internationalisation of canadian economic and

8/9/2019 Internationalisation of Canadian Economic And

1/9

The

Internationalisation of Canadian Economic and

Cultural Nationalism

Gordon Laxer

Sociology Parkland Institute

University of Alberta

In the following,

I

discuss the export of Canadian

nationalist internationalist

resistance to corporate globalization by exam ining Canadian leadership in defeat-

ing the Multilateral Agreement on Investment [MAI]. Typically Canadians count

their successes only after hearing praises from outsiders. Addressing a Parkland

Institute conference in 1998, Ralph Nader said that Canad ians were the opposite of

boastful Texans, but that too much humility hinders them from appreciating and

internationalising their unique contributions. Nader called Canadian anti-MA1 cam-

paigns 'another Canadian first'' Maria Mies said the German and Austrian MA1

campaigns were practically initiated by Canadians.An Innsbmck University stu-

dent wrote: I w ant you Canadians to know that you all do really exemplary work

on the MA I. Janace Moira Graham said: New Zealanders are talking about the

tremendous fight Canadians are putting up against the MA1 every day on national

talk back radio and on our newsgroups Each day I switch on my e-mail and there

you are, carrying the flag of freedom and democracy, and we 're encouraged all over

again to keep going. Here's sm iling at you, Canada. * Noam Chomsky wrote: In

Canada and C anada alone , the veil [of secrecy on the MA11 was broken in mid-1997

and since then has become a big issue nationally. 3 To understand why C anadians

led the defeat of the MA I, it is important to set the context.4

We are writing the constitution of a single global economy, boasted Renato

Rugg iero, Director G eneral of the WTO in 1996. The global capitalist constitution

was being constructed in one international agreement after another, enshrining U.S-

style rights for corporations to directly sue governments. The U.S. successfully

exported their model, first to Canada, next to Mexico and then to the rest of the

world. But the wheel did not stop there. In movem ent, counter-movem ent fashion,

Canadian economic nationalists counterattacked and led the international battle

against the M AI. The MAI's defeat in 1998 was the first to puncture the aura of

inevitable triumph around cap italist globalism. It laid the basis for the spectacular

breakthrough in Seattle the next year. For a century, the U nited States' recognition

of corporate rights was unique. Although corporations do not appear in the

Am erican Constitution, they gained the right to directly sue governm ents in a land-

mark Suprem e Court decision in 1886, during the 'robber baron ' era.5 The decision

had constitution-like implications and was a major factor in hindering the progres-

No. 48 2001 241


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sive expansion of public life in the U.S.

In Canada, corporate rights had been much more circumscribed. As the only

major country in this hemisphere not to make a revolutionary break from the old

order of Europe, the Crown had almost unlimited rights and powers, including the

power to 'expropriate. In this context, traditional conservatives and social democ-

rats built strong institutions of crown corporations and public services. In part,

Crown corporations such as the CBC were set up to provide a Canadian voice,

where unfettered capitalism would have brought U.S. domination. Graham Spry, a

prime initiator of the CBC, said Canada's choice in broadcasting was the state or

the United States. When Pierre Trudeau and his allies repatriated the Canadian

Constitution in 1982, the Canadian Right tried to insert protection for property

rights in the Constitution. They failed and Canada seemed safe from constitution-

alising corporate rule. The Constitution's amending formulae are so rigid, revisions

are unlikely. Yet seven years later, Canada was subject to the kinds of private prop-

erty rights' clauses that were excluded from the Constitution. Why the about-face?

Did the Prime Minister and every premier have a miraculous meeting of minds? No.

Canada's Constitution was superseded by the Canada-US Free trade Agreement

(FTA), which, in 1989, imposed the U.S. corporate regime on Canada. This is why

observers have called such international agreements the new constitutionalism or

corporate rule treaties. 6

After losing the historic campaign against the FTA, Canadian economic and

cultural nationalists could have given up. They were devastated after convincing

52% of Canadians to vote No, but seeing Mulroney's Conservatives win a majori-

ty with only 43 of the vote. Blocked on their home turf, the nationalist activist

leaders picked up their marbles and their spirits and played an international game.

