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"MAINTAINING NATIONAL UNITY
IN A PLURINATIONAL CONTEXT"
NOTES FOR AN ADDRESS AT
THE LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS
LONDON, U.K.
MAY 19, 1998
Indira Gandhi, who knew what she was talking about as a leader of a country made
up of 3 principal ethnic groups, 6 major religions and 24 major linguistic
groups, saw Canada as proof that "diversity not only enriches but can be a
strength". I hope that Canada will indeed prove equal to that ideal of
tolerance and respect for diversity. I think that a school that has received
students from throughout the world and from all walks of life, from John F.
Kennedy to Mick Jagger, must be the right place to talk about diversity! A
school that has had faculty such as Harold Laski and Friedrich Hayek must have a
pretty good idea of what pluralism means! And a school that has helped mould
both the champion of Canadian unity and former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre
Elliott Trudeau, and the historic separatist and former Quebec Premier, Jacques
Parizeau, must have something intrinsically Canadian about it!
And so, I am going to talk to you about Canadian
unity. At the invitation of Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, I entered his Cabinet
on January 25, 1996, without any direct political experience, but driven by my
convictions on Canadian unity. The Prime Minister appointed me Minister of
Intergovernmental Affairs. In that role, I have the mandate of advising the
Government on all matters pertaining to the functioning, improvement and
maintenance of the Canadian federation.
So, 1) why Canadian unity? and 2) how to
guarantee it? These are my two topics today. I think they will reveal the
reasons why I am very confident in the unity of my country.
1. Why Canadian unity?
Canada is a country that Indira Gandhi and many
others have seen as a model of openness and tolerance, and which is admired for
its ability to bring different peoples together, yet it is the only
well-established democracy that has faced the threat of secession for some 30
years now.
It is easy to imagine the reaction throughout the
world if Canada were to break up. It would be said that this defunct federation
had died from an overdose of decentralization and tolerance -- in short, from an
overdose of democracy. "Don't be as tolerant, decentralized and open as
Canada was, or else your minorities will turn against you, threaten the unity of
your country, and even destroy it." That's what would be said.
This is what was heard from some of the
"NO" supporters in your recent referenda: "Don't give Scotland
and Wales their own parliaments, or else you'll create ‘Quebecs' within
Britain."
And in the U.S. Congress, which recently
considered offering statehood to Puerto Rico, we heard some representatives
oppose the idea of creating a "Quebec" within the United States.
I entered politics precisely because I want to
hear the opposite point of view. I want countries throughout the world to say:
"We can have confidence in our minorities, and allow them to develop in
their own way, because they will make our country stronger, just as Quebec makes
Canada stronger."
Canadians are modest folk, who have no idea how
much the debate on the unity of their country is universal in scope. If a
country so blessed as Canada fails to stay together, Canadians will have sent a
most unfortunate message to the rest of the world at the dawn of the new
century.
Indeed, Canadians are now debating what could be
the most important question of the next century: how to enable different
populations to live together within the same country. And while it is true that
Canadians are talking about it calmly and peacefully, we have seen elsewhere
that things often go very much awry.
Since the end of the Cold War, the number of
conflicts within states has greatly exceeded the number of conflicts between
states, according to a commission of the Carnegie Corporation, which has
identified 233 ethnic or religious minorities that are calling for improvements
to their legal and political rights.
According to Professor Daniel Elazar of Temple
University in Philadelphia, there are some 3,000 human groups in the world who
are conscious of a collective identity. And yet, there are not even 200 states
in the UN. To each people its own state is an impractical idea that would make
the planet explode. As former United Nations Secretary-General Boutros
Boutros-Ghali has said: "Yet if every ethnic, religious or linguistic group
claimed statehood, there would be no limit to fragmentation, and peace, security
and economic well-being for all would become ever more difficult to
achieve."
Separating peoples is not only impractical, but
is often a moral error. I feel it is very difficult to justify secession within
a democracy. Democracy calls on us to show solidarity to all our fellow
citizens, while secession obliges us to pick and choose, keeping some, rejecting
others, according to criteria that will inevitably be ethnic, religious or
linguistic.
Democracy, on the other hand, invites us to help
our fellow citizens who are different from us, and to accept their help, and to
see our sometimes difficult cohabitation as a process of learning a more
complete citizenship that is closer to universal values.
It is a recognized fact that no wealthier regions
of a democratic state have been known to reject their poorer regions. The
separatists in Northern Italy are wasting their time. Unless I am completely
mistaken, they will never succeed in breaking the solidarity that unites the
Italians.
