Michael Ignatieff is used to being admired in his native Canada, not to mention envied. His genre-leaping successes as a writer and broadcaster — reporting from hot spots in books and documentaries, defining the legacy of a major 20th-century political theorist in his biography of Isaiah Berlin, and even making the Booker Prize short list for his novel Scar Tissue — rank him among the most influential Canadian thinkers. And it doesn’t hurt that, at 56, the former BBC talk-show host retains his made-for-TV looks and effortless eloquence. But these days Ignatieff is coming in for as much criticism as adulation on forays back to Canada from his day job as a human-rights professor at Harvard University. The issue that has driven a wedge between him and many of his Canadian fans: Ignatieff was arguably the most prominent liberal supporter of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
On a recent lecture swing through Manitoba and Saskatchewan, Ignatieff took his lumps, in question-and-answer sessions, from audiences that saw his hawkish stance as letting down the liberal side. He says he was happy to hear them out. “All appearances to the contrary, I believe I’m a highly fallible person,” Ignatieff told Maclean’s in an interview in his office at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. Not that he has changed his mind. He argues that anti-war Canadians were too worried about the way Washington was flexing its military muscle — and nowhere near outraged enough over how Saddam Hussein had long used his. “What I felt was disappointing about a lot of Canadian opposition to the war was that very few people seemed to give a damn about the human-rights situation,” Ignatieff says. “Very few seemed to care that peace had the consequence of leaving 26 million people inside a really odious tyranny.”
What makes Ignatieff’s chiding of Canadians more than a tiff between a cerebral media star and his home crowd is the way he links the war debate to a much deeper critique of Canada’s place in the world. His concern is not so much that Canada should have fought in Iraq, but that Canadians may be fooling themselves into believing that by staying on the sidelines their nation was holding true to its principles. Those values might be summed up as United Nations-based multilateralism, backed by a glorious tradition of peacekeeping and generosity toward poor countries. In fact, Ignatieff argues, Ottawa’s stingy foreign aid budgets and eroded contribution to UN peacekeeping — a result of perennially low defence spending — have long since rendered that glowing image of Canada’s profile abroad more myth than reality. “You can’t be a multilateralist on the cheap,” he said. “You can’t sit there bleating about the legitimacy of the UN being jeopardized over Iraq if your overseas development assistance numbers are as lousy as ours are.”
He still says “ours.” Ignatieff continues to define himself very much as a Canadian — a “patriot” at that — even though he hasn’t lived in the country of his birth for a long time. He has spent most of his adult life in Britain and the U.S. as a high-brow broadcaster, best-selling author and brand-name professor.(He pleads not to be tagged a “public intellectual,” even though he epitomizes the species.)His taste for the expatriate life might well be inherited from his father. George Ignatieff, who died in 1989, was a peripatetic diplomat in the Pearsonian generation, one of the legendary post-Second World War foreign policy innovators who are credited with forging a golden age for Canada on the international stage.
The senior Ignatieff ended his diplomatic career as ambassador to the United Nations. In fact, so deep was his father’s commitment to the UN that Ignatieff suspects he would never have supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq without the world body’s approval. The idea that he has broken away from his father’s convictions seems to weigh heavier on Ignatieff than the disapproval of many of his liberal contemporaries and a wide swath of his reading public. “If you ask me why it was tough supporting this war,” he reflects, “part of it was that I heard father calling.”
Despite those very personal misgivings, Ignatieff contends that he is staying true to the legacy of his father’s era in a broader sense. “We invented peacekeeping,” he says. “But to be a serious peacekeeper in a modern world of failed states and civil wars, you have to have tanks, helicopters, military lift. Expensive.” He points to peacekeeping debacles of recent years, from Somalia to Srebrenica to Rwanda, as evidence that blue berets need to be backed up by real military clout. But Canada’s defence budget just isn’t big enough to consistently put that sort of force behind many UN missions. And it shows. A recent ranking of commitment to peacekeeping by the Washington-based Center for Global Development ranked Canada 17th out of 21 developed nations, ahead of only the U.S., Sweden, Japan and Switzerland. And in the same report card, Canada did only a couple of notches better, 15th place, on our foreign aid spending.
For Ignatieff, though, the plight of civilians in strife-torn states is much more than the dry stuff of a think-tank’s report. What sets him apart from most other deep thinkers on foreign affairs is his first-hand experience in the hottest conflict zones. His next book, due to hit Canadian bookstores in the fall, finds him again reporting from blood-soaked ground, this time in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan. Its title, Empire Lite, is Ignatieff’s term for the way America used force in temporary “nation-building” exercises in those dangerous places — and now in Iraq. Unlike Washington’s many critics, however, Ignatieff stresses that he uses the word empire not as a pejorative, but merely to try to capture the reality of U.S. potency around the globe. And he is far more willing than most who would call the contemporary U.S. imperial to acknowledge the good that can come from the exercise of that power — especially where he has witnessed the misery the worst regimes can inflict when they are left to terrorize their own populations.
