Axworthy on the Responsibility to Protect: 'It's no pancake'

Notes from the 12th Annual Robson Lecture by Dr. Lloyd Axworthy
April 8, 2005, University of Winnipeg

When I walked into the room I was presented with a giant banner proclaiming World Peace Through World Law. To be honest, I didn't quite understand and I was skeptical over what was going to be fed to me over the next hour and a half. I grabbed a brochure from the World Federalist Movement and was soon asking myself why I'd never heard of this before and where was the catch. Am I a world federalist? Apparantly I am, on all accounts. From the brochure, my comments in brackets:

Are You a World Federalist?
You could be if you have three or more of the following signs and symptoms.

1. People just won't believe you when you tell them you're the moral and intellectual peer of Einstein, Socrates, Gandhi and Gorbachev, every one of them an advocate of world government. (Well, I wouldn't go that far.)

2. You're developing repetitive stress syndrome from wringing your hands as one genocide follows after another and the world stands uselessly by, wringing its hands. (I don't do much hand wringing, but I do kick things and chain smoke from time to time.)

3. Knowing that nations spend roughly fifteen times as much money on war and weapons as they do on relieving world poverty makes you want to fly to New York and a) pie the General Assembly, b) moon the General Assembly or c) both a and b. (Not so big on the mooning, don't really see it as being effective. Pieing seems to be pretty successful though, at least in terms of making a point.)

4. Police cars and traffic cops make you nervous, but the law of the jungle in the global village gives you panic attacks. (Law of the jungle? Law of the corporate executives . . .)

5. You feel compelled to put quotation marks around the world 'democracy'. You yearn for the day when strict limits on the influence of money and power will restore the D word to its former glory. (It's kind of a scary thought, complete control of the people . . . but yeah. Okay, yeah, giver'.)

6. You suffer from nightmares and feelings of impending doom, knowing that no one is minding the planetary store - except those who are looting it. (Daily.)

7. To see globalization hijacked by self-serving superpowers and corporations with budgets the size of Belgium gives you clinical case of road rage. (More like general rage. I don't drive all that often.)

8. You are a proud Canadian, but deep down inside dying to get out there is a frustrated world citizen. (Yes and yes.)

Alright, so they got my interest. I'd never heard Axworthy talk before but I generally knew who he was, Manitoba boy, former Minister of Foreign Affairs, current president of the University of Winnipeg and author of a recent scorching open letter to our southern friend, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice. As he was introduced and began to give his lecture I began to realize that this man had done far more and been to more places than most men and I slipped into an overwhelming realization that Axworthy might as well be my personal role-model. Although, he did start off kind of dry, once he got into what he was trying to drive home you could really tell he was excited about what he had to say.

As an example to prove his case for how world governance is becoming an important reality, he talked about his recent trip to Ethiopia-Eritrea as leader of a United Nations envoy to assess the violence there. Eritrea is a nation that seperated from Ethiopia in 1992 and the two nations have been in a state of perpetual war ever since, both sides unwilling to give an ground on a heated border dispute. As a result, 18 million people in the region are now living below the poverty line (around $200 annual income). Canada, for example, send millions of dollars every year in aid to Ethiopia, yet nothing is done to resolve the border dispute, and without resolving the border dispute, nothing is going to every change for the people of Ethiopia-Eritrea. Axworthy proposed the question, What do borders matter, lines drawn in the sand, when so many people are suffering? Maybe we have to start looking beyond borders and nations look at the people.

Another example, something Axworthy called a 'wake-up call', was the recent tsunami disaster in East Asia. When the wave hit land it didn't discriminate between Indians, Thais, Somalis or the handful of Canadian, European and Americans who were visiting there. Borders don't matter and the global response to this disaster is just a small example of what is possible when people around the world decide something is a good cause to donate to. He mentioned that it is a good thing to acknowledge human suffering and let it haunt us, that forgetting is as bad as instigating.

One of the major terms Axworthy pushed was human security, looking at the wellbeing of individual peoples rather than nation-states. In the post-Cold War world this has become a large part of Canadian foreign policy, it's overall effectiveness something left to be debated. Axworthy argued that since the collapse of the Soviet Union there is no use for giant armies and nuclear arsenals, even though NATO still declares it's ultimate deterrent is the fact is carries a nuclear payload. Who are we deterring? he asked, What nuclear balance is there to keep? The Cold War is over. The real fear now is not a massive launch of Soviet nukes on American cities followed by a massive of launch of American nukes on Soviet cities, but rather the fact that security at rusting Soviet nuclear facilities has become lax and inconsistent. Should, for example, a terrorist group or rogue state use a nuclear weapon they're going to use it whether they scared of getting nuked back or not. Instead of building new weapons of mass destruction, we should be focussing all of our time and energy on securing and dismantling the old ones. Instead of increasing our military capacities to fight wars against nations we should reducing and honing our militaries for peacekeeping and peacemaking missions, interventions to go in and help people rather than bombing the complete shit out of country.

Axworthy talked about his time spent in Columbia where he met a little girl who was forced by the militia to shoot her friends and keep shooting them until she could do it without crying so that she could be a more efficient child soldier. And then, hitting closer to home, he talked about a young woman he met in East Vancouver who was being exploited as a prostitute by the same Columbian drug-cartel. Human security spans borders and continents and cultures. This isn't just a 'Third World' (I hate using that term) problem, rather something that affects everybody everywhere. Another term comes into play here, the responsibility to protect. When a government is uncapable or unwilling to stop the suffering of its own people, or if it the source of the suffering, then this serves as a trigger to the global community to intervene. It is the global responsibility to protect, something that has become feasible with the end of the Cold War, not by entering into a war with the nation but by intervening to stop the killing.

Axworthy proclaimed that we have been in a new world since the mid-1990s, a world where world government is inevitable, and it is up to us what kind of world it is going to become. He sees the university students and young people around the world as the transistional gap that is going to start this global change for the better and he sees the beginnings of a global public domain, a mixture of varied institutions that are restricting markets and limiting power for the good of the people, focussing on human security for the public good, powered by information age technology that we haven't even begun to fathom. In this incredible period of change, graduating university students are going to find themselves in an international job market and take this opportunity and use it for the global public good is, well, as he puts it, "It's no pancake."

Axworthy sees Canada and Canadian students as a hub for this surge of globalized thinking and as a national model for resolving domestic disputes peacefully and promoting peaceful resolutions around the world. Canada has the resources, people and skills to make a difference. He scoffs at those who see Canada as weak because it doesn't have a large armed forces, he says 'There is nothing more important than a new idea to change the world,' a world where borders and national fortresses have been broken down, where people are the focus of domestic and foreign policies, rather than nation-states and gross domestic products.