I don’t mean that in a bad way. I’m just observing a fact. Harper is pro-war. He thinks that war is something worth doing. He thinks that war has numerous redeeming qualities.
Various commentators have pointed this out. After all, how many political leaders go out of their way to celebrate the beginning, rather than the end, of the First World War? Or who thinks that the War of 1812 is more worthy of commemoration than the adoption of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms? The Harper government is constantly sending out weird press releases, celebrating the anniversary of some battle or skirmish that no one has ever heard of.
And yet, the basis of this enthusiasm is difficult to pin down. There is some level at which Harper clearly likes war, and would very much like to see Canada get involved in more of them. And yet he is a peculiar sort of warmonger, in that he also doesn’t seem to have a lot of stomach for the reality of it. For instance, he has none of the grudging respect for men like Vladimir Putin that one finds on the right wing of the U.S. Republican Party. His reaction to the Ukraine crisis was more like “Oh my God, how could you?” rather than “This is how the great game is played, we must learn to play it better…”
All of this led me to thinking about the various sorts of warmongers who are out there. What kind of young man reads All Quiet on the Western Front, or watches a movie like The Deer Hunter, and comes away thinking “true, but on balance war still seems to me worthwhile”? I can think of several possible motives for such a view, and thus at least four different categories:
The Macho: The most common stereotype of the warmonger is the macho type, who sees human relations in terms of a dominance hierarchy. Typically this sort of person began, at a young age, to use force and intimidation as a way of moving up the dominance hierarchy, and over time allowed this to become something of a worldview (often couched in terms of “respect” or “honour”). The attitude toward war is basically a projection onto the nation-state of the lessons learned in interpersonal relations – you have to show people who’s boss, you can’t let your guard down, if they don’t fear you they will conspire against you, etc. This is the sort of person for whom the chant, “we’re number one,” resonates deeply.
The Realist: The realist is far less emotional than the macho warmonger – in fact, he is often better described as being “in the grip of a theory.” The theory in question is usually a somewhat reductionist view of human relations, which maintains that “when push comes to shove,” or “when you get down to brass tacks,” it is force that maintains social order. Thus the realist is inclined to view international law, negotiations and deliberations, to be potentially useful, but only when backed up by the use of force. The public, however, tends to forget this, which is why it is necessary to have a war every so often, in order to remind everyone how things really work.
The Nation-builder: Some see war more instrumentally, as part of a larger nation-building project. Nothing unifies people like having a common enemy. And as the Weimar-era political theorist Carl Schmitt argued, the nation is fundamentally about drawing the distinction between friend and foe. The nation-building warmonger initiates conflict, not only to distract from difficult domestic issues, but to enhance social solidarity, and to create a sense of national purpose.
The Romantic: In this day and age, the romantic militarist is a bit of an odd duck, despite the fact that it used to be a very popular view. Consider the passages in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, where Count Rostov expresses his fervent desire to die for the Tsar. This is the sort of romanticism that the mechanized slaughter of the First World War largely put an end to. At the same time, you can still find echoes of it, particularly among those who are intensely patriotic, or committed to the virtue of “sacrifice” – which always seems to mean dying rather than, say, paying taxes – or who think that war helps the nation to achieve “moral clarity.”
If one had to slot Stephen Harper in somewhere on this list, I think one would have to classify him as a romantic militarist. This is mainly due to the fact that his attitude toward the military, like much of his more general political conservatism, seems to be based on nostalgia. His book on hockey made it clear that this is a significant aspect of his temperament. Beyond the bundle of resentments that constitutes his attitude toward the modern world, his only core conviction seems to be that things were better back in the old days. A hazy romanticism about Canada’s military past is part and parcel of all this.
My inclination is to dismiss this as mostly just foolishness. As far as rebranding Canada as a “warrior nation” is concerned, the government seems to me to have been spinning its wheels. This is for two reasons:
First, there is the fact that they have been unable to figure out, any better than the Liberals before them, how to solve the problem of military procurement in this country. As a result, there is little danger of Canada actually becoming a fighting nation – we simply don’t have the hardware to do it. Furthermore, the lack of equipment — or even competence in the acquisition of equipment — betrays a fundamental lack of seriousness, which in turn makes a lot of the militarism seem like just play-acting.
Second, there is the fact that Canada does not need a fighting military. Americans often accuse other Western nations, particularly some European states, of free-riding on U.S. military power. And while this may not be true of some nations, it is certainly true of Canada. Part of what’s nice about having the world’s largest undefended border with the U.S. is that they would never tolerate the invasion of Canada by a hostile power. As a result, we have to be prepared for minor border skirmishes, but we don’t really need to have a full-scale military, sufficient to defend the country from attack.
The fact that the Canadian military is essentially otiose provides one way of understanding our past enthusiasm for peacekeeping – at least it provided some rationale for maintaining something like an able fighting force. Take away the peacekeeping, and what becomes the new raison d’être for the Canadian military? The Conservative government has yet to provide one — indeed, it seems not to be even aware of the need to. The boyish enthusiasm for the military that you find in the current government is essentially a matter of personal temperament and political ideology, but it lacks any underlying national or geopolitical rationale.
Original Article
Source: ottawacitizen.com/
Author: Joseph Heath
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