Canada, Britain, And Europe: A Canadian Dilemma, (Part One)

In fact, we tend to ‘decorate’ our relation with Britain for the good reason – partly – that we are a constitutional democracy sharing with other Commonwealth countries a monarch who no one (no matter how much they may hate monarchy) can reprove for failing in her duty as Queen. And the parliamentary system we have in which Cabinet Ministers must be elected from constituencies (not appointed from corporations) and must face daily Question Period in the House of Commons we know is superior to the very strange system in the U.S. where the “king” president appoints his Cabinet from wholly unelected people and never, himself, directly faces questions from the elected representatives of the people. Despite very strong “continentalist” (which means U.S.-loving) pressures to have Canadians show contempt for constitutional monarchy and therefore the possession of a monarch, Canadians stay with the system in part because they feel (even when they don’t think much about it) that our system does something to balance the power of the U.S. in Canada. At the present time U.S. actions in the world force many, many Canadians to a consciousness of the attractiveness of our own system. There is no use in saying that critics of the U.S. are “anti-Americans”, “knee-jerk haters of the U.S.A.” We are in too dark and deep difficulties because of U.S. expansionist policies to pretend on that score. Concern about the U.S. in Canada is real, and it has a real basis. No one denies that ten years ago the present intensity of Canadian concern about “a U.S. gone off the rails” could hardly have been imagined. But it is there now, and it is real. Reaching out for balance, a number of Canadians try to comfort themselves with Britain and Europe. “The U.S. is getting pretty bad”, they say, “but Britain, Europe, the European Union are creating a balancing force, an alternative to the insanely capitalist, increasingly militaristic, and violent U.S.A. It may be bent on turning the populations of the world into brainless, underpaid, insecure slaveys for giant corporations. But not Britain, not the European Union. Work to create the European Union was begun in 1957 and has continued to create a balance to the U.S.A. Hasn’t it?” The truth about anglo-Canada’s “motherland”, Britain, and French Canada’s “motherland”, France, is not, alas, nearly as comfortable as some of us would like to think. Let’s look at Britain in this column, Europe in a later one. Britain – in the history of Canada – has long been an uncertain ally. But we know that for a long time Britain “ruled the waves” and dissuaded the U.S. from making a military grab at Canada. The British empire was founded upon and maintained by sea power. The U.S. empire was founded upon and is maintained by air power. In fact, British sea power had much to do with the ‘Englishing’ of Canada. Captain Cook mapped the St. Lawrence River, and General Wolfe sailed up it to seize Canada for England, just for instance. After 1760, however, Britain found the defense of Canada a huge and threatening expense. By the mid-nineteenth century Britain was waffling. How much was it worth to equip thousands of troops, ship them from Britain across the Atlantic, and then march them to a theatre of war over hundreds of miles of rough terrain before even meeting the U.S. enemy? Too much, England concluded. And so Britain talked away Canadian territory to U.S. advantage over and over – in New Brunswick, the Alaska Panhandle, in the Oregon territory, in the Gulf Islands. In that last “dispute” the U.S. did what it had been doing at the edges of U.S. settlement all over lower North America. In 1859 it landed troops on San Juan Island in a familiar, phony move to provide “protection” for U.S. settlers. The British reacted promptly and the disagreement continued until 1872 when the German Emperor “impartially” assigned the island to the U.S. in what the Cambridge History of the British Empire calls a “narrow” interpretation. As a result of those historic giveaways Canadians have long had to ask where Britain’s allegiance lies between Canada and the U.SA. The latest developments, regrettably, leave no doubt. How many Canadians know that from the beginning of the Cold War (beginning almost with the close of the Second World War in 1945), U.S. governments sought actively to influence the direction of both major political parties in Britain. (See Keith Dixon, “The London-Washington Holy Alliance”, Le Monde diplomatique, Sept 04 30-31, my translations throughout). Particularly, U.S. governments sought to influence the right-wing of the Labour Party, even including some financing. The U.S. used cultural and political cooperative schemes like The Trade Union Committee for European and Transatlantic Unity and the British-American Project for a Successor Generation in the 1960s and 70s to target potential Labour leaders. “A quarter of a century later, those