COULD CANADA TURN INTO BOSNIA?[*]

Frank Cunningham
University of Toronto

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Shortly after the election in Quebec of the sovereigntist Parti Quebecois (the P.Q.) and one year before that party's 1980 referendum aimed at taking the province out of the Canadian Confederation, the Canadian Philosophical association convened a conference to address the country's Constitutional crisis. The event took place in Montreal bringing together philosophers from all regions of the country. Charles Taylor gave the keynote address, "Why Do Nations Have to Become States?" Round tables were organized on national self-determination, constitutional options, and individual and collective rights. The P.Q. lost its 1980 referendum but held another one in 1995, which also failed but by less than one percentage point, with a majority of Francophones in he Province supporting it. Re-elected in 1998, this party continues to pursue a sovereigntist politics. Hence, contributions to the conference as well as subsequent interventions by Canadian political philosophers addressing the themes the Association put before itself are still relevant.[1]

Reviewing the collective efforts of the Philosophers at that time, I find that deficiencies are not in the content of the contributions, but in a certain timidity and in a glaring absence. Care was taken to include philosophers from Quebec and from all regions of the country outside of it. Absent was any representation from Canada's aboriginal communities. Nor, with the exception of a few parenthetical references, were there discussions of issues especially concerning Native peoples. I shall return to this absence at the end of the paper, the bulk of which will address a topic the philosophers carefully skirted around, namely the potential for violent conflict, on which topic, as will shortly be seen, the situation of aboriginal peoples in the country has a direct bearing.

In focussing on violence I do not mean to suggest that I think it likely. However, in today's world Canadians would do well to avoid complacency, and there may be something to learn about how to minimize national conflict by looking at its limiting case. Political philosophy is well suited to this task. It is of its nature to identify the most extreme aspect of a subject matter, no matter how rare or improbable, and to try constructing theories that will accommodate it. Ethics or the philosophy of language would be too easy if they ignored lifeboat dilemmas or radical indeterminacy of translation. Another reason that political philosophy can address the possibility of violence is that this carries little danger of creating it. If foes of Quebec sovereignty (called Federalists in current Canadian discourse) in the Government or military leaders began publicly examining different violent scenarios, these could turn into self-fulfilling prophecies. But in Canada philosophy does not provoke such reactions, as few in the general public have thought of philosophers as politically efficacious enough to be threatening (though some have rightly feared the use or misuse of philosophical theories in the hands of those who were political effective).

Well, then, could Canada turn into Bosnia? In order to address this question, I shall first survey some recent philosophical or philosophically informed theories about the nature and causes of violent ethno-national conflict, such as those in the Near East, Ireland, South Asia, and Eastern Europe.[2] Dissatisfaction with such theories leads me to an alternate approach, which I shall apply to the Canadian case, drawing upon recent philosophical writings about nations and nationalism.

Main approaches to the question of ethnic violence at levels of philosophical abstraction have appealed to putative features of human nature. Aside from theological accounts in terms of original human depravity, the main theories I shall survey are those of the sociobiologists, the cultural theory of Rene Girard, and Russell Hardin's deployment of rational choice theory. I confess to being antecedently sceptical of these theories, due to suspicion of any political approach rooted in a conception of human nature, which seem to me to have a question-begging, "dormative powers"-like character about them. Though I shall note some useful things to be learned from each of the approaches, but I think that suspicion of their adequacy as full-blown analyzes is still justified.

With variations, accounts of violent ethno/national conflict on the part of sociobiologists appeal to the function of hostility toward or fear of out-groups for promoting in-group cohesion. As to why there needs to be such cohesion, this is explained by reference to the survival value to humans of co-operation, thus raising a further question about why such Cupertino should not extend beyond limited boundaries and why the boundaries are so remarkably divergent in extent (families, tribes, cities, regions, nations, religious communities, etc.) or, conversely, why xenophobia should not extend beyond very small groups of immediate dependents.

Sociobiologists addressing group conflict diverge in explaining these things.[3] Richard Alexander holds that competitiveness requires a certain blend of hostility and cooperativeness. Ian Vine suggests that the altruism required for co-operation must be tempered with "a weakly xenophobic tendency." Peter Meyer argues that "affectivity is a scarce resource" which can only extend to limited numbers of people. (He somehow picks the number 30.) To my mind these explanations are strained efforts at hypothesis saving. Sociobiology may well play a role in respect of some aspects of ethno/national conflict -- for instance, in accounting for why the young males who enthusiastically take up arms are over endowed with testosterone -- but I suspect that the macro phenomenon itself is too culturally infused and historically specific to admit of useful biological explanation. PURE LAINE (as the more chauvinistic of Franco-Quebec nationalists refer to the stuff required to be a true Quebecker) interpreted as pure blood, not old stock (the anglo-Canadian analogue) as gene stock.

Core aspects of the late Frank Wright's application of Girard's theory of violence to Northern Ireland and some other places[4] apply equally to the situation of Quebec and English-speaking Canada: societies on the frontiers of major world empires; historic grievances to incite revenge; the absence of secular or religious candidates for scapegoating; and (as is seen in a 1998 declaration of Lucien Bouchard, the Premier of Quebec, that his government would ignore a forthcoming ruling of the Supreme Court of Canada about whether secession was constitutional)[5] lack of fear of overarching law. On Girardian theory such conditions yield a prediction of cycles of revenge-motivated violence. The problem is that since these conditions have been in place in Canada for some time, and indeed, more starkly in earlier times, the theory ought not to be predicting violence but retrodicting it.

The theory of human nature underlying Girard's perceptive accounts of how of revenge take on a life of its own -- evidently applicable to several violence-ridden parts of the world today -- crucially involves mimetic envy: I want it because you have it. While there seems to be some evidence in experimental psychology for such a theory it is hard to see how it would apply holistically to large ethnic or national groups. It is sometimes alleged by Quebec nationalists that those in the culturally amorphous and dispersed parts of Canada outside of Quebec suffer "nation envy." My own experience has been that those in English-speaking Canada who have proclaimed its nationhood -- I'm thinking of philosophers in the tradition of George Grant or political economists such as Mel Watkins or Abe Rotstein[6] -- have more often elicited reactions by compatriots who disagree on this score of rebuff for the pretense than of alarm at threatened nationhood. Moreover, it is hard to think of an analogous object of envy on the part of Franco-Quebec.

