Document(s) 3 of 10

Canada is in search of new roles and a new policy framework in the transition period known, for now, as the post-Cold War era. This period is less than a decade old, but it has been tumultuous for many key foreign-policy actors. With the pace of change being so rapid, the media and the many new voices now engaged in international affairs being so impatient, and the pursuit of interests being so perilous, some weary policymakers might be tempted to identify this period as a far more confusing

time for Canadian diplomacy than any during the 40 years of the Cold War.

This volume deals with selected aspects of Canada’s engagement with the new international environment. Specifically, it examines Canada’s involvement in the resolution of prolonged deadly conflicts in Nicaragua, Cambodia, and Somalia. We refer to these international operations under the United Nations (UN) umbrella as missions for peace. The study focuses primarily on Canada’s role in these missions in light of Canadian security interests. However, in keeping with international trends, security is defined broadly to include issues pertaining to economic and social development. By examining several of Canada’s foreign-policy missions in the post-Cold War era, the book seeks to lay out potential guidelines for future decision-making.

By way of introduction to these themes, it is important to acknowledge the radical nature of the current era. The chief developments of the new era are manifold:

• The stunning collapse of the Soviet bloc and the worldwide disillusionment with the Marxist–Leninist doctrine that had exerted such a powerful influence in much of the Third World during the Cold War;
• The emergence of the United States as the sole superpower, albeit a Lilliputian one constrained by many strings;
• The spread of capitalism around the world, accompanied by the emergence of global economic competition as the new leitmotif of international relations;
• The concomitant decline of the sovereignty of nation-states;
• The proliferation of international actors and policy issues on the global stage; and
• The increasing appeal of nationalist or even racialist solutions to the problems of order and authority in many parts of the world, accompanied by a new and devastating trade in arms.

The effects throughout the world of two of these developments — the end of Soviet power and the rise of globalism and economic competition — can only be described as revolutionary.

It is true that the Cold War era had its own insecurities and anxieties; nevertheless, the relative order and clarity of the Cold War system — with its hierarchies of power and its well- established ways of

doing things — have given way to a less stable and less secure environment that is fluid, complicated by multipolarity, and confused by the multiplicity of actors. For many of the foreign-policy elite, the new system seems systemless and is a sobering reminder of a lost discipline. Others consider the end of the Cold War a welcome relief: it brought an overdue liberation of millions of oppressed peoples; an end to the perversities of superpower competition and the arms race; and prospects for greater consensus within the UN Security Council.

It turns out that both the optimists and the pessimists are correct. The immense Soviet empire has receded, the arms competition between the superpowers has ceased, and agreements to reduce arms stocks are gradually being implemented. However, vacuums of power dot the world, the lingering aftereffects of the Cold War and the withdrawal of superpower influence and interest. As societies and states adjust to new power realities, conflicts within states abound. Indeed, the sources of conflict and violence during the post-Cold War era have been primarily within states. This is exemplified by the breakdown or weakening of many nation-states with the emergence of identity groups, each with its own brand of exclusiveness. Regarding the nature of this conflict, Ignatieff (1997, p. 59) wrote the following:

Of the nearly fifty conflicts today, few conform to the classic pattern of professional war between states. They include armed insurrections and guerrilla campaigns against unpopular regimes, ethnic-minority uprisings against majority rule, and jackal gangs roaming freely amid failed states.

Accompanied by breakdowns in civil authority, vast refugee movements and displacements of peoples within their own borders, and the rise of ethnic and religious fanaticism, these phenomena have created serious regional instabilities in various parts of the world.

In part, the end of the Cold War served to reinforce trends with deep historical roots. Since World War II the number of states has proliferated enormously as the British and other European empires gradually contracted. Fully two-thirds of the contemporary roster of states has been established since 1945. At the beginning of the period, the world had barely 60 states. Through decolonization, that number increased to almost 160 by the end of the Cold War in 1988. More recently, with the breakup of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, that number has risen to 180 and is still climbing.

Unfortunately, the legacy of the colonial period has been bitter divisions. The borders for most of Africa’s roughly 50 states, for example, were drawn up by the great powers at the Berlin Conference in

1884, with little concern for the ethnic, linguistic, or cultural affinities of Africans. The borders of most of the modern Middle East were drawn equally artificially, deriving from the division of spoils between the French and British after the Ottoman Empire crumbled during World War I. Likewise, the borders of the newly independent former Soviet republics are tentative and tenuous, especially as so many ethnic Russians now live in “the near abroad,” beyond Russia’s frontiers, a situation that is a persistent source of tension.

