beyond.”

Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China

By Paul French

Chosen by Wenran Jiang

Says Wenran: “This is simply one of the best non-fiction reads, with or without any China related interests.”

The Embers of war

By Frederik Logevall

Chosen by Daryl Copeland

The Arab Uprising: The Unfinished Revolutions of the New Middle East

By Marc Lynch

Chosen by Bessma Momani

Says Momani: “In his book, Marc Lynch attempts to provide context to the dramatic changes that have unsettled so many assumptions and certainties in the Middle East. Although the causes and determinants of the political revolution sweeping through the Arab world are far too complex to define through academic analysis, this book is a great read, which offers a foundation to better understand the Arab Uprisings.”

Drift

By Rachel Maddow 

Chosen by John McArthur

Says McArthur: “An insightful and witty review of the how the world’s most powerful military has been structurally transformed in its relationship with its citizenry.”

It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism

By Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein

Chosen by Paul Quirk

Governing the World: The History of an Idea

By Mark Mazower.

Chosen by Jennifer Welsh

Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius

By Silvia Nasar

Chosen by Danielle Goldfarb

Says Goldfarb: “I found this to be a really engaging primer on the major economic thinkers, which helped put today’s US, European, and global economic policy debates in context.”

A Single Roll of the Dice: Obama’s Diplomacy with Iran

By Trita Parsi

Chosen by Tony Burman

Says Burman: “Brilliant and ground-breaking examination by a respected Iranian-American scholar of why a grand bargain between the U.S. and Iran is still possible if Obama’s early efforts to make peace are resumed.”

Joseph Anton

By Salman Rushdie

Chosen by both Stephanie Nolen and Samatha Nutt

Sussex Drive

By Linda Sevenson

Chosen by Mark Fried

Says Fried: “A brilliant over-the-top satire of Stephen Harper’s Ottawa. It isn’t non-fiction, but it is by far the best book about Canadian politics this year.”

House of Stone

By Anthony Shadid

Chosen by Nahlah Ayed

Says Ayed: “I met Shadid in Lebanon a few years ago, and ran into him often on the road – the last time would have been Libya in the spring of 2011. I was always a big fan of his writing and his deep (and rare) understanding of the minutiae of the region. I was anxiously awaiting his newest book when we heard the crushing news he had passed away in Syria. The book was a fitting punctuation to his passionate work as a journalist.”

The Signal and the Noise

By Nate Silver

Chosen by Gordon Smith

All Hell Let Loose by Max Hastings and Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin

By Timonthy Snyder

Chosen by John Hancock

Says Hancock: “Reminded me of the immense importance of history – and that history is not something that can be grasped a decade or even a century after the events. It’s now almost 70 years since the Second World War ended. But Hastings and especially Snyder forced me to look at it through a new lens – as if I were examining an entirely different conflict than the one I’d been taught in school. In an ahistorical age – when we’re convinced that everything today is unprecedented – and when commentators feel compelled to deliver instantaneous verdicts on world-changing events – it’s edifying to be reminded of the invaluable perspective that comes with patient research, intellectual modesty, and the passage of time.”

Bismarck: A Life

By Jonathan Steinberg

Chosen by John Curtis

The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society

By Frans de Waal

Chosen by Maxwell Cameron

The post The Best Reads From 2012 appeared first on Canadian International Council - Canada's hub for international affairs.

While NAFTA was groundbreaking at the time, we need to move beyond trade relations to get in the habit of thinking as North Americans on many additional fronts. And while the financial turmoil, geopolitical upheavals and socio-economic adjustments that have taken place since Dec. 17, 1992, might have distracted from general enthusiasm for the region, global developments since that date actually confirm – and strengthen – the case for thinking of North America as a community, and as a community of interests.

Today, North Americans not only trade with each other but also work together, make things together, learn together and face challenges together. But to prepare for the future, the people of North America need to push their leaders to build frameworks and institutions that enable their populations to do more together. By doing things together, we do them better.

North American trade and competitiveness took off in NAFTA’s initial years, but the impact of 9/11 dampened much of the economic advantage for several years. Meantime, the emergence of China as a global economic superpower, along with the opportunities provided by other new and exotic labour and export markets, distracted us from the North American idea. More recently, however, with wage differentials between China and Mexico decreasing, transportation costs increasing, Europe’s various upheavals, and Mexico’s demographic profile trumping that of other emerging countries, the outlook for North America looks rosier than it has for the much of the past decade.

So the occasion of NAFTA’s 20th anniversary is an ideal time to encourage North Americans – particularly the post-NAFTA generation – to get in the habit of considering possibilities for the region that extend past the original trade and investment profile, possibilities that reach beyond economics, beyond trade and beyond production and value chains.

Since NAFTA’s signing, climate change, health pandemics and food security have been recognized as major global challenges for humanity in the 21st century. What trio of national populations is better positioned than North Americans to address these global challenges together? And what trio of continental neighbours is as endowed with the complementarities that position it to deal with tough issues together?

The combination of a large, industrially developed, technologically advanced, entrepreneurial nation, a resource-rich middle power with a history of playing “honest broker,” and an emerging democracy with a strong demographic advantage, phenomenal biodiversity, a rapidly expanding middle class and membership in a variety of transnational networks makes a powerful regional triumvirate for tackling global challenges. Furthermore, the differing socio-economic and geopolitical perspectives that each of the three North American countries bring to bear on the world’s problems means the solutions they develop would be inclusive, fair and legitimate.

While we can do much together on a less lofty scale that taking on the major challenges to humanity, an aspirational vision helps develop and enhance habits of co-operation and collaboration. Our three countries’ innate complementarities – economic structure, geographic location, technological development, natural and labour resources – mean it simply makes sense for us to get in the habit of working together.

Just a few areas where we could develop habits of acting and being North American include agriculture, encompassing innovation and agribusiness; energy, including technology and services; and financial and health services, including mobile technology. Furthermore, bearing in mind that 50 per cent of the Mexican population is under 26, the potential for collaboration on a huge range of traditional and emerging creative industries is enormous. Each of these areas holds possibilities of the development of partnerships on a vast multitude of fronts.

Twenty years on, let’s be celebrating four decades of North American habits of thinking, doing, creating, solving and leading. Or better yet, let’s be taking it for granted.

This editorial originally appeared in the Globe and Mail

The post North America is Still the Future appeared first on Canadian International Council - Canada's hub for international affairs.

As Madelaine Drohan points out in the CIC’s recent report, The 9 Habits of Highly Effective Resource Economies: Lessons for Canada, resource-producing countries cannot rely only on exporting raw materials if they want to weather the blows of commodity market busts and the challenges of resource scarcity. Investment in industries that add value to the resource sector not only promotes more efficient production but also allows the resource-producing country to move up the global value chain.

While our report presents strategies for Canada to strengthen our resource sectors, this Chatham House publication takes a broader view, calling on 30 of the world’s significant resource producers, including Canada, to collaborate in identifying and addressing fault lines in the global resource economy. One fault line, of course, is the environmental impact of increased resource production and consumption. Many countries have put or plan to put a price on carbon; in 9 Habits, Madelaine Drohan argues that Canada should be one of them – our oil and gas sector will adapt. As Resource Futures points out, resource sectors will have to adapt to the more direct impacts of climate change – global temperature increases, rising sea levels, and extreme weather have major implications for mining and agriculture industries as we know them.

I met with the authors of the Chatham House report last week, and Madelaine Drohan spoke with them in the course of her research for the CIC’s 9 Habits report. As the CIC continues to encourage discussion and debate on Canada’s natural resource future, I urge Canadians to consider the thoughtful recommendations of the Chatham House report, and to explore their fabulous interactive feature.

The post Addressing the Fault Lines in the Global Resource Economy appeared first on Canadian International Council - Canada's hub for international affairs.

Hatzofe also cast doubt on the practicality of using vultures as secret agents: “I’m not an intelligence expert, but what would be learned from putting a camera onto a vulture? You cannot control it. It’s not a drone that you can send where you want. What would be the benefit of watching a vulture eat the insides of a dead camel?

Given Israel’s success in developing deploying drones for surveillance, it seems unlikely that the Mossad would now choose to send a live bird to monitor developments in West Sudan (or anywhere else for that matter). The vulture’s acute eyesight could be an advantage, certainly, but whether this would outweigh a tendency for target transfer – from suspected terrorist to tasty-looking dead camel – is unclear.

The post Ruffled Feathers in Sudan appeared first on Canadian International Council - Canada's hub for international affairs.

Canada should and could be an important partner for Mexico, bilaterally and as part of wider North American arrangements. With a GDP that is higher than South Korea’s, and an economy that is growing faster than Brazil’s, Mexico is an extremely valuable partner for Canada. Considering their similar status as middle powers living next-door to the world’s superpower, Canada and Mexico have much in common and much on which to build meaningful cooperation.

Unfortunately, the Canada-Mexico relationship remains underdeveloped. With the advent of NAFTA, tremendous advances have been made in strengthening economic ties, both bilateral trade and investment. However, much remains to be done in enhancing the two countries’ relationship with each other, and specifically their cooperation in dealing with the United States, working to convince their neighbour to strengthen the North American region.

Canada must now embrace Mexico, fighting “unhelpful stereotypes” and actively engaging in “Mexico’s moment”. The Canadian government’s intention to drop a prohibitive visa rule for Mexican visitors is a step in the right direction, though Prime Minister Harper has yet to provide the timeline behind his government’s wish for visa-free travel. Besides further strengthening bilateral trade and investment, many other areas for future cooperation exist, especially in food, health, energy, and policing.

Canadians will watch the new-and-reformed Institutional Revolutionary Party’s return to power with great interest, and we must be supportive of the reforms that the new government plans to implement. We appreciate Mr. Pena Nieto’s visit to Canada on the eve of his inauguration and “extend our hand in friendship and support” to Mexico and its new president.

The post Mexico’s New Face appeared first on Canadian International Council - Canada's hub for international affairs.

Women are not very well represented in central banking anyways. I think you’ll find that 6.3 percent of central bankers worldwide are women. […] I would say it’s definitely fair [to refer to central banking as a gentlemen’s club]. That’s probably true of finance generally, particularly the world of monetary policy. And particularly here in Britain.The City, which is the financial district here in London, is very traditionally male-dominated. I think that’s changing over time. But it will change when it has to, and this is an opportunity for it to choose to change.

The 2012 Central Bank Directory confirms Hare’s statistic, listing just twelve female central bank governors, a 50 percent rise over 2011. Carney’s new gig is especially male-dominated: 

The nine members of the monetary policy committee (MPC) are all men, as are the 11 members of the financial policy committee (FPC). Threadneedle Street [a metonym for the Bank of England] has three governors and 10 other executive directors, of whom only one…is a woman. Lady Rice is the only non-male among the dozen members of the Bank’s court of governors […] It is really not good enough that a body with such power, and which relies so heavily on public trust, should be so unrepresentative of the population it is serving.

An October 2012 Reuters article summarizes the challenges of ensuring balanced gender representation in central banks very well. Though no one doubts Carney’s qualifications, the British commentariat entertained at least three female candidates: Kate Barker and DeAnne Julius, both former external members of the BoE’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC), as well as MEP Sharon Bowles, chairman of the European Parliament’s economic and monetary affairs committee. Bowles, in particular, made an unapologetic case for her own candidacy:

I know more about financial services legislation than anybody else which fits well with the new expanded remit of the Bank of England. I’m not someone [who was] sitting on the monetary policy committee when the bubbles were growing in the boom years and doing nothing to pop them. […] The new Governor has to restore faith in the banking system. What bigger sign of change is there than choosing a woman and an outsider?

But in political terms, Bowles’ pro-European positioning and her role as a Liberal Democrat MEP would have nullified any real consideration from Tory Osborne. Another candidate Kate Barker released  a critical policy report in August, attacking the move of macro-prudential oversight away from the government toward the BoE’s Financial Policy Committee. But there is another issue at stake here, beyond assuaging consciences or appeasing critics. As Hare notes, central banks (specifically central bank committees) face a real risk of groupthink. The BoE recently came under fire for its opacity, lack of transparency and an organizational culture that obstructs independent thought. An internal review of the BoE’s liquidity operations noted:

The Bank is a centralised and hierarchical organisation with a large decision-making burden residing with the Governor and senior management.  Less senior staff undertake analysis of a wide range of policy options, and are often willing to challenge their superiors. But there appears to be some tendency for them to filter recommendations in such a way as to maximise the likelihood that senior staff will find the recommendation palatable.  While this makes it easier for the Governor…to reach conclusions it risks reducing the range of views he sees and…might lead to a less effective overall outcome. (Emphasis mine.)

In an era where the communication strategies of central banks are increasingly scrutinized, central bank transparency and internal dissent are not optional. While it is naive to think that the simple inclusion of more women will usher in more transparent and accountable central banks, it helps no one if central bank committees are composed only of old white men. As former MPC member DeAnne Julius observes: 

The evidence is, if you are going to have committee decisions there will be better decisions if they are made by a committee that has a broad range of perspectives and not a committee of clones.

The BoE sweepstakes are now over, but two things remain clear. Central banks would benefit from a more balanced gender composition. Oh, and Canada needs a new central bank governor (governess?).

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Drones have a unique capacity for information gathering that could be essential to the exploration – or exploitation – of space. The potential for more nefarious uses is certainly there, and that is what concerns other nations. The launch of the first drone into space in 2010 by the U.S. prompted talk of an arms race in space. China called the U.S. a hypocrite, saying that “As a superpower, the U.S. has been calling for nuclear disarmament all these years and urged other countries to be more responsible for world peace and safety … But in the meantime, its development of the space plane may lead to an arms race in space.” Russia is also keeping a wary eye on America’s tests and is promising to develop their own unmanned space plane.

Not much is known about the development of drones for space, but the recently returned X-37B is about 29 feet long, with “stubby wings that stretch out about 15 feet tip to tip. It is one-fifth the size of the space shuttle and can draw on the sun for electricity using unfolding solar panels.” This particular plane was designed to be in orbit for 270 days, but remained in space for 469 days, demonstrating definite potential for extended missions. The price tag on the development of the plane is high and details regarding its time in space have not been released, but the program has proved that drones can operate in space successfully.

Drone technology is emerging everywhere. Unmanned systems are being used in homes, to provide traffic reports and facilitate emergency services. They may eventually be used by NGOs to deliver aid. We know that drones may revolutionize warfare and the way we live our lives on earth, but they may also be the key to pushing the boundaries of our knowledge of the final frontier.

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That this latest game changer was developed in the U.S. drives homes the importance of creating a hospitable environment for technological innovation. The U.S. is the global leader on this front (if by a smaller margin post-2008). A critical reason for this, of course, is the amount that country spends on defense. Government backed research by military scientists and engineers has proven definitive in past decades. While game-changing, ‘disruptive’ innovations may have low startup costs, they eventually need serious support in order to move mainstream.

Over in Europe, the U.K. has reportedly spent more than £2 billion developing their own drone fleet (many of which were bought from the U.S.), and are poised to spend another £2 billion on the program. And group of six European countries has only just succeeded in developing an attack-sized stealth drone. The nEURON was launched from a French air base on Saturday, but is still only for demonstration purposes.

Given the enormous costs of breaking new ground with these kinds of systems in-house, Canada will need to enter the drone age via research partnerships or settle for buying American (likely dated) technology. 

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Today, urban drones are operated by either law enforcement agencies or local emergency services, and are primarily used for reconnaissance and information gathering. They allow for live, on-the-ground data collection that can be transmitted quickly. This quick communication is essential to react to unfolding events such as fires, protests, large-scale celebrations, and natural disasters.

Based on the technology and equipment used, these urban drones can be deployed in many different situations and by a variety of agencies. Fire departments can use them to assess the situation before crews arrive on the scene: urban drones can enter into buildings before crews to evaluate the stability of the building and help determine if there are people trapped inside. Police forces can conduct close or long-range surveillance, track fleeing suspects, and provide support to officers when entering a building.

Drones typically deployed in urban environments are much smaller than those conducting aerial strikes in the tribal regions of Pakistan. Larger scale UAVs, known as airships, have not yet been used over cities, but the idea has been floated (no pun intended). These airships could be used to provide traffic updates, surveillance of large gatherings or sporting events such as the Olympics, as well as logistical guidance to emergency services in the event of natural disasters or terrorist attacks. However, the use of theses airships and UAVs in general raise serious questions regarding privacy and the gathering of information. Just as UAVs used for air strikes in conflict zones have become increasingly controversial, UAVs used in urban environments for surveillance may become just as contentious.

The post Drone Urbanization appeared first on Canadian International Council - Canada's hub for international affairs.

But significant innovation is also taking place far below sea level. The U.S. Navy is developing unmanned underwater vehicles (AUVs), as are university researchers and private companies around the world (including Canadian-based ones), not to mention DIY hobbyists. Some observers have speculated that unmanned naval systems will revolutionize naval operations.

According to the Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Applications Center:

Part of the current effort is the Mk 18 family of unmanned underwater vehicles with side-scan sonar technology and a camera. Mod 1, the Swordfish, is about 80 pounds and 7 inches in diameter. The smaller variant is designed to navigate the surf and beach zones — less than 40 feet of water — which includes the most turbidity of all the water column zones, complicating the UUV’s efforts to determine depth…

The Swordfish has now been joined by the Kingfish, a robot that can gather information underwater for 24 hours. The U.S. Navy used to train dolphins for underwater mine-hunting, but now the mammals are being nosed out by the Kingfish – although dolphins still retain advantages over robots for jobs on the ocean-floor.

Drones are a more humane and cost-effective alternative to dolphins or mine-sweeping ships. When Iran threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz last year if their nuclear weapons program was targeted, the U.S. deployed four mine-sweeping ships. A new Kingfish drone may be introduced to the region next year, which would allow fewer of these ships to be deployed.

The Khaleej Times reported that:

…the Kingfish Mark 18 Model 2 is an upgrade of the first model [the Model 1 Swordfish UUV] and was tested during the recent mine countermeasures drills in the region and came up trumps. It is about 12-feet and resembles a torpedo. Guided by GPS, it also has a WiFi connection and can operate in the shallow waters of the Gulf and search a wide area and map them. There are three Kingfish vehicles in each system. The system can be operated from a rigid-hull inflatable boat, giving naval forces more mobility and speed to locate and detonate mines. . . Another new deployment is the SeaFox mine disposal system. While Kingfish helps to detect mines, the SeaFox drone is sent out to put them out of action. They are being used on ships and MH-53E Sea Dragon helicopters in the Gulf.

 You can find a photo of a Kingfish here, and more information on SeaFox and related technologies here.

For those excited by what one sea drone can do, from disarming a mine to detonating a potentially lethal bomb, imagine if you could deploy not just a single KingFish but a whole swarm. Researchers in Germany have moved from the realm of imagination to experimentation, building AUVs that swim together as would a school of fish:

The most important capability a swarm brings AUVs is redundancy. Rather than relying on a singular, expensive platform, MONSUN [a 4 kilogram AUV designed for underwater environmental surveying] uses a handful low-cost, homogenous robots that can alter their role within the swarm.  While a portion of the AUVs conduct tasks underwater, the others act as communication relays.  If one of these vehicles has a mechanical failure or is lost, the swarm continues to operate.

 And so innovation below the surface appears to be taking place at a similarly rapid pace as that above ground, with new models and prototypes continuing to be tested. One impetus may be the argument that as defence budgets shrink, shifting intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) capacities from land-based to sea-based platforms may help cut costs, as the latter would be less vulnerable to attack. Whether the costs of maintaining these platforms will prove prohibitive is unclear, as is whether fueling AUVs will prove an insurmountable obstacle to lengthier missions.

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But Mark Carney has a brilliant record of delivering results – a record unlikely to fade in his new job. He combines private sector savvy with public-minded commitment to the common good of international financial stability. In doing so, he is furthering Canada’s brand as a safe haven for investment thanks to sound financial management. Under Carney’s watch, Canada has come to be associated with economic stability – a valuable designation in a time of economic turmoil. No doubt his work at the Bank of England (and his continuing chairmanship of the Basel-based Financial Stability Board) will only strengthen this brand abroad.

In the U.K., there was unprecedented near-complete agreement in the House of Commons that Mark Carney’s appointment was a great decision. Covering the announcement there live, the Guardian reported that:

Labour Barry Sheerman comes closest to denting the sense of jubilation in the House of Commons, saying it’s a shame that we couldn’t find a British candidate.[Chancellor of the Exchequer George] Osborne replies that it’s a sign of Britain’s confidence that we can go and get the best person for the job, across the globe. Makes Carney sound like a monetary Sven-Göran Eriksson.

Somewhat characteristically, British commentators drew upon a football analogy. Sven-Göran Eriksson is, by all accounts, a brilliant football manager. He is also Swedish, and was the first foreign coach of the British national football team. His stint as England manager was not without controversy and, after losing a 2006 World Cup qualifying match, Eriksson faced unprecedented pressure to quit. 

The Guardian’s Larry Elliott suggested that if Mark Carney “fails to deliver results he will find that the unanimous approval with which his appointment was greeted on Monday will be rapidly followed by derision. Just ask Sven.”

Meanwhile at home, David Rosenberg compared Carney to Wayne Gretzky – an analogy that speaks directly to Canadians. Carney has had a brilliant, Gretzky-esque record – Chancellor Osborne calls him the “best banker of his generation.” 

However, Canadians trust that Mark Carney will not leave England with a loss, as was the case with Sven-Göran Eriksson, nor will Canada suffer like the post-Gretzky Edmonton Oilers.

Working within our strong financial regulatory system, Carney steered our economy through the crisis, successfully providing liquidity to financial markets without overstimulating them. Inflation has remained low and the Canadian dollar strong. Carney continues to advise us on how to increase our underwhelming productivity performance and diversify our trade and investment. And no one can dispute our soon-to-be former governor’s “winning smile”.

We wish Mark Carney well in his new position, and are proud that he will continue to represent the best of Canada to the world.

The post Carney’s Exit appeared first on Canadian International Council - Canada's hub for international affairs.

Why isn’t the Western media covering drone attacks more consistently, especially ones that eliminate a terrorist target with zero unintended casualties, not to mention at low costs? Canadians and Americans alike are proud of their military; Canada leapt to the collective defence of General Leslie following scathing comments from Fox News, and while the CBC and Sun News may squabble over the definition of appropriate, they both support the men and women that serve and their families. Following the completed U.S. assassination of Osama Bin Laden, President Obama praised the work of the service men involved: “We give thanks for the men who carried out this operation, for they exemplify the professionalism, patriotism, and unparalleled courage of those who serve our country.” So, why not tout the successes of the forces when it comes to the use of drone technology?

A recent Guardian article stressed that it is because soldiers are not placed in harms way during a drone attack that the military becomes “sheepish” when it reports on drone use: drones, “piloted by remote control from thousands of miles away, … have been the one unqualified military triumph of the war in Afghanistan.” Perhaps it is the lack of accountability or the general secrecy of these missions that detracts the Western media from reporting on them. Or, as the report “Living Under Drones” suggests, drones may not be as effective as they are made out to be.

The report is critical of the drone campaign in Pakistan, arguing that drones are not the precise, accurate, and limited weapon they have been portrayed to be: “the civilian toll from drone strikes is far higher than acknowledged”;  “many problems with the drone campaign go unreported”; and “government transparency is essential to gaining a better understanding of the campaign and its consequences.”

But the media isn’t the only group not publishing news of drone attacks. In a previous post, we discussed the lack of information around drones and their use with reference to Josh Begley, a New York-based app developer, who “created an app that aggregates the Bureau’s data on drone strikes and sends users a push notification whenever there is a new report of a drone strike. Apple has rejected the Drone+ app three times, and continually blocked it from the App store on grounds that the content is ‘objectionable and crude’.”

Why is the use of drones shrouded in such secrecy? “DRONE WEEK: KILL, WATCH, AID”, hosted by OpenCanada in partnership with CDFAI from Dec. 10th to 14th 2012, will explore this question and many more. Remember to tune in.

The post The Dearth of Drone Coverage appeared first on Canadian International Council - Canada's hub for international affairs.

 China’s progress, as well as a spate of drone-related incidents involving Iran, Israel, Hezbollah has led some to declare that a drones arms race is underway. Buy beating the drums for a drone war among the superpowers, whether China vs. the U.S., China vs. Russia, or some other Cold War game scenario, distracts from a more pressing concern: the potential for export of militarized drone technology by China or others with more lax export regulations than the U.S. to rogue actors – state and non-state – whose agendas may include retaliation against the U.S. for drone strikes in the Af-Pak region and Yemen.

 A drone arms race implies neck and neck competition in innovation and production, but the capabilities of Chinese models leave a lot to be desired when compared to American ones. As Wired Magazine writes, however, that’s unlikely to deter smaller states looking to buy unmanned systems on the cheap, “bargain shopping for flying death robots”.

 So, while a drones arms race among superpowers could be around the corner, the more immediate danger would seem to be drone spillover. The frame for the questions we’re tracking should be less Cold War inspired and more in line with the post-Cold War debate over how to deal with Iran acquiring nuclear weapons – should we enforce limits on the development of a now widely accessible technology? Can we effectively monitor who develops what and for what purpose, as well as what’s for sale and who’s buying?

 It’s what we don’t know – i.e. those states that don’t parade their drones at air shows for the world to see – that probably ought to worry defense analysts most. 

The post The Drone Wars: Episode Hype? appeared first on Canadian International Council - Canada's hub for international affairs.

An inevitable effect of state-led urbanization is that farmers are forced to vacate their land. Close to 300,000 peasants are removed from their villages every year to make room for the construction of airports, highways, and buildings. Since 1980, more than 60 million peasants, roughly the population of the United Kingdom, have been moved.

The displaced are not usually consulted before relocation. Governments frequently force them to leave by suspending the supply of utilities, such as electricity, to their homes. Increasingly, local governments are even hiring or colluding with gangsters to intimidate villagers who refuse to move. Tellingly, in some villages, these mobsters are known as the “second government.”

Ong’s article fills in some of the wider context behind a photo of a house in Wenling, Zhejiang province that made the rounds last week:

Reuters

The elderly couple who own that house refused to allow their house to be demolished, claiming that the compensation offered to them was not enough to cover what it would cost to rebuild elsewhere.

The post Land Reform Run Amok appeared first on Canadian International Council - Canada's hub for international affairs.

At present Canada has very limited ability to assert its sovereignty over a region fiercely contested by several countries. So far Denmark, Norway, Canada, Russia, and the U.S., all of which lay claim to parts of the Arctic, have taken a relatively diplomatic approach, though there has been some notable flexing of military muscles. Canada felt severely threatened in 2007 when Russia sent a submarine to plant its flag four kilometres beneath the ice at the North Pole. At the time, Prime Minister Stephen Harper responded by announcing that the Nanisivik mine on the northern tip of the Baffin Island would house a deepwater docking facility, adding to Canada’s military presence in the region. He added that Canada knew it had to “use or lose” the Arctic.

Drones present a possible solution to this problem.

U.S. defence contractor Northrop Grumman is in the process of developing the Polar Hawk. This unmanned aerial vehicle is robotically operated with human oversight, and is able to stay airborne for up to 35 hours, is not armed, and can fly above the high winds that can be problematic in the Arctic. The drone can be used to provide constant summer surveillance, provide coastal patrol in the Atlantic and Pacific, monitor forest fires and floods, and provide scientific and environmental sensing while operating out of a single base.

The post Keeping an Eye on the Arctic appeared first on Canadian International Council - Canada's hub for international affairs.

In the meantime, the U.S. Department of Defense is likely to continue updating existing manuals and issuing new policy directives in an effort to fill the void, such as the one released on Nov. 21, establishing DoD policy for the development and use of autonomous weapons systems with the intentions of “minimizing the probability and consequences of failures in autonomous and semi-autonomous weapon systems that could lead to unintended engagements.”

 For in depth discussion of the challenges of drafting and enforcing laws to govern the use of drones, check out contributions to “DRONE WEEK: KILL, WATCH, AID”, hosted by OpenCanada in partnership with CDFAI from Dec. 10th to 14th 2012. 

The post Countdown to Drone Week: Filling the Legal Void appeared first on Canadian International Council - Canada's hub for international affairs.

The CBC’s Greg Weston suggests that, in the past, the Harper government “took the slow road to China.” Now, Sino-Canadian economic relations are most definitely warming up. The Conference Board of Canada, an applied research organization focusing broadly on economic trends and public policy, recently published a study on Canadian export trends with our major trading partners and opportunities for expansion in the future. According to their study, whereas the value of Canadian exports to China was under $3 billion in 1990, it is now $15 billion and projected to increase to roughly $45 billion by 2025. China will thus take 6.8 per cent of Canadian exports, rather than the current 3 per cent – still a small percentage in overall terms.

More worrying, as Governor Carney has pointed out repeatedly, is the apparent reluctance and slowness of Canadian companies to jump into deeper trade and commercial relationships with the higher-growth emerging economies. Canadians are – unsurprisingly  given their historic dependence on commercial and economic relations with the U.S. – still more comfortable with the lower-growth countries. Propelling relations with the higher-growth, less traditional, more exotic countries is often riskier and at least unfamiliar. But the Harper foreign policy document demonstrates this government is keen to push forward.

Meanwhile, the Conference Board predicts that the American share of Canadian exports will drop from 75 per cent today to 68 per cent in 2025. Despite the Harper government’s current pivot toward China, the U.S. will remain Canada’s largest market. Nonetheless, the Conference Board’s Kip Beckman notes that “[a]n important shift is underway.” While Canadian trade with the U.S. has remained stagnant in real terms for the past decade, trade with the fast-growing markets, especially China, Mexico, India, and Brazil, is increasing, albeit at slower-than-desirable rates. Hopefully the Harper government’s foreign policy plan will propel public policy frameworks in this country to adjust in ways that facilitate deepening trade relations with high-growth emerging countries.

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Second, Robert Satloff, executive directior of the Washington Institute for Near East, had the following advice for President Obama:

I would caution the president from believing that President Morsi has in any way distanced himself from his ideological roots. But if the president takes away the lesson that we can affect Egypt’s behavior through the artful use of leverage, that’s a good lesson. You can shape his behavior. You can’t change his ideology.

Is it Morsi’s ideology that we should be concerned about? Or that of analysts of post-Mubarak Egypt, whose own ideological preconceptions of the Muslim Brotherhood and its relationship with Hamas lead to dim views on the prospects for cooperative U.S.-Egyptian relations?

Also, while there are identifiable tenets of Brotherhood ideology, how Morsi interprets and applies them will be a function of a host of factors, so a static take seems unlikely. One factor will be American projections of the relative importance of ideology to Egypt’s foreign policy. Given this, de-emphasizing Morsi’s ideology is of as little point as exaggerating its significance. The U.S. should seek to project a more realistic understanding of the role of ideology in foreign policy – that it informs the policies of all states to some degree, is multi-faceted, and that at certain times, some aspects will be more pronounced than others. It is not because reason trumped ideology that these two states were able to work together to broker a ceasefire, but rather a reflection of the fact that ideologically informed policies need not preclude cooperation.

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The United Nations Secretary General has released a statement condemning the resumption of hostilities, and U.K. Foreign Secretary William Hague has also expressed “deep concern” at the worsening violence.

The International Crisis Group released a report in October on the destabilization of the always-fragile situation in the DRC. That report is getting renewed attention now, as the costs of having failing to manage the crisis are now undeniable.

The violence threatens to spread across the borders of the DRC. Rwanda has accused U.N. backed Congolese forces of shelling a town on the Rwanda-DRC border, although a recent statement from the Rwandan foreign minister may help to defuse tensions:

“Rwanda does not intend to respond to provocation coming from the DRC…Issues in (eastern Democratic Republic of Congo) are too serious to be subjected to game playing.”

All of this will raise the usual questions about why the UN, the African Union, and the DRC, individually and collectively, have proven unable to avert the major humanitarian crises that grip this region with devastating regularity.

We hope that this latest round of violence provokes a renewed commitment to the search for answers.

Photo courtesy of Reuters

The post Goma Under Fire appeared first on Canadian International Council - Canada's hub for international affairs.

But that doesn’t mean that those politicians can completely curtail the conversation. Drone attacks are now being scrutinized by people around the globe using an array of tools.  Individuals on the ground, as well as organized groups and institutions are combining popular media platforms with satellite imagery in a number of innovative ways. Here are few that we’re tracking:

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism maintains a database of drone attacks,  compiles data from media reports, and charts drone attacks onto an  interactive map. You can also check out their interactive timeline of all reported CIA drone strikes.

In May, 2012 twitter users mapped a drone strike in Yemen. Drone strikes are supposed to be covert, but civilians in Yemen were able to use social media to draw public attention to this attack. Individuals continue to assist in the recording and mapping of these strikes, proving that even in a country where web use is as low as two per cent, the ability to share information online can make a big difference. 

Some individuals are seeking to test the boundaries of this kind of assistance: Josh Begley, New York-based app developer, created an app that aggregates the Bureau’s data on drone strikes and sends users a push notification whenever there is a new report of a drone strike. Apple has rejected the Drone+ app three times, and continually blocked it from the App store on grounds that the content is ‘objectionable and crude’.

This has sparked debate on the ethics of delivering information straight to users’ on a so-called covert  program. The app in question does not display macabre images of corpses or casualties of drone strikes, but the rationale for Apple’s objections (at least at first) was the supposed questionable  functionality of the app. Upon a second submission, questions over the content were raised. Begley states that he was simply trying to advance the discourse on drones and thought “reaching into the pockets of U.S. smartphone users and annoying them into drone-consciousness could be an interesting way to surface the conversation a bit more.”

James Bridle is a U.K.-based writer who is also helping to mainstream the drone discourse, intentionally or not. Bridle became curious as to what drone strikes actually look like. So he looked them up on Google Maps and republished the locations (published by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism )through his Instagram account, Dronestagram. You can find his Tumblr blog here.

The public’s interest and capability in tracking drone strikes is likely only to increase as the Obama administration continues to avoid a more frank debate of the drone program, in particular, how it is being implemented in Pakistan. 

So we’ll keep watching the drone-watchers and their near-daily innovations, but we’re also going to be tracking this over the longer term, because there are no quick solutions to dilemmas relating to if, when, and how to publicly share information about a covert program. 

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Some see the Canada-U.S. relationship as having grown increasingly strained, a result of the Obama Administration’s decision to block the building of the Keystone XL Pipeline and its failure to fight the “Buy America provision” in the American stimulus bill. President Obama’s still-forming second term agenda is the uncertain backdrop for a business summit, NAFTA20, now being held in San Antonio, Texas. The summit will assess the evolution of NAFTA and evaluate its prospects, and is an opportunity to consider why NAFTA has led to Canada and the U.S. being economically joined at the hip. For despite the fact there may be irritants in relations with our neighbours to the South, as Roland Paris wrote this summer, the “state of the Canada-U.S. relationship is sound.” 

A better understanding of NAFTA and of the parties’ socio-economic systems is needed if we are to more effectively institutionalize North American cooperation. NAFTA20 is a chance to examine the mechanisms underpinning the free trade agreement, and a reminder of a great effect of NAFTA – the forging of links among likeminded North American communities.

