The Canadian military order
By Neil Braganza
It is widely believed that military interventions can serve the ends of humanitarianism, peace and goodwill. This faith in “humanitarian intervention” came to the fore after the end of the Cold War with the idea, popularized by British PM Tony Blair, of “nations without enemies” who have the moral duty to “save” failing states. This kind of “humanitarianism” is a major source of Canadian nationalist pride.
But today, Canada’s self-image is being remade. It is being called a naïve “Boy Scout” on the world stage who must grow up to face a new dangerous world. The critique is coming from Canadian military sympathizers and lobbyists, like Chief of Defence Staff, Lt. General Rick Hillier, who sound alarms that the country is under attack by people of colour who hate our freedom. The alarm goes something like this: Boy Scout nations need to wake up and realize that they are potential victims of evil terrorists who hate the good work they do. Waking up means going on the offensive against the terrorist threat.
Indeed, just as Superman and Spiderman tried to pull out of crime-fighting, but re-entered the fray with a vengeance when evil-doers got in their faces again, so have the terror attacks of September 11th forced humanitarian interventionists to wage an infinite war to avenge their own goodness. Now that the world villain of terrorism has revealed itself, the nation that thinks it has no enemies must shed its naiveté if it is to survive. It must realize that humanitarian intervention is not enough: we have to hunt the terrorists. Humanitarianism is replaced with pre-emptive attacks. A boy becomes a (white) man.
It is true that the idea of “nations without enemies” is a naïve distortion of the world. But not for the cartoonish reasons offered
by Hillier. Rather, the problem is that the so-called “humanitarian” state depends on and reproduces the very global system that creates threats against it: collapsing governments, crimes against humanity, mass displacement of peoples, civil conflict, HIV/AIDS and other pandemics, weapons proliferation, environmental crisis, mass starvation and terrorism. Many of these problems are aggravated or directly caused by the military order that is said to keep freedom secure. Nationalist tales of benevolent wars and noble soldiering cover up this vicious circle and allow their storytellers to justify almost anything.
A maturing military order
The growth of war-mongering in Canada is but the latest sign that military defence and security are becoming top priorities in civil and political institutions across the country. Three other signs are:
First, there has been an increase in its international interventions since the end of the Cold War. Canadian troops have been deployed all over the world, with major engagements in the former Yugoslavia and Kosovo, Haiti, Somalia, the Persian Gulf and Afghanistan, where the number of Canadian troops is surpassing 2000 in the coming weeks.
Second, in April 2005 the Liberal government released an International Policy Statement (IPS) that, much to the delight of the military lobby, has a clear emphasis on overseas operations against terrorism and in defence of the global economy. The IPS is seen as heralding the end of the long decade in Canada between the end of the Cold War (1989) and the beginning of the “War on Terror.”
Third, there is the recent hike in government investment in the military. In June 2005, the Liberal minority government, with the help of the NDP, passed a budget that promises to double defence spending over the next five years.
Collectively, intervention by the military, international policy favouring the military and investment in the military form the basis of the Canadian military order. To understand how these factors work together, we need to retrace and explain some steps in history.
The Canadian state was the world’s fourth largest military power at the end of WWII. It was a part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) formed in the late 1940s in opposition to the “Communist” bloc in the Cold War. But with the collapse of the USSR in 1989 and the end of the Cold War, the Canadian government withdrew its forces from NATO Europe in 1993 and reduced the military budget. Between 1989 and 1998, 52,000 personnel were cut, the number of bases was reduced from 54 to 27 and funding was chopped by $1.1 billion.
Interestingly, however, after the end of the Cold War the Canadian Forces became even more active. They participated in a series of multinational interventions, such as in the former Yugoslavia, Somalia, Haiti and the Persian Gulf. The Mulroney government’s participation in the Gulf War against Iraq in 1991 and ratification of a free trade agreement with the US deepened the economic and political integration of the two countries. One would have thought that this would trigger more defence spending in Canada, but for several years it did not. Why?
Interoperability
The answer lies in how the evolution of military technology and organization gave Canada more bang for its military buck by allowing it to interface with US forces and thereby avoid the costs of becoming operationally self-sufficient. This “interoperability” allows a “soft power” like Canada to join campaigns that would otherwise involve prohibitive logistical difficulties.
Canada has been moving toward full interoperability with the US since the early 1940s, when the two countries began sharing military intelligence and coordinating and focusing military industrial production. In 1947, they developed exchange programs for training and observation, common designs and standards in arms equipment and organization, and they committed to being available to each other militarily. This relationship was concretized with the development of weather station networks.
Interoperability has progressed far past these early beginnings, especially since 1958 when it acquired an institutional basis in the North American Air (later Aerospace) Defence Command (NORAD). It also extended into NATO. Ottawa uses its privileged relationship with the US to work on turning NATO from a loose coalition of military forces playing niche roles into a standardized system interoperable with the US. Today, interoperability is clearly the dominant perspective in the Canadian military establishment. No new equipment will be purchased or developed unless it builds interoperability.