Gurr (1994), in a recent study based on an extensive worldwide survey of “minorities at risk,” found that “the increase in serious ethnopolitical conflict since the late 1980s is a continuation of a trend that first became evident in the 1960s. The deconstruction of the Soviet bloc nudged the trend upward but did not create it” (Gurr pp. 2–3). Gurr also noted that “the principal issue of the most intense new conflicts is contention for state power among communal groups in Third-World societies.” Moreover,

Power transitions within states have been the principal, immediate condition of civil and communal warfare, past and present. Two kinds of power transitions have increased in the aftermath of the Cold War: 20 new or redesigned states have come into existence; and a number of states are experimenting with new democratic institutions.

In many cases, nationalism is providing a new ideology and the new framework that undergirds the exercise of power (Berlin 1992, p. 251):

The rise of nationalism is today a world-wide phenomenon, probably the strongest single factor in the newly established states, and in some cases among the minority populations of the older nations.  . . . It might be said that this is an automatic psychological accompaniment of liberation from foreign rule — a natural reaction  . . . against oppression or humiliation of a society that possesses national characteristics.

The trouble is that this 19th-century doctrine has been a persistent source of strife (Kedourie 1966, p. 115):

Nationalism enormously complicates the relations of different groups in mixed areas. Since it advocates a recasting of frontiers and a redistribution of political power to conform with the demands of a particular nationality, it tends to disrupt whatever equilibrium may have been reached between different groups, to reopen settled questions and to renew strife.  . . . Far from increasing political stability and political liberty, nationalism in mixed areas makes for tension and mutual hatred.

The revival of nationalism is not the only important source of discord in the contemporary world. Hoffman (1995, p. 167) wrote that

There is another enemy in today’s world: not the violence that results from the clash of mighty powers or from the imposition of the power of the strong on the weak, but the violence that results from chaos from below. The world today is threatened by the disintegration of power — by anomie, which denotes the absence of norms but can also refer to the collision of norms.

In addition, the increasing incidence of irregular forces, always renowned for their savagery but made more vicious by the devastating effects of modern weaponry, has brought new terrors to these conflicts (Hoffman 1995, p. 61):

In the nineteen-nineties, most of the fighting is done by irregulars — the casualties of collapsing societies — or by paramilitary gangs that combine banditry with soldiery. As war passes out of the hands of the state into those of warlords, the rituals of restraint associated with the profession of arms also disintegrate.

THE INTERNATIONAL RESPONSE: AN AGENDA FOR PEACE

The new intrastate conflicts have spawned many requests for international assistance. Both the UN and the nongovernmental-organization (NGO) community have tried their hands at filling these vacuums of power. The results have been mixed but generally disappointing.

Initially, the international community was very enthusiastic about the use of UN peacekeeping to ensure the delivery of humanitarian aid and to restore order. However, confusion over mandates and rules of engagement resulted in a number of exceedingly treacherous situations — Bosnia, Rwanda, and Somalia are examples. In such cases, combatants are diffuse and difficult to identify; a politically and militarily enforceable cease-fire is often lacking; the central government is weak or nonexistent; and famine, disease, and population displacement are endemic. Such anarchic conditions of recent conflicts have compelled the international community to become deeply involved in the internal affairs of nominally sovereign states.

Some of these missions for peace have been obliged to function in a state-substitution mode, maintaining surveillance over extensive land areas and multiple factions. They have had enhanced requirements, involving an array of military and nonmilitary institutions, because they

are complex and multifaceted and because, at times, their objectives have been those of nation-building. In Cambodia, El Salvador, Mozambique, and Namibia, the aim was to provide the basis for the creation or re-creation of national institutions capable of running a modern-day state. Boutros-Ghali (1995, para. 21) detailed the new requirements:

The United Nations found itself asked to undertake an unprecedented variety of functions: the supervision of cease-fires; the regroupment and demobilization of forces; their reintegration into civilian life and the destruction of their weapons; the design and implementation of de-mining programmes; the return of refugees and displaced persons; the provision of humanitarian assistance; the supervision of existing administrative structures; the establishment of new police forces; the verification of respect for human rights; the design and supervision of constitutional, judicial and electoral reforms; the observation, supervision and even organization and conduct of elections; and the co-ordination of support for economic rehabilitation and reconstruction.

