Multilateral Cooperation and Peace and Security

MULTILATERALISM IN AN AGE OF EMPIREThe case for Canada persevering with multilateral system, in face of American disposition to act unilaterally, can be made in four points, as follows:* US is undoubtedly most powerful country ever seen and will remain so for any reasonably foreseeable future, but most Americans are little interested in empire or even domination and, in any case, as is evident in Iraq, US power does not create its own reality;* Canada should cooperate actively in defence of North America but should take care not to further identify itself with an American foreign policy that is estranging US from much of rest of world and endangering Americans in process;* multilateral cooperation will continue because there is no satisfactory alternative; and,* multilateral system, nevertheless, needs both renovation and innovation and promoting such reform ought to be major Canadian foreign policy priority.THE UNITED STATES: EMPIRE, HEGEMON, OR WHAT?To discuss multilateral reform it is necessary also to discuss US attitudes and policies that affect that reform. A fundamental question at beginning of this new century, in wake of 9/11, is whether US will be with international community or against it. Will other countries be able to work with United States in larger, common interest, or have to work around it? Will United States be subject of multilateral cooperation or object of it (not in sense of facing coalitions that will seek to balance American power, although that, too, is imaginable if United States were further to ignore international law and to show no decent respect to opinions of mankind)?1 We live in an increasingly globalized, integrated, interdependent world that requires cooperative management to function effectively and no single country, not even United States, has capability to run alone even if it wants to. Happily, notwithstanding aspirations of few hard-headed, soft-handed Washington consultants and commentators, misplaced Canadian speech writers, and other vicarious imperialists, there is scant evidence that most Americans want to.While empire debate is back, mostly among academics, it is difficult to make argument persuasively that US is an empire in any conventional meaning of word, i.e., a large state or group of states under single sovereign.2 Since UN charter proscribed the threat or use of force against territorial integrity or political independence of any state,3 and since last vestiges of colonialism largely disappeared in 1950s and 1960s, few countries have even contemplated conquest of others and still fewer have attempted it, although admittedly some might argue that that is what happened in Iraq.Most basically, if America is an empire, who are its subjects, and why are they not obeying? The extent of cooperation with US in war in Iraq, or its aftermath, is hardly consistent with coercive imperial power. Although Canada is arguably most likely candidate for domination (more than 80 percent dependent on US market for its prosperity, as doom-and-gloom, trade-policy-is-foreign-policy, integrate-or-die school never tires of reminding Canadians), it never felt coerced to sign up for war.Whatever outcome of ongoing contest over levers of American policy, power of American liberal values and scope and speed of modern communications preclude kind of brutality used to build empires in past. Tactics used by British to subdue and control Mesopotamia, for example, would not be tolerated today in Iraq by American public or anyone else.4 There was no CNN or BBC World Report or al Jazeera in 1920s. Consider global-not least American-outrage over Abu Ghraib or American decision not to destroy Fallujah and Najaf. Nor would even British objectives in Mesopotamia-economic self-aggrandizement-be acceptable these days by much more aware and integrated international community. …

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