Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Foreign Affairs
Issue 37 - Evidence
OTTAWA, Wednesday, May 12, 1999
The Standing Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs met this day at 3:53 p.m. to examine the ramifications to Canada of the changed mandate of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and Canada's role in NATO since the demise of the Warsaw Pact, the end of the Cold War and the recent addition to membership in NATO of Hungry, Poland and the Czech Republic; and of peacekeeping, with particular reference to Canada's ability to participate in it under the auspices of any international body of which Canada is a member.
Senator John B. Stewart (Chairman) in the Chair.
[English]
The Chairman: I now call the meeting to order. As I think back over our last meetings, I am impressed by the amount of time senators have spent on the most recent example of NATO peacekeeping, the Yugoslavia-Kosovo situation. I hope that we will not return too much to that example unless it has a direct bearing on the whole idea of peacekeeping. To help us this afternoon, we have two distinguished professors:. Professor Michael Bliss, who has been elected a member of the Order of Canada and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada; and Professor Robert Bothwell, also a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He has served as the Connaught Fellow and has been a visiting Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Centre of the Smithsonian Institute. Professor Bothwell has the current distinction of being the author of The Big Chill: Canada and the Cold War.
Please proceed.
Mr. Robert Bothwell, Professor of History, Trinity College, University of Toronto: My approach will be more historical and that of Mr. Bliss more contemporary.
My specialty is the history of Canadian foreign relations. I always think that one must go back to the beginning, to the origins of something, in order to understand how we arrived where we are.
Historians often perceive different routes and hold different views. Mr. Bliss and I have amiably disagreed about most of human existence for most of the 30 years that we have been friends. There should be a lot of "esprit contradictoire."
There is a lot of confusion about ideas, concepts and labels in Canadian foreign relations, especially the application of that awful word "Pearsonian." I ended an article recently with the observation that I did not think that Lester Pearson was really a Pearsonian. I am not sure that he would not have been embarrassed by the use of his name. I will talk about the twin origins of peacekeeping and collective security in Canadian foreign relations.
As a teacher of Canadian foreign relations to reasonably enthusiastic undergraduates, we always have a great deal of difficulty with the role of public opinion and public enthusiasms as these affect our foreign relations. I would like to speak about them as well.
Canada's foreign relations as presently constituted are still a product, not of the Cold War, but of World War II and of the experience of the decades prior to that conflagration. Before 1919, Canada, as a colony, had no foreign policy worthy of the name. That did not mean that Canadians did not have strong views about what their country was and where it ought to sit in the world. Even as colonials, Canadians have always taken a very active interest in how the world should move on.
The Canadian interest was almost always defined in terms of alliance or closeness to Great Britain and the United States. It would be very true to say that Canada's foreign policy, as it came out of World War II, was formed by that alliance. It is an alliance that reflects cultural, demographic and economic factors, so much so that Mackenzie King, at the end of World War II confided to that wonderful volume, his diary -- along with dreams of Sir Wilfrid Laurier in long red underwear -- that he thought that if he, as Prime Minister of Canada, deviated or was seen to be strongly opposed to a major American foreign policy, that he was not at all sure that the people of Canada would follow him or Harry Truman, the President of the United States.
Canadian leaders must keep that in mind. Culturally, Canadians are, and always have been, close to the trends of American opinion and American policy.
We are part of the original inner three of the NATO alliance. It was ourselves, the British and the Americans in 1948 who devised the blueprint that led to the NATO alliance. We wanted it very badly because we saw no other way in which we could entice the Americans into a regular relationship with the rest of the world. From Canada's point of view, that was overwhelmingly important.
The second reason for NATO of course is for security. It was a security that in 1948-49 we interpreted in a political way. People forget that NATO was a political alliance before it was a military alliance. The NATO Treaty does not make reference to the elaborate carapace of military institutions that now characterizes the alliance and has done for a long time.
Therefore underlying our foreign policy are the three factors of the United States, security and relations with Europe, for which Canada had great expectations in 1948-49, and which we hoped to institutionalize by turning NATO into more than a military alliance. At this point, students of Canadian foreign policy usually groan and say, "Oh no, he is about to discuss Article 2," and I am. Article 2 of the NATO Treaty is the Canadian article, and it is one that naturally occupies a large role in what we say about NATO.
Article 2 is more than a Canadian article in the sense that it was supposed to embody a collective spirit, a collective commitment to cultural and political values. Really, right off the bat you can say that NATO is -- especially from a Canadian but not only from a Canadian point of view -- a political, cultural institution. It would not exist, it could not exist if it did not have somewhere a kind of foundation of political philosophy. That is basically a liberal, democratic political philosophy with a commitment to the preservation of human rights.
I need hardly say that the NATO Treaty and the NATO alliance almost immediately contradicted itself by involving Portugal, which was definitely not committed to human rights as most people understand them. I suppose the hope was that Portugal would improve, and in any case it was small. So the NATO alliance and human rights have coexisted.
Canada naturally hoped to better its own particular foreign policy situation by involvement in NATO. In the first five or six years of NATO, down to the middle of the 1950s, Canada put a tremendous amount into the alliance. If you look at Canada's military budget for the early 1950s, you will see that it was 8.5 per cent of GNP, which in contemporary terms is just unimaginable.
Canada committed a division to European defence.; Granted we only sent a brigade or reinforced brigade, but two brigades were supposed to be waiting in Canada to come over. We sent an air division, which in the middle of the 1950s was one-fifth of NATO's air power. Thus, Canada in the early years was truly the fourth most important member of the alliance, after the club of Great Britain, the United States and France, which perched uneasily on top of the institution.
Canada's commitment, it is true, was towards Article 2 issues, but we should never forget that Canadians thought that the best way to make their words heard and the best way in which Canada could contribute was to make an absolutely outstanding contribution to the defence of Europe, a very significant contribution.
Nevertheless, we were not entirely happy. That was because we felt that the British, French and the Americans ignored our advice. We were right in that observation; they did. They did not give us -- or anybody else -- equality. Decisions in NATO were taken at the top by a restricted group.
In the late 1950s, or in 1956 at any rate under Lester Pearson, Canada did urge along with the Norwegians and the Italians, that NATO democratize its decision-making in one way or the other. That was advice that was probably even more obnoxious to the French and British than it was to the Americans, who at least had occasional spasms, as Americans often do, wondering deep in their hearts whether they are treating everybody right.
This initiative or this complaint really came to very little and NATO carried on much as it had, which is to say as an overwhelmingly if not exclusively military proposition, which in the 1950s was committed to the destruction of half of Germany in order to save half of Europe if it ever came to a war. NATO was a nuclear-tipped military alliance.
Canada continued to give large but somewhat diminishing attention to its military contribution. There is a slow but steady decline in the proportion of GNP consumed by our military budget from the mid-1950s. Of course, the Canadian GNP is moving up, so the amount does not look too bad. In terms of the federal budget, it moved from 45 per cent in 1953 to 28 per cent under Diefenbaker.
The Diefenbaker government continued largely the policy of the St. Laurent government towards NATO. Diefenbaker of course was consumed by other foreign policy issues. NATO was involved, but in the debate, NATO really seems to have escaped more or less unscathed as far as Canadian public opinion is concerned. Public opinion polls from this period indicate that NATO and its mission are overwhelmingly popular with Canadians.
