Let’s Hear It for Being Average

It is often said that Canada came of age in World War One. A part of our identity as a young nation was forged by the men who fought together on the battlefields of Europe. Through the experience of war, sacrifice and ultimately victory, we came to more fully recognize ourselves as Canadians.

We have now been engaged in Afghanistan for twice as long as we were in World War One. There is little question that this experience too has marked us as a country. But how? While it is too soon to pass judgement on ourselves—and our current military mission in Afghanistan will last at least another two years—perhaps it is already possible to catch glimpses of who we will become.

Canada’s Middle-Powerhood

In the years after the First World War, we began to be more aware of our particular place in the world, as a young, energetic country with vast natural resources, a burgeoning population and growing confidence. Inevitably, we compared ourselves more than ever with our emergent great power neighbour to the south.

After the Second World War, we came to see ourselves as an emerging middle power and sought, successfully it seemed, to punch above our weight in world affairs. We were significant players in the creation and early years of the United Nations, NATO and the other post-war international institutions; in the Suez Crisis and the first United Nations peacekeeping forces; in pressing for formal development assistance programs for the developing world, etc. With these successes, we gradually came to embrace a mythology of our exceptional role in the world.

But the trouble with having an identity dependent on exceptionalism is that it can never be fully satisfied. It is always necessary to continue to be exceptional.

In the first post–Cold War decade, we experienced perhaps the apex of this striving. We were relentless in our pursuit of exceptional Canadian-driven initiatives: the international landmine treaty (or the Ottawa treaty), the International Criminal Court, the Kimberley Process (regulating the sale of blood diamonds) and the human security paradigm, to name some of the more dramatic examples.

Again, we were in many ways successful.

But even with that success, there came something discomforting. It did not feel like enough. The trouble with mythologies is that they are hard to live up to. At best, they are exaggerations or simplifications of the past, which seek to crystallize something essential about how we want to see ourselves in the present.

Few serious history books, for example, will support the claim that Canada invented peacekeeping. At the dawn of the 20th century, there were innumerable advocates, among states people, military authorities and scholars alike, for a permanent international military force. After World War One, when the Covenant of the League of Nations was being drafted, France proposed the establishment of a force, composed of troops from several states, to be placed at the disposal of the League in case of conflict—but the idea was rejected by the British and the Americans. Nevertheless, the Council of the League of Nations went on to create the first truly international military force in 1934. Composed of 3,300 troops, from Britain, Italy, the Netherlands and Sweden, it was mandated to ensure an orderly plebiscite on the future of the Saar territory, a border region of Germany and France placed under League administration by the Treaty of Versailles.

Certainly Canada—and Lester Pearson—played an instrumental role in the UN peacekeeping force that finally got off the ground in the wake of Suez. But it was a broad, multinational diplomatic effort that we were part of; and historical records (many of which are now available on the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade website) suggest that the Americans encouraged us to take the initiative because of the legitimacy our role would bring.

But by the turn of the millennium, we had become increasingly nostalgic for what we began to think of as our “golden era” following World War Two. We looked in the mirror, and the country we saw was starting to look a little out of shape. Andrew Cohen summed up this pervasive sense of a decline in Canadian diplomacy in While Canada Slept: How We Lost Our Place in the World, and this attitude is still reflected in public debate about Canadian foreign policy today, including our current role in Afghanistan.

The Virtues of a Middling Power

In her 2004 At Home in the World: Canada’s Global Vision for the 21st Century, Jennifer Welsh makes the case for Canada as a model citizen of the world. In reference to the long-standing notion of Canada as a middle power, she points to the etymology of the word “middle,” which derives from “middling,” meaning mediocre. But middling also has an alternative meaning: average. Is it possible that this second definition might in fact not fit us so badly today?

The irony would be that such an identity is precisely what we have been so desperate in our middle-powerhood to avoid, to escape from: being average rather than exceptional. But there are several reasons to wonder whether, in today’s world, there might be certain virtues associated with averageness.

In the realm of global finance, it is not a bad time at all to be unexceptional. During the financial bull markets of the last 15 or more years, Canada has not been among the great risk takers—or, on the whole, among the great reward reapers of the boom in complex and, until recently, extraordinarily lucrative financial risk products. Blame it on something in the stern Scottish heritage of our banking industry. The upshot is that we are not among the great financial losers, and our banking system is ranked among the most resilient: four Canadian companies now rank among the ten largest North American banks.

In politics, the American zeitgeist has tended, over decades, to swing between manic highs and depressing lows—with corresponding impacts on world affairs, while Canadians have tended to alternately curse or bless our relative level-headedness. But we have mostly discounted the long-term advantages of predictability.

