Even War Has a Moral Economy

“I’ll tell you my position on the war if you’ll tell me yours?”
“You first.”
That’s how the conversation started with a waitress in an Edmonton restaurant earlier this month. As it turned out, both of us were appalled by what was going on. Neither of us wanted any more killing. We wanted it to stop. Why were we afraid to just come out and say so? Who would hear us if we spoke out clearly?

Moral action can often have costs. Sometimes those costs are economic. Canada’s opposition to military intervention in Iraq without UN support was a moral as well as a political stand. Is there a cost to this moral stand? Perhaps. Certainly the American ambassador to Canada, Paul Celluci thinks so. Recently the ambassador has warned us of the consequences of publicly disagreeing with Washington. The decision by President Bush to host a visit by the Australian Prime Minister rather than visit Ottawa this fall is widely interpreted as a public rebuke for our lack of solidarity.

Canada likes to think of itself as a sovereign, independent nation acting in a community of other independent states. What difference would it make to describe us as a dependency of the American empire? Is our relationship to the US now any different from the relationship of Poland to the USSR twenty years ago?

Some Canadian business leaders want to create a customs union with the US. This would prevent the next President from taking retaliatory economic action the next time Canada decided to act contrary to perceived American interests. The cost of such a customs union would be that trade would need to happen on American terms. In effect, Canada would have to agree to give up the very capacity for independent economic action that some Americans find so threatening.

Canada is not the only country made anxious by the new willingness of the US to impose its will on the world. Actually, most of the rest of the world is now significantly more afraid of the United States’ unwillingness to hold itself accountable to the Community of Nations. We have good reason to be more fearful when the Commanders of the world’s most powerful military refuse to abide by the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war or when they refuse to hold themselves accountable to the International Court of Justice for war crimes.

There is another model. On issues of culture, Canada has aligned itself with France to gather countries together to discuss how culture (films, TV, music, books etc.) can be protected from American domination through trade agreements. What would happen if we aligned ourselves with others to discuss how rural culture and local agriculture can be protected from American domination through trade agreements?

There are many patriotic Americans that think traditional American values have been abandoned by contemporary American foreign policy. By charting a different course, Canadians can also support their American cousins in calling their country to account. Canada’s moral leadership may have an economic cost but the most important moral leadership almost always does.

First Published in April 2003