These interventions worked reasonably well because there was an international consensus on what should and could be done. In Rwanda and Somalia, however, intervention came in the aftermath of a complete collapse of central authority but without any clear international consensus on what should be done. It is no surprise that in these cases the operations have been judged to be failures.

The major attempt to date to develop an international policy framework for such interventions was the position paper, An Agenda for Peace, prepared for the Security Council by the former UN Secretary-General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali (1992). The paper identified four measures the UN might take in response to actual or emerging conflicts:

• Preventive diplomacy — This involves diplomatic action, generally taken at the earliest possible opportunity and aimed at preventing disputes from arising between parties and at containing or resolving disputes before they reach the conflict stage. Article 33 of the UN Charter describes a number of available instruments, including negotiation, enquiry, mediation, conciliation, arbitration, judicial settlement, and resort to regional agencies or agreements or other peaceful means.
• Peacemaking — This was defined (Boutros-Ghali 1992, p. 11) as “action to bring hostile parties to agreement, essentially through peaceful means foreseen in Chapter VI of the Charter of the UN.” Boutros-Ghali’s recommendations focused on mediation and negotiation, greater use of the World Court,
  and the amelioration of situations of potential conflict through international assistance in, for example, the resettlement of displaced persons. These constitute the same methods as described above in article 33 of the UN Charter for preventive diplomacy, but they are applied after a dispute has crossed the threshold into armed conflict. It is also common (Evans 1993) to differentiate between stage-I peacemaking efforts, which aim directly at the cessation of hostilities and stabilization of the situation on the ground, and stage-II efforts, which aim at securing a durable political settlement and may be undertaken in parallel with peacekeeping efforts.
• Peacekeeping — This was described (Boutros-Ghali 1992, p. 11) as “the deployment of a UN presence in the field, hitherto with the consent of all the parties concerned, normally involving UN military and/or police personnel and, frequently, civilians as well.” This passage alludes to the recent expansion of peace-keeping activities to include nonmilitary activities. In Supplement to An Agenda for Peace, Boutros-Ghali (1995) described recent mandates that led peacekeeping operations to forfeit three “particularly important principles,” namely, consent of the parties, impartiality, and the nonuse of force except in self-defence: “these have been the tasks of protecting humanitarian operations during continuing warfare, protecting civilian populations in designated safe areas, and pressing the parties to achieve national reconciliation at a pace faster than they were ready to accept” (Boutros-Ghali 1995, para. 34).

  In the same document, Boutros-Ghali (1995, para. 36) argued for a clear distinction between peacekeeping and enforcement action: “peacekeeping and the use of force (other than in self-defense) should be seen as alternative techniques and not as adjacent points on a continuum, permitting easy transition from one to another.”

• Peacebuilding — This was an important addition made by the Secretary-General to the sequence of conflict-controlling mechanisms at the disposal of the UN. The term refers to strategies aimed at ensuring that disputes and armed conflicts do not arise in the first place or, if do they arise, that they do not recur (Evans 1993). The idea is to prevent the recurrence of violence by moving beyond remedial measures and venturing into the broad area linking conflict with economic and
  social development. Peacebuilding refers to national and international efforts to foster economic development, institution-building, and civil society, in other words, the creation of stable and sustainable states. Preconflict peacebuilding concerns long-term social, economic, and political strategies to help states deal with emerging threats and disputes. By contrast, postconflict peacebuilding involves rehabilitation and reconstruction, institution-building, and specific programs for such purposes as de-mining.

Each of the four measures addresses a particular stage in a conflict’s developmental cycle: preventive diplomacy is undertaken during the build-up to conflict but before armed conflict erupts; peacemaking and peacekeeping are undertaken after a conflict has crossed the threshold of armed hostilities; and peacebuilding may be undertaken in the preconflict stage or, as emphasized in An Agenda for Peace (Boutros-Ghali 1992), after a conflict or crisis, to help ensure there is no recurrence. Collectively, the four measures are intended to be a more or less comprehensive system for conflict resolution and prevention, and it is this full range of interventions that is meant to be covered by the term missions for peace.

An Agenda for Peace advanced a broad approach to security, emphasizing that conflict is often the consequence of human underdevelopment: social injustice, political oppression, poverty, and economic despair (Boutros-Ghali 1992, p. 2):

The sources of conflict and war are pervasive and deep. To reach them will require our utmost effort to enhance respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, to promote sustainable economic and social development for wider prosperity, to alleviate distress and to curtail the existence and use of massively destructive weapons.

