Tony Blair’s legacy is a redefinition of what it means to be of the left

In the May 6 British general election, David Cameron’s Tories took 306 seats – 48 more than Labour, which had been in power for more than a decade, but 20 short of an outright majority. For five days, both Labour and the Tories courted the third-place Liberal Democrats in the hope of assembling a parliamentary majority. The prospect of Labour staying in office via a “coalition of losers” was not a popular option – even among many Labour MPs. After five days, the Tories and Lib Dems crafted a formal coalition. Gordon Brown resigned, both as Prime Minister and as Labour leader; he announced his intention to leave Parliament. This marks the end of a political movement that began in 1983. That year, in an election that resulted in a disastrous loss for Labour, among the new MPs in the Labour caucus were Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Over the next decade and a half they overturned traditional Labour Party policies, and from 1997 to 2010 they governed Britain. Now is a good time to assess the successes and failures of their “New Labour” project.

A good place to begin this assessment is with two books by Anthony Seldon, a school headmaster and a prolific writer of “contemporary history”: books about currents in modern British politics. He has written about Margaret Thatcher and two massive tomes on Tony Blair, Blair (2004) and Blair Unbound (2007). Seldon’s exercises in “contemporary history” entail interviews with a vast number of players; this produces a great deal of chaff that other historians will in time blow away. His books are, for the moment, the best accounts available of Blair’s political career and influence. Blair is a controversial political figure, nowhere more so than on the intellectual left – in Canada as in Britain – where he is often damned as a usurper who manipulated the Labour Party into an embrace of Thatcher’s libertarian economic ideas and George W. Bush’s messianic imperial overreach.

In his review of Blair Unbound for the London Times, Simon Jenkins concluded that “Seldon does not place Blair in any political or historical tradition.” Jenkins, a prominent British journalist, succinctly stated the conventional left-wing dismissal:

Blair’s heart was always in Washington and his head in the clouds … The truth is that Blair was good at being Blair, but not prime minister. He never mastered the art of government. The list of his achievements (Ulster, tax credits, a minimum wage) is meagre compared with what he left undone, notably in Europe, Iraq and Afghanistan and in his incoherent upheavals of the health, education, police and local government services.¹

Blair made profound mistakes, an excessive faith in U.S. military competence to wage war in Iraq being the most dramatic. A more nuanced review of Seldon’s book, and of Blair, came from the Daily Telegraph’s reviewer:

Seldon doesn’t spare on Iraq, nor on foreign policy in general. He is more grudging on Ireland than he is understanding on Iraq, but he does realise that, here more than anywhere, judgment must be reserved … Seldon also understands that the second term was when Blair really found a method for reform of the public sector. It was when the spending restrictions were lifted that he found the policy to meet his instinct that extra money alone was not enough … The third term was, in many ways, the most fruitful: school reform, the NHS into surplus, pensions reform, energy, Northern Ireland … Looked at by a historian, rather than a participant with a column, Blair gets a good report.²

Whether the Telegraph’s reviewer had Jenkins in mind as the “participant with a column,” I have no idea. But Seldon’s books are important. They oblige an honest reader to recognize the substance of Blair’s effort to renew the “old” social democratic discourse that, by the time of Thatcher’s election in 1979, had become a set of ideological blinkers rendering the left in Britain a menace, unfit to govern. Better than anyone else, Blair understood that until the left addressed that which was legitimate in Thatcherism, it deserved to be out of office.

While parties rise and fall, the ideas that underlie them persist. No one disputes the influence of Pierre Trudeau’s constitutional ideas on Canada, regardless whether one agrees with them. In terms of ideas, the New Labour project represented the most successful and controversial social democratic movement in the Western world since the 1970s. It deserves inspection.

Blair through a Canadian lens

An interesting Canadian parallel is with J.S. Woodsworth, first leader of Canada’s Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (predecessor of the New Democratic Party), and one of many who claimed that socialism was “Christianity in practice.” In many ways Tony Blair differs from Woodsworth: Woodsworth never came near to governing while Blair was Prime Minister for ten years; Woodsworth was a pacifist – he even opposed Canadian participation in World War II – whereas Blair was among the most eloquent advocates of war in Iraq. But the two are similar inasmuch as both are deeply religious leaders. We know that Woodsworth bequeathed his legacy to Tommy Douglas. What is Blair’s legacy? What lessons can be drawn from his successes and failures for Canadian social democrats?

There are also parallels between Blair’s marriage of convenience with his Chancellor, rival and ultimate successor, Gordon Brown, and Jean Chrétien’s similar partnership with Paul Martin. First the positive. Even more than Martin under Chrétien, Brown’s fiscal priorities prevailed from Labour’s first victory in 1997 until the end. Martin’s tough budgets in the mid-1990s enabled Canada to end two decades of deficit spending, and to undertake recent fiscal stimulus without undue financial jitters. Brown’s determined opposition to Blair, who wanted Britain to join the euro, was right. Not being in the euro-zone, Britain is not adding to its fiscal woes by lending to Greece and potentially to other fragile euro-zone economies. Brown insisted on big spending increases in health and education, as did Martin once the deficit had been conquered. In retrospect, Brown placed too much faith on stable economic growth and loosely regulated financial markets. The post-2008 recession has hit Britain hard; it now has one of the largest defict/GDP ratios among OECD member countries. Brown spent too much, but spending increases were required to rectify Thatcher’s stinginess with respect to health and education budgets.

The negatives in the two political marriages are obvious. As a campaigner, leader and Prime Minister, Brown was to Blair as Martin was to Chrétien. But just as New Labour’s 1997 election did not mean repudiation of Margaret Thatcher’s moves to constrain trade unions and liberalize the economy, just as the election of Stephen Harper’s Conservatives did not mean Canadians had turned against the social liberalism practised by the Liberals, it would be wrong to view the rejection of Gordon Brown as a repudiation of New Labour.

Discussions around Blair and his legacy are coloured in Canada by our obsession with the United States and the deeply conservative nature of the Canadian left. Blair’s unyielding support for the American-led invasion of Iraq confirmed for the Canadian left that Blair was a usurper. It has ignored everything that Blair and Brown did to modernize the British welfare state.

Formerly close links between the British and Canadian left have atrophied, in part because the Canadian left never experienced an equivalent to the collapse of Labour self-confidence that occurred following the 1983 electoral debacle. Labour campaignd that year on an uncompromising left-wing platform, summarized as the “world’s longest sucide note.” The collapse of NDP support in the 1993 election might have produced an equivalent rethinking of left-wing orthodoxy, but it didn’t. In the 1990s many on the centre-left – Bob Rae the most prominent – simply abandoned the NDP and turned to the Liberals. The Liberals were happy to align with Blair’s ill-defined “Third Way,” a strategy that tried to combine the efficiency of the market with the social solidarity of social democracy, but most of this was opportunism, not ideology. If we leave aside the short-lived “green shift” led by Stéphane Dion, the Canadian Liberals have retreated to a postideological bunker: policies are a distraction from day-to-day partisan jousting.

With Jack Layton’s focus on organization and communications, the federal NDP learned the basics of New Labour’s modernization of electoral tactics. But the NDP has demonstrated no interest in the big ideas that obsess Blair – and major Canadian politicians from Woodsworth to Douglas to Trudeau. While Blair wanted to transform society, the NDP has carved out a niche as a parliamentary watchdog, fighting for lower credit card fees and parliamentary openness. There is no longer anything about the NDP that defines it as radical, other than its heritage and self-image.

Blair’s rise to power

Whether Blair and his New Labour project were or are left-wing is up for debate, but they were unquestionably radical. New Labour ideas dominated British political life for more than a decade. Building on its traditional commitment to well-funded public health and social programs, New Labour came to be trusted on crime and, finally, on tax and fiscal policy. The Conservatives were crushed in 1997 and again in 2001, and in 2005 Labour won an unprecedented third majority.