Interoperability with the US, however, is a chase after a constantly receding goal. Since the US spends more on its military in absolute terms than do all its allies combined – annually over $400 billion, compared to Canada’s $13.2 billion – it develops cutting-edge technology that is difficult to keep up with. The US is leading what is known as the “revolution in military affairs”: war is said to be computerized, urban and fast (and therefore precise and clean, but that’s delusional). Today, radar and communications systems allow a US commander to target and fire missiles from a Canadian ship by remote control.
The revolution in military affairs also involves greater emphasis on waging war “out of theatre,” in the economic, technological and cyber planes. This requires a deeper alliance between public and private sectors around military priorities and a greater emphasis on military research and development in addition to operational capacity. It means that the Canadian military is not assessed in terms of its present capabilities, but in terms of how fast in can grow to keep pace with the US.
The advantage this has for the US is clear: it allows the US to set the global pace. This is important because catching up with the US involves buying military technology and equipment from US companies. It also reinforces the central role the US plays in the world politically. It is no wonder, therefore, that the only directive the Bush administration needed to give Paul Cellucci, its former ambassador to Canada, to advance US interests was to push Canada to spend more on its military.
There are fears amongst Canadian liberals, nationalists and social democrats that interoperability threatens the autonomy of Canadian foreign policy and decision-making in military operations. For instance, NORAD, which involves Canadian and US forces, was put on active alert by the US after 9/11 without consultation with or report to the Canadian government.
The perceived threat to Canadian sovereignty has long been cited as the main reason why Canada must defend a multilateral coalition-building approach in international relations as a check to US dominance. The main theorist of Canadian multilateralism in the post-Cold War era was Lloyd Axworthy, Minister of Foreign Affairs under Chretien and now President of the University of Winnipeg. Axworthy championed the idea of “human security”: security isn’t just about acting against destructive forces but about creating and reconstructing community infrastructure, communication and legal and political institutions.
From this perspective, “soft powers” (Axworthy’s phrase for countries like Canada) cater to the needs of others and have a “responsibility to protect” victims of the world. This requires developing multilateral institutions and international laws that keep superpowers and soft powers on the same level. Axworthy’s approach is often derided by the military lobby as the end of the Mulroney-Reagan honeymoon and a return to a Boy Scout moralizing that ignores the reality that the US’s interests are our interests.
But when we take military interoperability into account, the distinction between Boy Scouts and soldiers falls apart. Axworthy’s multilateralism is difficult to distinguish from efforts to militarily and politically integrate more soft powers with the US. The Canadian state is uniquely positioned to help broaden multilateral interoperability – a task that becomes more urgent as military occupations become more difficult to manage. Canada is a leader in developing political and technical ways for soft powers to interface with the US military on a tight budget. Far from weakening the Canadian state, interoperability with the US gives it a special role to play in the imperial order.
What’s more, fears that interoperability threatens Canadian autonomy can actually fuel arguments for more defence spending. Interoperability threatens the sovereignty of the Canadian state only when the military is under-funded. This happened during WWI when Canadian interoperability with Britain meant political subordination to the latter. More funding means interoperability will be more complete and therefore less dependent on the US for various logistics. Thus, defending Canadian sovereignty against the US does not necessarily exclude the idea of increasing the Canadian state’s participation in endless and pre-emptive war.
The doubling of defence spending with the Liberal-NDP budget will surely extend the reach of the Canadian Forces. Coupled with a commitment to multilateral organizing, it will also increase the Canadian state’s leverage internationally as it styles itself as a facilitator of an interoperability going global. This is how the Canadian state benefits both from the gap that exists between the US and the world, and from any pressure to bridge that gap.
Globalization and war
What’s more, Canadian companies are becoming major military providers who can help countries catch up to the US standard. They are growing with huge assistance from the Canadian government. As Steven Staples from the Polaris Institute has shown, the government can award sweetheart deals to Canadian companies like SNC Lavalin and Bombardier International without fearing any penalty from the World Trade Organization (WTO). The WTO, as arbiter of free trade agreements around the world, strikes down government spending that restricts foreign investment and limits corporate profits. But it doesn’t touch defence programs. Thus, military spending is a way governments can circumvent WTO restrictions to create jobs.
In 2000, Canada’s 1559 companies in the defence industry generated almost $7 billion in production and services. In 2002, 59 percent of their revenue came from within Canada itself. SNC Lavalin was recently hired on massive contracts (to a value of $400 million for up to 10 years) to provide logistical support to the Canadian Forces in Afghanistan (there is no public scrutiny of the company’s profit margins). As the country’s economy becomes more dependent on the arms industry, military spending will be increasingly difficult to curtail, attracting more companies to the defence industry and pressuring Canadian diplomats to use their office to persuade foreign powers to spend more military money on Canada.