One very special keynote speaker at NAFTA20 will be Dr. Robert Pastor, a champion of the North American idea. A former National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter, Dr. Pastor will speak on the relationship between the NAFTA region and the world economy. He advocates for North American integration – through NAFTA and beyond – by encouraging the “three sovereign nations of North America to modernize their relationships”, in order to improve the lives of all North Americans. I look forward to introducing him, and to sharing Bob Pastor’s vision with the conferees – a vision that has inspired various strains of North Americanism, and one that stands the test of time.

The post NAFTA at 20 appeared first on Canadian International Council - Canada's hub for international affairs.

The Subcommittee also pointed fingers at the credit rating agencies (S&P and Moody’s) and the regulators (the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission) involved. With the regulators, the Subcommittee alleges their “failure to coordinate regulatory oversight of [MF Global] meant that the agencies missed several opportunities to share critical information.” But, acknowledging that the evolution of financial markets has blurred the SEC’s and CFTC’s jurisdictional boundaries, the Subcommittee made the following recommendation:

As financial products, markets, and market participants have converged, the SEC’s and the CFTC’s regulatory jurisdictions have increasingly overlapped.  In response to this convergence, the regulators have pledged to work together in various areas. […] None of these efforts, however, resulted in meaningful cooperation between the SEC and the CFTC regarding MF Global. The apparent inability of these agencies to coordinate their regulatory oversight efforts or to share vital information with one another, coupled with the reality that futures products, markets and market participants have converged, compel the Subcommittee to recommend that Congress explore whether customers and investors would be better served if the SEC and the CFTC…merge into a single financial regulatory agency. (Emphasis mine)

Just last month, even SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro made a similar observation:

My view is there is an enormous amount of logic to combining the two agencies, and I think as well as we work together, having to divide the over the counter derivatives market” regulations “is an example of why combining the two agencies would make sense.”

While the circumstances are quite different, the idea of merging financial regulators brings to mind Finance Minister Flaherty’s attempt to establish a national securities regulator with his proposed Canadian Securities Act. However, Canadian securities regulation lies within the constitutional jurisdiction of the thirteen provinces and territories. Reacting to Minister Flaherty’s proposal, Alberta, Quebec, Manitoba, and New Brunswick expressed concern over federal infringement on provincial jurisdiction. Minister Flaherty sought the advice of the Supreme Court of Canada to clarify the proposed Act’s constitutionality, and by December 2011, the court agreed with the four provinces in question. The Supreme Court declared that the economic importance of securities regulation does not justify federal intrusion. The court did concede that a cooperative and coordinated federal-provincial approach might be constitutionally possible. Minister Flaherty’s office noted it would respect and review the decision. 

It will be interesting to track the challenges and opportunities facing US securities regulation. By yesterday afternoon, the proposed regulatory overhaul was already causing political controversy; the SEC is governed by the House Financial Services and Senate Banking committees, while the House and Senate Agriculture committees are reponsible for the CFTC. But, irrespective of the future of Canadian securities regulation, the technical complexity of financial products will continue to accelerate, forcing regulators to react and provide adequate and responsible oversight of financial markets.

Nota bene: For those unfamiliar with the circumstances surrounding MF Global’s collapse, check out Frontline PBS’ documentary from May this year. Here is Chapter 1:

Watch Six Billion Dollar Bet on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.

The post Regulating Finance: Mergers and Constitutions appeared first on Canadian International Council - Canada's hub for international affairs.

Twitter is being used by the warring parties to send messages to their supporters and opponents, and those groups are responding and using those messages to fight their own battles. Individual attacks and counterattacks in turn are influencing state-run feeds.

Storyfied versions of the IDF’s social media offensive and responses from Hamas have already appeared, and Al Jazeera is hosting a live discussion on Battleground Twitter 19:30 GMT. 

Even a quick scan of what’s trending is revealing of a couple of things:

1) The extremists are out in full force on both sides.

Terrorist groups in Gaza fire rockets from residential areas. Would you raise your child in such a neighborhood? ow.ly/fk8cE #Hamas

— IDF (@IDFSpokesperson) November 15, 2012

https://twitter.com/AlqassamBrigade

2)  The polarizing aspects of Twitter are working against live-tweeting conflict as a medium for facilitating dialogue

3) There are a lot of people out there taking this opportunity to tweet a dangerously fine line between clever and insensitive.

https://twitter.com/search?q=%23HamasBumperStickers&src=tren

I predict a steep learning curve for all those live-tweeting as the bombs fall and rockets fly. 

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The Arctic has long been a part of the Canadian psyche, but few of us know anything about it. UBC’s Michael Byers and the University of Calgary’s Rob Huebert are notable exceptions. As an Arctic littoral state, Canada will always be a key player in any serious conversation about the Arctic.

Next May, our Arctic credentials will be put to the test, as Canada assumes the two-year rotating chairmanship of the Arctic Council. (NB: The State Department has reproduced an excellent article on the establishment of the Arctic Council.) In the most recent issue of International Journal, the scholarly publication of the Canadian International Council, Carleton University’s Andrea Charron discusses the agenda-setting opportunity that Canada will have as chair:

Canada has an opportunity to tackle issues of particular concern to it. And given that Canada sought to broaden the issues addressed by the Arctic Council to include social, cultural, and other challenges beyond the strictly environmental, it is logical that Canada’s priorities would continue to reflect this predilection. Certainly, on paper, Canada’s second, third, and fourth priorities outlined in its Northern Strategy include promoting social and economic development, protecting its environmental heritage, and improving and devolving Northern governance, all of which are consistent with the goals and spirit of the Arctic Council.

While Canada’s chairmanship has been in the works for a while, it recently flared up in Ottawa. In August, Prime Minister Harper announced that Health Minister and Nunavut MP Leona Aglukkaq will serve as chair of the Arctic Council. But last week, Western Arctic MP Dennis Bevington lambasted Harper’s choice of Aglukkaq, arguing that Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird is the more appropriate choice. Nevertheless, Charron sees Minister Aglukkaq’s appointment as an opportunity:

Canada could make a significant contribution with respect to the latest area to arrive on the Council’s agenda—public health. This is especially the case given that Canada’s chair is Canada’s Minister of Health and the Minister of the Canadian Northern Economic Development Agency, Leona Aglukkaq.

Even if Canada’s wasn’t Arctic Council chair, 2013 would still be an important year for Canada and the Arctic. Under Article 76 of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, Canada has until December 2013 to submit data to determine the outer limits of Canada’s extended continental shelf. In October, Canadian media reported that Canada’s submission will be roughly the size of the three Prairie provinces (approximately 1.75 million square kilometres of seafloor):

Jacob Verhoef, the Halifax-based Natural Resources Canada geologist directing the historic effort to redraw the outer boundary of Canada, says the final proposal is proving “pretty close” in size to what federal scientists predicted nearly 20 years ago. “I can’t give you a number, simply because I don’t have a number – we have not calculated the number. But our preliminary outer limit as we are now defining it is pretty close to what we had expected.”

While it is unclear how the federal government will leverage its chairmanship, or how our UNCLOS submission will go, the Arctic will continue to play an important role in Canada’s political, economic, military, and environmental future.

The post Looking Up North in 2013 appeared first on Canadian International Council - Canada's hub for international affairs.

We pulled into the hotel driveway at around 9 p.m. on a Saturday night. This is a city supposed to be able to house a million people. But stepping out of the car the only sound was the pinging of the crosswalk countdown timer across the road.

It actually echoed.

The hotel looked like something out of Las Vegas, and the reception when we arrived was oddly enthusiastic. The staff almost seemed surprised to see people wander through the door. It was as if they’d been all dressed up waiting for a very long time for someone to show up, and didn’t quite know what to do now that they had.

The lobby bar lights were quickly turned on and the piano started playing. By itself. There was no pianist in sight, just a computer program with a playlist that must have been set to “generic hotel lobby.”

Ghost cities, it seems, even have ghost pianists

Chinese ghost cities are nothing new. While both Australia’s SBS Dateline and Qatar’s Al Jazeera have previously reported on China’s ghost cities, the story’s importance has not diminished over time. While Ordos is China’s most famous ghost city, there are many others visible from satellite imagery, primarily scattered across China’s central provinces:

Bayan Nur, Inner Mongolia

View Larger Map

Erenhot, Inner Mongolia (China’s answer to Palm Springs)

View Larger Map

Xinyang, Henan

View Larger Map

There is some indication, however, that two of China’s famous ghost cities have begun to attract residents, albeit slowly. The ‘New Area’ of Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan Province was labeled China’s biggest ghost city in 2010, but there is at least one report of activity taking place:

There were people on the sidewalks, though not the numbers typical of an older, more dense section of a Chinese urban area  […] In short, the Zhengzhou New Area is alive and not a Ghost City. It may well be that it took longer than expected for the place to come alive. 

Changsha, the capital of Hunan province was also outed as a ghost city in 2011 by Business Insider, but was quickly contradicted by an on-the-ground report.  However, both Zhengzhou and Changsha are the capitals of major Chinese provinces (Henan and Hunan, respectively), so that their ‘ghost districts’ are reportedly being filled is no surprise, especially as China becomes increasingly urban. (On a side note, Canadian journalist Doug Saunders’ book Arrival City is an excellent read on the global shift from rural to urban environments. Highly recommended.) But why are there ghost cities in China in the first place? The most common explanation blames ill-advised, erratic and unsustainable government decisions to maintain high economic growth though relentless infrastructure investments. Blogger Brian Wang has also speculated that ghost cities are a convenient way for corrupt officials to hide their ill-gotten gains. While Wang’s hypothesis is only idle speculation, Evan Osnos has commented elsewhere on the difficulties of hiding cash in China:

When investigators caught him [the brother of former Minister of Railways Liu Zhijun], he was living among mountains of money so large and unruly that the bills had begun to molder. (Storing cash is one of the most vexing challenges confronting corrupt Chinese officials, because the largest bill in circulation is a hundred-yuan note, worth about fifteen dollars.) 

Notwithstanding the first world problems faced by China’s corruptariat, Yale professor (and former chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia) Stephen Roach takes a very different view of China’s ghost cities:

Reports of ghost cities, bridges to nowhere, and empty new airports are fueling concern among Western analysts that an unbalanced Chinese economy cannot rebound as it did in the second half of 2009. With fixed investment nearing the unprecedented threshold of 50% of GDP, they fear that another investment-led fiscal stimulus will only hasten the inevitable China-collapse scenario.

But the pessimists’ hype overlooks one of the most important drivers of China’s modernization: the greatest urbanization story the world has ever seen. In 2011, the urban share of the Chinese population surpassed 50% for the first time, reaching 51.3%, compared to less than 20% in 1980. Moreover, according to OECD projections, China’s already burgeoning urban population should expand by more than 300 million by 2030 – an increment almost equal to the current population of the United States. With rural-to-urban migration averaging 15 to 20 million people per year, today’s so-called ghost cities quickly become tomorrow’s thriving metropolitan areas.

Shanghai Pudong is the classic example of how an “empty” urban construction project in the late 1990’s quickly became a fully occupied urban center, with a population today of roughly 5.5 million. A McKinsey study estimates that by 2025 China will have more than 220 cities with populations in excess of one million, versus 125 in 2010, and that 23 mega-cities will have a population of at least five million.

China cannot afford to wait to build its new cities. Instead, investment and construction must be aligned with the future influx of urban dwellers. The “ghost city” critique misses this point entirely.

All of this is part of China’s grand plan.

While Roach correctly observes that China is quickly becoming a nation of urbanites – ironic given the Party’s historical agrarian pretensions (see: the Down To The Countryside Movement) – the ghost cities that are being populated (Pudong, Zhengzhou, and Changsha) are the ones adjacent to existing urban developments. Furthermore, it is puzzling for anyone to claim that a government that can encompass tens of thousands of corrupt officials can even purport to have, much less execute, any sort of ‘grand plan’. Nevertheless, there is little indication yet that the ghost cities that have sprung out of nowhere, such as Ordos, will soon become thriving metropolises. Worryingly, the consequences of China’s ghost cities might have farflung conseqences. If Chinese demand for commodities dips due to a construction slowdown or excess housing capacity, it could adversely impact other commodity-dependent economies. As Derek Thompson wrote last year: 

China’s housing problem is Latin America’s commodity mess is the world economy’s crisis. China gobbles up half of some of the world’s highest selling metals. A dip in demand hurts Australia (coal, iron ore, natural gas), South Africa and Brazil (industrial metals) and Chile (copper). […] A slowdown in demand would send ripples in all directions. Currencies in Australia, Brazil, Chile peso would decline. Ditto industrial production out of South Korea, Taiwan and Japan. […] China’s empty homes are worth watching.

In any case, neither ghost cities nor government corruption are going anywhere anytime soon in China. As the planning objectives of the new Xi Jinping-Li Keqiang administration become clear over the coming months, Ordos will continue to spook visiting journalists and worry wary China watchers.

The post China’s Ghost Cities appeared first on Canadian International Council - Canada's hub for international affairs.

Psy’s infamous horse-riding dance has gotten over 720 million views on YouTube since its release in mid-July, spawning an overwhelming number of parodies, including the widely-seen Mitt Romney-style and an unprecedented North Korean parody. This isn’t even the first Chinese spoof, with dissident Ai Weiwei recycling Grass Mud Horse style, a popular Hong Kong version that pokes fun at mainlanders, and a zany rendition from the Zhangjiajie Tourism Bureau. 

While we have no explanation for the correlation between Chinese viral videos and bulls, we’re still waiting for the meta-mashup-parody of the parodies. Gotye, eat your heart out.

Nonetheless, the Tibetan version may be the cleverest one yet, timed to coincide with the Chinese Communist Party’s 18th Party Congress taking place in Beijing over the past week. (You can find OpenCanada.org‘s coverage on the Congress here, here and here.) The target of the parody is Xi Jinping, the man expected to take over the leadership of the CCP on Thursday (and possibly the Central Military Commission), before assuming the Chinese presidency early next year. 

From the video’s description:

A takeoff of Korean star Psy’s uber-popular Gangnam Style, the video features China’s heir apparent as a dimwit — a big-headed oaf whose only response to Tibetans’ growing resistance is to arrest, beat and torture protestors. But Xi — like the four generations of undemocratic CCP heads before him — cannot stop Tibetans who are moving beyond fear and challenging the very foundations of Chinese rule in Tibet. Ultimately, the joke is on Xi Jinping, the soon to be leader of the unfree world and a remnant of authoritarian rulers of the past. Xi: Resolve the Tibet crisis now or Tibet will soon become your biggest headache.

While Chinese officials have exerted themselves to communicate how happy Chinese-ruled Tibet is, noting that Lhasa has been voted (by whom?) the happiest city in China four times in a five-year period, the self-immolations continue unabated:

The same day [November 9th], on the edge of Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, Communist Party delegates gathered to discuss the situation in Tibet. The afternoon meeting was part of the 18th Party Congress, a once-in-five-years communist leadership confab that began on Nov. 8, a day after the record five self-immolations took place. (A sixth fiery protest occurred on the Thursday the Party Congress first convened.) 

While Tibet is obviously not a new challenge for China’s leaders, it is clear that Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang have their work cut out for them. As the Congress closed earlier today in Beijing, journalist Tom Lasseter couldn’t help but notice that the fire brigade (the Anti-Immolation Squad?) was still standing guard in Tiananmen Square.

Noted on my way out of the 18th that the fire brigade was still at the ready on Tiananmen twitter.com/TomLasseter/st…

— Tom Lasseter (@TomLasseter) November 14, 2012

The post Xi Jinping Style appeared first on Canadian International Council - Canada's hub for international affairs.

In the lead up to DRONE WEEK, OpenCanada will be tracking international events and analysis related to UAVs in our dispatch blog. We welcome your suggestions – tweet @TheCIC #droneweek and tell us what you’re reading.

Week 1 Highlights:

Yemen’s President Abd-Rabbu Mansour al-Hadi has responded with enthusiasm to U.S. drone strikes and publicly accepted responsibility for many of them. He appears to view the risk of growing domestic opposition to a strike-friendly policy as an acceptable one because U.S. aerial drone attacks expand the capacity of Yemenese security forces to target extremists.

Whether or not drones attacks are similarly useful to the Pakistani security forces in countering terrorism is the subject of continuing debate (although not so much during the presidential election campaign, whether in relation to Pakistan or anywhere else, as the Washington Post and Bloomberg News both pointed out). According to Thomas Ricks in Foreign Policy, the current American drone program in Pakistan is a decent option, and the alternatives are less than promising.

Decidedly less enthusiastic on having American drones patrolling the skies is Iran’s Defense Minister, who recently confirmed that Iran defense forces fired shots at a U.S. predator drone that entered Iranian airspace last week. There’s little sign that the U.S. drone program (or the controversy surrounding it) is going to gear down over the next four years – almost immediately after Obama’s re-election was confirmed, a strike was reported in Yemen. The U.S. government has a new warfare trajectory defined by cover opts and drone strikes, says Jeremy Scahill. Whether or not the U.S. can ever return to a ‘peacetime presidency’ while on this trajectory is worth considering.

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This weekend’s CIGI conference, ‘5 Years After the Fall’, will focus on the future of a post-crisis economic system, where leadership is shifting from the advanced to the emerging economies, particularly from the U.S. to China. Chinese economic growth (but not in all sectors) is slowing faster than expected, however. The end of double-digit economic growth will have far-reaching effects on Chinese leadership and Chinese society, and could impact China’s capacity to fill global governance gaps created by the economic crisis. Carlton University’s Jeremy Paltiel, in a fascinating article for OpenCanada.org and the Asia Pacific Foundation, analyzes some of the challenges the economic slowdown presents to the ‘fifth generation’ of Chinese leaders. The CIC also recently hosted a conversation on the Communist Party’s leadership transition.

Beyond China, the CIGI conference will address the challenge of decreasing cooperation among states in the midst of the slowdown, and a corresponding decline in the capacity of any one state to lead. CIGI will be broadcasting sessions from the conference via webcast, which will feature some of the world’s leading experts on global finance in discussions on the legacy of the financial crisis.

The post The New Economic Order appeared first on Canadian International Council - Canada's hub for international affairs.

In her first speech in Canada since she assumed the role of IMF managing director in July 2011, Mme. Lagarde emphasized the importance of international collaboration in addressing economic weaknesses that, needless to say, have global ramifications. On that point and others, Mme. Lagarde praised Canada, commending Canada’s cooperative spirit, solid regulatory system, and reliable supervisors, particularly Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney, whom Mme. Lagarde called a “a fantastic governor of [the] central bank,” and thanked Canada for sharing him with the world for his work heading the Financial Stability Board.

Mme. Lagard’s speech contained more than praise and optimism. She reminded us that the theory of emerging economies’ resistance to the downward pull of faltering advanced economies has been disproven. The IMF continues to lower its global growth projections for 2012 and 2013. On the global financial system, Mme. Lagarde stated that “the basic structures that we found problematic before the crisis are still with us,” citing overly complex banking systems, highly concentrated assets, and institutions’ excessive reliance on wholesale funding. Counter-productive vested interests must be combated and national strategies must have global outlooks, reflecting the fact that the global economy is more deeply integrated than ever.

We are very grateful to Mme. Lagarde for taking valuable time to speak to our audience on the global economic and financial outlook and the road to financial sector reform. Once again, I encourage you to hear what Christine Lagarde has to say.

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There are potentially more interesting questions to consider while waiting for the floods to abate and the power to come back on. One is how natural disasters affect international relations (political and economic) in a networked world.  

Stock markets went quiet as the storm hit. While updates are constant, it’s difficult to predict how quickly normal trading will resume and or the total costs of productivity losses.

Another question is how disasters of this scale can impact state-to-state relations. When a state suffers from a severe earthquake or flood, for example, questions – often politicized – relating to the size and delivery of international aid surface. When and how countries choose to step up is worth analyzing, as the UN Institute for Sustainability and Peace is doing, particularly now that the fallout from disasters, whether natural or man-made, is rarely confined within state borders.

A storm, however massive, hitting the United States won’t present an opportunity to consider “disaster diplomacy” (fingers-crossed) but it is an opportunity, to wade through some of the deeper issues relating to environment and security.

The post Super Storm Watch appeared first on Canadian International Council - Canada's hub for international affairs.

Here are 13 links to coverage of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Thirteen links for the 13 days the world hovered at the edge of an existential – not just a fiscal – cliff.

• Special PBS programs on the crisis: Three Men Go to War and The Man Who Saved the World, an episode of Secrets of the Dead. (You can find the NYT’s commentary on these here.)
• The NYT archives from October and November 1962: the headline stories.
• The Belfer Center’s interactive timeline of the crisis.
• Fred Kaplan at Slate with 4 lessons that the CMC can teach us for dealing with today’s crises.
• Newly declassified documents published by the Wilson Center’s Cold War International History Project and James Hershberg at the Wilson Center on new historical sources.
• CMC expert Graham Allison on this episode’s historical significance.
• James G. Blight and Janet M. Lang on the lessons we can take from the past and Fen Hampson on what the crisis meant for Canada.
• Foreign Policy’s in depth coverage, plus since the start of the anniversary, following @missilecrisis62 provided a play-by-play of the crisis via real-time tweets from Foreign Policy and Michael Dobbs.

The post 13 Links For 13 Days appeared first on Canadian International Council - Canada's hub for international affairs.

We were awarded a gold medal for best online-only series of articles for The Future of Fighting: How the Canadian Military Must Adapt, our series in partnership with the Canadian Defence & Foreign Affairs Institute. OpenCanada.org also earned a silver for best overall online-only publication website. Our Roundtable blog was also a finalist in the best blog category, so a big congratulations to our dedicated bloggers!

The COPA awards recognize the best editorial and design work in digital publications in Canada. Winning publications are chosen by a panel of expert international and national industry professionals, representing prestigious publications such as The Atlantic, the CBC and the Montreal Gazette. This was the Fourth Annual COPA Awards ceremony; some past winners include the Globe and Mail, CBC, the Toronto Star, and Walrusmagazine.com. OpenCanada.org is very proud to stand alongside past and current COPA winners.

Huge congratulations to the CIC and everyone on the OpenCanada team. Next stop gold in best overall online-only site at COPA 2013!

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Please join us for the live stream of the 2012 Globalist of the Year address at 7:45 pm on October 25^th at OpenCanada.org. Governor Mark Carney will be making opening remarks, and Christine Lagarde, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, will deliver the keynote address. After Mme. Lagarde’s speech, Amanda Lang, CBC’s Senior Business Correspondent will conduct a Q&A with Mme. Lagarde . We will be liveblogging and tweeting from the event. We invite you to follow #cicglobalist and tweet your questions for Mme. Lagarde to @TheCIC.

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As the September 11 attack on the American consulate in Benghazi made clear, Libya remains very unstable. But has the worst of the political upheaval and violence now past?

There are those who argue that, despite the severity of the attack and the government’s inability to control the country’s militias, Libya is making good progress.

 Serious obstacles may still lie ahead.

Since the attack, Prime Minister Mustafa Abushagur was dismissed in a vote of non-confidence after serving less than a month. Libya’s National Assembly then elected Ali Zidan, a former diplomat and outspoken critic of Qaddafi, as the country’s new prime minister a week later. The Daily Beast examines Zidan’s immediate challenges, which include forming a government and continuing the investigation into the attack on the U.S. consulate.

A major security challenge that the Libyan government must address is the myriad of armed militias. You can find Time’s video on Libya’s transitional council’s attempt to rid the country of its weapon stockpiles here.

How Libya should deal with those tied to the old regime presents another serious challenge: the fate of Qaddafi’s son, and current detainee, Saif al-Islam, is still uncertain; arguments continue on whether he should be tried in Libya or in the Hague.

Whether Libyans are prepared to hold Qaddafi’s enemies accountable is also unclear. On October 17, Human Rights Watch released a 58-page report on the circumstances surrounding Qaddafi’s death. The report calls for Libyan civilian and military authorities to investigate any violations of international humanitarian law.

The world may be taking this anniversary as an opportunity to weigh in on Libya’s progress, but the global spotlight shines on this member of the Arab Spring only intermittently. Public interest waned as the American-led intervention ended, even as crises quickly emerged on a number of fronts. These issues were explored by the Cato Institute’s Project on Middle East Democracy’s event, “Libya One Year Later”. You can watch the event here.

So while some highlight progress and others fear for the future, a year after Qaddafi’s death, there is a growing consensus. It is nicely summed up by Horace Campbell, Professor of African American Studies and Political Science at Syracuse University: “A Year Later, The War in Libya is Far from Over.”

*For a crowdsourced analysis of the country since the overthrow of Qaddafi’s regime, check out Crowdvoice’s interactive timeline.

Photo courtesy of Reuters

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Chavez is bidding for another six-year term as president, leading the leftist Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (United Socialist Party of Venezuela). His primary challenger is Henrique Capriles Radonski, who is representing the centre-right Movimiento Primero Justicia (Justice First Movement) and was, until he stepped down to pursue the presidency, the  governor of the state of Miranda. (Check out Retuers’ fact box for Capriles’ platform).

CFR’s blog post outlines the high stakes for Chavez and the leftist socialist revolutionary movement he stands for: if Chavez goes down, there could be an opportunity for a very different kind of Venezuela and a shift in U.S.-Venezuelan relations. There could also be serious post-election instability, which could in turn provoke intervention by Venezuela’s neighbours. 

According to some, Chavistas stand a good chance of not being disappointed on Sunday (although the still uncertain state of Chavez’s health raises questions as to whether they can count on another full six years under his rule), while others point to polls that show Capriles pulling ahead.

The Chavez “fear factor” may drive even those who detest his rule to cast a ballot in his favour, for fear of losing government jobs or state allocated benefits. Some argue there is a chance for a “qualified” fair election, but election-related violence has already claimed three lives. Still, the Globe and Mail has argued that Chavez’s rhetoric about civil war – an attempt to scare the wealthy into voting for him – is indicative of his fear of the strength of the opposition.

Before Sunday, PBS Fronline’s 2008 documentary on Hugo Chavez is definitely worth watching:

(To view chapters 2 through 8, please visit the documentary’s website. You can also view the documentary in Spanish.)

After which, you can test how well you know Chavez with The Christian Science Monitor’s Chavez 101 quiz.

The post What to watch for when the polls open and close in Venezuela on Sunday appeared first on Canadian International Council - Canada's hub for international affairs.

The report was authored by Madelaine Drohan, an award-winning journalist and Canada’s correspondent to The Economist. The report will be available for download at www.opencanada.org at 8:00am ET on Tuesday, October 9.

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On the second goal of human security, Baird turned the delegation’s attention away from Canada – averting reminders to his audience at home of perceived disappointments in the Harper government’s foreign affairs history – choosing instead to point his finger at rogue states, Syria and Iran, and at unnamed member states of the UN “that are allowing the atrocities to continue.” Unsurprisingly, Baird also took the opportunity to defend Canada’s closure of its Iranian embassy last month on the grounds that Canada steadfastly refuses to engage with “a regime that…threatens to perpetuate crimes against humanity.”

On the goal of human dignity, Baird presented examples of the notorious political prison camps of North Korea; the forcible recruitment by rogue groups in the Democratic Republic of Congo; forced marriage of young girls; criminalization of sexuality; and the suppression of religious freedoms. He completely steered away from Canadian efforts in the past – which have had mixed results due to inconsistent commitment levels – in the advancement of democracy and human rights promotion in a region such as Latin America, where Prime Minister Harper made a commitment to advancing democracy early in his tenure in the form of the “Americas Strategy,” a strategy based on a “peace and prosperity partnership” (PPP) seldom mentioned in official discussions today.

Minister Baird struck his strongest note when he told the delegation, “The UN spends too much time on itself. It must now look outward. The preoccupation with procedure and process must yield to the tracking of substance and results.” This declaration recalled Canada’s acclaimed role in the early days of the United Nations, a time when Canada’s efforts to promote global stability through the UN yielded positive change and progress. However, Baird undercut his valuable distinction between process and progress – and its evocation of Canada’s traditional international role of “honest broker” – by using the distinction to excuse Canada from involvement in UN reform. “Canada’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations will henceforth devote primary attention to what the United Nations is achieving, not to how the UN arranges its affairs.”

The attitude that Canada is exceptional in its license to refuse involvement in the kind of work – organizational procedure and process – that Baird regards as inefficient, may ill-befit a middle power. What made Canada exceptional in the past was its ability to effectively leverage its middle power position to facilitate peaceful power transitions. Now, as Pax Britannica and Pax Americana draw to close, perhaps Canada – with its diverse population and membership in a wide variety of international networks – should be positioning itself as a mediator, power broker, or negotiator among the rising, current, and former powers. Instead, we seem to demand change on the world stage while cutting the diplomatic resources necessary to explain to those concerned how we can help bring about those changes.

Baird is right to judge the UN not on what it is but on what it does. And what it can do is entirely dependent on the will of its member states. In the same vein, perhaps Canadians should view the Harper government through the lens of measurable progress on international issues instead of dwelling on perceptions of what it stands for.

This op-ed originally appeared in Embassy

Photo courtesy of Reuters

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The “drawing a ‘red line’ for Iran” rhetoric isn’t new, or unique to Netanyahu, but on September 11th, he took it to a whole new level. On that day, Netanyahu blasted Washington’s decision to not set firm deadlines for when the U.S. would use force to stop Iran’s nuclear program. Said Netanyahu:

The world tells Israel to wait because there is still time. And I ask: Wait for what? Until when? Those in the international community who refuse to put red lines before Iran don’t have a moral right to place a red light before Israel. If Iran knows that there is no red line or deadline, what will it do? Exactly what it is doing today – continuing to work unhindered towards obtaining nuclear weapons capability and, from there, nuclear bombs.

The “red line” was also the focal point of Netanyahu’s address to the Annual Meeting of the United Nations General Assembly in New York this past week. The Israeli PM’s decision to draw out a diagram to illustrate his point provoked a firestorm of ridicule – mid speech, Netanyahu sketched out a cartoon bomb with a red line across it, to signal the point when Iran would have 90 per cent of the weapons grade material needed to swiftly manufacture a nuclear bomb. Talking about the “final stage” of Iran’s nuclear program generally provokes strong reactions, but Netanyahu’s amateur drawing is what has really got people talking. And laughing in some cases, particularly on Twitter.

But the hilarity factor is negligible at best to those who believe Iran’s nuclear program seriously undermines global security. Some fear that the diagram encourages making light of what is in reality an existential threat to Israel, and that using a cartoon bomb – even if it got the world’s attention – was a mistake.

How severe or imminent the threat of an Iranian nuclear attack on Israel actually is remains unclear. According to a CFR interview with David Albright:

Iran has made considerable progress at developing a fairly robust nuclear weapons capability, so that if it decided today to enrich uranium up to weapons-grade for making nuclear weapons, it could do so. There’s nothing standing in their way, technically, anymore, and they could produce quite a bit of weapons-grade material. But the key issue is that they haven’t made a decision to do that.

While Canada has made clear where it stands on Iran in relation to its human rights record and anti-Israeli sentiments, the Harper government has not publicly backed Netanyahu on his red line offensive. Perhaps the government’s strong backing of Israel generally, and its moves to condemn Iran specifically – the recent embassy closure being the obvious one – speak louder than any definitive statement in support of Netanyahu’s recent red line offensive would. Regardless, Canadian officials are being careful. Peter MacKay discussed the issue at a news conference in Washington, D.C. Friday morning:

There have been a number of red lines placed already, and Iran has edged closer and stepped over those red lines on a number of occasions now, particularly when it comes to cooperation around the subject of inspections … The achieving of nuclear capability is the red line, when and where that kicks in I guess is open to interpretation.

Obama’s team has clearly decided that keep open lines of communication – red or otherwise – with Netanyahu, is too risky right now. In the midst of election season and with tensions still running high throughout the Greater Middle East, Obama is distancing himself from contentious leaders, as indicated by the cold responses to requests for visits from both Netanyahu and Egyptian Prime Minister Mohamed Morsi. This is both strategic and pragmatic because Iran has shown little indication that it responds well – if at all – to ultimatums on its nuclear program.

As Martin Indyk, the former U.S. ambassador to Israel, notes, “The problem with the whole red line issue is that Israel has set so many red lines and the Iranians have crossed every one of them.”

We need to think more about where the “red line” arguments could lead us, and spend less time debating where the red lines are, or should be, if we want to avoid being drawn into the exact conflict Netanyahu is so keen to avoid.

Photo courtesy of Reuters

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– Best overall online-only publication website
– Best Blog (for the Roundtable)
– Best online-only article or series of articles (for our series The Future of Fighting)

Congratulations to our Roundtable bloggers, Roland Paris, Jennifer Welsh, John Hancock, Stephen Saideman, Gregory Chin, and Andre Pratte, and to our editorial and production team!

The post Canadian Online Publishing Awards appeared first on Canadian International Council - Canada's hub for international affairs.

There are two overlapping topics of debate keeping Nexen and CNOOC on the radar.

The first is the takeover itself: what it means for the Canadian economy in the short and long term, what it means for the future of oil sands development and energy exports to Asia in particular, and the potential implications for our national security.

Most commentators have taken a rather negative view of things. As Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada President Yuen Pau Woo says, “critics on the left are in rare alignment with critics on the right in their uniform opposition to the deal.” Those on the left who typically favour government involvement in the economy are wary of a State-owned enterprise (SOE) buying a private asset, while those on the right who typically think the government should keep its hands to itself now want it to knock CNOOC out of the ring.

The second conversation is about the approval process: whether it is too opaque – damagingly so in that it risks discouraging further investment in Canada by Chinese companies and others, as Steven Globerman argues in an article for the Financial Post – or whether there are valid reasons for keeping the details of the review process under wraps, and serious questions of national security to be considered.

Upping the stakes in these debates are the recent public statements of interest by Canadian and Chinese government officials in negotiating some kind of free trade agreement.

“We want to do more to see Canadian goods exported to China,” said Foreign Minister Baird in a recent interview with Global News. “There are obvious opportunities for us to collaborate and have more prosperity and more jobs that trade brings.”

More directly, Chinese Ambassador to Canada Ambassador Zhang Junsai told the Globe and Mail, “It’s high time to do the exploratory work on the possibility of a free-trade agreement. Under a free-trade agreement, there will be more and more trade and investment.”

Should Canadians urge the Harper government to let this deal proceed as smoothly as possible (at least from this point on), acknowledging an inevitable rise in the level of Chinese FDI in Canada? Nexen shareholders recently showed their supreme confidence in the deal, with 99 percent voting in favour, but many in the Canadian foreign policy and business communities appear reluctant to leave scrutinizing the deal up to Industry Minister Christian Paradis.

Ambassador Zhang’s media rounds are evidence that the Chinese government is not going to stand quietly on the sidelines either, although it’s difficult to predict what impact his statements will have on the majority of Canadians who dislike the deal. Luckily for CNOOC, the tenor of Canadian dislike is far more muted than was American sentiment in 2005 when the company made a bid for the American company Unocal only to withdraw in the face of an intensely hostile political environment. 

