As he promised, Prime Minister Jean Chrtien kept the leaders of the Group of Eight industrialized nations on the message of African development. It was a great success, culminating with the summit’s declaration of an Africa Action Plan (the genitive case having apparently been lost on its draftsmen), under which the summit leaders declared full support for the New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD).
Chrtien’s African agenda at least had the merit of turning the volume down on that annoying Middle Eastern conflict. It deflected attention from the United States President’s inflammatory remarks that the U.S. might have trouble dealing with Palestinian strongman Yasser Arafat in the future, and if the Palestinian people wanted the White House leaning on Israel for the creation of a Palestinian state, they ought to find someone else to run the Palestinian Authority. We were proud to see Foreign Affairs Minister William Graham set everyone straight, by usefully pointing out that the Palestinians would be permitted to vote for anyone they wanted, and George Bush’s plan to send Colin Powell and Anthony Zinni over with pre-printed ballots for them was a non-starter at the G8.
But when we picked ourselves up off the floor, we realized that an African initiative was a significant thing, touching, as it does, on a population of almost 800 million and on a continent rich in mineral resources. Whatever foolery cabinet ministers put on, Africa matters, and matters deeply.
No doubt the Chrtien cabinet and the upper reaches of the diplomatic service — all schooled in the post-war vision of Canada as a “middle power” — saw Canadian sponsorship of the NEPAD proposals as being in the rich tradition of development aid and Third World outreach that came out of this country in the 1950s. No doubt they have not realized yet that the world moved on without them.
The sophisticated still giggle at the American joke about the world’s most boring headline, “Worthy Canadian initiative.” The problem is that it’s not very funny any more, because a worthy initiative from any recent Canadian government would be up with little green men invading Earth for newsworthiness, and about as likely to happen.
This is all in keeping with the country’s determined effort to make itself irrelevant to the rest of the world. For the country that, through shouldering far more than its weight in two world wars, shamed the great powers into giving it a place at the highest tables, Pearsonian internationalism proved only to be a high-sounding way to subsume our own national interest in that of a vaguely defined “international community,” generally represented by the United Nations. In 1951, we were the immovable heroes of Kapyong; by 1994, the impotent spectators of Kigali. The problem was that the UN was never representative of the people of the world, but did a fine job of representing its petty tyrants and kleptocrats, while building an immense international bureaucracy to spend the industrial West’s money. When we made a point of getting on the UN’s cheerleading squad back in the mid-1950s, we were saying to the world that we would go along with whatever everyone else decided; that we had no ideas of our own, other than to provide the treasure (and occasionally the blood) the UN needed to keep the party going.
Thus our determination to be international nice guys, unfailing multilateralists, and dreamily soft-hearted social workers to all the world has put us on the sidelines where the authors of bad ideas eventually go. Did we become the “moral force for the Left in international affairs” that Ivan Head wanted us to be? No. How often did we exercise Lloyd Axworthy’s fabled “soft power?” Not very. Remember Pierre Trudeau’s “peace initiative” of 1984? Neither do we, and we don’t need reminding, either.
Thus we shouldn’t be surprised if the rest of the Group of Eight pay little mind to the government’s plan for NEPAD. But there are other reasons, too, that go beyond a forty-year career of punching below our weight in world affairs.
One is that the industrial nations’ summits have turned into yet another photo-op. They started, back in the 1970s, as a way for heads of government to butt heads and settle urgent issues affecting the world economy: fixing up exchange rate imbalances, bailing out debtor nations, that sort of thing. But when they started gaining world press attention in the mid-1980s, they became a stage for politicians and their retinues instead of a working meeting, and each year brings more elephantiasis and less substance: perfect, one suspects, for governments of Jean Chrtien’s stamp.
At the modern G8 summits, heads of government reach no decisions but do issue prefabricated statements on what Melville Watkins once called “global this and that and the international free flow of everything.” In that setting, the African development issue will find plenty of lip service, but nothing concrete.
Another is that European governments have never been so inward-looking. If, in political terms, the project of European integration has become the supplanting of democratic and constitutional government at the national level by bureaucratic fiat at the Union level, its economic face has changed every bit as radically: where the Treaty of Rome meant opening European nations to one another, Maastricht and beyond have been more about closing Europe to the rest of the world.
Despite vital present-day interests and (for no less than eight EU states) a colonial connection to Africa, European governments seem shy of Africa in a way that suggests both preoccupation and embarrassment. (We should note an exception franaise that is very much alive in this sphere.) Yet Europe, because of its long relationships on the continent, is indispensible to any program the industrialized world wants to build in Africa. An old-style summit might have concentrated European minds; the new style does not.
Similarly, Japan is deep in economic crisis and will have no taste to look outward: and this illustrates better than anything else the evolution of the mid-year summit. Twenty years ago, there would have been a plan to help Japanese industry, and a support package for the Bank of Japan. This year, there were the usual carefully scripted declarations.
Most fundamentally of all, is the plan any good? The crucial problem facing Africa is the disintegration of its society, displayed most tragically in the persistence of tyrannical government. Yet on that, Western leaders have provided only a carrot: there will be “enhanced partnerships” with African governments that provide “measured results” on good government. The stick of sanctions against the monsters of the continent — with Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe now at their head — has been placed quietly in a closet.
The measurement of good government itself will be interesting. We find it easy to imagine Western apologists for left-leaning African dictators fudging the criteria, or arguing for the “constructive engagement” that validates the tyrant’s self-regard. It is also not hard to imagine that political leaders in the West, who themselves constantly confuse elections with democracy and democracy with liberty, extending their own banality of mind southward.
African “peer review” of governments, which the summit leaders declared was “potentially decisive” in the implementation of NEPAD, has its own checkered past. The sham of elections in Zimbabwe last March got glowing review from some of the country’s African peers, and at least lukewarm endorsement from others, such as South Africa. The G8 countries reserved the right to “make our own assessments,” which says something about the level of trust they place in peer review.
Moreover, G8 governments persist in believing that they can choose and direct flows of capital to those African countries that develop secure systems of law and business conduct. It cannot be plainer that investment will go where the risks to legal property tenure are least and where contracts can reliably be enforced; no business needs government to take on that tas
k for it.
And where governments could do substantial good: on debt relief, removing barriers to trade, and redirecting foreign aid programs, the NEPAD declaration offers only the same formulas we have heard in the past. The G8 will top up the shortfall in the International Monetary Fund’s debt-relief program: well, who else would have? The G8 will meet the schedule laid down in the Doha trade talks: is this a new promise? The G8 will meet previous agreements on effective development aid: what, were they not serious before?
The industrialized world should want to help Africans develop Africa. But it can do this better by opening up trade opportunities, by ending futile aid programs, and most of all by dealing only with clean politicians and benevolent regimes.
Next week: is Africa under a “commodities curse?”
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