Document(s) 2 of 21

Ever since I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago in October 1962, I have been interested in challenges at the global scale that could affect the future of humanity. The Cuban Missile Crisis brought home to me how vulnerable we are. Indeed it brought home that we could be dead from causes thousands of miles away with a warning of a maximum of thirty minutes. It was obvious the world was becoming smaller.

As I looked out the window from my apartment in Chicago, I could see children of school age at play in the alley – despite it being a weekday. They weren’t in school. One rarely saw adult men with them – only women. What consequences would that bring? Not far away was the headquarters of a strange group calling themselves the Black Moslems. There was a palpable anger that radiated from there. Where would this lead? Was there not a breaking point in how much difference in wealth and general well-being could be tolerated?

I became increasingly interested in international politics, in particular about how we governed ourselves through international institutions and international law. Hans Morgenthau emphasized to us the importance of national interests. It became clear to me that governments needed interests as an incentive to act, certainly if there were important consequences in acting. Values were important but were not a sufficient condition.

I decided to complete my graduate work at MIT because of its program in strategic studies. Thanks to William Kaufman I became increasingly aware of the consequences of uncertainty, differences in perception and failures in communication. Bill was at the time working part-time in Washington as an adviser to Bob McNamara, the Secretary of Defense. The latter produced a superb DVD called The Fog of War, which includes an insider’s view of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The bottom line emerging from McNamara’s account is that the world was very close to nuclear war. More disturbing still, war could well have occurred not because any state really wanted such a conflict, but instead through inadvertence.

In the following decades, I worked both in positions outside Canada as well in Ottawa. My NATO experience both in the late 1960s and as Ambassador from 1985 to 1990 confirmed in my mind the fragility of the international order. Working in Ottawa in the Privy Council Office taught me a great deal about how governments make decisions. There was an obvious gap between our growing interdependence in the world and our means for governing that interdependence.

In 1994 Prime Minister Jean Chrétien asked me to be Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs and his Personal Representative for the G-7/8 Summits. I restructured the Department of Foreign Affairs so that there would be a strong group capable of dealing with the emerging agenda of non-traditional issues. These ranged from climate change to trans-national organized crime. It became more and more apparent to me that global governance in the various sectors was lagging. It was also clear that attempts to improve global governance were fraught with difficulty – largely stemming from perceptions of national interest that were limited in their time perspective. Perspective was essentially determined by the electoral calendar.

Observing the G-7/8 up close was very valuable. It was clear that leaders had a broader view and were often frustrated by the tunnel vision of their ministers. They were interested in big global issues; one year, for example, there was a focus on the spread of infectious disease. It was also clear that inter-personal dynamics counted for a great deal. They became, more or less, friends; you talk differently to people you see on a regular basis and who call you by your first name.

Imagine my delight, therefore, when I went to see Paul Martin, then Canada’s Finance Minister, and he told me that managing our growing global interdependence was the most important challenge facing the world. Although his portfolio focused on international financial issues, his interest was much broader. When in due course Mr. Martin became Prime Minister, he brought with him a desire to apply the lessons he had learned as one of a group of twenty Finance Ministers to the head of government level. As for me, I left the public service in 1997 to build the Centre for Global Studies at the University of Victoria. Perhaps not surprisingly, given my background, it has focused on issues of global governance.

This book describes the journey of advancing former Prime Minister Martin’s initiative to create an L-20. Or at least it describes what a group of people led by John English and me tried to do both to test the validity of the idea and to broaden its support. Although many of us had governmental experience in our backgrounds, we were no longer part of government. We now lived in the environment of “think tanks”. Our new task was to cast the net wide for useful ideas and bring back what we found to decision-makers, in the hopes that they in turn would be inspired to act.

Particular credit has to go to my friend and colleague, inside and outside government, Barry Carin, who did more work than anyone on this project. He thought through the approach, organized the meetings and wrote the reports.

We must also give thanks to our various sponsors, most importantly the International Development Research Centre and the Canadian International Development Agency.

Paul Martin is no longer active in government. But his conviction that leaders can make things happen that no one else can replicate remains; I share that conviction. Our work now focuses on creating a smaller group of fourteen countries. It may be easier to agree on fourteen to start. The fourteen are the G-8 plus Brazil, India, China, South Africa and Mexico (the BRICSAM countries have been invited to the last couple of G-8 Summits to participate in a few hours of the meeting). That makes 13. We are also including Egypt as it is inconceivable, at least to me, that a new Summit membership could be struck without an Islamic country, preferably one from the Middle East.

I hope this book will be of interest to a variety of readers:

• those interested in global challenges and the gap in global governance;
  
  
• people interested in Summit reform;
  
  
• those who want to know more about what happened to the L-20 idea; and
  
  
• people who want some ideas on how those on the “outside” can influence the “inside”.

We would be delighted to hear what you think; contact us at cfgs@uvic.ca, and we can continue the conversation which this book chronicles.

Note to University Teachers

The information in this book has been developed into an L-20 University Course Package. This Package can be found at two locations on the World Wide Web – the L-20 website itself (http://www.l20.org/learning.php) and the IGLOO online database (http://www.igloo.org/l20project). IGLOO is an online network that facilitates knowledge exchange between individuals and organizations studying, working or advising on global issues.

Executive Director
Centre for Global Studies
University of Victoria

Dr. Gordon Smith

Document(s) 2 of 21