Sovereignty games that only the Yankees mustn’t play

For months, close friends and satellites of the American military-commercial colossus have been writing and ringing their hands purple over the possibility that an insincere, reckless businessman who’s had everything he wanted since his first adult dreams might win the presidency of the United States on behalf of a crazy idea: that the US can be truly independent again. Meanwhile, this week, the former center of the so-called Anglo-sphere will vote calmly on whether to go back to those glorious days when the English Channel was wide enough to keep Europe’s disorderly games at a safe distance.

It’s amazing how our own affairs keep sneaking up on us while watching America burn.

Sovereignty proponents in Quebec, Scotland, and now in England are treated calmly as normal people promoting a disruptive idea. They put their case to the people in state-organized referenda and, eventually, everyone weighs in. It’s a stimulating exercise; it tests ideas and aspiring and incumbent politicians. So far, the status quo prevails with arguments about incremental economic costs and, oh yes, last-minute threats about social benefits and pensions.

Why is nationalism—that desire to not be bound collectively to other collectives less competent or less trustworthy or less civilized than us—a tolerable sentiment in relatively small places and for places that practiced it so disastrously barely a century ago, but absolutely not in the USA?

My hypothesis can’t be verified because no one can admit to it. Still, here goes: European and Canadian politicians and opinion-makers think they can be idealistic and emotional, and can imagine surviving safely outside the status quo, because the US-of-A will always be there to give them security from other powers and from each other, and will keep generating enough economic growth to keep their economies recognizably afloat.

The longer the US is on the scene as their steady, rather philistine, superpower, the longer the rest of us can argue about how to make history again.

Of course, America’s friends can’t keep talking about transformative, existential changes for themselves without having another patient, team-spirited, mainstream President in the White House.

2013: Fewer firefighters and more architects?

Last month, during a London School of Economics symposium on the European Union a student asked whether we need fewer firefighters and more architects in positions of power. The question sounded slightly rhetorical. The audience applauded.

Four Decembers ago, on either side of the Atlantic, such an audience of political scientists would have laughed.

Whether elected as visionaries or as technocrats, leaders in Europe and North America were not required to envision, but to act. It didn’t matter then whether they were democrats or bullies, outgoing or shy, elected to office or one step removed and running central banks. They didn’t have to define the problem; they just had to fix it.

Thanks to four years of successful firefighting, it shouldn’t be surprising that the public is less awed today by can-do executive resumes and talk of imminent collapse. (Otherwise, in the US, Rick Santorum or Mitt Romney would be President-elect, and Donald Trump would be recognized as a builder and not as an arsonist.)

As people get used to breathing more easily, they’re less easily impressed and are more open to new worries--new problems that can’t be addressed by the emergency power leaders have been relying on through the Great Recession.

Centrists in Washington probably have enough votes to stabilize the public debt’s share of US GNP. North Americans should also be able to stabilize and eventually reduce CO2 emissions, in absolute terms. A Canadian-style immigration policy should eventually be adopted by the US.

Nevertheless, North American and European leaders do not know how to stay ahead of China and the other BRIC’s economically while meeting the frustrated expectations of their own middle classes. Whatever they do domestically, they don’t know how to inspire collective global action on the environment without being in charge anymore.

Firefighters have little to offer. Technocrats may agree broadly that more continental integration and less parochialism on both continents would offer the scale--and the architecture--for greater success. However, big policy, on paper, is cheap. 

The leadership task now won’t be solved literally by replacing today’s leaders with architects. However, the ones we have need to master politics’ toughest job. They need to be able to be persuasive, to convince us that we ought to try something new rather than simply replace the smoke detectors. 

The Decline of Ideology and the Rise of Bigots

Today, universal political ideas—and their champions—are in retreat. We suspect ideologies the same way we suspect religion.  Faith in markets, in worker solidarity, and even in the West’s big one— that freedom of expression favors the truth—are thrown around as accusations.    Cynics are sure they don’t sell. Optimists hope that uncontaminated social-economic data can drive public discourse, forward.

Unhappily, bigotry isn’t retreating along with Matthew Arnold’s Sea of Faith.

Tory backbenchers in Westminster, urban reformers in Toronto, Quebec progressives all too often work from a common script: Those Europeans, those knuckle-draggers in the suburbs, and those polluters in Alberta are holding us back. If they got out of the way, we could make this a far, far, better place. (Of Course, along with our lousy neighbors, there is always the divisive state of American politics to reassure us that we are civil and that things could be worse.)

These new grievances, however, are the grievances of true believers who are failing at home.

The right-wing backbench of the British Conservative Party has made little progress de-regulating the British economy since Margaret Thatcher’s first term—over thirty years ago. Instead of asking the British people to shrink their own government once again, the Economist reports, they rail against the bureaucrats of the European Union. They seem to believe that if Britain got out of Europe, British voters would unreservedly embrace those famous British market principles they have so often compromised in the past.

Quebec progressives claim that widespread concern in Quebec over climate change is an expression of ‘Quebec values’ and promptly solve the problem by saying oil producers in Alberta should pay higher taxes.

In Toronto, this week, downtown Councilor Adam Vaughan suggested that one way to repair a freeway that links Toronto’s core to its regional suburbs—and workforce—would be to sell the whole freeway to the private sector. Supposedly, it would go for $billions, if the City allowed the new owners to levy commercial tolls. Last year, Vaughan’s allies rejected out of hand selling the downtown’s precious subway or electrical utility, or asking for the privilege of raising revenues by imposing pollution taxes on Torontonians.

