21

Multiple Reconciliations

“It’s rare to lose a country. It happened to me. I’m not talking about a state or a regime, but a country, where I was born and which was, until yesterday, my own. I loved Yugoslavia. . . . And yet I was not a Yugoslav nationalist.”

Predrag Matvejevitch, Le Monde “EX”1

ON DECEMBER 14, 1995, THE president of the United States, the prime ministers of Russia and Britain, the German chancellor and others gathered in the Élysée Palace for the signing of the Yugoslav peace accord.

Stop! you say. There is no parallel between Canada and the violent mess in the Balkans. Two hundred thousand casualties. Four million displaced people.

Of course there is no parallel. But there is something else which caught my eye.

First, the government leaders in that room knew full well that the Yugoslav disaster was in part their fault. Second, they had recognized in it a magnified playing-out of the sorts of divisions and violence which had plagued most of their own countries in the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries. Third, the intelligent or reflective among them seemed to have focused their attention on the idea of reconciliation.

The Balkans have always been a logical choice for jokes about nationalism. After all, here is a place where there is no such thing as pure blood or language. Almost everyone is intermarried or to some degree the product of intermarriage. The multiple groups have always lived in mixed communities. And yet throughout the Balkans there is a low ignition level for passionate claims about religion, language and blood.

The twentieth century has been filled with the search for a Balkan modus vivendi. Marshal Tito, whatever his flaws, succeeded. Within each of the small ethnic groups he managed to tap those elements which believed in reconciliation. The result for almost half a century was a relatively successful country, particularly by local standards. Even in the smallest villages people of different religions and mixed cultures lived and they lived together. By local standards they were relatively free. By local standards they prospered.

Without entering into Tito’s mistakes, which in the end severely weakened his creation, it is reasonable to say that he died leaving a country worth saving and capable of survival. Those who succeeded him were unable to rise to the needs of the situation. They looked after themselves, allowed a vacuum to grow and the country to drift.

When it exploded, they were blown away by the blast and the nationalist extremists were able to emerge, beat their breasts and take over the public and private agendas of the people. That is the sort of thing which tends to happen when a vacuum is created in a society.

At the signing of the peace in 1995, President Chirac said he hoped that the result would be a “unified, pluricultural, democratic” society. But that is, of course, what Yugoslavia had been. “They must live together in the respect of differences.” The ex-Yugoslavs might have answered that this was not what the great powers had done in their own countries. They had pulverized their minorities. But the signatories sat quiet and humiliated while the world lectured them on ethics and respect for the other. The central lesson being delivered was that of reconciliation.

The difficulty with proffering this noble idea was that the Yugoslavs had already been reconciled for half a century. Then in the late 1980s, they slipped into a primal delusion in which political difference was added on to political difference until these seemed to be racial differences. Once launched on that tempting quicksand, they dragged one another down into a Hades of hatred and bitterness. Gradually the developed world became too embarrassed to continue putting up with the Balkans’ collective nervous break down. So they were to be reconciled again.

What struck me, as I listened and watched, was that the great tragedy was not quite what it appeared to be. It wasn’t the violence and the loss of lives and the waste of a civilization’s time, terrible though all of this was. These were the various products of the tragedy. The tragedy itself was the loss of reconciliation. The loss of the ability to cohabit. More than a tragedy, it was a human failure, a crime of civilization. Those with power broke the pacts which held these humans together. They accomplished this first by doing nothing and then by exploiting despair and anger in the basest of causes.

That the result was violence and extreme poverty is not the point. It might have been far more benign. Still it would have been a crime. Reconciliation is a great human quality. One of the more important. Those with power know it can be neglected, abased, deformed, ridiculed in the name of various emotional or financial imperatives. Reconciliation is the most difficult of human states to defend. It is dependent on an acceptance of the idea of the public good. It invariably stands in the way of power, narrow self-interest and self-righteousness.

The vacant hopeless stare of Ottawa during much of the last national crisis, supplemented by heavy-handed warnings of a low-level economic nature; the hyperbole and exaggeration of differences, which amounted to a raising of prejudice, coming out of Quebec City; the increasing selfishness of provincial politics, particularly in Ontario and Alberta; all of these are the signs of an élite prepared to abandon the idea of reconciliation, preferring instead a vacuum of power in which they can manoeuvre.