Useful as it is, Boutros-Ghali’s position paper contains a number of conceptual ambiguities and contradictions. One is the Secretary-General’s adherence to the concept of state sovereignty, despite an acknowledgment of the erosion of sovereignty in the post-Cold War era. One critic pointed out that the paper neglects to mention those cases in which sovereignty is “superseded by new international forms of behaviour just as it is in global environmental politics or finance” (Weiss 1993, p. 8). The actions in Bosnia and Somalia certainly departed from traditional practice: “in neither case was international intervention grounded on self-defense or consent; in both cases the grounds were largely, if not entirely, humanitarian” (Jackson 1993, p. 604).

Jackson (1993, p. 583) outlined three justifications for overriding the principle of nonintervention:

(1) self-defence: the intervention is taken for valid reasons of national security or intervention is taken for valid reasons of national security or international peace and security; (2) consent: the intervention is at the request of the government of the target state — perhaps to assist that government to counter a prior intervention or to defend itself against an armed rebellion; (3) humanitarianism: the intervention is to protect the civilian population of the target state (or segments of it) from grave abuses at the hands of its own government or antigovernment guerrillas or as a result of domestic anarchy.

In Bosnia and Somalia, the concept of state sovereignty was inapplicable. Nevertheless, there appeared to be a demand for international organizations to impinge on what, until that time, had been regarded as the sovereign rights of governments. In short, the general good (international peace and security) requires some curtailment of national sovereignty.

Another limitation of Boutros-Ghali’s (1992) An Agenda for Peace is that the primary focus in securing peace is on the state. The rather perfunctory treatment of the role of NGOs, for example, reflects the tension that persists between the UN and the NGO community. Yet, the involvement of NGOs is essential to mounting successful missions for peace; “conflict management must be conceived broadly enough to include a host of such non-governmental actors as clans and the International Committee of the Red Cross” (Weiss 1993, p. 8). The challenge of the new era is to sort out the roles of different actors in light of their respective interests and capabilities. Boutros-Ghali paid little attention to the interrelationship of the various components of the peace process or to the optimum division of labour. The peacebuilding process seems particularly well suited to NGOs; peacemaking seems essentially a diplomatic–political activity; and peacekeeping, in its traditional sense, is chiefly a military activity.

The multiplicity of mission objectives poses a still more difficult issue. By their very nature, conflict situations send urgent but often contradictory messages, to which is added a cacophony of external voices and interests. In Rwanda, for example, the priorities were to feed needy people, stop the killing, deny legitimacy and impunity to the mass killers, prevent flows of refugees, obtain a cease-fire, and obtain a political settlement. As the case studies in this book make clear, failure to define objectives has been one of the greatest weaknesses of missions for peace.

DEFINING MISSIONS FOR PEACE

Missions for peace is not a recognized term in the lexicon of international relations. The generic term the UN uses to encompass its expanded range of interventions is peace operations. However, these UN operations always involve the military, which gives short shrift to peace-building, as well as to other activities that do not necessarily involve the military at all. Accordingly, we coined the term missions for peace to describe a wide spectrum of multilateral and multidimensional engagements, involving both civil and military elements, that have been developed in an effort to prevent, contain, or resolve conflict. Missions for peace are especially, but not necessarily, associated with the UN, the world’s principal multilateral instrument for the maintenance of international peace and security. They are also almost invariably led by countries of the developed or industrialized world, so they tend to reflect the values of Western or liberal-democratic societies.

Such missions are often regarded as an outgrowth of the Cold War innovation of peacekeeping, and peacekeeping is certainly a component. But in many respects, this is an unhelpful connection that has been made simply because peacekeeping has been the chief form of UN intervention and one in which Canada has developed a substantial expertise and reputation. Classical peacekeeping conformed to rather rigid rules: consent of the parties involved in the conflict; use of lightly armed infantry units and limited logistical support; use of weapons only for self-defence; and highly restrictive rules of engagement, the guidelines for soldiers’ use of force.

By contrast, missions for peace cover a range of interventions apart from traditional peacekeeping. Their objectives are multiple and, therefore, often ambitious and complex; the interval of intervention is potentially longer; and they are multidimensional, sometimes involving the military but also calling on a variety of civilian skills and expertise. Such missions may now include monitoring of elections, training of civilian police forces, maintenance of law and order, protection of human rights, provision of safe conduct for refugees, development efforts, restoration of infrastructure, de-mining, and humanitarian activities. They are nothing if not ambitious, and the international community is just beginning to learn what makes certain interventions work and what makes others problematic to the point of failure. The issue of objectives has already been mentioned: these multilateral responses attempt to address the underlying causes of conflict, in the

hope that a firmer foundation will be laid for durable peace. This is a bold ambition and the subject of considerable controversy.

