28
Nationalism
IF OUR ÉLITES TELL US THAT THE principal forces moving throughout the west are such things as global trade, the money-markets and competition, and that these are beyond anyone’s control, well then, the citizen is left in an awkward position. With the ideological stroke of inevitability, we are deprived of the community powers which, particularly over the last two centuries, have permitted us to put an increasingly decent social structure in place. What does this do to the citizens’ self-esteem, this return to a single absolute religion in which the forces which determine our future are as out of reach as those of an all-knowing deity? What powers does it leave us, except those old mediaeval crutches—emotion and superstition? Thanks to them, in lieu of real power, we are left free to turn in upon ourselves.
Not that nationalism in all its different manifestations has ever completely disappeared. Nor should it. Nor will it ever.
But the aggressive return of nationalism as a negative force is largely the responsibility of those élites who have embraced a higher, greater utilitarian superstition. This introverted nationalism of particular characteristics is the consolation prize offered to the losers—the citizens—when their real powers are given away.
It isn’t surprising, therefore, that negative or exclusionary nationalism continues to grow. Whether in Italy, France, Austria, Germany or elsewhere, a language which marries particularity with fear is rewarded at the ballot box. In hard numbers it now hovers between a fifth and a quarter of the voters. But other, more mainstream politicians have amended their own vocabulary to fit in with this atmosphere. In Canada, Preston Manning and the premiers of British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario and Quebec reach easily into the language of negative nationalism in order to advance their political positions.
Still, nationalism as a positive creative force continues to exist. Nationalism need not be about fear or anger. And tempting though the option is, we need not try to tie nationalism to joy. The joy of being the best. The joy of winning. Even the joy of being special.
After all, the history of nationalism tells us that joy has always been closely linked to fear and anger. Hitler, to take the most outrageous example, used fear, anger and joy as a revolving holy trinity which rolled the citizenry repeatedly and at great speed from one to the other to the other until they lost all sense of reality.
That this was negative and dangerous is now clear. And yet these are the elements and the methods used and rewarded in modern public relations, to say nothing of the business of sports and of political campaigns. And they remain at the core of negative nationalism.
But what is the positive variety made up of? What does it mean to say, for example: positive nationalism responds to the question of how humans can live together? Am I talking about a sense of community? Perhaps, yet the concept of community has also brought us great problems in the past. Look, for example, at the era of renaissance city-states. They functioned on a strong sense of civic belonging. But their devotion to their community caused them to slip into rivalries, jealousies and hatred, one for the other. If their era came to an end, creative and positive though much of it was, the reason was their inability to stop fighting each other.
A sense of place, of belonging, is central to creative nationalism, but what makes it positive is a strong sense of how society works and should work. Belonging to a community means something positive only in so far as it is attached to an idea of the public good, which is by its very nature inclusive.
Not that pride and rivalry, jealousy and competition don’t have their roles in the real world. Society isn’t a Sunday school and we do have a right to reassure and distract and amuse ourselves with assertions of our qualities, just as lovers do. But this isn’t nationalism; or rather, if it is elevated to that level it quickly becomes racism or some other dangerous characteristic.
Jean-Pierre Derriennic talks about “civic nationalism,” which includes all citizens, and “ethnic or identity nationalism,” which, by virtue of its definition of identity—language, religion or any other criteria—“separates nationality from citizenship.”1 In other words, it excludes people.
That is an honest and severe definition. The real situation is both more complex and more interesting. What we have always experienced in Canada is an agreeable though challenging mess of civic nationalism, regional nationalism and identity nationalism. And all of this has been bound up in—or rather confused with—competing demands for specific political powers by the federal or the provincial levels of government. There has always been a competition for concrete responsibilities between the provinces and Ottawa. That is a condition of federalism. Sometimes it has to do with respecting the constitution; sometimes with an honest belief that the public good can best be served at one level rather than the other. But most of the time we are just witnessing banal competitions for power—politics at its most predictable and self-interested. And as the technocracies have grown at both federal and provincial levels, so the demands for more powers at both levels have become automatic and alarmingly insistent. Here we can justifiably talk about the nationalism of characteristics, even if the characteristics in question are those of a political-administrative class rather than a mythological tribe. After all, the innate drive of any technocracy is to increase its power. The role left for the politicians is often little more than to provide exciting rhetoric for a not very exciting struggle; the public entertainment which dresses up the serious business being done in private.