Russell Hardin's rational decision approach to ethnic conflict is based on a broadly Hobbesist theory of human nature: individuals are primarily motivated to pursue narrowly self-interested ends by whatever means will likely achieve them. This typically renders co-operative behaviour problematic, due to the intractability of the prisoner’s dilemma. By contrast, when people find themselves "co-ordinated" in groups, the members of which are not in competition with one another and whose joint actions serve individual goals, this dilemma does not obtain. This is sometimes the case with ethnic or national groups, thus sustaining people's identification with them. Unfortunately, groups themselves are not infrequently in conflict and this can result in violence.[7]

Hardin is largely concerned to offer an alternative account of violent ethnic or national conflicts to those which regard them motivated by atavistic blood lust, and in this I believe he has succeeded. In the examples he gives, ordinary people are more often tragically caught up in violence than willing instigators of it. But beyond this insight, I find his account inadequate to account for non-violence. Because co-ordinated groups are modelled on rational individuals in his sense, violence should result whenever there is competition between groups, or even when there is perceived potential competition; since, as he notes, it will always be rational for any group to launch a pre-emptive strike against another group, and co-operation among groups to preclude this will confront the prisoners dilemma again.

Hardin, himself, does not seek a general explanation for how groups end up in violent conflict. Sometimes, group conflicts accidently "tip" into violence, or violence is instigated by self-serving group leaders. He laments that people identify with national or ethnic groups at all (thus devoting a third of his book, One For All, to condemnation of Communitarian philosophers, who see such identification as a source of value for individuals), and he describes group identification PER SE as the root of violence. What group identifications people have or how they identify with a group is of incidental interest to the theory.

It seems to me, however, that understanding how group conflicts can turn violent requires close attention to specific group identifications the manners in which they identify. Inattention to such matters is one of the things that makes Hardin's treatment of Canada unsatisfactory. Hardin's main concern is to figure out what Quebec wants. He speculates that perhaps the sovereigntists are motivated by desire to preserve Franco-language and culture, but he wishes to resist this conclusion because he does not regard it rational. His preferred explanation is that Quebeckers figure they can do economically better under the terms of the North American Free Trade agreement as an independent country than as part of Canada. Even a cursory reading of Quebec history, at least beginning with the "Quiet Revolution" in the 1960's, should make it clear that a principal motive has been cultural and that free trade is a recent factor, embraced by some sovereigntists, resisted by others.

I do not pretend that the accounts of violent ethno/national conflict based on theories of human nature that I have summarized exhaust the field. The aim is to demonstrate that while useful ideas are suggested by such accounts they are of dubious application to the current Canadian situation. Theories of human nature applied to violent ethno/national conflict are also likely to be biased in a pessimistic direction. Because violent conflicts actually take place, such theories could hardly lead to the conclusion that this is foreign to human nature, and because violence is so widespread and persisting it would be difficult to conclude that it is a deviation. Still, I do not think that philosophers addressing the topic need shun human nature theorizing altogether or embrace a purely constructivist stance toward the human condition. Rather, I believe that this issue can be side stepped. Pro-human nature theorists might also be sorted into two categories, which I label, "crude" and "sophisticated," where the former strive to identify a set of dispositions toward just one sort of behaviour, e.g., selfish, violent, altruistic, or pacific, whereas, the latter look for complex dispositions which may be in tension with one another. The theories I've summarized probably admit of either crude or sophisticated interpretations.

Crude human nature theorizing most easily fits what I call a "lid on the pot" paradigm of explanations for violent ethno/national conflict. According to this paradigm violence is seething beneath the surface of national life and will bubble forth unless forcibly confined. This is a common approach to violence in Eastern Europe which was supposed to have been present from at least the time of the Ottoman Empire, but contained by Soviet domination. On a contrasting, "combustion" paradigm, violent conflicts result from the coming together of independently innocuous elements which in combination have disastrous results. Obviously, violent conflict cannot take place if forcibly constrained, but on this paradigm absence of such constraint is simply one element that may come into combination with others. Combustion paradigmatic accounts are clearly compatible with strong anti-human nature theories. They are also compatible with sophisticated viewpoints on human nature. However, for the purpose of inhibiting (or containing or reversing) violent conflict, primary attention to the combustible elements suffices.

Assuming the combustion paradigm (and setting aside general philosophical and inductive, historical arguments that I believe can be given in its favour), I wish now to identify those combustible elements suggested to me by examination of places where violent ethno/national conflict has already taken place. These are: a certain popular culture of enmity; economic conditions fostering malcontent and mean spiritedness; the absence of acceptable channels for pacific resolution of differences; and an appropriate spark. I shall summarize each of these and then apply them to the current situation in Canada.

In reading accounts of attitudes within the populations of conflict torn parts of the world (and in informal interviews with people on the spot in some recent research trips to some of these places) I have tried to ascertain the character of ethnically hostile attitudes by identifying their phenomenological centres, that is, the core attitude around which people made sense of their conflictual social worlds. I found no dearth of fear, vengefulness, and attitudes of superiority, sometimes verging on racism, but concluded that these figure more as causes, effects, or justifications for violence than as organizing principles of a violence sustaining world view. The candidate I favour is "blame." People immersed in relations of enmity view opposing groups as morally blameworthy for misfortunes they suffer in common with other members of their own group: economic hardship, frustrated political self-determination, erosion of their culture, and the like. With blame comes demonization of the other group and a sense of oneself as a victim. It is because blame has a moralistic dimension that people are able to endorse behaviour which is dangerous to themselves and in normal circumstances would be seen as morally unacceptable.

