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I sent Ray's meditative piece on Don Lee Anderson out to a number of
friends. In return, Ewart Walters, the editor of a small but excellent
Ottawa newspaper, "the Spectrum", sent me one of his forthcoming
editorials.
Ed Weick
Sound and principled
When the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989 to mark the end of the Union of
Soviet Socialist
Republics as the (counter-balancing) second super-power,
the world looked forward to enjoying
what our southern neighbours said was
the “peace dividend”. Remember? The billions that were
being spent on arms
and defence would now be made available for aiding needy countries and
their
people, and for other peaceful purposes. Prosperity would bloom. Remember?
Now, with only the one remaining super-power seeking more and more billions
to spend on war,
the peace dividend is as dead as the international law
Strategic Arms Limitation Treaties (SALT)
George W. Bush last year decided
were outdated. What is more, instead of seeing even millions of
dollars in
aid being sent to poor countries, we began hearing instead about “Failed
States.”
“Failed States”, like the earlier US term “the underclass” which replaced
“the lower class” and -
therefore admits no possible progress to a middle
class - is a final diagnosis and sentence that
locks up people after three
convictions, regardless; that says, time is up, there is no use trying to
help these countries any more.
The term “Failed States” does not merely seek to include “rogue states” who
would imperil their
citizens, their neighbours and the world with weapons of
mass destruction or international
terrorism. No. “Failed States” also
includes any country whose economy is weak or which does
not operate exactly
as some (external) people want it to.
The questions are many. Who determines this? Which one country has the
authority to make
these decisions about others? And from whom does it get
this authority? Does this not smell very
much like somebody saying “we are
the master race”? (And the rest of you are from failed races?)
Isn’t this exactly why we have gathered together as individual nations under
the umbrella of
multilateralism in something that is not a superpower, but
rather a genuine super-authority? Isn’t
this why our own individual
sovereignties have come together, in an international coalition of the
willing, to give up a little of their sovereignties - without threat or
bribe - to establish ourselves as
the United Nations as the custodian of our
fears and our aspirations for peace? Isn’t our
establishment of this
super-authority our own sovereign expression of the rule of law?
Because it is of humans, the United Nations has weaknesses. But surely, those
weaknesses are not
beyond our ability to repair. It is at our peril that we
seek to abandon the protection of
multilateralism. There may be danger grave
enough to cause us to take temporary leave of this
protection, but, in our
current world crisis, we have not yet arrived at that point.
In the circumstances Canada’s decision to maintain the principle of
supporting the super-authority
is sound and principled - never mind the
howling noises to the contrary.
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