A dispassionate observer can see the origins of reconciliation in Canada in the Quebec Act in 1774. The constitution of 1791 was the product of active cooperation between large parts of the newly arrived anglophone community and the francophones, working together on a reform agenda. The cooperation of the 1837 Lower Canada and Upper Canada rebels and that of the reform leaders of 1840–51 confirmed what then looked like isolated events to have been a social trend. There is no lack of addenda to this reconciliation, just as there is no lack of irritants which have more or less been dealt with. And now, without the population on any side of the argument having clearly taken the initiative to break our hold on reconciliation, we stand on the brink of doing it anyway.

As I watched the peace signing at the Élysée I was filled with that sense of the horror which any conscious human must feel when faced by the possibility of a reconciliation being broken and tossed aside. And what would the result be? As the parallels laid out in the previous chapter show, the result remains a mystery until the error is made. Then it unfolds according to its own bitter, destructive logic.

But surely all the qualities of careful moderation and imagination which I described in earlier chapters would come into play. Perhaps. But the qualities of a civilization are precisely that. They are not genetic or racial qualities. They are the product of the evolution of that society. That’s why I keep coming back to the importance of practical memory and to the pattern of our long experience and to the pacts struck along the way.

Our standards and our methods are in part the product of geography and political circumstance. But our reaction to place and circumstance today is the surprisingly stable result of endless small and large choices made along the road. By no means were all of these choices the right ones or even satisfactory. But they all are part of the larger pattern which I have attempted to describe. Those choices—and not our laws—are the structure of our civilization, the unwritten but understood structure of acceptable behaviour upon which democracies, more than any other form of society, survive.

The experience of other societies has been that, if you tear down that structure, then you lose your orientation. Unpleasant forces wrestled to the ground long before suddenly emerge, released and encouraged by the confusion. In other words, societies, humans, react badly to abrupt change. In most cases this takes the form of destabilization. You no longer know that if A does X, B will probably do Y or Z.

For example, Canada wrestled the worst of its nineteenth-century nationalism to the ground in the last years of the nineteenth century and the first few decades of the twentieth. The referendum of 1995 was enough to rerelease some of those forces. Suddenly, we now hear talk on all sides of violence and race. Where did it come from? How does it dare show its face? Why is it not swept away by some sort of common assent?

The response of most commentators today is to insist that public figures should respond to what are presented as essential questions. Would you be for or against partition? Force? Negotiation?

But these are not questions. They are assumptions—assumptions that, whatever happens, everything will be manageable, and therefore managed on the basis of decisions made among the élites as presently constituted. Indeed these decisions will be made among the same people who are now in positions of authority.

The democrat would ask different questions. If we do this, if we abandon the reconciliation on which we have been working now for more than two centuries, what forces will be unleashed? Or rather, will incalculable, uncontrollable forces be released? The current-affairs approach of our professional élites would be to leap immediately away from the fundamental questions and to concentrate instead on what they would see as a practical question—Well, how would we control these forces? But how can this be a practical question when you have no idea what forces will be released or how strong they might be? Again the democrat would be more likely to ask—What is a responsible act, given such unknown forces? Real questions revolve, as they always have in public affairs, around how difficult it is to create a stable, workable equilibrium which, if a great deal of effort is made, may be able to serve the public good. There is a built-in consciousness that this takes a very long time, and even then is permanently at risk. How many struggles are there along the way? What happens if you should chance to destroy that equilibrium? Forces will be unleashed. Experience tells us that they are rarely those sought by the people who wanted radical change. It is, as I said earlier, like throwing the cards in the air. That’s why the citizenry cast their votes with such precise consideration.

It appears that any attempts by the federal government or anglophones or indeed francophones to talk about possible negative effects of separation, such as partition, simply anger most francophones—even many federalists—and heighten the possibility that in the future Quebec francophones might vote to go. Perhaps this is because most francophones see the issue as one of self-respect or dignity rather than of separation. Their reaction is therefore an understandable response to being threatened. And to the extent that these are threats it is probably a sensible reaction.