Return to Hardin's theory serves to introduce what I see as the economic combustible element. His only concrete political prescription for avoiding ethnic or national strife is worldwide capitalist competition. Citing Adam Smith for authority he says, "we make a better world by ignoring what kind of world we make and living for ourselves than if we concentrate first on the ethnic political structure of our world,"[8] and echoing current neo-liberal sentiments he advocates down sizing government, which he thinks will both promote generally beneficial free competition and remove an enticement for power hungry leaders to whip up popular hatreds (namely to secure control of a strong state). I believe there is some room for doubt that unbridled capitalism has the potential currently claimed for it to create worldwide prosperity. More precisely, I see invisible hand and trickle down rhetoric as little more than cynical rationalization for augmenting morally reprehensible privilege on the part of the already bloated rich. However, if general prosperity or even just economic security could be achieved, whether through LAISSEZ-FAIRE capitalism or any other method, then one contributor to violence would be eliminated. I do not mean that economic conflict is the cause of violence, nor that religious, ethnic, national or other forms of extra-economic conflict would cease, but only that in the absence of economic hardship on the part of one or all parties, the conflicts would be easier to manage and violence less likely.

There is, however, a cultural dimension to capitalist competition which could still have fractious consequences. I am thinking of the political culture of what C.B. Macpherson called "possessive individualism" wherein people view their own and others' capacities as commodities to be bought and sold in a competitive market for the sake of limitless pursuit of consumer goods. This culture, Macpherson persuasively argued, promotes values of mean spirited selfishness and greed.[9] Such values might militate against what Hardin calls coordination with others within a shared ethnic or national group, but it might also encourage such identification for the sake of competitiveness with those in other groups with the result that the worst aspects of national or ethnic chauvinism and aggressive capitalism infuse one another. I believe that this is what has happened in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.

Channels for peaceful confrontation of conflicts include an agreed upon body of law or a mutually acceptable process of arbitration. But they also include some subjective factors. One sometimes hears it said that the solution to group conflicts is for people to think of themselves as individuals and not as members of groups. While it is certainly true that a world of socially unencumbered individuals would minimize group conflicts, I consider such a prescription hopelessly unrealistic. Individuals importantly, if not exclusively, recognize themselves in terms of a variety of group identifications. However, no individual identifies with (or if one wants to put the point more radically is constituted by) one group alone. Somebody may identify with any combination of such things as an ethnicity, nationality, class, profession, gender, religion, linguistic community, generation, region, and so on, with varying and changing priorities. Members of groups made up of people who share highly prioritized identifications over time may have a range of attitudes toward other groups from friendly feelings to indifference and hostility.

On a combustion paradigm, conflicts between such groups do not automatically turn to violence, but may often be handled by peaceful negotiation. While almost any combination of possible objects of identification may be compatible with negotiation, certain objects must be kept out of an identifying cluster, namely those objects required for negotiation itself. I am thinking, in particular, of geographic terrains physically inhabited by different groups and of political terrains wherein negotiation may take place. If the members of a group believe that exclusive domination of a territory or that preponderance of state power is integral to their very identities, this denies the terrains for peaceful negotiation, and violence is risked.

The elements of a violence prompting combustion so far listed are more contingent than those appealed to in crude human nature theories, but they figure in more systematic accounts than those often found in popular history, for instance, of the sort that could explain World War I just by reference to the assassination of arch Duke Ferdinand. At the same time, such contingent precipitating events still do play a part, just as do sparks in an actual combustion. It is for this reason that when violence begins people are sometimes surprised with how quickly it spreads. Perhaps this lends plausibility to the lid on the pot paradigm.

The point about sparks is best explained by turning to the Canadian case and the aboriginal fact ignored in the earlier conference of philosophers.[10]. Shortly before the 1995 Quebec referendum, the Cree announced that if Quebec left Confederation, they would remain. What if the vote in that referendum (decided by around 1%) had gone differently and, failing a compromise in the resulting negotiations (the track record of such negotiations has not been stellar), Quebec had announced secession? Cree lands are so extensive and rich in resources that it likely the Quebec government would have obliged them to remain within the new country, and if the Cree resisted, force might well have been employed. Violent encounters between native peoples and governments in Canada, in and out of Quebec, are not unprecedented.[11] Had the Cree called on the Federal Government for help, what would have happened?

I remain optimistic that such a scenario would have drawn all parties back from the brink. But if other elements of a combustion are present this is just the sort of thing that can spark violence. The sociobiologists have at least underscored the point that violent behaviour is not inimical to human comportment. Hardin well explains how violence can be an unintended consequence of seemingly benign antecedents, such as national commitments, and Girard reminds us that once begun, violence is fed by cycles of revenge.

My reading of the situation is that some measure of all the combustible elements listed above is present. That each is mixed with counteracting features and is not exactly full-blown gives one cause for hope, but that the elements exist at all is worrisome. Alarmists point to such things as jokes made by anglophones and Francophones at each other's expense or jeers at the language in which the anthem is sung at sporting events as evidence of dangerously hostile cultural attitudes. Though distasteful, I do not think these things grave in themselves. Perhaps one thing that sociobiological or Girardian theories can help us to understand is why and how bonding rivalries involving chants, colours and the like are so widespread and are intense even among people who have a great deal in common (e.g., neighbouring cities or schools). More troubling are attitudes of blame, which I identified as the phenomenological centre of parties to violent conflict.

At the core of blame in Quebec is belief that English-speaking Canada is responsible for the erosion or threatened erosion of important parts of Quebec culture and especially the French language. Canadians outside of Quebec charge the latter with trying to break up the country. In all situations of conflict, cultures of blame have some objective basis, and this is no less true in the Canadian situation. But, also as in other places, blame grows out of proportion, becomes more diffuse, and comes to take on a central place in people's phenomenological fields. Thus, in both Quebec and the rest of Canada other threats to the French language and to Canadian unity, such as global and domestic economic threats, are often overlooked. I encounter people in my part of the country attributing all sorts of social and political problems to Quebec sovereigntists who could have little to do with them. The Quebec license plate slogan, "JE ME SOUVIENS," has come to refer not to religious and other traditional values, as originally intended, nor even to the Plains of Abraham where British forces conquered Quebec in 1759, but to mistreatment of Quebec by LES ANGLAIS in general. Not long after the 1996 Referendum in Quebec, a major and mainstream English Canadian newspaper, the Toronto Star, featured a gruesome cartoon in which the sovereigntist Premier of Quebec, Lucien Bouchard, was depicted chopping off the tongue of a figure labelled "anglophone." One hears of less violent but still analogously demonization of prominent federalists in Quebec.