Where does this description sit with the peacekeeping that we like to remember Lester Pearson for? For Pearson, as Canada's foreign minister and later as prime minister, you must remember that NATO came first. Peacekeeping came second. NATO came first because Pearson, as ex-President of the General Assembly of the UN, as a constant attendee in New York, understood very well that the UN was a paralysed institution and that if we were to make our opinion count, we had to participate in NATO.
In 1956, there was the Suez incident and Pearson's subsequent Nobel Peace Prize. That peace prize recognized an initiative that was mainly directed at restoring harmony among the NATO allies. That was the idea behind it. It was to reconcile the British, French and Americans who had fallen out over the Suez incident. The UN was the instrument, but it was not really the object.
Nevertheless, Pearson had a mischievous side to him. In the 1960s as Prime Minister he would torment Paul Martin, Mr. Whelan's neighbour, by suggesting periodically that Canada should pull out of NATO. Martin would fall on the floor, foam and go off to his corner and weep, and Pearson would return happily home to a glass of Canadian Club. Pearson had that attractive characteristic of not being impressed with his own divinity.
Pearson also had that nice quality of not thinking that institutions that he was connected with or he himself had ascended to the level of the godhead. So Pearson, more than people today assume, took a skeptical view of the various institutions with whose foundation he was associated, and that is both the UN and NATO. Under Pearson, Canadians became extremely disillusioned with peacekeeping and the United Nations in the forgotten aftermath, which was when Nasser kicked out Canada's troops from Palestine or Sinai. This was utterly humiliating for the Canadians. This was special treatment that Canadians at the time resented and quite properly so.
When people talk about our lengthy commitment to peacekeeping, that is not quite the way I see it. It is much more up and down than that. Of course, the Cypress involvement, which came at the same time, is also something that must be seen in a NATO context. Yes, it is peacekeeping, but it is really NATO. It is keeping the Greeks and Turks from each other's throats.
In 1968-69, Canada's policy towards NATO changed significantly. I do not think that it was an entirely fortunate change, but it does represent a continuing Canadian sense that NATO was not absolutely what was required. I can talk more about this in questions if anyone is interested.
Now NATO's history, in which we are involved as one of 18members, is divided into several parts. NATO does not move in a straight line. In the first part, from 1949 to1950, there is no NATO army. The second part, from 1950 to the late 1960s, is a period of nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union. French withdrawal from the military side of NATO was a catalyst that moved NATO to seriously reconsider itself and reshape itself in the mid-1960s. This produced the Harmel report and the invention of NATO as a true diplomatic forum, which changed matters considerably.
Finally, we have the two-track decision in 1979, which allowed NATO to play a major role in diplomacy through the 1980s. NATO moved from being purely a military instrument to being a combined political, diplomatic and military instrument in the 1970s and 1980s. Again, as polls show, it continued to be popular in Canada. Somebody quipped that the enduring NATO was the endearing NATO. People were surprised when they found that Canadians continued to respect and support NATO in particular. I bet that polls would show that Canadians supported NATO more than they did the United Nations.
NATO has really been right at the centre of Canada's foreign policy now for 50 years. It has enjoyed an unusual amount of support in the Canadian public. Canada's approach to NATO has certainly changed over the years, as NATO has. It is hard to imagine another institution that would quite as well represent Canadian approaches to foreign relations. In a very odd way, NATO truly is a popular institution in the sense that it reflects what Canadians want.
Does this mean that it always works? Does it mean that it would have worked? I should say as a historian that we know remarkably little about how NATO actually has worked in the 50 years of its existence. Much of what we think we know about NATO turns out to be a bit of a mirage the closer you come to it. It has been one of the most secretive institutions on earth, not necessarily because its directors are totally devoted to secrecy, but because members can never agree on the proper declassification of their materials. Only now, 50 years after its formation, are some of the materials coming out that would actually allow us as historians really to examine how NATO actually functioned. As a symbol, it is big, it is major, it is shining like the North Star that is its emblem. When you come closer, God help us, I do not know if we can really say. It may turn out that it is defence-designed by a committee, the defence equivalent of a camel, but we really do not know.
I have talked mostly about the politics of NATO and its significance in Canadian foreign relations.
Mr. Michael Bliss, Professor of History, University of Toronto: It is a privilege to be able to come and talk with you on these issues, although my first comment when I was phoned by your staffer was to make very clear that I do not have and do not pretend to have special expertise in the history of Canadian foreign policy and Canadian foreign affairs. Perhaps that was why they went and got a real expert, my colleague, to whom on almost all matters historical related to Canadian foreign policy I happily defer.
Like many Canadians, I had not paid a lot of attention to foreign policy issues since about the end of the Cold War, which I had thought was a wonderful turning point in our history. We had grown up with the terrible menace of World War III. When the Soviet empire collapsed finally, an era in history had ended. Many of us turned our back on foreign policy issues and assumed that the world was now in fine shape.
I know you do not want to talk a lot about Kosovo unless you must today, but my involvement stems from having woken up on the morning of March 24 to learn that Canadian fighter pilots were dropping bombs on Yugoslavia as part of a NATO action. I began trying to think through the implications of this and found that my train of thought led me to quite remarkable, and for me, very surprising conclusions.
To circle around that, I agree almost entirely with Professor Bothwell's analysis. We are part of a group of Canadian historians who well understand Canada's history of being, when called upon and necessary, a war-making country. We believe it is very important that Canadians remember and honour the extraordinary military contributions we made in the two world wars of this century. I fully agree that in the post-war period we understood that our commitment to NATO overrode our involvement in other collective organizations.
I agree with Professor Bothwell that the notion of Canada as having a distinct peacekeeping role has always had a whiff of exaggeration, not to say fraud, about it, because we always knew that in a confrontation, if the Cold War turned hot, we would be a war-making nation. Of course for a time, I believe we had pilots flying planes with nuclear weapons, so that we were never by any means an innocent country.
Nonetheless, when I began to think through the situation on March 24, it struck me that the world had changed, and the old rules were not applying. NATO was not doing in Kosovo what it had been founded to do. It had been founded as a defensive alliance whose overwhelming role was to organize the defence of the west in the event of an assault from the communist east. NATO existed as a way of providing collective security to the North Atlantic nations because of the threat of the Soviet empire.
The Soviet empire had collapsed, and it seems to me that, with the end of the threat to the North Atlantic community, there was in fact an end to the purpose of NATO. Clearly since 1991, NATO has been trying to define a new role for itself. I am sure Canada has been part of those discussions, largely behind closed doors, although we know a bit about the dimensions of the discussion.
Now we see that NATO has declared its new role, and indeed, NATO is very vigorously pursuing that role, which has been to intervene in Yugoslavia -- intervening in what is to my mind a civil war in Yugoslavia. In the view of our government, it is intervening because of an overriding humanitarian concern.
