Could Canada Turn into Bosnia?
Frank Cunningham University of Toronto
Presidential Address, Canadian Philosophical Association,
Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences Meetings,
University of Ottawa, May 28, 1998.
Twenty years ago, almost to this day, the Canadian Philosophical Association undertook at its annual meetings, held that year at the University of Western Ontario (c'est-a-dire en plein Haut-Canada), to convene a conference to address the Constitutional crisis. The event took place the subsequent year in Montreal bringing together about 50 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. Papers from the conference were published by the Association in a collection edited by Stanley French.[1]
I recall having moved the CPA motion to initiate that event and volunteering to organize it. Being considered in those days a radical and a bit of a loose cannon, this task was instead entrusted to Storrs McCall, who, however, immediately co-opted me to a nationally, politically, and philosophically diverse organizing committee, which he chaired with truly remarkable skill. I would like to think that occupancy of my present post reflects a change in the Association in a radical and loose cannon-friendly direction, but I must allow the possibility that it is I who have changed.
Reviewing my own modest contribution to the collection lends some weight to the interpretation I favour. I still think that national self-determination is a presumptively worthy goal to which transnational capital poses a major threat. The more substantive contributions are still relevant. Taylor's address was reproduced by him in a recent collection.[2] David Copp's definition of "nationhood" has not been very much improved upon. The contrasting interventions of Michael MacDonald and David Braybrooke on rights are as apt now as then. We should still heed the advice of Serge Robert, Brenda Baker, Maryann Ayim and (feus nos colleagues) AndrÇ Paradis and Stanley Ryerson to avoid abstraction from the economic, gender, social and historical contexts within which philosophical reflection on this topic takes place. David Gauthier's application of social contract theory and Jack Stevenson's recommendation for a consociational model of confederation continue to offer stimulating ideas.
On the whole I think the efforts twenty years ago -- to my knowledge the first time philosophers from across the country collectively addressed a matter of pressing national concern -- hold up rather well. Moreover, current thinking on topics like nationalism, sovereignty, and self-determination could profit from the sort of clear headed analysis found, for instance, in the contributions by Steven Davis, Danny Goldstick, Marsha Hanen, Guy Lafrance, Alistair Macleod, Jean-Guy Meunier, or Bob Ware.
I. Violence
Looking back on the interventions of the 1979 conference, or at least on those with which I was in general accord, I have the impression that where they contain deficiencies these are not because they were simply wrong, but because they needed further development. Some such development has been achieved in the intervening years, especially in the application of sophistication in theories of justice, language, and rights to the "national question" (as evidenced, for instance, in the special issue of PHILOSOPHIQUES, UNE NATION PEUT-ELLE SE DONNER LA CONSTITUTION DO SON CHOIX? or the collection edited by Joseph Carens, IS QUEBEC NATIONALISM JUST?: PERSPECTIVES FROM ANGLOPHONE CANADA).[3] I have also found most useful Charles Taylor's defence of a politics of recognition, Will Kymlicka's demonstration of the compatibility of group rights with liberal-democratic values, and James Tully's articulation of constitutional complementarity.[4] In my subsequent remarks I shall assume these achievements and take a run at one aspect of the current situation of Canada/Quebec.
That aspect is the potential for violence. Choice of this topic is not accidental in a philosophical setting. For one thing, it is of the nature of philosophical polemics 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 Jean ChrÇtien or Stephane Dion had explicitly discussed even the abstract possibility of armed conflict when speculating about "Plan B", or if military leaders began publicly examining different violent scenarios, these could turn into self-fulfilling prophecies. But philosophers rarely provoke such reactions. Ever since Plato so dismally failed as a political advisor in Syracuse, 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 are politically effective.
Well, then, could Canada turn into Bosnia? In order to address this question, I have devoted whatever time I could secure over the last three years to studying situations where violent ethno/national conflict has been severe, including first-hand study in Jerusalem, Belfast, Karachi, and (earlier) some parts of the former Yugoslavia, and surveying the sparse philosophical literature on such violence.[5] This research has, I fear, ground to a halt due to inability to secure the funding needed to pursue it further, but some tentative lessons have resulted from what I have so far been able to do. In the rest of this address, which, be forewarned, will extend beyond the announced half-hour, I shall apply these lessons to the case of Canada/Quebec.