I shall return to consideration of some matters of popular culture after addressing the topic of combustible economic conditions. Behind these conditions in the Canadian case is a vexing problem which nearly everyone grants has plagued the country since Confederation. As in any federation made up of regions with special needs and more or less distinct cultures, but still requiring some measure of centralized organization and a central tax base to remain economically strong and to account for unevenness of benefits and opportunities, a continuing problem has been to find the right balance between centralization and decentralization. This problem is exacerbated in Canada due to its national complexity: if Quebec is treated like all the other provinces, it will not have sufficient powers to conduct its affairs in a way that is satisfactory to its majority Franco-population, but if Quebec is given special powers for this end, other provinces demand equal special treatment.

In recent years, the Business Council on National Issues (BCNI), an organization made up of the CEO's of the largest capitalist enterprises and a group which has given new life to conspiracy theory in the Canadian left, entered the long-standing debates on this question by recommending radical devolution of powers to Quebec and to all the other provinces. This is easy for the Council to advocate since large capital has shown little interest in preserving safety nets for the economically disadvantaged, maintaining environmental controls or labour standards, or pursuing proactive country-wide economic plans aside from deficit reduction or tax relief: in short the sorts of things that a strong central government is needed to do. The BCNI's intervention, echoed by right-wing think tanks, the Western-based conservative Reform Party, and wings of the traditional Progressive Conservative Party, reflects increasing neo-liberal, deregulatory policies implemented by the Federal Government and several provinces, including Quebec where the neo-liberal wing of the P.Q. currently dominates its social democrats.[12] The ostensive promise of neo-liberal economic policies is promotion of economic competitiveness, job creation, and the trickle down of wealth. As already indicated, I doubt that the policies have these effects and fear that they will, instead, create increasing economic hardship and insecurity for the overwhelmingly large majority of the population -- fertile soil for general discontent and attitudes of hostility toward groups said to be the cause of one's troubles.

Following Macpherson, I earlier claimed that neo-liberal economic practice and popularly disseminated theory contribute to possessive-individualist values. The BCNI's recommendation for devolution is attached by it to demands for provincial and regional autonomy. This contributes to the integration of these values with provincial and regional identifications and encourages people to think of the regional or national groups with which they identify as necessarily, even desirably, in competition with others. Further, group identification itself can come to be viewed instrumentally, as a tool for individual competition. When mean-spirited and competitive economic values are linked with provincial, regional, or national rivalries, possessive individualism feeds "possessive nationalism" and yet another element conducive to violent combustion is present.

The third element to be discussed in the Canadian case is the absence of channels for peaceful resolution. Some channels still remain, but the traditional method of negotiation among political elites is, if not entirely closed off, at least suspect after dramatic failures of major Federal-Government led initiatives for a redistribution of provincial and federal powers in the Meech Lake accord of 1987 and the Charlottetown accord of 1992. Refusal to recognize the authority of the Supreme Court regarding matters pertaining to secession by the P.Q. with support of a large proportion of the Quebec public weakens the prospect for employing legal channels.

Remaining are more democratic, people-to-people encounters, in which there may be some ground for hope. I am not referring to referenda or to attempted love-in's like one just before the Charlottetown vote when the Liberal Party sent train loads of Canadians to Montreal to protest their affection. Rather, I am referring to occasional, if so far rare, encounters at which problems besetting the Confederation are addressed by people who share interests cutting across the national divide -- to advance the status of women, working people's interests, environmental concerns, religious convictions, and so on. Such activities have the potential to seek out and bring political pressure to bear for securing pacific channels in part just because their participants are not monolithically constituted in terms of specifically national interests.

As to possessive nationalism, we are most fortunate not to confront theocratic identifications. Nor are national identities as desperately fused to a land as in places such as Palestine. However, there are still exclusionary attitudes toward territory which, while involving geopolitical calculations, go beyond these to approach identity-determining attachments. On the Quebec side this is most evident in the case of the northern lands made objects of contest by conflict with the Cree and other aboriginal peoples referred to earlier. At a gathering I attended in 1998 of political theorists from Quebec and anglo-Canada designed to find grounds for constructive dialogue, the question of whether Quebec borders could be a matter of negotiation, especially in the case of these lands, was the major sticking point in striving to reach a consensus.

From the side of Anglo-Canada I think an attitude of possessive nationalism is reflected in the common auto bumper sticker reading, "My Canada includes Quebec." Puzzlement over the meaning of this slogan prompts reflection about identity formation in Canada and Quebec. In the interrogation of such formation I am guided by the premise that national and ethnic identities are constructed. This means they are not fixed, and they are subject to influence by active intervention. This provides grounds for hope that the specifically cultural elements of a potential combustion can be counteracted, and it also gives philosophers something worthwhile to do other than playing the Owl of Minerva. However, construction can also be destructive.

I am thinking here of some journalistic approaches to national conflicts in Canada. One of these is reflected in a newspaper column by a prominent Anglo-Canadian journalist, Gwynne Dyer, around the time of the P.Q.'s 1998 re-election: "Since its birth Canada has been plagued by two rival tribalisms, British and French." Luckily immigration has diluted at least one of the tribes (the British): "If Canada were a Balkan country, we ... would be stuck with the ethnic groups and hatreds we started out with.... But we are a country of immigrants and that means we can change."[13] Now, as I understand each situation, Canada is indeed like the Balkans in some respects, one of them being that neither is correctly described as tribal. Rather, such rhetoric in the popular media -- itself a slur against tribally organized aboriginal societies due to its modern connotation of atavistic hatred and violence -- contributes to potentially self-generating anticipations of violence and to simplistic self-identification by antagonistic bonding: sporting event jeers and aggressive flag waving writ large.