The same must hold true for fellow citizens who
don't speak the same language or don't have the same cultural references. The
compelling idea that should convince them to stay together is that of plural
identities. I have the good fortune to be a Quebecer, and I am proud and
happy to be a Canadian at the same time. I know that someone from Calgary or
Vancouver will be quite different from me in cultural terms and is very unlikely
to speak my language. And yet, I also know that our life in common is a learning
process in citizenship, which is sometimes difficult, but which is the true
greatness of Canada.
And now let me tell you why I am confident about
the unity of my country. It is because poll after poll confirms very clearly
that Quebecers also feel Canadian. Only 20% to 25% no longer recognize that they
have a Canadian identity. I'll admit that if the numbers were reversed, if
between 75% and 80% of Quebecers no longer wanted to be Canadian, I'd be
worried.
And so we must promote plural identities. Let
every Quebecer be able to say: "I am a Quebecer and a Canadian, and I
refuse to choose between the two".
2. How to guarantee Canadian unity
To maintain national unity in a pluri-national
context, there are two false solutions that I feel are doomed to failure,
certainly in Canada: assimilation and forced inclusion. I believe the solution
lies instead in maintaining the balance between the primacy of individual rights
and recognition of collective realities, between integration and autonomy.
Assimilation was actively sought by liberal
thinkers in the 19th century everywhere in the Western world, including by means
of one-size-fits-all public education. They saw it as a precondition for
equality of opportunity among individuals. Lord Durham, the governor sent to
Lower Canada by the British Crown after the rebellions of 1837-1838, who
advocated the rapid assimilation of French-Canadians as a solution, was a
progressive in Britain, and a supporter of public education, voting rights, and
land reform for small farmers, so much so that he was given the nickname
"Radical Jack". He believed that it was all very well to be French if
one lived in France, but that the French-Canadians, in an Anglo-Saxon context,
would be unfairly penalized, stymied in their development, if they were not
assimilated.
Assimilation has existed and still exists in
Canada today, but on the whole, it has failed. Francophones and Anglophones
learned first to tolerate each other, then to better respect each other, and
then to help each other, and that difficult learning process, although it has
had its dark moments, made them better disposed to welcome new citizens from
throughout the world.
Now let's look at forced inclusion, that is,
prohibiting secession. A number of democratic states prohibit secession in their
constitutions, explicitly or implicitly. They believe that every portion of the
national territory belongs to all the citizens of the country, which is thus
indivisible.
This principle is defensible, but one needs to
ask nevertheless whether a democratic state can keep against its will a
population that is concentrated in one part of its territory and that very
clearly wants to leave.
In Canada, we believe that our country would no
longer be what it is if it were not based on a voluntary decision by all of its
component groups to remain Canadian. None of the political forces in Canada want
Quebecers to be held in Canada if it is against their clearly expressed will.
The Government of Canada believes, however, that it has a duty to ensure that
secession does not occur without the assurance that this is very clearly what
the population wants. The Government of Canada has asked the Supreme Court to
specify whether the separatist government now in power in Quebec has the right
to effect independence unilaterally. The Government of Canada believes that this
claim by the Government of Quebec has no legal foundation, and certainly no
moral foundation.
Another false solution, in my opinion, is what I
would call "internal separatism", which consists of giving separatists
everything they want inside the country, hoping that they will lose interest in
separating. For Canada, a federation that is already very decentralized, this
would mean gradually handing over almost all public responsibilities to the
Government of Quebec. It is hoped that the vast majority of Quebecers would thus
be satisfied with such broad autonomy, and the separatist hardliners would be
marginalized.
I believe it would be mistaken to follow such a
strategy. Every new concession made to appease the separatists would lead
Quebecers to withdraw ever further into their territory, to define themselves by
an exclusive "us", to see other Canadians increasingly only from afar,
and to reject the Canadian government, common Canadian institutions, as a threat
to their nation, a foreign body. This is not the right way to promote plural
identities.
Moreover, every concession made to one province
would spark jealousy in the other provinces, which would call for the same
powers in turn, leading in fact to a sort of balkanization. And yet if the
federal government refused to grant the other provinces the same powers as
Quebec, it might give rise to a powerful backlash.
"Internal separatism" is a strategy
that is doomed to failure; it cannot make a country work in unity. To be sure, a
human group concentrated in a territory which is conscious of a collective
identity, as a people or a nation, must have an autonomy, institutions in which
it can recognize itself. But at the same time, if the concept of plural
identities is to have any meaning, those citizens must also feel that they are
members of the country as a whole. They must feel solidarity with their fellow
citizens, in complementarity with them. They must play their role in common
institutions. They must be invited to see life in society other than through the
single grid of their nationalism.