II. Some Theories of Human Nature
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've looked at are those of the socio-biologists, the cultural theory of RenÇ Girard, and Russell Hardin's deployment of rational choice theory. I confess to being antecedently skeptical of these theories, due to suspicion of any political approach rooted in a conception of human nature. I find that these have a question-begging, "dormative powers"-like character about them. Though I learned some useful things from each of the approaches, I was not surprised to find my suspicions borne out.
With variations, accounts of violent ethno/national conflict on the part of socio-biologists 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 cooperation, thus raising a further question about why such cooperation 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 be extended beyond very small groups of immediate dependents.
It is in proffering explanations for these things that sociobiologists addressing group conflict diverge.[6] Richard Alexander holds that competitiveness requires a certain blend of hostility and cooperativeness. Ian Vine suggests that cooperation requires self-deceptive attitudes of altruism, which, to avoid being carried too far, 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 overendowed 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 is not easily interpreted as pure blood, nor old stock 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 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 we see in Lucien Bouchard's reaction to the possibility of Supreme Court rulings on Quebec sovereignty, lack of fear of overarching law.[7] 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 now ought not to be predicting violence but retrodicting it.
The theory of human nature underlying Girard's perceptive accounts of how cycles of revenge take on a life of there 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. I've heard it alleged by some 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 -- 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 cooperative behaviour problematic, due to the intractability of the prisoner's dilemma. By contrast when people find themselves "coordinated" 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.[8]
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, as in other situations of ethnic violence, 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 nonviolence. Because coordinated groups are modeled 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 preemptive strike against another group, and cooperation among groups to preclude this will confront the prisoner's dilemma again.
Hardin, himself, does not seek a general explanation for how groups end up in violent conflict. Sometimes, group conflicts accidentally "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 in a way that risks reintroducing a new atavistic villain, he seems to regard 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 just what group identifications people have and the manners in which they identify. Inattention to such matters is one of the things that makes Hardin's treatment of Canada unsatisfactory. (I should add that in a back-firing way this treatment prompted in me a STRENGTHENING Canadian identification, when I found myself put off by his mistaken designation, in the book's first edition, of the capital city of the country.) Drawing exclusively for his information about Canada on Mordecai Richler and Stephane Dion, 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 NAFTA as an independent country than as part of Canada.
III. Elements of Violence
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, which in any case is open to future theories. The aim is to demonstrate that while useful ideas are suggested by such accounts they are at best 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. To defend this opinion I beg indulgence briefly to digress into a large subject.
No critic of human nature theories could object to the claim that all humans have some features in common (linguistic capacity, ability to walk upright, etc.); however, the critics can still take stronger or weaker stands. The strongest position denies that universal features are relevant to complex behaviour of the sort addressed by political theory. Weaker variants grant such relevance, but insist that the common elements interact with historically and socially diverse environments in such a way that universal predictions or perhaps also prescriptions based solely on appeal to these elements are unwarranted. 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, alone or in combination with the orientation of a weak critic, 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 or may not 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 especially when talking with people on the spot -- I spent, for instance, not a little time drinking excellent ale in pubs on both Shankill and Falls Roads in Belfast last August (my last name served as good cover on each of these confronting Loyalist and Republican streets) and earlier having resided on both sides of the Green Line dividing Jewish and Palestinian sectors in Jerusalem -- I tried to figure out 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, verging sometimes 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, instead, 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.
Hardin's only concrete political prescription for avoiding ethnic or national strife is world-wide 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,"[9] and echoing current neoliberal sentiments he advocates downsizing government, which he thinks will both promote 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 world-wide 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 consumption of consumer goods. This culture, Macpherson persuasively argued, promotes values of mean spirited selfishness and greed.[10] 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, for example, 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.