Strangely, our own partial blindness to our middling virtues has not been equally hidden from others in the world. We may insist on framing our identity in the world as that of a minor superhero (the inventors of peacekeeping, the champions of the responsibility to protect, etc.), but as worthy as such an identity—and the initiatives that derive from it—may be, it is not at all clear that this is how others see us. Nor is it certain today that such an identity is entirely sustainable or likely to prove of greatest value to the world.

Surveys continue to confirm our global popularity: a February 2009 BBC/Globespan poll, for example, ranked Canada second in terms of our positive international reputation. But we might ask ourselves: is this really the result of our history of exceptional diplomatic initiatives, our relentless drive to outdo ourselves in world affairs? (With regards to the above poll, the top-ranked Germans, it must be said, have been the opposite of aggressive foreign policy exceptionalists for the last 64 years.)

In a world wracked by political and economic chaos, it is Canada’s comparative blandness that may well give us our greatest status. This is clearly not a strictly mathematical kind of averageness, since our status as a prosperous social democracy is more exceptional in the world than not. But it does relate to the sense of moderation or balance in our disposition and actions mentioned above; our combination of free markets with a social safety net represents a stable compromise between norms—one that many others aspire to.

Understanding Canada as attractively average in this sense does not necessarily conflict with being assertive advocates for progress on critical foreign policy issues. Its principle effect is rather to reorient our idealized international self-image from being “exceptional” to being “exemplary.” Striving to be exceptional means striving to be either at the very centre or furthest periphery of world affairs, either leading the way or beating your own path. But striving to be exemplary, I wish to argue, means seeking to stake out an acceptable middle ground among other countries: seeking to represent that which is positive in the nature or behaviour of a group as a whole.

Our eagerness to claim ownership of certain exceptional initiatives can actually be counterproductive. Human security, a paradigm that is still gaining traction in the world, might in fact have been an easier sell—as a British colleague once dryly told me—if we had not been so insistent on labelling it as Canadian. This is to say that our branding, as it were, lends legitimacy, but only to a point. The most effective advocacy probably involves persuading others to share ownership in an initiative.

Canada has, over the years, tended to play a bellwether-like role for other countries. We have been looked to as a signal—not of the latest gust, but of larger, longer-term patterns in world affairs. Consequently, allies have wanted Canada onside because of the message it sends to others. This, in and of itself, has given us a significant degree of moral authority and diplomatic leverage.

Such a dynamic was perhaps most evident at certain critical periods of the Cold War, in diplomatic forums such as the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. Originally envisaged in the late 1960s as a consultative mechanism for reducing specific military tensions between the East and West, the CSCE gradually broadened in the 1970s to include social, economic and human rights agreements—a sort of baseline for where East and West could, at the very least, agree to disagree on key issues. Canada was rarely a ground breaker in what continued through the 1980s as a normative wrestling match between superpowers; but in the rough and tumble, our positions were closely followed and our support strongly sought, because of the important markers we laid down for where the middle ground might eventually be found.

There are more recent examples of this, too: it was certainly not for our military capabilities that the United States wanted us onside at the start of the Iraq War. Our bellwether-like status is also why our voting record on Middle East issues at the United Nations is often watched so closely by others. And it is perhaps the most significant source of our legitimacy in continuing climate change negotiations.

Recognizing the inherent value of our averageness would also reinforce our instinctive multilateralism. Again, it is mostly a question of refocusing the lens. For what an effective system of global governance will demand is not exceptional member states, but representative member states. In the wake of the global financial meltdown, the gradual (re-) emergence of great powers such as China and India and the ever-growing recognition of the wide-spread dangers of failed states, what the international community desperately needs more than anything today is standard operating procedures to address globalized challenges.

From this perspective, Canada’s reputation for averageness is a major asset. It will allow us to put the weight of our widespread esteem behind global governance solutions that judiciously balance competing and frequently conflicting norms, such as state sovereignty and universal human rights.

Currently, for example, given the resilience of our financial system, the Canadian model of sober financial regulation is quite suddenly in the spotlight; as the world’s financial system is necessarily rebuilt—and new global standards are proposed to reduce the risk of future financial crises—there is a particularly trenchant role for us to play.

The Virtues of Muddling Power

There is a catch, however, to proselytizing Canadian averageness as a model to the world: we ourselves are not quite sure of, and are therefore less than confident about, our blueprint. Canada’s existential agonies, our competing cultural and linguistic identities, and our ambiguous self-comparisons with the big elephant to the south are well known to the world. But while we tie ourselves up into knots over them, other countries find our struggles rather admirable.