The up side of construction is the possibility of reconstruction. What has been stitched together can be taken apart and reconstituted. I believe that something like this has happened in Ireland, where religious affiliations have shifted from being primary components of conflicting national identities to markers for political identifications -- Loyalist and Republican -- that have displaced them in this role. This did not of itself end the violence, but it meant, in accord with Frank Wright's neo-Girardian speculations, that with changing priorities in the relevant political metropolises (the U.K. And the Republic of Ireland) the sustaining bases of antagonistic nationalisms in Ulster began to wane. In his contribution to the 1979 conference of the Canadian philosophers, Francis Sparshott offered a line of reconstruction concerning Canada. He deplored the fusion of state and body politic in debates over Confederation suggesting that this represents an outmoded conception of sovereignty. With the break-up of empires, the divinely sanctioned absolute power of rulers became sovereign state control over territory.[14]

Along the same lines, but with a different emphasis, I am inclined to think that a root fusion to be challenged is that between "land" (as in "homeland" or "This land is my land" in the popular song) and "territory" (as in the spaces bounded by surveyors' markers, or urine), or in French the distinction between TERROIR and TERRITOIRE. Assumption of such a fusion means that identification with a land requires exclusive sovereignty with respect to it or, conversely, defense of a territory becomes a point of national pride. Success in prying the notion of land and territory apart would open the door to conceptions of sharing a land or of reconceiving sovereignty to void it of the notion of exclusive domination.[15] In the Canadian case it would create options for negotiation foreclosed as long as national identities are territorially infused.

Returning to the bumper sticker slogan, on the surface it could and probably usually does just mean, "We Anglo-Canadians like Quebeckers and don't want them to depart from the country;" although it is also sometimes advanced in a threatening way. In any case it is worth trying to figure out just what is feared to depart from what. A simple interpretation is that the slogan refers to the state of Canada and its substate component, the Province of Quebec and is thus a declaration against political secession. In a more statist society than Canada, such as the United States or France, where being part of a powerful and unified state is an important component of people's identities, such a conception might be strongly enough held to evoke passion. Such passion might also accompany an imperial identity which retained memory of the Plains of Abraham British victory, but this, too, is surely confined to very few people in contemporary Canada.

Perhaps the slogan is, rather, a declaration of Canadian nationhood. It could then be interpreted to mean, "Quebec's being a part of the country is important to my Canadian national identity." This interpretation also seems strained to me. For one thing, as mentioned earlier, it supposes a stronger sense of Canadian nationhood than is likely found within the general population. Recognition of Quebec as a nation is also unlikely if, whether with benign or menacing intent, the sticker is displayed to indicate opposition to Quebec sovereigntists, since admission or rejection of Quebec nationhood has become definitive of one's stand on sovereignty.

The most likely situation is that people sporting the sticker do not know what it means beyond either an affirmation of friendship or a threat and that one reason for this is that the relation between Canadian nationhood and Canadian statehood is not clearly fixed in the popular mind. Those who level the "nation envy" charge at Anglo-Canada would interpret this as a result of non-existent nationhood. Though the topic is too large to defend here, I believe that such a charge is unjustified and that, broadly speaking, it makes sense to characterize Canada as a single state comprised of three national groupings: Quebec, Canada outside of Quebec, and the ensemble of aboriginal nations, understanding that national sentiments admit of degrees of strength and granting that the concept is contested.[16] Conventional wisdom among theorists who can agree with this interpretation regarding Canada or any other bi or multinational state is that people who confuse state and nation are either simply mistaken or are deliberately obfuscating the distinction for political purposes.[17] at the current juncture of Canada/Quebec relations I suggest that this convention on the part of the engaged political theorists needs rethinking, and I shall shortly turn to this task, but first I wish to introduce a related effort in rethinking, namely of the relation between civic and ethnic nationalism. In Canada this task is motivated by consideration of the tension between nationalism and multiculturalism.

Quebec is not homogeneously of people whose maternal language is French, but includes as well an Anglo community and several communities of "allophones," that is, those whose maternal language is neither English nor French. Anglophones and allophones make up about 10% each of the total Quebec population. Also, there are minority Francophone populations in each of the provinces outside of Quebec. In earlier times those in and out of Quebec who were prepared to talk of a French nation in Canada saw Quebec as the centre of this nation, whose members included all the Francophones in the country. Around the time of the first election of the P.Q. in 1976, when the prospect of secession became a thinkable option, reference to a French nation fell out of common discourse in Anglo-Canada, while nationalists in Quebec began to think of the Province of Quebec alone as a nation. In addition to generating not a little resentment among Francophones outside of Quebec (who felt betrayed by the exclusion), this shift left the thorny question of the status of the Anglo- and allophones unresolved.

The tension was illustrated on the eve of the narrow defeat of the second Quebec referendum on sovereignty (in 1992) when the then Premier of the Province, Jacques Parizeau, publicly described the defeat as the combined result of threats of economic reprisal by English-Canadian based big capital and the vote of the anglophone and the allophones. While not an inaccurate report regarding the breakdown of the vote (nor regarding the threats of capital), in context, Parizeau's comments reflected the sort of dangerous culture of victim-hood referred to earlier wherein national self-determination is not only denied by LES ANGLAIS, in and out of Quebec, but also by allophones in the Province, who are branded enemies within. Thus construed Parizeau's comments highlighted a problem familiar to all nationalistic secessionist movements of this Century: what stance to take toward the toward minority groups within a majority nationality. Thankfully, Parizeau's tone of resentment has not found expression in ethnic cleansing type rhetoric on the part of the P.Q., which instead has projected a nation state with two official languages, French and English where, however, allophones are to send their children to French-speaking public schools and thus eventually assimilate, at least linguistically, to the Franco-majority. But there remains no consensus about how to conceptualize the national/ethnic relations in the Province.

One line of thought taken up by some Quebec intellectuals draws on the work of David Miller and Yael Tamir, among others, who have introduced the notion of "civic" or "liberal" nationalism into the general debates over this topic. According to a strong version of civic nationalism loyalties of Quebeckers would be as citizens who share commitment to liberal-democratic political and legal institutions.[18] The shortcoming of civic nationalism in this stark form (not embraced by Miller and Tamir themselves) is that it risks loosing touch with national sentiments of the Franco-majority, whose support for sovereignty has been motivated by linguistic and other cultural concerns rather than simply civic values, which in any case are currently embedded in the Federal Constitution.

Successful confrontation in theory of the unstable relation between ethnicity and civility in national arenas would help to provide a perspective from which to resist development of a full-blown and combustible element of blame. I thus concur with the organizing theme of a recent collection of essays on nationalism published by the CANADIAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY described by its (Quebec sovereigntist) editors, Jocelyne Couture, Kai Nielsen, and Michel Seymour, as the "supersession" of the ethnic/civic nationalism distinction.