Still, CNOOC is being publicly criticized for its human right’s record and has become a general target for those who claim the business practices of Chinese SOEs will introduce corruption to the oil patch. These critiques are getting fresh coverage thanks to the publication of a letter from Amnesty International Canada to Minister Paradis calling out CNOOC for human rights violations. A recent CSIS report which claims that certain SOEs “with close ties to their home governments have pursued opaque agendas or received clandestine intelligence support for their pursuits here” is doing the same for corporate and political espionage.

Exactly how valid these concerns are remains open to debate. As Margart Cornish wrote in a recent report on the behaviour of Chinese SEOs abroad for the CIC:

Foreign corporations must all abide by Canadian laws and all Canadian jurisdictions have the wherewithal to enforce vigorously their health and safety, labour, and environmental protection laws … Should an SOE be found to operate in non-commercial ways that disadvantage Canadian market or a Canadian company, Canada has a robust range of policy and legal forms of recourse.

The conversations swirling around CNNOC and Chinese FDI in the energy sector show no signs of abating. Whether they support the deal or not, the majority of Canadians seem to think this relatively small takeover is too big a deal for a “hands-off” approach by the government, and too big a deal to stand back and allow ideological rhetoric to decide policy.

There is a serious potential consequence of all this talk. As we debate the implications of the Nexen deal, we are setting the parameters for a future debate: what kind of free trade agreement we want with our second largest trading partner.

Photo courtesy of Reuters

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It’s been an open question for years, but the recent decision of the Japanese government to nationalize the islands has brought the point to a head.

Anti-Japanese protests have been organized in more than 100 Chinese cities, Japanese businesses operating in China have closed or scaled back operations, Japanese websites have come under cyber attack, and the U.S. ambassador to China’s car was pelted with small objects.

Things sound very tense indeed. The question is, should we be worried? After all, this is not the first time the two countries have butted heads. Indeed, this isn’t even the first time they’ve butted heads over the Senkaku/ Diaoyu Islands. CIPS’s Scott Simon wrote about the long history of the issue earlier this year in a blog post titled “The Senkaku Islands: A Forgotten Flashpoint in the Western Pacific.”

But that, say many commentators, is exactly the problem. When relatively minor disputes keep boiling over, it points to deeper unresolved issues.

The Economist lays out the problem well. Yes, political transitions in both countries have exacerbated things this time around. Yes, this latest squabble will eventually die down. But long-term, the nationalism that fuels these disputes is only getting worse:

Growing nationalism in Asia, especially China, aggravates the threat … The islands matter, therefore, less because of fishing, oil or gas than as counters in the high-stakes game for Asia’s future. Every incident, however small, risks setting a precedent. Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines fear that if they make concessions, China will sense weakness and prepare the next demand. China fears that if it fails to press its case, America and others will conclude that they are free to scheme against it.

Professor Yinan He, writing for the Council on Foreign Relations, agrees that nationalism is the real problem:

When an ancient feud is inflamed by new fears, overreactions occur. Not only are the anti-Japanese demonstrations in China the largest and vandalism the worst since the two countries normalized relations in 1972, but Chinese surveillance ships also entered Japan’s claimed territorial waters near the islands, hiking the danger of a military clash… But given Japanese public sentiment and oppositional pressure, backpedalling is hardly conceivable for Tokyo. Beijing’s hands are equally tied, as it faces the dilemma of either appearing soft-kneed if it suppresses mass protests too harshly, or suffering damage to China’s social stability and international image should the chaos drag on.

Beijing must feel particular flummoxed by that dilemma, considering that it had a direct hand in organizing those mass protests. Says Mark MacKinnon:

While China’s Communist Party government whipped up the anti-Japanese fervour through state-run media, and has facilitated the protests to date, there’s a sense the authorities are now worried the rage they created could get out of hand.

The fact that the two countries are so economically intertwined at this point doesn’t seem change what they think of each other. As Wenran Jiang writes in The Globe and Mail, political and cultural tensions can be quite independent of where you do business:

Intensified interactions between the world’s second- and third-largest economies have not translated into closer ties in other areas. While more than 70 per cent of Japanese and Chinese viewed each other favourably in the late 1970s, when the two countries signed a friendship treaty, the honeymoon is long over today, with some 80 per cent in both countries registering unfavourable feelings toward each other.

Most commentators agree that cooler heads must and very likely will prevail in this latest dispute over Senkaku/ Diaoyu. But solving the problem of xenophobic nationalism that allows these incidents to so balloon so quickly won’t be so easy.

The post Should We Be Worried About China and Japan? appeared first on Canadian International Council - Canada's hub for international affairs.

On the decision to sever diplomatic ties with Iran, two groups emerged: on one hand were those who condemned the decision, questioning Baird’s reasoning, and warning against ideologically-driven policy. One the other were those who favoured Baird’s “tough” approach, arguing that Canada’s condemnation is right and necessary.

Baird’s speech was aimed at Quebecers in the first group. The foreign minister is clearly aware of the doubts expressed by the incoming minority PQ government. Pauline Marois has declared there is little congruency between Quebec’s policy goals and the federal government’s foreign policy. Baird’s speech carried a unambiguous message: the Harper government’s decision to close the embassy in Tehran was entirely consistent with its principled stand on human rights and individual freedoms.

Baird’s emphasis on rights and freedoms is in line with the steps Harper has taken to put his stamp on Canada’s foreign policy. The prime minister made his priorities clear from the beginning: increased military spending, public support for the Canadian defence community, a strong stance on Arctic sovereignty, firm backing of the democratic state of Israel, and pressure on the Chinese government to respect human rights and religious freedom. Following Harper’s lead, Minister Baird has made numerous visits to China and is leaving his own stamp by focusing on individual rights and freedoms such as forced marriage and the persecution of homosexuals abroad. Foreign ownership and investment in various natural resources has recently complicated the government’s efforts to pressure China to uphold human rights, and will likely provide the Quebec government with plenty of fodder for claims of hypocrisy.

Standing up for the values Canadians believe in, and that they believe others have the right to enjoy, is sound policy. Believing we can do so by preserving our unique middle-power strengths – a respected diplomatic presence around the globe, a moderate and fair voice in world debates, and a reputation for successfully negotiating multilateral partnerships with major powers – is not. In the global context, powers of different sizes of influence take on different roles. Small powers without the ability to form or change the system adjust to circumstances created by large powers. Medium-sized, or ‘middle power’ countries, use diplomacy and multilateral channels to help them achieve their goals. Only the most powerful countries have the ability to shape the system and bring about system-wide change.

The Harper government’s foreign policy strategy increasingly appears to be one of bold statements and lofty rhetoric, of claiming the moral high ground. But Canada is delivering judgment from a shaky platform of limited material power and diminishing soft power. The consequences of trading diplomacy for bellicosity may prove costly. Harper’s current path will likely have the reverse effect of what he desires, making Canada a lesser middle power rather than a major player.

Harper’s aspiration for Canada to move from middle power to system-altering power status – revealed by specific policies, such as the embassy closure, and more general agenda items, such as his and Minister Baird’s focus on human rights – carries a clear risk. Canada could find itself in a position where the only choice it has is to react to the actions of the more powerful. This will be because we overreached, even as we under-invest in resources we need to maintain our current status. The first step to overcoming our limitations should be to respect them and the complexity of navigating the contemporary global context as a middle power.

Photo courtesy of Reuters

The post Knowing Our Limits, Playing To Our Strengths appeared first on Canadian International Council - Canada's hub for international affairs.

• Twiplomatic spats are making headlines: a snarky exchange between those in charge of the American embassy in Cairo’s feed and those on Ikhwanweb, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Twitter feed, is still radiating, impressive given the giga-watt speed of the Twitter news cycle.

• A recent global study by PR firm Burson-Marsteller and number of international conferences are considering the subject.

• Hilary Clinton has gotten a lot of attention for her emphasis on social media, specifically Twitter, as a crucial tool for diplomats and foreign service officers. She has made a push for the State Department to become social-media savvy from the top down. What her successor does will determine whether U.S. foreign officers continue to set the trends in Twiplomacy, or whether other nations such as China, which has seen a surge in microblogging, will take the lead.

• A recent episode of CBC’s The Current considered both the potential and limitations of using this technology to ease the tensions that plague states seeking to navigate a shrinking world.

But policy direction from the top is not the only thing that will determine the extent of Twitter’s utility in the diplomatic arena. At every level, Twiplomats are beginning to realize just how tricky controlling this new medium can be. The growing numbers of feeds and tweets, both official and personal, inevitably increases the opportunities for awkward, potentially damaging interactions in the public sphere.

There clearly are limits – even risks – to tweeting on behalf of a government, embassy, or statesperson. No doubt the “oddly informal” tone of the U.S. Embassy to Egypt’s Twitter feed will soon become more formal, at least for the immediate future.

Currently, Canada lags behind this trend – John Baird’s most recent tweet was on September 10, and before that August 20^th. But if DFAIT decides that Canadian diplomats should ramp up their Twitter presence (or find themselves being pushed in the Twiplomacy era by their American counterparts) they will need a finely calibrated, consistent voice – one that balances personability with professionalism. This is not an easy task, particularly when tweets are much more likely to be written by staffers rather than the diplomats themselves, and when the medium depends on rapid-fire responses, demanding that oversight be light or non-existent.

The growing violence across the Muslim world presents the Twittersphere with yet another opportunity to show how this popular and public technology is impacting the traditionally elitist, closed-off world of traditional diplomacy. Over the next days and weeks, Twiplomacy will remain on trial.

Photo courtesy of Flickr

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The CIC launched OpenCanada.org last year to serve as a hub for conversation and debate and an aggregator of Canadian work on international issues. The features of the OpenCanada site allow for creative and substantive contributions and present unique possibilities for reader interaction: our Roundtable bloggers comment on topical international issues, our Think Tank section features work by thinkers and organizations both in Canada and around the world, and our Readings section highlights work by journalists and experts deserving of attention by Canadians.

We have also hosted in-depth series on key issues in foreign affairs today.

Our partnerships with The Globe and Mail, Maclean’s, the Canadian Center for Defense and Foreign Affairs Institute, and the Trudeau Centre delivered ‘The New Humanitarians’, ‘The New Missionaries’, ‘The Future of Fighting: How the Canadian Military Must Adapt’, and ‘Peace vs. Justice: The ICC and its Alternatives’. Our Ask Baird series brought the foreign minister to our audience to answer questions from readers across the country.

To expose our audiences to the most engaging voices in foreign affairs conversations, we held in-person interviews as well as online chats. From audio, to film, to online conversations, we provided expert analysis on topics ranging from drone warfare to sustainable mining practices.

At home and abroad, our audience has grown exponentially since we started. OpenCanada.org has become a valuable resource for students, journalists, and professionals with diverse backgrounds and interests. Most importantly, OpenCanada.org has taken the CIC’s mandate to promote interest and discussion of international affairs into the online realm, where anyone can participate, complementing the role of the CIC’s network of 16 volunteer-led branches across the country, who held over 150 events last year.

OpenCanada.org has links with foreign relations councils around the world. These organizations increasingly share ideas and insights online and through social media channels. Drawing on those international networks, we are able to deliver world-class content to readers within Canada and around the globe.

We invite you to be part of this network, to explore the content on our site, and join the discussions on our pages. We want to help you find opportunities through our OpenResources and OpenJobs pages, and to hear what issues you want to see covered by the OpenCanada team.

 OpenCanada.org is your hub for international issues. Open up your world with OpenCanada!

Photo courtesy of Reuters

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The official line from the Department of Foreign Affairs is that Iran represents “the most significant threat to global peace and security in the world today.” Tehran supports the Assad regime, refuses to abandon its nuclear program, regularly threatens Israel, tramples human rights, sponsors terrorism, and has no respect for the Vienna Convention that guarantees the protection of diplomatic personnel.

The critics, however, aren’t buying it.

As the Globe and Mail’s Doug Saunders points out, simply disliking another country’s policies is no reason to cut off diplomatic ties:

Closing an embassy is rarely done even in moments of hostility. By its very nature, it prevents the possibility of further relations with the country in question, good or bad, influential or ineffective. Messages of protest, off-record moves to quell an eruption, clandestine efforts to build relations with reformists within the regime – all of these options are no longer possible. Once you’ve pulled the plug, you’re out of the game.

John Mundy, Canada’s former ambassador to Iran, agrees. By closing our embassy in Tehran, Mundy writes in the Globe and Mail, we have taken ourselves “out of the game.” No communicating directly with the Iran government, no diplomatic staff on the ground to assess Iranian policy, and no way to directly protect Canadian citizens living or incarcerated there.

The only good reason Mundy can find for cutting diplomatic ties is to protect our diplomatic personnel. Which begs the question, how credible is that threat? Mundy suggests that in the event of an Israeli attack on Iran, being the only Israeli ally on the ground in Tehran would certainly not be a good position to be in. Although, as Jennifer Welsh points out in her post on OpenCanada, it’s curious that other states, particularly the Europeans, have not felt the same need to completely cut off relations with Iran.

Writing for the National Post, David Frum goes with the threat angle:

Canada has led the way to forcing the isolation of Iran – and a new round of sanctions may soon be coming, this time targeting the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. The risk is real that when the Iranian regime is pressed, it will lash out at anyone within its reach.

And it’s not just our diplomatic staff we have to be worried about. There’s also the threat presented by the Iran embassy in Canada. Frum lists a number of transgressions committed by the Iranian diplomatic service in other countries, including assassinations, bombings, and espionage.

For the CBC’s Brian Stewart, that threat is much more clear and present. He posits that the hasty diplomatic departure was spurred by new intelligence that Iran has been organizing guerrilla cells under diplomatic cover that would be used to attack the West should Iran itself be attacked. Says Stewart:

Just days before Canada hastily broke off relations, the head of the Iranian army’s joint chiefs of staff boasted to the Fars News Agency that if Iran was attacked, America and its allies should expect major terror attacks in their homeland. The deputy chief commander of the Revolutionary Guard echoed this, vowing “Any aggression against Iran will expand the war into the borders of the enemies. They know our power…”

Considering the recent attacks on the American consulate in Benghazi, talk is sure to continue regarding threats against diplomatic personnel in the Middle East and when they should be withdrawn for their safety.

 Photo courtesy of Reuters

The post Why Now On Iran? appeared first on Canadian International Council - Canada's hub for international affairs.

These “required” names will soon become familiar – they make the cut year after year. Even graduate students, well versed in IR’s foundational texts, can expect to see them on their seminar lists.

Professors who find affinity with one or more of IR’s still-expanding lists of schools of thought – Realism, Liberalism, Neoliberalism, Neo-realism, Constructivism, Critical Theory, Feminist Theory (and the list goes on!) – know reflexively who to put down on their lists as “required.” They could rhyme off the seminal works in IR in their sleep.

But their students may scan their lists and ask two questions: First, what about these books secured their authors reading-list tenure? Are the insights they provide truly timeless, or is it academic inertia that keeps them around? And second, given how little time students have when balancing a full course load, is it worth taking the time to read material that is not specifically assigned for a given week?

On the first question, it’s the former – and good thing, too. The IR cannon is the glue holding together a discipline that too often seems bent on tearing itself apart. The deepening of ontological and methodological divisions among scholars seems to be the inevitable fate of most bodies of knowledge. Scholars start spending more and more of their time defending their views on what constitute the most important objects of study for their field, and how to study them. IR has seen this to a greater degree than many other fields of study for two reasons.

On the one hand, IR has had to wrestle with the usual problem of interdisciplinary subjects: how to define its relationships to other disciplines, such as political science, international law, comparative government, peace and conflict studies, etc.

On the other hand, layered on top of the quest to define its identity relative to others are a series of intra-disciplinary debates. These are battles within IR over what IR is and what doing IR means. This includes the heated debate over quantitative versus qualitative approaches, or, really, statistically based analysis versus everything else.

The lengthy exchanges among scholars on these issues are typically of little interest to those outside the field. The public is generally more concerned with learning the answer to a particular question than in hearing the justification for why one approach was chosen over another.

And so are students – particularly new students, who usually start down the IR track because they think problem-solving on international issues is what IR is all about.

Perhaps this is part of why the “puzzle approach” has gained ground in recent years. This approach says that students should choose their analytical tools based on the nature of the puzzle they’re trying to solve instead of what a certain school of thought demands. On the whole, this is a promising shift. It suggests that IR scholars are seeking to bridge their divisions and engage in constructive dialogue. There is a risk, however, that a strict emphasis on finding a puzzle will lead to equally valid research questions that don’t lend themselves to this framework being set aside.

But back to those hefty “required readings” and whether busy students can, in good conscience, pass them by. The answer (frustratingly, if you’re a time-pressed first-year student) is no. These books provide critical guidance in a discipline whose borders and identity remain contested, and where, too often, one analytical approach reigns supreme.

So, when the theoretical going gets tough, students should turn to the intellectual (and often literal) heavyweights of IR – whether in hardcopy, e-book, or audiobook. Use them as a reminder that there is room in IR for making bold claims and taking the “wrong” approach – for thinking very big, very small, and everywhere in between – and that that is a large part of what makes it a great field to study and work in. Turn to those “general readings,” because there is nothing “general” about them – unique depth and breadth of perspective is what has raised them to the top of the list. And it’s often the case that in taking in the view from the top, we see a way forward through the complexity below. 

A random selection of my favourite “required readings,” moving along the theoretical spectrum from classical realism to constructivism…

Thucydides – The History of the Peloponnesian War

Hans J. Morgenthau – Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978

Kenneth Waltz – Theory of International Politics (Addison-Wesley Pub. Co.: 1979)

E.H. Carr – The Twenty Years’ Crisis

John Mearsheimer – The Tragedy of Great Power Politics

Immanuel Kant – Perpetual Peace

Thomas Schelling – Arms and Influence

Michael Doyle – Empires

Hedley Bull – The Anarchical Society

Alexander Wendt – Social Theory of International Politics

Friedrich Kratochwhil – Rules, Norms, and Decisions: On the Conditions of Practical and Legal Reasoning in International Relations and Domestic Affairs

Peter Katzenstein – The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics

Photo courtesy of Reuters

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But not so fast. Even a PQ minority could make serious trouble for the Harper government’s execution of foreign policy. While this might not trouble those who question the merit/coherency of Harper’s policy to begin with, it should. Canada needs to speak with a single voice on foreign policy issues – whether foreign development spending, the Arab-Israeli conflict, trade negotiations, or foreign direct investment.

Recent cuts to diplomatic spending, limited resources to expend on military and development assistance, and heavy-handed policy pronouncements that are more often than not only empty rhetoric, have left Canada with a diminished international stature. Given this, if Quebec were to undercut whatever policy line is adopted by the federal government at the bargaining table – on trade with the EU for example – Canada will find it very difficult to be taken seriously.

Consider the trouble the EU has had in convincing the world that it can formulate and implement a single foreign policy. Unable to speak with one voice, a coherent EU foreign policy exists only in the imaginations of Brussels’ bureaucrats. To paraphrase the line often attributed to Henry Kissinger, if you don’t know who to call when you want to call Europe, you may not bother calling at all.

The PQ made a more assertive stance on foreign policy part of its campaign platform. This should remind Canadians and their leaders how different the issues at play are when it comes to Quebec politics. Historical precedents (Gaullism, La Francophonie) and contemporary political realities (Quebecers’ opposition to Harper’s defence spending priorities) encourage separatist leaders in Quebec to use the question of foreign policy autonomy for leverage at the provincial and national levels.

So rather than rest easy, because it is unlikely that a PQ minority can wrest any real control over foreign policy from the federal government, the Harper government must guard against even the perception of diluted control. Fortunately or unfortunately, that appears to be something that the PMO’s office does rather well.

Photo courtesy of Reuters

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The episode was particularly timely in light of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s visit to Canada the following week. Both Carney and Merkel reminded Canadians that Europe’s crisis is very much our concern.

As Canada’s foremost international financial figure, Governor Carney stakes out his positions on financial issues both foreign and domestic in a thoughtful manner, and stands behind them – whether calling for a truly global financial system to underpin Europe’s recovery, defending Canada’s interest in saving Europe’s common currency, or refusing to blame the high Canadian dollar for our manufacturing sector’s woes. Many watch our Central Bank Governor closely as he directs a monetary policy that balances the relatively strong pace of Canada’s economic growth against the needs of many of the world’s economies for more stimulus.

Mark Carney’s international stature gives Canada prestige and possibly even leverage in international financial discussions.  A new brand seems to be emerging for our resource-endowed middle power country, a brand with a strong potential investment-inducing flavor. While keywords such as secure, stable, and solid may not be sexy, there will likely be little appetite for titillation in financial circles after the goings-on in international financial markets since 2008.

Rumours have floated across the Atlantic that Carney is being considered to fill the position of Mervyn King, outgoing Governor of the Bank of England. Canadians should be proud to hear that one of our best and brightest may be on this shortlist, but are no doubt also relieved by reports by the CBC and others that Carney is ruling out the Bank of England post.  Our Governor is proving to be an invaluable brand-builder in his international role as well as a responsible Central Bank Governor in his domestic one.

Photo courtesy of Reuters

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This year’s sudden change in Saudi Arabia’s gender restrictions on competitive sport means that these are the first Olympic Games in which all participating countries have sent female athletes. Furthermore, women’s boxing qualifies as an Olympic sport for the first time this summer, and hopeful champion Mary Spencer – a Canadian – could be the first North American aboriginal woman to win Olympic gold. Limitations on the rights of Saudi women and the prosperity of Canadian aboriginals aside, we triumph in the participation and success of these groups in the Olympics, this time as a global community imagined fuzzily by all. 

Another force shaping imagined communities is the ubiquitous use of social media. We have seen the power of social media to both enable and restrict the expression of athletes, viewers, and professionals. A Greek long-jumper and a Swiss soccer player have been expelled from the Games for publishing racist tweets. Two Australian swimmers were sent home promptly after competing after photos of them posing with guns surfaced online. In both instances, national committees stated the athletes acted in violation of Olympic ideals and values – the stuff of the Olympic imagined community.  Olympic athletes find themselves in diplomatic roles not to be taken lightly.

The sheer volume of social-media coverage at these Olympics has brought challenges to the Olympic committees. More than 9.66 million tweets mentioned the opening ceremonies alone. Eighty-seven per cent of Olympic attendees are said to connect via social media. To that effect, Olympic officials have attempted to regulate mobile usage to protect broadcasting rights of companies and the basic functioning of the Games. A British journalist’s Twitter account was frozen after he criticized NBC for not broadcasting the Games live in the United States, the implications of which are being debated online.

The Olympics are about more than just sport: They are unifying. As we are witnessing in London, international sport competition inspires change of many sorts, increases dialogue on important issues, and stimulates cooperation in the host city.

Toronto is hosting the Pan-American Games in 2015. A recent Globe and Mail editorial outlines why the people of Toronto should give more support to such an initiative. As we see from the example – and lessons – that London provides, it is certainly in Toronto’s best interests to do so. Like the Olympics, the Pan American Games will be about more than just sport.

Photo courtesy of Reuters

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Keeping track of the Games:

Whether you are looking to be eye-deep in Olympic action or just want to keep up on the headlines, there’s a source for you. For the biggest events, check out The Atlantic’s 10 Most Anticipated Days on the Olympic Games Schedule. And if you missed the fact that a blind archer smashed the previous world record, The Guardian is there for you with its ongoing list of record-breaking moments at wasanolympicrecordsettoday.com. For a little more voice with your Olympic coverage, New York Times writers are blogging here. And for those who want more Canada in their updates, follow the CTV Olympic Twitter feed at @CTVOlympics.

Athletes:

Beyond the chest-thumping nationalism and crass consumerism, the Olympics are really about the athletes. TIME Magazine has compiled a list of 50 athletes to watch at the London Games. A photo essay from Foreign Policy features “the Middle East’s aspiring women in sport.” And for Canadian athletes to look out for, see this Huffington Post article.

Economics:

Of course, the Olympics wouldn’t really be the Olympics without that crass consumerism. The Games are certainly big business. But is it smart business? The Atlantic‘s Andrew Zimbalist doesn’t think, at least not for the hosts. His article, 3 Reasons Why Hosting the Olympics Is a Loser’s Game, explains why. The Economist considers who the ultimate winners and losers are in this article. And then there’s the competition between the economists themselves to predict how many medals each nation will bring home, as explained by The Economist here.

Infographics:

The Financial Times compiled a list of “Olympic Visualizations.” To that list we would add the FT‘s own Olympics In Numbers graphic at the bottom of this page. And Visual Loop’s Pinterest board has an extensive collection of Olympic-themed infographics.

Criticism and Controversy:

The IOC has long been the target of criticism and that hasn’t stopped with the London Games. This article from the New York Times blasts the organization for its apathetic and elitist leadership. It’s also technologically stunted – this TIME article asks whether the IOC is restricting the free speech of athletes when it cracks down on un-Olympic posts on Facebook and Twitter. Doping, of course, has been an ongoing source of Olympic drama. Here, Wired explains the cat-and-mouse game between dopers and those trying to stop them.

Should you be bored of the Olympics as is:

And now for something completely different, Foreign Policy lists its picks for the strange sports it wishes were at the Games.

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We wish you well Anouk, and look forward to keeping in touch!

– The OpenCanada team

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1. Every Nation For Itself: Winners and Losers in a G-Zero World, by Ian Bremmer

and

2. No One’s World: The West, the Rising Rest, and the Coming Global Turn, by Charles A. Kupchan

It is time to broaden the debate over whether we are living in a unipolar world, and ask whether the current world will even be recognizable in 50, 30, or even 20 years. Pick up the Council on Foreign Relations’ Charles A. Kupchan’s No One’s World to learn how we can move smoothly toward a system characterized by multiple modernities, and read Eurasia Group President Ian Bremmer’s Every Nation For Itself to discover a modernity beyond the control of any power – a chaotic and potentially dangerous world that belongs to no one.

3. Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power, by Zbigniew Brzezinski

American decline has returned to the forefront of American foreign-policy discussions, and many esteemed voices in foreign-affairs circles have offered their prescriptions. From “strategic retrenchment” to “sustained forward engagement,” there are a lot of policy options on the table, and it can be tough work to separate the good from the excellent and the prescient. Former U.S. national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski’s Strategic Vision defines the latter category, with its insightful adaptation of traditional “balance of power” arguments to the 21st century. Brzezinski counters claims of inevitable American decline, and proposes that a strategy of “off-shore” balancing can renew and safeguard a liberal world order. His clear-eyed vision gives readers a standard for evaluating the most recent wave of books on American grand strategy.

4. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson

Figuring out why some states have dominated the global economy while others stagnate or collapse remains critical, as the likes of Jared Diamond and Paul Collier have shown us. Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson are the two latest intellectual heavyweights to wade into the murky waters of the “failed state” debate. They explain that it is the centralization of power and inclusivity of institutions that matter most to a nation’s development, shedding light on such puzzling cases as Botswana’s wealth and North Korea’s poverty.

5. The Arab Awakening: Islam and the New Middle East, by Tariq Ramadan

and

6. The Arab Uprising: The Unfinished Revolutions of the New Middle East, by Marc Lynch

Never one to shy away from controversy, Tariq challenges the Arab world to step forward and redefine its identity in the modern world. For those who find the “secular modernity versus Islamic traditionalism” framework unsatisfying, Ramadan’s book is a refreshing exploration of the alternative roles for Islam in contemporary Arab society. The Arab Awakening poses fascinating questions about the legacy of the Arab Spring, and the means by which Arab leadership can address the most pressing challenges facing the Middle East.

Marc Lynch’s The Arab Uprising poses a similarly tough challenge, but this one is directed at the West: to accept that the Arab Spring has transformed Middle Eastern politics for good, and to be wary of leaping to conclusions about what Islamist majority governments will mean for democracy in the Arab world. Tracing the recent upheaval back to the 1950s Free Officers revolution in Egypt, Lynch remains hopeful about the region’s overall trajectory. A provocative read, particularly in light of recent moves by Egypt’s Supreme Council of the Armed Forces.

7. China Airborne, by James Fallows

Much has been written about China’s economic transformation and the impact of its rise on the international agenda. On issues ranging from climate change to counterterrorism, China now exerts enormous influence, but it also faces enormous internal challenges. There are still few discussions of China’s economy that go beyond one-dimensional portrayals of an economic powerhouse or a hollowed-out edifice destined for stagnation and failure. In China Airborne, James Fallows rises above such superficial analyses by carefully tracking the development of the Chinese aviation industry. The view from Chinese airspace is of a country flying high in some industries, but struggling to even achieve lift-off in others. With Fallows as navigator, we get real insight into why.

8. George F. Kennan: An American Life, by John Lewis Gaddis

Although George F. Kennan didn’t quite make OpenCanada’s 2012 publication cut-off, we felt obliged to make an exception. The title and author of this book speak for themselves: the life of the father of Cold War containment doctrine, in the hands of one of the most eminent historians of the Cold War. Kennan granted Gaddis exclusive access to his personal documents, and the men developed a close relationship that continued right up until Kennan’s death. The result is a masterful exploration of a man whose ideas on power and politics, history and diplomacy, continue to influence U.S. foreign policy. Gaddis’ elegant prose does justice to a man whose telegrams and articles helped to launch policies that transformed the post-Second World War world in ways that, more often than not, caused Kennan enormous frustration and regret.

9. Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power, by Rachel Maddow

One could be forgiven for expecting a book by an MSNBC talk-show host to be an exercise in self-promotion. One could also be forgiven for expecting a book by Rachel Maddow to offer a less-than-balanced portrayal of a highly politicized issue. Political-talk-show hosts are hardly known for publishing deeply thoughtful, nuanced accounts, or for fairly presenting issues that sharply divide those on the left from those on the right. Drift does both. Maddow carefully analyzes what the pendulum-like shifts in power between Congress and the executive have meant for the exercise of American military power in the past and present, and makes a strong case that the decision to declare war has largely drifted into the hands of the president. Her book has been acclaimed by voices across the political spectrum – no small feat, given Maddow’s provocative television persona.

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Mr. Pena Nieto takes over from a president whose war on the cartels has been blamed for a staggering number of drug-related deaths – more than 55,000. Violence levels have risen as a result of Felipe Calderon’s kingpin strategy, which targeted cartel leaders, prompting spectacular displays of vicious intimidation by those vying to replace them. However, drug-related homicides have decreased by 19 per cent so far this year.

This is encouraging progress and given our strong investment and manufacturing ties to Mexico, Canada should expect a strong stand against drugs, crime and corruption to continue under the new administration of its NAFTA partner. Furthermore, Canada should offer help and support, particularly in the areas of policing and judicial reform.

Internationally, Mexico is a fellow middle power. Like Canada, it is a new member of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a G20 country, and former G20 host. It is an important hemispheric power unlikely to backtrack on the steps made toward democracy in recent years. Its growing middle class and youthful, increasingly educated, people are proud citizens of a democratic country that participates in many multilateral fora, and does so globally as well as regionally.

Mexicans today are far less tolerant of corruption than previously. The PRI has had to work hard to prove itself appropriately renewed to win the level of support that it gained during this campaign. Let’s not forget that it was under the PRI that a sufficiently open and democratic system was established to allow a rival, the National Action Party (PAN), to win the 2000 election. The PRI and its supporters must be well aware that the country has paid too high a price in lives lost to the drug war to slide back now to the bad old days of accommodation and deals with criminal organizations, which would be even more dangerous due to splintering and rivalry within the cartel factions. The Pew Global Attitudes Project survey released last month reveals that 80 per cent of Mexicans approve of Mr. Calderon’s use of the army in the drug war. Many of these same Mexicans have voted for Mr. Pena Nieto, believing he will stay the course in the war on drugs in their country.

More disconcerting are Mr. Pena Nieto’s rumoured ties to Televisa, the leading media outlet in Latin America. The history of the media’s relationship with politics in Mexico is complex, but at a basic level there have been allegations throughout this campaign that while Mr. Pena Nieto was accorded flattering coverage, other candidates were less kindly treated. A major demonstration against Televisa and in support of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) reminded Mexicans to be aware of the potential political power of media giants, a valuable lesson that the British – a long-established democracy in contrast – appear to be learning only today.

Mexicans have also elected 500 deputies, 128 senators, six state governors, and the head of government in the Federal District. Canadians are old hands with the mechanics and institutions of democratic governance. With our strong economic interests in Mexico, our common identities as resource-rich nations, North American countries, hemispheric neighbours, G20 countries, and new members of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, let’s extend our hand in friendship and support to the new president-elect of Mexico, and let’s do so as quickly as possible.

This op-ed originally appeared in the Globe and Mail

Photo courtesy of Reuters

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We have grown. One year after launching OpenCanada.org, we have published over 270 articles, 90 video interviews, curated 220 of the best international affairs content from around web, and gained more than 2,600 Twitter followers. We also launched the Weekly Dispatch newsletter to keep our readers and members up to date on OpenCanada.org content.

We have impact. Thanks to our amazing contributors, OpenCanada.org articles have been published by The Globe and Mail and Maclean’s, and our content has been featured on the websites of Foreign Policy Magazine and the Council on Foreign Relations, to name a few.

We engage in policy discussions. Earlier this month Minister John Baird answered tough questions from our readers about Canada’s foreign policy in a candid on-camera interview.  Our e-conference on the future of the Canadian military, launched in partnership with the Canadian Defence & Foreign Affairs Institute, was far-reaching.

We have adapted. Thanks to feedback from our contributors and readers, we have experimented with new formats for online content, online events and online engagement. We look to our readership to continue providing us with feedback as we experiment with online media.  

We continue to grow. We have a lot of plans in store for year two.  This year we will be launching a site redesign, working on longer essays and reported pieces, hiring more editorial staff, entering into new publication partnerships, and funding a wide range of research at the intersection of technology and international affairs through the Global Media Lab, a project beginning this summer.

As we mark our first birthday and plan to break new ground before our next, we hope that you will make a donation to support OpenCanada.org. We are non-profit and non-partisan, and our success this year is thanks to generous donations from our supporters and friends.

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“What we do know is that Mr. Mulcair criticizes our government for not participating with Canadian taxpayers’ money in bailing out European banks,” Finance Minister Jim Flaherty said last week. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Stephen Harper makes a point to “remind Canadians of two things constantly: that Canada is doing better, much better, and our mid-to long-term fundamentals are much sounder than virtually the rest of the developed world.” He is also quick to note that Canadian exposure to the economic problems in Europe is quite low. The implication seems to be that not only are Canadians insulated from eurozone issues, they are also free from any responsibility to help bolster the euro by virtue of Harper’s successful economic policies. 

Germany’s stance on many advisable policy changes and bailout measures also seems to be guided by domestic considerations, such as a fear of hyper-inflation dating back to the 1920s, as Niall Ferguson and Nouriel Roubini pointed out in their op-ed in the Financial Times last week.

On both sides of the Atlantic, the crisis is fodder for politicizing as confusion grows. And, as The New Yorkers’ John Cassidy recently noted in a blog post, there is no shortage of confusion.

But scoring political points at home will not help solve a crisis of this magnitude. As Gideon Rachman has pointed out, the political transformation that would bring social security systems in line with each other sufficiently for a banking union to take place would take much more time than is available to avert financial catastrophe.