The party’s first term in office was marked by fiscal prudence, as Labour had to prove that intense and enduring public fears about its tax-and-spend tradition were unfounded. It is easy to downplay those concerns now, but Labour’s previous periods in office, and its “longest suicide note” campaign against Thatcher’s early reforms, had scarred the party’s reputation among the majority. An American pollster, astonished by the visceral dislike of many voters for Labour in the early 1990s, asked rhetorically, “What did you do, to make these people hate you so much?”³ In this context the prudence of 1997–2001 made sense. But it means that an understanding of Blair as Prime Minister, and a fuller exposition of his political beliefs, has to focus on his second and (incomplete) third term in office.

Blair rose to power in a divided Labour Party. First elected in 1983, Blair initially shared an office in the overcrowded Commons with David Nellist, an MP backed by the Trotskyist “Militant Tendency.” The Labour establishment, a coalition of trade unionists and middle-class intellectuals still smarting from their loss of government in 1979, was severely weakened by the 1982 defection of many moderate Labour supporters to found the Social Democratic Party, which soon joined in alliance and eventual union with the old Liberal Party.

At the time, Labour’s radical left was ascendant. Sectarian groups seized control of weakened Labour constituencies; they ran city governments – most notably Liverpool – with spectacular incompetence. Labour appeared to be in a death spiral, driving away moderate supporters and alienating millions of voters who preferred Thatcher’s Tories to incompetent Marxists. For the four million unemployed at the worst of the early 1980s recession, Labour militants offered the finer points of Lenin’s April Theses. The party’s extremism made it impotent, allowing Thatcher to reshape the political landscape.

The Labour establishment began to fight back with the election of Neil Kinnock to replace Michael Foot as leader following the 1983 rout. Kinnock began to reclaim the party, expelling the Militant Tendency after a full-frontal attack. He began to reshape the party’s organization, determined to avoid recent disasters that had seen multiple conflicting election campaigns waged by factions supposedly within the Labour fold.

The necessary price of victory over the ultra-left was an end to the cozy relationship between Labour and trade union leaders. Thatcher’s aggressive, and widely popular, anti-union legislation of the 1980s generated bitter strikes, the most dramatic being that of the coal miners, led by Arthur Scargill. Under Kinnock, Labour refused to serve as backup to leaders such as Scargill. Where decisions had been decided by former Labour prime ministers and union leaders over “beer and sandwiches” in Number 10, it was clear to Kinnock, himself elected with union support, that future Labour governments would have to maintain a critical distance from organized labour. Not surprisingly, for Labour leaders to define and accept such a critical distance took many years. Trade unions were not just related to Labour; the Trades Union Congress was Labour’s parent, creating the party through a resolution in 1900 – just as the Canadian Labour Congress united with the CCF to give birth to the NDP six decades later.

Ironically, Labour adopted many of the ultra-left demands for change in the party’s culture and procedures, and these changes contributed to the rise of Blair. Incumbent MPs now had to secure renomination by party members before each election; the party’s governing bodies opened to include more grassroots members; and space was made for women, young people and minority communities. Union influence was reduced: the “block vote” that allowed union leaders to cast several million votes at party conferences was curbed. This allowed a new generation of activists to feel welcome in the party. The party grew. In the 1987 election Labour outperformed Thatcher’s Conservatives, then at the peak of their power. But a slick campaign was not enough to conceal the fact that beneath the new logo – a stylized rose, combining an old socialist symbol with an English icon – the old policies of nationalization, unilateral nuclear disarmament and withdrawal from the European Union were still in place. Thatcher won; Kinnock lost.

Kinnock won his big battles with his party in open combat, a lesson Blair, moving up the ranks of the Shadow Cabinet in the late 1980s, learned well. Appeasement is the enemy of democracy, which relies on open conflict between clearly articulated positions. He was frustrated by the slow pace of change under Kinnock, and sensed that much more clarity about its policy changes was required before “middle England” would again trust Labour.

Here, around 1990, the paths of the NDP and Labour diverged. It is worth recalling that between Brian Mulroney’s initial victory in 1984 and the subsequent free trade election in 1988, the federal NDP was a major force in Canadian politics. Realistically, party leaders hoped to replace the Liberals as official opposition; some speculated about assuming power. As in Britain, union leaders overplayed their hand. Accusing Ed Broadbent of insufficient vigour in opposing Canada–United States free trade in the 1988 election, union leaders forced the party to the left, which led to an ignominious rout in the 1993 election. The party remained on the critical list for the next decade.

In 2003, Judy Rebick, Buzz Hargrove and Svend Robinson led the New Politics Initiative, a less potent equivalent of the Trotskyist Militants within Labour. The NPI advocated an incoherent mash of New Left social policies and economic protectionism. After dispatching the NPI, the NDP’s new leader, Jack Layton, did as Kinnock had, moving away from the unions. Layton championed fashionable left-wing reforms but, rather than collecting his commitment to bicycles, communities and recycling into a coherent whole, the party promoted boutique programs aimed at small constituencies, coupled with a pragmatic approach to working with other parties in Parliament. While this strategy has restored the party to levels of popular support obtained in the 1970s, it also represents the politics of low expectations. The party refused to bury old myths: NDP events continue to use the language of mid-20th-century trade union conventions. The red rhetoric clashes with the pale pink policies on offer.

The NDP has a base of old activists and new voters to maintain in uneasy balance; confronting either with its intellectual limits could lead to electoral oblivion. British Labour in the 1980s, the Canadian Tories in the 1990s and Ignatieff’s Liberals right now showed us that voters don’t take kindly to a party engaged in civil war. But a cautious approach that avoids all the major political tradeoffs is equally unlikely to yield electoral dividends. There were many moments in Blair’s leadership when his pushing the party towards the mainstream could have been rejected, notably his campaign to dump Clause IV in the party constitution. This was the clause stating that the party’s goal was to nationalize the economy. In 1995 he succeeded in replacing it with the reassuring communitarian statement that “We achieve more together than we can apart.”

In the 1992 election, John Major, Thatcher’s successor, defeated Neil Kinnock in a campaign that exploited the public fear of Labour tax increases. Kinnock promptly resigned and was replaced by the conciliatory John Smith, who galvanized Blair and the modernizers – although not Gordon Brown: Blair urged Brown to stand against Smith for the leadership, but Brown refused. In 1994, upon Smith’s premature death, Brown ceded his aspirations to Blair, who ran successfully to be leader.

Blair’s election as Labour leader was the first to be based on a partial “one member one vote” system that gave the party membership a large say. Blair’s personal biography was middle-class with aspirations; his parents worked hard to send him to private school, despite his father’s suffering a serious stroke and, a few years later, the death of his mother. He went on to Oxford, where he became first a Christian, then a socialist. He briefly practised law in London before being selected, at the last minute, for a safe Labour seat in the northeast for the 1983 election.

Blair’s connection to the Christian- or ethical-socialist tradition, which emphasizes community cooperation over state control, could have led to strong links with the Canadian social gospel tradition (had that tradition survived). Unlike Labour in Britain and Labor in Australia, both trade union parties, the CCF was at the outset a party in the Blairist mould: community-based, emphasizing financial restraint and voluntary cooperation in place of grand statist visions. The nationalizing rhetoric of the Regina Manifesto was a sop to the Marxian wing of the party, much as was Clause IV for most Labour leaders. However, transformation of the CCF into the NDP directed Canadian social democracy away from the ethical-socialist tradition and, as we have seen, the NDP has now comfortably settled into its niche, far removed from power.

Instead, Blair drew on Scottish and Australian philosophers, coupled with strong connections to party organizers who emphasized the electoral advantages to be gained. From the outset Blair hoped to reunite the Liberal and Labour traditions that had separated at the dawn of the 20th century. Long forgotten is that Blair’s natural pessimism as to Labour’s electoral chances led him to offer the Liberal Democrats a role in his first government, a promise ironically broken by Labour’s massive majority in the 1997 election. The victory denied Blair any tactical reason to persuade the Labour Party’s base to dilute its own control over the government.

Reform at home and trouble abroad

Seldon’s Blair Unbound takes Blair from his second general election victory in May 2001 through to his departure from Downing Street in June 2007. Seldon portrays a Prime Minister who grew steadily into his job, pushing ever more radical programs as the end of his career drew closer. Despite the distractions of Brown’s endless campaign for the party leadership, and the dissent caused by Blair’s support for the invasion of Iraq, the Blair of Unbound is not the poodle of Bush; above all he is a domestic reformer who pushes transformation in health care and education, who oversees a successful peace process in Northern Ireland and devolution for Scotland and Wales, who greatly expands protections from discrimination and who presides over the country’s longest period of economic growth.