These philosophers identify as pure types the civic nationalism of Ernest Renan, for whom the nation is primarily an association in which people are bound together by common commitment to political values, and ethnic nationalism, of the sort extolled by Johann Gottfried Herder, based on language, culture and tradition.[19] as the editors note, no stark examples of these pure types can be found, and all theorists addressing the subject, including Renan and Herder, advance nuanced views, albeit ones that place their emphases on one or the other of the ethnic or civic poles in their attempts to define "nationhood." For example, Miller, Tamir, and Will Kymlicka identify shared ethnic or cultural national cores (variously described by them) which are embedded within political societies with their own, uniquely civic values.[20] Couture, et. al. reverse this characterization and see nations as "political communities" which "very often" contain majority and sometimes also "minority nationalities" within them.[21] Dominique Schnapper maintains that, not withstanding the unavoidable tension between them, civic and ethnic attitudes are jointly necessary elements of any national state.[22]

Perhaps a universally applicable definition of "nation" or cognates can be articulated and defended, but I have the impression that putative attempts to date are usually tailored to local circumstances and aims. This was clearly the case of Renan and Herder, who had post-Revolutionary France and the emerging Germany in mind. Tamir makes this observation, noting Kymlicka's effort to make room for limited national rights within Canadian liberal-individualism and Miller's concern to promote nation-friendly welfare politics in the U.K.[23] Her own efforts, as she acknowledges, grow out of her national experiences (in Israel), and the effort of Couture, Nielsen, and Seymour is explicitly motivated by the aim of defending a pluricultural vision of a sovereign Quebec. Thus, while I shall frame my own run at the "nation question" in general terms, I have more confidence about it regarding Canada/Quebec than regarding other places.

In his contribution to the 1979, Canadian Philosophical association conference on Confederation, Charles Taylor argued that the virtue of national cultures is that they provide "a horizon of meaning, which can only be provided by some allegiance, group membership [or] cultural tradition," which in the modern world, where people's identities are in flux, is required as a base from which they can give meaning to their lives.[24] In the same conference, Francis Sparshott offered a more prosaic explanation of the same type: "My nation is defined by those with whom I feel at home, not having to think about what I do, not having to explain myself....My nation, like my family, consists of those with whom I am presumed by myself and others not to be strangers...."[25]

Taylor entitled his contribution, "Why Do Nations Have to Become States?" because he saw a tendency for people sharing national identifications to attempt securing them and gaining international recognition by means of statehood. In the light of persuasive arguments by recent historians that nations, states, and hence nation states have diverse origins, in some of which not only statehood but nationhood is "constructed,"[26] Taylor's thesis should not be taken as a general causal one. This does not mean, however, that determination (or at least preparedness) to defend the sorts of cultural contexts which Taylor and Sparshott describe plays no role in the construction and maintaining of states. The advantage of a state for this purpose is that it can use legal means to protect, enhance, or promote a shared culture, for instance, in language policies, education, and cultural funding programmes. Arguably, then, people for whom aspects of a culture are important will be at least disposed to favour state measures to preserve them, while, conversely, attempts to force a state on people with no such dispositions will secure popular loyalty, if at all, only with difficulty, as was exemplified in several parts of he late Communist world.

It is for this reason that articulation of an intimate connection between nation and state is needed. Not all cultural participations are as central to the popular identities (or quests for identity) that Sparshott and Taylor describe, and people for whom such participation is central are not always in demographic, economic, or geographical circumstances that make statehood a realistic option. But when the cultural features are central and the circumstances are apt, state support for the shared cultural identities will be an attractive option. The presence of this option is what, in my view, distinguishes nations from ethnic groups and hence multinationalism from multiculturalism. I digress to expand upon this point since it is especially important in Canada, which in 1982 constitutionally entrenched commitment to multiculturalism and which includes both in Quebec and elsewhere a large number of diverse ethnic communities.

The up side of official multiculturalism has been to afford people of other than Anglo and Franco origins legitimization and sometimes resources for maintaining aspects of their unique cultures and to resist the ethnic chauvinism accompanying alternative, "melting pot" policies. This does not mean that ethnic chauvinism is absent. In English-speaking Canada proclamations of commitment to multiculturalism, especially outside a few large urban centres, does not go much beyond toleration for occasional folk festivals and itself masks a fair measure of continuing Anglo, indeed, Anglo-Protestant chauvinism. Franco- chauvinism in Quebec is exacerbated by the fact that from the late 1960's and 1970's Federalist political leaders have appealed to multiculturalism to characterize Franco communities, both inside and outside of Quebec, as one ethnic group among the many others in the Canadian "cultural mosaic." Far from dissolving Franco-Quebec nationalist sentiments, this stance has fuelled the fire of its most chauvinistic adherents -- those for whom to be a true Quebecker is not just to speak French ("unaccented") but to be of Franco-Quebec lineage (the "PURE LAINE" enthusiasts).

Standing against such chauvinists are those, such as intellectuals including the editors of the aforementioned collection and members of various social movements in the Province, who envisage a Quebec made up of people from several ethnic and national origins, but self identified as Quebeckers, competent and willing to function in French as the main language of public affairs, committed to Quebec's political and juridical systems and respectful of the main inherited traditions of its majority.[27] Pitting multiculturalism against nationalism can only impede the efforts of the nonchauvinists in the Quebec context where the majority sees itself not just as an ethnic group but as a nation. The theoretical problem is to identify in what this nationhood consists. I submit that among its defining characteristics is the realistic ability, as well as the preparedness of people otherwise culturally identified to seek statehood to preserve and promote those aspects of their culture which are important to them if statehood is deemed required by them for this purpose.[28]

A demographic precondition for statehood is that the resulting state includes a significant majority committed to preserving the relevant cultural features that motivate its formation. Ethnic minorities in the resulting state will likely constitute a spectrum from those who have come to identify with at least some aspects of the majority culture to others who are prepared to support and even politically identify with the (dominant) nation state provided its offices and benefits are open to them and it includes tolerant, nonchauvinistic attitudes on the part of the majority, to still others who are in varying degrees dissatisfied with such a development and at best prepared to accept it only grudgingly and of necessity. Such a definition does not by itself entail that any nation has an unconditional right to statehood. For instance, intolerance and the prospect of persisting diminished opportunities for ethnic minorities should defeat claim to such a right. But if, on any of several philosophical-normative grounds or even just pragmatic-political ones, it is thought that people constituting a nation on this conception ought, cateris paribus, to be accommodated,[29]

