The Rights Revolution Read online

  ALSO BY MICHAEL IGNATIEFF

  NONFICTION

  A Just Measure of Pain

  The Needs of Strangers

  The Russian Album

  Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism

  The Warrior’s Honour: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience

  Isaiah Berlin: A Life

  Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond

  Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry

  Empire Lite: Nation-Building in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan

  The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror

  American Exceptionalism and Human Rights

  True Patriot Love

  FICTION

  Asya

  Scar Tissue

  Charlie Johnson in the Flames

  MICHAEL IGNATIEFF

  THE

  RIGHTS REVOLUTION

  Copyright © 2000, 2007 Michael Ignatieff and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

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  This edition published in 2009 by

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  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Ignatieff, Michael

  The rights revolution / Michael Ignatieff. — 2nd ed.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  eISBN 978-0-88784-892-6

  1. Civil Rights – Canada. 2. French language – Quebec (Province).

  3. Language policy – Canada. 4. Indians of North America – Canada – Claims.

  5. Indians of North America – Canada – Land tenure.

  I. Title.

  JC599.C3146 2007 323.0971 C2006-904288-8

  Cover design: Bill Douglas at The Bang

  Cover photograph: David Levenson/Getty Images

  We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

  For S. Z.

  as always

  PREFACE

  WHEN I FIRST DELIVERED these Massey Lectures on CBC Radio in 2000, I was a professor at Harvard University. Looking back now, I can see that The Rights Revolution began the process that led to my entering public life here at home in 2005. Like every Canadian, I carry within me a certain idea of Canada. This book outlines that idea.

  As Canadians, we have managed to create a single political community of equal citizens out of Aboriginal peoples, francophones, anglophones, and all the people like me whose families came here as emigrants from other countries. Out of those different languages, traditions, and cultures, we have forged a political system that holds us together and keeps us talking through our differences peacefully. We have also succeeded in maintaining a distinctive culture and a tradition of proud independence next door to the most powerful state in the world. All of this is no mean feat.

  Canada’s political achievement is important. The world’s deepest problem is not climate change or the supposed clash of civilizations or inequality between rich nations and poor ones — as important as these problems are. The fundamental problem facing humanity is political: how to create stable political order among people of different religions, cultures, and economic classes. As long as states can cohere as viable political communities, all their problems can be managed. But if they cannot maintain order and freedom, they cannot solve any of them. Here Canada has shown the way: maintaining freedom among peoples who value their differences yet desire to live as equals in a political community.

  Being Canadian, we do not shout our achievement from the rooftops. We know we still have a long way to go before the achievement is complete. Many of our people do not share in the promise of Canadian life; many of our regions feel left out of our prosperity; our national unity is a permanent work-in-progress. But we know what we have to do. The rights enshrined in our Charter of Rights and Freedoms exhort us all to narrow the gap between the Canada we actually live in and the Canada we know we can build together.

  Other countries have also managed to maintain successful political communities. What makes Canada’s achievement distinctive? While all modern democracies protect rights, our system is special in the way it reconciles individual and group rights. Both our provincial and federal charters protect group rights to language in order to guarantee the preservation of the French fact in North America. These charters also protect the treaty and Aboriginal rights of our First Nations, Inuit, and Metis peoples. Reconciling group and individual rights is not easy. Canadians want both their equality recognized and their differences respected. They want to be acknowledged as equal individuals and as members of communities. Recognition of equality points one way; recognition of difference can point another. Moreover, while all communities in Canada should be equal, not all communities are the same. Aboriginal Canadians claim the status of first nations, in recognition of the fact that they maintained political order before European settlement. The Québécois see themselves as a national group within Canada, in recognition of their distinctive language and history as a French colony. There is no reason in principle why acknowledging the national character of certain communities in Canada should put the unity of the whole at risk. We have been working at reconciling these competing principles since Confederation, and while constitutional reconciliation of equality and difference remains elusive, our arguments have not broken up our country. Indeed, we have become a model for the world of how to balance majority and minority interests and how to maintain the unity of a complex federation. Our vocation in the world is to help other countries deepen and develop their citizenship as we have deepened and developed our own. Just as we seek to promote “peace, order and good government” at home, we should seek to do the same abroad.