They took their technical knowledge about corporate rights agreements, their

movements' knowledge about how to build broad coalitions against the 'corporate

agenda', and their concerns about economic and cultural sovereignty to interna-

tional fora. First Canadians went to Mexico to help form anti-NAFTA movements.'

Then the MA1 came along.

We need to distinguish between globalisation and globalism. A strong global-

isation thesis posits that today's world is a qualitative break from the past. The the-

sis underestimates the extent of international integration in the past and overesti-

mates it now. In the hands of writers like David Held, the globalisation thesis pos-

tulates the withering away of the nation state or at least its great diminution.8 Every

generation of intellectuals since the mid 1800s has made similar predictions. This

was and is wishful thinking.9 If there is not a truly globalised economy, there is

even less a globalised politics, especially at the level of citizens. But the corporate

elite and their supporters have a global politics and frequently meet at Davos,

Bilderberg, through the IMF, the World Bank, the FTAA and other fora. For them,

nations and nationalisms are pass6 and a threat. Neo-liberal globalism is their dom-

inant paradigm and goes by several terms: Structural Adjustment Programs, The

Washington Consensus, the Wall Street-Treasury Complex, Liberal Productivism,

the New World Order. The prescription for every country is to: dismantle national

242

No. 48,2001


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Issues and DebatedEnjeux et de bats

economic sovereignty over foreign ownership, investment and exchange; privatise

public enterprises and deregulate business; reduce public expenditures and corpo-

rate taxes, and balance budgets.10 The most controversial element is the right of

corporations to directly sue all governments for almost any policy which adver-

tently or inadvertently diminishes their profits or that has the potential to diminish

future profits. This clause Chapter 11 in NAFTA was the central element of dis-

pute in the MAI, and at the WTO in Seattle.

Is globalism or the Washington Consensus merely one ideology freely com-

peting equally with all the other ideologies in the democratic marketplace of ideas?

Or is it the ideology of global governance backed by the U.S.A. and its junior part-

ners? In Dublin in 1999, Henry Kissinger said that globalisation is a new word for

America's dominant role in the world. ll Lawrence Summers, Secretary of the

Treasury under Clinton, called all critics of the

3 1 ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

h 0 ~ j l b

washillgton

Consensus separatists. Our ideology, capitalism, is in ascendance everywhere ,

he contended. 'Separatists' is Summers' term for proponents of national sovereign-

ty over their own resources, economy and cultures. For Summers, conformity to

Globalist economic policy ... is the forward defense of America's deepest security

interest.

l*

Thinking his remarks would stay in the room, David Rockefeller, head

of Citibank, told fellow globalists at the 1991 annual Bilderberger Conference: We

are grateful to the Washington Post, The New York Times, Time Magazine and

other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected

their promises of discretion for almost 40 years. It would have been impossible for

us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subjected to the lights of pub-

licity during those years The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite

and world bankers are surely preferable to the national auto-determinationpracticed

in past centuries. l3

The MA1 and the Battle in Seattle were major victories for Lawrence

Summers' separatists against the Washington Consensus. That efforts to defeat the

MA1 were led largely by economic nationalists and environmentalists defending

national sovereignty from English-speaking Canada, should not surprise.14 The

U.S. corporate rights clauses were first applied to Canada to counter economic

nationalist measures of the late 1960s to early 1980s, which significantly reversed,

U.S. corporate domination. Canadian economic nationalists internationalistscould

not have defeated the MA1 on their own even if they reversed Canada's gung-ho,

pro-MA1 position. The country has too weak a voice at the OECD to have a veto.

Thus, the need for Canadians to find international allies. Before France pulled out

of the MAI, thus killing the deal, it issued the

Lalumikre Report which argued that

the MA1 marks a step in international economic negotiations. For the first time, we

are witnessing the emergence of a 'global civil society' represented by BGOs],

which are often active in several countries and communicate across borders. This is

no doubt an irreversible change. After making this bold claim, the Report argues

that the main basis for civil society's objections to globalization is the threat to

national sovereignty.