Now, one can understand NATO taking on a new purpose, and one can understand the notion of humanitarian interventions. However, in the world that we have structured since 1945, it has been generally understood that in the general hope of creating a new regime of international law, the United Nations was the body of choice. The United Nations was in fact the only body that had the possibility of creating a structure of international law that would govern the affairs of nations. In extreme cases, the United Nations would, for humanitarian, or perhaps other reasons, agree to the overriding of national sovereignty in military actions. It is my understanding that in effect when we sent troops to Korea, we were operating under UN sanction. It is my understanding that when we had troops in the combat role in the Gulf War, we had UN sanction.
To my mind, the overriding fact of the Kosovo action was that we were sending troops into combat in the skies of Yugoslavia without any kind of mandate from the United Nations, and indeed, in flagrant and direct violation of not only the UN Charter, but as I understand it as it is written, of the NATO Treaty itself.
In other words, I understood the rationale. I listened to the explanations that the United Nations would have been paralysed if there had been a vote in the Security Council, that the veto would have been exercised. Our side would have lost a vote in the United Nations. There was nothing that would be irregular or unlawful about that vote.
A metaphor has occurred to me again and again. The NATO operation in Kosovo was and is a vigilante operation of people declaring that since existing legal structures are not adequate to their purposes as they see them, they will take the law into their own hands. It seemed to me on March 24, and this feeling has become increasingly certain since, that this was an extraordinarily perilous thing to do. It was perilous in two ways. As a matter of principle, vigilante organizations have a way of begetting other vigilante organizations. I cannot see how the world can operate on the kinds of principles that NATO has eannunciated.
Second, it occurred to me that we were making a huge practical mistake in becoming involved in a Balkan civil war, that we were in a situation that had not been properly thought through, that we were relying on a strategy that had failed repeatedly in wars of this century, and that we were heading straight into a quagmire. It seems to me that we are now seven weeks into the quagmire. We are much more deeply into it. I cannot imagine anyone, knowing what has happened in the past seven weeks who, if they could turn the clocks back, would believe that NATO should start attacking Yugoslavia. This has been a bungled operation. It is also an operation that has possibly created the most serious international crisis in recent memory. Not only has NATO contributed to the destabilization of Yugoslavia and the Balkans, but now it has managed to begin the destabilization of the whole world. I take extremely seriously the deterioration of our relations in Russia and China that have resulted. I see the possibility of a new Cold War emerging and of a great deal of good that has happened in the world being undone. I find it depressing almost beyond thought.
It seemed to me that Canada, believing in its obligations to NATO, has been a good soldier in the NATO operation. I understand that our membership in the alliance probably did commit us. If we are part of NATO, we would have to be part of it. I understand that we would have to make a military contribution, but it seems to me that this situation that has happened ought to now cause us to think what for me was unthinkable during the period of the Cold War, because I had always understood the primacy of NATO in our foreign policy. Now I find myself saying that we must think the unthinkable. If this is the mandate that NATO is to pursue, is it in our interest as Canadians to maintain our membership? To me, this is thinking the unthinkable. I never would have believed that I would be raising this issue.
However, I think that we can begin to ask ourselves these questions. I have been haunted since March 24 by the thought that at any time we may lose a Canadian plane and pilot -- or more planes and pilots -- and we will have sacrificed lives because of our involvement in the Balkans.
What exactly is Canada's national interest in the Balkans? Why should Canadian lives be sacrificed? How many Canadian lives should be sacrificed? Why is Canada doing Europe's job if this is a regional issue? It seems to me that we are a long way from that region. I understood why we were in an alliance with the Europeans in 1949, but it does now seem that European security ought to be a matter for the Europeans.
I understand the possibility that we may be involved in humanitarian efforts around the world, and through the United Nations, peacekeeping activities. While not previously central to our activities, these are good things for us to do. Humanitarianism does not seem to me to be regionally based. I do not think our humanitarian interest ought to be Eurocentric. It seems to me that we have humanitarian interest in other parts of the world and we ought to pursue these roughly equally.
Our membership in NATO and the involvement that it has led to have very seriously jeopardized the possibility of our playing a meaningful role in the broader affairs of the world. Are we now having any significant impact in finding a way out of this situation? Would we not have been better off if -- suppose for some quirk of history we had not been part of NATO -- we had not been part of this? It seems to me that we would have greater freedom of action now if we were not bombing Yugoslavia. If we were not one of the 10 countries Yugoslavia has hauled before the International Court of Justice, we would have a possibility of actually being in on the peacekeeping force that will eventually move into Kosovo. I expect now that we will not be welcomed. If we had not been part of this, we would have had a greater standing with Russia and China in the diplomatic efforts.
If we had followed advice that I always thought very foolish in the past and been out of NATO, we would be better positioned now to play a constructive role in the affairs of the world, and I think one in accordance with the wishes of our people.
This engagement has shown that when push comes to shove, the junior partners in the alliance have no particular function except to say, "Ready, aye, ready." I believe that our foreign policy now -- and I thought I would never say this because I am not an anti-American -- is being made in Washington. The Government of Canada has virtually no room to manoeuvre, no room for an independent foreign policy.
As someone who believes in free trade, in the strengthening of North-South links, that we are part of a continental society and ought to be, I nonetheless feel that if we are to be an independent country, there must be a purpose to our independence. If there is any purpose to our independence, it is that from time to time when the world is faced with difficult decisions, we will be able to speak with an independent voice. We are not speaking with an independent voice now; we are prisoners of an outdated commitment to an alliance that has mutated.
One of the outcomes of this will be to prompt widespread Canadian debate in the future of our foreign policy, our involvement with NATO. I am very pleased that your committee is taking a lead in beginning this debate. I hope that you will continue and that you will hear a very wide spectrum of opinion.
I saw yesterday a pollster who said that health care is still the number one issue in the minds of Canadians. However, in six weeks Kosovo has become the second issue of greatest interest to Canadians. We have had a re-awakening, a wake-up call. Foreign policy will be on the agenda, and we will all be thinking a lot about it, and I hope that your committee will be able to give us a lead.
The Chairman: Professor Bothwell, in your initial presentation, you told us that over the years, Canadians have given strong support to NATO. Canadian public opinion favoured NATO. Now are you talking particularly of the Cold War period and the period immediately after when the Canadian public had not yet realized that the defensive purpose of NATO, as far as many people were concerned, had disappeared. Was there a kind of inertia in public opinion relative to NATO?
Mr. Bothwell: That is a good way to put it. Probably I would go a little further. Canadians identify with the countries that make up NATO. These would be seen as culturally similar, ethnically similar, understandable, countries resembling ourselves, holding the same values. I believe that Canadians would have questioned our being outside such a club.
I would not say that Canadians have had occasion until now to seriously debate what NATO actually does or has become or how it makes its decisions or on what grounds it makes its decisions. These things were not really thought of.
Right at the end of the Cold War -- and at the time we withdrew our last garrison from Europe -- there was an assumption, which the Europeans themselves fed, that they would take over. They would start afresh and security in Europe would be Europe's business. Of course as we know, the Europeans made a dismal botch out of it and had to beg the Americans to come back in and make decisions for them.
I do not suggest that the Europeans begged us to come back in. Some of them, if they thought about it hard, would have thought that it might be nice to have the Canadians along. This is almost always put in American-European terms rather than Europe- Canada or even Europe-North America.