For a while in Canada, we lost that balance to be
maintained between autonomy within a country, on the one hand, and solidarity
throughout the country, on the other. And we lost it in connection with what is
perhaps the most sensitive issue in this whole situation: the issue of identity.
Following various rounds of constitutional discussions, a proposal was put
forward to recognize Quebec as a distinct society within the Canadian
Constitution. That proposal failed to be ratified in June 1990, with a
substantial proportion of Anglophone Canadians seeing it as a source of
privilege that would give Quebecers the upper hand in the federation.
But many Quebecers saw that constitutional
failure as a rejection of their identity and their culture. The independence
option then took an unprecedented upturn. The Quebec leaders in favour of
Canadian unity wanted to counter that separatist upswing by demanding of the
rest of the country a massive transfer of powers from the federal government to
the Government of Quebec. That transfer was not forthcoming, making many
Quebecers frustrated and disappointed as they went to vote in the referendum on
October 30, 1995. Almost half (49.4%) voted YES to Quebec sovereignty, albeit on
an ambiguous question, with the separatist vote artificially inflated by a
protest vote. In fact, the polls showed that many YES voters hoped that their
vote would improve Quebec's place within Canada.
Today, two and a half years later, the polls show
that, even with the same ambiguous question of October 30, 1995, support for
secession hovers around 40% in Quebec. Secessionnists would get even less
support with a clear question on separation. Two thirds of Quebecers say they do
not want another referendum. The Liberal parties, which support Canadian unity,
are leading the separatist parties in the polls, both federally and
provincially.
Of course, polls are polls are polls, and
variations can be linked to specific current events, such as the fluctuating
popularity of leaders. Nevertheless, I believe that a fundamental change has
been gradually taking place over the past two years. We have returned to a
better balance between Quebecers' need for autonomy and their desire to feel
that they are an integral part of Canada.
Canada is doing better economically, and that
recovery has been spearheaded by Quebecers: Prime Minister Jean Chrétien,
Finance Minister Paul Martin, and Treasury Board President Marcel Massé.
Natural disasters in Quebec and Manitoba have led Canadians to demonstrate their
powerful solidarity with one another. Improvements have been made to the way the
federation works, not to please separatist leaders but to improve the capacity
of the governments of Canada and of the provinces to work together within their
respective jurisdictions. The other provinces have adopted a declaration
recognizing Quebec's unique character and the equality of status of the
provinces; while this declaration is not a legal text, it is seen nonetheless as
a positive step toward reconciliation.
At the same time, a debate has been initiated on
what secession would mean, how it would be effected, and what consequences it
would have on relations between Quebecers. For too long, secession has been
described as a negotiation between two monolithic blocs: Quebec and Canada. It
is now increasingly seen as a source of division between Quebecers, where
Quebecers who no longer wanted Canada would try to take it away from those who
wanted to keep it. More and more, Quebecers are aware that this would be a
difficult process.
Conclusion
Often, authoritarian regimes only put a lid on
ethnic hatreds. Once the authority disappears, the conflicts resurge as if they
had never stopped. It may be, conversely, that a democracy cannot survive over
decades without forging genuine ties between its populations. Those ties should
be able to hold plural identities together.
The German philosopher Herder wrote that
"the most natural state is one nationality with one character." I
don't know what a natural state is, but I know that a country gains in humanity
when it draws on the best of what the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, a
Quebecer, calls "deep diversity".
Of course the Quebec people exists. So does the
Canadian people. The vast majority of Quebecers have the good fortune to feel
that they are members of both peoples at the same time. It would be a grave
error for them to see that dual allegiance as a source of tension, an anomaly, a
contradiction to be resolved.
In Canada, we often talk about the "two
solitudes" to describe the difficulties between Francophones and
Anglophones. We have forgotten that this expression is taken from a letter by
Rilke, who was trying to express love, rather than isolation. "Love
consists in this, that two solitudes protect, and touch, and greet each
other," wrote the poet, expressing this dual quest for autonomy and
sharing, for defining oneself and opening up to others, which is necessary both
for relations between persons and relations between populations.
In fact, in this global world, where populations
are increasingly intermingled, the capacity to interiorize different cultural
values, the opportunity to rely on fellow citizens who complement us in their
own way, the marriage of autonomy and solidarity, will more than ever be a
strength. When you are fortunate enough to have more than one identity, you keep
them all.
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