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Writing about the WTO battle in Seattle, Paul Hawken wrote;. Those who

marched and protested opposed the tyrannies of globalization, uniformity, and cor-

poratization, but they did not necessarily oppose internationalization of trade

Globalization refers to a world in which capital and goods move at will without the

rule of individual nations Nations do provide, where democracies prevail, a

means for people to set their own policy Globalization supplants the nation, the

state, the region, and the village. While eliminating nationalism is indeed a good

idea, the elimination of sovereignty is not. l5 If we combine the Lalumikre and

Hawken formulations, then the aim of global civil society is to defend national sov-

ereignty, but without nationalist attachments. These apparent contradictory propo-

sitions are convoluted attempts to avoid the nationalist label and associations

with racism.16 Many Left intellectuals call for popular sovereignty and social soli-

darity, that I call nationalism

/

internationalism. For much of the Left today, posi-

tive nationalism dare not speak its name. Recently, there has been lots of rethink-

ing of nations and nationalisms, but little exploration of the anti-globalism poten-

tial of Left nationalisms, which involve attachments to and support for the sover-

eignty of one's political community. Since nationalisms get most of their content

through the associations they

keep.17 Left nationalisms are those that seek deep

democratic transformations in partnership with anti-colonial, socialist, feminist,

ecological and anti-racist movements. Primarily they work at the level of the nation,

the state and through international ties with similar movements abroad.18

Dual Enem ies Democracy and Nationalism

The shift in power away from nations is not inevitable. The U.S. has worked

for this end. At a Western Hemisphere conference in 1945, Noam Chomsky noted

that the U.S. was deeply concerned with the philosophy of the new nationalism

that was over spreading Latin America and the world. That philosophy, according

to U.S. internal records, now available, aimed to bring about a wider distribution of

wealth and raise the living standards of the masses. Radical or economic nation-

alism operated on the heretical principle that the first beneficiaries of a country's

resources are the people of that country rather than U.S. and other foreign investors,

and locally allied elites. The U.S. view prevailed and the conference called for an

end to economic nationalism in all its forms. Chomsky concludes that in the cruel

and bloody half century since, these remain central themes.19

Similar concerns reappeared in the early 1970s. After emancipation from colo-

nial rule, national liberation movements confronted the neo-imperialism of multi-

national corporations. Citizens were mobilized by appeals to democracy and

nationalisms, couched in anti-Western or anti-American discourses. In Canada, the

Waffle movement for an Independent Socialist Canada, the Committee for an

Independent Canada and the New Democratic Party, urged the takeover of foreign-

owned oil and potash companies and campaigned against corporate welfare

bums. Similar campaigns elsewhere resulted in 336 takeovers of transnationals

during the first half of the 1970s.20 Thus, transnationals have been de-globalised in

the past. Who's to say it won't happen again.

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Issues and Debates/Enjeux e t de bats

Alarmed at the wave of de-globalizing the transnationals, corporate leaders

and bankers counterattacked, founding New Right organizations, such as the

Trilateral Commission. Set up in 1973 by David Rockefeller, head of Citibank,

Zbigniew Brezinski and others to create ruling class partnerships in North America,

Western Europe and Japan,21 Trilateralists decried an excess of democracy in

which the democratic spirit is egalitarian, individualistic, populist and impatient

with the distinctions of class and rank. *2 Nationalism was the other target.

Rockefeller called for a massive public relations campaign to explain the neces-

sity for the withering of the nation-state. Recent talk about the borderless

world , the end of nations and nationalisms7', and the inevitability of globaliza-

tion , shows the effects of these campaigns even on the Left.

The Indian theorist, Aijaz Ahmad,23 notes that the prominent nationalisms of

the past

25

years have been narrowly ethnic, often racist and vicious, leading the

Left to dismiss nationalisms as irrational, masculinist, Western and reactionary.