Statehood, itself, breeds and sustains cultural dimensions, some of which, such as statism, are pernicious, but others, like acknowledgement of the equal rights of citizens (when liberal states are in question) are generally to be encouraged. Values attached to the specifically state-related functions of passing and enforcing laws are at the core of what are commonly designated the civic values such as respect for the rule of law and toleration of different life plans among citizens as long as they also conform to the civic values. Civic values may thus become part of a citizen's cultural identification. They differ from prepolitical cultural values in part by always involving a normative commitment, which, in accord with Wayne Norman, I agree not all national or other ethnic identifications do.[30] However, while adherence to civic values may become as it were "new" parts of a person's national identity, I doubt that they can bear no relation at all to those aspects of pre-existing cultural identifications or at least of those of them that involve shared values as well as identifications.

It is from such identifications that the civic values gain their motivating force; if they were unrelated to or at odds with cultural identifications, the disposition to statehood for the purpose of protecting or advancing the latter would be counteracted. Leaving it to political-cultural historians to evaluate them, I advance as illustrative hypotheses that the particular form of participatory democracy of ancient Athens was thus underwritten, so to speak, by some pre-existing mores, not withstanding the tragedians depiction of conflicts between the utterly old and the utterly new ways (perhaps these conflicts would not be altogether tragic if there were no bases for simultaneous mutual attractions and repulsions). The sexist exclusions of that form of democracy also found in already existing cultural grounds.

Analogous comments can be made about non-democratic state forms and about the liberal-democratic civic values of our times. The reason that overlapping consensuses can be achieved among people with different life goals in a liberal democracy on this hypothesis is that there are antecedent bases for agreement. Liberal- democratic societies, such as France and the United States, the political forms of which originated in revolutions are sometimes portrayed by their champions as having completely caste off the old moralities and identifications, but such claims do not explain differences in the character and deployment of civic values even between these countries, for which one needs to appeal (though not, of course, exclusively) to pre-revolutionary cultural as well as economic and political differences. Against this sort of theoretical background Taylor is able to show how Franco-Quebec and Anglo-Canadian political values can overlap, though expressed and interpreted differently due to the different cultures from which they arose (communal and individualist, respectively).[31] It is thus that nation and state are intimately associated.

Sparshott devoted a portion of his intervention at the Confederation conference to the notion of "sovereignty," or the overwhelming exercise of power within a territory, insulated from constraint, which he portrayed as an anachronistic throwback to the thinking of premodern empires and at odds both with the needs of the body politic of individuals and with national collectives.[32] Not only does this ring true from a prescriptive point of view, but it is clear that state sovereignty has never been complete and that it is becoming less so. The recurring Constitutional crises in Canada, like similar problems in all multinational states, are examples of the state's inability in such situations to provide cultural protection of support to everyone's satisfaction. Even mononational states are limited in their powers in the world's many federated countries, none of which to my knowledge, is immune from grey and contested areas between and among local and federal state authorities. No state has had total control over all the relations between those within it and states and extrastate institutions internationally. With the growing force of global economic agencies, large areas of state sovereignty are being eroded DE FACTO, and DE JURE state sovereignty is giving way to international laws and institutions, as in the case of the European Union. Together these considerations suggest that statehood, far from being complete and insulated is a matter of degree.

Assuming that I've got them more or less right, attending to these two phenomena -- the interpenetration of civic and cultural values and the degrees of statehood -- suggests places to focus on to confront elements of a potentially violent combustion in Canada. The most obvious implication concerns the absence of channels for seeking compromise solutions. Recall that the most severe of such impediments is encountered when protection of national or other identities is thought to require full national control over a state, in the extreme case involving a fusion of national and state identifications. Such fusion can be counteracted by acknowledging the intimate connection between state and nation but emphasizing the instrumental nature of the state's role in support of national identifications and the variability in a state's sovereignty. When the subordinate role of the state with respect to national concerns is highlighted, and it is recognized that sovereignty need not be absolute, but can be partitioned and shared in a number of ways, attention can be turned to the practical questions about what form of association can best serve all relevant national interests. I favour some form of asymmetrical federalism, but recognize other options.[33] On the principle that pragmatics is a good antidote to ideology, such questioning has the potential to weaken what I earlier labelled possessive nationalism.

To the extent that demonization of a hostile other derives in part from feelings of political impotence, opening spaces for negotiation over sharing power within a common state or between (quasi) independent ones should help to direct energies in constructive ways thus addressing a second combustible element by diffusing what was earlier labelled a phenomenological centre of blame. In addition, the orientation here prescribed dictates dialogue, initially to strive for mutual understanding of simultaneously divergent and convergent values and then to seek ways of highlighting and drawing up common policy on the basis of convergence. This is what Taylor calls a "politics of recognition,"[34] and it seems to me that even embarking upon such a path will help to counteract or forestall development of enmity defined self-identifications. Such an undertaking may be hard to get going, especially if a measure of enmity already exists, but I believe it realistic if one encourages looking first not at contradictory statements at state-level power politics, but at values in popular cultures to find convergent paths.

If such processes are hard to start, they ought to be progressively easier to pursue once started, as mutual understanding deepens and successful joint action breeds enthusiasm. One objection to such a strategy is that it would stand no chance of success if, looking into the souls of a dialoguing partner, one was repulsed by what is seen. This might sometimes happen, of course, but I maintain in the case of Quebec and Anglo-Canada that demonizing mythology is not at all reflective of general popular values on either side. A weightier objection is that by bringing matters of national identity into the political arena, they become politicized in a pejorative sense as differences are exaggerated to stake out bargaining positions and political leaders whip up nationalist antagonisms. In response to this objection it should first be noted that national matters are already part of the political landscape in Canada, indeed, often dominating it, and simply declaring that they be taken off the agenda is not a viable option.