Let’s hope that Germany, a great beneficiary of the European experiment, eventually does the right thing. Berlin clearly needs to embrace further monetary easing by the European Central Bank, and should seriously consider measures like debt mutualization  – although one need only look at other major European countries to understand the domestic political perils that this could engender. 

And let’s hope that Canada, a fiscally and financially responsible nation, also shows international leadership by encouraging viable and progressive financial regulatory policies in Europe. Canada, for example, is widely lauded for its exemplary deposit insurance, which Ferguson and Roubini advocate for Europe.

By undertaking consistent and sensible action now, both countries will be positioning themselves strategically should the crisis worsen. If other economies end up requiring bailouts like Greece and Spain, Canada will have been prescient in setting a precedent for involvement in order to avoid getting railroaded by G20 countries going into a panicked crisis mode. In such a situation, Canada would not be able to call any shots if it had been intractable in its stance up to that point. Canada needs to find a way to clearly acknowledge that the collapse of the periphery will matter to everyone but remains the responsibility of the Europeans.

Certainly the Canadian government’s point that EU members do not deserve a bailout because they are not developing countries is wearing thin. When Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy allegedly texted “España no es Uganda” to his finance minister, Luis de Guindos, the popular response was, “Yes, Uganda is better off.” Divisions between developed and developing countries are irrelevant as the European crisis deepens. Glib comments from politicians should not be used to disguise the profound political will necessary to bridge social and economic divides in the industrial world.

Photo courtesy of Reuters

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The CMP is an annual meeting of several bilateral working groups, including Agri-business; Energy; Environment and Forestry; Housing and Sustainable Communities; Human Capital; Labour Mobility; and Trade, Investment, and Innovation. Minister Espinosa stressed the opportunities offered by strengthening bilateral ties, focusing on identifying private-sector synergies, expanding temporary-worker programs, launching a youth-mobility program, and, perhaps most importantly, “projecting our partnership globally and regionally” by publicizing our countries’ “shared core values” in universal human rights, the rule of law, and democratic governance.

The CMP meeting, which convenes a variety of communities such as poultry farmers, women’s-health advocates, and community-based groups, is doing important bilateral work. Perhaps just as importantly, though, it is also providing the people-to-people contact that allows Canadians to step away from the pictures they have of Mexico as either a series of beaches and holiday destinations or a country mired in violent drug wars. To the delight of Mexico-watchers, The Globe and Mail has also taken to pointing out the cosmopolitan nature of the country, the rapidly growing middle class, and the myriad benefits to Canada of expanding and deepening ties between our two countries. Mexican reforms are proceeding apace, often with Canadian support. Trade and investment ties between Canada and Mexico have grown exponentially since the signing of NAFTA, and the growing Mexican economy is on track to be larger than Canada’s in a matter of a few years.

Mexico continues to confront many challenges, but if its reforms (including policing and judicial reforms that will aid in the struggles with the drug cartels) can keep pace with its economic development, this resource-rich, financially stable country with a relatively young population holds tremendous promise – for itself, for Canada-Mexico relations, and for North American competitiveness overall.

Given the extraordinary line-up of international meetings taking place in Mexico in the coming weeks, it is certainly significant that Minister Espinosa took the time from her very busy schedule to join a small but hearty group of Canada-Mexico enthusiasts in Ottawa. Also fortuitous was her presence at a breakfast meeting to launch the most recent Canada Among Nations volume, dedicated to Canada’s relationship with Mexico.

Several of the authors – myself included – gathered to hear the minister’s remarks and to tell the assembled guests about some of the partnership themes in the book in areas such as energy, security, sustainable development, and research collaborations, all of which reflect the interests of the CMP working groups. These on-the-ground groups are proceeding along very pragmatic and practical lines. High-level recognition of those efforts from people like Baird and Espinosa is a hopeful sign of progress.

Photo courtesy of Reuters

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In 2010, Canadian trade with Mexico reached $27 billion, exceeding trade with the U.K. for the first time and making Mexico our third-largest trading partner in the world next to the U.S. and China. By the end of that year, over 2,600 firms were registered in Mexico as having Canadian capital.

While trade with, and investment in, Mexico has increased steadily since the signing of NAFTA nearly 20 years ago, tourism to Mexico has only recently spiked. Between 2005 and 2010, the annual number of Canadian tourists in Mexico doubled to 1.6 million, and increasing numbers of Canadians are considering Mexico as a retirement destination. The violence that threatens those tourists, however, is due to a drug trade that Canadian consumption helps feed.

Yet, Canada’s interest in – and potential to help solve – Mexico’s security problem is too seldom discussed. The Canada-Mexico Partnership (CMP), which will hold its annual meeting in Ottawa next week, has a collection of working groups in areas such as agribusiness, energy, trade, investment, and innovation – all relating more or less directly to prosperity and economics. None deal directly with the security issues that threaten those things.

Deepening economic integration with Mexico is, of course, a good thing. As Graeme Douglas and Carlo Dade put it, “The main problem with the Canada-Mexico relationship is that there are no major problems with the relationship.” But increased integration must be complemented by increased acknowledgment by Canadians of the wide range of security issues facing both Mexico and Canada. These threats are not just narco-related – they also emanate from global challenges that emerging countries are less resilient to than developed ones: climate change, public health, food-security issues, and economic inequality.

In the latest volume of Canada Among Nations, titled Canada and Mexico’s Unfinished Agenda, I present avenues for collaboration between Canada and Mexico on these global threats to prosperity. The book is a collection of essays that answer, in various ways, the question of why Canada, which has benefited so much from Mexico’s rise, seems to be impervious to Mexico’s challenges. The contention of Canada Among Nations is that Canadians should acknowledge Mexico’s true position as a strategic ally, and take up the relationship’s unfinished agenda.

Photo courtesy of Reuters

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This Week on OpenCanada

Environment at War
Climate change causes hurricanes, droughts, and floods. But it also causes violence. The University of California at Irvine’s Richard Matthew on the role Canada can play in navigating the relationship between environmental change and international security.

The Outsourcing of the Cyberwar
Don’t blame China. The greatest cyber threats emerge not from states, but from private actors. The Oxford Internet Institute’s Jon Penney gives some advice to the Canadian government on the changing security environment.

Canada and NATO, NATO and Canada
The main reason for Canada to purchase the F-35 is its involvement in NATO. Is it really worth it? Steve Saideman assesses the relationship.

Taking Up the Canadian-Mexican Agenda
The interests of Canada and Mexico are now indisputably intertwined. Canadians just need to realize it. Jennifer Jeffs on why Canadians should acknowledge Mexico’s true position as a strategic ally.

Truth and Reconciliation in Canada
South Sudan, Northern Uganda, and East Timor. Now our Peace v. Justice series turns to Canada, where Kim Stanton looks at the government’s recent cuts to indigenous organizations, and their impact on the reconciliation process.

NATO ± Canada
158 Canadians died in the NATO mission to Afghanistan. In the wake of the Chicago NATO Summit, OpenCanada presents an infographic on Canada’s contributions to the alliance in recent years.

Rapid Response Question of the Week

Should Canada view cyberspace as a threat or an opportunity?
As our Future of Fighting series goes to space, our Rapid Responders weigh in on the star trek threat. Former High Commissioner to London Jeremy Kinsman says the Chinese government should be worried, while former Ambassador to EU Gordon Smith and Kyle Matthews note, threat or opportunity, cyberspace is here to stay.

Weekly Readings from the World Wide Web

“Our Not-So-Friendly Northern Neighbor” by Laurence Bherer and Pascale Dufour in the New York Times
In Quebec, Putin is pronounced “poutine.” Very funny, right? Not so much anymore, write two University of Montreal professors on the provinces assault on democratic rights.

“Egypt Elects its President While in Crisis” by Sherif Younis in Jadaliyya
How has the political crisis in Egypt developed in the past months? How has it been reflected in a general state of intense frustration? Some answers to the major questions behind this week’s elections.

“The Threat of German Amnesia” by Joschka Fischer in Project Syndicate
Germany destroyed itself – and Europe – twice in the twentieth century. Let’s avoid doing this a third time, writes Germany’s former foreign minister

“Unequal Shares” by James Surowecki in The New Yorker
Facebook may have more clout than Canada – and many other countries – when it comes to international outcomes. For this reason, it is important to understand why the newly public company’s governance structure is far from democratic.

“One Scenario for the U.S. and China to Stop Their Brawling” by Steve LeVine in Foreign Policy
We’re running out of oil, right? Wrong. How the oil sands and other oil deposits would help quell the conflict between the world’s two biggest nations.

Reports

Canada and NATO: A Military Assessment
Elinor Sloan assesses NATO’s ability to conduct out-of-area crisis management operations in the latest paper from the Strategic Studies Working Group.

Events

May 29
Online Conversation
New Capabilities
For the past 5,000 years, combat meant putting people at risk. Today, it doesn’t have to. The Brookings Institution’s Peter Singer and Oxford’s Jennifer Welsh debate what recent developments in drone technology mean for the way we fight.

May 30
Ottawa
Rising India: Will the Elephant Dance with Canada? Challenges and Opportunities
The National Capital Branch presents David Malone and Peter Sutherland.

May 30
Waterloo
CIC-CIGI Media Panel – Bordered Biases: National Identity in World News Coverage
The Waterloo Region Branch presents a panel with Mitch Potter, Kevin Carmichael, and Tony Burman, moderated by Steve Paikin.

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Against this backdrop of escalating violence, Mexico will hold a presidential election in July. In fact, since President Felipe Calderón took office at the end of 2006, his crackdown on the drug cartels has created new gang relationships and ousted several gang leaders, producing two major gang rivals as smaller gangs became absorbed by the larger and more powerful ones. In the meantime, nearly 50,000 lives have been lost, many solely for the sake of spectacular displays of violence and intimidation. As his term draws to a close, Calderón – the first Mexican president to aggressively launch raids and law-enforcement reform to combat the cartels – leaves the problem unsolved. Along with the continuing problems of the drug trade, Mexico’s next president faces an additional challenge: fatigue and defeatism in drug-war politics.

Mexico’s next president will have to choose between taking up where Calderón left off (i.e. continuing the struggle to defeat the illegal drug trade) and negotiating with the criminal gangs to reduce violence, thereby undermining the progress that has been made thus far, at the expense of so many lives. The choice is the subject of a recent article in Foreign Affairs, “The Cartel Crackdown: Winning the Drug War and Rebuilding Mexico in the Process,” by Robert Bonner, who appropriately advocates that the new president, whoever he or she is, continue the fight against the cartels.

Calderón’s federal police force, while still in need of expansion and improvement, is  nonetheless a remarkable accomplishment. This force has increased from 4,000 to 35,000 officers in the past four years, and now hosts Mexico’s first national crime information system. The judicial reform advocated by Calderón’s administration is also a big step forward for Mexico: Oral trials would increase transparency and modernize the judicial system, and would be a tremendous improvement over the current system, which leaves too much room for corruption and bribery.

The most difficult challenge will be combating the cartels directly. Calderón’s kingpin strategy involves weakening cartel operations to facilitate locating and arresting the leader and his cronies. This strategy, successful in Colombia in the 1990s, is key to preventing Mexico’s descent into a Mafia state, as deduced from Moisés Naím’s Foreign Affairs essay, “Mafia States: Organized Crime Takes Office.” Unlike Russia, in which “the line between government agencies and criminal groups has been irreparably blurred,” Mexico’s government institutions have been reformed, and their progress is the source of considerable pride in the country. Government officials, like law-enforcement officers, are not yet completely immune to corruption, but issues of corruption and rent-seeking have declined dramatically as reforms have been implemented. 

If Mexico’s next president – whether Andres Manuel López Obrador, Josefina Vasquez Mota, Gabriel Cuadri, or Enrique Peña Nieto – does not take up the fight against the criminal gangs, he or she will put more of Mexico’s strengths at risk. Among emerging countries, Mexico has the advantage of a relatively well-educated population, sound fiscal policy, a sophisticated private sector, and an abundance of natural resources. Its economy is forecast to supersede our own by 2030. As a result of these factors, Mexico has been attracting considerable foreign investment – particularly in important industries such as aerospace – despite the repellant forces of gang and monopoly rule. But increasing violence that implies a weak state will eventually discourage even the most enthusiastic investors.

Last November, Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes told an audience at the Royal Ontario Museum that violence does not define Mexico any more than the violence of last century’s American mobs define the United States. In doing so, he deftly reminded his Canadian audience of the cynicism and cowardice underlying the view of Mexico as an essentially violent place. To the extent that Canadians and Americans see Mexico’s violence as an unchangeable reality, they abdicate responsibility for feeding that war through demand for the drugs Mexico’s cartels supply. Calderón’s drug war has combatted that view, but if Mexico’s future policies reflect fatigue and defeatism, the rest of the hemisphere will follow suit.

Photo courtesy of Reuters

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This Week on OpenCanada

A Post-Afghanistan Military
Lately, there’s been a lot of talk about the F-35. In the first week of our Future of Fighting series, we step back for a moment. Roland Paris and Steve Saideman examine the threats Canada will face in the longterm – and how we should prepare.

OpenCanada at HotDocs
Kim Jong-il liked movies. But there’s a lot more to the connection between geopolitics and film. Anouk Dey interviews the documentarians behind some of this year’s best documentaries on international issues.

Two Priorities for the Canadian Forces
Say good-bye to Uncle Sam. The greatest challenge Canada faces is the transition from a U.S.-led international system to a multipolar one, writes Roland Paris. Fortunately, institutional reform is something Canada is good at.

Towards a Grand Strategy for Canada
We may squabble with Denmark every once in a while, but the real threat to Canada in the Arctic is Russia. Steve Saideman shares some advice on how to counter Putin & Co.

Aid Through Education
Primary education is like hockey: Canada is really good at it. For this reason, Jennifer Jeffs thinks that promoting primary education should be at the centre of CIDA’s agenda.

Rapid Response Question of the Week

What is the biggest lesson Canada can take from its experience in Afghanistan?
Philippe Lagassé from the University of Ottawa says that we learned that amibition alone can’t sustain a military mission. Journalist Don Newman says the Afghan mission proved that fools rush in where wise men fear to read. And Mark Sedra, a Senior Fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation, thinks the lesson was the importance of assigning clear and realistic objectives that reflect the local realities.

Research

An Open Call for Research and Commentary
The CIC invites individuals and institutions to contribute their research and commentary to our Natural Resources and Foreign Policy Project. We welcome submissions of reports, papers and essays that respond to the project’s fundamental question: How can Canadians be smart about developing our abundant energy, mineral and forest resources?

Weekly Readings from the World Wide Web

“How the Obama Administration’s Narrative About Chen Guangcheng Unraveled, One Tweet at a Time” by Emily Parker in The New Republic
Has Twitter fundamentally changed geopolitics? Tracing the past week in China-US relations, Emily Parker makes a clear case that it has.

“The Spy Who Came in From the Code” by Matthieu Aikins in The Columbia Journalism Review
When we think of hackers, we think of Anonymous. But authoritarian regimes employ hackers too. On World Press Freedom Day, Canadian journalist Matthieu Aikins reminds journalists of the cautions they must take.

“Harper Needs Fresh Faces in International Portfolios” by Campbell Clark in The Globe and Mail
It’s not because a military helicopter picked Peter MacKay up from vacation or because Bev Oda likes expensive OJ. Campbell Clark explains why Canada needs some new international faces.

“Hollande is Half the Story” by Martin A. Schain in Foreign Affairs
Bonjour, populism! Hollande is getting all the headlines, but Martin Schain says that the real story is about the resurgence of populism in France – and it doesn’t have a happy ending.

“These are the Countries that will Win and Lose in the New Global Paradigm” by Ian Bremmer in Business Insider
First, Ian Bremmer predicted the end of the free market. Now he predicts a G0 world. This may be bad news for the G8 but, for Canada, it’s not quite a zero-sum game.

Events

May 8
Your Navy at Home and Abroad
The Montreal Branch is pleased to invite you to a timely and intimate discussion with Vice-Admiral Paul Maddison, the Commander of the Royal Canadian Navy.

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Governments in developing countries tend not to prioritize basic education when less labour-intensive investments promise faster returns. Yet universal primary education ranks second only to the eradication of hunger among the UN’s Millennium Development Goals for 2015. By stepping up to this challenge, Canada would show international leadership both in addressing one of the UN’s highest priorities and in discovering new and effective ways of executing aid programs beyond the typical government-to-government model.

Canada is well-positioned for international leadership in education development. The latest statistics show that Canada already has a record of significant investment in primary education. While countries belonging to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) spend, on average, 31 per cent more on secondary education than on primary, Canada weighs primary and secondary education more equally, spending only 11 per cent more on secondary. 

Canada’s investments pay off, according to the results of the OECD’s latest Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) index. Among all OECD countries, Canada’s average scores ranked in the top 10 in all categories – reading, mathematics, and science. Canada also showed a weaker correlation between socioeconomic status and assessment performance than OECD countries did on average. In other words, Canada does a relatively good job of ensuring that wealth and social capital do not monopolize academic success. Canada also continues to lead in higher education: The country’s advanced research programs attract a higher proportion of international students than OECD countries in general.

Successful education results across socioeconomic strata provide an excellent foundation for development programs abroad. But Canadian education policies cannot simply be exported. To raise human capital in developing countries, we must send our human capital to developing countries. CIDA turned a blind eye to this fact when it cut its retired teachers volunteer program last year without explanation.  The program, which was more than 50 years old and partnered with the Canadian Teachers’ Federation, sent retired teachers to work in developing communities in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. As C.D. Howe points out, CIDA’s budget does not reflect the UN’s priority of making primary education accessible to all. Successful Canadian non-governmental organizations (NGOs) such as the Canadian Bureau for International Education and Aga Khan Canada have tended to partner with CIDA in areas such as public-sector training and maternal health. While these are both worthy goals, they do not reflect the UN’s broader development mandate and Canada’s particular strength in education.

As the C.D. Howe paper suggests, NGOs specializing in education should not limit themselves to pursuing CIDA’s funds or host governments’ support. They should partner with other non-government actors, both in Canada and in host countries, to build education agencies where public schools have failed for lack of political will. As old aid models of government subsidy give way to new models of pluralistic partnerships, Canada should lead the way.

Photo courtesy of Reuters

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Before looking abroad, however, perhaps Baird ought to look at home. In the cabinet in which Baird serves, women represent less than 25 per cent of ministers. The same proportion plagues Parliament, ranking it 40th in the world on the count of female representation. We are trounced not only by the usual suspects – Finland, Iceland, Norway and Denmark – but, ironically, also by many of the countries to whom our foreign aid agenda has traditionally been directed, such as Rwanda, Uganda and Ethiopia, among others.

This week, Foreign Policy’s Sex Issue published a list of the 25 Most Powerful Women You’ve Never Heard Of. There were no Canadians on it. Had Foreign Policy published a list of the 25 Most Powerful Women You Have Heard Of, it’s still unlikely a Canadian woman would have made the cut (Louise Arbour might be the lone exception).

Getting more women into powerful political positions is a key step in the promotion of women’s rights. Three arguments are usually made in favour of more women in Parliament.

The first argument rightly asserts that Canada is failing to tap into an enormous pool of talent. By making political life undesirable for women, the argument goes, Canada is not served at home or represented abroad by the cream of the crop. More Canadian women than men earn a high school diploma, enrol in college and university programs, and leave these programs with diplomas or degrees. Our best and brightest, it follows, should be at least 50 per cent women. Follow Defence Minister Peter MacKay’s handiwork on the F-35 file and you will no doubt agree.

The second argument is one of fair representation. It makes the case that Parliament is democratically elected. Since slightly more than 50 per cent of Canadians are female, then to be representative, Parliament ought to be about 50 per cent female. Underlying this argument is the assumption that all women think similarly.  Though I am reluctant to accept that there is a uniquely female way of reasoning, or that I am more likely to arrive at the same conclusions as Bev Oda rather than Michael Chong, there are certain issues in which, indeed, female experience begets good policy. Consider maternity support services: is it a surprise that Sweden, a country with 45-per-cent female representation in its parliament, boasts one of the strongest maternity support systems in the world?

In many ways, it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. More women in Parliament begets stronger maternity support systems, which begets the opportunity for more women to run for Parliament, which begets more women in Parliament…

The final argument contends that women have certain uniquely female traits that make them valuable additions to Parliament. Andrea Horwath made this argument earlier this week, when she was honoured with Equal Voice’s 2012 EVE Award. She cited the female knack for consensus, exhibited in full force in her past week of political negotiating, as one reason why Canada would benefit from more female politicians.

While Horwath clearly has an aptitude for this type of political maneuvering, it is a mistake to employ this rationale in defence of improving the number of women in Canadian politics. Just as the logic “Women have x which makes them good for x” can be used to advance the goal of increased female political representation, so too can that logic be used to argue, “Women have x which makes them good for…” This sentence is too often finished with “communications” – or in Parliament, “social development” and “international co-operation.”

There is absolutely nothing wrong with communications, and our ministers of social development and international co-operation are integral to the success of Canada. I would just like to see more Canadian women following in the footsteps of our four female provincial premiers, demonstrating that women can compete on the same playing field as men, and that no uniquely female characteristic positions them well for one role but not another.

Photo courtesy of Reuters

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Eugene Meyer
Term: 1946-1946
Nominated by: President Harry Truman
Before he was president, he was: A newspaper publisher
The More You Know: Meyer bought The Washington Post when it was going bankrupt and financed it for more than 20 years without profit to improve its quality.

John Jay McCloy
Term: 1947-1949
Nominated by: President Harry Truman
Before he was president, he was: U.S. assistant secretary of war
The More You Know: During the Second World War, McCloy halted plans to help concentration camp prisoners by bombing the rail lines that led to Auschwitz. He later pardoned convicted Nazi war criminals as High Commissioner for Germany.

Eugene Robert Black
Term: 1949-1962
Nominated by: President Harry Truman
Before he was president, he was: An executive at Chase National Bank
The More You Know:  Black had been such an integral part of the World Bank in its first 16 years, it was often at the time known as “Black’s Bank”.

George Woods
Term: 1963-1968
Nominated by: President John F. Kennedy
Before he was president, he was: An executive at the investment bank First Boston Corporation
The More You Know: Wood went to night school in banking after high school only after receiving the encouragement of his employer at the time.

Robert McNamara
Term: 1968-1981
Nominated by: President Lyndon Johnson
Before he was president, he was: U.S. Defense Secretary
The More You Know: McNamara was secretary of defense to John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, but left the office after Johnson rejected his recommendations to freeze troop levels and to halt the bombing in North Vietnam.

Alden Clausen
Term: 1981-1986
Nominated by: President Ronald Reagan
Before he was president, he was: An executive at Bank of America
The More You Know: Clausen earned the nickname “Tom” after playing a character with that name in a school play at age 6. The name stuck throughout his life.

Barber Conable
Term: 1986-1991
Nominated by: President Ronald Reagan
Before he was president, he was: A U.S. Congressman
The More You Know: Though Conable was a long-time ally of Nixon, he severed these ties in disgust after the Watergate scandal.

Lewis Preston
Term: 1991-1995
Nominated by: President George H W Bush
Before he was president, he was: An executive at J.P. Morgan
The More You Know: Preston died of cancer during his tenure at the bank.

James Wolfensohn
Term: 1995-2005
Nominated by: President Bill Clinton
Before he was president, he was: A partner in his own investment firm, James D. Wolfensohn, Inc.
The More You Know: Wolfenson competed at the 1956 Summer Olympics as a member of the Austrian fencing team.

Paul Wolfowitz
Term: 2005-2007
Nominated by: President George W. Bush
Before he was president, he was: U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense
The More You Know: Wolfowitz resigned from the World Bank in 2007 after it was discovered that he was involved with Shaha Ali Riza, a senior officer at the World Bank, and had improperly handled her pay increases.

Robert Zoellick
Term: 2007-2012
Nominated by: President George W. Bush
Before he was president, he was: Vice Chairman of  Goldman Sachs
The More You Know: Zoellick was one of the signatories of the 1998 letter to President Clinton from the Project for a New American Century advocating military action against Iraq. Later, as Deputy Secretary of State in the Bush administration, he was a leading voice for ending the violence in Darfur.

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This Week on OpenCanada

Rage Against the Machine
It’s not just the French. Across the western world, voters are deserting the centre ground of politics for fringe parties and populist movements. John Hancock explains why.

The Sex Issue
Foreign Minister John Baird has committed himself to the promotion of women’s rights abroad. But what about at home? Canada ranks 40th in the world when it comes to women in political office and that’s a problem, writes Anouk Dey.

Better Know Your World Bank Presidents
Past presidents of the World Bank came from Golman Sachs, J.P. Morgan and the Bank of America. Dr. Jim Yong Kim is a Korean-born university president. A chart showing just how different Kim is from his predecessors.

Rapid Response Question of the Week

Who is the most innovative thinker on Canada’s place in the world today?
Building Markets founder Scott Gimore says Mark Carney and Elissa Golberg. Former U of T President Rob Prichard says Michael Ignatieff. Former High Commissioner to the U.K. Jeremy Kinsman says Robert Lepage. And John McArthur, Senior Fellow with the UN Foundation, takes the opportunity to issue a wake-up call to Canadian thought leaders on foreign policy.

Weekly Readings from the World Wide Web

“Why Do They Hate Us?” by Mona Eltahawy for Foreign Policy
The revolution hasn’t begun until it shifts from the presidential palaces to the home, writes an Egyptian-American journalist sexually assaulted by Egyptian police in Foreign Policy’s much-discussed Sex Issue.

“‘Seriously, Guys!’ How (Not) to Write About Gender and Foreign Affairs” by Charli Carpenter for The Duck of Minerva
Foreign Policy’s Sex Issue claimed to take gender seriously. Yet, plastered across its cover was a nude women with black body paint suggesting a niqab. Charli Carpenter takes the old boys club of foreign policy to task.

“A Clunky Cyberstrategy” by Rebecca MacKinnon for Foreign Affairs
President Obama says that the Internet and mobile technologies should “empower citizens, not suppress them.” Yet American companies are providing the software authoritarian regimes need to monitor their citizens. Rebecca MacKinnon tackles the paradox.

“Keeping Cool on Nuclear Heat” by Gareth Evans for Project Syndicate
Mitt Romney says that Obama isn’t tough enough on American foreign policy. But Gareth Evans, former head of the International Crisis Group, thinks the President is acting just right on Iran and North Korea.

“Bureaucrats against the Holocaust” by Charles Krauthammer for The National Post
In marked contrast to Gareth Evans, Charles Krauthammer blames President Obama for lack of will.

Events

May 1
What Are the Military and Foreign Policy Lessons of Afghanistan?
A live, online conversation with Steve Saideman and Roland Paris, moderated by Philippe Lagassé, at 2pm est on Tuesday. Part of Strategic Studies Working Group series in partnership with the Canadian Defence & Foreign Affairs Institute.

May 2
Building Canada’s Asia-Pacific Gateway: Open Skies and Efficient Border
The Vancouver Branch will host Tony Gugliotta discussing how to make Vancouver International Airport (YVR) the gateway of choice between the Asia-Pacific and the Americas for both travellers and airlines.

May 2
Canada and the Changing Arctic: Sovereignty, Security and Stewardship
The Toronto Branch, with the generous support of Cisco Systems, are pleased to host a special Munk-Gordon Speaker Series Event: the official book launch of Canada and the Changing Arctic: Sovereignty, Security, and Stewardship.

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This Week on OpenCanada

What went wrong in Afghanistan?
Blame Canada? Blame Karzai? Blame Pakistan? We ask Bill Graham, Margaret MacMillan, Roland Paris, Eugene Lang, and Bob Bothwell to identify the culprit behind Canada’s longest ever military commitment.

The Three Bad Decisions Made in Afghanistan
Counter-insurgency is like baseball. Steve Saideman examines the three strikes that doomed the Afghanistan mission.

What Went Wrong in Canada?
Canadian troops withdrew from Afghanistan exactly 50 years after Dwight Eisenhower gave his famous military-industrial complex speech. Anouk Dey thinks it’s more than just coincidence.

A Brief History of Canada and the International Criminal Court
On the 10th birthday of the ICC, we celebrate Canada’s involvement – and wonder why it has waned in recent years.

Rapid Response Question of the Week

Was the first decade of the ICC a more just one?
On the International Criminal Court’s 10th birthday, War Child founder Samantha Nutt, Brookings’ Bruce Jones, Concordia University’s Kyle Matthews, former ambassador Jeremy Kinsman, and author Erna Paris face off on whether the world is a more or less violent place. But are these experts even answering the right question: does justice necessarily mean less violence?

Weekly Readings from the World Wide Web

“Joseph Kony: Trouble in South Sudan,” by Alexis Okeowo for The New Yorker
Everything was supposed to be okay after the referendum. But, according to the New Yorker, all is not well in South Sudan.

“Cairo’s Candidate Shuffle,” by Jeff Martini for Foreign Affairs
Plus ça change, plus ça reste la même. A few reasons why the forthcoming Egyptian election is no different from those that came before the revolution.

“The G-20 Is Failing,” by Edwin M. Truman for Foreign Policy
Canada should be proud of being a G20 country right? Not so, according to Edwin Truman: the G20 simply isn’t what it used to be.

“War Games,” by Noah Richler for The Walrus
In an excerpt from his forthcoming What We Talk About When We Talk About War, Noah Richler argues that, today, Canadian heroes are soldiers, not peacekeepers.

“Human Capital,” by Beth Haddon for The Literary Review of Canada
This year, three Canadians have published books about their kidnapping ordeals in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Maghrib. Which ones to read, and which ones not to read.

“Pictures at a Revolution,” by Luke Allnutt for Foreign Policy
Who needs international relations theorists, when you have data visualization? An overview of how data is being used to explain revolutions.

Events

Louise Arbour: Truth To Power
On Thursday, April 19, OpenCanada.org live streamed a dialogue between Louise Arbour, former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, and UBC President Stephen Toope at UBC. Don’t worry if you missed it. You can still watch the conversation online, which touched on the ICC, the War on Terror, the rights of prisoners, and Canada’s diminished position in international affairs.

April 24
Corruption, Diplomacy and International Sport: Two Game Changers
The National Capital Branch is honoured to host two outstanding warriors for sports integrity, Declan Hill, author of The Fix: Soccer and Organized Crime, and Dick Pound, former president of the World Anti-Doping Agency.

April 25
Inside Syria: A Conversation with Glenn V. Davidson
The Halifax Branch will be holding a roundtable discussion with Glenn V. Davidson, Canada’s ambassador to Syria between 2009 and 2012.

April 25
The Canadian Forces and OP Mobile: The Operation in Libya 2011
The Calgary Branch will be hosting Lieutenant-Colonel Normand Gagné, the Canadian Deputy Air Component Commander charged with helping enforce the No-Fly Zone as part of the mission in Libya.

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How does Eisenhower’s solemn caution on the influence of the military-industrial complex apply to Canada’s Afghanistan experience? According to those present when major decisions about Canada’s longest-ever military commitment were made, the war in Afghanistan fundamentally weakened Canadian democracy. Last week, when asked what went wrong in Afghanistan, former Liberal leaders Michael Ignatieff and Bill Graham suggested that the real wrongdoing occurred in Canada.

Two decisions, in particular, provide evidence of the war in Afghanistan’s assault on Canadian democracy:

May 17, 2006:

The Conservative government, still fresh off its win, held an emergency debate on extending Canada’s military presence in Kandahar through 2009. It was clear that the NDP would vote against the motion, as then-leader Jack Layton had objected to the initial redeployment to Kandahar a year earlier. The Bloc (remember them?) faced anti-war pressure from Quebec, and was also unlikely to support the motion. This left the Liberals holding the balance.

Bill Graham, interim leader at the time, allowed Liberal MPs to vote according to their individual preferences. The result was a split: The majority of the party, including leader-to-be Stéphane Dion, voted against the motion, while the rest, Ignatieff and Graham included, voted for it. Six hours later, the final tally registered 149:145 in favour. In other words, had two Liberals swung to the Dion side, the Conservatives would not have gotten their way.

According to Ignatieff, the Conservatives viewed the Kandahar decision strictly as a “wedge operation” – an opportunity to divide the opposition. As the former Liberal leader put it, the closed-door discussions that day hardly referred to the relevant evidence: the mounting violence in southern Afghanistan, the Canadian military’s counterinsurgency experience, the increasing interference from Pakistan, etc. Instead, the evidence deemed relevant focused on the internal dynamics of the Liberal party.

If this is true, then Eisenhower’s warning is all the more powerful. Following this vote, Canadian casualties continued to mount. In fact, reading through the list of casualties from the point at which the Canadian mission moved to Kandahar, one is struck by their frequency: one every two or three days.

It is not clear whether blame lies with the Conservative party, or whether other parties would have acted similarly if faced with analogous circumstances. What is clear, however, is that Canadian institutions were not equipped to deal with the war in Afghanistan. Rather than treating it as a war to be fought, they treated it as an issue that had to be dealt with.

Mar. 13, 2008:

As mentioned, Canadian casualty rates in Kandahar were very high – higher, in fact, than the casualty rates of all other NATO troops operating in Afghanistan. In addition, in the year following the May 2006 vote, the initial allegations of abuse of Afghan detainees began to surface. As popular discontent about the war surfaced, other parties began to make stricter demands for withdrawal.

When time came to renew the mission to Afghanistan, the prime minister’s main goal, according to Ignatieff, was to keep the issue off the political radar. Going through the Hansard record from this period, one is shocked by how rarely “Afghanistan” comes up. 

Consciously or not, the Conservative government relieved itself of ownership of the war in two ways. First, it appointed the Special Committee on the Canadian Mission in Afghanistan (the Manley Committee) to issue a set of recommendations, which it promised to follow. Whether or not it was politically motivated, the decision to solicit expert opinion was a good one. Second, on the Manley Committee’s suggestion, the Conservative government positioned Canada’s involvement in Afghanistan as a training mission (as opposed to a military engagement), with the goal of withdrawal. In doing so, the Conservatives situated themselves as the dramaturges behind the denouement of an unpopular war begun by the Liberals.

Again, the issue here is not the way the Conservatives behaved. (As in May 2006, another party in a minority position may well have acted in the same way faced with similar circumstances.) The more pertinent issue is whether Canada’s democratic institutions are capable of dealing with a war like Afghanistan. Was it in the Canadian national interest for a war that cost Canadian taxpayers more than $18 billion – and invaluable lives – to be swept under the rug so that a minority government could stay in power? Handling a war, it seems, should never mutate into handling a minority government.

As we reflect on Canada’s decade in Afghanistan, the question may not be, “What went wrong in Afghanistan?” but rather, “What went wrong in Canada?” We must begin to consider what reforms to Canadian institutions will ensure we avoid another May 17, 2006, and Mar. 13, 2008. Eisenhower had the courage to demand this conversation from the American population. Perhaps, today, Canada’s leaders should follow suit.

Photo courtesy of Reuters

The post What Went Wrong In Canada? appeared first on Canadian International Council - Canada's hub for international affairs.

But don’t be fooled. While recent decades have seen significant development of infrastructure and institutions, political reforms and an explosion in the numbers of people moving up to the middle class, much of the recent hardiness of the region is due to unsustainable factors such as access to cheap money from rich countries, and record high prices for natural resource and commodity exports, fuelled chiefly by strong demand from Asia.