Traces of an earlier way of thinking about international relations can be found in the concept of missions for peace. Their appeal to Canada arises still from the opportunity they afford to project Canadian values abroad. They build on two Canadian foreign-policy vocations, at least as they evolved during the Cold War: peacekeeping and development assistance. They reflect the now general acceptance of the interrelatedness of the various components of the peace process, both at the conceptual level and at the practical level. In policy terms, this should translate into greater congruence between formerly discrete elements in Canadian foreign policy, specifically peacekeeping and development assistance. In operational terms, missions for peace represent a hybrid of diplomatic and military conflict-resolution techniques, on the one hand, and international-development concerns applied to situations of conflict, on the other.

THE CHANGING INTERNATIONAL CLIMATE

Conceptually appealing as missions for peace may be, there is at present no policy or strategy for where or when they should take place. UN peace operations have been largely reactive, responding only after international media and public opinion have generated strong pressure. A more rational and comprehensive system of engagement remains at best a gleam in the eye of a few middle powers like Canada. To be sure, An Agenda for Peace (Boutros-Ghali 1992) generated a fair bit of interest and remains a key document in multilateral maintenance of international peace and security. Boutros-Ghali (1995, para. 44) even mused about the possibility of a rapid-reaction force for the UN:

Such a force would be the Security Council’s strategic reserve for deployment when there was an emergency need for peace-keeping troops. It might comprise battalion-sized units from a number of countries. These units would be trained to the same standards, use the same operating procedures, be equipped with integrated communications equipment, and take part in joint exercises at regular intervals. They would be stationed in their home countries but maintained at a high state of readiness.

Three member states — Canada, Denmark, and the Netherlands — all prepared studies on various aspects of the concept of rapid reaction. Canada’s study was the most comprehensive; it shrewdly contained a

number of relatively modest and practical suggestions for improving UN operations, and so it has elicited considerable interest and some action. Yet, the central idea appears for now to be a nonstarter, not unlike Security Council reform: a laudable notion but unattainable in the current climate.

At the UN the climate has changed from the brief euphoria of the early 1990s to an atmosphere of caution and diminished expectations. This reflects contemporary realities, in which the major powers appear to be retrenching in various areas of the world. They are no longer willing or able “to intervene unilaterally with arms or military forces in proxy wars or conflicts far from home” (Diehl 1993, p. 1). Nor are the major powers eager to consider bold new multilateral initiatives, as they are fatigued and rather sceptical from operations already undertaken, and the Cold War no longer provides the glue or the framework that justifies a common and concerted approach to international problems. The notion of a public good has come under sustained assault in Western societies in recent years, and this trend is paralleled on the international scene by increased doubt and scepticism about investments in common interests such as development assistance. There is far less conviction today that national self-interest requires investment in international or multilateral causes. Other factors, such as financial constraints and increasing social problems within donor countries, have further weakened the attention given to problems abroad.

Virtually all donor countries are reducing their levels of official development assistance (ODA), creating a serious development-aid crisis. Many developing countries no longer have the geopolitical significance they enjoyed during the era of bipolar competition, when states were propped up by the superpowers. Developing countries now compete with eastern European states for economic aid, with the latter tending to have stronger political constituencies in donor countries. At the same time, aid is increasingly seen as a question of emergency and humanitarian assistance. Mark Duffield (cited in Pallister 1994, p. 7), senior lecturer in the School of Public Policy at Birmingham University and consultant to the United Nations Children’s Fund, made the following comment:

What we are seeing is something unique in the history of warfare — the integration of humanitarian aid into the dynamics of conflict.  . . . Conventional wisdom is how and when to intervene. But my view is that relief systems are a symptom of disengagement with the South. Overseas development assistance is either stagnant or declining while humanitarian aid is rising.

A new political framework for international cooperation is needed. The aid community acknowledges that, given the new international political conditions, a basic restructuring of ODA is necessary. New thinking and strategies in development assistance have emerged around the notion of sustainable human development. It may be that the best that can be hoped for in the medium term is the selective use of multilateral instruments, along with such mechanisms as can be devised to help the international community choose its interventions well. This is what an editor of Foreign Policy called “opportunistic idealism,” a pragmatic response to the conundrum of UN overstretch (Maynes 1993, p. 20).