  We have also established the most progressive political culture in the Americas. Our laws protect the equality rights of all Canadians regardless of sexual orientation, including rights to marriage. Our laws guarantee a woman’s right to choose. The Canada Health Act commits the federal and provincial governments to guarantee equal rights of access to health for all citizens. Our constitution commits the federal government to use its authority and spending power to maintain rough equality of services among all regions and among all citizens. There are some other distinguishing marks as well. Unlike the United States, Canada does not recognize a constitutional right to bear arms. Canada does not practise capital punishment. In these and other ways, our rights culture entrenches our national identity as a progressive people.

  Maintaining these commitments is not easy. There is no stable political consensus in favour of them. It takes political leadership to articulate why these values matter, and why we need to make sacrifices in order to keep them flourishing. It is also the work of political leaders to hammer out compromises when the rights and interests of competing groups conflict. Active engagement in politics — by citizens and by leaders — is essential if we
are to maintain our distinctiveness as a progressive people and to find the compromises that keep us together.

  Since this book was first published, much has changed in the world. With the devastating attack on the United States on September 11, 2001, most countries, including Canada, have had to learn how to live with the threat of terrorist attacks. All governments enacted new security legislation which changed the balance between liberty and security. In another of my books, published in 2004, The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror, I review the challenges that terrorism poses to the fabric of democratic societies. While all democracies have to protect themselves against terrorist attack, they must do so in a way that does not betray their principles. Being democracies, they have to fight with one hand tied behind their back, and being democracies, they win because they exercise restraint. Thus torture should be prohibited in any democratic society. Interrogations must be rigorous, but they must always be lawful. Short periods of preventive detention of terrorist suspects can be lawful, but indefinite detention of anyone, citizen or otherwise, cannot be. Offensive military action against terrorist militias who have attacked a state is justified, but the killing of civilians and indiscriminate attack on civilian infrastructure are not. In every case, both ethics and strategic selfinterest should compel democratic leaders to seek a balanced and controlled approach to the problem of terrorism. Such an approach helps avoid falling into the trap that terrorism always seeks to set: provoking democracies into repressive actions which give terrorists the political victory that they cannot hope to win by military means alone.

  As a democratic state, Canada cannot be a neutral bystander in the battle against terrorism. As we have discovered, terrorist organizations will not allow us the luxury of being bystanders. The challenge in defending ourselves and our allies is to remember that we are a free people. We cannot defend our values unless we truly respect them, unless we allow them to restrain our impulses and inspire us to the highest standards of conduct. Rights matter not just because they protect us from abuse by governments. Rights also protect us from ourselves, from the self-righteous belief that everything is permitted in our own defence. Not everything is permitted. We must respect these limits, if we are to respect ourselves and the immense achievement that Canadian freedom represents to all our citizens and to the world.

  I

  DEMOCRACY AND THE RIGHTS REVOLUTION

  IN THESE LECTURES, I am going to talk about a fundamental change that has come over us in our lifetime. I’m calling this change the rights revolution, to describe the amazing way in which rights talk has transformed how we think about ourselves as citizens, as men and women, and as parents. The rights revolution took off in the 1960s in all industrialized countries, and it is still running its course. Just think for a minute about how much rights talk there is out there: women’s rights, rights of gays and lesbians, aboriginal rights, children’s rights, language rights, and constitutional rights. In one sense, the rights revolution is a story of inclusion, of how previously excluded groups obtained rights of equality. In this regard, the extension of rights has widened and deepened our democracy. In a second sense, however, the rights revolution has been about protecting certain groups from the effects of democracy. Group rights to language and aboriginal rights to land and resources are designed to enable minorities to protect that which is essential to their survival from the power of elective majorities.

  In other words, rights have a double-sided relationship to democracy. Rights enacted into law by democratically elected representatives express the will of the people. But there are also rights whose purpose is to protect people from that will, to set limits on what majorities can do. Human rights and constitutionally guaranteed rights are supposed to have a special immunity from restriction by the majority. This allows them to act as a bulwark for the freedom of the vulnerable. So the rights revolution has a double aspect: it has been about both enhancing our right to be equal and protecting our right to be different. Trying to do both — that is, enhancing equality while safeguarding difference — is the essential challenge of the rights revolution, and this is what I want to explore with you in these lectures.

  Rights are something more than dry, legalistic phrases. Because they represent our attempt to give legal meaning to the values we care most about – dignity, equality, and respect – rights have worked their way deep inside our psyches. Rights are not just instruments of the law, they are expressions of our moral identity as a people. When we see justice done – for example, when an unjustly imprisoned person walks free, when a person long crushed by oppression stands up and demands her right to be heard – we feel a deep emotion rise within us. That emotion is the longing to live in a fair world. Rights may be precise, legalistic, and dry, but they are the chief means by which human beings express this longing.