There are a number of other factors that enter into it, but inertia is certainly one. Almost all institutions survive because of inertia.
The Chairman: We have been hearing in financial discussions that the International Monetary Fund, by helping countries in financial distress, are creating what is called a "moral hazard," a term which I initially found very difficult. It means that a country that seems to have mismanaged its financial affairs is given money and thus the expectation is created that if they mismanage their affairs again, they will get more money.
Could this analogy apply to Europe? They do not have to make the hard decisions. They do not have to spend money on the armament and the standing army because they know that NATO will do the job for them. Consequently, they relax. Now, whether you want to make that as an argument for or against NATO is another question. Does the moral hazard approach apply in the case of NATO and the Western European military organization?
Mr. Bothwell: That touches on the very important issue of our relations with Europe and what Europe has become. Canada initially in NATO hoped for a great deal from Europe. Unlike the United States, Canada has been consistently disappointed by what has happened.
Europe, under the American umbrella, and I suppose initially the Canadian too, was given the extraordinary luxury of not having to go back to its old vice of standing armies and armament races and so on. When we thought about it, we thought that was a damn good thing considering what the Europeans had done to the world in the previous two world wars. We felt that we had an overriding strategic interest in that. Yet the institutions which were being created in Europe functioned in a very peculiar way. When we see what the ultimate product of those institutions is, currently the European Union, I sometimes wonder at how they can make decisions at all. The European institutions, political and economic, absolutely work by inertia. Inertia is what sustains them. I do not believe that if they were ever put to the test, as they were briefly in Croatia and Bosnia, they could produce an agreement. Take, for example, what happened in the cod war with Spain. The Europeans fell apart, thank goodness, in all directions.
I find the possibility, even the notion, that Europe is, under its present circumstances, able to pull itself together and make decisions, very debatable. Having said that, I am not at all sure it is in our interest that they do so. Is it the moral hazard? I suppose if you want to see it that way we have retarded the Europeans from becoming mature and making their own decisions. Maybe that is good.
The Chairman: This would seem to be an argument for retaining NATO, even though we find it hard to tolerate at times.
Mr. Bothwell: Yes, it is definitely in our larger interest.
Senator Kenny: I wanted to ask about the value of NATO to Europe, particularly the stability that NATO has brought Europe. Some refer to it as an insurance policy, 50 years of peace. We have seen the military of the different countries become comfortable with each other. They have a better understanding of each other's capacity.
We see NATO serving an interesting role, reassuring many European countries who are nervous about a new, stronger and expanded Germany. During the period when Professor Bliss was asleep, we saw the evolution of Partners for Peace. PFP set certain standards that were very important for the East Block countries. We saw criteria being set for NATO membership that struck me as being pretty progressive: stable and accepted borders, peaceful and democratic change, free press, no serious ethnic problems and commitment to free enterprise economies. NATO was performing a very interesting role as it looked towards expansion. Would either of you care to comment on the value that NATO might have had during those 50 years and whether the Partnership for Peace process -- which took place principally between the end of the Cold War and the start of the bombing -- was a valuable exercise?
Mr. Bliss: You may see the essential difference between us. Despite the Canadian clause, NATO never functioned as anything but a military alliance. It was a necessary alliance, and by being there it did a lot of good, but the threat disappeared. As we think the unthinkable and ask what will happen to NATO, and do we need NATO, my question is where is the threat?
Senator, you mentioned Germany. I point out to you that Germany is now Europe. Germany is the dominant country in Europe and can hardly threaten itself. Where is the military threat to Europe that requires a tight, secretive, armed-to-the-teeth military alliance? There is no such threat.
Now it is possible, and this may be the terrible irony of what NATO is doing, that by having run amuck as it has, it will create a self-fulfilling prophecy and recreate the Cold War. Then possibly we will say that we must have NATO again, and what a terrible tragedy that would be.
If NATO were to fall apart -- and this is the point about the inertia of institutions -- sometimes you must say that if they disappeared, would it matter? If NATO had disappeared, had wound down in 1992, it is clear in 1999 that the world would be a better place.
Mr. Bothwell: Professor Bliss invites me to disagree with him and I do, but only up to a point. NATO is no stronger than the direction that the United States is prepared to give it. That is very clear. The U.S. is the predominant power in NATO and it is becoming more predominant in an odd way. Even though the Americans have cut the size of their military considerably, the Americans now have such a technological lead over the Europeans, who have been collecting the peace dividend along with us really since the 1960s, that relations in the alliance are even more uneven, even with the Germans, than they used to be.
I am certainly not here to defend Bill Clinton's way of making foreign policy. As far as I can tell -- you may be better informed than I -- it is capricious.
Senator Prud'homme: And selective.
Mr. Bothwell: Exactly. One must hope for better direction by the United States. Certainly the Partnership for Peace was basically a good idea. It struck me as being rather like the circles of a club, giving people candidate membership and so on. This is fine. Certainly, I agree that it is consistent with NATO that the new members must have conformed to democratic values or democratic criterion, which has been characteristic of every NATO member except the ones we do not like to mention: Portugal, Greece and Turkey. But what of that? Basically, it is good intentions.
I have not given up on it, but I am certainly alarmed by the direction that NATO's strategy has taken in this particular conflict. I am not as vehement or decisive as my colleague on this. I still see much potential and good in NATO, especially for Canada. I have not reached his conclusion, but he has some evidence on his side.
Senator Kenny: You have commented on PFP just in passing. The fear of Germany has been real in the last couple of decades, particularly with a united Germany. When you talk to people of neighbouring countries, they take great comfort in the fact that NATO exists. Further, you commented earlier about the fact that the WEU could not function and is not likely to function without American leadership. We have seen a stable Europe up until now.
Perhaps what is occurring in the Balkans is an anomaly, and perhaps for the purpose of these discussions we should treat it as an anomaly and talk more about what we have seen up until the bombing started. Has it not provided us with stability? Is that not within Canada interests?
Mr. Bothwell: It is in Canada's interest to be part of an organization where we have a seat at the table and where important information is exchanged and at least some decisions are made. Canada is criticized as having "joineritis," but this is one organization where our membership has made a difference. Canada, even with a perhaps less than adequate military contribution in the 1970s and 1980s nevertheless through the strength of its diplomats and the intelligence of its performance did well for all, in particular for us.
Nevertheless, do not forget that NATO has never been put to the test before. NATO has never actually run a campaign before. We never had any idea as to how NATO would really function. Do not forget that NATO is wrapped in cosmic class security and abetted by Canada's lack of Access to Information Act, it is darn hard for us to obtain real details on how these things go, even in our own country.
I must give you a caveat. Yes, if we agree with what we know is good up to this point, that is great, but there are some deficiencies in what we know.
Pardon me as a historian for saying it, but in the 18th century the Duke of Marlborough cursed the fact that wherever his army marched under him as the grand director of the allies, there marched too a committee of Dutch parliamentarians. Every time Marlborough proposed to make an attack, these guys would sit in a tent and debate and vote as to whether the Grand Duke should be allowed to go get the French. Marlborough feared the Dutch more than he feared the French. It did occur to me as I watched this thing unfold, is this a war designed by the successors of those Dutch parliamentarians?