Not all is positive. Under Blair came a mild but pervasive authoritarianism, a faith in government regulation and intervention in citizens’ everyday lives. This area of Blair’s leadership has been little examined. The sympathies of the old left, keen on regulation, and of the right, keen to be “tough on crime” and to revive the spirit of the Blitz through laws relating to the post-9/11 war on terror, coincided to downplay erosion of British liberties, including habeas corpus and the right to satirize religious beliefs. Blair’s communitarian instinct led him to empathize with middle-class abhorrence of what crime and lawlessness wreaked on poor communities and communal spaces. The result has been a massive increase in public and private surveillance. Britain set a benchmark for closed-circuit television sales that the Chinese did not match. “Anti-Social Behaviour Orders” attempted to contain bad behaviour, but at the cost of semicriminalizing behaviour that had been dealt with by community standards, the old-fashioned tools of public shame and ostracism. Blair the communitarian made the authoritarian mistake of thinking public morals could be changed through legislation, not education.

On the world scene Blair’s liberal internationalism received widespread recognition when applied with military force to Kosovo and Sierra Leone, and to leadership on debt relief to poor countries and aid to sub-Saharan Africa. This was a consistent theme, and no one should have been surprised by his decisions on Afghanistan and Iraq. Blair’s decision to join George Bush in the invasion of Iraq consumed much of the political oxygen in British and world politics between 2002 and 2007, and takes up much of Unbound.

The caricature of Blair as Bush’s lapdog is nonsense. Independent of the United States, Blair wanted to remove Saddam Hussein and he stated repeatedly that the only reason he didn’t pursue other dictators such as Robert Mugabe and the Burmese junta was that the geopolitical environment and Britain’s limited resources didn’t allow it.⁴ Blair insisted that Bush seek a second United Nations Security Council resolution to spell out conditions under which Saddam could prevent the invasion. France’s announcement that it would veto any resolution that included the threatened use of force ended the diplomatic track. Blair hoped that British support would moderate U.S. policy and influence conduct of the war. That proved naive. From 2003 to 2007, the United States attempted to prevail by brute military force. It required the internal U.S. army dissension associated with General David Petraeus to reorient U.S. military and diplomatic strategy.

The government’s obsession with “political spin,” the presentation of public information in a favourable manner, should not mask the fact that Blair was actually revealing information to the public. The so-called “Dodgy Dossier” included what turned out to be inaccurate intelligence information about Iraqi weapons systems. Few governments would have released such information in the first place, and likely few will in the future given the multi-year media flogging Blair and his entourage received for allegedly “sexing up” the intelligence. For many, especially on the left, it was easier to imagine that politicians were lying than to entertain the more worrying thesis that Saddam’s tyrannical regime was superbly efficient at misinforming the world, including Western intelligence agencies, as to its intentions.

Transforming the beloved but creaking National Health Service was a high priority of the Labour government. During the first and early second terms the focus was simple: a massive injection of cash. In a January 2000 interview Blair committed to increasing health spending from 5.7 per cent of GDP to the European average of 8.0 per cent.⁵ It became clear that money could not resolve structural and management defects, and Blair began an increasingly aggressive campaign to introduce private-sector incentives into the health system, based around the idea of foundation hospitals, state-supported but managed by nonprofit or private foundations, an innovation that had met with considerable success in Spain.

A similar approach was tried in education, where foundation schools or academies were introduced, cautiously and in the face of stiff teachers’ union opposition. The results spoke for themselves, and the program spread, coupled with a renewed focus on teacher training standards. Brown, who resisted many of Blair’s plans to introduce incentives into provision of public services, eventually became a convert to foundation schools.

Blair was an effective leader but he had little understanding of how large organizations worked and little interest in finding out. Brown was similarly handicapped. Blair often approached policymaking with blunt analytical tools. First, he would spend money. If that did not succeed, he would look for private-sector solutions. Significant reviews intended to make the bureaucracy more efficient within the context of ongoing exclusive public ownership and public supply were rare.

“Your problem is that neither you nor anyone in Number 10 has ever managed anything,” said a senior civil servant to Blair, in a comment that applied to most senior Labour politicians. An aide told Seldon that Blair “was very concerned that the 2001 election should give him a personal mandate for radical reform, but he was uncertain exactly what the radical reform should be,” and Seldon adds, “It took him time to realize that attending ‘third way’ jamborees, or announcing policy initiatives in speeches, did not automatically translate into hard policy.”⁶ This blind spot contributed to Blair’s tendency to move quickly toward private solutions, which worsened relations with public-sector workers who felt reforms threatened not just the way they worked, but survival of their jobs. In this conundrum Blair’s instinct was healthy inasmuch as the public service exists to provide the public with services, not public servants with jobs. But his lack of attention to public administration meant missed opportunities to engage with genuine reformers within government.

This failure to recognize the importance of organizational structures left the government prey to rapid policy reversals, often provoked by a Treasury keen to use the power of the purse to support the position of the Chancellor and his political allies instead of delivering on government promises. Seldon addresses this point repeatedly, but never draws the obvious conclusion that a failure of management requires a focus on management. He highlights the impact of personalities in Blair’s entourage – notably Peter Mandelson, the political organizer turned cabinet minister turned European Commissioner, Alastair Campbell, Number 10’s famously pugnacious communications director, and Anji Hunter, Blair’s assistant from the early days of his political career – and notes when each outlived his or her usefulness. He chronicles the rise of Andrew Adonis, the policy wizard who gave Blair’s later reforms their intellectual weight. Seldon’s conclusion: Blair was not a policy expert, but he could evaluate which policies would drive his agenda forward.

Large questions, incomplete answers

The 2008–09 recession slammed Britain and shredded Labour’s policies. The damage was made more severe because Blair and Brown’s liberalizing policies had dismantled the harbour wall of regulation that surrounded the finance and banking sector, making the sector more competitive when the financial seas were calm but vulnerable to the perfect storm that swept the world in 2008. The scandals that stain most aging governments also multiplied. Voters remembered Blair’s long-ago promise to run a “purer than pure” government, and contrasted the promise with a torrent of ministerial resignations, corruption and sex scandals.

The optimism of late-nineties “Cool Britannia,” with London the world’s capital of finance and with Brit-pop, artist Damien Hirst and British writers and thinkers ascendant, dissolved into “Broken Britain.” The country’s self-image crumbled under the crimes of a new underclass resistant to every government program, ethnic ghettos infected with Islamic fundamentalism and a parliamentary expenses scandal that exposed politicians from all parties as white collar thieves. Faith in institutions is at a nadir, and the idea of community at the heart of Blair’s philosophy has been eroded by fear, individualism and consumerism. Many of Blair’s goals from 1997, such as being “at the heart of Europe,” are further from realization now than then. If Blair’s goal was to transform first Labour and then Britain, it is easy to conclude – as a shattered party examines its electoral entrails in a divided country – that he failed.

But that easy conclusion is too harsh. Blair transformed Labour, just as Thatcher had transformed the Conservatives, and in the process he forced the Conservatives to change once more. Leader after leader attempted to reincarnate the spirit of Thatcher and foundered on the rocks of public disapproval. The Tories finally acknowledged that success lay in reincarnating Tony Blair; hence the rise of David Cameron. Labour forced the Conservatives to abandon libertarian excess; that has to count as a victory for progressive politics.

In social policies Blair advocated new paths to success, but failed to sustain them. For the British left, much now depends on how the transition from Brown to a new Labour leader is handled. Will the party embrace internal democracy and have an open leadership race that encourages ideas, or will it conduct a quick contest? A quick contest will probably eliminate the chance for appealing modernizers such as David Miliband and James Purnell. The danger exists that, in reaction to its defeat, Labour will return to being a champion of “old Labour” verities.