Despite their apparent escape from the financial turmoil experienced in Europe and the U.S., Latin America and the Caribbean remain among the regions with the highest economic inequality levels in the world. In Colombia, the host country of this year’s summit, per capita income of the richest 10 per cent of Colombians is 25 times higher than that of the poorest 40 per cent. While widening differentials are explained by the fact that increases in wealth far outpace increases in poverty, it remains true that, although recent growth in the region has benefited the poor, it has benefited the rich more.

To achieve long-term economic sustainability, Latin America needs to confront the challenge of maintaining economic gains while addressing the persistent high levels of poverty and inequality. Commodity price fluctuations are inevitable, but reliance on natural resource revenues, even as they ebb and flow, tends to stymie investment in the human capital needed to further develop the economies of resource-exporting countries. Meantime, as inequality persists or increases, the potential for social, political and economic disruption escalates, dampening the appetite of international capital for that country that may be buoyed in times of high commodity prices, but quickly evaporates when prices fall.

Traditional production structures in the economic systems of natural resource-endowed developing countries make it difficult for those industries to move up the value chain. Without the significant investment in education and technology it would take to develop the economies of many Latin American countries, gaping inequality threatens to remain a feature of many of the region’s resource-based economies.

Leaders meeting this weekend in Cartagena would thus be wise to address two of the summit’s key challenges – inequality and access to technologies – in tandem. Summit participants, from the business forum to the civil society groups, should consider the importance of integrating value and production chains in order to develop a variety of industries – high-tech to community based – that work in relation to natural resource industries, raising demand for human capital in resource-related services.

This year’s Summit of the Americas – Connecting the Americas: Partners for Prosperity – offers a practical, logical and convenient forum for discussing co-operation, partnership and integration tactics that would take advantage of today’s revenues from natural resources to relieve future vulnerabilities caused by inevitable commodity price fluctuations; invest in human capital while creating programs for worker training and education; and develop science, technology and research partnerships that bring the resources of wealthier countries together with the ambition and enterprise of less developed ones.

Creating programs that design frameworks for integration and co-operation that are flexible and anticipate change, development and evolution of societies throughout the Americas is the route to connecting the Americas in partnership for prosperity.

This essay originally appeared in the Globe and Mail. Photo courtesy of Reuters

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Design by Cameron Tulk

The post A Brief History of Canada and the International Criminal Court appeared first on Canadian International Council - Canada's hub for international affairs.

This week, Prime Minister Stephen Harper visited Washington with two goals in mind: to promote North America and to make clear that Canada’s energy strategy is focused on Asia, not the U.S. Neither of these goals inspires a positive view of Canada in the United States.

First, North America. “Canada places the highest value on the friendship and partnership among our three countries,” Harper declared yesterday. While it is in Canada’s interest to have a close relationship with the United States, it is not in Canada’s interest to pursue that relationship by promoting a “North American idea” that includes Mexico.  

Canada and Mexico occupy very different spaces in the American consciousness, and it is in Canada’s interest to keep it that way. When Americans think of Mexico, they imagine drugs and beheadings. When they think about Canada, they imagine abundant energy resources and speed bumps. While the media may have inflated Mexico’s portrayal as No Country for Old Men, it is not in Canada’s interest for these two images to mix.

And yet, most commentators seem to enjoy mixing a little Corona with their Molson. Robert Pastor, director of the Centre for North American Studies, encourages Canada to join Mexico in promoting “Buy North American” so as to “awaken the U.S. to the continent’s promise.” Earlier this week, former Canadian diplomat Colin Robertson lamented, “Sadly, the idea of closer economic integration creating an uber-North America… is on life support.”

While it is true that the Mexican economy is on track to become the world’s fifth-largest economy by 2050, and undoubtedly offers many opportunities for Canada, let’s not convolute our priorities. Canada’s No. 1 focus is trade with the United States. Its trade with Mexico is peanuts in comparison. By teaming up with Mexico in its approach to the United States, Canada risks compromising the basis of its most lucrative partnership. It would be like Norway teaming up with Greece to better its relationship with Germany.

Secondly, Canada’s hard-nosed energy rhetoric. Asked about Canada’s reaction to U.S. President Barack Obama’s rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline, Harper explained, “Look, the very fact that a ‘no’ could even be said underscores to our country that we must diversify our energy export markets.” The prime minister went on to allege that the United States has been ripping off Canada, buying energy for less than it is really worth.

The prime minister is correct that Canada would benefit from diversifying its energy market. That the biggest emerging markets together account for less than eight percent of Canada’s overseas sales has been reiterated by economists over and over again. But compare the way Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney explained this strategy to the way the Prime Minister did. Where Harper positions Canada as saying “no” to a greedy U.S., Carney positions Canada as saying “yes” to enthusiastic emerging markets.

In any case, the likelihood is that Keystone XL will eventually be built. Instead of positioning the pipeline decision as triggering an irreversible new trajectory for Canadian energy policy, why not construct a narrative in which Canada, like the United States, seeks to take advantage of new prospects for growth? What about a narrative that imagines energy co-operation with the United States not just on consumption, but also on climate change?

It is in a state’s interest to be perceived in a certain way. Canada should seek to maintain its reputation as the United States’ best friend, separated from Uncle Sam only by its propensities for pacifism and pucks. Canada derives real power from these positive vibes. That three quarters of our exports go to the United States is largely a consequence of geography. But we should not discount the value of perception. Canada’s reputation as a reliable and likeminded partner goes a long way toward explaining the close to $2 billion worth of goods that pass the Canada-U.S. border each day. So, Harper, next time you visit Washington, make Mr. Obama smile.

Photo courtesy Reuters.

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The North American Free Trade Agreement was an outcome, the product of trade negotiations between the United States and its only two continental neighbours, countries different in size, influence and temperament. Today, in contrast – nearly 20 years later – it is more useful to regard North America as a process, a means to achieve certain goals, than as a product. It is a process that involves communities of interest where productive links can be, and often are, forged between business leaders, policy-makers, journalists, and researchers on issues of importance to the three countries and beyond. The problem is that these links and processes have limited use and impact due to their lack of institutional context and support.

Areas of common concern for the three North American countries have been listed many times, often in these pages. Security, energy, climate change, health care, demographics, food security, and competitiveness are the most obvious. In each of these areas, progress made by any one of the North American neighbours will carry implications for at least one of the others. Why then, do we not work more closely together, so advances accomplished by any of the neighbours would benefit the others?

Well, we often do, but to ensure the results have impact, we need to institutionalize the ways we collaborate better. Collaborative ventures between the three countries do exist. The North American Commission on Environmental Cooperation, for example, has accomplished a good deal on a very modest budget, but it has not connected sufficiently with many of the groups with shared interests in the three countries. There are numerous initiatives in play dealing with energy in North America involving experts from the three countries and combining private sector, policy, and research communities. While all worthy in their own right, a co-ordinating mechanism would avoid duplication of efforts, leading to greater progress and more valuable outputs.

NAFTA represented commitments by the American, Canadian and Mexican governments to do less rather than more, allowing markets to function more autonomously while relying on a North American economic system that was well advanced before the trade agreement was ratified. As the global economy became increasingly competitive, many Canadian, American and Mexican firms developed integrated production and distribution systems to capture greater efficiencies. Companies created continental systems, locating units in strategic sites and linking them via highly effective logistics-transportation systems. Many service industries also rely on continental networks and linkages. Yet, oddly, we understand little of all this, depending deeply on something we don’t know much about.

In the post-NAFTA era we need to focus serious attention on learning more about how North America works, which factors drive our competitive advantage and which might hinder it. In order for a globally competitive North America to persist in the next half century, deep thinking is needed now about how it would look, and how to make it look that way. We need to stop referring to ourselves as “North American trading partners.” We are production partners, as well as security, climate change, energy, health, etc. partners.

The Canada-U.S. Chamber of Commerce fell apart years ago and the North American Competitiveness Council’s influence was damaged by its association with the apparently sovereignty-threatening Security and Prosperity Partnership. But these are not good excuses for the strange fact that no broadly-based North American business-focused organization exists today. It is surely time that such an organization – a North American Chamber of Commerce, perhaps? – be created, networked with business and workers associations, regional bodies, and business and policy schools.

Given recent deadlocks on specific North American issues, perhaps we should be thinking more about governance. The Keystone XL pipeline and the hold-up over the second Detroit-Windsor bridge are obvious examples of our inability to make decisions on urgent matters without institutional frameworks. NAFTA veered away from institutional innovation and the impetus for integration was largely bottom-up through the 1990s, driven by changes in corporate structure and strategy, not by a continental vision.

Now is the time to start thinking – together – about decision-making and implementation frameworks at various levels, including between national capitals, significant regional cities, and states and provinces. North America is perfectly poised to set a global precedent for collaboration on global challenges by combining a variety of political strategies – from sub-national initiatives led by elected officials, to research partnerships on various scales, to business and NGO associations. This is more than the photo opportunity provided by this week’s North America Summit.

This essay originally appeared in the Ottawa Citizen. Photo courtesy of Reuters.

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Here is what we know about Mulcair’s foreign policy:

• Mulcair is not too keen on Canada’s cozy relationship with the United States. His foreign-policy platform asserts, “For too long Canada has been sheltered in the shadow of our closest friend – the United States.” Roland Paris has noted that the chances of meeting the targets of the perimeter security agreement “depend in large part on the willingness of both the Prime Minister and the President to devote sustained attention and political capital to these objectives.” It is unlikely that Mulcair would push for the perimeter agreement like Prime Minister Stephen Harper has. In Mulcair’s words, “We’ve just got to stop being such chumps when it comes to dealing with the Americans.” On the other hand, Mulcair has come out quite publicly against the oil sands. While he is not quite as against them as many members of the NDP are, he does insist that crude should not be exported until it is refined. Ironically, this position may actually bring him nearer to the American point of view, which, at least in terms of the Keystone XL pipeline, aligns much more closely to the environmental perspective than the Canadian case did. That said, if skeptics like Gerald Butts are right, and Keystone XL passes as soon as the American election season is over, then so much for an imagined North American enviro-alliance. 

• If not the U.S., then who? Mulcair is not one to pull a post-Keystone XL Harper move (“Au revoir, U.S.; salut, China!”). Mulcair worries about Canada’s growing dependence on a state “that still opposes ethnic minorities and political dissenters.” In rhetoric, at least, his stance on China has much in common with the principled approach that Harper took early in his term, before he returned from Beijing with two pandas. So, if not China, where? Mulcair seems much more positive about emerging democracies like India, so even though he may back down on Harper’s free-trade-deal frenzy, he’ll probably push hard to finalize the negotiations underway with India.

• On free trade, Mulcair believes, “Without the freedom to vote, the choice to join a union and the right to freedom of speech and assembly, trade will not guarantee a better quality of life for those who most need it.” Under Harper, Canada has signed a record number of free-trade agreements with countries in the Americas: Panama, Colombia, and Peru. We’re also in negotiations with the Caribbean Community, the Central America Four, and the Dominican Republic. Mulcair is not only against signing agreements with countries that fail to uphold basic rights, but he also does not buy into the current government’s fascination with the Americas. “The Conservatives have continued [to] shift foreign policy priorities without explanation – abandoning our focus in Africa where our help was dearly needed for a concentration in the Americas that has not produced results,” Mulcair’s platform states. Right now, Canada is only negotiating a free-trade deal with one African country – Morocco. Under Mulcair, that may change. Harper has also not visited Africa since 2007. That, too, may change.

• Unsurprisingly, Mulcair seeks to increase Canada’s Official Development Assistance to 0.7 per cent of GDP by 2022. This is more than double what it currently is. One can assume that a majority of that funding increase will go toward Africa, harkening back to the Chrétien era, when Canada pushed for African priorities at G8 meetings and passed the Pledge to Africa Act.

• Increasing Canada’s aid dollars will certainly elevate Canada’s standing in international organizations, but Mulcair wants to do this in other ways, too. In her response to this week’s Rapid Response question, Catherine McKenna described Canada’s international brand as “unilateral.” Mulcair would try to take us back to our “multilateral” heritage, and, in contrast to the current government, perhaps “go along to get along.” Part of this, unsurprisingly, means returning to the table on climate-change talks. When Canada withdrew from Kyoto last year, some optimists suggested that perhaps this would give Canada an opportunity to replace a sub-par regime with something better. If Mulcair is serious about making “Canada a world leader in the fight against climate change,” then perhaps we will soon see an end to Canada’s winning streak at the fossil awards. The thorn in Mulcair’s side, as so often seems to be the case, is Israel. Mulcair is more supportive of Israel than many of the members of his party. In 2008, speaking at an event hosted by Tribune Juive, he noted, “My in-laws are Holocaust survivors. Their history is part of my daily life. That’s why I am an ardent supporter of Israel in all instances and circumstances.” It’s difficult to imagine an NDP leader promoting the current government’s Israel-has-no-greater-friend-than-Canada line, but, still, even mild support for contested Israeli policies could compromise Canada’s popularity in international institutions.

• The priority Mulcair places on Arctic sovereignty is also surprisingly similar to the ways of the current government. Mulcair would cancel the F-35 purchase, but, hey, the current government would, too! Mulcair places a priority on guarding against threats to Canada’s territorial sovereignty, and his advocacy for a robust Arctic policy probably flows, in part, from his close relationship with professor Michael Byers, author of Who Owns the Arctic? Byers advocates for a Canada-Russia axis against the U.S. in advancing certain Arctic claims. And Mulcair reiterates, “We must work with our friend [read: U.S.], but not be afraid to act independently when our interests diverge – most notably on issues such as international trade and Arctic sovereignty.” But how does an alliance with a Vladimir Putin-led Russia vibe with Mulcair’s promise to deal with states that “oppose ethnic minorities and political dissenters”?

The above is conditional on a very big “if.” As Ibbitson puts it, “if Mulcair ever does swap Stornaway for 24 Sussex Dr., it will be because voters expect his government to be no further to the left than the Obama administration, just as the Harper government is no further to the right than the Cameron administration in Britain.” Mulcair, like Harper, is a pragmatist. Pragmatists want to get elected. And to get elected in this country, there are some foreign-policy postures that one must simply accept.

Photo courtesy of Reuters

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Chris Sabatini’s piece in the current edition of Foreign Affairs points out that the U.S. narrative on Latin America seems stuck in a 1980s time capsule. His assertion that Cold War thinking still dominates U.S. policymaker attitudes toward the region indicates that U.S. thinking is stuck in a completely different geopolitical reality than the one that we live in today. Social movements, electoral trends, and democratic development give little insight into the important relations between states in the region, and between the newly emerged states both within the region and outside it.

The rise of Brazil as a global power is promoting Colombia’s regional influence. The Chinese appetite for natural resources that are found in abundance in the hemisphere, and their gifts of bridges and soccer stadiums to several Latin American countries, are trends that U.S. students and policymakers should be watching and pondering, as should Canadians. Given the substantial investment that Canadian mining companies – and at least one major Canadian bank – have made in the region, on top of the Canadian government’s recent focus on the hemisphere via its “Americas Strategy,” the short-sightedness of U.S. policymakers that Sabatini laments is, in fact, an opportunity for Canada.

As Sabatini points out, while the U.S. lacks sufficient interest in, and understanding of, the rapidly changing geopolitical dynamics of Latin America, Canada can fill that void by taking seriously the actions of Latin America’s increasingly potent (and competitive) regional and global players. Informed Canadian engagement with countries in the region will be mutually beneficial, and could also influence U.S. policymakers, encouraging them to think about Latin America in terms of 2012 geopolitical realities.

The recent Republican  debates in the U.S. have demonstrated a staggering lack of understanding of Latin America. While fears of criminal networks becoming sufficiently internationalized to encompass and accommodate the jihadist threat are understandable in a post-9/11 world, the strong historic economic and social ties between Latin America and the United States should surely translate into a deeper understanding – and support – of the trends developing in these vibrant and often resource-rich countries. As Sabatini points out, “A little realism would go a long way.” But perhaps the historic legacy of U.S. activity in the region is too strong, and resentments too enduring.

Meanwhile, Canada is ideally positioned to deepen its relations with its hemispheric neighbours. Canada’s  experience of democratic institution-building – including its support for the development of judicial, educational, and policing systems in the region – and, in contrast to the U.S., its historical record of no military intervention in the region, show potential for mutually beneficial exchange and engagement with Latin American countries. Collaboration with Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico, for example, in the development of fossil fuels and biofuels as alternative energy sources would further integrate the hemisphere’s economy while de-emphasizing the importance of Venezuela’s oil. While Mexico’s security threats are an obvious concern, Canada could take the lead in partnering with Mexican researchers in areas that would provide entry for Mexico’s massive youth population into the knowledge-based economy. (In addition to clean energy, this could include areas such as biotechnology, aerospace, and health care for developing regions.) By fostering these relations, Canada would pave the way for other hemispheric partnerships, setting an example for the U.S. in its efforts to tackle governance, resource management, and environmental issues through regional investment and partnerships.

Given the U.S.’s preoccupation with security, transnational crime and its potential links to the jihadist threat might be a good place to start. But security is only one aspect of the global challenges facing the hemisphere, and cannot be addressed in isolation. Latin America needs partnerships in its natural-resource and associated sectors, in education and health-care research initiatives, and in bracing for climate change. Canada should fill that need, engaging with Latin America in a spectrum of areas that the U.S. and China have largely neglected.

Photo courtesy of Reuters

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But recently Canada has been making news on Foreign Policy‘s website, the one-stop-shop for any American interested in international affairs.

And it’s not just because a man who many political commentators have compared to the villain Penguin from Batman canceled a visit to Canada, citing concerns about his “personal security.”

First, after U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney won the Michigan primary and proclaimed, “I’ll get that oil from Canada that we deserve,” Vaclav Smil (a Canadian, but still one of Foreign Policy’s top global thinkers in 2010) noted that a “thank you” every once in a while from our neighbours to the south “would sure be nice.”

Only a week later, struck by news that Iceland might “go loonie,” Foreign Policy editor Joshua Keating brought attention to Laurence Smith’s argument that power is shifting not to the BRICs, but rather to the NORCs (northern rim countries).

Now, The Multilateralist’s David Bosco is taking note of OpenCanada’s debate on whether Canada should endorse Jeffrey Sachs’s candidacy for the presidency of the World Bank. Perhaps this is what happens when an international figure is compared to Dean Martin with keys to a liquor store. Regardless, it’s rare for anything Canadian to be modified with the adjective “feisty.”

Canada’s repeated presence on the web pages of Foreign Policy may be mere coincidence, but perhaps there is still a lesson to be learned.

As the G8 transforms into the G20 and an increasing number of emerging countries compete with Canada for status on the world stage, Canada no longer has the flexibility it once did to be a leader across many areas of international concern. Canada only has so much power on the international stage – to be effective, we must focus our efforts.

I’m not suggesting that we focus on oil. Or that we focus on Iceland. Or even that we focus on the End of Poverty. As Foreign Minister Baird embarks on a foreign-policy review, however, he would be well-advised to avoid publishing a broad overview of possible Canadian priorities. It’s better to stay narrow and dig deep. Then, maybe, a Canadian political leader could make it into Foreign Policy’s top global thinkers of 2012.

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If you didn’t know who Joseph Kony was before this week, there’s a good chance you know about him now — which is just what the San Diego-based NGO Invisible Children hoped its video, Kony 2012, would do. Its aim was “to make Joseph Kony famous, not to celebrate him, but to raise support for his arrest and set a precedent for international justice,”  But in the process, it also brought a lot of attention to Invisible Children itself, and not everybody liked what they saw. The NGO was criticized for its finances, its facts, and its mission.

Below is a brief timeline of how Invisible Children and its campaign to raise awareness of a Ugandan warlord  became the talk of the Internet in just one week.

February 20

The Kony 2012 video is first posted to Vimeo.

March 5

The Kony 2012 video is posted to YouTube. Invisible Children tweets that it gets 800,000 hits in the first 24 hours.

March 6

Kony 2012 starts to make waves on Twitter. “Kony” and “#KONY2012″ account for close to four percent of all tweets. The Invisible Children website is shut down for a quick redesign. Users are directed to Vimeo to watch the video until the site is back up.

March 7

Invisible Children sends a letter to U.S. President Obama urging him to redouble U.S. support for Uganda to catch Kony. Meanwhile, criticism of the campaign and the organization grows. A photo of the filmmakers brandishing AK-47s and a RPG launcher with members of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army makes its way around the Internet. Critics quickly jump on the photo, although few mention that it was taken in 2008. The photographer who took the shot responds by filling in some of the context.

March 8

Invisible Children responds to their critics with a new section on their website.

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Over 30 of those TSX-listed companies operating in Colombia are Canadian, and they, along with Canadian investors, largely welcome the more modern and reliable system for the registry of land and mineral rights heralded by Cárdenas. The changes are consistent with Colombia’s rebranding as a relatively secure state intolerant of corruption. By signing a free-trade agreement with Colombia, Canada acknowledged that rebranding while also acknowledging the deep trade and investment linkages already existent between the two countries. The vast majority of these linkages are in the oil and gas and mining sectors.

The strength, impact, and symbolism of Canada’s mining industry comprise an increasingly potent foreign-policy force. In fact, many of Canada’s FTAs are signed with countries in which Canada has a strong pre-existing mining presence. Aside from Colombia, Canada also recently signed FTAs with Peru, Honduras, and Panama. The agreements with Peru and Panama were preceded by Foreign Investment Promotion and Protection agreements, of which there are many between Canada and countries that host its mining activities, including Argentina, Armenia, Barbados, Madagascar, the Congo, and South Africa.

The link between Canada’s mining industry and its foreign policy was made explicit earlier this year, when the Canadian International Aid Agency (CIDA) proposed a development initiative in South America and Africa that would involve private sector partners from the Canadian mining industry. International Co-operation Minister Bev Oda then stoked controversy when she said of the distinction between Canada’s trade and foreign policy interests and its development goals, “I really don’t separate them.”

Suspicion of public and private sector motivations aside, it is unsurprising that the Canadian government takes the mining industry into account when it comes to foreign policy. The Canadian mining sector invests over $100 billion in assets in over 90 countries annually. Meanwhile, more than 80 per cent of global mining financing transactions and a third of global mining capital flow through the Toronto Stock Exchange. Mining exports account for less than four per cent of Canada’s GDP, but the activities of the mining industry’s global financial hub, the TSX, keep the Canadian mining industry on the map.

Events like the PDAC conference show Canada’s eagerness to match this global strength with global responsibility. The PDAC conference is not just a trade show like the Indaba conference hosted in Durban last month but an international educational event hosted by Canadians. PDAC holds dozens of sessions and workshops led or co-led by Canadians that provide technical training in a range of areas. Among these areas are best practices in exploration, land management, aboriginal relations, investment fundamentals, regulation, strategic communication and company management. PDAC also devotes a six-part event series to corporate social responsibility. Such events are crucial to Canada’s reputation as host not only of the industry’s financing but also of its best practices, cutting-edge technologies and reputable corporate cultures.

Industry activities do not a foreign policy make. But Canada’s mining legacy, from the Yukon Gold Rush to the rise of the Global Mining Index, is internationally recognized and respected. With responsible decisions from both the private and public sectors, it should remain that way.

Photo courtesy of Reuters

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• Sally Armstrong, journalist and member of the UN’s International Women’s Commission: If Thatcher made feminist foreign policy unpopular, Armstrong is bringing it back.
• Louise Arbour, International Crisis Group: The Canadian with the biggest impact on human rights is not a bachelor.  

• Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, Joyus.com: Former president of Google’s Asia-Pacific and Latin America operations, Singh Cassidy is Canada’s Sheryl Sandberg. 
• Lyse Doucet, BBC: The Canadian government may have had little role in the Egyptian Revolution, but, for many people around the world, the voice of the Arab Spring had a Canadian accent.

Watch OpenCanada’s interview with Lyse Doucet about reporting from Tahrir.

• Chrystia Freeland, Thomson-Reuters: If you buy Freeland’s argument that Bill Gates and Peter Munk have more power than Stephen Harper and John Baird, then don’t underestimate the power of the woman who keeps the pulse of the global elite.

Watch Chrystia Freeland’s interview with CIC Globalist of the Year Naguib Sawiris.

• Elissa Golberg, Canadian Ambassador to the United Nations: A Canadian woman has Ban Ki-moon’s ear.
• Moya Greene, Royal Mail: Delivering Canada’s message to her international audience.

• Naomi Klein, author: Occupy Wall Street has a Bay Street (Dundas West?) leader.

• Margaret MacMillan, University of Oxford: One woman changed the way we think about the three men who shaped the post-WWI peace.

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It is not September, and Brad Pitt is not promoting his latest film at the Toronto International Film Festival. Rather, it is the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada’s annual mining conference, and Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver is being treated, as Embassy Magazine put it, “like a rock star.”

It is not just celebrity that is different at this conference of over 30,000 rock jocks – it is also Canada’s reputation. Most Canadians have grown accustomed to a portrait of Canada as the place where innovation goes to die. Study upon study attempts to solve Canada’s “innovation gap.” Three years ago, at the request of the minister of industry, the Canadian Council of Academies released a report called “Innovation and Business Strategy: Why Canada Falls Short.” More recently, in response to another government request, an expert panel chaired by Tom Jenkins published, “Innovation Canada: A Call to Action.” Innovation is to Canada what the Stanley Cup is to the Leafs.

And yet, at this conference with representatives from over 120 countries, Canada is captain innovation. A group of miners from Argentina invoked a modern Louis Joliet as they described Canadian prospectors arriving in their country and exploring areas that Argentinians had never dared to explore. A group of Mexicans at the conference made Canada sound like Israel as they told the story of Canadian geologists using technology they had never seen before to extract copper from their soil. Aussies gathered around a table of Canadian scientists showcasing new digital surveying methods, oohing and awing as if they were watching Novak Djokovic beat Rafael Nadal in the Australian Open.

But Canada’s innovation reputation is not solely constrained to ways in which we interfere with the environment. Canada also seems to have some international stature on issues like corporate social responsibility. Yesterday, the CEO panel on this issue featured CEOs from several Canadian companies. With every “sustainability, eh?” I felt a twinge of Canadian pride.

Of course, it doesn’t hurt that this conference was held in Canada, or that Canada accounts for almost half of global mining activities. An Argentinian conference on beef might have made Argentina look innovative, too.

As Globe and Mail columnist Konrad Yakabuski made clear in his 2009 deep dive into Canada’s innovation gap, “Canada’s resource sector has a poor record of innovation.” Canadian levels of private research and development remain embarrassingly low, particularly in natural resources. It may be less that Canada’s level of mining innovation is high, and more that the mining industry’s standard for innovation is low.  

Photo courtesy Reuters.

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Thomas Pettitt, a professor of English at the University of Southern Denmark, argues that the communications revolution that Johannes Gutenberg triggered is an aberration in a much longer communications trajectory. The 500 years between 1500 and 2000, Pettitt claims, are to communications what the CN Tower is to the Toronto skyline: an exception. Pettitt maintains that oral culture is the norm, and that the print culture of the past half millennium represents a divergence from that norm. In other words, iPads and Google have much more in common with the oral storytelling and theatre of the Middle Ages than they do with books and magazines.

This theory has been coined the Gutenberg Parenthesis: the Gutenberg era of books represents an interruption – a parenthesis – in an otherwise smooth arc of human communication. 

The similarities between Jack Dorsey (founder of Twitter) and the medieval peasant may not be immediately apparent, but dig a little deeper and you’ll see that Pettitt has a point. In the current era, as with the pre-Gutenberg era, truth is malleable. Our sources of knowledge are no longer permanent – like libraries and indexes – but rather constantly evolving – like chat rooms and Google. There is no Encyclopedia Britannica to ground what we know. Instead, we rely on Wikipedia, where something may be true today but false tomorrow. Our digital networks of knowledge have more in common with a medieval town than they do with the national library.

But the similarities and differences extend beyond how and where we get our knowledge. During the book period, we relied on categories to organize information, but today – as in the pre-book period – there is no linearity to our organization of knowledge. Each time the Google SEO algorithm changes, so, too, does the structure of our knowledge. Similarly, in the pre-book period, a person’s reputation changed with every whisper through the town square.

During the book period, we grew accustomed to stories with beginnings, middles, and ends. Today, as in the pre-book period, our stories are constantly interrupted and changed. Consider how this interactive film compares to a history book about the Second World War. During the book period, culture took the form of individual works. In today’s online world, in a style similar to that of the oral, pre-book period, Twitter feeds and Facebook walls aggregate the input of multiple “authors.”

One does not expect a folklore scholar to declare a new theory of international relations, but I think Pettitt might be onto something. The period of the Gutenberg Parenthesis, after all, corresponds closely with what scholars of international relations might call the Westphalian period of state sovereignty.

The Peace of Westphalia was signed in 1648, and introduced the concept of territorial sovereignty, which grounded global politics for the subsequent 350 years or so. In the last few decades, sovereignty has lost its iron grip on international relations: Regional communities like the European Union have emerged, and intervening in other states has become the norm. In 2001, the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty fundamentally redefined sovereignty. The international community, the Responsibility to Protect affirmed, is obligated to intervene in a state that fails to protect its population from mass atrocities.

Many theories of international relations have tried to explain this devolution of sovereignty. Some have even drawn, without knowing, on the Gutenberg Parenthesis. Parag Khanna, for instance, argues that the modern city-state is replacing the state as the primary unit of international relations, so that the geography of the future looks very similar to that of medieval cities.  

It would take much more rigorous analysis to position the Westphalian system within the Gutenberg Parenthesis. But even preliminary analysis shows that the Westphalian system shares many characteristics of other parenthetical phenomena. The Westphalian system of states is remarkably linear, particularly in comparison to more networked theories of international relations. Political units, as defined in this system, are easily categorized and stagnant: A state may be failing from the inside but, as far as the Westphalian system is concerned, it remains a state. In the Westphalian system, communications occurs between presidents, Prime Ministers and appointed diplomats, not between amorphous communities of digital diplomats. And a state’s history is the product of treaties, not Wikileaks.

Whether or not you believe Facebook caused the Arab Spring, there is no doubt that new methods of communication are changing the dynamics of international relations. Drawing on English folk drama, communications theory is making strides in making sense of the many-to-many dynamic of Google, Twitter and the like. Perhaps it is time for international relations to do the same.

Photo courtesy Reuters.

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First, tones of aggression or embitterment following the U.S. Keystone rejection risk making the trip’s accomplishments, such as the Foreign Investment Promotion and Protection Agreement signed by Prime Minister Harper in Beijing last week, seem quaint. Second, unless Canada is prepared to take sides in a conflict, it should be careful not to frame escalating relations with one superpower as occurring at the expense of relations with another. Canadian international policy is most certainly not a zero-sum game.

Christopher Sands writes on this website that middle powers are susceptible to two foreign policy traps – excessive motivation by domestic politics and the pursuit of “the perception of relevance, rather than accomplishment.” Canada can avoid both of these traps by treating multilateralism as an avenue for accomplishment.  As the CIC’s GPS report points out, “Multilateralism is a means to an end… There is no prestige in merely being at the table. All that matters is results.”

The key, of course, is to ensure that we are not left out of multilateral meetings where we actually do want to participate. This often means managing the intersection of domestic and international political manoeuvring, and with a much stronger awareness of the international dimension than short-term domestic interests take into account. The Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership is a case in point. As one of CIC’s Rapid Responders, Laura Dawson describes in a recent CD Howe report that Canada is not welcome at the TPP table because our supply management system of certain agricultural products is widely considered highly protectionist. Meanwhile, Mexico, one of Canada’s NAFTA partners, is keen to get to  the table, increasing the attractiveness – and risks of exclusion – for Canada.  If Mexico joins the TPP and Canada does not, the growing trade and investment relationship between Canada and Mexico will slow down, weakening the fabric of a North American trilateralism, which is where Canada should focus its efforts. As two prominent North Americanists, Stephen Blank and Isabel Studer, have pointed out many times, Canadians don’t just trade with each other, they make things together.

A sure way to make multilateralism a source of both Canadian relevance and accomplishment is to use it as a means of finding solutions to global issues. Canada should encourage collaborative North American approaches not only to manufacturing, but also to climate change, clean-energy solutions and infrastructure improvement, among other issues that affect the three North American countries equally. If multilateralism is a means to an end, the most ambitious multilateralism is a means to solving pressing global challenges.

Photo courtesy Reuters.

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This week, OpenCanada joined The Economist, Ian Bremmer, and the other ambassadors of state capitalism to prove Adam Smith wrong. While there was disagreement over whether only the hands of the BRICs were becoming visible, all concurred that capitalism is becoming increasingly fettered by the state: global economic freedom is on the wane, the biggest companies in the world have names like Sinopec, China National Petroleum Corporation, and Japan Post Holdings.

And yet Canada remains a striking outlier. According to the Fraser Institute, economic freedom in this country is higher than in many of our peer countries, including the United States and the United Kingdom. Among countries with natural resources, we stick out like the oil sands in an Edward Burtynsky photograph. The graph below shows the ten countries with the greatest oil reserves in the world. Canada is the only one without a national oil company.

Shortly after the Keystone XL decision, Slate published an article titled “Saudi Arabia. Nigeria. Venezuela. Canada? Is our neighbor to the north becoming a jingoistic petro-state?” This graphic suggests otherwise.

Graphic by Cameron Tulk.

The post What Ever Happened to Petro Canada? appeared first on Canadian International Council - Canada's hub for international affairs.

The report’s title is based on its strategy: a cross-country review of Canada’s foreign-policy interests conducted by Edward Greenspon, former editor-in-chief of The Globe and Mail, and his globally oriented, digital-age panel members.

When the Open Canada report was released in June 2010, Canada was assuming the highly visible international profile that it, for better or worse, currently sustains: The Olympic Games had been held in Vancouver that winter, and the G8 and G20 meetings were held in June in Hunstville and Toronto, and were associated with considerable controversy, both at home and abroad.

The CIC chose that moment to take stock of Canada’s international interests in order to make strategic recommendations to our government for navigating the uncharted waters of rapidly shifting geopolitical dynamics and technological change, particularly in communications. The CIC also chose to take advantage of its unique position as an independent, member-based council promoting foreign-policy discussion nationwide by engaging CIC members and branches in the research process. As one of our signature bloggers notes on this website, a foreign-policy review “should be subjected to rigorous discussion across government, and with Canadians.” By involving a wide variety of Canadian constituencies, the Global Positioning Strategy (GPS) panel was able to calibrate the demands of the international moment with the expressed interests and values of Canadian citizens, whose lives, hopes, and future are directly affected by foreign-policy directions and decisions.

The GPS group presented a set of guiding principles on which to base a global positioning strategy. These principles included: the priority of enhancing Canada’s global economic position and the tenet that national interests do not wear partisan badges; and the understanding that international policy is closely intertwined with domestic policy, and that a networked world means that international engagement takes place on many levels among constituencies whose interests have rapidly been internationalized. The report made recommendations for enhancing Canadian international influence and prosperity on issues such as relations with our North American and hemispheric neighbours and the emerging Asian giants, environment and energy, the Arctic, development, aid, and defence policy, all while exploring the new avenues for multilateralism created by technological change.