The old divisions that were driven by big ideas were not consistently more attractive or safer. However, they weren’t only defensive and they didn’t consistently divide people geographically or stereotype the other. And, above all, their leaders could challenge their own voters and compromise their own interests.

Too often, today’s troublemakers, on both scores, are simply smaller. 

Brian Mulroney and the End of History?

Brian Mulroney’s pal Ronald Reagan is now considered one of America’s greatest presidents. For Canadians, memories of Mulroney’s two terms as prime minister are every bit as inflated. We don’t idealize the man. We grant him something even grander: we treat his accomplishments in Canada’s relations with the US—and his failures in constitutional reform—as the end of the journey.

Last week, Canadian opinion leaders celebrated the 25th anniversary of his Free Trade Agreement with the US; the FTA that eliminated nearly all Canadian and US tariffs, created a non-binding dispute settlement system, and provided national treatment for each country’s investors. This deal is not simply widely praised and sparsely reviled; it’s treated as a kind of final settlement in Canada-US economic relations.

After two centuries of progress and retrenchment, Canada’s place on this extraordinary continent appears settled: overseas, we’ll burnish our brand and sign trade deals; at home, we’ll tinker.

Like the sunny memories of Reagan’s economic policies by Reaganites, numbers don’t adequately express the FTA’s positive impacts. Kevin Lynch, once Canada’s highest-ranking civil servant and now Vice-Chairman of the Bank of Montreal, believes the real stuff is intangible:

“Free trade helped Canada to grow up, to turn its face out to the world, to embrace its future as a trading nation, to get over its chronic sense of inferiority."

“'It caused a sea change in attitudes,' he believes. The courage needed to take that free-trade ‘leap of faith’ equipped governments to tackle other seemingly insurmountable challenges: Establishing the goods and services tax, eliminating the deficit, reducing corporate taxes.

“Most important, FTA convinced Canadian governments, Canadian businesses and Canadians generally that this country had the knowledge and confidence to compete in any market.”

As it is in the US, bravado in Canada is also a sure sign of paralysis.

The right and the left see how little Canada’s economy has changed for the better. (Both Kevin Lynch and Jim Stanford, an economist with the Canadian Auto Workers union, accept that Canada’s productivity, just 74% of US levels, is actually slipping further behind the "declining" USA.) Nevertheless, neither protectionists nor free traders make much effort to either undo or outdo what Mulroney put in place.

"Trade diversification" has become the center of the action, the drug of choice by incrementalists in Washington and in Ottawa. At the same time, entrenched bureaucracies manage a Canada-US border that inhibits innovation, competition, and enterprise in both countries—as well as Canada’s security globally.

Currency unification, the physical elimination of the border, and, for instance, a common regime to manage the environment are European ideas, too radical for serious consideration in the New World.

Pros in Ottawa accept that Brian Mulroney pushed Canada about as far as Canadians would go. Indeed, on the constitution, he proved to them how dangerous it would be to try to improve on the success of the country’s last great closer, Pierre Trudeau.

This is a debasing form of respect for the good works of a different time.

Having given thanks, now let’s face it: the "coming of age" gift of the Mulroney-Trudeau years has been turned into a political straightjacket—a limiting sense of what’s possible in the very business of what is possible.

In fact, North Americans are stuck a generation behind European efforts to make their continent a more productive, efficient, and competitive economy. Furthermore, Canada’s constitution still includes two undemocratic and colonial institutions—at the very top.

Canadian optimists should stop watching for moves by the Chinese government to turn China into a law-abiding market democracy and waiting for the children of Canada’s last generation of politicians to stir their hearts.

Rather than feel left out, young Canadians should feel embarrassed. After that happens, they should look around for politicians who want to change things significantly.

Worriers of the World, Unite!

Canadian values and the American Dream supposedly hold us together in two separate federations. Purposeful visions—along with just-in-time bilingual visionaries—are not adornments. They’re the imagination’s rationale for our federations. 

Accordingly, along with a strong military, energy security, and diplomats punching above their weight, we must nurture, reward, and finance more positive thinking—otherwise, both federations will collapse, or at least stop impressing anyone. 

French Philosopher Andre’ Glucksmann, in an interview in Der “Spiegel, offers a more reliable, less rigid, and intellectually less strained case for sustaining Europe’s troubled federation.

Glucksmann: … Europe is a unity in its division or a division in its unity. Whichever way you put it, though, it's clearly not a community in terms of religion, language, or morals.

SPIEGEL: And yet it exists. What does that lead you to conclude?

Glucksmann: The crisis of the European Union is a symptom of its civilization. It doesn't define itself based on its identity but, rather, on its otherness. A civilization isn't necessarily based on a common desire to achieve the best but, rather, on excluding and making the evil taboo. In historical terms, the European Union is a defensive reaction to horror.

SPIEGEL: A negatively defined entity that emerged out of the experience of two world wars?

Glucksmann: In the Middle Ages, the faithful prayed and sang in their litanies: "Lord, protect us from pestilence, hunger and war." This means that community exists not for good but against evil.”

North America’s relatively ancient federations were defensive concoctions—far surer and more united about the shortcomings and vices of the outside world than about what they might do on their own.

As the world gets smaller and more divided, worrying should continue to keep us together and creative.