If much of the ongoing federal-provincial drama is banal administrative rivalry, the way to make it exciting is to provoke the emotions of negative nationalism. Suddenly the administration of a relatively ordinary service is transformed into an element of life or death for the national character of a province or a region or, alternately, for the nation as a whole.
This is further confused in a federation by the various ideas of community. After all, if there is a characteristic proper to Canada, it is that we have not rigorously set out to eliminate differences. In our more intelligent moments we have encouraged them. So our nationalism exists on a spectrum, from the impossibly generous idea that all people belong to all communities across to the exclusive and negative opposite in which each of us is limited to a single community. The latter is what Séguin approvingly called “. . . the principle of nationalities in all its rigour.”2 Now that is a phrase Colonel Sam Hughes—our disastrously Orange minister of defence during the First World War—would have liked.
This exclusive approach is our inheritance from the nineteenth-century European nation-state. European nationalism became the enclosing wall by which one type or concept of community shut its inhabitants in and all others out. That, they said, was necessary and normal, even inevitable, in a “real” nation.
What then about the impossible idea that all people belong to all communities? It could be said that this mythology is Canada’s contribution to the ongoing western debate over the nature of nationalism. I am not suggesting that we have ever seriously believed in such a possibility or even acted as if we did. But for many Canadians it has been a fantasy at one end of the spectrum; a fantasy much exploited by political figures.
Our more realistic and indeed real attitude is that we all belong to several communities and do so at several levels. And we tend to see our situation as a condition which must be turned into something positive, rather than mistaking our condition for a problem which needs to be solved by eliminating differences.
The idea of belonging to multiple communities makes practical sense in a decentralized federation built upon three cultural foundations. But it has also distressed some people. For a start this is not the classic western understanding of the monolithic nation-state. And the formalization of this idea of diversity into something called multiculturalism has exacerbated the discomfort many felt.
But the social reality of our diversity—the reality we all live—has never had much to do with the formal politics of multiculturalism. I would say that both the Utopia and the bogeyman of multiculturalism are false. And the pattern of the last hundred and fifty years is relatively clear: the immigrants who come here and stay do so because in the long run they want to become something called Canadian. If you look back over that long experience, you find it has normally taken about two and a half generations for families to find their place in the larger community. If you consider the destabilizing drama of emigration and immigration, this is quite fast. If anything, it has been slowed not by the immigrants but by the exclusive attitudes of those already here.
The smoothness with which people adapt is first and foremost dependent on the quality of the public education system. This is as true for francophones as for anglophones. If you put aside some of the marginal details of Quebec’s language laws, you come to the core, which relates to public education. Having got that more or less right, the provincial government found that the immigrant communities increasingly began to adjust in a way which didn’t threaten francophone society.
It is interesting that the provincial governments most eager to use the monolithic European nationalist models are the same governments which have most severely cut back on public education over the last few years. Even in a rich province like British Columbia, with heavy per-capita immigration rates, the government continues to reduce per-student spending on education, as do Alberta, Ontario and Quebec. In doing this they are failing to assume their most important obligation. Instead they distract us from this central point by continually moaning about Ottawa’s interference on the margins of education or in other areas and about the immigrants’ supposed reluctance to fit in.
Let me restate this in a more aggressive way. The decision to admit immigrants is one made by Canadians. We have a very unusual, steady and high level of immigration. This has been, for a century and a half, a conscious policy. No matter how desperate the lives of immigrants before they come, no matter how much they may want to come here, they come because we have chosen to invite them in. If it is our decision, then we must be prepared to assume the related obligations. We cannot invite people in—particularly poor people—and then moan about their effect on our society. If their role is in some way troubling, then it is entirely our fault for not assuming our full responsibilities to smooth the difficult path of immigration. And the primary institutional responsibility is public education. You cannot have high levels of immigrants and expect them to find their way if you are not willing to spend well above the per-capita norm of western countries on education.