THE CANADIAN RESPONSE

In Canada, the climate of opinion has also changed. The Canadian government is obliged to deal with a much more sceptical public than in the past. Neither peacekeeping nor development assistance is any longer regarded as a panacea, or even as particularly successful. The peace operations in Rwanda, Somalia, and the former Yugoslavia are regarded as extremely flawed at best, and this has done nothing to burnish the image of UN peacekeeping. As for ODA, Canada like other donor countries is suffering from aid fatigue. Canadians feel less certainty than ever about the effectiveness of aid delivery and far more cynicism about the dependency of the beneficiaries, which the upsurge in humanitarian emergencies has only underscored.

Many Canadians are not convinced that we can or should attempt to cure the world’s ills. Canada’s resources are now stretched to the limit, they claim, and the country should not be in the business of “pouring money down sinkholes.” A kinder, gentler way of framing the argument might be to insist that the cutbacks instituted by the government are necessary under the circumstances and that no new expenditures should be contemplated until fiscal order is restored to Canada’s own house. The question for those who value Canada’s international involvement is whether voices such as these represent the silent majority or merely a disaffected minority.

Canadians also have less assurance today that our troops are ideally suited to the new generation of peacekeeping, as the grinding controversy over the Somalia affair and inquiry demonstrate. It is doubtful that Canadians are entirely comfortable with the expanding scope and changing nature of missions for peace. The fact that times

have changed and that a different sort of force may be called for is bound to raise concerns.

These developments are provoking some rethinking of Canada’s international involvements and the way these are organized within the federal bureaucracy. During the Cold War, elements of Canada’s external relations were distinct, particularly development assistance and peacekeeping. Development assistance has been channeled through the Canadian International Development Agency, whereas peacekeeping activities have been the domain of the Department of Foreign Affairs (policy) and the Department of National Defence (operations). Since the Cold War there has been greater recognition of the interdependence of security and development concerns, and the international political climate has been favourable toward a more integrated approach to conflict situations. Continuing obstacles to cooperation take the form of differing corporate cultures, institutional rivalry, and budgetary battles over a shrinking resource pie (with both defence and aid budgets under the knife).

Nevertheless, the pressures on Canada to rethink its approach to international peace and security and to rationalize its overseas commitments may yet encourage a cooperative approach. This was the approach suggested by the Special Parliamentary Joint Committee Reviewing Canada’s Foreign Policy in 1994 (SJCRCFP 1994, p. 19):

What Canada can do is to choose when possible those operations which make best use of the things Canadians do best (e.g. highly professional military skills, air transport and traffic control, logistics, engineering and communications, medical teams, policing and civilian mediation). It may be possible, for example, to combine elements of the “vanguard” concept with elements of an enhanced civilian–military approach, so that Canada could help the UN to intervene swiftly, but could then contribute a smaller force to interface with civilian actors for the longer haul. Such an approach would probably mean limiting Canadian involvement to fewer missions but with more significant participation in each.

To improve cooperation and coordination among the international, national, government, and nongovernment actors, the committee (SJCRCFP 1994, p. 19) cited suggestions made by a witness for “a program of personnel secondments, a systematic exchange of information, and the establishment of an ongoing tripartite liaison body or roundtable to follow Canada’s participation in recent humanitarian operations.” A brief prepared by CARE Canada (Cooperative for American Relief Everywhere) urged a rational division of labour among people with the skills and specialities and the organizations currently

participating in such missions (CARE Canada 1994; see also Schmite 1995). Thus far, none of these suggestions have been taken up.

For the Chrétien government, cutting the deficit has taken precedence over other considerations. Net ODA decreased from $2.5 billion in the 1993/94 fiscal year to $2.1 billion in the 1996/97 fiscal year, and the government also pared the National Defence budget. At the same time, the government has been actively engaged in thinking about the new generation of peace operations and in participating in several of them. The harrowing experience of Rwanda seared the consciences of a number of highly placed officials. Also, in the government statement on foreign policy, which was tabled in the House of Commons in February 1995, the following reference was made (GOC 1995a, p. 27):

Serious shortcomings in UN capabilities  . . . have been highlighted by slow and hesitant decision-making in the UN that delayed deployment of personnel at the outset of UN involvement in Somalia in 1992, and again in Rwanda in the spring of 1994, when urgent reinforcement of the UN’s presence on the ground could not be achieved in time to forestall massive loss of life.