targeted people are directors of ‘new Labour’ in the group that surrounds British prime minister Tony Blair”. A love affair began in the 1980s of Labour notables with the U.S. Democratic Party. In 1993 Tony Blair and Gordon Brown went to Washington to meet people in charge of Bill Clinton’s electoral campaign. And in 1996 Blair returned to Washington under the aegis of the Democratic Party to reassure them in case of the Labour victory, which came about in 1997. From there, the Labour Party in Britain jettisoned more and more of its Left structure and took on more and more U.S. policies. .Direct contact with Blair in Washington again in 1998 was connected to phrases like “the third way” and “beyond the right and the left”, the last, incidentally, the title of a book published by ‘new Labour’ theoretician Anthony Giddens in 1994. From the U.S. came ideas that were so-called “Labour initiatives”: workfare (called “welfare to work”), the notion of zero-tolerance, harsher political penalties, private prison management … and more. Tony Blair has such a tight relation with U.S. government that some commentators “claim even that London has given up its political sovereignty”. That seems to be the case. With born-again religious zeal, Blair now has insisted or insists (a) upon the ‘moral right’ to interfere in “the conflicts of others” (b) the right, from 1998 onwards, to bomb Iraq without U.N. sanction (c) that there might be “many other battles: before the drama [of Iraq and ‘terrorism’] is finished”, and (d) above all, that the U.S. is moral and must be followed as world leader. In 2003, before the U.S. Congress Blair said: “No theory of international politics is more dangerous than one which claims it is necessary to balance U.S. power”. As Keith Dixon remarks, George W. Bush and Tony Blair have a substratum of common “values”. That substratum is a belief in “economic liberalism cross-bred with Christianity…. The two leaders not only believe in the ‘free market’, but also in the family, in social order and social discipline, and in a divine authority who is the soul judge of the good as Mr. Blair imprudently declared when he was asked about the British losses in Iraq.” Watching the growing might of the U.S.A. – pushing British imperial power aside –the British slowly developed what they chose to call their “special relation” with the U.S.A. After the Second World War that claim intensified. For some years the Labour Party was skeptical about the U.S. But the long U.S. policy of muted interference with British government paid off. Openly fawning on the U.S. and eager to send Britons to fight U.S. imperial wars, Tony Blair is the outcome. There is no move on the part of the present British government to forge (perhaps with Europe) an independent force, critical of foolish U.S. actions, and determined to be economically free of U.S. pressures. For Canada, Britain provides no balance, no associations, no parliamentary cooperative groups, no task forces of businessmen to balance increasing U.S. imperial aggressiveness. It provides no source of power that in unified action might slow and/or modify U.S. designs for the Atlantic community. That fact constitutes a deep threat to Canada, for the long ‘natural’ connection of what Winston Churchill called “the English-speaking peoples” can be used to railroad a lonely Canada into giving away more and more sovereignty. That is already happening, and the Paul Martin government is showing no sign of resistance. “Well then”, you say, “remember Europe (Germany and France, at least) battered the U.S. before it went into Iraq and those countries refused to participate. Remember – as Bernard Cassen writes (Le Monde diplomatique Sept 04 30) - Europe doesn’t share U.S. belief in individual rights before collective rights, hyper-nationalism, a sense of global superiority, elite indifference to inequalities, the death penalty, refusal of international co-operation as revealed in the Kyoto accord, the Court of International Justice, and so on”. “Surely”, you say, “Europe is, therefore, building an independent force based upon the great ‘single market of 350 millions (and many, many more lining up to join)’. Surely,” you say, “Canadian hope can be pinned to a strong, united, economically and militarily independent Europe acting as a significant break on U.S. adventurism and violence.” Well. Sorry. It isn’t so. The European Union is not what it seems. To explain that will take another column. It will explain why Canada is more and more tightly squeezed in a transatlantic vice, a vice that intends the people of Canada no good. [For those who might wish to pursue Keith Dixon’s investigations, he is the author of a book, La Mule de Troie. Blair,l’Europe et le nouvel ordre americain, editions du Croquant, coll. “Savoir/Agir” Broisseau, 2004. The book doesn’t seem to have been translated, but its title translated is The Trojan Mule. Blair, Europe and the new American order.]