Mr. Bliss: Mr. Axworthy might like to think that Mr. Clinton fears the Canadians but I doubt it. If you want to look at this action as an anomaly, the obvious comment is some anomaly.
Part of this issue is that of the United States' role in Europe. In fact, the NATO countries are now facing the moral hazard. In The New York Times today in fact is an article which suggests that the NATO countries are now smack up against this issue because they know that they too are in the hands of the United States in the conduct of the war. They know that they do not have the military capacity to run a war of their own.
Again, it is what we have not thought about before, would Canada be better off if we decided that we did not want a seat at this table? The Americans, because they have global interests, may want to have a seat at the European table. We have had an honourable one, and we have 100,000 graves as a result of our interest in Europe. However, we may want to be interested in North America first.
The two North American nations have not always gone the same way. In both wars the Americans decided that it was in their interest to stay out of European affairs for a time. True they came in. Maybe we wish they had come in sooner. We do not have to go the same way vis-à-vis Europe as the Americans do. It ought to be thinkable that they would have their responsibilities, and we would protect our interests. Our interests may not be the same as their responsibilities.
Senator Kenny: We are looking at NATO through the optic of what has gone on in the Balkans. The committee should take a look at NATO prior to the Balkans and decide whether or not something was functioning well and usefully and then decide after that whether moving into the Balkans was an error or the wrong way to go. However, if the committee persists in looking at it through just one optic, it may miss the picture.
The Chairman: Our reference refers to NATO in peacekeeping. We have not talked very much about peacekeeping. What do you think of the idea of peacekeeping in general, and specifically, peacekeeping by NATO? It is a question that begins to haunt the committee.
Senator Lynch-Staunton: I am still trying to understand how NATO operates and has operated for the last 50 years. It has nothing to do with Kosovo, but of course Kosovo has initiated an interest in our study. When the government officials were here last week both from Foreign Affairs and from the military, they let us understand that it worked by consensus. We know what that word means.
Professor Bothwell, you have told us that decision-making is highly secretive. We do not know how it operates. Is that a fair conclusion from your comment?
Mr. Bothwell: Yes. We are beginning to have a general idea of certain NATO decisions, which I could talk about if that is the intent of your question.
Senator Lynch-Staunton: The Greeks are not too keen on the Kosovo intervention. I understand that they would not participate in any way, certainly not militarily. That makes them the odd man out. How does that affect their status in the alliance by taking that position?
Mr. Bothwell: I do not think that at present it would be very much in our interest, either in terms of our domestic harmony, our politics or our relations with other NATO alliance members to go the way of the Greeks. The Greeks have a very serious worry. There are a lot of Albanians disguised by the Greek census in the same way that there are a lot of Macedonians disguised by the Greek census. The boundaries in the Balkans are highly permeable. I am sure that the last thing that Greece wants is to see a greater Albania evolve from this. This would be close to their worst nightmare because it would potentially have ethnically based claims on all its neighbours, including Greece. Their hearts are with the Serbs. It is very a crude and realistic fear for the loss of Greek territory.
Senator Lynch-Staunton: I can understand why Greece took that position. I was wondering about its status within the alliance.
Mr. Bothwell: Greece has a strong incentive to behave because of its membership in NATO and in the EU, which is very important to Greece. Greece is typically the odd-man out in the EU as well as in NATO. This is not the first time; this is characteristic. They have very serious interests in Cyprus, which they want NATO to be good about, so the Greeks are going along with us in a sense.
Canada's position is very different. We certainly have nothing in particular to Canada to win or to lose in the Balkans. We just do not have the same impetus. We do not have the same history. I resist the idea that Greece is an appropriate analogy for us.
If we pulled out of this operation or out of NATO, our interests would be very seriously affected. We would have to pay for that somewhere, sometime. The tone of the American administration and of American politics is such that I believe that they would present the bill. I have not the slightest doubt about this. I say this as one who likes Americans: Americans should not be given free reign.
Senator Lynch-Staunton: Professor Bliss commented that our foreign policy was made in Washington. Was that a provocative throw-away line or do you really believe that we are taking instructions? I would like Professor Bothwell to comment on your answer.
Mr. Bliss: The logic that you have just gone through shows that I agree with Mr. Bothwell. Once we are in the alliance, given our position, we cannot be Greece. We have to be a good soldier in this cause. The problem of being the junior partner is that all you can do is say, "Ready, aye, ready." We cannot back out now.
I agree that if Mr. Axworthy broke ranks publicly, there would be hell to pay. He cannot break ranks, so where is our foreign policy made?
Mr. Bothwell: There is something else at play here. It may go back to Senator Stewart's unasked question. We have a tradition in our public life and public discourse of involvement and interest in the world. That is why I said in the beginning that even as colonials, Canadians paid attention to what was occurring in the world. When Papineau and the Patriotes rose up in the 1830s, they had been reading in the newspapers about Bolivar and the liberation of Latin America. They were paying attention and they were engaged.
There are contradictory traditions in our public life, and maybe they are best summed up by the two British politicians from the 19th century, Gladstone and Disraeli. I look at Mr. Axworthy and I see William Ewart Gladstone, the liberal Prime Minister of Great Britain and the man who trumpeted the Balkan horrors 100 years ago, and who, by the way, won an election on it.
Then there was Disraeli, the cynical Tory who said, "What is this far distant place? Our real interests, military or economic, are differently engaged." I wondered if Michael and I should not have done a Punch and Judy show as Gladstone and Disraeli. There is a moral aspect to our public life. We cannot get around it. Our domestic politics centre on questions of morality or at least express themselves in moral terms.
It is similar with international politics. Without making any specific reference to the latest version of Gladstone's Balkan horrors, there is a moral issue here that has particular salience in the 20th century because of the experience of the Holocaust and everything that has been written and talked about it since. It is still a very lively issue.
When I lived in Washington last year, I saw the endless buses pulling up to the Holocaust Museum.
We can allow horrors to go on somewhere and claim that it is no concern of ours. We can say that it is very regrettable, that our hearts are with you, but really we cannot do anything about it. There are often very good, compelling, overwhelming reasons to stand aside. Yet, there is after that a price to be paid.
Why do we have the foreign policy we do? It is because we stood aside in the 1930s. We said that it was not our business. Yet ultimately, World War II was interpreted after the war. It was not fought initially for questions of morality -- although there is some of that -- but after the war, the experience was interpreted in moral terms. We cannot be true to ourselves. As participants in a small "L" liberal democracy we cannot entirely avoid this question. We will always be torn between an idealist side and a realist side. Michael is that rare thing, an idealist realist.
Nevertheless, this is something that we must bear in mind. If we do pull out and stand aside and cultivate our garden, maybe that is the wisest thing to do, but our children, grandchildren and great grandchildren will wonder why. We must answer that.
The Vietnam War was essentially ended by a moral crusade that defeated another moral crusade, and that may well happen here.
Senator De Bané: Professor Bliss, you have put very clearly your position. Each of us of course has his own way of looking at things.
