The ideas in Frank Harvey’s new text, Smoke and Mirrors: Globalized Terrorism and the Illusion of Multilateral Security, set the cat among the pigeons. They force us to address, without flinching, one of the most critical challenges the international community faces as it enters the 21st century. Have we passed the point where we can rely on lowest common denominator multilateralism, so favoured in Canadian foreign policy, when facing international terrorism? Has technology advanced so far as to give malcontents the definitive advantage in their war against modern societies because those societies, when reacting, are constrained by the rule of law and the self-imposed need for multilateral agreement? Do the quarrelling nation-states of the West have to give up participatory decision making if our culture, indeed our civilization, is to survive?
Harvey’s answer is a resoundingly clear yes. But, if he is correct, we face a profoundly murky and problematic...
Michael Bell is the Paul Martin Senior Scholar in International Diplomacy at the University of Windsor and co-chair of the Jerusalem Old City Initiative. A career foreign service officer, he served as Canada’s ambassador to Jordan, Egypt and Israel.
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