The CIC believes that a Canadian foreign-policy review must embrace the networked nature of the multilateral world. In fact, we think the Open Canada report made such a good case for the digital nature of Canada’s international future that we gave its name to our website, which seeks to aggregate the best ideas on international issues and presents them for discussion among Canadians nationwide. OpenCanada.org continues with the call to action of the Open Canada report – a call on all Canadians, not just those in government, to “concentrate our minds” on the international issues that directly impact our lives and determine our prosperity. OpenCanada.org is part of the international affairs discussion. Please join in.

The post A Call To Action appeared first on Canadian International Council - Canada's hub for international affairs.

Though one was an urbanist and the other a philosopher, Jacobs and McLuhan both predicted this shift. Jacobs’ urban writings and grassroots activism on behalf of the city are well documented, but McLuhan, too, took a deep interest in cities – and not just in an indirect “global village” type-of-way. McLuhan commented on the “rich community effects” caused “simply by locating dwellings in non-linear patterns” and drew parallels between a suburb killing an old city and a new medium killing an old one. In fact, Jacobs and McLuhan served together on the Stop Spadina, Save Our City Coordinating Committee and produced a short film in support of their cause (Jacobs was apparently amazed that McLuhan’s unsystematic narrative produced such a compelling visual tale).

As we reflect on 2011, and move forward into an increasingly city-dominated world (in 2007, for first the first time, the world’s population became more urban than rural, and this trend continues), it is worth considering what these two Canadians – or, more appropriately, Torontonians – taught us about global politics.

The first lesson they taught us is that national borders are quickly disappearing. In the “age of the information explosion,” as McLuhan put it, walls between nations and economies will blow out. And what will be left amid the rubble? Dense communities of individuals who have, in McLuhan’s words, “adjusted to the new proximity.” The city will become the lifeblood of the state. Canada will be nothing without Toronto (or Vancouver, or Montreal, or Calgary), the U.S. nothing without New York, and Japan nothing without Tokyo. More importantly, Haerbin, Shantou, Guiyang, and the other cities McKinsey names in its report on global cities of the future will wield far more power than many states.

In this scenario, David Cameron’s decision to place the concerns of “the City” above those of the rest of England in opting out of the Brussels Treaty seems less political, and more prescient. So, too, do the efforts of the C40, a group of cities working to solve climate change, and trade deals between Hamburg and Dubai, and Abu Dhabi and Singapore. Less so are treaties signed between nations – and not cities – such as the Kyoto Protocol, the perimeter border deal, and countless Free Trade Agreements.

The second lesson is that, without the proper governance structures, this environment of close proximity will be a scary place. Yes, “the medium is the message” – but how? McLuhan argued that the shift in how we communicate would change us neurologically – and not into David Brooks-imagined “social animals” excelling at everything in a peaceful world. Rather, we would regress to primal tendencies, devolving into bicameral humans who operate unconsciously and automatically.

When the world is a hockey rink and its inhabitants David Steckels (and not Sidney Crosbys), global governance systems are crucial. With the exception of the intervention in Libya, 2011 proved another year in the United Nations’ slide toward irrelevance. As Parag Khanna argues, we need global institutions built on “cities and their economies rather than nations and their armies.” Jane Jacobs recognized this a long time ago when she observed that democratization is no longer the purview of states, and proceeded to develop the concept of “localism.” Next week, we will have the opportunity to evaluate how a new form of global diplomacy might work when diplomats of the digital age – prime and finance ministers, but also mayors, academics, and Bono – come together at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

Finally, McLuhan and Jacobs taught us to plan our cities with global visions. As Jacobs described them, cities are active urban organisms that require the proper nourishment to flourish. This may not come in the form of a gravy train, but it does require a certain amount of funding. As the Toronto City Council prepares to cut TTC services and close shelters, pools, and city programming, we should think about what this means, not just for Toronto, but for Canada’s place in the world. 

Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

The post The Global Village, Circa 2012 appeared first on Canadian International Council - Canada's hub for international affairs.

In terms of financial stability, we are in an enviable position. As chair of the Financial Stability Board, Mark Carney is a new kind of multilateral ambassador. A stable and equitable international financial system is the best start to addressing an issue that the global community is realizing could be the defining problem of our age: inequality both within and between nations. Canada is in a unique position to lead by example. Inequality in this country is on the rise, but, due to our solid financial performance over the last five years, we have the flexibility to use a myriad of tools to address this challenge. If we act quickly and decisively, we have the chance to set Canada up as the global leader in this area.

Second, Canada has one of the largest and most diverse diaspora populations in the world. While our total investment in emerging economies is strangely – and embarrassingly – low, we can turn that performance around by leveraging the almost three million Canadians living abroad, who total close to 10 per cent of Canadians. We should sustain our recent engagement with China by relying on our vast diaspora network, using human ties as a foundation for economic linkages. Our Indian diaspora should be pushing us to be much more proactive in terms of Canada-India engagement and partnerships in a wide variety of areas. Our much smaller Latin American diaspora should be growing, encouraged by the expanding trade and education linkages between the region and Canada that have been witnessed in recent months.

Canada also has strong human ties to Syria and Russia, which is a good reason to pay close attention to the changes taking place in those countries. With its history of helping to build legal, financial, educational, and security infrastructure at home and in developing countries, Canada is in a unique position to be a global leader as these countries undergo transformation. Moreover, unlike many other countries with similar democratic histories, we are perceived by many developing countries as less burdened by special interests. Let’s not wait until the last moment to demonstrate our willingness and ability to be supportive and encouraging of democracy movements everywhere.

This also applies to the fledgling democracy in our NAFTA partnership. Being supportive and helpful to Mexico will not only allow Canada to capitalize on its geographical proximity to large markets, but will also earn us the respect of the United States, for which Latin America represents a point of major concern. Given the number of strategic trade and commerce relationships in the hemisphere, it is pragmatic to engage more fully with our neighbours.

It has long be an argument that bad media is better than no media. Let’s make this true. Canada’s withdrawal from Kyoto has given the country more international profile than it saw after Roméo Dallaire commanded the UN mission in Rwanda, after Lloyd Axworthy ratified the Ottawa Treaty, and after it introduced the concept of the Responsibility to Protect to the world. Not since the days of Lester B. Pearson – or perhaps the ’72 series – has Canada achieved such international notice.

The time is ripe for Canada to show the world that its levers of international impact go beyond withdrawal. Canada is ideally positioned to be a global leader of the future. With our unmatched reputation for economic stability, we can advise other countries in tackling the problems of the post-Occupy world. With our unrivalled diaspora outreach, we boast a network of informal ambassadors poised to act in the age of new diplomacy. And with our history of developing the central institutions of civic society, we can provide crucial support to the countries that, in the wake of democratic transformation, will become pillars of international society.   

Photo courtesy Reuters.

The post Bad Media is Better Than None. appeared first on Canadian International Council - Canada's hub for international affairs.

In our inaugural Dispatch post, Taylor Owen suggested four ways to adapt the Canadian foreign-policy discussion to new global dynamics. OpenCanada is still in its infancy but, with the end of 2011, we reflect on the site’s progress in these four areas:

(i)            We desperately need innovation of ideas.

While Canada boasts a wealth of top thinkers on international relations, they rarely interact outside of the academic world. Instead, their ideas are presented publicly isolated in newspapers, with little room for commentary or discussion. The Roundtable blog seeks to give a group of Canada’s top foreign-policy innovators a place to share ideas, and to give the Canadian public a portal into their conversations.

Sixty-one blog posts later, Roundtable has delivered, producing OpenCanada’s two highest-traffic-generating pieces – Roland Paris’ “What is Stephen Harper Afraid of?” and John Hancock’s “Quitting Kyoto: Un-Canadian” – and prompting vigorous debate about the Responsibility to Protect in Libya and Canada’s China policy. All addressed ideology in the context of foreign affairs, challenging the widespread notion of an “ideal, centrist, moderate foreign policy.” 

This desire to confront ideology permeated other areas of the site as well, with the Think Tank inviting four prominent conservatives to answer the question “What Does Conservative Foreign Policy Look Like?”, and the Rapid Response asking, “Is Conservative foreign policy different from Liberal foreign policy?” Jennifer Welsh’s critique of David Cameron’s brand of British Exceptionalism caught the Daily Beast’s Andrew Sullivan’s attention, spurring an international discussion of transatlantic conservatism.

(ii)          We must reform, dismantle, or replace the institutions through which we conduct foreign policy.

The Arab Spring demonstrated the promise of new technology in pushing global governance away from hierarchy. OpenCanada embraced this trend, particularly through our Rapid Response feature. Each week, for 24 weeks, we asked a select group of high-profile Canadians a question via email. This has provided unique personal and direct insight from 25 of Canada’s top foreign-policy thinkers on 24 different issues. For the first time, Canadians were able to hear what Rob Prichard and Janice Stein really believe should be John Baird’s priority, what former UN ambassador Paul Heinbecker seriously thinks about Ethical Oil, and if Roméo Dallaire sees secession as the solution to African conflicts. The questions that solicited the greatest response were, “What issue should John Baird prioritize?” and “Are diplomats needed in the digital age?”

(iii)         We must meaningfully engage and incentivize the new foreign-policy actors.

OpenCanada recognizes that it is not only the procedures of global governance that require updating; it is also the actors. The principal drivers of Canadian foreign policy are no longer the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade and the Canadian International Development Agency – they are the individuals, corporations, and groups working at the new intersections of domestic and international affairs.

Before we can incentivize these actors, we must identify them. To this end, OpenCanada has sought to broaden the definition of who qualifies as a foreign-affairs actor with series’ on Canada’s diaspora, Canada’s stake in intellectual property, and the Canadian manufacturing sector.

Two of OpenCanada’s most popular pieces were written by rising academics studying Africa. Erin Baines of the University of British Columbia wrote about U.S. President Barack Obama’s challenge to Uganda and Sudan’s Lord’s Resistance Army, spurring international Twitter debate about the implications. After the recent Congo elections, Oxford’s Emily Paddon’s “Beyond Elections in the Congo” drew large global readership, including thousands of views from within the Congo thanks to its mention by a prominent Congolese blog.

(iv)         We must base our foreign policy in the tools and tactics of a networked world.

OpenCanada recognizes that it is not only the actors of global governance that require updating; it is also their methods. We seek to actively innovate in this new and rapidly changing space. The #cdnfp Twitterati list, our active @TheCIC handle, and our Readings section have all sought to bring together the emerging online debate of Canadian foreign policy. More broadly, though, Canadians clearly agree that aggregation and “super-curation,” as Anne-Marie Slaughter puts it, are the editing practices of the future. Beyond Canada, the most meaningful and innovative international-affairs conversation is now almost exclusively online, with key content nodes around the world forming the core of a global network of audience, reader, and content creators. This media space is immensely exciting, and rapidly changing, and we intend to be a part of it.

There is no reason to think that the next six months will not bring as much change to Canadian foreign policy as the past six did. In preparation, we are experimenting with new ways of stimulating conversation and broadening our reach. In January, we will launch our Future of Aid series, creating a platform for discussion among five of the top thinkers on international development. As part of this, we will launch our video conversation technology, taking Facebook chat to a new level. Later in the year, we will delve into the future of Canada’s military and the complexity of contemporary supply webs.

For us, this will be a year of rapid expansion of both our content and staff. A year of constant platform and technological experimentation. A year of pushing Canadians and Canadian international affairs into the global conversation. We hope you will join us!

2011 OpenCanada Content Glossary

Think Tanks:

For each Think Tank, we ask a group of experts and practitioners to reflect on an international policy issue.  Here are the subjects we explored in 2011.

• Are Social Media Driving the Arab Spring?
• Is Good Banking Regulation Good Foreign Policy?
• Can Diplomacy and History be Transparent?
• How Can Canada Engage its Diaspora?
• Can War Be Beautiful?
• Who Shot Ahmed Wali Karzai?
• Will Germany Kill Europe?
• Did al-Qaeda Hijack the Terrorism Discourse?
• Canada Navigates China’s Rise
• Is Brazil the Key BRIC?
• Sitting on the Stimulus
• What Does Conservative Foreign Policy Look Like?
• Does IP Policy = FP?
• The CIC and CCA Welcome Colombia’s President
• Does Brazil Care about Canada?
• Diplomacy in the Digital Age
• Tweeting Genocide
• Will Globalization Kill Canadian Manufacturing?
• A Billionaire Revolutionary?
• Perimeter: NAFTA 2.0?
• How We Fight

Essays: 

Stand alone essays are individual long-form contributions

• Colin Robertson’s ‘Could the Great Lakes Represents Canada’s Economic Future?
• Erin Baines’ ‘Target or Captives? Obama’s LRA Challenge’
• Simon Wexler-Collard’s ‘Designing Institutions for a New Libya’
• Jean-Frédéric Légaré-Tremblay’s ‘Ghengis Khan Keeps an Eye on his Riches’
• Emily Paddon’s ‘Beyond Elections in the Congo’
•  ‘How can Canada Engage its Diaspora?’: Patrick Johnson
• Canada Navigates China’s Rise’: Joanna Wong and Michael Hart
• What Does Conservative Foreign Policy Look Like?’: Hugh Segal
• ‘The CIC and CCA Welcome Colombia’s President’: Stephen Randall
• ‘A Billionaire Revolutionary?’: Paul Sedra and Bessma Momani
• ‘How We Fight’: Stephanie Carvin, John Tirman, Michael Spagat and Leslie Roberts

Interviews

We have conducted a wide range of interviews, by phone, email, video recording and online chat.

• ‘Is Canadian Liberal Internationalism Dead?’ with Andrew Cohen
• ‘What is Canada’s Legacy in Afghanistan?’ with Graeme Smith
• ‘The World Focused on Oslo’ with Kristian Berg Harpviken
• ‘When Civil War and Drought Collide’ with Chris Tidey
• ‘Ignatieff’s Greatest Success?’ with Michael Ignatieff
• ‘Tales from Tahrir’ with Lyse Doucet
• ‘Al Qaeda: A Hostage Reflects’ with Robert Fowler
• ‘Are Social Media Driving the Arab Spring?’: Sarah Abdurrahman, Sonia Verma, Brian Stewart and Jillian York
• ‘Is Good Banking Regulation Good Foreign Policy’: Chrystia Freeland, Colin Robertson and John Manley
• ‘Can Diplomacy and History by Transparent’?: Margaret MacMillan, Clay Shirky and Jeremy Kinsman
• ‘Can War be Beautiful?’: Danfung Dennis and Sophie Hackett
• ‘Who Shot Ahmed Wali Karzai?’: Mark Sedra and Matthieu Aikins
• ‘Will Germany Kill Europe?’: Louis Pauly, Brian Milner and Hans Kundnani
• ‘Did al-Qaeda Hijack the Terrorism Discourse?’: Stephen Walt, Mark Juergensmeyer and Sean Brighton
• ‘Canada Navigates China’s Rise’: Paul Evans and Jon Penney
• ‘Is Brazil the Key BRIC?’: Ted Hewitt, Raul Papaleo and Richard Pound
• ‘Sitting on the Stimulus’: Catherine Swift and John Curtis
• ‘What Does Conservative Foreign Policy Look Like?’: Adam Daifallah, David Bercuson and Nicholas Gafuik
• ‘Does IP Policy = FP?’: Rafi Hofstein, David Wolfe and Richard Gold
• ‘The CIC and CCA Welcome Colombia’s President’: Arlene Tickner
• ‘Does Brazil Care About Canada?”: Paul Knox, Jamal Khokhar, Joao Augusto de Castro Neve, Christopher Garman, Jean Daudelin and Susan Kaufman Purcell
• ‘Diplomacy in the Digital Age’: William Thorsell, Brian Box, Ed Greenspon and Drew Fagan
• ‘Tweeting Genocide’: Rick MacInnes-Rae, Mona Eltahawy, Gordon Smith, Roméo Dallaire and André Pratte
• ‘Will Globalization Kill Manufacturing?’: Jim Milway, Andrea-Mandel-Campbell, Stephen Chase, Christopher Sands and Edward Burtynsky
• ‘Perimeter: NAFTA 2.0?’ Duncan Wood
• ‘How We Fight’: Peter Singer, Michael Rubin

Editorial Content

These stand alone pieces were developed in-house by our editorial staff.

• Who are the #cdnfp Twitterati?
• 10 Ways 9/11 Changed Canadian Foreign Policy
• Canada’s Stance on Palestine
• Occupy vs. The Tea Party
• A Story of Widgets
• Sawiris: Globalist of the Year
• Counting the Dead

Rapid Response Questions:

Each of the questions below, was sent to a group of Canadian international affairs experts.

• What issue should John Baird prioritize?
• How has Canada’s experience in Afghanistan changed Canadian foreign policy?
• Can Lagarde and the IMF save the Euro?
• Should Canada strengthen its military presence in the Arctic?
• Does last week’s creation of a Southern Sudanese state point to secession as the solution to other African conflicts?
• What’s the ultimate objective of Harper’s softer stance on China?
• Should we view the Oslo attack as an arbitrary act or as a reflection of wider political and religious extremism?
• Was Jason Kenney’s public outing of 30 wanted war criminals legitimate and / or effective?
• What societal problems have the London riots exposed?
• Does the ‘royal’ rebranding of the Canadian Forces have a wider meaning?
• What would be the regional fallout from the end of Assad’s regime?
• Is Conservative foreign policy different from Liberal foreign policy?
• If 9/11 defined the last decade, will the Arab Spring define the next?
• Is a U.N. resolution on Palestinian statehood a step forward or backward for the Israel-Palestine conflict?
• Is the Ethical Oil Campaign helping or hurting Canada’s international reputation?
• Is Jean Monnet’s dream for Europe ending in nightmare?
• Should Canada treat its intellectual property as a national asset?
• Are diplomats needed in the digital age?
• Why commemorate the War of 1812?
• Could the spread of information via digital media reduce mass atrocities?
• How can the G20 help save the euro zone?
• Can the Egyptian revolution be counted a success while the Armed Forces remain in power?
• With the delay in Keystone XL, will attention now shift to the Northern Gateway?
• What is the best international affairs book of 2011?
• What was Canada’s best international moment of 2011?

The Roundtable:

Gregory Chin:

• Global Leadership at Cannes: China’s Arrival or What Happened to America?
• Dear Prime Minister Harper – A Good Time for an Asia Strategy
• Dear Prime Minister Harper – A Good Time for an Asia Strategy, Part II

André Pratte:

• Questions on Libya and R2P
• The Provocation Flotilla
• God Save the Superstars!
• What Future for the Euro?
• Somalia: No Water. No Solution.
• Power Corrupts. Even the Fourth.
• Norway: Tweeting at the Speed of Light.
• Libya and Canada’s “New” Foreign Policy
• The Canadian Forces are Royal… and Obese (Again)
• Obama’s Jolt: Will it Work?
• Secrets? What Secrets?
• Desperately Looking for Leadership

Jennifer Welsh:

• Question, Challenge and Dispute 
• Libya and R2P
• In Defence of R2P
• Canada’s Bush?
• Blame the Bobbies
• The Big Deal? The Big Distraction.
• What’s Next for Capitalism?
• Rights and Responsibilities in a Post- Qaddafi Libya
• In Conversation on Libya
• The Folly of Europe Bashing
• Recognizing States and Governments – A Tricky Business
• The Impact of 9/11 on the Ethics of Military Action
• It’s About Politics, Not Economics
• Revenge of the Technocrats
• How New is the Threat of Cyber Attack?
• British Exceptionalism and the ‘National Interest’

Photo courtesy Reuters.

The post 2011 Roundup appeared first on Canadian International Council - Canada's hub for international affairs.

Think Tanks:

For each Think Tank, we ask a group of experts and practitioners to reflect on an international policy issue.  Here are the subjects we explored in 2011.

• Are Social Media Driving the Arab Spring?
• Is Good Banking Regulation Good Foreign Policy?
• Can Diplomacy and History be Transparent?
• How Can Canada Engage its Diaspora?
• Can War Be Beautiful?
• Who Shot Ahmed Wali Karzai?
• Will Germany Kill Europe?
• Did al-Qaeda Hijack the Terrorism Discourse?
• Canada Navigates China’s Rise
• Is Brazil the Key BRIC?
• Sitting on the Stimulus
• What Does Conservative Foreign Policy Look Like?
• Does IP Policy = FP?
• The CIC and CCA Welcome Colombia’s President
• Does Brazil Care about Canada?
• Diplomacy in the Digital Age
• Tweeting Genocide
• Will Globalization Kill Canadian Manufacturing?
• A Billionaire Revolutionary?
• Perimeter: NAFTA 2.0?
• How We Fight

Essays: 

Stand alone essays are individual long-form contributions

• Colin Robertson’s ‘Could the Great Lakes Represents Canada’s Economic Future?
• Erin Baines’ ‘Target or Captives? Obama’s LRA Challenge’
• Simon Wexler-Collard’s ‘Designing Institutions for a New Libya’
• Jean-Frédéric Légaré-Tremblay’s ‘Ghengis Khan Keeps an Eye on his Riches’
• Emily Paddon’s ‘Beyond Elections in the Congo’
•  ‘How can Canada Engage its Diaspora?’: Patrick Johnson
• Canada Navigates China’s Rise’: Joanna Wong and Michael Hart
• What Does Conservative Foreign Policy Look Like?’: Hugh Segal
• ‘The CIC and CCA Welcome Colombia’s President’: Stephen Randall
• ‘A Billionaire Revolutionary?’: Paul Sedra and Bessma Momani
• ‘How We Fight’: Stephanie Carvin, John Tirman, Michael Spagat and Leslie Roberts

Interviews

We have conducted a wide range of interviews, by phone, email, video recording and online chat.

• ‘Is Canadian Liberal Internationalism Dead?’ with Andrew Cohen
• ‘What is Canada’s Legacy in Afghanistan?’ with Graeme Smith
• ‘The World Focused on Oslo’ with Kristian Berg Harpviken
• ‘When Civil War and Drought Collide’ with Chris Tidey
• ‘Ignatieff’s Greatest Success?’ with Michael Ignatieff
• ‘Tales from Tahrir’ with Lyse Doucet
• ‘Al Qaeda: A Hostage Reflects’ with Robert Fowler
• ‘Are Social Media Driving the Arab Spring?’: Sarah Abdurrahman, Sonia Verma, Brian Stewart and Jillian York
• ‘Is Good Banking Regulation Good Foreign Policy’: Chrystia Freeland, Colin Robertson and John Manley
• ‘Can Diplomacy and History by Transparent’?: Margaret MacMillan, Clay Shirky and Jeremy Kinsman
• ‘Can War be Beautiful?’: Danfung Dennis and Sophie Hackett
• ‘Who Shot Ahmed Wali Karzai?’: Mark Sedra and Matthieu Aikins
• ‘Will Germany Kill Europe?’: Louis Pauly, Brian Milner and Hans Kundnani
• ‘Did al-Qaeda Hijack the Terrorism Discourse?’: Stephen Walt, Mark Juergensmeyer and Sean Brighton
• ‘Canada Navigates China’s Rise’: Paul Evans and Jon Penney
• ‘Is Brazil the Key BRIC?’: Ted Hewitt, Raul Papaleo and Richard Pound
• ‘Sitting on the Stimulus’: Catherine Swift and John Curtis
• ‘What Does Conservative Foreign Policy Look Like?’: Adam Daifallah, David Bercuson and Nicholas Gafuik
• ‘Does IP Policy = FP?’: Rafi Hofstein, David Wolfe and Richard Gold
• ‘The CIC and CCA Welcome Colombia’s President’: Arlene Tickner
• ‘Does Brazil Care About Canada?”: Paul Knox, Jamal Khokhar, Joao Augusto de Castro Neve, Christopher Garman, Jean Daudelin and Susan Kaufman Purcell
• ‘Diplomacy in the Digital Age’: William Thorsell, Brian Box, Ed Greenspon and Drew Fagan
• ‘Tweeting Genocide’: Rick MacInnes-Rae, Mona Eltahawy, Gordon Smith, Roméo Dallaire and André Pratte
• ‘Will Globalization Kill Manufacturing?’: Jim Milway, Andrea-Mandel-Campbell, Stephen Chase, Christopher Sands and Edward Burtynsky
• ‘Perimeter: NAFTA 2.0?’ Duncan Wood
• ‘How We Fight’: Peter Singer, Michael Rubin

Editorial Content

These stand alone pieces were developed in-house by our editorial staff.

• Who are the #cdnfp Twitterati?
• 10 Ways 9/11 Changed Canadian Foreign Policy
• Canada’s Stance on Palestine
• Occupy vs. The Tea Party
• A Story of Widgets
• Sawiris: Globalist of the Year
• Counting the Dead

Rapid Response Questions:

Each of the questions below, was sent to a group of Canadian international affairs experts.

• What issue should John Baird prioritize?
• How has Canada’s experience in Afghanistan changed Canadian foreign policy?
• Can Lagarde and the IMF save the Euro?
• Should Canada strengthen its military presence in the Arctic?
• Does last week’s creation of a Southern Sudanese state point to secession as the solution to other African conflicts?
• What’s the ultimate objective of Harper’s softer stance on China?
• Should we view the Oslo attack as an arbitrary act or as a reflection of wider political and religious extremism?
• Was Jason Kenney’s public outing of 30 wanted war criminals legitimate and / or effective?
• What societal problems have the London riots exposed?
• Does the ‘royal’ rebranding of the Canadian Forces have a wider meaning?
• What would be the regional fallout from the end of Assad’s regime?
• Is Conservative foreign policy different from Liberal foreign policy?
• If 9/11 defined the last decade, will the Arab Spring define the next?
• Is a U.N. resolution on Palestinian statehood a step forward or backward for the Israel-Palestine conflict?
• Is the Ethical Oil Campaign helping or hurting Canada’s international reputation?
• Is Jean Monnet’s dream for Europe ending in nightmare?
• Should Canada treat its intellectual property as a national asset?
• Are diplomats needed in the digital age?
• Why commemorate the War of 1812?
• Could the spread of information via digital media reduce mass atrocities?
• How can the G20 help save the euro zone?
• Can the Egyptian revolution be counted a success while the Armed Forces remain in power?
• With the delay in Keystone XL, will attention now shift to the Northern Gateway?
• What is the best international affairs book of 2011?
• What was Canada’s best international moment of 2011?

The Roundtable:

Gregory Chin:

• Global Leadership at Cannes: China’s Arrival or What Happened to America?
• Dear Prime Minister Harper – A Good Time for an Asia Strategy
• Dear Prime Minister Harper – A Good Time for an Asia Strategy, Part II

André Pratte:

• Questions on Libya and R2P
• The Provocation Flotilla
• God Save the Superstars!
• What Future for the Euro?
• Somalia: No Water. No Solution.
• Power Corrupts. Even the Fourth.
• Norway: Tweeting at the Speed of Light.
• Libya and Canada’s “New” Foreign Policy
• The Canadian Forces are Royal… and Obese (Again)
• Obama’s Jolt: Will it Work?
• Secrets? What Secrets?
• Desperately Looking for Leadership

Jennifer Welsh:

• Question, Challenge and Dispute 
• Libya and R2P
• In Defence of R2P
• Canada’s Bush?
• Blame the Bobbies
• The Big Deal? The Big Distraction.
• What’s Next for Capitalism?
• Rights and Responsibilities in a Post- Qaddafi Libya
• In Conversation on Libya
• The Folly of Europe Bashing
• Recognizing States and Governments – A Tricky Business
• The Impact of 9/11 on the Ethics of Military Action
• It’s About Politics, Not Economics
• Revenge of the Technocrats
• How New is the Threat of Cyber Attack?
• British Exceptionalism and the ‘National Interest’

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First, David Cameron vetoed a new EU-wide treaty designed to address the eurozone’s economic plight. Jennifer Welsh repudiated any analogy between Cameron’s embrace of “splendid and detached isolation” and Churchill’s over 70 years earlier. While going alone served the British national interest then, in a world of Globalization 3.0 (as Friedman describes it), the case is much less clear. The financial sector accounts for only 10 per cent of British GDP – was spurning key allies like France and Germany really worth saving the city? It would be one thing if Cameron had closed the door to Europe with the intention of opening it to, say, China. It appears, however, that he simply said a Tory ta-ta to globalization.

Then, as John Hancock put it, Canada gave the finger to the rest of the world over Kyoto. For all of its inadequacies, Kyoto represented a global solution to a global problem. Like the Montreal protocol before it, Kyoto accepted that certain problems cannot be dealt with by individual nations acting alone. It implicitly acknowledged that national borders are coming down – that globalization is as much of a reality as global warming. Canada’s withdrawal, then, represented another Tory ta-ta to globalization.

Canada’s no – and Britain’s, to a lesser extent – was incredibly shortsighted. It is not just Chiquita banana that took note – so, too, did international organizations like Oxfam (which tweeted that it was “an affront to poor people fighting #climate change around the world”) and the international media (like The Globe’s Doug Saunders, who tweeted: “You can just watch Canada’s international reputation collapse in the international press this morning. All to save $14 billion”).

But perhaps there is something more profound afoot. While David Cameron and Peter Kent were playing Scrooge, some thoughtful people were also questioning the merits of globalization.

First, Mark Carney, speaking at an Empire Club event, explained, “Europe’s problems are partly a product of the initial success of the single currency. After its launch, cross-border lending exploded. Easy money fed booms, which flattered government fiscal position and supported bank balance sheets.” He went on to describe how this irrational exuberance masked massive imbalances in national inflation rates, labour costs, and other crucial metrics.

Carney, chairman of the Financial Stability Board, clearly believes in finding global solutions to complex problems. His remarks simply suggest that he has a healthy suspicion of jumping into the integration process too quickly – without adequate safeguards in place.

Then I had the fortune of interviewing Samantha Nutt, founder of War Child, in preparation for our upcoming series on the Future of Aid. In her new Damned Nations: Greed, Guns, Armies and Aid (McClelland), Nutt is immensely critical of programs that send untrained students who are in their “gap years” to support relief efforts. She argues that these self-proclaimed aid workers do more harm than good. “With every school that is built by well-meaning western volunteers in impoverished villages in Africa,” she writes, “there is one less opportunity to provide employment and skills training to young people living in these communities.”

This all begs the question: If we are to develop a future generation of global citizens, don’t we need them to see the world’s problems first hand? Like Carney, Nutt believes that global integration is an inescapable process. The problem of development, in particular, requires a global solution. But sending Torontonian teenagers to Darfur, and Vancouver undergraduates to Haiti, won’t do it. We need to first cultivate their global outlook at home, and then send professional aid workers abroad to support local organizations in implementing community-based solutions.

There are thus two ways to confront the tides of globalization. The first, epitomized by Canada and Britain’s recent moves, is to view integration as an opt-in/opt-out type of enterprise. The problem with this is that, ultimately, globalization will sweep you into its wake – and, particularly if you are a relatively small country, it will be impossible to escape it.

The second approach is to follow in the footsteps of Mark Carney and Samantha Nutt and recognize that there are both upsides and downsides to globalization. As Friedman wrote during a better week, “Whatever people’s fears of change, globalization is here to stay – and, if properly managed, it will be a good thing.”

Photo courtesy Reuters.

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To build on the Canada-US agreement, and to think strategically about achieving a “special” relationship with the US that goes beyond the basic trade and economic relationship that we value so highly, Canada needs to pay attention to issues that concern the US. Jobs, energy,  and regulatory harmonization are always front and centre in Canada-US discussions. But Canada also needs to pay more attention to the fact that Mexico also matters to the US in these same ways, as well as in many others that go to the heart of US domestic policy: immigration, drugs,  and weapons, just for a start. Crassly stated, Mexico’s problems offer a vehicle for Canada to demonstrate to the US that it can be a special and strategic partner in more than bilateral trade matters, and that it understands US concerns in the hemisphere.

JenniferJeffs on recent contributions to the drug policy debate

Canadians tend to perceive issues emanating from the US southern border — such as guns,  gangs, illegal immigration, drugs, and organized crime — as “their” problem, not “ours”, hence our insistent differentiation between our border and the US-Mexico border. But if Canada does not become more deeply involved with helping the US and Mexico struggles with drug cartels and criminal networks, it will not only ignore a large and important set of  US domestic issues and Canadian exposure to the social risks associated  with them, it will also fail to acknowledge the issues faced by the large number of Canadian companies with significant — and growing — investment in Mexico.

What could Canada do? How about provide support for the Merida initiative, a military and police training program in Mexico funded by the US. When the Americans notice us sitting by their side on initiatives like this, they will start to see Canada as a natural ally; what greater inroad for influence in Washington? Also, Canada currently sits as an observer rather than full member of Ameripol, a hemispheric intelligence organization. Support for these two programs will not only demonstrate Canadian solidarity with US and Mexican security concerns, it will also resonate with Canadian strategic continental and hemispheric interests.

Mexican civil society is working to strengthen and consolidate democracy and democratic institutions. While Canadians have been watching the unfolding of the Arab Spring with great interest, they have another fledgling democracy much closer at hand, a country that is also a favoured holiday destination for well over a million Canadians during the winter months. Reforms are progressing in Mexico. Labour, fiscal and, judicial reforms are a work-in-progress, as is the fight against corruption. On these files, Canada can be helpful and supportive in areas where the US — with its historical legacy with Mexico — must tread very carefully.

Greater involvement with Mexico’s democracy consolidation also enhances Canada’s reputation in the greater region, which should be another important strategic consideration given the focus on the Americas by the Harper government, the rising levels of Canadian investment in many countries in the area, and the designation of a junior minister with specific responsibility for the region.

This post first appeared on TVO’s The Agenda with Steve Paikin blog. Watch Jennifer Jeffs on The Agenda.

Photo courtesy of Reuters.

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Discussions of international affairs are increasingly shaped and facilitated by the evolution of technology and media. This year the CIC responded to these changes with several initiatives, including a major research project on international intellectual property (IP), which examined Canada’s IP regime in the international context. Our major report Rights and Rents: Why Canada must harness its intellectual property resources, provoked much media attention and lively discussion across the country. The CIC has delivered dozens of briefings on the report to media, policy-makers, academics, corporate leaders, entrepreneurs and CIC members.

A major innovation for the CIC this year was the launch of our new website, OPENCANADA.ORG, which expands national dialogue on international affairs by taking it online, where more people can participate. OPENCANADA.ORG uses web-based tools, social media, and editorial features to host discussions on global issues that fascinate Canadians. Since the spring, we have produced multimedia analyses of topics such as diplomacy in the digital age; the impact of Twitter on international crises; Canada’s legacy in Afghanistan; Canadian diaspora engagement; the impact of Wikileaks on diplomacy, and much more. Our lively online activities would not be possible without financial support from donors.

The CIC’s 2011 events calendar demonstrates the vibrant nature of the 16 volunteer-led branches across the country that hosted over 200 events this year. Panels, conferences and seminars covered a wide range of timely foreign policy issues. My heartfelt thanks to our volunteer branch executive members, and in particular to our volunteer branch presidents, who give their time and energy so generously to the CIC.