I, like you, look at what has happened. I look at the actions of President Milosevic, who managed to launch four wars in his own country in the last 10 years, which have killed over 300,000 people. He has fuelled hatred of the Serbs against the other ethnic groups in this country. He has taken control of the media in his country more than anyone ever did at any time during the communist regimes. Ms Albright has said that history may say that maybe we should have done this or that. She would prefer that we be criticized for not implementing a good policy than that history record that the West remained idle when that guy slaughtered a group that was not of his own ethnic group. This I put on the idealist side.
Can Canada wish to sit at the table of the Big Eight while at the same time maintain that we have no responsibility whatsoever in the stability of this planet and the different conflicts that can happen thousands of miles away from us? Is that really sustainable?
Mr. Bliss: I do not think that we should be continue to delude ourselves that we are one of the Big Eight. When we leave that table we will have a more realistic sense of the role we play in the world. If we had not been part of NATO, we would in fact be playing a more significant role in bringing peace to the world right now. At the moment we are handicapped. You raise the hard issue, the issue of ideals and idealism. Professor Bothwell had in a sense set that up.
First, we are haunted of course by Hitler and the Holocaust, and we are haunted by history and our guilt at the fact that we did not beat Hitler for the right reasons or beat him in time. We feel that we cannot let it happen again, so we keep saying that history is repeating itself, but of course there have been earlier rounds of history. I think often of the time the Balkans inflamed the whole world in World War I and how that was an idealistic war, particularly because it was the war to end wars. It was a great humanitarian crusade. We heard all the atrocity stories and we demonized the Huns in World War I. There were stories about the Germans raping Canadian nurses and crucifying Canadian soldiers. After that war we discovered that most of those atrocity stories were not true, that we had gone way overboard in our idealism and demonized people who were not demons. We got ourselves into a horrible mess after World War I.
The fact that people had cried wolf so often with atrocity stories in World War I rebounded in the worst kind of way. When the atrocity stories started coming out in World War II nobody believed them. because we had all become cynical. We are caught in these horrible dilemmas.
The demonization of Milosevic that is occurring will be toned down. Some of us will regret it. I simply do not believe that he is another Hitler. It is utterly irresponsible to use the word genocide today and to make that comparison. It in fact demeans the Jewish people, and it is also not a position being taken by the State of Israel, which has very mixed opinions about this war.
More importantly, even if you and Ms Albright are right, the catholic doctrine of the just war that you enunciated means that you must employ means that are appropriate to your end;, that you must be likely to achieve your end;, and that you must not do more harm. As this has developed, it is clear that we have not be able to come close to achieving the end. Almost certainly we have made things much worse.
We are now engaged in the systematic destruction of the infrastructure of Yugoslavia and we are still not able to achieve any of our ends. We have gotten ourselves into the kind of situation, that is analogous to a police chase where the tremendous NATO armed machine is chasing after Milosevic, spewing bombs and weapons in every direction, and is beginning to take a significant civilian toll, utterly destroying the stability of nations in passing. This is a police chase that has done far more harm than good. Even if I give you the idealism argument, NATO is the wrong instrument.
The right instrument of course would have been the United Nations. I agree that we, as idealists, ought to do everything we can to strengthen the United Nations and create goodwill. We are members of the Security Council, and we have a tremendous problem now with the other members of the Security Council. Think of what we have done, first with Russia, and now with China and the problems we have created; they are just mind boggling.
Senator Bolduc: Professor Bothwell, you said that the NATO decision-making process is fairly segregated. I like to read biographies and things like that. I recently finished The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made by Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas. It is very clear that the post-war institutions in Europe were designed to keep Germany on our side. That process has done its job. At the same time, the United States has placed its economic antennae all over the world. Most of the American multinationals are already in Europe. The Americans have built an interest in Europe much more than we have, in my opinion.
Even if our world interests are not the same as the Americans, is it conceivable for us to move out of an institution that we have been part of for 50 years, with people of similar cultures, Western Europeans? Somehow I have difficulties with that.
Mr. Bothwell: It is interesting that the founders of NATO, the people in the first generation, the people about whom you are reading, assumed that the military help -- the Canadian brigade, the Canadian air division, the four American divisions -- that we sent to Europe in 1950-51 was temporary. This was just to help them on their way, give them a little crutch and then their economies would be restored and so on.
Eisenhower was on record as saying that NATO would have failed if there were American soldiers left in Europe when he left office in 1961. Pearson thought rather the same. Pearson, when he was tormenting old Paul Martin, as he liked to do, had a serious point. Why should we continue on and on and on? This is certainly a very real question.
NATO partly solved this question by accident; de Gaulle was the unconscious catalyst. Charles de Gaulle in a curious way saved NATO because it forced NATO to really redefine itself in 1966-67 when it was kicked out of France, and to seriously undertake a real diplomatic mission. The Harmel report of that year gave NATO a role in seeking détente in Europe. It meant for the first time that NATO really began to discuss serious questions among the members. Prior to that, there was very little.
I would not begin to pretend that Canada ever played an important role in military decision-making in NATO. I do not think anybody would claim that. As a consequence of the Harmel Report, we really did have a role and an interest.
Do we have an interest now? Unlike my colleague, who I think wants a dramatic gesture, I think dramatic gestures are best confined to the stage. We ought to wait for that other characteristic of institutions. Senator Stewart raised inertia, and there is another -- senility. Many institutions' disappearance would cause tremendous eruption -- more than it is worth in my opinion. These institutions can be allowed gently to go to sleep. In a way, this is already happening with the group of eight, which is functioning in a manner that would have given joy to the Emperor Maximilian in 1518. There are tremendous pageants and bands and thousands of journalists, all paid for by the public. It is wonderful. But in fact these meetings are about very little and eventually this will be recognized. Now they are a spectacle. These things will eventually perish. They will become senile. They will go away when people understand that all that is being said are bromides, placebos passed from one side of the table to the other. That is ultimately what will happen to NATO.
I do not say this as one who advocates it happening. I would like to imagine a different and transcendental fate, but that does not usually happen in institutions of this kind.
Senator Grafstein: I have followed Mr. Bliss's work most carefully in some constitutional debates. In one instance I shared his views completely. Today I have a little different view and perhaps friends can agree to differ.
I want to direct my comments to Mr. Bliss because he tended to make the case that Canada has moved off its traditional relationship with the United Nations and has gone on some sort of errant exercise with NATO. Is that a fair characterization?
Mr. Bliss: Yes.
Senator Grafstein: Let me take you back to some of the facts on the ground dealing with the United Nations and the Kosovo question because we are dealing with the relationship between NATO and international law in general terms.
You are aware obviously that the United Nations passed a resolution establishing early on in this decade Srebenica as a UN safe haven. You recall as well that under the United Nations flag, people of that region flocked to Srebenica only to be slaughtered because there was no armed support to enforce that safe haven. The United Nations was paralysed and failed in that case.
Yesterday in the International Court at The Hague, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia brought a challenge against Canada and 10 nations that we are in breach in effect of the United Nations. However, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia has refused to be a member of the United Nations. Now let me just deal with the United Nations now.
UN Security Council Resolution 1186, Resolution 1160, Resolution 1199 and Resolution 1203 are all very detailed. Are you familiar with them?