Put aside the complicating factor that most of us—whether francophone or anglophone—realize our moderation is being treated as of secondary importance, given that those who are organizing these sequential referenda are interested less in dignity than in political separation. Let us stay, instead, with the impact of the debate on how citizens see themselves.

The difficulty is that the possibility of breaking up the country is also a threat and can only be felt in that way by those on the receiving end. The suggestion that highly charged votes over whether to break up the country are somehow healthy exercises in self-expression, unrelated to the future of those living outside of Quebec, is a difficult argument for most to digest. After all, if such campaigns are a threat to how Quebec federalists see themselves and imagine themselves, it is equally a threat for those living outside the province. In other words, for non-Quebecers it is a dagger aimed at the very heart of what they consider to be the national mythology.

It cannot be repeated enough that Quebec and, more precisely, francophone Canada is at the very heart of the Canadian mythology. I don’t mean that it alone constitutes the heart, which is after all a complex place. But it is at the heart and no multiple set of bypass operations could rescue that mythology if Quebec were to leave. Separation is therefore a threat of death to anglophone Canada’s whole sense of itself, of its self-respect, of its role as a constituent part of a nation, of the nature of the relationship between citizens. From my federalist francophone friends I sense that they understand this threat in more or less the same way. And because this mythology has been gradually developing since the Quebec Act of 1774, it is lodged so deeply in the Canadian psyche that no one can imagine what would happen if it were cut away. Remember, this is not a relationship born of some after-the-fact agreement between two mature nations. Its roots lie in patterns set in the 1770s and 1780s, when there were fewer than a total of 150,000 francophones and anglophones. It is therefore something which has grown and developed with the population as it has multiplied two hundred times.

The recurrent suggestions that anglophones must make as few comments as possible on the possibility and effects of Canada breaking up is meant to be a reflection of concern for the psychological make-up of francophones. But it doesn’t take into account the psychological makeup of anglophones.

Mr. Chrétien literally instructed the rest of the country to keep their mouths shut in the lead-up to the referendum, as if everyone should comply with the manner in which a referendum reduces the participants to temperamental children. It was only when those denied a vote saw the country on the edge of catastrophe that they reacted by pouring into the streets, not just those of Montreal, but from coast to coast. There was no time and no intellectual preparation. That these events were childlike fitted logically into a referendum atmosphere. As I said earlier, it doesn’t matter whether this psychological explosion had a positive or negative effect on the vote. At the very least, it reminded everyone that anglophones, like francophones, are humans laden with mythologies, and that these are the same mythologies as those to be found among francophones, even if they are interpreted differently, that they have a sense of themselves, a sense of the other and an emotive force.

It also undermined the delusionary idea of officials on both sides that it was they who were in charge of the brief and would negotiate whatever was required on behalf of the citizens. The reality is that most of the federal figures would quickly have been swept away by anglophones in the case of a Yes vote. And we now know that Mr. Bouchard and his team, ready to negotiate, were in effect also to be swept away by Mr. Parizeau and a more hard-line approach.

To return to my point of departure, the question is not, therefore, whether speaking of partition angers the citizenry. The question is, in the case of a vote to break up Canada, would the sort of leaders produced by a major reconfiguration of the federation put forward partition as one of their principal policies?

I have no idea. However, history tells us that instability releases demons and encourages the extremes. Having been given a role, once the central question had been decided without them, it is difficult to see why anglophones would take a positive approach. Partition would be one of the most obvious items for the new leadership to promise. Why? Because the desire of Canadians to salvage some sort of geographical survival would demand it; because Inuit, Natives and pockets of Quebec anglophones would demand it; and because the legal position for partition is at least as strong as that of Quebec for separation.

Again, this is neither my opinion nor my desire. Daniel Turp has put forward exactly the same scenario in his writings on Native rights.