This is the most important provincial responsibility. These governments have the full obligation to prepare citizens for their adult lives, whether they are native-born or immigrant. By cutting back rather than increasing their education budgets at a time of high immigration, they are not, as they claim, stabilizing their economies. They are destabilizing our society. On a short-list of government failures in Canada, this stands at the top, well above the various stupidities of the federal government.
That we have seen a revival of regional nationalisms over the last quarter-century in many of the twenty-odd western countries both surprises and disturbs our élites. What’s more, given the inability of these élites to accept the root causes of this phenomenon, there is every reason for nationalism to continue to grow and to do so in all its forms, from the positive through to the negative. In fact, the disconnection of the élites suggests that it is the negative variety which will dominate.
There are at least six reasons for this revival: an understandable reaction to half a century of centralization at all levels of authority, or what we might call ‘normalization’ to central standards; a related reaction to the growth in technocratic power and the weakening of real democratic power; a frustrated reaction to the difficulty of sustaining public debate when the élites have embraced the inevitabilities of expert answers; a reaction to globalization and the related sense of powerlessness; a delayed but hardly surprising reaction to the failure of the élites to deal with the real problems created by the factors I’ve just mentioned; and another related reaction to the attempts, particularly over the last century, to eliminate local differences.
If you look at Canada in the context of these six explanations, you find that, on the first point, there is a regional reaction to centralization, even if in comparison with other countries there has been very little real centralization.
There is a deep frustration with the weakening of democratic power versus that of the technocracy. This is complicated by the fact that the problem is the same at the provincial level. It is further confused by constant campaigns organized by the private-sector technocracy to attack the idea of the public good by attacking those employed to deliver it—the public technocracy.
There is a particularly exacerbated frustration with the unsustainable nature of public debate. This has always been of particular importance in Canada, given the distances, the regional differences, the linguistic complications. I argued earlier in this book that ours is an oral society. A weakening of public debate strikes at that need.
The sense of powerlessness before globalization seems to be particularly developed among anglophones, perhaps because they have been used to making the effort required every day to go on existing when there is a great empire next door using the same language. Among francophones this frustration is present, but confused by the eagerness with which their élites have unanimously encouraged globalization. They have argued that language is a protection, when the opposite is more likely.
The most narrowly nationalist have argued that globalization frees Quebec from the rest of Canada. What they haven’t pointed out is that most of the powers needed to create and maintain a public-private society of the sort developed across Canada, including Quebec, are gradually being abandoned in order to conform with the global model. So a sovereign or separate Quebec would have few levers left to protect or develop its social and cultural structures. What’s more, those same leaders have encouraged the delusion that the United States would welcome a partnership with a more or less social-democratic French-speaking partner. This suggests that no one in Quebec knows their history. Which isn’t the case. And so, sublimated though it must be, there is frustration just under the surface among francophones, just as there is among anglophones.
The sense that the élites are unable to deal with the problems at hand—high unemployment and underemployment, dropping real standards of living—is shared everywhere. The citizenry are constantly looking for ways to punish or wake up those to whom they give authority to deal with these issues.
On the final point, that of attacking local differences, Canada has taken a very different track from the other countries. When you look at how healthy the differences are here, you can’t really attribute their state to the rise of regional nationalisms. If anything, the strength of French and of regional ways of life would suggest that the system works. But in the context of globalization, such simple logic makes no sense. Any sign of differences is misinterpreted as a sign that the system doesn’t work. It is as if a ‘real’ nation is one which conforms to low-level principles of market-place theory: either harmonize or spin off the company’s constituent parts.
What I draw from these six reasons for citizen discontent is that for the first time in 150 years the real power of the individual as a citizen is in decline. The mechanisms of self-interest, of interests and of technicians dominate. These are all good reasons for a revival of nationalism. The question is, will it be negative nationalism, filled with the illusive protections of self-definitions? Or will it be positive nationalism aimed at re-establishing the role of the citizen and of the public good?
The form which the gradual return of nationalism takes will depend on our ability consciously to avoid the emotions of the extremes. And because language can’t help but be central to any debate over the shape of a society, a great deal will turn on our ability to identify the real meaning of words. By language, I mean here not one language or another, but our means of communication.