Mr. Bliss: Only vaguely, if they are the ones governing the Kosovo crisis.
Senator Grafstein: It goes beyond that and deals with Kosovo and the former Republic of Yugoslavia's actions in Kosovo, and it includes the contact group, which is France, Germany, Italy and Russia. In effect, they say stop the deportations, stop the ethnic cleansing, and conform to international law. Stop roughing up UN-supported verifiers, which happened a number of times.
The United Nations and Canada, as a partial player in this, have spoken time and time again about this. It is therefore not fair to say Canada and the NATO nations have not utilized the United Nations.
At the end of the day, is it not fair to say that NATO, including Canada, acted the way it did out of frustration with the UN because the Security Council was not able to enforce UN resolutions because of the Russian and Chinese vetoes.,
Mr. Axworthy, rather than following the American agenda, is following the UN mandate here. Yugoslavia is an aberrant state that fails to be a member and fails to conform to UN resolutions. I am familiar with one aspect of this as a member of the Organize for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). We passed a resolution to send in peacekeepers on a verification mission.
On another front, one of our Canadian representatives at the International War Crimes Tribunal, Madam Justice Arbour, tried to get into Kosovo to do her duties. She was refused, pushed back and roughed up. There was nobody to guard and protect her. Professor Bliss, how can you tell us that in fact Canada has gone on an errant mission of its own with NATO when it was only seeking to enforce UN resolutions using the only means available to it, which was in effect NATO?
The Chairman: Professor Bothwell must leave now because of another commitment. Professor Bothwell, we are most appreciative and we thank you very much. Bon voyage.
Mr. Bliss: I am willing to double for Professor Bothwell as a historian. I cannot turn myself into a lawyer. I assume that you will have lawyers and you will rehash the issues of the legality of the war.
Senator Grafstein, I am as troubled by the problem of the law as anyone. You put a moral case, not a legal case because none of those resolutions in fact authorize the attack on Yugoslavia. There is no UN authorization for an attack, which is a flagrant violation of the UN Charter, whether or not Yugoslavia is a member of the United Nations.
You may say that Canada did all it could. I appreciate that and I appreciate Mr. Axworthy's dilemmas. The fact is that ultimately, when we thought we had done all that we could, we decided that we would move ahead without the Security Council resolution that we knew we could not get. We could not win in the Security Council, so we have gone ahead and violated the UN Charter, for better or worse. I say to you that we have put the UN in jeopardy.
You say that 19 countries have done this, and they are a pretty impressive lot, but you know there is very little support among the other 160-odd countries in the world for what NATO has done. I mentioned Israel, and of course there are Russia, China and India. There is terrible anxiety in Cypress. The Cypriot ambassador told me that Canada has helped to discredit the United Nations because the United Nations is Cypress's umbrella.
Again and again our intentions were good, but good intentions can still lead to horrible consequences. I think that we have made a huge blunder.
Senator Grafstein: The Security Council clearly -- China for sure -- has said that it will not under any circumstances authorize force to support these resolutions. Russia is different because it has been engaged and supports each one of these resolutions.
How is international law to be enforced if in fact the enforcer of international law uses an errant veto not to comply? How do we enforce principles that the United Nations accepts? These were strong resolutions. These are not weak resolutions.
Mr. Bliss: I appreciate the problem. I do not have ready and easy answers for all of them. I believe that Mr. Axworthy is already working on proposals to reform the Security Council. It may be that the veto should be changed, although it is hard to imagine that that will actually happen.
The problem with the good intentions argument is that we have also seen the effect of what we have done. When we went into Yugoslavia, the UN itself had given a total casualty figure of 2,000 people in the Kosovo situation. We have vastly multiplied the casualties in the refugees and we have not succeeded in accomplishing anything.
Surely it would have been much better for everyone in that region if a paralysed UN had at least been able to keep its impartial observers in there. If only NATO had not taken what appears to be the bluff of the Rambouillet accord and if only that bluff had not been called. Then we would not have had everything that has followed in its train. There are times when you must accept paralysis and you must live with evil. You must do it if the consequences of trying to do something will be worse than what you must live with. This is the police chase argument. You go all around it. There are times when you must let the bad guy get away if you do not have an appropriate way of dealing with it.
Senator Grafstein: There was in UN Security Council (1998) Resolution 1186 a statement "reiterating its appreciation for the important role played by the United Nations Preventative Deployment Force (UNPREDEP) in contributing to the maintenance of peace and stability." There was a peace force there, authorized by the United Nations to maintain peace and stability. We hopefully will get into that later on, Mr. Chairman.
Senator Prud'homme: I am fascinated by the views that you have expressed. Even if I did not agree with them, I would still be fascinated, but I share most of your views. You speak for me. You resolved some issues and I will raise some more.
I was of the view that when the situation between the two superpowers changed, we should have declared NATO as we know it dead. However, as soon as we declared its death, we should have immediately reassessed what now will be the role of NATO. I will not change my opinion on that.
I am extremely concerned because Yugoslavia is one of the two regions of the world I know very well, along with the Middle East. I am extremely concerned about this enlargement because some of them wanted the Marshall Plan of development. I raised that before they talked about it in the paper, and it fell flat. No way.
I spoke in Albania as soon as the old government fell. I was invited by an American institution, paid by the American Congress. However I agreed to go. I was astounded by their requests. They were asking the West, "Help us." They were asking for a librarian. I spoke to all the parliamentarians in their own little Parliament and they said that we looked the other way.
Now it seems that the only way to receive aid is to knock at the door of NATO, to be a member of NATO, and then abundance will follow. I regret that very much. This enlargement is worrying me. The three Baltic states are now pressuring the world. If you touch the Baltic, you know that Russia will certainly be upset. Then you have the rest of the old Warsaw Pact countries and then three, maybe four of the Balkans. Everyone wants to be part of NATO because they think that is the new aid program for the old East countries. I am concerned about that.
What concerns me most is how we come to make policies. Is it by looking at tragedies on television? The latest one for a guy like me who has been involved for 35 years is the forgotten question of the Palestinians. That is where I found the most hypocrisy. Today there are 700,000 people who have been living in refugee camps for 52 years. They can see their house from where they are in Gaza and we are doing nothing about their situation. Yet there have been countless United Nations resolutions on the subject, which are unenforced. People talk about UN resolutions, but they are all unenforced. There are hundreds of thousands of people in South Lebanon who are now living in unbelievable ways. Their houses are right there, but they have been kicked out of them.
This picking and choosing of what should be done is something that troubles me. Not much reflection is done as to the universality of human rights. If you believe in this principle that is sacred to all, then you cannot pick and choose which one you enforce, which one you are ready to go to bat for and which one you prefer to forget.
Mr. Bliss: We are of course in general accord, senator. I am deeply troubled. I do not have answers about the broad principle you enunciate. We now live in one world with instant communication. Everything is on television now. We all believe deeply in human rights. We vaguely think that human rights should trump the nation state, and yet I am convinced that this is a recipe for global chaos. We cannot for example become ourselves involved in military operations in every hot spot where human rights are at stake. If we do, we will pour out rivers of blood.
