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Liberal Baggage

David Eaves and I have a review of Peter C Neman’s When the Gods Changed, in this month’s Literary Review of Canada.  We use it to continue to explore the theme of progressive politics that has now been the basis of many joint articles, opeds and a forthcoming book. Our initial piece on this topic was also in the LRC, three years ago, called Progressivisms End.

A few key graphs from the Newman review, titled Liberal Baggage: The Party’s Greatest Burden May be its Past Success are below, but the whole thing is here:

Newman seems intent on forcing the Liberal Party’s troubles into a narrative of psychological disrepair. And it is certainly true that the cocksure certainty of governance among party faithful takes time to dissipate. But an author who spends years looking at the world through the eyes of his or her subjects can fall victim to a type of biographical determinism—a view of history that places far too much weight on the actions of those being written about. Herein lies the central problem with this book. Newman wants to see the recent decline of the Liberal Party exclusively through the thoughts and actions of his subjects, Michael Ignatieff and a few “kingmakers” around him.

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The Liberal Party’s real baggage is not psychological; it is institutional. Over the course of a century, the party built a series of social institutions designed for an industrial world. As the information age has fundamentally changed citizens’ challenges and expectations, Liberals have been left defending the existence of institutions, some now broken or in disrepair, over the progressive values they were originally intended to promote.

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While Davey is dismissive of his efforts to reform the party, the reality is that both he and Ignatieff brought a wide range of new people, energy and ideas into the Liberal fold. But these people will need to move beyond a rearticulation of 20th-century ideas, presented through a modernized campaign. They will need to rethink the place of liberal politics in Canadian society. Newman is right: a 21st-century Liberal party may not look anything like the 20th-century juggernaut. But that would be a good thing.

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For the Liberals, it’s time for the path not taken

A short essay for the Ottawa Citizen a few weeks ago:

Before becoming leader of the Labour Party, Tony Blair wrote a pamphlet for the august thinktank of the British left, The Fabian Society, in which he questioned the socialist pillar of his party’s constitution. Adopted in 1918, Clause IV tied the Labour Party to a goal of nationalizing the means of production, distribution and exchange. At the time, this clause reflected a modern vision for the industrialization of 20th-century Britain. Eighty-five years later, it was a millstone around the neck of a party seeking to reinvent itself for a post-industrial world.

In his leadership acceptance speech a year later, Blair challenged the party to abolish Clause IV and to build with him a New Labour, one that embraced markets, technology and globalization. In one act, he redefined both the vision and structure of his party, took on the once intransigent party establishment, and made it clear that the Labour Party was to become a 21st-century institution, rather than a 20th-century one.

It is hard to look at the Liberal Party of Canada and not think that they too need a Clause IV moment. At the base of most of their problems, and there are many, lies a similar core challenge that once faced Labour: the Liberal party is an institution that has failed to modernize. In structure, operation, policy and vision, it is a 20th-century party in a 21st-century Canada.

While there has been much premature prognosticating of the Liberals’ demise, it is certainly worth keeping the party’s very real challenges front of mind.

First, the structure of the party remains laden with bureaucracy, committees, and entrenched interests. Over time (and despite much success) it has simply become bloated. More critically, lines of authority have been blurred. On any issue, it is unclear whether the leader, their staff and advisers, the party executive, regional leadership, MPs, riding associations, committees or party members have legitimate agency or control. This leads to endless internal tension. This may have been acceptable in an era where the party was in power, with lots of jobs to fill and flush funds. It is profoundly illsuited for a lean period of rebuilding and innovation.

Second, operationally, the party remains out of date. Voter identification has only recently been digitized, fundraising is built around a low volume/big donor model that no longer exists, the membership system is easily corruptible, the volunteer structure draws only on the most strident party faithful, and there is no network of like-minded organizations and think-tanks. How can this party expect to compete with a conservative political machine that has rebuilt itself from the bottom up?