For example, in the language of Preston Manning you can hear the phraseology of Sir Allan MacNab, whose attempts to please the remains of the Family Compact and the Château Clique finally unleashed the riots in Montreal which ended with the burning of the Parliament Buildings and the Annexation Manifesto. I hear the same superficial respectability filled with a coded language of unacceptable behaviour. And his talent for placing the most divisive of phrases at moments guaranteed to increase division in the population is not unusual. But we have not seen someone wield such a talent at that level of influence since D’Alton McCarthy.
Mr. Manning claims to be the descendant of the early prairie reform movements. I take him at his word and read the manifestos of those movements—for example, one of the earliest, the Farmers’ Manifesto. There, as elsewhere in prairie populism, you find that their concept of reform was one of justice and equality. It had nothing to do with the unleashing of personal power outside of, indeed against, a concept of the public good.
The same sort of unbalanced remarks—either unconsidered or intended to unleash uncontrolled anger—slip effortlessly from the mouths of men like Brian Tobin, Glen Clark, Jacques Ménard and Bernard Landry. You could call this cheap or lazy politics. But if you draw back, what you can hear is a growing pattern: a spreading desire to express a sense of powerlessness by taking the easy road—that of injuring people rather than dealing with reality.
In such a context negative nationalism can be seen as an almost medical condition. It resembles a violent outbreak on the human body. Societies like humans move along in as balanced a manner as possible. When something is wrong it will often build up within them like an infection, then suddenly explode in unexpected and inexplicable ways, like a fever or a boil. The unilingual movement in northern Ontario, the fighter-plane contract in Winnipeg, the sign legislation in Montreal, the air-controllers’ crisis—they explode as if from nowhere. To call them crimes of passion would confer undue dignity. They are infections, which indicate deeper frustrations, and which are often related to something quite different. Each outbreak heals slowly and leaves scars.
The job of good leadership is to lance the boil before it rises. As Laurier put it in Trois-Rivières, in one of his last speeches, Borden’s attitude towards conscription “was simply stupid.”3 Why? Because it didn’t take into account the reality of the society. He therefore had turned his back on the public good.
Georges-Émile Lapalme quoted Eric Kierans being sensible in 1966 on the same subject—the reality of our society. “A desire for indépéndance exists in the heart of all French Canadians to a greater or lesser degree and this desire can be exacerbated as quickly by indifference as by hostility.”4 All Laurier, Lapalme and Kierans were talking about was the balance and restraint necessary in a complex society.
They were not talking of a particularity of French-Canadian society. Rather they are referring to the basic truths of such situations. Lapalme put it succinctly—“Any minority is basically nationalist.”5 The complicating factor in Canada is that everyone sees themselves as belonging to a minority. Even the Orange Order justified their position on that basis. Everyone is quick to appropriate the position of the aggrieved party or, as Margaret Atwood recently put it, “Victimization is the coveted position.”6
This also encourages groups to seek strength through solidarity. Minorities are always told by their leaders that only by sticking together can they survive or do well. “What is nationalism?” Michel Brunet asked. “It is simply the manifestation of the natural and spontaneous solidarity that exists among members of a human group sharing a historical and cultural tradition from which the group derives its distinctive identity.”7
This is a perfect summary of negative nationalism. At first glance his formula is heart-warming and seductive. On second glance you begin noticing and analysing those disarming terms—“simply” and “sharing.” How curious to use the word sharing to mean sharing with no one else. “Natural and spontaneous”? I know of nothing in the history of nation-states, peoples, tribes, communities, families and above all democracies which is natural and spontaneous. Only ideologues claim that events or situations are natural and spontaneous. But these two words are only modifiers. The phrase is “natural and spontaneous solidarity.” What happens to those who do not join in the solidarity? Do they, like Marcel Trudel and Fernand Ouellet—the historians who disagreed with the Montreal School—eventually feel that the only way to continue a reasonable career is to leave the province? Put aside whether you agree or disagree with the import of their work. What did they do which made their lives so difficult? Well, Trudel believed he was devoting his work to the principle that “history must serve no cause.”8
Their fate is in no way a comment on francophone society. But it is a comment on those within the élites who believe they are the leaders of a natural and spontaneous solidarity, whether it be in Quebec or Alberta.