My own view varies back and forth. I believe that there is a time when you tend your own garden and be a beacon to the world because of what we do about human rights in our country. That is how we will help improve the world. We cannot tell every other country how it should treat its ethnic minorities. We can show that we know how to make a Charter of Rights and Freedoms work in a way that everybody should copy.
We can also say to our young people, yes, this is a world that needs a lot of people to go out and do good. Through CIDA and our other international organizations you can go to these places and try to help. I believe that peacekeeping in the UN is what we are about. In fact, my own view of our military is that we have taken the weakening of our military effectively past the point of no return. We cannot be a significant global military power again. We should realize that and decide to really specialize in peacekeeping through the UN.
Coming back to NATO, as Professor Bothwell said, we were a really significant partner in NATO at the beginning. We were a major military power for a time, but we are not now. The Americans know this. Our own contribution, proud as some of us are of it, is not significant. That is why we can partly think of getting out of NATO because the Americans know that we have no real military muscle to add. These are terribly difficult issues for the long term. The world is suddenly a much scarier place.
Senator Stollery: I have listened with great interest to our two distinguished witnesses. As usual, we are side-tracked into Kosovo. It is unfortunate. I noted the words here of guilt and morality and things like that. I do not actually feel guilty and I am not particularly interested in morality. We are a country of 31 million people. I am more concerned about instilling some order in a disorderly world, which is dangerous to everyone. Our 31 million people is not a small country. Let us forget about that business about Canada being a small country. It is important and we have very large commercial interests in Europe, by the way. This committee is more aware of that than many people in terms of our investments.
We sit besides a country of 260 million people. I calculate that the U.S. is about eight and a half times bigger because our population is increasing faster than the Americans. As a country of 31 million people, I accept that we should have a defence policy. You and Professor Bothwell have spoken about Canada and the United States in a North American context. I think a country of 31 million people is certainly grown up enough and big enough to have a defence policy. We are a very rich country by any standard.
We must have a defence policy that takes into account that we live beside a country that is eight and a half times bigger than we are and that has threatened us in our history several times. We all know that they got Alaska because they wanted the Hudson's Bay Company to give them what are now four Canadian provinces. I am not suggesting that the Americans are about to attack us, but I think we must have an independent view of these things.
Should we have a defence policy in which we are just on our own? Would that not put us in a rather difficult position with a country eight and a half times bigger than us that spends $400 billion on its defence budget, which is more than all of the other countries in NATO put together? Should we be in a defence system that has the U.S., Canada, the U.K., France, Germany and so forth? I am not trying to be clever or anything like that, but it seems to me that we are continually sidetracked by Kosovo.
I basically agree with many of your observations about Kosovo. I have been quite critical about the fiasco that is Kosovo. That is not our mandate. Our committee is talking about our defence policy, and how NATO adapts to the emerging world that has changed so fundamentally between the Brussels Pact and the fall of the Berlin Wall? That is how this whole issue should be seen.
Mr. Bliss: NATO was essential to our defence policy. What will our defence policy be? Who are our enemies? We must maintain our internal security, so we need basic armed forces for that. In a sense, the only country capable of walking in and taking us over are the Americans. We no longer need a defence plan to fight them at the Niagara frontier. They are not an enemy.
I do not pretend to have an expertise here, but there is an issue of continental defence if you foresee a missile threat from China, Russia or North Korea. Even before there was NATO, we had to co-operate with the Americans in the joint defence of the continent, and that probably still is necessary. I know that there are ongoing discussions about the future of continental air and missile defence, and I do not know anything about these, but we must be part of that. That is a very long way from what NATO has engaged in.
I think that you at least ought to be exploring the possibility of maintaining continental defence with the United States while withdrawing from NATO. Let the Europeans look after their defence and we will look after the defence of North America.
Senator Stollery: In the discussion that we are having, is the enemy not disorder? Is disorder the danger in the world today? I do not think it is unlikely that someone may let off a nuclear device in New York City. I do not think that is unlikely at all. You cannot protect yourself within your own frontiers or within North America because the disorder for example of Afghanistan caused them to set fire to the World Trade Centre in New York. Does that not give us the need for a bigger picture than just continuity?
Mr. Bliss: Of course there is a bigger picture, but what can we do? We cannot worry about terrorism in New York. We cannot put troops into Afghanistan. The best we can do is to do all that we can to protect our own people, our own society, act in our reasonable interests, and again, try in the way we organize our own country to be a beacon to humanity. Then we can do what we can to help other countries within reasonable limits.
Senator Whelan: We had a lot to do with Gorbachev saying, "Free world, free environment." His ambassador Yakovlev was a great believer in social democracy. He wrote several books on it. I often wonder now about whether we did the right thing because it worries me when I see one superpower without any competitive marketing.
The Chairman: There is nobody at the other end of the tug of war rope.
Senator Whelan: Professor Stewart corrects us old farmers every now and again. Do you think that if the Soviet Union still existed, we would have had all the turmoil, all the killing, all the murder, all the raping that has taken place in the last 10 years? An estimated 10 million people have been killed.
Mr. Bliss: I have asked myself exactly that question and I do not know the answer. I am happy that the Soviet Union as it was does not exist because, like you, I grew up wondering what would happen if the bombs went off and killed us all. We all remember the Cuban missile crisis and how frightened we were.
This is a hard issue: we are now in a unipolar world. There is one superpower. What if they screw up and make a mistake in their foreign policy? Who will counter them?
Whereas in the past it was expedient for Canada to go along with the Americans in the fight against the Soviet Union, maybe now, when American mistakes are really scary, we ought to say to ourselves that we are independent and we will distance ourselves from the U.S. a little bit and exercise more of a scope for disagreement.
The Americans will not like it, but then again we have disagreed with them in the past. We have disagreed with them on Cuban policy for 30 years, and they have just said that this is what Canada does. We never went into Vietnam and I think we tried to play a useful diplomatic role in Vietnam. Most Americans would say that maybe it was a good thing that Canada stayed out. It is a terrible problem but it leads us to ask ourselves what our independence is for? Why do we bother?
Senator Whelan: I attended quite a few world meetings in my career. I became notorious for speaking up for Canada's rights and expressing what I figured was the feeling of Canadians at those meetings. However, there were two superpowers, so there was a little competition. I became President of the World Food Council. Yakovlev, the Soviet Union's ambassador to Canada was a good friend, and he got us to bring Gorbachev to Canada. Others in this room had something to do with this, too.
My wife comes from Yugoslavia, so I am not an authority on the history of that country, but I have read a lot of books about it. You do not have to comment on this if you do not want to. It was a terrible mistake when Germany recognized Croatia as an independent country. Canada was the second country to do so. It could never be a democratic country, such as we have in Canada. Could you express an opinion on that?
Mr. Bliss: I defer to your knowledge of Yugoslavia. It seems to me that history does suggest that hubris gets great powers into huge troubles. One think of Britain at the height of its empire getting bogged down in South Africa.
The Chairman: I remind you of the words of another great historian, Lord Acton, "Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely."
We are most grateful for your candid, well-informed expression of your views. I assure you that the committee will take them into full account.
The committee adjourned.