This contrasts with the 1950 to 1975 period, when national liberation was seen as

essential in breaking from colonial and neo-colonial rule and in making socialist

societies. Ironically, left critiques of nationalisms as reactionary fit closely with

New Right discourses which deified Adam Smith's anti-nationalist critique of mer-

cantilism. Free trade was directed precisely against [the] concept of national eco-

nomic development , writes Hobsbawm.Z4 Economic theory was based on the indi-

vidual enterprise and world market and there was no place for the nation, or any

collectivity larger than the firm. Observers, therefore, tend to view ethno-cultural

nationalisms negatively and civic nationalisms positively. But nationalisms cannot

be neatly evaluated as civic good, ethnic bad. Every nationalism is unique, con-

tinually evolving and gets its content by association with other movements.

I

view

as positive, nationalisms that come closest to inclusiveness, embracing deep diver-

sity, being substantively democratic, refraining from expansionism and supporting

inter-nationalism.25

Nationalisms in anada and France and the Defeat of the MA

A key element to defeating the MAI, were alliances between citizens groups

in North and South (Goodman, 2000 . Martin Khor, head of the Third World

Network, which has ties to governments in the South, first told Northern activists,

including Tony Clarke, about the coming of the MAI. International opposition to

the MA1 first coalesced in Paris in October 1997 where NGOs were invited to meet

OECD negotiators in an attempt at cooptation. The attempt failed and NGO's took

a unanimous and uncompromising position. However, Tony Clarke, former head of

the anti-free trade group, the Pro-Canada Network and Lori Wallach, of Ralph

Nader's Public Citizen in the U.S., felt that to defeat the MAI, opposition could not

be based in transnational NGO's. For Clarke such groups had absolutely no rela-

tionship to an authentic constituency and are the ones that make compromises, such

as NAFTA's ineffective, side-bar deals on the environment. Working on behalf of

the International Forum on Globalization, based in San Francisco, Clarke's and

Wallach's strategy shifted to country campaigns, because citizens movements tend

No. 48,2001 45


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to self-organise most densely and effectively at national levels and in the end, gov-

ernments decide on international treaties. They care about domestic, not foreign

public opinion.

That the greatest opposition to the MA1 came from Canada and France, where

Left nationalism and cultural nationalisms are highly developed, is not surprising.

The nationalism that supports Canadian economic, cultural and political sovereign-

ty is associated with progressive internationalism. Its leading proponents, Maude

Barlow and Tony Clarke, took the initiative in defeating the MAI. Clarke found the

MAI's draft text, framed the issue as Corporate Rule , and released it to the world.

Barlow and Clarke wrote the first books on the MAI. After completing a Canadian

edition, subtitled threats to Canadian sovereignty7', hey wrote the only U.S. book.

Only in France, and perhaps Australia, was public consciousness of the MAI, at

anywhere near a comparable level. The CBC sent two television crews to cover

Maude Barlow and MA1 opponents' meetings in Paris in October 1997. No other

country sent television crews to cover them. Elizabeth Smythe and Jay Smith exam-

ined the

4

web sites focussing on the MA1 in English, French, German and

Spanish. The OECD had the highest number of links. The next four were

Canadian.26 Six of the top 12 were Canadian, all in opposition.

Clarke attributes the greater resonance of the MA1 in Canada to the fact that

we are still the first country to have gone through a comprehensive free trade

agreement with the U.S. and the first country to be exposed to the investor-state

mechanism in chapter 11 of NAFTA . In France, opponents of the MA1 formed a

coalition of

70

associations. Opposition came largely separately from the cultural

community, including its Minister of Culture, environmentalists, the Communists,

junior partners to the Socialist government. The sum of oppositions built to the

point where France pulled out of the MA1 talks in October 1998. Strongest resist-

ance came from the cultural community, which, as in Canada, has long fought

against Americanization. The emcee of the Cesar's, France's academy awards, read

a statement to millions of television viewers condemning the MAI, to prolonged

applause.27

onclusion

It is no accident that Tony Clarke and Maude Barlow alerted the world to the

dangers of the MAI. Their embeddedness in positive nationalist circles enabled

them to be effective internationally. There is no contradiction. Positive nationalism

and internationalism were complementary. It is unlikely that one-worlder cos-

mopolitans would have led an anti-MA1 struggle against the loss of national sover-

eignties. In most cases, popular sovereignty coincides with national and sub-nation-

a1 sovereignties. Citizens' movements are primarily nationally, regionally and local-

ly rooted and bring their own wisdom to the international community by virtue of

their roots in communities of place. Instead of globalisation from above to uphold

corporate rights, we need, not globalisation from below, but positive nationalisms

and genuine internationalism and transnationalism from below. The global market

is the arena for transnational corporations, business professionals and the rich,