Blair stood against his party on many issues, and against the public – most notably on Iraq. The accusation that he adjusted his rhetoric to remain popular is wrong. Like Thatcher, he was a “conviction politician,” but undeniably he often seemed to be in search of convictions. He had principles, based on his religious and political evolution, but he struggled to transform them into a coherent ideology. He famously said that Labour should pursue “principles without specific policy prescriptions,” but he failed to realize that it is the elevation of policy prescriptions into political struggles that motivates people to engage in democratic politics. In this failure Blair is not unique. He was an ambitious failure: the modern democratic left is still struggling to motivate people with a battle cry that focuses less on the workers losing their chains and more on making sure every home has a white picket fence and that children achieve higher school grades.

A post-Blair left will have to return to basic questions, the most important being “What is government for?” In the face of a century of evidence, the answer is that we want government to take the lead in the sectors of health, education, welfare, infrastructure, environment and justice. In those areas we need to make the public service excel; beyond them government must step aside, and serve as the defender of individual liberty, creativity and market competition.

Tony Blair started to redefine what it means to be of the left, not just in Britain but in the wider Western world. That is his legacy. That Blair, in government, incompletely answered the questions he posed – about liberal international interventionism, communitarianism, consumer-oriented public services – is testament to a seriousness of purpose, not to failure.

Continue reading “New Labour: A Retrospective” →

Canada can make a difference

Afghanistan’s so-called marriage law, much discussed in recent months, is a disgrace. It leads us to ask why Canadian and other soldiers are dying to support a government that denies women the freedom to control their own bodies. Reports about warlords in President Hamid Karzai’s cabinet, prosperous opium farms and graft cracking the foundation of an economy our aid dollars are supposed to be reinforcing raise similar questions.

But the debate should not be about who is better, Karzai or the Taliban; the debate should be about Canada. What do we stand for, a country of 32 million in a world of more than six billion? Why did we send soldiers to this faraway point on the planet? And if we can answer those questions, and they lead us to see an obligation in Afghanistan, what should we be doing there?

Accidents of old empires favoured Canada with borders that allow us to be small-minded. We pretend the world’s problems are far away, and enjoy the protection of our oceans and the Americans. Our self-image as humanitarians and peacekeepers is sentimentality, not internationalism. The reality is that our development programs are modest, our diplomatic footprint is small and our military suffers from erratic support and direction. We have benefited from good luck, but are now reluctant to share it with others.

Where we are blessed, Afghanistan is cursed. It lies in a tidal zone of struggle between world powers: Persian, British, Soviet, American. Waves of conflict have scoured the country, stripping it of everything except the most hardened political organisms. Afghan villages are fortified barnacles that have survived. They are led by conservatives because most people who are repeatedly attacked tend to become conservative, wary for good reasons of strangers and new ideas. Where we benefited from the Enlightenment, from the struggles between religion and secularism, left and right, Afghanistan has seen the modern world as a legacy of weapons left behind by foreign armies.

Are the rights we enjoy universally relevant?

Great powers are forced by their range of global interests to be hypocrites, doing one thing in one country while advocating the opposite somewhere else. The United States has to justify engagement with Iran, isolation for Cuba and free trade for all unless it threatens U.S. markets. As a small country, Canada has the option of being consistent, of reflecting its principles in its foreign policy. We have a power born of our small size and the protection the Americans are forced to offer us, more or less regardless of our specific policies.

To start, we need to choose between pacifism – with its unavoidable twin, isolationism – and, on the other hand, engagement with an often violent world. Many Canadians deny there is a choice to make. They want Canada’s military restricted to unambiguous peacekeeping and our engagement to consist of worthy development programs. The first of several contradictions in this denial is that our development programs often require protection by someone else’s army.

If principled pacifism and isolationism are rejected, we need to define the terms of our engagement. It is not easy. There is a consensus on what we mean when we talk about good government in Canada: a commitment to rights and freedoms, obligations and the adequate provision of collective goods such as health care and education. Most of all, we mean a commitment to the rule of law, to the ideal that everyone will be subject to the same rules and the same punishments if they break those rules. We never reach that ideal but it serves as a goal and inspiration.

We would show little tolerance for any group in Canada that argued on cultural grounds for the execution of couples who married against their parents’ wishes (as in Afghanistan) or the right of aggrieved cultural majorities to practise genocide on ethnically defined minorities (as in Rwanda). But do we agree that the rights we enjoy are rights that everyone should enjoy? On the left, many insist on accommodating traditional culture; on the right, on leaving people alone. Why should our concern for human rights end for people living on the wrong side of arbitrary borders drawn long ago in Washington, Paris and London? Sometimes foreign intervention works, as did British intervention in Sierra Leone or Vietnamese intervention to overthrow the Cambodian Khmer Rouge.

That doesn’t mean Canada and other states should seek to intervene in every country where substantial human rights abuses exist. There is generally no stomach for such imperial overreach among Western citizens (the Taliban were left in peace until the 9/11 attacks), and in many cases the intervention does not work as intended (think U.S. interventions in Haiti). Opportunities for effective intervention are unusual but, when they are presented, we have no moral justification for refusing to take them on.

It is racist to say, as many on both left and right frequently do, that Afghans are inherently violent, or that democracy can never take root because of the country’s “culture” or “values.” These are excuses for leaving corrupt, extreme or violent elites in charge and letting them run a country in a way we would never recognize as legitimate in Canada. The essence of democracy is that the people choose their leaders and, in Helmand as in Halifax, this is a principle worth defending. We Canadians may collectively not be prepared to sustain the protracted costs, financial and human, of our Afghan mission. But we should not confuse a limited willingness to engage with the world with the self-justifying notion that the majority of Afghans want to be governed by drug-dealing warlords and the Taliban.

Clearly most Afghans today would not vote for legalizing gay marriage or separating religious authority from the state, and many oppose giving women fully equal rights. Today’s Afghan democracy would not be today’s Canadian democracy. But Afghans have shown support for voting by actually going to the polls; they have shown support for the education of girls by enrolling them in schools. In the face of rocks, threats and the ominous click of cell-phone cameras used to aid later abductions and murders, some men and women protested the recent marriage law on the streets of Kabul.

Because we entered this Afghan mission without a sense of ourselves and without a plan for military victory or for reconstruction, we are eroding our chances of reaching any goal. Most Canadians, and nearly all Afghans, agree that Afghanistan could use some of our peace, order and good government. Without peace there can be no order, and without order, no good government. These are not abstractions. There is no point building hospitals when armed groups are free to attack them, or registering girls for school only to make them an easier, concentrated target for suicide bombers.

If we Canadians decide that the rights we enjoy are universally relevant, and that circumstance has provided a reasonable prospect of their export to Afghanistan – in a way sadly absent from Burma, North Korea or much of sub-Saharan Africa – we must think carefully about where we are going, and exactly what we will do.

Making our mission work

To make our mission work: first define it, then commit to it. Defining our mission means accepting that the village and village leaders are the basis of Afghan society, and working to co-opt these men, one by one. This is the only way to reach military and, later, development goals. Our troops have done this, winning support through military protection and public works, but too often they have then been forced to leave, abandoning people who had risked their lives to side with us. Every time this happens we create an image of weakness, of being just another army passing through.

Defining our mission also means remembering an ancient military lesson. Only George W. Bush’s incompetence could have made this lesson seem revolutionary. After years of losing the Iraq war because he didn’t commit enough troops, the success of the “surge” is now mythical and its creator, General Petraeus, has become a latter-day incarnation of the legendary Chinese strategist Sun Tzu. But it’s just common sense: in a counterinsurgency more troops are the first necessary ingredient.

Committing to our mission means that if we are in Kandahar, we should stay in Kandahar. Build support, one village at a time, with consistent occupation, followed by development. That will earn us respect and give the Afghan public concrete reasons to support our presence. Let us be honest about what we are doing, and why.

Committing to our mission also means accepting the deaths that are an inevitable part of war, and forging an understanding of why they are worth incurring. Starting this discussion is the government’s responsibility and both the former Liberal and present Conservative governments deserve harsh criticism for dodging it. What’s the point of democracy if there’s no discussion about something as critical as sending soldiers to die?

Canada can make a difference in Afghanistan. We do not need to spend our time worrying about why the Americans are there; we need to know why we are there, and to plan a mission we can support with confidence. That means an ongoing Canadian presence in whatever part of the country we can afford to occupy, based first on providing security and then on providing for political and physical infrastructure.