Out of this experience came the government’s decision to undertake a study of a UN rapid-reaction capability. Foreign Minister André Ouellet (1994) told the UN General Assembly that “recent peacekeeping missions have shown that the traditional approach no longer applies.” The study, presented to the UN in September 1994, recommended closer civil–military cooperation in pursuit of common goals in future missions (GOC 1995b, p. 66):

The more complex missions of the 1990s have already demonstrated the importance of a comprehensive approach to peacekeeping, in which military and civilian staffs, drawn from a number of organizations and agencies, some governmental, some inter-governmental, some non-governmental, work to common objectives. Peacekeeping is no longer a purely military vocation, and humanitarian assistance, legal affairs, human rights, electoral assistance, and other elements have become integral parts of the peacekeeping equation.

In addition, Canada has been actively engaged in a variety of operations to restore democracy and to assist in institution-building. In Haiti, Canada initially participated in an international maritime embargo to ensure that cargo bound for the country did not violate UN sanctions. Since then Canadian troops, police, and civilians have been involved in leadership roles in efforts to assist the Haitian government in the professionalization of its police, maintenance of a secure environment, national reconciliation, and economic rehabilitation.

These efforts have been clear instances of the government’s and particularly Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy’s keen interest in peacebuilding.

The Canadian government also contributed significantly to the UN multinational force organized in late November and early December 1996 in a desperate effort to avert a major human tragedy in Zaire. This mission was intended to facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid by relief organizations, as well as to facilitate the voluntary repatriation of refugees and the return of displaced persons by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. With the massive voluntary flow of refugees from Zaire back to Rwanda, however, the mission’s mandate was undermined, and the force was disbanded. According to The New York Times (DePalma 1997, p. 16), “there were clear signs that troops were not properly trained or equipped for the task, and officials breathed a sigh of relief when the mission was called off.”

Foreign Minister Axworthy, in a speech at York University on 30 October 1996, provided some insights into his approach to the new concept of peacebuilding. The Minister observed that the international community had begun to reconsider the whole concept of security and that out of this two key concepts had emerged: human security and peacebuilding. The former embraces “fundamental freedoms, rule of law, good governance, sustainable development and social equity” (Axworthy 1996). He made the point that if peace is to be restored and sustained, human security must be guaranteed every bit as much as military security is. Peacebuilding enters the picture at this point, described as a “package of measures” to strengthen and solidify peace by “building a sustainable infrastructure of human security” (Axworthy 1996). It aims to put in place the minimal conditions under which a country can take charge of its own destiny and under which social, political, and economic development becomes a possibility (Axworthy 1996):

I see peacebuilding as casting a lifeline to foundering societies struggling to end the cycle of violence, restore civility and get back on their feet. After the fighting has stopped and the immediate humanitarian needs have been addressed, there exists a brief critical period when a country sits balanced on a fulcrum. Tilted the wrong way, it retreats into conflict. But with the right help, delivered during that brief, critical window of opportunity, it will move towards peace and stability.

Axworthy’s speech left hanging a fundamental question: Is peace-building simply development cooperation under the extreme circumstances of war or is it a new form of emergency assistance that specializes in rebuilding social and political infrastructure? In his

speech, the Minister leaned toward the latter view. This would seem to be confirmed by discussions he conducted with the Japanese in April 1997 about the possibility of civilian rapid-response teams as a counterpart to a UN military rapid-reaction capability (McKenna 1997). Such an undertaking could include collaboration on joint training of local police, judges, and human-rights monitors or administrators. Axworthy was quoted (McKenna 1997) as saying that “unless there is the capacity to quickly get engaged after a cease-fire, you then lose whatever momentum there is and a lot of the problems reemerge.”

Nevertheless, experience teaches us to be very modest in our expectations of how much difference peacebuilding will make to countries in conflict. In the main, peacebuilding should be seen as the continuation of development assistance in circumstances of deadly conflict. Seen in this light, it is not something new or original: it finds its roots in the period of reconstruction and development after World War II, the most successful experiment in peacebuilding, bar none. The lessons from that period serve as a sobering reminder of what we can expect from contemporary peacebuilding activities. Political will and policy coherence are essential. Moreover, peacebuilding works best when married to economic recovery and large, sustained infusions of outside assistance. The fact that these conditions do not normally obtain in contemporary peacebuilding reminds us that the modesty of our expectations is unavoidable.