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Issues and ebatedEnieux et dkbats

where p owe r is based on unequal command o f property. The p oli t ica l arena for

most wage-earners and peasants are countries and regions where aspirations for

democracy and equa lity are widely-held, if no t always practised. fmo st peop le are

imm ob ile and do not want to cross borders to f in d work, the sovereignty o f their

polit ical communities is fundamental. Imagine the alternative: vast international

m obi l i ty; w orkers roaming the w or ld

in

search o f w ork and aggregations o f t ran-

sients w it h no comm on collective mem ory and l i t t le ab il i ty to communicate. S uch

conditions exist inma ny Persian G u lf States and are ide al for ma nipulation and dic-

tatorship. As M il a n Kun dera said The struggle o f m an against pow er is the strug-

gle o f mem ory versus forgetting.'Q8 Col lect ive m emo ry is b ui l t s low ly in demo-

cratic struggles, largely at national and loc al levels. Instead o f globalisation fro m

below, we need to de-globalise transnational corporations and bu il d peop le to peo-

ple international solidari ties. ant to end w ith Na om i Klein's formulat ion wh ich

is very dif ferent than

think

globally, act loca lly'. I t s 'defend the local, national-

ly'.

otes

1. Marlow, Maude (1998), The Fight of my life, Toronto, Harpe r Collins.

2. Nelson, Jeremy (1998), Toppling the MAI , Canadian Dimension, MarIApr,

32,2.

3. Chomsky, Noam (1998), 'Power in the Global Arena , New Left Review,

Summer Amiel Lecture, London, 28.

4.This paper is a sum ma ry of Gordon Laxer (2001), Surviving the

Americanizing New Right , Canadian R eview of Sociology and Anthropology,

37, l , February and Josee Johnston and G ordon Laxer (2001), Solidarity in the

Age of Globalisation: Lessons from the anti-MA1 and Zapatista Struggles,

Manuscript.

5. Korten, David (1995), When Corporations Rule the World, West Hartford,

Kumerian Press, 59.

6. Clarke, Tony (1997), Silent Coup: Confronting the Big Business Takeover of

Canada, Toronto, Canadian C entre for P olicy Alternatives, Lorimer.

7. RMALC , the Mexican network against trade liberalization was formed in 1990

after a visit of C anadian an ti-FTA activists.

8. Held, David (1995), Democracy and the Global Order, Stanford, Stanford

University Press.

9. Calhoun, Craig (1997), Nationalism, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota

Press.

10. Williamson, John (1993), In Search of a Manual for Technopols , in John

Williamson, ed., The Political Economy of Policy Reform, Washington, Institute

for Econom ic Research.

11. Kissinger, Henry

(1999), Globalisation and World Order, Lecture to Trinity

College, Dublin October 29. Posted on the web by O .C. Obaro, October 30.

12. Summers, Lawrence

(1996), America's Role in Global Econom ic Integration,

Talk to the Brookings Conference on Integrating National Economies: the Next

No. 48 2001 247


8/9

Step, January 9.

13. Draffan, George (2000), The Corporate Consensus, A Guide to the

Institutions of Global Power, Fossil, Oregon: Blue Mountains Biodiversity

Project, 34.

14. In Paris in October 1997, Elizabeth May, head of the S ierra Club of Canada,

said we must mount a tremendous campaign to defend the sovereignty of the

nation-state. France, Report on the Multilateral Agreem ent on Investment

(MAI) Interim Report September 1998 , Ministry of Economy , Finance and

Industry. Authored by Catherine Lalumiere (MEP), Jean-Pierre Landau,

Emmanuel

Glimet. This version was posted in English on the Council of

Canadians' website.