Cambodia and Nepal are harbingers of Beijing’s emerging influence

For the last eight years I have lived in South and Southeast Asia – in Bangladesh, Cambodia and now Nepal. I have yet to visit China, but China has come to me. From being invisible to those of us living beyond its borders, a large but not imposing presence, it has become a rival to the United States across the region.

Has this been organized in Beijing? Or was it the organic consequence of China’s rapid economic growth and vast size? Today the inevitability of Chinese political power is accepted, even as Western politicians point out that Beijing, at least before the current economic crisis took hold, controls only the world’s fourth largest economy, and armed forces not yet capable of projecting even regional power.

When I lived in Bangladesh early in the decade, China was another poor, overpopulated country. China’s economic growth was a source of envy to Bangladeshis, but so was India’s. Talk of a highway linking China to the Bay of Bengal was taken in the same spirit as proposals from Burma – opportunities for diplomats and politicians to justify good dinners in fine hotels. Chinese businessmen appeared here and there in Dhaka, but they were lost in the mix of South Koreans, Americans, Indians and others looking to take advantage of a low-wage economy.

Cambodia: Chinese influence explodes

In 2002 I arrived in Cambodia. The local Chinese population was economically significant but politically marginalized. During the Khmer Rouge regime they were targeted for their wealth; during the Vietnamese occupation that followed they were persecuted for being Chinese – Beijing had supported Pol Pot, and invaded Vietnam as punishment for the displacement of their pet Maoist in Phnom Penh. But the community survived.

By 2003, Chinese influence was detectable but subtle, and natural given the links between the two countries. In 2004 that influence exploded. This is not something you can document, because Cambodia keeps poor records of immigration and emigration: a business visa is available on arrival at the airport in Phnom Penh, for just $5 more than a tourist visa. Some estimates are that as many as 300,000 Chinese arrived in the country that year, going to work on timber concessions and construction, adding financial and human resources to every sector of the economy.

The United States, despite its “secret bombing” (not secret to the Cambodians) and invasion of large swaths of rural Cambodia during the Vietnam War, was viewed in a positive light by most Khmers. In 2003, I watched the first days of the U.S. invasion of Iraq on a television in a restaurant in a provincial town. The people who were watching cheered. “Iraq is lucky,” one older man said. “Where were the Americans when Pol Pot was here?”

U.S. policy in Cambodia was dominated by the old anti-Communist line, making it hard to establish good relations with the ruling Cambodian People’s Party. The CPP evolved from the puppet regime installed by Hanoi in the early 1980s, and it leads Cambodia’s coalition government. Maybe China saw a diplomatic opportunity, or maybe its business people simply recognized that Cambodians’ laissez-faire attitude meant opportunities for the Chinese.

Whatever the explanation, the Chinese have filled a void. As longtime Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen colourfully put it, “If 1.3 billion Chinese were all to urinate at the same time, it would unleash a major flood in Cambodia. But China’s leaders are doing good things with their partners … When China gives, there are no strings attached. You can do what you want with the money” – unlike Western donors, with their concerns over human rights, labour standards and so on.

Beijing now has a reliable ally in Cambodia, a profound change from the days when Hun Sen described China as his country’s worst enemy. Beyond access to the country’s unregulated economy, the payoff to China has not been huge, but payoff there is – expulsion of Falun Gong activists, Cambodian support in the United Nations for China’s positions on a range of issues. As a small country with a history of being batted between greater powers, Cambodia recognizes its subservient role, and is particularly sensitive to shifts in regional influence. It is a canary in the diplomatic mineshaft. Its decision to nestle under China’s wing may be an important indicator of what’s to come in the region. The American eagle is now playing catch-up but, with its economy teetering and its ability to project military power eroded by the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it has lost the advantage.

Nepal: The shifting balance

Nepalese sometimes describe their country as a soft mango squeezed between the hard coconuts of India to the south and China to the north. There is a long tradition in Kathmandu of playing off the northern against the southern neighbour. However, the Himalayas to the north form a natural border, and the mountains, along with closer cultural ties to India, have kept Kathmandu’s eyes focused southward. Historically India has treated Nepal as a satellite state, in somewhat the same way the United States treats Canada. “Equidistance” is official Nepali policy, but until recently working with Beijing was a pose to irritate the Indians, and not a genuine policy alternative.

Now the balance is shifting. Like Cambodia, Nepal has undergone a recent increase in Chinese influence. While China’s aid contributions have remained small compared to those of Western donors or India, Nepal now considers Beijing to be Delhi’s equal.

From the mid-1990s to 2006, Nepal was wracked by a civil war.¹ The guerrillas called themselves Maoists, although that is a misnomer inasmuch as their leaders are largely upper-caste Brahmins with few links to the Chinese. Ex-guerrilla leader Prachanda (a nom de guerre meaning “The Fierce One”) came out on top in an election in the spring of 2008. Now Prime Minister, he took his first foreign trip to Beijing, for the closing of the Olympic Games. This trip had the same impact on India’s elite as George W. Bush’s first foreign trip in 2001 had on Canada’s elite – Bush visited Mexico City, not Ottawa.

China was embarrassed by Nepal’s Maoists, who took up arms in the name of the Great Helmsman decades after he went out of favour back home. But the Chinese now seem happy to encourage closer ties with Kathmandu. The Nepali habit of appeasing Chinese interests predates Prachanda’s rise to power, and crosses the ideological spectrum. Nepal’s now-dethroned absolute monarch closed the Dalai Lama’s Tibetan Welfare Office in 2004, and throughout 2008 all major Nepali parties supported the brutal crackdown on Free Tibet protesters in Kathmandu. In an unusual display, the Chinese ambassador repeatedly called for Nepal to be even more aggressive in stopping the protests, a contrast to the policy of “non-interference in the affairs of sovereign states” that Beijing purports to place at the centre of its foreign policy. In recent weeks Nepal’s Home Minister has talked of deporting Tibetan refugees who lack proper papers.

There is irony in this, as the police have refrained from using force against political demonstrations, or criminals, since the King was overthrown in 2006. Similarly, while Kathmandu regularly criticized the government of Bhutan for its expulsion of ethnic Nepalese in the early 1990s, there was no comment when Nepalese living along the China-Nepal border, who rely on access to Chinese goods, starved this year when the frontier was sealed by a Chinese regime afraid of pro-Tibetan infiltrators.

In contrast with Cambodia, Nepal has a poor investment environment, a congealed bureaucracy not yet convinced that feudalism is over and the legacy of a ten-year civil war capped by ongoing political uncertainty. And unlike Cambodia, Nepal already has a strong patron state in India. There are fewer economic opportunities for Chinese business, and a much smaller Chinese community with which to build links. Kathmandu’s resident Tibetans seem unlikely to embrace Chinese advances. And Nepal has little that China needs: the new Himalayan republic’s main export is young men, who travel to India or the Gulf in search of work.

Nonetheless, China has clearly grown in influence. Discussions are underway to link China’s railways with Nepal, a project that makes sense only if India agrees: a railway that stopped in Nepal would make Sarah Palin’s Bridge to Nowhere look like a sound investment.

Will China’s political model spread?

So far, China’s expansion into its near-abroad seems driven by economic interest, with political concessions extracted as an afterthought. As Hun Sen put it, Chinese money comes with no strings attached. When rumours spread of an American naval base to be built in Cambodia, China did not object: it kept buying up more Cambodian forests, hotels and gem mines. Nepal’s government is desperate for any support for its ambitious development plans, and bashing a generally disliked Tibetan minority costs little in political capital.

The concern for liberal democrats – in Cambodia, Nepal or Canada – should not be China’s investment model but the spread of its political model. For the first time, a country outside of the petrostates is credibly claiming that Western-level economic growth can be achieved without Western political freedoms. For governing elites with autocratic tendencies – and that describes most regimes in the world – it is tempting to imagine your country stable and wealthy, while you and your friends govern it forever. And in a country like Nepal, acknowledged even by its own elites as having been badly misgoverned, there is a strong temptation to embrace one-party development in exchange for the promise of economic growth. The limitation of much of this growth to a minority of the population and the widespread social unrest and corruption that continue to infest the Chinese countryside are easy to ignore, thanks to strict media controls and the displays of ostentatious wealth seen in China’s cities and in coverage of the recent Olympics.