Third, on the policy front, the party is stalled. It is stuck in a vision of Canada successfully implemented in the late 20th century, but which hasn’t kept up with the rapidly changing world. Simply put, the party has prioritized the defence of the progressive institutions and programs that it built, over the outcomes they were intended to enable.

Canadians know – as health care threatens to eat up 50 per cent of provincial budgets and service levels remain mixed – that their healthcare system is broken.

Young Canadians don’t trust that a pension system will exist for them. Anyone can see that traditional peacekeeping cannot solve today’s international conflicts. Where are the bold progressive policy ideas on health care, drug policy, inequality, climate change and education? All are ripe for a rethinking that prioritizes progressive outcomes rather than dated 20th-century progressive processes.

Finally, the party does not have an overarching vision that resonates in a 21st-century Canada. Liberals are not alone. At the heart of the challenge facing the emergence of a new Liberal vision is a paradox plaguing centre-left parties around the world. Voters see a system of government built for a different age, one far less effective at delivering services than any other institution in their lives. Conservatives have an easy answer to this inefficiency – get rid of government. The Liberal challenge is far more difficult; they must present a convincing argument for reforming rather than dismantling government.

It is through the lens of these challenges that next week’s party convention should be viewed. While non-leadership party conventions hold limited expectations, this is no ordinary time for the Liberal party. It is fair to ask: do the proceedings of this event lay the groundwork for revolutionary rather than evolutionary change?

There are three areas in which we can look for indicators: the proposed policy resolutions, the proposed constitutional amendments, and the candidates running for the party presidency.

First, while true that party platforms are rarely made on the tangled convention floor, anyone looking for a new vision of Canada in the list of policy resolutions is sure to be disappointed. There are the usual general calls for national programs and strategies (post-secondary education, child care, anti-poverty, a national energy grid, national pharmacare, increased research funding, universal broadband). There is a proposal for (yet another) Renewal Commission, a suggestion to ban the penny, a call to oppose Bill C-11 (the government’s copyright legislation) and another to reinstate the long-form census. None of the health-care resolutions address the underlying structural challenges, and only one of the foreign policy proposals, a resolution on corporate international responsibility, offers more than platitudes to “be better.”

There are two exceptions to this rather bland list, both proposed by the Young Liberals: the requisite call to legalize marijuana and a resolution to cut ties with the monarchy. The time has surely come for national conversations on each, and both have a cross partisan constituency. Irrespective of their individual merit, these are the type of policy explorations than will need to come out of a party in renewal. A hundred more bold ideas and we’d have a real policy conversation.

Second, while most of the proposed procedural constitutional amendments represent minor adjustments, two are significant, and while flawed, will signal the party members’ appetite for real structural change.

The first proposal is to create a new category of party member, called a supporter, who can register to vote in the party leadership. This is what is being called the “primary model” and the intention is to bring more Canadians into the leadership selection process. As many have pointed out, this is a big idea, and one with lasting consequence, but it may not pass due to a failure to spell out the specifics in the resolution.

The second, related resolution will allow these supporters to participate in riding candidate nominations. This idea is modelled on the “open nomination” trials that David Cameron successfully conducted in the lead-up to the last British election, and are meant to break away from entrenched party member control of candidate selection.

While imperfect (true open nominations freed from incumbency and party membership would go significantly further than either resolution), and perhaps unlikely to pass in their current form, the intent of both of these proposed reforms gets at one of the core challenges facing the party, namely, how to attract and entice both riding and leadership candidates from outside of the party ecosystem. Together, they reflect a recognition that the party needs new blood if it’s going to survive.

Finally, the election of the new party president has turned into a symbolic initial marker of the party’s reform. Rightly or wrongly, Mike Crawley has emerged as the reform candidate and Sheila Copps as the leader from the past. Copps has strong links to the old left of the party, and is even proposing a national tour of former Liberal MPs to reinvigorate the party. Crawley on the other hand has successfully captured the support, if not yet imagination, of the next generation of the party. For this reason, his likely victory will be at the least a symbolic win for advocates of substantive reform.