THE CASE STUDIES

The case studies that follow were conducted in the context of the changing international climate to which we referred earlier, namely, a more sober, morning-after appreciation of the constraints on missions for peace. The idealism that was embodied in these international interventions has now met repeated, harsh tests of reality arising from, among other things, obdurate forces of history, shifting and contradictory foreign-policy objectives, and organizational roadblocks and potholes. The earlier hope that the international community could put together a conflict-resolution toolbox now seems rather naive.

The purpose of the case studies was to explore the lessons that may be learned from three of the missions for peace that engaged the international community in the past 10 years, namely, Nicaragua, Cambodia, and Somalia. All three missions contributed to the development of a more sober assessment of the prospects for international interventions to

end conflict and make peace. We asked each of the authors to provide a general review of the missions for peace while focusing their attention on what they regard as a critical determining factor in shaping such missions.

In the first of the case studies, Andrés Pérez argues that the historical roots of conflict — and the historical constraints on peace — must be understood if the international community is to have any chance to meaningfully contribute to the resolution of conflict. In the case of Nicaragua, the long history of outside intervention in the internal politics of the country has meant that a genuine national politics of negotiation and accommodation was never able to develop. Professor Pérez dwells on this point because, as he argues, missions for peace tend to rest on a naive faith in techniques such as peacekeeping and development assistance as instruments for overcoming history. In place of this historical conceit, he offers this more modest hope (Pérez, this volume, p. 23):

A mission for peace should not be conceived of as a form of intervention designed to solve the social, political, and economic problems of a polarized society. The most that missions for peace can hope to achieve is the deactivation of destructive historical forces and their temporary reorientation to more manageable levels. By doing this, missions for peace create new historical opportunities that the elites of politically polarized and socially divided societies can use to begin to construct a minimum social consensus as the foundation of a durable peace.

In the second of our case studies, Gérard Hervouët explores the connections between Canada’s active but modest participation in the UN operation in Cambodia and its wider foreign-policy ambitions. He writes (Hervouët, this volume, p. 58) that

as the 1980s drew to a close, it was becoming evident that Canadian interest in a peaceful solution in Cambodia went beyond Khmer borders. Canada’s goals were twofold: to increase its participation in ASEAN [Association of Southeast Asian Nations] economic prosperity and simultaneously to position itself in the face of the possible reintegration of Viet Nam into the Southeast Asian economic-expansion zone.

In documenting Canada’s determination to do well while doing good, Professor Hervouët is drawing our attention to the fact that national foreign policies supply much of the motive power behind missions for peace. This elementary point bears repeating because the notion has taken hold in some quarters that missions for peace, particularly UN

missions, are powered from some global command post that will soon be running the world.

A mission for peace might be defined as a situation in which the irresistible forces of international politics meet the immovable objects of local history, a point captured perfectly in the title of the third of our case studies “Somalia: When Two Anarchies Meet.” The author, Kenneth D. Bush, writes (this volume, p. 93) that “the dynamics of conflict among clans and subclans in Somalia was mirrored in less violent ways in the relations between the international actors involved in relief operations, especially those under the auspices of the UN.” His case study documents abundantly that missions for peace are themselves rich sources of conflict as local and international actors compete for resources and power.

In exploring the underlying factors shaping missions for peace, all three of the case studies refer in varying degrees to the Canadian experience. This is not because Canada was the dominant player in any of the missions. Far from it. Partly it is because we are Canadians and naturally draw on the experience of our own country, but there is more to it than that. Few countries in the world have invested more hope than Canada in the promise of missions for peace. These complex undertakings have been seen by some Canadians as a new foreign-policy vocation combining and perhaps superseding the two main foreign-policy vocations of the past 40 years, namely, peacekeeping and development assistance. The tough lessons of the past 10 years have diminished, if not extinguished, those hopes.

We fear Canadians are in danger of learning the lessons too well and concluding that their country’s foreign policy should be far more self-interested than it already is. It is true that the record of missions for peace is a cautionary tale for enthusiastic, or at least naive, internationalism. It is equally true, however, that the lessons point to the continuing need for effective internationalism. Each of our case studies begins with a situation of persistent conflict generating enormous human suffering for the people of a country and instability for the international community. In all of these cases, the level of conflict and suffering was much diminished after international intervention, although, as recent events in Cambodia reveal, the situation on the ground is still well short of paradise. We argue that the lesson of these cases studies is that we can and should learn to conduct missions for peace more effectively, not that we should abandon the effort.

Document(s) 3 of 10