Cambodia and Nepal are two small countries in China’s growing orbit of economic and political influence. They are small but potentially important harbingers of a future in which a free press and individual liberty are dispensable, exchanged for basic economic security. As I write in October 2008, the developed world is falling into an economic crisis that may develop into the worst since the 1930s. Now, as then, there is a hunger for new models of governance. Watch this space.

Continue reading “China’s Growing Orbit” →

Through my work for an American-based democracy-building institute, principally in South and Southeast Asia, I have dealt with corruption in different forms. But I acquired the tools of my trade earlier, as a political activist in Nova Scotia. And sadly, to this point, there is no type of corruption I did not first encounter back home.

Federal transfer payments to have-not regions offer Canadians a close-to-home example of how aid dollars, in their billions, can disappear into flawed megaprojects or the pockets of provincial elites. Donors are left frustrated by the failure of interventions to achieve desired goals and by the growth in affected regions of a dependency culture that saps economic and cultural strength. Corruption takes root when donors expect failure and recipients know that dismal performance will bring no adverse consequences. Examining the roots of corruption and insisting on its eradication are essential to Canada’s domestic and international development programs.

The police in Phnom Penh

Corruption has many faces. Living in Phnom Penh, I cannot get used to driving during the day with my headlights off. The Cambodian police officer who pulls me over explains, “Driving with your lights on in the day is the practice in Canada because it is dark all the time, because of the snow.” In Cambodia, it is the practice to drive with your lights off during the day – and often at night – and it is also the practice, the officer tells me, to give policemen who stop you, whatever the pretext, twenty U.S. dollars. Sensing my reluctance, he bargains down to ten dollars, then five, then one. Eventually, we’re down to a can of Angkor beer and a pack of twelve-cent cigarettes, but still I won’t pay.

Cambodian police earn about $20 a month, so unless they supplement their income with bribes they can’t feed their families. But I’m not offering a good return on this officer’s time investment. Cambodian traffic police are a fairly benign species, and I know he’ll soon move on to easier prey, leaving me with a feeling of self-righteousness that, as an honest Canadian, I value greatly.

For Cambodians, corruption is part of daily life. As in 19th-century New York, firefighters battle to be first at a blaze but do not start the water until the homeowner pays, or offers the pick of salvaged possessions. You can get a driver’s licence by taking an exam, or you can pay US$25 and it magically appears. Teachers in government schools teach only those children who pay an extra fee.

For Canadians, corruption is our tax dollars diverted to buy that second Lear jet for a sub-Saharan dictator; it’s money for a dam project misappropriated before the dam is finished, but after towns downstream have been bulldozed. The amounts involved are small – less than $100 annually for each Canadian – and the people involved are far away. All this makes it easy for the citizens of a donor country to ignore the issue or assign it to the corrosive effect, depending on one’s prejudices, of left-wing autarkists or mercenary free traders.

This lack of interest suits donor governments. Close public scrutiny of corruption in foreign aid delivery might lead the public to pay more attention to similar problems at home: money diverted to friends of government ministers, contracts unfairly tendered, paid work uncompleted and so on. To readers of the Auditor General’s reports or viewers of the Gomery Commission’s hearings, this problem is starting to sound familiar.

The 2005 federal budget promises to double Canadian foreign aid by 2010, relative to 2001. Deep in the budget is a passing reference to the problem of “poor governance” in developing countries:

Achieving the Millennium Development Goals requires mobilizing the private sector – and the contributions it can make to economic growth, job creation and incomes of the poor. Entrepreneurs are emerging throughout the developing world, but many of them are locked into informal micro and small enterprises. They must cope with weak policy and regulatory environments, poor governance, and inadequate infrastructure.

As Canada expands its international development programs, more than a cautiously worded paragraph is required. Without an honest reevaluation of past naiveté, Ottawa will squander tax dollars internationally as it has domestically, and add to cynicism at home and abroad about the ability of donor governments to address social and economic problems positively.

From the Mira to the Mekong

Corruption is a universal human behaviour, and any examination of the issue must begin with a look at the people involved. A crisis, be it famine in Malawi or the collapse of Canada’s East Coast fishery, creates pressure for government action. Programs are quickly designed, often by people without direct knowledge of the region or problem in question, or by large committees with conflicting interests and agendas. If locals are consulted, they are rarely from the affected groups – be they Malawian farmers or Newfoundland fishers – as donors prefer to draw on local elites who understand the politics and language of aid diplomacy. This tendency is understandable but dangerous, and often ignores the leading role those groups played in causing the problems they are now, with outside funding, supposed to address. Expecting any group to behave responsibly with other people’s money when they have cheerfully squandered their own is optimistic.

Bangladesh, which means “land of people who speak Bengali,” became a sovereign country in two stages: in 1947, it became part of Pakistan after the departure of the British and the partition of India; in 1971, after a bitter war, Bangladeshis liberated themselves from Urdu-speaking West Pakistan. The legacy of “anti-imperialist” pro-Bengali education policies post-1971 created an acute shortage of English speakers. Those few with higher education and English fluency come largely from the traditional elite, a group with a high tolerance of corruption that bears singular responsibility for the myriad problems that afflict the country. In Cambodia, most English speakers are part of the exile community that fled following the Vietnamese invasion in 1979. They tend to oppose the party Hanoi put in power, making it difficult for English-speaking foreigners to obtain a balanced picture of political life.

In a domestic context, consider Atlantic Canada. The dominant influence of the Liberal Party over the Canadian civil service, especially in the Atlantic provinces, creates similar difficulties for outsiders. Few Canadians outside the region understand the intimate links between local Liberals and officials. Accustomed to adjusting their work to justify changing political needs, the bureaucracy becomes a part of the problem when politicians cross the line into corrupt practice. While not as straightforward as the Cambodian policeman’s pyramid scheme, the moral underpinning is the same: it’s easy to justify bad behaviour when the system within which you work encourages it.

The Atlantic Groundfish Strategy (TAGS) provides a recent example of a misbegotten program. Having extended Canadian sovereignty over coastal waters to 200 miles in the 1970s, Ottawa then acceded to local pressures to subsidize overfishing, and in the 1990s fish stocks collapsed. TAGS did a poor job helping displaced fishers but helped launch many “training centres” operated by friends of the governing party. “I’d like to work in a call centre, but my fingers are too mashed for the computer and even my wife don’t understand my accent,” was how a Cape Breton fisherman summed up his TAGS-funded training experience. Development aid is too often a story of inappropriate solutions to ill-understood problems, reflecting the latest fad to grip donor governments.

From the Mira River in Cape Breton to countries bordering the Mekong in Southeast Asia, governments seeking development money learn a complex dance. They accommodate the latest development fashion because they know requests cast in fashionable language mean more cash. But recipient governments must also play to the local audience, emphasize their independence and show that the aid money is tribute, not charity. Present problems are treated as being entirely due to past injustices: Atlantic provincial poverty is due to ill-conceived trade policies imposed by Ontario that destroyed access to traditional U.S. markets; poverty in Kenya is due to colonial rulers who pitted tribe against tribe. Historical disasters are dusted off and propped up as totems, distracting donors and recipients alike from examining the actual impact of aid money.

Communities already isolated by poverty lose the moral right to object to the conditions that determine their lives, and fall victim to a cycle of paternalism familiar to students of welfare dependency. Aid money perversely weakens the hand of indigenous reformers. As communities come to identify with the bad behaviour of their entrenched leaders, it becomes harder for those who would stand against them to speak with authority; it is nearly impossible for any individual to remain untainted by a corrupt environment.

Only in the last decade have donor countries imposed serious monitoring of foreign assistance; before, it was considered an infringement of sovereignty to ask if aid dollars were reaching their intended destination. With such weak oversight, it is unsurprising that most projects failed; what is surprising is that it took so long for donors to address the problem of governance. Poor program design, incompetence and corruption all played their part, but there is another problem to face squarely. For developing-world elites whose prestige derives in part from their control of donor money, it is safer to extrapolate past failures than to do things differently. After all, doing more of the same keeps aid flowing.