Liberal renewal has been largely empty rhetoric ever since Paul Martin’s 2006 election loss. Up until now, entrenched party interests and actors have won out over real reform. Attempts to shake up policy, to bring in new big ideas, have been vigorously fought off by the party establishment. There hasn’t been a Clause IV moment; no one has even tried.

But the reality is that there is opportunity in the current electoral landscape. On the right is a Conservative party that, at its core, doesn’t believe in the federal government. Its appeal is the offer to dismantle the parts of the system that are broken, but in so doing it will leave behind many of those who are protected and enabled by the government.

On the left is a party whose vision is to return Canada to the 1960s. It’s a world of a strong national government, of an even bigger health-care system, social safety net and welfare state. The conservatism of the left means protecting what is unsustainable.

There is room in between for a re-imagined progressive federal vision. One that is built around the political axes of the 21st century: open vs. closed systems; evidence-based policy vs. ideology; meritocratic governance vs. patronage; open and fair markets vs. isolationism; sustainability vs. disposability, and emergent networks vs. hierarchies.

The question now is whether the threat of extinction is sufficient to spur the innovation of ideas, people and structures needed to turn the broken-down 20thcentury jalopy that is the current Liberal party into a state-of-the-art vehicle purpose-built for a 21st-century progressive vision.

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Conferencing in Halifax while Rome Burns?

Cross-posted on CIC Dispatch Blog

Billed as the Davos for Security, the Halifax International Security Forum – funded by the Department of National Defence (DND) – sought and accomplished to court the security elite. Last weekend’s lavish affair was attended by nearly 20 defence ministers, top global security analysts, beltway security consultants, international affairs journalists, and a handful of security academics. As at Davos, it’s hard to fault the execution, and the host, Peter Mackay, deserves a lot of credit.

Throughout the event, though, I couldn’t help asking whether this was the right group of people having the right conversation at the right time. With deeply troubled military occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, attention increasingly turning to Asia and the BRICs, and much of the world embroiled in an uprising against concentrated political and financial power, what is the value proposition of a largely Euro-Atlantic, NATO-focused confab of security-sector leaders?

This feeling was magnified by the subject matter on the agenda. For two days, debate swirled around the purchasing of F35s, the potential invasion of Syria and bombing of Iran, and the western security implications of Arab revolutions. Throughout, military actions were discussed in an unproblematic way, as part of a natural escalation of engagement.

This was not entirely surprising, as the event was, for all intents and purposes, a military conference. But even for a military conference, this discourse seemed limited. There was no discussion of the abyss of the war in Afghanistan, the very real problems with the Libya mission (beyond the easy success of bombing fixed, undefended targets), or the dilemma that no one wants to put troops on the ground in NATO missions.

Talking about this with a sage colleague, I was reminded that the Security and Defence Forum (SDF) program, also funded by the DND, was recently cut. Over four decades, the SDF program financed a wide range of Canadian academic work on security. There are rumours that the program was cut not just for budgetary reasons, but because its policy utility was questioned – what use is critical academic work to the running of a defence policy? Interestingly, the budget of the SDF was similar to the rumoured budget of the Halifax forum – around two million dollars.

There is, of course, no reason to suggest a direct connection between the two programs, but it is worth discussing what we are losing and acquiring with this amount of money. Is it more valuable to fund an academic program on security or a two-day event that brings together the global power brokers? What are the trade-offs between a conversation you cannot control and one you diligently curate?

The SDF program, for all its faults, funded a wide range of security thinking and conversation. While some of this was classical defence studies, it also involved theoretical, practical, and political critiques of security policy. In so doing, the SDF fostered a community of academics engaged in the Canadian security discussion, and the openness of the program supported a very diverse range of security perspectives.

It is a trope in international relations to say that the world of security changed “after the end of the cold war.” The Economist magazine even bans articles that start with those words. But it is certainly true: The security conversation now rightly involves any number of auxiliaries to military affairs, including development, human rights, the environment, public health, local violence, and so on. The SDF program encouraged this broad view of security.