As a non-partisan, not-for-profit organization, the success of CIC programs depends on donations. As 2011 draws to a close, I invite you to make a tax deductible charitable contribution to the CIC. Our mandate to foster discussion and debate of international issues would not be possible without your generous support. Donations can be made online by clicking here, or by phone, credit card or cheque payable to the Canadian International Council. Click here to download a donation form.

Along with the CIC board, staff and volunteers, I extend my warmest wishes to you and your family for a happy and healthy holiday season.

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Throughout the event, though, I couldn’t help asking whether this was the right group of people having the right conversation at the right time. With deeply troubled military occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, attention increasingly turning to Asia and the BRICs, and much of the world embroiled in an uprising against concentrated political and financial power, what is the value proposition of a largely Euro-Atlantic, NATO-focused confab of security-sector leaders?

This feeling was magnified by the subject matter on the agenda. For two days, debate swirled around the purchasing of F35s, the potential invasion of Syria and bombing of Iran, and the western security implications of Arab revolutions. Throughout, military actions were discussed in an unproblematic way, as part of a natural escalation of engagement.

This was not entirely surprising, as the event was, for all intents and purposes, a military conference. But even for a military conference, this discourse seemed limited. There was no discussion of the abyss of the war in Afghanistan, the very real problems with the Libya mission (beyond the easy success of bombing fixed, undefended targets), or the dilemma that no one wants to put troops on the ground in NATO missions.

Talking about this with a sage colleague, I was reminded that the Security and Defence Forum (SDF) program, also funded by the DND, was recently cut. Over four decades, the SDF program financed a wide range of Canadian academic work on security. There are rumours that the program was cut not just for budgetary reasons, but because its policy utility was questioned – what use is critical academic work to the running of a defence policy? Interestingly, the budget of the SDF was similar to the rumoured budget of the Halifax forum – around two million dollars. 

There is, of course, no reason to suggest a direct connection between the two programs, but it is worth discussing what we are losing and acquiring with this amount of money. Is it more valuable to fund an academic program on security or a two-day event that brings together the global power brokers? What are the trade-offs between a conversation you cannot control and one you diligently curate?

The SDF program, for all its faults, funded a wide range of security thinking and conversation. While some of this was classical defence studies, it also involved theoretical, practical, and political critiques of security policy. In so doing, the SDF fostered a community of academics engaged in the Canadian security discussion, and the openness of the program supported a very diverse range of security perspectives.

It is a trope in international relations to say that the world of security changed “after the end of the cold war.” The Economist magazine even bans articles that start with those words. But it is certainly true: The security conversation now rightly involves any number of auxiliaries to military affairs, including development, human rights, the environment, public health, local violence, and so on. The SDF program encouraged this broad view of security.

This critical perspective was virtually nowhere to be seen in Halifax. Save for regular interventions from Anne-Marie Slaughter and Ambassador Swanee Hunt, the discussion was almost exclusively centred on the military and global economic sides of security. Participants and speakers often came across as too aligned – too in agreement about the primary security threats and the necessary responses. The downside of controlled discourse, of course, is groupthink. And groupthink can be dangerous.

If there is one lesson we learned from the financial crisis, it’s that those in charge were not as smart as they thought they were. Left unchecked, the financial elite put a global system at risk by seeking, at every step, to maximize their interests. There was no balance at the global decision-making table, so one perspective – one worldview and set of interests – ran amok.

Such can also be the case with security policy. Does talk among decision-makers of bombing Iran, left unchecked by criticism, make bombing more likely to occur? Quite possibly. Do self-oriented discussions among militaries perpetuate the failures of Afghanistan, in which militaries sought and got “quick victories” but completely missed the larger purposes and goals involved? Probably. Does glorifying the John McCain approach to U.S. foreign policy make Canada more likely to act in this mould? Maybe. Does having a security conversation dominated by the military, with little engagement from diplomatic and development departments, lead to a more militarized foreign policy? Almost certainly.  

With Canada and NATO continuing to sing the praises of whole-of-government and comprehensive approaches to intervention and nation-building, surely the conversation in Halifax should have been broader.

On the economic front, the discussion was tainted by a notable condescension towards the Occupy movement – condescension that betrayed detachment to the security concerns raised by the increasing disconnect between a rising popular concern about inequality, and the political and financial elite’s focus on debt-cutting and austerity. Surely, a security discussion should have shown more awareness of the potential for increasingly exacerbated social divides to lead to animosity and instability, both within countries and between them. 

We need to recognize that controlled conversations, if they are not broadened to include critical, uncomfortable, and diverse views, risk perpetuating siloed solutions. The military is almost always more likely to advocate military solutions over development, humanitarian, and diplomatic ones – which is why the military doesn’t control foreign policy.

I am not suggesting that the Halifax forum should be cancelled. In fact, I personally found it stimulating and engaging. The format of the conference, based around interview-style plenaries, was perhaps the best I have ever seen, and the calibre of participants and speakers was exceptionally high. I was glad that Canada put on an event of this scale. But when discussing and debating war, in which the costs are so immensely high, we have to be incredibly careful not to fall into groupthink and the prescribed policies of self-reinforcing communities. Doing so invariably leads to the type of path dependency that we saw in the lead-up to the Iraq war and financial crisis.

Herein lies the value of the SDF program and the academic discourse it enabled: It fostered engagement and critical thinking in a space prone to secrecy and control. The direct benefit of this kind of discourse to policy-making is difficult to calculate, but it is nevertheless a benefit.

In the end, foreign and security policy is about balancing worldviews. The field of security studies, once the purview of the military, has moved on to include many more perspectives and actors. So, too, must the elite debate.

Photo courtesy of Reuters.

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I commend the magazine for honouring a group of remarkable Canadian women, and I congratulate these women for proving to young Canadian women like me that female mentors are not wanting. But when I think about Canada’s “top influencers… whose successful achievements contribute to the Canadian and global economies” [emphasis added], I think of Canadian women in international affairs.

In my role realizing OpenCanada’s mandate to bring the best international affairs content into Canadian discussions, I have discovered that women represent one of Canada’s strongest bridges to the world. Sylvia Ostry, Louise Fréchette and Huguette Labelle helped to pave the way; now many Canadian women are walking it. Here are thirteen women I think should be added to Women of Influence’s list. This is just a start, so please tweet me at @anoukdey with names you think I missed.

Here’s to a Canadian foreign policy with hips!

• Sally Armstrong, journalist and member of the UN’s International Women’s Commission: If Thatcher made feminist foreign policy unpopular, Armstrong is bringing it back.

• Louise Arbour, International Crisis Group: The Canadian with the biggest impact on human rights is not a bachelor.  

• Lyse Doucet, BBC: The Canadian government may have had little role in the Egyptian Revolution, but, for many people around the world, the voice of the Arab Spring had a Canadian accent.

Watch OpenCanada’s interview with Lyse Doucet about reporting from Tahrir.

• Chrystia Freeland, Thomson-Reuters: If you buy Freeland’s argument that Bill Gates and Peter Munk have more power than Stephen Harper and John Baird, then don’t underestimate the power of the woman who keeps the pulse of the global elite.

Watch Chrystia Freeland’s interview with CIC Globalist of the Year Naguib Sawiris.

• Moya Greene, Royal Mail: Delivering Canada’s message to her international audience.

• Naomi Klein, author: Occupy Wall Street has a Bay Street (Dundas West?) leader.

• Margaret MacMillan, University of Oxford: One woman changed the way we think about the three men who shaped the post-WWI peace.

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The G20 created the Financial Stability Board to replace its precursor, the Financial Stability Forum, at its London meeting in April 2009. This move increased the representative reach of the organization in a manner that mimicked the expansion of the G7 to the G20.

But while the legitimacy as well as the efficacy of the G20 are often questioned and suggestions are made for both its expansion (G31) and contraction (G2), due to its much more technical mandate, we hear too few parallel concerns regarding the FSB.

Unlike the G20, the FSB is intended to be a regulatory agency and as such, it promotes common rules and standards, and fosters compliance, not only among its members, but also internationally.

The organization currently boasts 23 country members and 12 international institutional members, yet seeks to generate regulatory and surveillance systems that apply to all countries participating in the global financial system.

While the intricacies of the rules and regulations pertaining to international financial activity are complex, often beyond our grasp and outside our interests as we go about our daily lives, the centrality of the concept of democratic representation within rule-making institutions is completely in line with Canadian expectations regarding the way the world should operate. So when members of the FSB create and/or endorse global financial regulations and standards with which non-members are expected to comply, we should detect some dissonance.

In addition, compliance with the international standards promoted by the FSB is monitored by peer review, and decisions are reached by consensus among FSB members. This means that member countries under review have the ability to veto decisions about themselves, while non-member countries have no voice.

For maximum inclusivity, legitimacy, and basic buy-in, all countries participating in, benefiting from, or suffering due to the operation of the global financial system should be accorded membership in the body that creates and endorses its rules. One could argue that participation in rule-making does not matter as the FSB holds no formal legal standing, which of course makes enforcement of its rules problematic. And yet, precisely because the body tasked with keeping the global financial system stable operates by consensus and without legal recourse, its effectiveness relies on participants’ voluntary compliance.

If that compliance is not forthcoming, the FSB will be unable to fulfil its mandate. Let us hope, for the sake of the global financial system, that Governor Carney can put the Canadian stamp of inclusivity on this multilateral forum.

This article was originally published in the Ottawa Citizen.

Photo courtesy of Reuters.

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Canadians may care, but they do not act. With the exception of a feather-headed slur and an ignominious misstatement by a Bloc Québécois candidate, aboriginal issues rarely made headlines during the most recent federal election. Last week, former prime minister Paul Martin raised this issue at an event hosted by the C.D. Howe Institute. His message was clear: For Canadians to do something, we need to reframe the problem.

Fortunately, the language exists.

A few weeks ago, as part of Action Canada, I visited an Inuit community in the Nunatsiavut region of Northern Labrador. I had not anticipated that two years of arguing about the responsibility to protect and contemplating the application of human security to the Levant would serve me. To my surprise, it did.    

There are at least three ways in which the vocabulary of international relations can help us articulate one of the greatest challenges we face at home. Once we are able to conceive of the problems facing Canada’s Inuit, First Nations, and Métis people in the same light as we do those of the oppressed masses of Libya and Syria, perhaps we will feel compelled to address them.

Human security. The United Nations defines human security as the protection of “the vital core of all human lives in ways that enhance human freedoms and fulfillment.” The notion emerged at the end of the Cold War when security could finally be articulated outside the framework of the state. By that point, the casualties of war had wildly shifted from combatants to non-combatants, and the impact of war was no longer measured in terms of wounds and dead soldiers but, instead, according to the effects of starvation, disease, and displacement. What appeared was a notion of security – human security – that relied on the integration of political, environmental, economic, military, and cultural systems “that allow individuals to prosper over time” (see this article by OpenCanada’s Taylor Owen for a more detailed description). 

At that point in time, Canada was one of the few states that embraced human security as a guiding point for development and peace-building activities. The doctrine proved central, for example, to its leadership in banning landmines. Why, then, have we failed to deliver on human security within our own borders? Using this terminology, and thus drawing parallels between insecurity at home and abroad, perhaps we can reframe this issue so as to impel action.

Failed and fragile states. In his government’s 2005 International Policy Statement, Paul Martin explained, “Canada and the international community share a responsibility toward the people who are the victims of state failure.” This was largely the rationale behind Canada’s mission in Afghanistan – whether it was about stabilizing the state to limit its capacity to breed terrorists or to protect individual Afghans, the justification was largely articulated in the language of “failed states.” This framing of the problem convinced a majority of Canadians to support the initial effort in Afghanistan. The political currency of this terminology remains strong, playing a prominent role in the more recent Canada First Defence Strategy.

Why not recognize that we have a fragile – and perhaps failed – state within our own borders? The threats that emanate from our dire social landscape may not materialize in terms of terrorist attacks (despite what the Canadian Forces’ National Counter-Intelligence Unit may believe) or refugee flows, but they are just as striking.

Consider that Canada’s aboriginal population is its fastest-growing segment. If more than half of Aboriginal students are dropouts, what does this mean for Canada’s stock of human capital? If our criminal-justice system is structured in such a way that 22 per cent of Canadian inmates are Aboriginal (despite the fact that Aboriginal peoples only represent three per cent of Canada’s total population), what does this mean for Canada’s future prospects? Where labour shortages are acute – such as in the oil sands industry – Canada’s neglect of its Aboriginal population is already being felt by businesses. As the trajectories of globalization and demographics collide, it is crucial that Canada harness this resource – for both moral and economic reasons – if it is to compete. By employing the same language to reserves as we do to Afghanistan, perhaps Canadians will be able to refocus the national interest inwards.

Sovereignty. When asked about the self-governance agreement the Nunatsiavut government signed with Canada six years ago, the mayor of Nain reflected, “It is much easier to deal with the mistakes we make ourselves than those others make for us.”

It has been almost 100 years since self-determination first became en vogue in Versailles, and, as the centennial of Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points approaches, we are seeing the doctrine emerge with renewed vigour. As organizations like Independent Diplomat embrace secessionism as creed, and the Arab Spring turns into the Arab Fall, it is time for Prime Minister Stephen Harper to re-read his copy of John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding – and for Canadians to follow suit. 

It is not just a matter of providing Aboriginal Canadians with nominal self-determination; we must also provide them with the political, environmental, economic and cultural resources required to fully assert their rights. This is where the language of international relations – of human security, failed states and sovereignty – can help. By recognizing that the problems of Afghanistan and Libya plague our co-nationals, perhaps we can transfer some of the effort we put into policies beyond our borders to policies within them.    

Photo Courtesy Reuters.

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At last month’s Banff Forum, which this year focused on the oil sands, there was virtually unanimous consensus across industry, academia and government that a carbon tax was required. Perhaps it is time we had this conversation.
 
Proponents of a carbon tax have typically focused on the environmental benefits.  But the reality is properly costing oil sands development will have three positive effects.
 
It will make us more powerful, as Canada as a country, rather than just the companies that develop the resource, will have an increased role in the global energy conversation.
 
It will make us richer, as the price of oil will only go up over time, increasing profits for the oil and gas sector, and allowing for a wider social benefits from increased revenue.
 
Finally, if the oil sands will eventually be developed and the carbon released, why not do it when both extraction and end use consumption are more efficient?  This applies to both carbon and resource use. Producing a barrel of oil sands oil currently requires almost a barrel worth of energy, and 10 barrels of water. The efficiency of both, along with how carbon ultimately gets used, will increase dramatically with time. 

If absolute emissions and resource use are what matters, let’s extract and consume the oil sands when it can be done more responsibly.  Doing so could also make us richer and more powerful.

Photo courtesy of Reuters.

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Investment in and strategic management of human creativity and intellectual resources and products are key to our future, and to our health and prosperity. The world’s abilities to grow crops more efficiently under tougher climate and soil circumstances, provide clean water to rich and poor alike, and unlock new renewable energy sources all depend on its ability to acquire knowledge and develop increasingly sophisticated technologies. This requires thoughtful and strategic management of its intellectual property.

Last year, the CIC decided to examine Canada’s IP regime, comparing it to IP regimes developing in elsewhere. We hired Karen Mazurkewich, an investigative business journalist who had spent many years in the Middle East and in Asia, both regions very mindful of innovation strategies, writing on themes such as innovation and leadership. For the past nine months, as co-directors of the project, we have been learning about the IP policies in other countries, speaking with policy makers, lawyers, economists, CEOs, inventors, academics, and academic administrators. And in a remarkably short period of time, Karen has written a comprehensive report that pulls the lessons learned by other countries into our national context, deriving lessons learned, best practices, and targeted comparisons. This report and the recommendations therein are the result.

In sum, the CIC’s IP report is a call to action. Many countries have undertaken extensive IP reviews in recent years. The UK, for example, has undergone two IP reviews in the past five years. While we repeatedly look at productivity, research and development, and innovation, unlike others, we have yet to undertake a thorough examination at the strategic management of intellectual property in this country. This report is our call-to-action to redress this oversight.

Photo courtesy Reuters.

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Naguib Sawiris is an Egyptian businessman as well as a political activist. He was the executive chairman both of Wind Telecom and Orascom Telecom Holding until May, 2011, when he announced his decision to enter Egyptian politics. Mr. Sawiris has founded a new Egyptian political party, Al Masryeen Al Ahrar, meaning the Free Egyptians, with the goal not to become a political leader but to “play a role in the transformation of post-revolution Egypt into a civil democracy.” Under Mubarak’s rule corruption was rampant, and much of the country’s business elite worked to defend the ruler who protected their interests. Mr. Sawiris, however, publicly supported the Tahrir Square protestors, as he told his own Coptic spiritual leader that religion should stay out of politics in Egypt.

In 2001 Mr. Sawiris founded the Sawiris Foundation for Social Development, which promotes job creation and improved health care in Egypt, while providing scholarships and student training on human development issues. Mr. Sawiris’ career as a business leader in telecommunications also illustrates his commitment to political liberalization – the Orascom mobile network, with over 100 million subscribers across Africa, the Middle East and Asia, has become symbolic of democratic freedoms in these regions.

Egypt has always been a strong force in the Middle East due to its central geographic location, its size and its historical importance. Nevertheless, the country remains politically and economically fragile, and the prospect of elections later this year has sparked debate among key groups about the correct path for the new government. The essential question will be whether this new government can create opportunities for its young population and foster overall economic growth through attracting foreign investment and trade in a country that suffers from  an illiteracy rate of 34%, where 22% of the population lives below the poverty line.

With the support and example of citizens such as Mr. Sawiris, Egypt’s protests brought with them the hope that revolution in Egypt could mean success for other social movements that would lead to democratic reform and increased prosperity in the region.

In November the CIC will honour Mr. Sawiris’ contributions to Egypt with our Globalist of the Year Award. We eagerly anticipate the Globalist of the Year Award Gala, at which Mr. Sawiris will speak about his country’s potential to transition to civil democracy.

For further comments on Naguib Sawiris and the Globalist of the Year Award, see Bessma Momani’s piece in The Huffington Post.

Photo courtesy of Reuters.

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The regional military training centre in Herat is a desolate and harsh place. On the outskirts of an Afghan city bustling with commerce and construction, the vast training grounds extend out into the desert and high into the mountains.

We were at this training facility to see a live-fire exercise, intended as a demonstration of what is now the primary pillar of the International Security Assistance Force mission: forging the Afghan army into a force capable of securing the country and keeping the national government together as NATO draws down.

After winding through dozens of marching drills and shooting ranges, we arrived at the edge of the facility and a line of six young Afghan soldiers, each with a rocket-propelled grenade launcher on their shoulder. They were aiming at three burned-out Russian tanks. One by one, they fired at the tanks, most missing wildly.

After this somewhat chilling demonstration, we were taken to meet the commander of Regional Command West; he will ultimately take control of one of five regional armies. His message was blunt: He had fought for themujahedeen, the Russians, the Taliban and now for NATO. While he appreciated our support, he had no doubt it would be fleeting.

It would be difficult to find a better distillation of the challenges NATO faces in Afghanistan than what we saw at this training facility. But such is the current state of the mission. With eight years of fighting having mostly failed, the NATO mission is in a process of transition, with security being transferred to Afghan forces between now and 2014. Training, which began in earnest only in November of 2009, is at the centre of this strategy.

Canada may no longer be fighting in Kandahar, but this new mission is nonetheless a daunting and risky task.

The police training process, for example, involves only three weeks of very basic security and language training (85 per cent of the recruits are illiterate). As one German colonel who is part of the mentoring program put it, we are training them to be checkpoint guards, not police officers.

This has real consequence for our counterinsurgency strategy. In the north, the Afghan National Police has proved incapable of patrolling and securing villages; immediately after NATO soldiers leave, the insurgents simply return. The village is then taken again and those who assisted NATO are punished. Each time this happens, more civilians are killed. The villagers then stop pointing out the whereabouts of IEDs, thereby increasing NATO casualties.

In the past year, there hasn’t been a single village held by the Afghan National Police in the north. The insurgents always come back.

Also of concern is the fact that the departing Americans are meant to be replaced by these new Afghan recruits. For example, the 30,000 U.S. soldiers who are being withdrawn over the next 18 months are supposed to be replaced by 50,000 to 70,000 new Afghan National Army troops. While there’s something to be said for the argument that an Afghan soldier can be more effective than a Western one, the lack of training, organization, leadership and equipment, combined with corruption, make one seriously question NATO’s math.

Training is also incredibly expensive. NATO support for training now costs $11-billion a year, mostly paid by the Americans. After 2014, the security sector is expected to require a continual $4-billion a year of external financial assistance, in a country with a GDP of $15-billon. It’s extremely unlikely that this level of financial and logistical assistance will be politically and economically sustainable by Western countries tired of war and teetering on the edge of yet another recession.

Ultimately, the questionable quality of the forces being trained, combined with the unsustainability of NATO support, presents potential strategic peril. As we put $11-billion a year of arms and training into the security sector, the civilian governance structures continue to falter amidst corruption and diminishing authority. Are we paving the way for a military-run Afghanistan?

One thing is clear: Our participation in this training process, while likely the best course of action in a very challenging situation, simply adds to both the moral responsibility we owe Afghanistan and the strategic corner we have backed ourselves into. If we build this army, we had better be willing to fund it and support it long into the future. This will be added to the long-term development and humanitarian engagement we also have rightly committed to and have the obligation to maintain. Afghans, of course, have been taught to shoot RPGs before.

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OpenCanada.org, which launched in June, is the CIC’s website devoted to fostering our national dialogue on international issues. OpenCanada.org uses a wide range of web-based tools and publishes various types of editorial content. Three features should prove exciting to the academic world as the fall term develops:

(i) The Think Tank is the CIC’s thought lab on international affairs. This section brings internationally-produced content into the Canadian discussion, soliciting responses from Canadian and global experts. After the attacks in Oslo and Utøya, we asked Stephen Walt and other terrorism experts to comment on whether al-Qaeda has hijacked the terrorism discourse. We have solicited comment from Paul Evans and Michael Hart on the impact of China’s rise on Canada and from Brian Milner, Lou Pauly and others on whether Germany will save Europe. In addition, OpenCanada asked Graeme Smith, Harper’s Magazine’s Matthieu Aikins and Mark Sedra to review Canada’s legacy in Afghanistan, interviewed Margaret MacMillan, Clay Shirky and Jeremy Kinsman on the impact of Wikileaks on history and diplomacy and generated a list of the #cdnfp (Canadian foreign policy, in Twitter lingo) Twitterati. In the next month, prominent Canadian conservatives will share their views of what a conservative Canadian foreign policy should become, while Don Tapscott, Jim Milway, Andrea Mandel-Campbell, Ed Burtynsky, Steve Blank and others will reflect on whether Canadian manufacturing can compete in a globalized world.

(ii) The site’s signature Roundtable blog follows discussion on current international events among Roland Paris from the University of Ottawa, Jennifer Welsh from the University of Oxford, John Hancock from the WTO and André Pratte of La Presse. Recently, these bloggers have been engaged in vigorous debate about Canada’s role in Libya; since our launch this summer, Roundtable has also covered the UK riots, the debt ceiling, the impact of Twitter on journalism and the Responsibility to Protect.

(iii) Finally, Rapid Response presents short, informed responses to a weekly question on a timely global issue from a group of eminent Canadians. For instance, Louise Fréchette, Rob Prichard and Janice Stein weighed in on, “What issue should John Baird prioritize?” Roméo Dallaire had thoughts on, “Does the creation of a Southern Sudanese state point to secession as the solution to other African conflicts?” while Yuen Pau Woo, Bruce Jones and others responded to, “What’s the ultimate objective of Harper’s softer stance on China?“

OpenCanada.org aims to be the place where creative thinking on Canadian foreign policy happens. To do this, we hope to engage academic communities across the country. We hope that students in particular will participate in the discussion, both by adding comments at the bottom of posts and tracking @CICDispatch on Twitter. We also welcome your input as this fledgling site takes off!

I look forward to your engagement with our site!

Photo courtesy of Reuters.

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Prime Minster Stephen Harper’s trip has directed much media attention to the commercial and trade ambitions that apparently propelled it, yet Canada can, and should, engage with Brazil in a great variety of ways, building on interests and commonalities not immediately apparent when one juxtaposes the northernmost hemispheric country against the largest southern one. These commonalities are more numerous than one might guess, and warrant serious attention.

First of all, we must be aware that Brazil is now a global power, and that Canada needs to engage with all global powers.

Second, both countries are global energy powerhouses, and, in that role, both are looking at how to manage traditional energy extraction and processing in an environmentally responsible manner, while also looking ahead to developing energy sources and the evolution of new energy paradigms.

Third, both countries host enormous agriculture sectors, and the complementarities and added value that Canadian advanced farming techniques and agri-food processes can contribute to Brazil’s agrarian sector is very high.

Fourth, in education, particularly in sectors from technical training to post-graduate management education, Canada can contribute value-added training for professionals at expert levels.

This last point is extremely important. Brazil contains a vast and growing market for high technology engagement. It is a huge consumer of communications technology that not only needs manufactured electronic goods, but also the content and the software to power those goods. With a market of 200 million consumers that speak a language not widely spoken in the rest of the world, Brazil must be its own supplier of that content. To do this, it needs to train and educate its people to supply that content for their country. This presents a very important opportunity to provide training and education to Brazilians to fulfill the content and platform needs for electronic goods used by their rapidly growing middle class. To do this, Brazil needs value-added education support. Canada can provide this support, and is now on track to do so.

During the prime minister’s visit, it was announced that the governor general would be taking a group of Canadian university leaders to Brazil next spring. Given that Gov. Gen. David Johnstone is a former university president who made tremendous inroads internationally, he will no doubt set serious goals for this trip, which will clearly reap important results for both countries.

To Canadians, Brazil generally seems like an exotic, distant, tropical land of carnivals, music, rain forests, and beautiful people on beautiful beaches, but also a place potentially fraught with complications. Crime rates, gangs, poverty, and favelas – on top of a foreign language ­– make it sound like a very complicated place to learn about, and to do business. However, from another perspective, Brazil is a fellow commodity-based economy, a country facing similar currency and foreign-exchange challenges to Canada, and a place that shares with Canada an interest in Haiti, and in generating food aid for Africa. In terms of Canada’s need to generally diversify its international-trade portfolio, it is important to note that it is no more difficult to do business in Brazil than it is in China. The regulatory system is no more complex, government intervention is no more prevalent, and it is due south in our own hemisphere, so, although the distance is significant, the time difference is a mere one hour from Toronto.

At a time when Canada is broadening its trade and investment horizons, Brazil presents both a regional and global platform for Canadian international engagement. The Canadian International Council is delighted to be partnering with the Centre for Hemispheric Studies in Miami to present the Brazil Forum in Toronto on September.

Photo Courtesy Reuters.

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Take last weekend, for example. Over the weekend, a pre-release of Nicholas Schmidle’s expose of the Bin Laden raid went viral on Twitter. Virtually all of the 100 or so foreign policy specific handles I follow posted it immediately, and it then crossed into most other online conversations. Instead of reading it online, I checked the New Yorker iPad app, and there was Monday’s issue ready to be downloaded. The New Yorker’s iPad app does something quite remarkable.  Leveraging the iPad’s elegance and engagement features, the app perfectly balances its focus on writing, journalism and style in a way that lets the magazine breathe. Each week, a new issue pops up in the app, and it takes a satisfying minute or two for the whole 140mb of issue to download. Last week, the New York Times outlined the success of the app in a piece that also got a lot of attention.

So on a lazy Sunday morning, I tucked into Schmidle’s article in this great reader-centric format. The piece itself was astounding in both its detail and style. A decision had clearly been made in the Pentagon or White House to provide the definitive account of the raid to The New Yorker, and that account will surely become the basis for movies and books.

But because The New Yorker pushes content aggressively and effectively online, the reach and life of the piece extended far beyond a limited number of solitary reading indulgences. The New Yorker has now, somewhat unexpectedly, become a hub in the international affairs conversation and can position pieces cleanly and effectively in the international debate.  It is no longer simply the rag of the elite and well-bred. It is fuel in a community of international affairs journalism, being spread and multiplied by innovative websites, Twitter and diverse networks of engaged readers.

Take two examples. Foreign Policy Magazine has in the past few years transformed itself from an austere print publication skimmed in airports, to a leader in pushing diverse content online. This has meant changing both how they write, who writes for them, and where and by whom the content is seen. I would argue they are significantly more influential now than they ever were in their limited and isolated print days. They are certainly more interesting.

Second, consider three emergent international affairs leaders on Twitter. Covering the Arab uprisings for the New York Times, Chris Chivers (@cjchivers) has demonstrated a best in practice use of Twitter for the foreign correspondent.  At times, when connections were poor, he would literally file in real time via Twitter. But he goes further. Because Twitter is a two way conversation, followers can pose a question to him, about a particular rebel group he was embedded with, for example, and often get replies. If blogs personalized the journalist and author and allowed readers to comment, Twitter has moved engagement into real time.  Again, this is a case of an at times austere publication, the New York Times, becoming more influential not by isolating itself in hallowed halls but by experimenting and engaging.

Andy Carvin (@acarvin), a reporter with NPR, has literally created his job description – Twitter curator for international affairs. When the uprisings were breaking in Egypt, there was a flood of tweets documenting the events on the ground. Carvin filled a need for a filter and served as the go-to hub to make sense of this massive flow of information.

Finally, Anne-Marie Slaughter (@SlaughterAM), back at Princeton after time as Director of Policy Planning at the State Department, where she led the Obama Administration’s social media outreach to the middle eastern uprisings, has become a figure head of sorts for the emergent online international affairs community. She mentored and enabled two young social media leaders at State, @JaredCohen (now at Google Ideas) and @AlecJRoss, has begun a new project with the Atlantic Monthly to capture the paradigm shifts happening in the practice, scholarship and communication of international affairs, and has become a champion and curator of these conversations on Twitter.

These examples are simply to point out that the conversation has moved online, and that the organizations and publications that are currently the most effective, influential and interesting are those making innovative use of the medium.

So back to The New Yorker and the “Getting Bin Laden” story. Over the course of the week, the article was built on, added to, debated, challenged, promoted and celebrated in countless online spaces. It became the focus of an international conversation in a manner that would have proved impossible with a New Yorker piece even five years ago. Because the magazine has pushed content online, via the web, Twitter and a brilliantly conceived app, it remains at the center of the journalism game.

I take a number of lessons from this. As a neophyte professor in a school of journalism, it provides a shining success story of leveraging one’s assets into the online space. It is of course idiosyncratic – it’s The New Yorker after all. As the Financial Times’ and the New York Times’ pay walls are ill-suited to most papers, the particular New Yorker model will not be the solution for most magazines. But it is nonetheless well-conceived, and shows that no one online model will work for all.

As the editor of this site, the lesson I take is that constant innovation from day one, is the only viable model. This means, as Emily Bell, formerly of the Guardian, now at Columbia Journalism, has said, being first and foremost “of the web, not on the web”. It means rethinking the site, and evolving constantly – we are, for example, re-launching in September with new features, adjusting what hasn’t worked, building on what has. Finally, it means thinking of the site as part of an emerging and rapidly changing international discourse , one which includes the top policy makers, journalists and academics in the world, and is radically democratized by the form it is taking. It has never been a more exciting time to be in this business.

Photo courtesy of Reuters.

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It is this context that brings the contrast between the trajectory of Europe and that of the Americas into focus: While European power increasingly drifts toward one central pole, the powerbase in the Americas seems to be drifting apart.

It is not just the debt crisis that is compromising the United States’ status as the American unipole; as Jean Daudelin perceptively noted in a recent blog post, for many states in the Americas, “The U.S. matters, but along Europe and especially China.” Daudelin writes in response to the United States House Foreign Affairs Committee’s recommendation to suspend its contribution to the Organization of American States (OAS), a withdrawal of support that has serious implications for the activities, if not the very existence, of this regional body.

What is striking is not the impact of such a decision, but the lack thereof. The OAS is largely considered a U.S.-centred organization – yet, today, the U.S. is no longer the exclusive foreign policy concern of South and Central America. Consider Mexico’s recent announcement that its dependence on the American market is on the wane, and China’s rapidly increasing investment in the region.

In Canada, similar momentum is afoot. John Baird’s recent visit to China signaled a new turn in Canadian foreign policy. Around the same time, it was announced that Canada exports more softwood lumber to China than it does to the U.S. In British Columbia, the government’s significant investment in the port in Prince Rupert, as well as developments related to the Gateway pipeline, point to a renewed Pacific focus.

This week, our Rapid Response question asked, “What’s the ultimate objective of Stephen Harper’s softer stance on China?” Though our respondents disagreed on the ultimate objective, they concurred on one issue: The Asia-Pacific is crucial to Canadian prosperity. Drawing on International Journal’s recent issue (“Canada, the U.S., and China: A New Pacific Triangle?”), OpenCanada plans to produce a series of Think Tank pieces that further probe the implications of the rise of China for Canada.

Early in the last century, the Canadian national interest underwent a major change, shifting its focus from Europe to the United States. Only a couple decades earlier, following its victory in the Franco-Prussian War, Germany appeared to be claiming its place at the centre of Europe. As the Canadian national interest witnesses another critical reorientation and Germany asserts its power in Europe, we must hope that Karl Marx was wrong when he said: “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”

Photo courtesy of Reuters.

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While on my trip in Afghanistan, we had five briefings that focused on women and gender issues. Each left me with a different feeling, from disgust to frustration to awe. There is no doubt that the lives of many have been improved by our presence. And as I felt in Northern Iraq several years ago, it is tremendously difficult to argue with the logic of someone who has been liberated. But the fact that one group in one region has been freed, should not blind us to the consequences of this liberation for others. With this in mind, these were my five encounters.

First, one evening we had a formal dinner at the Serena hotel, one of the few international hotels in Kabul. Our group was seated along one side of a long table, and a delegation of various Afghan think tankers and university professors were on the other. Seated across from me were an Afghan woman and a young male Afghan, who worked for NATO HQ. For the first half hour or so, the woman was very quiet. Her English was not very good, and the men around her, particularly one who was a cousin of Karzai, were dominating. But when we figured out a way for the young Afghan man beside her to translate, she opened up, and her story was incredible. She was 20 when Taliban fell. Until then, she had spent her teenage years being taught in secret schools for girls. One of her teachers had been killed by the Taliban. In 2001, she went to law school, got the best marks in the school and now is a law professor at Kabul University. I’m sure there are many women with similar stories, and I feel somewhat hesitant recalling it, as if I’ve been had by NATO TOLA planners, but she really was nothing short of remarkable. Watching and listening to her and the young guy both helping to translate and telling his own story, which was impressive in its own right, I saw pretty clearly that there is a new generation waiting in the wings in Afghanistan. They are frustrated, impatient and when they get a chance, it’s hard to see how they will not do better than the current crowd in charge. I only wish we could empower them sooner.

