Ignatieff and the Liberals

Michael Ignatieff, author of such books as The Lesser Evil, will be the keynote speaker at the Liberal Party’s convention. Some have suggested he’s good leadership material. A principled public intellectual who can steer the Liberals out of their cesspool of cynicism and reestablish a liberal vision. Some have suggested he’s the new Trudeau, an outsider intellectual to lead the decrepit machine into the electoral promised land again.

Canada hardly needs another Trudeau, and I’m happy to see that Ignatieff is no Trudeau. For instance, I suspect the lefties who dominate the delegates won’t be too happy to hear Ignatieff tell them to get real about Canada-US relations:

“I am struck by the difficulty Canadians — and the government — are having sorting out their relationship with the Americans and with the Bush administration,” wrote Mr. Ignatieff. “Canadian-American relations are to 21st-century Canadian politics what Quebec-Canada relations were in the 20th century. That also means that the distinction between foreign and domestic policy has all but collapsed: Everything is ‘intermestic.’ “

This will sound like realpolitik to party activists. But scratch behind his wonkish “intermesticity” language and you find someone who fits well into the Liberal Party foreign policy camp of blinkered internationalism.

Jeremy Rabkin recently wrote an insightful critique of The Lesser Evil in the Claremont Review of Books. In it, he observes that Ignatieff makes some sensible comments about the need to have emergency measures to protect citizens against imminent attack. To prevent turning those emergency measures into legal norms (i.e., turning into tyranny), Ignatieff suggests giving courts greater oversight of executive actions. The problem with this, Rabkin observes, is that courts hardly prove a counterweight to a determined executive. For instance, it was Trudeau who imposed War Measures, and it was Trudeau who gave us the Charter.

More importantly, though, Ignatieff’s internationalism is inherently hostile to the moral claims that a state makes to preserve its citizens. He rejects the notion that a state should prefer to protect its own citizens over non-citizens. Internationalism replaces not nationalism, but the principled protection of the constitution and the state. Rabkin observes:

Indeed, there are many reasons to doubt that any country could survive for very long with this philosophy. Pressed to its logical conclusion, the idea that we should not prefer our own citizens to others would imply that foreigners�??in unlimited numbers�??have as much right to move into our country as do our own citizens who have taken a trip abroad. Pressed again to its logical conclusion, this principle of equality would seem to imply that a wartime commander should be as concerned about the lives of enemy troops as he is about his own. Should every war, then, out of respect for the equality of enemy troops, be fought with self-inhibiting standards to ensure an equality of losses?

Ignatieff subscribes to an ethic that would undermine the ability of a state to protect itself. This is the opposite of realpolitik. Moreover, it isn’t even just war theory, as found in Cicero, Aquinas, or Pufendorf, in which the state must use force that is proportionate to the ends that the violence seeks to obtain. Concern for the enemy comes under the principle of proportionality, not under the clumsy blanket that eclipses the very purpose of war, which begins by distinguishing friends from enemies.

This is why Ignatieff is such a great fit for the Liberals. Martin has just decided that the Canadian state is no longer responsible for protecting Canada.