IV. The Situation of Canada/Quebec
The point about sparks is best explained by turning to the Canadian case. Shortly before the 1995 Quebec referendum, the Cree announced that if Quebec left Confederation, they would remain. What if the vote in that referendum (recall that it was 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 announced secession? Cree lands are so extensive and rich in resources that it is likely the Quebec government would oblige 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. Had the Cree called on the Federal Government for help, what would have happened then? We would all like to believe that violence would somehow be averted, and I remain optimistic that such a scenario would draw all parties back from the brink. But if other elements of combustion are present, this is just the sort of thing that can spark violence, even if almost nobody wants it.
My reading of the situation is that some measure of all the combustible elements listed above are present. That they are mixed with counteracting features and are not exactly full-blown gives one cause for hope, but that they exist at all is worrisome. Alarmists point to such things as jokes made by anglophones and francophones at each other's expense, jeers at the language in which the anthem is sung at sporting events, or the recent flag waving displays in Parliament as evidence of dangerously hostile cultural attitudes. Though distasteful, I do not think these things grave in themselves. Perhaps one thing that socio-biological 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 our situation. But, also as in other places, such 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. I'm told that the Quebec license plate slogan, "Je me souviens," has come not to refer to religious and other traditional values, nor even to the Plains of Abraham, but to mistreatment of Quebec by les anglais in general. Two years ago the TORONTO STAR featured a gruesome cartoon in which Bouchard is depicted chopping off the tongue of a figure labeled "anglophone." I hope that analogous demonization is not to be found in Quebec, but fear that it might.
I shall return to consideration of some matters of popular culture shortly, but first I shall address 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 it's majority Franco population, but if Quebec is given special powers for this end, other provinces demand equal special treatment.
Recently 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 deficitreduction 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 Reform Party, and wings of the Conservative Party, especially in Ontario and Alberta, is not just rhetorical, but reflects increasing neoliberal, deregulatory policies implemented by the Federal Government and several provinces, including Quebec under current P.Q. leadership.[11]
The ostensive promise of neoliberal 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. We can already see this happening in my part of the country in the increasing enmity between Torontonians and suburbanites who disparagingly and impersonally refer to one another by their respective telephone answering codes: the "416ers" and the "905ers." Imagine if they spoke different official languages as well.
Following Macpherson, I earlier claimed that neoliberal 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 remaining element to be discussed in the Canadian case is the absence of channels for peaceful resolution. I think that some channels still remain, but the traditional method of negotiation among political elites is, if not entirely closed off, at least suspect after the failures of Meech Lake and Charlottetown. Rejection of submission to Supreme Court authority by the P.Q., apparently 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 the one just before the Charlottetown vote when the Liberal Party sent train loads of Canadians to Montreal. On a small scale the meeting of academics and a few activists, Canada/ Quebec Dialogue, recently organized by Michel Seymour and Phil Resnick illustrates the sort of contact I have in mind. The meeting generated a set of principles circulating as an open letter for signatures here at the Congress of Social Sciences and Humanities meetings. I was able to sign this letter, and urge others in the Association to consider doing so as well. If analogous encounters were pursued between 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 -- perhaps several pacific channels can be secured.
As to possessive nationalism, we are most fortunate not to confront theocratic identifications (although, in a course on identities I taught this year, many students were surprised to learn that Quebec is among the most secular of provinces). Nor are national identities fused with attachment to a land, as for example in 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 the Quebec/Canada Dialogue meeting, 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. (Those curious may consult the resulting document to see how this was resolved.)
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 has led me to some conclusions 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 an article by Gwynne Dyer which recently appeared in Toronto's GLOBE AND MAIL, where he writes: "Since its birth Canada has been plagued by two rival tribalisms, British and French." Luckily, according to Dyer, 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."[12] 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 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 CPA conference, Francis Sparshott suggested 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 breakup of empires, the divinely sanctioned absolute power of rulers became sovereign state control over territory.[13]
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 folk song) and "territory" (as in the spaces bounded by rivers and hills, surveyors' markers, or urine). 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. (This idea was independently suggested to me with reference to Isreal by the most unlikely allies, Emil Fackenheim and Asmi Bishara.) In the Canadian case it would create options for negotiation foreclosed as long as national identities are territorially infused.