Second, when we were in Mazar e Sharif, we had a meeting with the Gender Engagement Team. Led by a young female Swedish soldier, the team was made up of three Afghan women in their twenties. It’s hard to overstate how courageous these women were. They are essentially conducting psi-ops for RC-N, coming in and out of the base on a daily basis and reporting on what people think about ISAF. What is particularly amazing is that their friends and family now know that they work for ISAF. As insurgent violence picks up in the north, they are at significant risk. At one point during our two hours with them, they got very angry with the German and American commanders in the room over the night raids. I will post on this issue separately, but the strength with which they rebuked the ISAF line that night raids are essential because they reduce civilian casualties was remarkable. Even if the raids do reduce casualties, the team argued, they also are a humiliating experience. Men descend on their villages at night, breaking down doors, and see them, particularly the women, at their most vulnerable. The disconnect between the cold rationalism of the ISAF argument and the aggressive push back from those actually affected was bracing.

Third, in Herat, we met with two Provincial Councilors, both of whom were female. The meeting was clearly intended to demonstrate the progress being made in local governance, in particular the mandated 50% female quota. What we got was both tragically and wonderfully different. With the Italian PRT contingent watching on, and the more jingoistic members of our party somewhat disgruntled, the two women clearly and articulately disagreed with virtual every assessment we had heard of Herat to date. For two hours they made it abundantly clear that, while considered the most secure and developed region of the country by ISAF, the west has a very long way to go. They spoke of villages that support the insurgents in order to get NATO aid (if considered safe, they are ignored), of the problems with narcotics trafficking, particularly the widows created by arrested or killed husbands who took up trafficking to make a living, of the rising violence levels, of how even elected women remain shut out, and of the power of the mullahs. They were confident and impressive. I was left hoping but doubting that the rest of the councilors compared.

Fourth, immediately following the meeting with the councilors, we were escorted to the Italian PRT’s signature project in Herat, a women’s center. When we pulled up to the modern three story building, we were greeted by a shocking display of Italian military force (I know there is a joke here). There were three armored trucks each with a high caliber gunner on top, a couple of dozen fully kitted out soldiers, and our escorts, another half dozen men. They had closed part of the street, the heavy guns were pointed at the neighbouring buildings, and there were soldiers guarding the door of the center. We were rushed into the building to find 20 or so visibly stunned Afghan women. For the next hour, we were paraded around what can only be called a model of tokenism. The women were selling textiles and saffron in a series of brand new shops. It was entirely unclear who might shop there, other than PRT guests, as there are few tourists in Herat, and surely locals don’t need a gift mall to buy Afghan textiles. In fairness, the center does function as a community center of sorts for women, with a gym, and classrooms. But there was no mistaking the reason we were there, and it made me sick.

Finally, on our last day in Kabul, we had a fascinating and wide-ranging conversation with a senior UNAMA official. When asked about the status of women in the country, he got visibly frustrated. The idea that women lead significantly better lives in most of the country, he said, needs to be dismissed. Afghanistan remains a deeply conservative Islamic state. It has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world. And in wide swaths of the country, women are treated in a brutally oppressive fashion. The Taliban, he argued, were particularly appalling, because they codified this treatment, but it is still occurring on a widespread scale.

Coming back to the future, and to the Taliban, the same UN official made an interesting point, which I hadn’t heard before. The Taliban, he stated, have recently softened their position on women. More politically savvy than when they were in power, many Taliban leaders now recognize the political importance the international community places on the rights of women, and wanting to be part of the political process, their views are evolving. This is a fascinating quirk in what is too often portrayed in a simplistic narrative – the Taliban are bad because of their treatment of women. Now this softening of doctrine may not be true, but if we are welcoming them back into positions of power, as our reconciliation policy would suggest, then let’s hope the Taliban find it politically expedient to treat women in a less brutal fashion. In many ways, these small victories may become big markers of the mission’s lasting impacts.

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The Global Commission was initiated by three former Latin American presidents and consisted of 19 world leaders, former and present, in government, business and human rights. Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and Canadian former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour were among them. The Global Commission’s report adamantly recommends the decriminalization of drug use by those “who do no harm to others” as part of a global movement to treat rather than incarcerate drug users, while persecuting the criminal organizations that commit and perpetuate drug-related violence.

The CIC’s report shows less faith in the absolute benefits of legalization and decriminalization, though it anticipates the Global Commission’s judgments in stating that Canada’s current antidrug efforts “are exceedingly modest, by no means commensurate with the magnitude of the problem.” The report therefore presents an Agenda for Action recommending that Canada promote the following initiatives:

1. Institutional development and capacity-building in police and military sectors, fiscal accountability, anti-corruption measures and legal training for lawyers in affected countries
2. Multilateral/regional cooperation to battle corruption on provincial and state levels
3. Taxation and fiscal reforms in countries burdened by drug-related crime
4. Greater Canadian efforts to interdict drug trafficking
5. Canadian efforts to trace money laundering
6. Improved international coordination through the drafting of an international charter outlining shared priorities in countering the hemisphere’s drug trade
7. Canadian public health campaigning to discourage drug consumption in North America and Europe
8. Collaboration between the Canadian government and its private sector to counter economic inequality, which is associated with increased gang recruitment
9. Increased Canadian funding of research into antidrug policy

The CIC would welcome responses to these recommendations.

Photo courtesy of Reuters.

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Within this mass appraisal, two related trends jumped out at me. First, Canadians evaluate the Afghanistan mission according to different criteria than those associated with the mission’s objective. Secondly, Canadian commentators have a propensity to overestimate the role the Canada-U.S. relationship played in shaping Canada’s role in the war.

Both of these trends are important to note: the first because it points to a disparity between what Canadians thought the mission was about and what it was really about; the second because it demands a re-evaluation of the conventional narrative about Canada’s longest military commitment ever.

NATO’s goal in Afghanistan is explicitly concerned with state security, with “creat[ing] the conditions whereby the Government of Afghanistan is able to exercise its authority throughout Afghanistan.” In Weber’s overused terminology, the mission was about granting the Afghan government a “monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.”

Evaluations of Canada’s performance, however, tend to focus on human security: how individual Afghans feel about their personal livelihood. They quote locals commentating on their living conditions and polls assessing whether Kandaharis “feel safe” (see Smith’s article on why these polls should be treated cautiously).

There is a fundamental discrepancy between how Canadian soldiers organized their efforts and how we evaluate them.

One could simply blame the media. But it’s not just journalists and academics who judge our performance in measures of human security; so, too, does our government. The above poll results, after all, were pulled from the Canadian government’s latest quarterly report on the mission. Moreover, soldiers who were involved in the mission unfailingly share stories about individuals: women finally free to go out of their houses, children going to school for the first time, etc.

One way to reconcile this apparent divergence might be to argue that human security is achieved through state security; that is, only in a state in which the government has a “monopoly on the legitimate use of violence” can individuals pursue their fundamental rights to their fullest. One must look no further than President Assad’s “monopoly” in Syria at the moment to question this claim.

To resolve the difference between what Canadians clearly thought the mission was about, and what it was really about, we must go back to the beginning. This is where the second trend becomes relevant: We must re-evaluate why we were in Afghanistan in the first place.

The conventional wisdom (most widely perpetuated by Janice Stein and Eugene Lang’s thoroughly researched The Unexpected War) is that Canada went to Afghanistan in 2001 because, after 9-11, it had to; in 2005, Canada said “Yes” to dramatically increasing its commitment (including deploying to Kandahar) because it had said “No” to the U.S. on Iraq.

This account fails to explain many of the choices Canada made regarding Afghanistan. In 2001, Canada was obliged by its NATO commitment to involve itself in the mission in Afghanistan; it could have, however, assumed a very different role. With enough diplomatic pressure, Canada could have surely convinced the Europeans to include it in the more passive International Security Assistance Force mission in Kabul, rather than the American-led Operation Enduring Freedom.

Similarly, in 2005, Canada had the option to station itself in Heart, Chagcharan, or Kandahar provinces. Many external observers were shocked by Canada’s choice to serve in the most volatile of these areas.

Moreover, on other issues being negotiated between the U.S. and Canada during this period, such as Ballistic Missile Defense, Canada showed little concern for the U.S.’s feelings. As Brian Bow reminds us in his insightful The Politics of Linkage, had Canada been so concerned with its relationship with the U.S., it would surely have treaded more lightly on Iraq. Instead, it directly challenged the White House on what it saw as the primary national security issue of the day, and did so very publicly, in a way that would be embarrassing for the Bush administration in terms of wider international audiences, and also American voters.

Though the troops have pulled out, Canada’s decade in Afghanistan should not be a closed book. Let last week’s reflections on Afghanistan represent the beginning of a much longer and more fruitful dialogue. Only in seeing the war less as unexpected, and more as chosen, can we begin to make sense of many of the mysteries of this mission, and to match our criteria of judgment with our criteria of engagement.

Photo courtesy Reuters.

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The response I received was that NATO itself is neither nation-building nor implementing all aspects of the comprehensive approach. What is really meant by the comprehensive approach, I was told, is that NATO is a participant in the comprehensive approach with other organizations who are doing the governance and development components. As an example of this, the point was rightly made that NATO countries have refused to task the alliance with a rule of law mandate, as member states feel that this would go beyond their military focus.

This, however, is simply not how we have been briefed over the past week, nor how the mission is explained to domestic publics, at least in Canada. Some of the PRTs are clearly part of the NATO mandate, while others are member country run, and at virtually every briefing we have received, we have been told of the importance and details of governance and development projects. Indeed, the briefings we have received from Senior Civilian Representatives (SCRs) at all levels, have focused exclusively on non military NATO tasks. Here is where I agree, though. I don’t think NATO should be doing all of these tasks, but as states participating in this conflict we have not properly equipped and funded the orgs that should be– i.e., the IOs, NGOs and local groups who should be doing way, way more.

Perhaps the military should be doing the initial targeted tactical assistance during the hold phase of COIN, but this absolutely must transition to a civilian project almost immediately. This civilian operation would need security, but this should likely be done by Afghan and/or private security. If civilian orgs as currently constituted aren’t willing to take this risk, then I think we may need not rethink either the rules governing government civilian orgs, or whether we should be attempting these tasks at all.

I suppose I don’t blame NATO, they have come a long way since McChrystal dragged them into a COIN strategy. And in the absence of other major actors able or willing to do the development, they are stepping up to some degree. Instead I blame NATO member states who have failed to adequately fund the orgs that they should know full well should be doing the governance and development. For example, we met a WFP official who said they are $220 million short to fulfill basic food needs this year. This is in a country in which the US alone is spending a $100 billion a year.

Until we are honest about these parts of the project – parts wee claim are required for success – then we are not being serious about the comprehensive approach.

There is of course another very simple potential explanation for this, one being pushed by one of my trip mates – viz, the comprehensive approach is not actually required to meet our objectives, because our objectives are are actually far more modest than we are politically willing to admit.

It is quite likely that we are hoping to at best leave an Afghan state structure that is capable of staying roughly together, in which case, we need to secure as many villages as possible in the two and a half years remaining, hope that Karzai’s governors can hold their provinces together and leave some special forces, trainers and operational support here for a decade after. Our mission is then not one of nation building, but of basic nation stabilization. Needless to say, I am increasingly skeptical. But I’m meeting with both Petraeus and Gass in the next couple days, so maybe they will make it all make sense.

Photo courtesy of Reuters.

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The main base in northern Afghanistan, RC-N, is run by the Germans, and is meticulous. The bunks are clean, the roads and paths nicely paved, there is a beer garden and night club. What we heard though, is of a war effort disjointed from the strategic narrative being pushed by Kabul. Two specific tactical challenges point to potential fundamental flaws in the transition plan.

The strategy, as outlined by HQ, sounds reasonable and feasible. Over the next three years build the Afghan army and police so that they can take over the security role vacated by ISAF forces. This is supposed to happen in a series of tranches, whereby control of governance and security are transferred.  In RC-N here is how that is to work in reality: the Afghan National Army (ANA) supported by ISAF, takes a village, forcing out the insurgents.  The Afghan National Police (ANP) then holds the village, while a comprehensive approach is applied to the village, mainly focusing on governance reforms. As we draw down, we will have ideally left secure communities, policed and governed by Afghans, with some operational support and long term development assistance continuing. Take, hold, build.

Here are two problems as recounted by a German Colonel and his team who run the mentoring program for RC-North.  First, the ANP is incapable of holding villages once ISAF and the ANA have departed. The police force, intended to grow to 170,000 by transition, gets approximately 4 weeks of training.  They are largely illiterate, and they are principally trained to act as checkpoint guards. They are incapable of patrolling and securing villages so immediately after forces leave, the insurgents simply return. The village is then taken again.  Each time this happens, more civilians are killed, and the population stops informing on the whereabouts of IEDs, increasing ISAF casualties. In the past year, there has not been a single village held by the ANP.  This is worth repeating.  In the words of the Colonel, speaking abouf RC-N, the insurgents always come back, there have been no successful hold phases in the past year.

The second challenge is related to the governance component of the comprehensive approach. Simply put, we don’t have close to enough resources to implement the governmace reforms required. As the same ISAF Colonel put it to us,  the comprehensive approach is a headline. At a macro level, the resource imbalance is astounding. The military resources present here represent a remarkable logistical feat. Civilians, however, are almost nowhere to be seen. At a tactical level, what this means is that we don’t have the resources to mentor administrators, lawyers and judges in the communities we are trying to hold. This leads to few of the reforms that we have promised Afghans and which we have determined are required for strategic success. They see the same corruptions and abuses of power that they have lived with for so long. In short, implementing the comprehensive approach will require both additional military resources to hold the villages ourselves, but also more importantly, a massive civilian increase that we are simply unequiped to provide.

Ultimately, we are able to take villages, which is not surprising given the scale and sophistication of our force deployment. But we are unable to either hold or build. Simply put, there is a structural imbalance in our comprehensive approach strategy.

What this means in the North (and a big caveat that these observations are only based on what we have been briefed on in this part of the country, though a part that is supposed to be amoungst the most secure), is the following. A comprehensive approach is required to nationbuild, ie to achieve the overarching objectives of the transition of providing governance reforms and basic development. If we are not willing or able to provide the correct kind and magnitude of deployment, we are likely going to leave a country with wide areas back in the control of the only groups able to provide security, governance and jobs – the various warlords, and criminal groups that make up the insurgency. We can likely keep the Taliban out of power in Kabul, and al-Qaeda out of most of Afghanstan, and we will have done a lot of good throughout the country, but nationbuilding by force is tough business, and I remain unconvinced that we have proven able to accomplish it.

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The ISAF security infrastructure is suffocating. This is i’m sure obvious to anyone who has spent anytime here, and I certainly expected it, but nonetheless, the security within the green zone, which houses various headquarters, country bases, embassies and ministries, it a fortress like I have never seen (the only thing that come close for me is the US base in Erbil). The labyrinth of 20-30 foot blast walls, the immense rows of barbwire, the absurd amount of checkpoints, and the elaborate chambers for exiting and entering by foot, are truly incredible. Being inside it, and under the ‘protection’ of it, makes the thought of existing in the other Kabul seem impossible, even though you know that this is what many friends and colleagues do.  It feels like a catch-22, though – you are safest with either full military protection, or none.

The singular focus is on “transition”. So far, there has been only one theme of our briefings (by senior military, civilian and Afghan officials) – namely, transition. Whereas a year ago, I’m certain one would have heard about more generalized counterinsurgency strategy and tactics, now everything is about what will be in place by 2014.  The overwhelming focus of this is on training, or the NTM-A.   The training command, which only began in earnest in November 2009, has an objective of training and educating between 300,000 and 350,000 soldiers and police officers by October of this year.  While many of the early problems have been worked out (such as pay inequity, some of the corruption, 85% illiteracy), and while the program is now properly resourced ($11 billion a yr), it is still a monumental task.   What’s perhaps most concerning, though, is that the US force draw down is meant to be replaced by these new recruits.  For example, the reduction of 30,000 US forces over the next 18 months, will be replaced by 50-70,000 new ANA troops.  While there is something to be said for the argument that an Afghan soldier is in some ways more effective than a western one, the lack of training, organization, leadership, and equipment, combined with the remaining corruption, make one question this premise.   Interestingly, this is what the Canadian mission will shift to this week, and I will be visiting two places where our trainers will be based (RC-N and RC-W) this week.

The layers of bureaucracy are astounding. Several years ago I did some work on the whole of government approach that Canada was using in Afghanistan.  One of the things I took away from this research was that despite good the planning and coordination  between the military, diplomatic and development components of our mission, the overall complexity of the task and institutional responses built threatened to marginalize these efforts. And this was only in the Canadian context. The overwhelming sense I am getting through these briefings is that the layers of bureaucracy that are being created and used to tackle the incredibly challenging tasks we have given NATO are so vast and complex, that they ultimately may become unmanageable, and are almost certainly unsustainable post-transition. They feel all but certain to collapse in on themselves. Take just as one example the NTM-A. They are building a dozen military and policy schools, teaching all recruits to read and write, building an air force, training a special ops team, constituting anti-corruption programs, training officers and military leaders, and on and on.  All are positive, but they are all based on a western military and institutional model, and there is no doubt that this is am immense system being build for a country that does not have a recent institutional history. These same phenomena can be seen across the ISAF, OED, EUPOL, and UN missions.

Obama’s speech has had a real impact: It is easy to forget when one is watching politics in North America, that major policy changes are announced in what are often simply viewed as political speeches.  We arrived here a couple of days after Obama’s Afghanistan speech, in which he announced the beginnings of the draw down of the surge. The ubiquitous reaction we are getting is that while this was largely expected (Obama said when he announced the surge that he would begin drawdown in July 2011), it still has a real impact.  Much of these forces will likely be taken from non front line combat troops, but it will have a real impact. As an interesting side note, it took the US military a year just to physically fly in the 33,000 troop surge. So draw down will ultimately take a fair amount of time.

One final, perhaps minor point before I have to get some sleep:

There seems to be lots of talk at HQ that the new leadership trio of Crocker-Allan-Gass is a positive combination for the transition. It’s no secret that Patraeus and Ikenberry didn’t get along.  It was also no secret that Patraeus was the primary American voice in Afghanistan. This has served to reinforce the strength of the military as the primary voice and public face of the mission for the past two years.  While resources will of course continue to be overwhelmingly military, and there is little evidence of a shift to a real civilian surge, there is considerable talk that the balance of power will switch to the diplomats for the remaining 3 years of the mission. Crocker is a big presence and has the star power of Patraeus. And Simon Gass has a lot of experience in Afghanistan. They also get along well. It sounds like it is likely that the US embassy and NATO civilian civilian rep are about to take a lead role. Allen, less of a personality than McCrystal or Patraeus, will likely take less of a public role, as the focus shifts to polical transition and away from full scale counterinsurgency and towards training, reintegration and reconciliation.  Again, this does not necessary mean the local governance challenges are going to get the attention they require, but it is likely that this diplomatic leadership will move aggressively on high level reconciliation and pressure on Kabul.

Ok, those are a few very quick rough notes on the first 24hrs.  Will have much more to relay in the coming days.

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As the launch of this website is due to our musings at the CIC regarding the ways in which technology has altered the roles of traditional media and the skills needed by a foreign correspondent, we found this event particularly timely!

The CIC was proud to partner with The Mowat Centre at the University of Toronto and the Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program, on the Great Lakes Summit last week.

The summit was based on the idea that regions will be just as important as nation-states in ensuring the well-being of communities in the decades ahead. The summit white paper “The Vital Commons,” concludes that communities across the Great Lakes – St. Lawrence Region share common challenges, but are rich with the assets needed to succeed in the global economy. The report fleshes out an agenda for working together to overcoming the challenges and leverage the assets.

We would be very interested in receiving your reactions to the common agenda proposed by this Canada-US think tank partnership.

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The debate last week was on China and featured Henry Kissinger and Fareed Zakaria versus Nial Ferguson and David Li debating the resolution: be it resolved, the 21st century will belong to China.

While the debate was wonderful (one of the best yet, elevated by Ferguson’s Oxbridge cleverness, Zakaria’s polished showmanship, Li’s calm confidence and Kissinger’s very presence), from the moment I learned of the pairing several months ago, I have been uneasy about Kissinger’s participation. Leaving aside the irony that Christopher Hitchens (whose 2001 book The Trial of Henry Kissinger argues that Kissinger should be prosecuted for war crimes) participated in the previous Munk debate, I have substantial misgivings about the man and the role he plays in society. I am not absolutist about this – I recognize that he is a mainstay in elite foreign policy and media circles – but I didn’t feel entirely right about his participation.

This apprehension stems from substantial work I have done on the US bombing in Cambodia. A number of years ago, when I was in Cambodia doing research for my thesis, I was given a database by a computer technician at a de-mining NGO. On the CD, was a GIS database of all US drop points in Cambodia during the Indochinese war.  More info on this story can be found in thisWalrus piece that emerged from the research, but the short version is that I have spent a number of years studying the data and its implications with the world’s principle Cambodia historian, a Professor at Yale named Ben Kiernan.

And this is where Kissinger comes back in. One of the things we did was compare every written statement Kissinger has made on the bombing, as well as the White House transcripts that have recently been declassified, with the new bombing data. The result is that we can point to a very wide range of lies told by both Kissinger and Nixon. Based on this work, I believe that the secret bombing of Cambodia was both against US law and constitutes a war crime. I do not say this in the slightest bit lightly. I will likely be testifying in front of the Cambodian Tribunal this year to this effect (bizarrely, I am being called by the defense, which is another blog post all together).

Given all of this, here is the point I would like to make. I understand that leaders often have to do things in the interest of the state that are illegal and/or immoral. I understand that war opens, stretches and contorts the bounds of both. But if one feels that these exceptions are necessarily made, in the direst of circumstances, then I think that in order to signal the gravity of such an action, they should be held to some sort of account. To do so is not necessarily to condemn the act absolutely (though it may be), but to show the seriousness with which such acts should be treated. Perhaps this is a legal accounting, or, perhaps it is as simple as being socially ostracized. What I find off-putting about Kissinger is that not only has he remained wholly unrepentant about Cambodia and a host of other questionable actions taken in the name of national security, but that he has been coddled and ingratiated by the US elite and has profited mightily from his role as a statesman.

An analogous situation is that of a torturer. Let’s grant those who support torture the questionable premise that a person may choose to torture believing that to torture is the best possible action given the circumstances.  Even exceptional decisions should be held to account, and any person who tortures should be made to defend the urgency of his or her actions in both the courts of law and public opinion. This point for me is critical in ensuring that very rare acts do not become normalized by their acceptance. So too should be the case for illegal acts done in the name of the state.

So in my mind, even if what Kissinger has done can be defended by some grand theory of realpolitik, as matters of state security, in my view he should still be forced to account for them  (for instance, the hundreds of thousands of Cambodian civilians slaughtered by carpet bombs). At the very least, perhaps Kissinger shouldn’t be embraced by polite company.

When I met him backstage last week, I was surprised by my reaction.  I have in the past sent him my work with Ben on Cambodia and have tried unsuccessfully to get an interview. When I saw him, though, the overwhelming sense I got was that this man is, thankfully, of another age. He speaks a language that feels distant, ancient and out of touch. His quips have seen too many cocktail parties.  His reflections on China emerge from past realities and encounters.  This was made even more poignant by the fact that I’d spent the day with David Li, the very embodiment of the 21st century China – confident, brilliant, and quietly dismissive of the very Western world that the Kissingers of 20th century America built. Ironically, by reaching out to Mao, and shepherding China into the modern world, Kissinger may have helped build the very bridge that has made his world obsolete.

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The first feature you encounter on the site is The Think Tank. In this section, the CIC aggregates and analyzes work being done on international affairs in research institutes across the country, and internationally. The carefully curated content in The Think Tank will cover a wide range of topics and will operate in multi-media including print, audio, photo-essays, and videos.

Roundtable is the meeting place of our signature bloggers, a group of dynamic young thinkers on Canadian foreign policy who are located both in Canada and abroad. John Hancock will be participating from the WTO in Geneva; Roland Paris  from the University of Ottawa; André Pratte from La Presse in Montreal; and Jennifer Welsh from Oxford University.

About thirty high profile Canadian figures are participating in our Rapid Response section. These eminent personalities, representing a variety of sectors—academia, policy, and corporate—will respond to a timely “question of the week” on international issues by posting short responses on the site. We expect this to be a lively feature!

Our Global Events Calendar  is a resource for events and special dates around the world, and is toggled with the CIC Events Calendar  of branch activities. The site will also allow us to share the many—over 150 last year—events produced by our network of 16 branches across the country.

Finally, Dispatch, the CIC editors blog, provides ongoing commentary on both the work being done by the CIC, and on international affairs overall by myself, acting as Editor-in-Chief, our Senior Editor, Dr. Taylor Owen, a current Banting Fellow, and Anouk Dey, M.Phil, a current Action Canada fellow.

The editorial and technology platforms for the site were developed and built in collaboration with The Mark, a producer of multimedia content and conversations that feature influencers worldwide.

We invite you to enter our site, enjoy, and participate. All sections on the site include interactive commenting and social sharing options, and we encourage you to get involved and use them. We are standing by, eager to transmit your views through the CIC networks.

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We have approached this in several ways.  In our section called The Think Tank we engage with, analyze and promote research and journalism produced both around the world and in Canada.  We will not replicate the primary content creation role of other think tanks and publications.  Our Rapid Response feature provides real-time reactions to world events directly from the BlackBerrys of eminent Canadians. I’m very excited about the initial group, which we will continue to expand.  Our group blogs bring top academic and international discussions into an approachable and inviting format.  The Roundtable, our first group blog, tackles the field of international relations and features four leaders: Roland Paris, Jennifer Welsh, André Pratte and John Hancock.

The editors of opencanada.org will post from this blog, Dispatch.  Here you can find commentary on international affairs from myself and deputy-editor Anouk Dey, as well as postings by the CIC President Jennifer Jeffs.  On Twitter our @cicdispatch handle will curate and engage with the growing and dynamic community of international affairs scholars and policy-makers.

Site-wide we will run a full media production suite.  Our CIC Events Calendar and Global Events Calendar will alert you to organized events, from international elections to the activities of organisations and universities, both national and abroad.  On our homepage we run a Twitter feed that selects topical tweeters each week.  We plan to host virtual and live events and, wherever possible, to use technology to facilitate online engagement.  Through this variety of features we will promote other think tanks, academics, and journalists while encouraging a lively discussion of international affairs.  To be the hub of a conversation, we need to be completely open.  This platform is yours as much as it is ours.

While this site is a work in progress, it is a labour of love, and we have a host of exciting expansions and projects to roll out over the coming months.  We can’t wait to build the 21st century platform for international affairs in Canada – a platform that has been for too long absent.  Welcome to opencanada.org, Canada’s online hub for international affairs!

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We are delighted to welcome the Windsor-Essex Branch to our cross-country branch network, and to have them support the CIC’s partnership with the Mowat Centre and the Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program Great Lakes – St. Lawrence Region Summit in Windsor, Ontario, on June 21 and 22, 2011. Leaders from business, government, non-profit, and other sectors from Canada and the US are gathering to scope out a vision for the region and identify practical steps necessary to achieve this vision through enhanced collaboration across the Canada-US border. Watch for our commentary on the proceedings on www.opencanada.org after the event.

While at national office we have been working hard with our collaborators at The Mark to launch our site this week, branch activity has been very busy from coast to coast. Montreal hosted Kenya’s leading women’s rights Champion, Flora Terah; Ottawa presented an eminent trio of Canadian foreign policy experts—Denis Stairs, Jack Granatstein, and David Bercuson—to talk about Canada’s international role, learning from the past and looking to the future; in Victoria, eminent Canadian diplomat Jeremy Kinsman gave a talk, Democracy Rising: Are idealists realists? And on the opposite side of the country, in Halifax, Marq de Villiers will be talking about Strategies for Surviving the 21st Century World. The Waterloo Branch is holding their annual media panel Muzzled Media—The Global Challenge, in collaboration with the Centre for International Governance Innovation.

I look forward to hearing your comments, feedback, and suggestions for our new digital platform. I am looking forward to sharing your views with our readers via my Dispatch pieces.

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1. We must base our foreign policy in the tools and tactics of a networked world.

It is one thing to say, as the CIC Open Canada report as well as The Liberal Party of Canada’s recent foreign policy report, titled “A Global Network Strategy”, did, that the world is now interconnected.  It is quite another to map these networks and develop policies that take advantage of benefits and mitigate threats. The world is not simply multipolar, it is multiscalar.  States are still important, but they are subject to the actions of individuals and groups as never before. Although there are countless examples of networked international policy actors, groups and phenomena, such as al-Qaeda, microfinance organizations, do-it-yourself development theory, social entrepreneurial mergers of NGOs and for-profits, and so on, none more uniquely embodies the new global reality than the case of Wikileaks.

The recent Wikileaks release of thousands of diplomatic cables from U.S. embassies follows the publication of hundreds of thousands of documents containing operational information about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. These massive data leaks, while lauded by many, underline the tension between a government’s justifiable need for secrecy and the public’s demand for more open and transparent governance. There are both benefits and costs to this new phenomenon that together accentuate the complexity of the new foreign policy environment.

2. We must reform, dismantle or replace the institutions through which we conduct foreign policy

Most of the institutions through which we as a country engage with the world form a part of the modern social democratic state.  This institutional structure was developed in response to deep ideological divides between mercantilist capitalists and communists that existed at the turn of the last century.  It originated in the early 19th and early 20th centuries in response to a series of cascading global challenges. Like today, the pace of change was so rapid in 1912 that Americans, as Woodrow Wilson put it, were “coming to feel they had no control over the course of their affairs.” Consequently, as a movement composed of diverse interests a centrist progressive agenda sought to reconcile industrial capitalism with individual rights and democracy, diminish the religious and moralist tradition by integrating science and professional management into public policy and a professional bureaucracy, and confront international threats such as imperialism, fascism and expansionist communism with democracy and international stability.   From the late 19th century through the 1960s, three generations of leaders successfully built the national institutions and principles that define much of western world: liberal internationalism through the Bretton-Woods institutions and the League of Nations/United Nations, middle-class entitlements like Social Security and Medicare, and the advancement of individual rights through the suffragist and civil rights movements.

These New Deal institutions are characterized by their hierarchical structure. At the heart of virtually all of them lies a centralized administration allocating resources. While command-and-control bureaucracies were a productive development in industrial economies, this organizational model is profoundly ill-suited for the globalized knowledge economy. New information technologies lower the costs of democratically affiliating, mobilizing and organizing people and co-creating and distributing ideas. More importantly, diversity and freedom — not control — drive innovation in a networked world.

There are both domestic and international examples of these out of date institutions.  Domestically, the role of DFAIT has in many ways been made redundant as other departments have taken on increasingly prominent international roles.  As domestic issues are become increasingly international, so too must the departments responsible.  As an example of DFAIT’s diminishing role, during the Afghan war, Canada implemented what they called a Whole-of-Government approach, which merged our development, diplomatic and military capacities into one central strategic command.  Incredibly, instead using DFAIT as the central coordinating body, which is after all its role, the integrated mission was run from an ad hoc PCO department.  A second example is the struggle of CIDA to evolve its development models.  Since CIDA is laden by bureaucracy, there are growing calls to disband or radically reform CIDA, including one from from the Open Canada report.  NGOs, donor countries, development contractors and individual employees are all increasingly frustrated with the CIDA development model.

The same challenge mires our international institutions.  The UN, World Bank and IMF were all built for a different word; one where nation states in general, and a select groups of states in particular, had a near universal monopoly on power.  This is clearly no longer the case.  The result is that small fixes, such as reforming the Security Council, will prove insufficient. We need to rethink what global governance looks like in a networked world.

3. We must meaningfully engage and incentivize the new foreign policy actors

If you were interested in international affairs in the 1970’s, your clear career choice was to join the foreign service. As a result, in what many see as the golden age of Canadian foreign policy, a small groups of diplomats guided our engagement in the world.  There were literally a handful of people responsible for our entire foreign policy.  It goes without saying that this is no longer the case.  If an engaged Gen Y’er wants to work on global issues, chances are he or she is not going to join the government.  In fact, the chances are pretty good that he or she is not going to even engage with the questions of Canadian foreign policy proper.

Instead, this group, my peers, start NGO’s, write books, work for multinationals, create social enterprises.  They are innovating.  They look at the government and see an institutional structure which does not appeal.  They see a bargain whereby they have to put in two decades of work to be in a position of authority and independence. What’s more, while some select few can have an impact within government, one can often make a far more significant impact from the outside.

And there may be a deeper shift in play.  This new generation of Canadians shaped by the internet and globalization have replaced a traditional desire for certainty (from their politicians, newspapers and teachers), for the probability of truth.  They understand that there are multiple perspectives that need to be balanced and understood. This is the basic fact of living in a network with access to an abundance of information. Have been presented with an online world centred around choice and freedom, made possible by decentralised authority, these people are increasingly interested in remaking the real world along those lines. In short, they are willing to trade the security of centralization and hierarchical institutions for something new.

4.  We desperately need innovation of ideas

The most significant thing lacking in the Canadian foreign policy discussion is innovation.  As the CIC’s report, Open Canada: A Global Positioning Strategy for a Networked Age states, “ideas are the new industry.”  But our debate feels out of date, the language is tired, and we simply do not have the institutions needed to spur innovation.

First, the language of the discussion is both tired and out of date.  You would be hard pressed to pick up a Canadian foreign policy book or essay without seeing such clichés as: Go for Gold, World Class, Energy Superpower, Getting Back in the Game, Size of the fight in the dog, or any number of tedious sports metaphors. More importantly, the theoretical frameworks used to describe the context of foreign policy, such as strategic studies, security studies, the values versus interests debate, national security, and power relations, simply seem ill-suited for the contemporary world.  The policy discourse would benefit from a broader array of theoretical constructs.

Second, at the moment we do not as a country have the capacity for an innovative foreign policy discussion. Where is the creative thinking on foreign policy happening?   What is the framework in which a new generation are viewing foreign policy? I see very few researchers or institutions pushing the boundaries of the Canadian foreign policy debate.  Think tanks struggle for resources, and academics are dis-incentivised from working on Canadian topics, as all of the big disciplinary journals are international.

Finally, and related to the first two points, we need to cease being afraid of bringing ideology into the foreign affairs conversation. As discussed above, there is a widespread belief in the ideal, centrist, moderate foreign policy.  I believe that this is mythology, and that using ideological lenses to develop and critique ideas and policies would be one way of advancing what is a stagnant discourse.  Take the Liberal Party of Canada as an example.  We need to rethink what a liberal internationalist foreign policy looks like in a post 9/11 world.  Some of the greatest thinkers of the left in both the US and UK have recently been bitterly divided between interventionists and isolationists.  With Michael Ignatieff as its leader, the Liberal Party was perhaps uniquely positioned internationally to rethink this ideological world view.  And yet they remained stuck in glorifying past accomplishments developed in and for a world that no longer exists. Similarly, I would be fascinated to hear a clear articulation of a morality-driven Conservative foreign policy platform.  The way in which the Harper government has navigated the Chinese rights versus market debate has been telling – and indicative of an emerging Canadian conservative ideological worldview- but all we have really heard are piecemeal, disjointed and often contradictory policy ideas. We sense that there is not an overarching ideological lens. These are the types of ideological arguments and tensions that should be present in a vibrant policy debate.

So there are four thoughts to get the conversation going.  We are going to do our part here to foster these and other debates.  Here’s hoping you will join us.

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