This critical perspective was virtually nowhere to be seen in Halifax. Save for regular interventions from Anne-Marie Slaughter and Ambassador Swanee Hunt, the discussion was almost exclusively centred on the military and global economic sides of security. Participants and speakers often came across as too aligned – too in agreement about the primary security threats and the necessary responses. The downside of controlled discourse, of course, is groupthink. And groupthink can be dangerous.

If there is one lesson we learned from the financial crisis, it’s that those in charge were not as smart as they thought they were. Left unchecked, the financial elite put a global system at risk by seeking, at every step, to maximize their interests. There was no balance at the global decision-making table, so one perspective – one worldview and set of interests – ran amok.

Such can also be the case with security policy. Does talk among decision-makers of bombing Iran, left unchecked by criticism, make bombing more likely to occur? Quite possibly. Do self-oriented discussions among militaries perpetuate the failures of Afghanistan, in which militaries sought and got “quick victories” but completely missed the larger purposes and goals involved? Probably. Does glorifying the John McCain approach to U.S. foreign policy make Canada more likely to act in this mould? Maybe. Does having a security conversation dominated by the military, with little engagement from diplomatic and development departments, lead to a more militarized foreign policy? Almost certainly.

With Canada and NATO continuing to sing the praises of whole-of-government and comprehensive approaches to intervention and nation-building, surely the conversation in Halifax should have been broader.

On the economic front, the discussion was tainted by a notable condescension towards the Occupy movement – condescension that betrayed detachment to the security concerns raised by the increasing disconnect between a rising popular concern about inequality, and the political and financial elite’s focus on debt-cutting and austerity. Surely, a security discussion should have shown more awareness of the potential for increasingly exacerbated social divides to lead to animosity and instability, both within countries and between them.

We need to recognize that controlled conversations, if they are not broadened to include critical, uncomfortable, and diverse views, risk perpetuating siloed solutions. The military is almost always more likely to advocate military solutions over development, humanitarian, and diplomatic ones – which is why the military doesn’t control foreign policy.

I am not suggesting that the Halifax forum should be cancelled. In fact, I personally found it stimulating and engaging. The format of the conference, based around interview-style plenaries, was perhaps the best I have ever seen, and the calibre of participants and speakers was exceptionally high. I was glad that Canada put on an event of this scale. But when discussing and debating war, in which the costs are so immensely high, we have to be incredibly careful not to fall into groupthink and the prescribed policies of self-reinforcing communities. Doing so invariably leads to the type of path dependency that we saw in the lead-up to the Iraq war and financial crisis.

Herein lies the value of the SDF program and the academic discourse it enabled: It fostered engagement and critical thinking in a space prone to secrecy and control. The direct benefit of this kind of discourse to policy-making is difficult to calculate, but it is nevertheless a benefit.

In the end, foreign and security policy is about balancing worldviews. The field of security studies, once the purview of the military, has moved on to include many more perspectives and actors. So, too, must the elite debate.

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The Risks of Building the Afghan Army

Below is an oped that appeared in the Globe and Mail.

The regional military training centre in Herat is a desolate and harsh place. On the outskirts of an Afghan city bustling with commerce and construction, the vast training grounds extend out into the desert and high into the mountains.

We were at this training facility to see a live-fire exercise, intended as a demonstration of what is now the primary pillar of the International Security Assistance Force mission: forging the Afghan army into a force capable of securing the country and keeping the national government together as NATO draws down.

After winding through dozens of marching drills and shooting ranges, we arrived at the edge of the facility and a line of six young Afghan soldiers, each with a rocket-propelled grenade launcher on their shoulder. They were aiming at three burned-out Russian tanks. One by one, they fired at the tanks, most missing wildly.

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After this somewhat chilling demonstration, we were taken to meet the commander of Regional Command West; he will ultimately take control of one of five regional armies. His message was blunt: He had fought for themujahedeen, the Russians, the Taliban and now for NATO. While he appreciated our support, he had no doubt it would be fleeting.