An alternative proposal to that of taking national concerns out of politics is to turn efforts at national recognition against a certain way of conducting politics. This was the response of Sparshott, whose perspicacious observations on this point merit quotation in full:

It has been said that the idea of a nation is cultural rather than political. But that view seems to rest on the equation of politics with the distribution of powers, on the [exclusionary] sovereignty model [which is] to degrade the notion of politics and thus unwittingly to degrade the quality of public affairs. Of the alternative notions of what politics is, interest brokerage likewise has no special place for nationhood, though national interests could be set alongside commercial and other interests as recognizable participants in negotiations; but one could argue that this view of politics also, equating formal public interactions with trading relations, reflects and promotes a degraded view of humanity. But if we equate politics with the joint conduct of affairs in certain specifiable conditions, the nation becomes a PRIMA FACIE political entity as consisting of those who have most joint affairs to conduct.[35]

On the perspective sketched above wherein nation and state interpenetrate, Sparshott's concern that national questions not be regarded entirely extrapolitical is accommodated, and if, in addition, the notion of sovereignty is relaxed and nation-regarding politics are carried on in a pragmatic way, there is an opening for the political activity as engagement in public affairs he calls for.[36]

What is more, current "specifiable conditions" of the main national groupings in Canada, both inside and outside of Quebec, include an overriding problem, namely that effective power to engage in collective action in or between any of them is being diminished due to global economic changes that take decision-making power over economic and social priorities out of Canadian hands. One reaction to this situation, unfortunately largely pursued both by federal and provincial political leaders (including in Quebec) is to try playing the neo-liberal game: signing on to "free" trade agreements, reducing social services to cut taxes and remove constraints from profit-seeking entrepreneurs, foregoing national planning, and so on.

This is not the place to defend the claim that such a strategy is short-sighted for a small country like Canada. At best, it could only succeed in making some individuals rich or richer, and it involves the sort of brokerage politics Sparshott warns against, wherein regions, provinces and national groupings within the country are played off against one another in efforts of global economic competition. It also encourages the possessive individualist values, which I argued above, contribute to the economic element of potentially violent combustion. An alternative strategy is to encourage joint action between Quebec and the rest of Canada to cooperate in protecting institutions and practices traditionally valued as important parts of their national characters -- for instance, linguistic and related cultural practices in Quebec and a culture in Anglo-Canada which, by contrast to its Southern neighbour, is more egalitarian and less aggressively individualistic. To the extent that such specifically national appeals are to commitments that are not up for sale, but which are involved in people's national identities, this strategy therefore has the potential to counter yet another combustible element.

Earlier I suggested that one avenue for reconciling differences is direct interaction between relevant groups of people in and outside of Quebec. I wish now to conclude with a prescription for what, as a first step or at least an essential component of any step, such groups should do. This is to address the concerns of the third national grouping in Canada/Quebec, our Inuit and First Nations Peoples.

The publication in 1996 of the Report of a Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, which, backed up by a wealth of historical and other data, prescribes ways that aboriginal peoples could exercise appropriate self-determination,[37] offers an excellent occasion to put this question prominently on the agenda of any such discussions -- to which native people themselves should be party whenever feasible. There is also a strong pragmatic incentive for resolving this issue, namely to extinguish the spark for violence referred to earlier. The "Indian Question" is not going to go away. Land claims will persist. Canadians should not forget, either, that aboriginal interventions have twice had important impacts on Constitutional debates and upset the plans of white politicians: first in when the sole aboriginal member of the Manitoba legislature, Elija Harper, single-handedly blocked that province's required endorsement of the proposal for a redistribution of provincial and federal powers in the Meech Lake accord and when the assembly of First Nations (the umbrella group of First Nation and Innuit peoples in Canada) withheld support for the second run at such a scheme in a country-wide referendum over the Charlottetown accord.

James Tully, among others, including the authors of the Royal Commission Report, has made out a good case that there exist models within aboriginal history and communities from which the rest of Canada may learn important lessons relevant to Canada/Quebec relations. The notion of shared sovereignty is not foreign to native political culture as it is to those inherited from Europe.

As well there are lessons to be learned from native peoples about alternative ways of regarding the relations of land or TERROIR and territory, state and nation, and ethnicity and citizenship.[38]

At the very least a politics of national recognition should be a three-way matter. If, instead of playing the "Indian Card" in a power political way, people from inside and outside of Quebec, federalist and sovereigntist, jointly worked for just settlement of aboriginal demands, this could help to break down mutual suspicion. People who work together on a common project tend to grow together.[39] What is more, it should be noted that such a project has morality on its side. Aboriginal peoples in Canada account for less than 3% of the population, and yet they continue to marshal sufficiently widespread popular support and sympathy that politicians cannot for long ignore them. I attribute this to the moral strength of their wish to extract themselves from the terrible conditions imposed upon them.

Living up to moral responsibilities in this matter should have two more consequences relevant to avoiding the Bosnification of the country. First, the task requires challenging possessive individualist economic policies and culture. Ovid Mercredi, former head of the assembly of First Nations, was right to announce, shortly before standing down from that post, that he saw neo-liberal policies of the Ministry of Finance as graver threats to aboriginal aspirations than those of the Department of Indian Affairs. Moreover, not withstanding the sad fact that Native peoples are sometimes driven by desperation to economic practices out of keeping with their traditions, we have something to learn from these traditions, which embody alternative values to possessive individualism. Writing with reference to aborigines of Australia, Ross Poole makes the apt point that in this regard, aboriginal attitudes toward their lands is in keeping with a normal stance of all peoples which is currently obscured by neo-liberal rhetoric and practice: "The principle [of national sovereignty] has played an enormous role in the past two hundred years and continues to do so. If it has not been much discussed in much philosophy and political theory, this is because of the dominance of a narrowly economic understanding of the relationship between people and their physical environment."[40]

The effort should also help to combat intolerance generally. Recent scholarship on racism has been making out a good case that it and analogous forms of extreme intolerance have origins in the abysmal treatment of our aboriginal peoples during the campaigns of European colonial expansion.[41] as well culturally and physically genocidal, these campaigns set in motion psychodynamic processes among the Europeans and their descendants comparable to sexism in their tenacity and reach. Coming to grips with original and continuing degradation of the aboriginal peoples both prompts and requires a self-critical attitude which is itself essential to a culture of tolerance and mutual respect. On this view, working together finally to retrieve the well being and dignity of Native peoples in Canada is required to exorcize a demon that could otherwise drive it down a path nobody in the country wants to take.