The Canadian government’s financing of the war industry gains support, furthermore, whenever its troops participate in multilateral interventions. Any joint operation inevitably exposes technology gaps between the parties. This gives political ammunition to the Canadian military lobby, allowing it to complain about embarrassing delays and the dangerous ineffectiveness of the forces. The drive for more Canadian defence spending is thus tied to the drive for a more aggressive foreign policy and more Canadian military interventions around the world.
Furthermore, the war drive and war industry belong to the neoliberal capitalist system that also creates the very problems that military interventions are supposed to address. Take the case of Yugoslavia. In the 1980s, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) required the Yugoslav state to pursue a series of “reforms” that involved reducing its costs by privatizing services. To ensure these reforms were carried out systematically and comprehensively, the IMF also required Yugoslavia to shift more control over monetary policy to the federal state and out of the hands of Yugoslavia’s six republics. Resistance from the governments of the republics gave rise to nationalist movements that came into conflict with the federal state and each other. This led to efforts to disperse minority populations from different regions (often by means of mass rape and killing). The Yugoslav state eventually collapsed in 1991.
The Canadian state played a central role in the international intervention in Yugoslavia under the UN flag in 1992-1995. The intervention added another military presence to the fray. This escalated the situation as rivals competed for international support. Nationalists sometimes even allowed their own people to be slaughtered in order to paint their enemies in a negative light and influence the direction of international “peacekeeping.” Though this gave Western militaries a chance to practise in the field, develop interoperability, learn how to manage occupations and later argue for more defence spending at home, it made a disastrous situation in Yugoslavia worse.
One of the more glaring examples of this effect occurred when NATO nations, looking for an excuse to act independently of the UN (and particularly of Russia), bombed Serbia in 1999 in the name of defending the Albanian claim over Kosovo. The dreadful irony was that it was mainly after the bombing that Serbs moved to drive hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians from their homes, creating the food, health and shelter crises that the bombing was somehow supposed to resolve. Eighteen Canadian CF-18 jets rained down 530 bombs in 682 sorties over Serbia. Only in a neoliberal world can bombing be offered as an effective strategy for community development and conflict resolution.
Another example is Somalia. The modern history of Somalia is one of a struggle between an indigenous population rooted in a peasant economy with kinship-based social regulation, and successive European colonial powers each seeking to impose a central state in Somalia and modernize agricultural production to suit international capital. The emergence of a central state created competition for control over that state and its funds, leading to rivalries between successive dictators. As this “modernization” happened, the Somali state became dependent on foreign loans, which in turn led to cuts in education, health care and other services. With the pressures of neoliberalism and strains of competition between rival clans fighting for control over state resources, the Somali state collapsed in 1992 and famine spread rapidly. 700,000 Somalis died of hunger in 1992 according to the Red Cross.
It was only after the famine ended that Washington, looking to increase funding to the Pentagon after the Cold War and before the “War on Terror,” announced in November 1992 that it would deliver humanitarian aid to Somalia under the UN banner. But this escalated the situation by shattering the balance of forces in Somalia as various factions settled scores before the arrival of the international police. This caused more health crises, deaths and damage to remaining community infrastructure.
When it was discovered that Canadian troops in Somalia tortured and executed Somali teenager Shidane Arone, and ritually humiliated and tortured other Somalis including children, an inquiry into what became known as the “Somalia Affair” was launched. Like current discussions underway in the US around Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, controversies like the Somalia Affair create opportunities to challenge the military political order. But as Sherene Razack has shown in her book Dark Threats & White Knights, the inquiry only absolved everyone by portraying Canadian soldiers as victims of an impossible situation.
Spectacles like the Somalia Inquiry illustrate the depth of allegiance to the military order in Canada. It goes deeper than formal declarations like the recent IPS, mentioned earlier. It is rooted in practices that cut across levels of government, the media and daily life in the Canadian state. It is this systemic alliance that allows the military order to weather storms of controversy or changes in government.
The alliance, however, needs to be nurtured, and the military lobby knows this. Though it sees the IPS as a solid basis for military growth, its fear is that the IPS won’t do enough to build alliances between politicians and the military to ensure defence growth through different governments and controversies. The way to ensure military growth is not only to seek legislative guarantees for long-term funding, but to discipline Canadian politics and everyday life so that security and defence are always top priorities. Preparations for possible terrorist attacks or natural disasters in Canada, for instance, are examples of how an alliance is built between the military and politicians, medical professions and the media.
But as long as consensus around the military order needs to be
actively managed, there will be opportunities for anti-war activists to challenge that consensus by calling attention to the barbarism upon which it rests.