It would be difficult to find a better distillation of the challenges NATO faces in Afghanistan than what we saw at this training facility. But such is the current state of the mission. With eight years of fighting having mostly failed, the NATO mission is in a process of transition, with security being transferred to Afghan forces between now and 2014. Training, which began in earnest only in November of 2009, is at the centre of this strategy.

Canada may no longer be fighting in Kandahar, but this new mission is nonetheless a daunting and risky task.

The police training process, for example, involves only three weeks of very basic security and language training (85 per cent of the recruits are illiterate). As one German colonel who is part of the mentoring program put it, we are training them to be checkpoint guards, not police officers.

This has real consequence for our counterinsurgency strategy. In the north, the Afghan National Police has proved incapable of patrolling and securing villages; immediately after NATO soldiers leave, the insurgents simply return. The village is then taken again and those who assisted NATO are punished. Each time this happens, more civilians are killed. The villagers then stop pointing out the whereabouts of IEDs, thereby increasing NATO casualties.

In the past year, there hasn’t been a single village held by the Afghan National Police in the north. The insurgents always come back.

Also of concern is the fact that the departing Americans are meant to be replaced by these new Afghan recruits. For example, the 30,000 U.S. soldiers who are being withdrawn over the next 18 months are supposed to be replaced by 50,000 to 70,000 new Afghan National Army troops. While there’s something to be said for the argument that an Afghan soldier can be more effective than a Western one, the lack of training, organization, leadership and equipment, combined with corruption, make one seriously question NATO’s math.

Training is also incredibly expensive. NATO support for training now costs $11-billion a year, mostly paid by the Americans. After 2014, the security sector is expected to require a continual $4-billion a year of external financial assistance, in a country with a GDP of $15-billon. It’s extremely unlikely that this level of financial and logistical assistance will be politically and economically sustainable by Western countries tired of war and teetering on the edge of yet another recession.

Ultimately, the questionable quality of the forces being trained, combined with the unsustainability of NATO support, presents potential strategic peril. As we put $11-billion a year of arms and training into the security sector, the civilian governance structures continue to falter amidst corruption and diminishing authority. Are we paving the way for a military-run Afghanistan?

One thing is clear: Our participation in this training process, while likely the best course of action in a very challenging situation, simply adds to both the moral responsibility we owe Afghanistan and the strategic corner we have backed ourselves into. If we build this army, we had better be willing to fund it and support it long into the future. This will be added to the long-term development and humanitarian engagement we also have rightly committed to and have the obligation to maintain. Afghans, of course, have been taught to shoot RPGs before.

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How the New Yorker Goes Viral

Crossposted at opencanada.org’s Dispatch blog

For years I have read The New Yorker as a non-US print subscriber. This meant that somewhere between a few days and a week after an issue was published, it arrived in the mail. The uncertainty of its arrival is fun, and the novelty of flipping through the Goings on About Town to find the Tables for Two has never really worn off. Every once in a while a story would reach me in a different way – a Hirsch piece during the Bush administration, for example, would get wide engagement online. But for me, The New Yorker was principally a solitary print experience.  Such was its charm.  So the online transition path for the magazine has never been obvious.  Recently though, I have been engaging with the magazine in two new ways – on Twitter, and using their exceptional iPad app. The ways in which the magazine has transitioned to both are a model for a struggling form and fit into a wider shift in the international affairs conversation that the CIC site seeks to engage.

Take last weekend, for example. Over the weekend, a pre-release of Nicholas Schmidle’s expose of the Bin Laden raid went viral on Twitter. Virtually all of the 100 or so foreign policy specific handles I follow posted it immediately, and it then crossed into most other online conversations. Instead of reading it online, I checked the New Yorker iPad app, and there was Monday’s issue ready to be downloaded. The New Yorker’s iPad app does something quite remarkable.  Leveraging the iPad’s elegance and engagement features, the app perfectly balances its focus on writing, journalism and style in a way that lets the magazine breathe. Each week, a new issue pops up in the app, and it takes a satisfying minute or two for the whole 140mb of issue to download. Last week, the New York Times outlined the success of the app in a piece that also got a lot of attention.