V. State and Nation/Ethnic and Civic Nationalism
Returning to the bumper sticker slogan, it could and probably sometimes does just mean, "We anglo Canadians like Quebeckers and don't want them to depart from the country." However, I think that it is more often intended in a menacing way. In any case it is worth trying to figure out just what is thought included in 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 1759 conquest, 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. Also, it raises the question of how the Quebec that is so essential to this identity is conceived. Regarding Quebec as one province among others would hardly motivate display of the slogan. We do not see bumper stickers in Ontario saying, "My Canada includes Alberta" (indeed, one can more easily imagine the opposite declaration). Recognition of Quebec as a nation is also unlikely, if, as I suspect, those brandishing the sticker are setting themselves against Quebec sovereigntists, since admission or rejection of Quebec nationhood has become definitive of one's stand on sovereignty on both sides of the debate.
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 nonexistent nationhood. Though the topic is too large to enter 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 that the boundaries of nations are fuzzy.[14]
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 (as Quebec sovereigntists often claim about Trudeau). At the current juncture of Canada/Quebec relations I suggest that this convention on the part of the engaged political theorists needs rethinking, and a dichotomy between seeing a strict distinction between nation and state, on the one hand, or identifying them, on the other, should be superseded. In fact, if among the criteria for something to be a nation are that it could, objectively, be a state and that its members, subjectively, are prepared to seek separate statehood in order to pursue large scale or transgenerational projects (such as preserving their language and culture), then a conception of statehood is already implicated in this traditional definitional component of nationhood.
I am using the term "supersession" in its technical sense to mean retaining some elements of each side of a dichotomized pair within a third perspective which makes them compatible, and I confess not knowing just what the superseded conception of state and nation would be like. Still, I suggest that the effort to articulate one could help to dampen a possessive nationalist attitude especially in Canada outside of Quebec. Recognition that Canadian nationhood can include association with Quebec at the level of the state would not require denial of unique Quebec nationhood. In keeping with Sparshott's prescient distinction between the body politic and the state (more relevant today than twenty years ago due to such things as the E.U.), such a conception also invites one to see statehood as variable and a matter of degree. This might help to turn attention toward practical questions about what form of association can best serve all relevant national as well as state interests. (I favour some version of asymmetrical federalism, but recognize other options.) On the principle that pragmatics is a good antidote to ideology, such questioning has the potential further to weakening possessive nationalism.
Before turning to my conclusion, I shall indicate another dichotomy the political philosophers might try their hand at superseding. I referred to Gwynne Dyer's view that immigration will save Canada from turning into Bosnia. He qualifies this to say that this is illustrated so far only in Canada outside of Quebec, which has lost its erstwhile Anglo-Prostestant chauvinism to become thoroughly multicultural. Since my next comments are going to be addressed to some current thinking in Quebec, I wish to preface them by disagreeing with this commonly expressed claim and insist that multiculturalism is also precarious in my part of the country. I have found that my last name serves me just as well in the pubs of Toronto as in those of Belfast, but the same is not true of my wife, who, though a third generation Canadian, born and raised in Ontario, finds that her Japanese last name does not gain her the same ready acceptance.
After Jacques Parizeau's unfortunate referendum night comment about the allophone vote, debate among Quebec sovereigntist intellectuals intensified over what the character of an independent Quebec nation should be like. They thus joined a world-wide discussion on the nature of nationalism. In this discussion, theorists like David Miller and Yael Tamir have challenged the traditional assumption that nationalism is centrally, if not exclusively, a matter of ethnic identification and have articulated an alternative conception of "civic nationalism." This has been taken up by some in Quebec to describe a form of nationalism in which, though French would remain the common language, other aspects of franco-Quebec culture would hold no privileged place. Loyalties of Quebeckers would be primarily as citizens bound together by shared commitment to liberal-democratic political and legal institutions.[15]
The ideal of civic nationalism is evidently most commendable, favouring as it does pluralistic tolerance and civic virtues. From the point of view of avoiding violence, its realization in Quebec would go a long way toward countering a culture of blame. The significance of blaming allophones for loss of the referendum in this context is that it heightens a sense of victimhood on the part of sovereigntist Quebeckers: national self-determination is not only denied by les anglais, in and out of Quebec, but also by allophones in the Province. A sense of being surrounded by blameworthy enemies within and without is one crucial precondition for violence.