The revolution that wasn’t

You can’t turn off the Big Red Machine; you just shut it down for maintenance.
– Liberal party activist, Cape Breton, 1997

Nova Scotia, as my Upper Canadian friends point out, is a have-not province, long a recipient of transfer payments paid by the generous people of Alberta and Ontario. But the money spent has not had the desired effect. It has spawned impressive levels of corruption and welfare dependency, while failing to resolve problems of low economic growth, inadequate health services, underperforming schools and – the ultimate sign of political failure – continuing out-migration.

The pattern is simple. Desperate communities are plied with development projects. Voters are bought with promises of jobs, a paved road, a favourable review of a disability pension application. Voters apply rational choice, and vote for the party that offers the most tangible short-term incentive. Sometimes the price of a vote is depressingly small. I recall a group of old men staggering from a minivan into a polling station in North Sydney, too drunk to walk a straight line. A young man called from the van, “Don’t forget – vote for the Premier!”

The effects of generous transfer payments from Ottawa were devastating to Cape Breton. In the 19th century, the island contained vibrant communities, filled with immigrants who came to work hard at often-dangerous jobs. Its towns were centres of community activism and radical politics. Today they have degenerated into depopulated semirural slums, ridden with substance abuse, crime and neglect and abandoned by those with sufficient ambition and ability to escape.

Working for the Nova Scotia NDP I believed, as recently as the 1997 federal election, that this situation was about to turn around. Paul Martin’s 1995 budget appeared to have ended the addictive relationship between Nova Scotians and the Liberals. Post-1995, access to unemployment insurance required more work; make-work income replacement programs for the fishery were wound down and the long-threatened closure of the Cape Breton coal industry loomed. As unemployment rose, confusion and despair spread in the poor communities that fringe the Atlantic coast. In northern New Brunswick, riots broke out against reductions in seasonal benefits.

When the Liberals called the 1997 election, they anticipated an easy win in Atlantic Canada. In 1993, they had won 31 of 32 seats in the region. The Tammany Hall style was much in evidence. Doug Young, Liberal minister for New Brunswick, gained infamy with his threat of military base closures if voters failed to vote correctly. David Dingwall, patronage king at the Department of Public Works and the Atlantic Canada Opportunity Agency, had spent nearly 20 years building a power base from his Cape Breton constituency. Infamous for spending tax dollars on a stone wall surrounding the University College of Cape Breton (a folly dubbed the Ding Wall) and for hiring well-connected construction companies to build boardwalks along stretches of deserted coast, the minister lived up to the traditions of crony politics by marrying into the family of Prime Minister Chrétien. But when he told an angry crowd of demonstrators that there were “no more bags of money,” voters stopped and asked themselves: if there weren’t any bags of money, why vote “correctly”?

I watched this wave of anger build and break from an abandoned storefront in a decrepit rooming house, a building with no electricity and a failing furnace that couldn’t keep out the raw winds blowing across offshore icebergs. Considered desirable office space in Glace Bay, this was my base and the campaign HQ for New Democrat Michelle Dockrill. She worked in a local hospital and was nominated less than four weeks before election day. In 1993, the NDP had won 6 per cent of the vote, against Dingwall’s 78 per cent.

The office was warmed on election night by dozens of supporters who, despite my “mainlander” insistence on peace and quiet, crowded in to listen to results. We didn’t wait long: minutes after the polls closed, the CBC declared that Dockrill had won. Not only did the NDP defeat Dingwall; the party also defeated Young in New Brunswick. Across Atlantic Canada, the Liberals’ hegemony appeared to be broken; their regional caucus collapsed to 11. The NDP, with no Atlantic MPs in 1993, elected eight in 1997.

There are few things as intense as the joy that comes with an unexpected political victory. Despite the efforts of the local police, who descended on our campaign office to distribute retaliatory parking tickets, that night offered hope to a part of Canada long bereft. I moved to Glace Bay and began work in Dockrill’s office, hoping to be part of what could have been the Canadian equivalent of a revolution.

It was soon clear that there would be no revolution. Even though the patronage machine had been starved of cash by Martin’s austerity programs, the Liberals still controlled federal spending, and in Cape Breton that meant control over everything.

Had the NDP been able to offer an alternative to the status quo, events might have evolved differently after 1997. But the New Democrats could not or would not address the role of corruption in the region’s decline. Having personalized the problem as the fault of specific Liberal politicians, and then having dislodged several of them, the party faced the realities of an entrenched patronage system. I saw this first hand as Liberal influence over the bureaucracy exerted itself and elected officials were marginalized. Senator Al Graham was appointed as the face of the federal government in Nova Scotia; NDP MPs were “accidentally” left off invitations to the opening of federal projects, including ones they had initiated. Government agencies forwarded only the signature pages of grant applications to our office. We had no tools to influence the bureaucracy.

With its close ties to public sector unions, the NDP was reluctant to address the corrupting nature of transfer payments administered by the civil service. When specific program abuses were uncovered, New Democrat MPs were paralyzed. The Liberals branded criticism of corrupt spending as attacks on impoverished communities. Believers in an active government, New Democrats were reluctant to argue that government handouts per se were flawed, and eager to muffle any sentiment that could be seen as anti-union. Before the 2000 election, the Liberals rescinded some of the 1995 reforms and boosted spending. Both Cape Breton seats returned to the government fold, while in Atlantic Canada overall, the Liberals recouped half their 1997 losses. Better the devil you know.

Meanwhile, on the Mekong

In Cambodia, in 1993, the United Nations administered the most expensive election in history, ending decades of revolution and occupation. Voters chose FUNCINPEC, the royalist party founded by then-King Norodom Sihanouk, over the Communist Cambodian Peoples’ Party (CPP) that had governed since the Vietnamese overthrow of the autogenocidal Khmer Rouge. But the royalists could not compete against a state bureaucracy created and staffed by the CPP since 1979. Unable to present a viable alternative, the royalists were outmanoeuvred, sidelined and, in 1998, defeated.

Similar problems have befallen the opposition Sam Rainsy Party (SRP). Born in 1995 from anger over corruption, the party captured the imagination of Cambodians who wanted their country to emerge as a modern liberal democracy. In 2003 it won a fifth of the vote. But, in a system where dissent is frowned on and corruption and nepotism are culturally entrenched, the SRP found it hard to develop a coherent policy to address government failures, and harder to ignore internal pressures to distribute positions and gifts to party cadres. When the SRP speaks out against alleged misuse of government funds it is criticized for being unpatriotic, for putting partisan interests ahead of the national good by jeopardizing aid-financed projects that bring services and jobs.

Foreign aid allocation is often based more on the political considerations of donors than on the actual needs of recipient governments. Just as Atlantic Canadian politicians adjust to changing federal patronage interests – from nationalizations and megaprojects in the 1960s and 1970s to call centres in the 1990s – the governments of developing countries are attuned to donor rhetoric.

There is fierce competition for money. Only Denmark, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden – to be joined by 2013 by Ireland, Belgium, Finland, Spain, France and Britain – meet the UN goal of 0.7 per cent of a donor country’s GDP being dedicated to international aid. Despite the promised increases in the 2005 budget, Canada’s expenditures have declined throughout the last decade to just 0.3 percent of GDP, and a large percentage of our aid is “tied,” forcing Canadian-sponsored programs to purchase Canadian-made goods. Assistance for an agriculture project in Bangladesh may be primarily benefiting Canadians through the subsidized purchase of domestically manufactured tractors or other equipment, a neat example of the confluence of national and international patronage.

Turf battles between aid agencies are endemic. In Cambodia, more than 1,000 NGOs are conducting work in a country of 14 million. In Bangladesh, a legislative support project provided hundreds of computers to government officials. All of them promptly disappeared, except for three converted into a makeshift coffee table in one office. Despite this obvious failure, another European aid agency relaunched the project, with predictable results. From Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, the story is the same: local beneficiaries play off one donor against another, seeking to gain funds for the same project from multiple sources or to continue funding a failed project by moving from one donor to the next, confident that the lack of coordination will make detection unlikely. I am reminded of the Sydney Tar Ponds, a project “solved” by more than half a dozen separate programs, though these solutions have yet to clear the tar from the ponds.