Let me persist in this unpleasant discussion a moment longer. The 1995 bill authorizing the Quebec government’s referendum plans stated on the first page in its reasons:

BECAUSE we occupy the lands outlined by our ancestors, from Abitibi to the Îles-de-la-Madeleine, from Ungava to the American frontiers. . . .—PARCE QUE nous habitons les territoires délimités par nos ancêtres de l’Abitibi aux Îles-de-la-Madeleine, de l’Ungava aux frontières américaines. . . .

But, of course, Quebec brought less than half of that into Confederation. Ottawa gave it Abitibi in 1898 and Ungava in 1912. These territories therefore do not fall within the argument that Canada is a federation of sovereign territories; an argument which theoretically permits a constituent part to leave with the guy who brung them. In addition the treaties which hold the Natives in Canada are with the central power. As Daniel Turp puts it:

Such a right would allow the Native nations to decide their political and constitutional future as freely as the Québécois.... In other words, by virtue of their right to self-determination, the Native nations of Quebec could decide to attain sovereignty, to remain integrated with Canada, to stay with Quebec if it becomes sovereign or to remain within Canada even if Quebec chooses sovereignty. . . . Should the Native nations attain sovereignty or separate from Quebec to remain within Canada, there would be a problem of territorial integrity similar to that posed by the secession of Quebec from Canada. If Quebec were to object to sovereignty measures democratically approved by the Native nations, these nations could undoubtedly claim that their democratic right to self-determination and to secession had been violated.2

Indeed they have already made their wishes clear on two occasions by majorities so massive as to constitute virtual unanimity. Mr. Turp goes on in his 1992 published argument to discuss precisely how the province would be carved up. Needless to say, once he identified himself with the Bloc québécois, he stopped this sort of writing. And he felt himself obliged to withdraw his commitment to write a similar analysis for the Royal Commission on Native Affairs.

In any case, Mr. Bouchard keeps repeating—“The territory of Quebec has a fundamental characteristic; it is integral.”3 The sentence reminds us of his taste for nineteenth-century writers from the metropole. It has the ring about it of Charles Péguy, the romantic, conservative, Catholic French nationalist author. Like Péguy’s visions of the nation, Mr. Bouchard’s declarations of geographic integrity have more to do with romantic assertion than generally accepted realities.

The public place is now littered with constitutional and other lawyers ready to argue the case one way or the other. Both Ottawa and Quebec City have begun making statements to position themselves on the question. Jacques Brassard, the Quebec minister of intergovernmental affairs, stated clearly at the beginning of 1997 that Quebec would be ready to use the police to defend its territory. Mr. Manning is already tracing out an equivalent position which reflects the opposing extreme and he will increasingly press forward with it.

Jean Charest, in the one unrehearsed comment I heard him utter during the 1997 election campaign, replied to a question on his position over partition, “Once we’ve crossed that threshold we find ourselves in an area where there are no longer any rules.”

Moderates on all sides are horrified by the drift of the debate. They rightly, but desperately, point out that separating part of Montreal would be a crazy catastrophe. They say less of the Hull area, call for calm, and if possible remain silent on the subject of the northern half of the province.

All I am doing here is describing a few elements from the maelstrom of energy-sucking arguments and emotions which could consume our lives.

I know Predrag Matvejevitch. I first met him at Zagreb University when he was running the French Department and writing his books. That was before the Yugoslav vacuum had degenerated into civil war, before he had to flee into exile. What strikes me about Predrag and my other Yugoslav friends is, again, not the scars of the violence, which they somehow disguise with an astonishing elegance of civility, but the tragedy of the lost opportunity. It is as if their lives, creative though they are, can no longer be consumed by creativity, let alone family, responsibility or pleasure. Instead, they have been taken over by the sectarian differences which have somehow, in a way which none of them can really explain to themselves, consumed their society.

That ‘inexplicability,’ even among the most worldly and sophisticated of thinkers, tells us everything about the forces of disorientation which can be let loose once structures which reward the qualities of moderation are torn down; in other words, once a referendum scenario has created the illusions of clarity and rebirth. The point is not whether partition is right or wrong, possible or impossible. The point is that the road away from reconciliation leads not towards resolution but into the swamps of self-destructive animosity.