  It’s important to understand that this longing is a global phenomenon. One of the reasons rights talk seems irresistible in Canada is that wherever we look beyond our borders, people are fighting for their rights. From 1948’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights onward, the history of the past half-century has been the struggle of colonial peoples for their freedom, the struggle of minorities of colour and women for full civil rights, and the struggle of aboriginal peoples to achieve self-government. Some of these struggles are etched in my memory. I remember the television pictures of that small crowd of protesters who crossed Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, on their way to Montgomery to demand the right of black people to vote in the American South. I remember the men of Attica prison, in upstate New York, who staged an uprising to protest their living conditions. The state police and national guard took the prison by force and forty-three prisoners died. Before the final assault, one of the prisoners said: “We have resolved, after long and bitter experience, that if we cannot live like men, then we are prepared to die like men.”1 From these examples, I learned that human beings value some things more than their own survival, and that rights are the language in which they commonly express the values they are willing to die for.

  Struggles in Europe during the 1970s and 1980s also helped to shape Canadian awareness that the rights revolution was truly global. The campaigns by Solidarity in Poland, led by that extraordinary shipyard electrician, Lech Walesa, created the first free trade unions in the Communist world. In Czechoslovakia, Charter 77, a movement led by writers and playwrights such as Vaclav Havel, demanded civil and political rights for Eastern Europeans. Finally, there were the campaigns on behalf of Soviet Jewry, in which members of the Canadian Jewish community took a prominent part. In 1990, I vividly remember travelling from Kiev, in Ukraine, to Vienna with a trainload of Soviet Jews on their way to Israel. They were frightened, bewildered, and sat up all night asking me questions about Israel, a country I had visited only once. They did not know where they were going, but they knew exactly what they were leaving: a land where even the humblest freedoms were beyond their reach. All of these battles for rights inside the Communist bloc had a huge political impact on the shape of our times. For the demand for rights was a demand to live in truth; to end the regime of lies; to live, finally, without fear and shame. What began as a campaign for rights within the Communist system ended up destroying the system altogether. When the Berlin Wall was pulled down in those unforgettable days in November 1989, the rights revolution changed history.

  None of these victories came easily. The rights revolution is a story of struggle. Indeed, the concept of rights comes from the struggles of the male landholders of England and France to throw off the tyranny of barons and kings and establish rights of property and due process of law. But one of the ironies about rights is that people who win theirs don’t necessarily want anyone else to have them. What dead white males fought for, they then denied to everyone who came after — women, blacks, working people. Nothing is less obvious than the idea that rights commit us to equality. Men who had enjoyed voting and property rights for centuries, for example, couldn’t conceiv
e that women should have them too, and they displayed astonishing ingenuity in denying claims that now seem self-evident. Likewise, union rights to closed shops and collective bargaining used to be regarded as a dastardly infringement on the freedom of individual workers and employers alike. This illustrates an ironic lesson: there is no more effective way to deny the rights of others than to claim that they are denying your own. The battle for union rights had to expose and defeat these claims. Workers did so by standing out in the cold in front of plant gates, and holding up placards and signs demanding the right to unionize their factories. It took from 1880 to about 1945 for North American workers to prove that collective union rights are the only effective way to counter the disproportionate economic power of employers.

  History shows that there is nothing secure and unassailable about our rights heritage. At this very moment, some clever official in Ottawa, Washington, or London is devising an ingenious way to abridge our right to communicate freely on the Internet. In Britain, a Labour government — a Labour government! — is considering a bill to allow the police to monitor Internet communications. It may be a cliché, but some clichés are deeply true: the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.

  Thanks to these struggles — many of them won only in the last generation — Western liberal societies have arrived at a new moment in their history. For the first time, they are trying to make democracy work on conditions of total inclusion. Everybody has the same rights, and everybody has the right to be heard. Democracy is supposed to belong to everyone. No wonder Western elites have worried since the 1960s that our societies are becoming ungovernable. What they mean, of course, is that we citizens are less obedient, less willing to leave politics to them. The rights revolution makes society harder to control, more unruly, more contentious. This is because rights equality makes society more inclusive, and rights protection constrains government power. Countries with strongly defended rights cultures are certainly hard to govern. But who says the ways of democracy must run smooth? Democracy is rough and tumble; conflict is built into the process, but provided the conflict stops short of violence, it is better than bland or managed consensus. To paraphrase Bette Davis, fasten your seat belts, because the rights revolution makes for a bumpy ride.