Canada and the Security Problem

Abstract

THE CONTEXTBROADLY DEFINED, THE CIRCUMSTANCES that we all face as we approach the millennium are well known (or at least widely assumed) and those most commonly cited can be reduced to a series of recurrently trumpeted propositions. Most are blindingly obvious. Some may be a trifle vacuous. And a few are probably misleading or even dead wrong. But to set a context for the discussion that follows it may be useful to run quickly through them nonetheless.Proposition 1: The cold war, as we are usually (although not always) happy to observe, is dead, and for the time being at least its demise may have brought to an end (or so the optimists like to think) any serious prospect of having to cope in the foreseeable future with big wars between big states - or certainly with big wars between fully developed states. The latter have discovered at last that in the world they have engineered for themselves big wars do not pay. Their domestic populations, moreover, show signs here and there - although not consistently and not everywhere - of having learned the same lesson. Hence they feed it back as a tacitly reinforcing instruction to government.Proposition 2: At the same time, however, the removal of the ordered discipline that came from the cold war's bipolar structure, buttressed as it was by the ominous rattling of nuclear sabres, has made it possible for the lesser, but much older, demons of the human condition to renew their mischief. The conflicts of competing religions, cultures, and ethnicities have returned with a vengeance. Subordinated to forces larger than themselves, they had gone for a time unnoticed, while the practitioners of international politics focused on other things. But now their manifestations are as ugly and brutish as ever. They work their death and destruction not so much in wars between states as in wars within them (although they do a bit of the former, too, as recent events in the Balkans have reminded us yet again). And the slaughters to which they lead are often lightly, if frenziedly, done - with machetes, axes, clubs, handguns, and automatic rifles. The latter, it should be recalled, often originate as left-overs from the contracting armies of the greater powers. Surplus military debris, they have been re-cycled into black markets through the exotic, even the desperate, transactions of shadowy merchants of death.But the slaughters, as we have all come to see, are no less deadly for being delivered by primitive instruments. Nor does it help the cause of proportionality - of bringing at least some measure of reason to the matching of practical means to political ends - that the killings are so often executed by mindless adolescents, by role-playing youngsters whose childish motives would in Canada place them immediately under the protection of the Young Offenders Act.Proposition 3: Notwithstanding these displays of darkness in the heart, or perhaps in part because of them, there is abroad the further observation that the threats to our welfare as a species have been greatly multiplied in our time by modernity itself. The list is familiar enough. Among its more prominent and persistent components are 'basket case' poverty in the non-developing world; famine, torture, and pandemically infectious disease; environmental decay; the depletion of resources; the diffusion of weapons, some conventional and some not, among the disorganized, the excited, and the deeply aggrieved; the ruthless exploitation of women and children for purposes of work and pleasure alike; and the sundry predations of prejudice, superstition, and autocratic rule. In some parts of the world - certainly in our own parts of the world - we think we can see progress in the human condition. The Whigs are winning. But elsewhere the Horsemen of the Apocalypse are multiplying, and some of them brandish their spears at Canada's gates.In what measure these phenomena are really new, and to what extent they are really 'products of modernity,' are debatable questions. …