Come from Aways

I hope the government doesn’t push too quickly; at this rate I’ll be back in France within a year.
– NGO worker in Pakistan, concerned about anticorruption reforms, 2002

The perverse incentives created by aid money are rarely discussed. Those working in the field have a vested interest in maintaining their positions, which means having projects funded. It is the rare aid organization that adopts the motto: our job is to make ourselves redundant.

Just as the creators of the welfare state in the early 20th century did not imagine the crisis of state capture by interest groups, development theorists did not conceive that similar problems of rent seeking and dependency would be replicated at a global level.

Most donor states have reformed their domestic economic policies in the last 20 years. There are few career avenues open for those who espouse bigger government as the solution to domestic problems in developed countries. Marginalized at home, those who favour public spending as a catch-all solution have often ended up working overseas, inflicting outdated ideas on poor countries likely to accept the most empty-headed advisors when they arrive with full wallets. As Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen once said, “Too many people who cannot find work in their own country come and tell us what to do.” The tendency of aid organizations to serve as repositories for worn-out ideologies, and sometimes worn-out people, remains a serious impediment to development. I acknowledge the irony of these words coming from a New Democrat.

“Come from Aways,” as they’re called in Atlantic Canada, are a well-known phenomenon: experts who visit a region to change some aspect of local life they don’t like, the “Quiet Americans” of the development world. Local resistance to new ideas may stem from an aversion to change, or from the geographic isolation that corruption encourages. But sometimes there are sound grounds for hostility. While principles of political organizing and management are identical from place to place, the subtleties of culture mean that an idea presented in one way in one village has to be presented differently down the road. This applies to neighbourhoods in Toronto, Cape Breton or Pakistan. A donor’s lack of respect for local practice abets corruption: if reform is seen as undermining indigenous culture, it is easier for transparency initiatives to be dismissed as alien, or incompatible with existing social structures. When corrupt behaviour is rewarded with more aid targeting corruption, and that aid is in turn stolen, cynicism is hard to escape.

Aid-receiving nations adjust publicly stated priorities to maximize international assistance. Bangladesh responded to donor pressure for “gender equality” by creating 30 parliamentary seats reserved for women, and received praise for the initiative. The women MPs are appointed, not elected; in effect the governing party gives itself 30 additional members. Without the veil of women’s participation in politics being drawn across it, this move would have been roundly and rightly condemned.

Drawing conclusions

For all the above reasons, many have given up on international aid as a tool to address poverty and bad governance. Isolationists point to the long list of failures and call for an end to the enterprise, while neoconservatives say the way forward is to concentrate on economic liberalization and free trade. Both point out, correctly, that most developing-world success stories began with open markets and domestic anticorruption efforts. Think Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong and, most important, China.

In these countries, local elites decided, usually at a clearly defined point in time and with clear leadership, to address the major political issues facing their peoples. They embarked on reforms that had an impact on all areas of life including the elite itself, which was often undermined by the process. But there are many countries that have made the choice not to embrace reform, and that tolerate corruption and failure while enriching themselves and those around them.

These countries are the usual targets for foreign aid, but the nature of their past failures means that too often development money keeps the wheels of corruption greased. As public resources are stripped, more outside assistance is required, opening new avenues for graft. Those new veins of corruption then require excavation by more development specialists, who bring with them yet more money.

To address these issues, Canadians need to decide what we can hope to gain from our development programs, and stop using them as a sop for our collective conscience. Aid as charity, given without question, demeans the recipient and endangers Canada’s investment. We invest in schools and hospitals and training centres in developing countries and hope it will lead to – what?

As a small country, Canada is limited in what it can achieve. Our failure to address poverty and corruption at home speak to those boundaries. But while Canadian Liberals gain some political advantage from tolerating domestic corruption and bad governance, there are no such incentives on the global level. The key to successful development projects are clear goals and strategies, aimed at creating the political will among a country’s leaders to effect change. The following are steps Canada can take to help make that happen:

• Foreign aid needs to focus on countries. Targeting isolated sectors ignores the pervasive nature of corruption; pumping assistance into children’s health programs will simply make those programs the target for corrupt and powerful people who will absorb a new source of illicit revenue. Recent moves by Canada to focus aid on a smaller number of countries and provide more comprehensive assistance make sense.
• Criteria for the receipt of Canadian aid should be clear and detailed, and conditions for its continuation must be equally transparent. Following a request from a government for assistance, thorough assessments need to be undertaken of existing structures, past efforts to address problems and possible solutions. Too many development programs are based on reports written by consultants who spend one week in a country before moving on, and too many donors are unwilling to spend the time and money to study an issue before proposing prescriptions.
• Aid programs should be comprehensive. If civil servants supplement their salaries through bribery because there is no tax system to generate their wages, foreign interventions should touch on all areas of the civil service salary system. Increase wages, create a tax system to pay the civil servants in the future and educate the public and authorities about the changes. Interested politicians and party leaders can work with Canadian counterparts (preferably not Nova Scotia Liberals) on designing anticorruption programs and increasing ethical standards within parties, while bureaucrats and bankers create similar links.
• Programs need to be sustained for five, ten or more years, allowing long-term education and training projects to bear fruit. Assistance programs traditionally operate under one- or two-year funding cycles, which encourage short-term thinking and generate often-illusory results used to ensure continued funding. Much of the important work in development consists of passing information and skills to those who need them; the simple process of identifying such people can easily take a year. At the other end, aid programs should include a “sell-by date,” at which point they will be closed down. While flexibility should be maintained to address changing circumstances, recipient governments must not see programs as neverending.
• Aid must focus on developing public institutions. Too much effort has been dedicated to the creation of “civil society” organizations that come to serve as parallel governments in countries with corrupt public sectors. This distorts the development of a genuine civil society, as local groups attune themselves to the needs of donors instead of local communities, and creates hostility between governments and nongovernmental organizations. NGOs play a critical role in all countries, but well-meaning donors should not use them to create neocolonial power structures while they seek short cuts around unresponsive governments.
• Canada must follow Britain’s example and ban “tied” aid. Similarly, we cannot preach the virtues of open markets when our trade relationships with many underdeveloped countries remain restricted. Part of being a partner in a more focused and intensive Canadian aid program should be free trade and a greater economic, cultural, educational and political exchange. This will also help rebuild an international diplomatic power base for Canada, a goal abandoned by our government in recent decades.

If the corruption that exists in many corners of the world continues unaddressed, the poor and the desperate will seek other answers for their misery, and other avenues for their liberation from misrule. If wealthy nations do not offer concrete measures to improve living conditions, we should not be surprised if more of the world falls into the camp of those opposed to liberal democracy, and if more of the human fallout from the resulting conflicts lands on our doorsteps.

On the left, discussion around corruption and development needs to move away from sterile arguments over neocolonialism. Asking recipients to account for how they spend our money is not an act of condescension. Opposition to accountability is understandably put forward by recipient governments, eager for the flow of money to continue. But it is also advanced by many in donor countries concerned that greater conditionality will exacerbate the distorted relationship between rich and poor, North and South.

This argument ignores the fact that aid money is not going to poor people in poor countries; it is going to the governments of poor countries, which is not the same thing. It is precisely to ensure that our money reaches its intended targets, the poor and oppressed, that we must impose stricter standards on aid-recipient governments. In so doing, we will help the poor and give hope to local reformers, who exist in all states and political parties. We need to strengthen their hand because they must do the real work of developing their countries as their citizens see fit. The present situation of unaccountable aid, channelled through local elites, is more appropriately labelled neocolonialism. It has entailed foreigners setting the agenda for indefinite periods, based on their changing and often mercantile policy priorities.

Efforts to fight corruption must hold to the idea that individuals have the power to change their environment. In too many communities, in Canada and far away, that belief is stillborn or has yet to be conceived. Until aid programs contribute to the expansion of that idea, our development money will continue to disappear and our worst suspicions about others will be confirmed. We will ourselves start sliding away from a belief in a more liberal and humane world toward a narrow place that denies the possibility of one person helping another, for the benefit of both.