15. Hawken, Paul (2000), The WTO: Inside Outside, All Around the World,

Published on the lnternet by Hawken, Natural Capital Institute, January 16, 10.

16. Mouffe, Chanta1(1992), Dem ocratic Politics Today , Dimensions of Radical

Dem ocracy, London, Verso, 11-12. For an entry into this debate, see July 1999

debate in The Monist, Vol. 82, No. 3.

17. Lloyd, David (1995), Nationalism Against the State: Towards a Critique of

the Anti-Nationalist Prejudice , in Timothy P. Foley et al, eds., Gender and

Colonisation, Galway, Galway Un iversity Press, 256-281.

18. Think globally, act locally is the overused slogan that crowds out Left nation-

alism. In another paper, I probe why many in the Left fail to defend the need for

strong citizen com mitmen t to the national polity and its sovereignty (Laxer, 2001,

The Movement that Dare not speak its name. The return of Left

nationalismlinternationalism , Alternatives, 26). The heart of the paper is an his-

torical analysis and critique of civic and ethno-cultural nationalisms and an eval-

uation of their positive and negative features. An historical section on English-

speaking Canada examines how, contrary to much European experience,

racism and recent Canadian nationalisms have been opposing tendencies.

19. Chomsky, Noam (1998), Power in the Global Arena, New Left Review,

Summer, Amiel Lecture, London, 28; Chomsky, Noam (1999), Profit Over

People, New York, Seven Stories Press.

20. Stopford, J.M., Susan Strange and John S. Henley (1991), Rival States,

Rival Firms, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 21.

21. Sklair, H. (1980), Trilateralism: The Trilateral Commission land Elite

Planning for World Managem ent, Mon treal, Black Ro se, 2.

22. Crozier, M. et al (1975), The Crisis of Democracy, New York, New York

University Press, 162.

23. Ahmed, Aijaz (1998), Nationalism. Between History and Ideology, Lecture,

University of Alberta, M arch 13 .

24. Hobsbawm, E.J. (1990), Nations and Nationalism Since 1870, Cambridge,

Cambridge University Press, 26.

25. evaluate nationalisms by the following criteria: First, how inclusive are

the y? All states restrict who can enter and who has full rights, but there are great

variations. How open are they to in-m igration and how colour blind are they? Do

nations base membership citizenship on presumed descent or long-term resi-

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Issues and Debates Enieux et dkbats

dency? Second, how much respect is there, in law and in practice, for deep

diversity ? Are unity and conformity compulsory and in which areas of social-

political life? Are they nation-states or multi-nation states? What collective rights

and recognition do minority nations have? Do they have the right to secede?

Third, how deeply democratic are they? Fourth, are they expansionist, sover-

eignty seeking or neither? Fifth, are they inward-looking or inter-nationalist?

Amongst those invited were the World Wide Fund for Nature, Friends of the

Earth and Consumers International. Interview with Maude Barlow, Ottawa, Aug

4, 1999.

26. Smythe, Elizabeth and Jay Smith (1990), Globalization, Citizenship and

Technology, The MA1 meets the Internet , Canadian Foreign Policy, 7.2.

Interview, Clarke, Ottawa, Aug. 4 1999. Collectif Franqais contre Les Clones De

L'Ami, Accord Des Citoyens et Des Peuples Sur Les lnvestissements et les

Richesses , sixieme version, 1999, p. 23. From the Home Page of Susan

George.

27. Barlow, Maude (1998), The Fight of my life, Toronto, Harper Collins, 219. In

1990, foreign workers were 70% of the labour force in Saudia Arabia, United

Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and Bahrain. Many left before the 1990

Gulf War.

28. Kundera, M. (1986), The Book of Laugher and Forgetting, Translated by

M.H.Heim, Markham, Ontario, Penguin.

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internationalisation of canadian economic and

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