So on a lazy Sunday morning, I tucked into Schmidle’s article in this great reader-centric format. The piece itself was astounding in both its detail and style. A decision had clearly been made in the Pentagon or White House to provide the definitive account of the raid to The New Yorker, and that account will surely become the basis for movies and books.

But because The New Yorker pushes content aggressively and effectively online, the reach and life of the piece extended far beyond a limited number of solitary reading indulgences. The New Yorker has now, somewhat unexpectedly, become a hub in the international affairs conversation and can position pieces cleanly and effectively in the international debate.  It is no longer simply the rag of the elite and well-bred. It is fuel in a community of international affairs journalism, being spread and multiplied by innovative websites, Twitter and diverse networks of engaged readers.

Take two examples. Foreign Policy Magazine has in the past few years transformed itself from an austere print publication skimmed in airports, to a leader in pushing diverse content online. This has meant changing both how they write, who writes for them, and where and by whom the content is seen. I would argue they are significantly more influential now than they ever were in their limited and isolated print days. They are certainly more interesting.

Second, consider three emergent international affairs leaders on Twitter. Covering the Arab uprisings for the New York Times, Chris Chivers (@cjchivers) has demonstrated a best in practice use of Twitter for the foreign correspondent.  At times, when connections were poor, he would literally file in real time via Twitter. But he goes further. Because Twitter is a two way conversation, followers can pose a question to him, about a particular rebel group he was embedded with, for example, and often get replies. If blogs personalized the journalist and author and allowed readers to comment, Twitter has moved engagement into real time.  Again, this is a case of an at times austere publication, the New York Times, becoming more influential not by isolating itself in hallowed halls but by experimenting and engaging.

Andy Carvin (@acarvin), a reporter with NPR, has literally created his job description – Twitter curator for international affairs. When the uprisings were breaking in Egypt, there was a flood of tweets documenting the events on the ground. Carvin filled a need for a filter and served as the go-to hub to make sense of this massive flow of information.

Finally, Anne-Marie Slaughter (@SlaughterAM), back at Princeton after time as Director of Policy Planning at the State Department, where she led the Obama Administration’s social media outreach to the middle eastern uprisings, has become a figure head of sorts for the emergent online international affairs community. She mentored and enabled two young social media leaders at State, @JaredCohen (now at Google Ideas) and @AlecJRoss, has begun a new project with the Atlantic Monthly to capture the paradigm shifts happening in the practice, scholarship and communication of international affairs, and has become a champion and curator of these conversations on Twitter.

These examples are simply to point out that the conversation has moved online, and that the organizations and publications that are currently the most effective, influential and interesting are those making innovative use of the medium.

So back to The New Yorker and the “Getting Bin Laden” story. Over the course of the week, the article was built on, added to, debated, challenged, promoted and celebrated in countless online spaces. It became the focus of an international conversation in a manner that would have proved impossible with a New Yorker piece even five years ago. Because the magazine has pushed content online, via the web, Twitter and a brilliantly conceived app, it remains at the center of the journalism game.

I take a number of lessons from this. As a neophyte professor in a school of journalism, it provides a shining success story of leveraging one’s assets into the online space. It is of course idiosyncratic – it’s The New Yorker after all. As the Financial Times’ and the New York Times’ pay walls are ill-suited to most papers, the particular New Yorker model will not be the solution for most magazines. But it is nonetheless well-conceived, and shows that no one online model will work for all.

As the editor of the CIC site, the lesson I take is that constant innovation from day one, is the only viable model. This means, as Emily Bell, formerly of the Guardian, now at Columbia Journalism, has said, being first and foremost “of the web, not on the web”. It means rethinking the site, and evolving constantly – we are, for example, re-launching in September with new features, adjusting what hasn’t worked, building on what has. Finally, it means thinking of the site as part of an emerging and rapidly changing international discourse , one which includes the top policy makers, journalists and academics in the world, and is radically democratized by the form it is taking. It has never been a more exciting time to be in this business.

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