The weakness of civic nationalism is that it risks loosing touch with national sentiments altogether. Imagine a world where everyone spoke Esperanto and adhered to the values of civic nationalism. Neither nationalism nor nations would have a place in such a world. It is dubious that they would have a place in a world which only differed from the imaginary one in being divided into linguistic communities. To say that the two worlds would be quite different because languages are not just instrumental to communication, but carry cultural meanings would invite reintroduction of ethnic nationalism. Ought the allophones to be obliged not just to speak French, but also to accommodate to other aspects of Franco-Quebec culture as well? Insisting on this is probably better than a blood-based nationalism, for which no degree of cultural accommodation would suffice, but in the demographic and linguistic realities of North America, it still risks perpetuation of a group of people viewed with suspicion by the majority culture.
Supersession of the alternative between civic and ethnic nationalism would, as I see it, contribute to solving this problem. As in the case of state and nation, I'm not sure what the resulting conception would be, but I do think that progress in getting beyond this opposition -- made not just by political theorists in Quebec, but also in Anglo-Canada -- could have several benefits, not the least of which would be to contribute toward overcoming the combustible element of blame.
VI. Native Peoples
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.
Recent publication of the Report of the 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, 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. It should not be forgotten, either, that Aboriginal interventions have twice had important impacts on Constitutional debates and upset the plans of white politicians: first when Elija Harper single-handedly blocked Manitoba endorsement of the Meech Lake Accord and then when the Assembly of First Nations withheld support from the Charlottetown Accord.
James Tully, among others, has made out a good case that there exist models within Aboriginal history and communities from which the rest of us may learn important lessons relevant to Canada/Quebec relations.[16] The notion of shared sovereignty is not as foreign to Native political culture as it is to those inherited from Europe. I believe, as well, that there are lessons to be learned from native peoples about alternative ways of regarding the relations of land and territory, state and nation, and ethnicity and citizenship.
At the very least a politics of recognition should be a three-way matter, not just limited to Quebec and the rest of Canada. If, instead of playing the "Indian Card" in a power political way, people from inside and outside of Quebec, federalist and sovereigntist, came to a shared recognition of aboriginal peoples and a determination jointly to work 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.[17]
This last comment needs to be qualified, since not all such interactions have salutary consequences; so it makes a difference what kinds of projects are undertaken in common. One feature of the project I am prescribing is especially salient here, namely that it 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 demand for the wherewithal to extract themselves from the terrible conditions imposed by our European ancestors and perpetuated by succeeding generations.
Living up to our moral responsibilities in this matter should have two consequences relevant to avoiding the Bosnification of the country. First, the task is not compatible with a mean-spirited, possessive individualist perspective on society and politics. Ovide Mercredi was right to announce, shortly before standing down as head of the Assembly of First Nations, that he saw neo-liberal policies of the Ministry of Finance as graver threats to Aboriginal aspirations than those of Indian Affairs. Second, the effort should help to combat intolerance generally. In keeping with recent speculations about the origins of racist attitudes in North America, I submit that it and analogous forms of extreme intolerance have origins in the abysmal treatment of our Aboriginal Peoples. These set in motion psychodynamic processes comparable to sexism and equally tenacious and far reaching. On this view, coming to grips with original and continuing degradation of the Aboriginal Peoples should both prompt and require a self-critical attitude which is itself essential to a culture of tolerance and mutual respect.
To put the point in a way that would be rhetorically risky in almost any setting except a gathering of the country's philosophers: working together finally to retrieve the well being and dignity of our Native Peoples is required to exorcize a demon that could otherwise drive us down a path nobody wants to take.
Notes
1. Stanley G. French, ed., Confederation: Philosophers Look At Canadian Confederation / La Confederation Canadienne: Qu'en Pensent Les Philosophes? (Montreal: The Canadian Philosophical Association, 1979).
2. Charles Taylor, Reconciling The Solitudes: Essays On Canadian Federalism And Nationalism (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1993), essay 3.