What we apparently fail to grasp is that it is not because we have ideal federal-provincial governance structures that we are an example to the world, with Canadian experts called on to help design new ones in places such as Iraq and elsewhere. To the contrary, it is that our constitution is innately problematic and yet we manage, somehow, to hold together politically. We are likewise a country of social, cultural and economic cleavages, yet we coexist mostly peacefully. In short, we are deeply envied by other countries, ravaged by instability and conflict, for our ability to muddle through.

If only we knew ourselves what the secret formula was.

We therefore potentially make a well-intentioned mistake when, as part of a program of development assistance, we bring a formulaic notion of our governance expertise to places such as Afghanistan—so desperately in need of better governance. There is no question that we have valuable technical knowledge and advice to share. In Afghanistan today, for example, Canadian advisors work full time in numerous government ministries, including regional and rural development, energy and water, education, finance, justice and local governance, providing daily support to senior politicians and officials. But we should never forget the imperfect reality of our own governance experience—even the imperfections in our knowledge of that experience—and the fact we muddle through regardless.

One excellent example of the kind of policy approach this awareness encourages is the work of the Forum of Federations, an international organization headquartered in Ottawa and established with Canadian government support ten years ago. It is now a partnership of nine federal countries, developed and less developed, with experts from each sharing their knowledge of how federalism works, however imperfectly. Official multiculturalism, perhaps our country’s signature policy in the eyes of the world, provides another case in point: as set out in the works of internationally renowned political philosopher Will Kymlicka, Canada’s luck with our historic and present multicultural policies is intimately connected with the less than straight-forward (yet still powerful) lessons these policies offer to other countries.

The Consolations of Middle Age

Over the last eight years, Canadians have struggled to explain—and justify—our role and ongoing sacrifices in Afghanistan. One reason for this continuing doubt may be that, rather than playing an easily demonstrated exceptional role, Canada is actually, semi-consciously, playing the sort of exemplary role advocated above.

For one thing, Afghanistan is not “Canada’s War.” We are part of a UN Security Council– sanctioned, NATO-led coalition of countries that is engaged in a massive, multi-year security, reconstruction and development effort at the invitation of the democratically elected Government of Afghanistan. Moreover, our collective Afghanistan engagement is in many ways the focal point for a vast complex of issues: international terrorism, religious extremism, geopolitical tensions (among Pakistan, India and Iran), the wider global impacts of failed and failing states and the compounding problems of technological and economic globalization. In the face of all this, it is understandable for many Canadians to feel that our contribution—and our deeper raison d’être—has somehow gotten lost in the mix.

It is not, however, realistic, or even necessarily desirable or appropriate, for Canada to play an exceptional part in the profound global challenge that Afghanistan has come to represent. We, along with the world, have been learning since 2001 that there are no quick fixes to the complex Afghan situation. In other words, the relative decline of singular Canadian diplomatic initiatives in recent years is much less a reflection on ourselves and much more a reflection of a very changed world.

And so, curbing our exceptionalist foreign policy reflexes, Canada has been learning to play a cooperatively exemplary role in Afghanistan. We have taken on the linked-up challenges of security, reconstruction and development in Kandahar, one of Afghanistan’s most important and volatile provinces. And at the impetus of the Manley panel last year, we have sought to have a more focused impact on a few key areas, and to more directly build the Government of Afghanistan’s capacity to serve its own people. In practice this has meant doubling our civilian presence in Kabul and Kandahar in less than a year: an increase in diplomats, development experts, police trainers and other non-military staff.

And particularly with the shift in focus from Iraq to Afghanistan of the new U.S. administration, it is fair to say that Canada’s military and, especially, our civilian efforts—which are blended in the structure and operation of our Kandahar Provincial Reconstruction Team—are increasingly recognized as important bench-marks among our international allies.

All this suggests an answer to the question of how Afghanistan has marked us as a country—and what historians may make of Canada’s Afghan experience decades hence. Perhaps our inner turmoil and self-doubt, in the face of relative outward success, will be seen as akin to a mid-life crisis. Reaching middle age often brings about a confrontation with your limitations and with your long-held expectations regarding your place in the world; likewise, coming through such a crisis often means accepting that the world, and the world’s destiny, does not entirely revolve around your every action and reaction, but that there is still a vital place for you. It also means having the self-confidence not to endlessly seek to be exceptional for its own sake, but rather to derive inner satisfaction and outer authority from exemplary action.