3. Philosophiques, Numero Special, Une Nation Peut-Elle Se Donner La Constitution De Son Choix?, dir., Michel Seymour, Vol. 19, No. 2 (Automne 1992); Joseph H. Carens, ed., Is Quebec Nationalism Just?: Perspectives From Anglophone Canada (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1995).
4. Taylor urges a politics of recognition in essay 8 ("Shared Divergent Values") in Reconciling The Solitudes and in his "The Politics of Recognition," in Amy Gutman, ed., Multiculturalism: Examining The Politics Of Recognition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994) 25-73; Will Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community, And Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989); James Tully, Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism In An Age Of Diversity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
5. I summarize my thinking to date on the subject of violent ethno/national conflicts in "Group Hatreds and Democracy," Daniel Avnon and Avner de Shallit, eds., Squaring The Circle: Liberalism And Its Practice (New York: Routledge, forthcoming).
6. See the essays in Vernon Reynolds, Vincent Falger, and Ian Vine, eds., The Sociobiology Of Ethnocentrism: Evolutionary Dimensions Of Xenophobia, Discrimination, Racism And Nationalism (London: Croom Helm, 1987)
7. Frank Wright, Northern Ireland: A Comparative Analysis (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1987) and Two Lands On One Soil (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1993). Rene Girard's classic statement of his theory is Violence And The Sacred, trans., Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977).
8. Russell Hardin, One For All: The Logic Of Group Conflict (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); I have criticized Hardin's theory in "Critical Review of Russell Hardin," The Canadian Journal Of Philosophy, Vol. 27, No. 4 (December 1997) 571-594.
9. Hardin, 179.
10. C.B. Macpherson's major explication of possessive individualism Is The Political Theory Of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes To Locke (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1962).
11. Ed Finn addresses provincial reactions to the "BCNI Agenda" in his column In THE CANADIAN FORUM, (May 1998), 6-8.
12. Gwynne Dyer, "How the 'new' francophones will save Canada," The Globe And Mail, (March 28, 1998), D3.
13. Francis Sharshott, "Nation and Sovereignty -- Reflection on Two Concepts," in French, ed., 107-115.
14. I defend "tri-nationalism" in "The Canada/Quebec Conundrum: A Trinational Perspective," Constitutional Forum, Vol. 8, No. 4 (Summer 1997), special issue in Its Canada's Prospects Series, Janet Ajzenstat and Caroline Bayard, eds., 119-129.
15. Yael Tamir, Liberal Nationalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); David Miller, On Nationality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). A collection of essays largely organized around the viability of civic nationalism (or, "liberal nationalism" as Yael labels the viewpoint) is Franáois Blais, Guy Laforest, and Diane Lamoureux, dirs., Liberalismes Et Nationalismes (Quebec: Les Presses de l'UniversitÇ Laval, 1995); a popular expression of civic nationalism may be seen in La Charte D'un Quebec Populaire (Montreal: SolidaritÇ Populaire Quebec, 1994).
The Supplementary Volume no. 22 of the Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Rethinking Nationalism, edited by Jocelyne Couture, Kai Nielsen, and Michel Seymour (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1996) contains several contributions attempting to supersede the civic/ethnic nationalism dichotomy.
16. Tully, Strange Multiplicity.
17. I take it as a hopeful sign that intellectuals who actively intervene in the Constitutional debates and from a variety of political and national orientations concur on the importance of addressing the aboriginal question. Some examples are: Tony Hall, "Aboriginal Issues and the New Political Map of Canada," in J.L. Granatstein and Kenneth McNaught, eds., "English Canada" Speaks Out (Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 1991), 122-140; Michel Seymour, "Le nationalism QuÇbÇcois et la question autochtone," in Michel Sarra-Bouret, ed., Manifeste Des Intellectuels Pour La Souvereignte (Montreal: Fides, 1995) 75-99; Henri Dorion, "Au dela de la dialectique majorite/minorite: la voie non gouvernmentale a la convivialite," in Jean Lafontant, ed., L'etat Et Les Minorites (Saint-Boniface, Manitoba: Les Çditions du BlÇ, 1992) 187-199; and Peter Russell, "Aboriginal Nationalism and Quebec Nationalism: Reconciliation Through Fourth World Decolonization," in Ajzenstat and Bayard, eds., 110-118.