Vaclav Havel said that insiders always characterize “every attempt at open criticism as naked terrorism.”9 If you live in a minority, you can add that open criticism from the inside represents the naked terrorism of a traitor.
This explains why groups which adopt the methods of negative nationalism so often name themselves after the group in question or appropriate a term central to life in that group. This is what I described in Voltaire’s Bastards as the dictatorship of vocabulary. It was common in the 1960s for the president of single-party nation-states to use words like freedom and democratic to name their party and/or their state. D’Alton McCarthy’s movement was called the Equal Rights Association. Preston Manning’s party is centred on the same two words—equality and rights. In both cases the intent was and is inequality. Mr. Manning uses the word reform to capture a central myth of Western populism, while his actual policies run counter to that whole tradition. The Parti Québécois’s name is an attempt to co-opt the legitimacy of the community as a whole. Other parties may name themselves for a theory or an approach, but the PQ wraps itself in the idea of a natural solidarity. In effect, they adopted the exact arguments developed by Maurice Duplessis around the idea of a ‘national union’ and took them one step further. ‘Which national union?’ ‘That of the Québécois.’
Curiously enough, minorities rarely do well through solidarity. Even to function with the strong sense that solidarity would be an advantage is damaging. Both the thing itself and the expectation of it removes the group’s ability to make full and positive use of the strength of democracy; that is, of its own shared intelligence—which only dissension (les chicanes) can unlock. Solidarity encourages passivity. It is the ultimate corporatist solution.
Of course there are moments of great crisis—wars, natural disasters, extreme economic collapse, just to take a few examples—when a temporary and narrowly focused solidarity is necessary over a limited period of time. Constitutional differences and the other elements of the Canadian condition do not fall into this category of a crisis.
Society’s greatest need is not for agreement but for responsibility. And in a democracy, responsibility is based on the inevitability of disagreement. Responsibility-disagreement has to do with an understanding of our obligation to society. Solidarity has to do with the artificial removal of difference. In the name of what? If you feel obligation, you cannot remove difference.
Getting power, even getting their own way, doesn’t seem to remove this need felt by negative nationalists that everyone must act as one. The more nationalist movements built on the need for solidarity succeed, the more they seem to rely on calls for solidarity. The better placed they are to deliver the promised Utopia, the more that Utopia recedes and so the more the movement must make appeals to the powers of mythology deformed into mystification.
The reality of our history is that francophones have done best at both the federal and the provincial levels by avoiding the issue of loyalty to group and instead supporting coalitions built on ideas. This began with the LaFontaine–Baldwin coalition. The most creative and reforming of Quebec provincial governments have come to power and governed on the basis of ideas. The most damaging and the most mediocre Quebec governments have been attached to the idea of solidarity.
One of the outcroppings of solidarity is an inability to see the other as another human. This is the core of negative nationalism. The Reform party’s 1997 campaign ads—“The voice for all Canadians, not just Quebec politicians”—had all the markings of this incapacity to see the other. As with the use of equivalent statements by the European false-populist movements of the 1920s and 1930s, Reform claimed simply to be stating facts. Dispassionate facts. Yet for the following week the Reform party had already scheduled patriotic ads with Mr. Manning talking about his love of country, while placed in front of a big flag. The two ads taken together as part of a strategy were perfect examples of the negative-nationalist trilogy: fear and anger followed by joy.
Yves Michaud, PQ stalwart and Quebec agent-general in Paris during the 1980s, would probably also invoke the defence of dispassionate facts, if reminded of his 1964 statement on a proposed gathering of citizens—an Estates-General, which was to include only francophones—“The English, the Jews, the Americans and all the others will have no business in the Estates-General. This is an initiative that we alone can bring to good conclusion. . . .”10 He might add that to use such a quote against him was to insinuate something about francophones in general. Not at all. My own experience is that Quebec society in general is extremely open and relaxed about race and therefore about minorities. As in the rest of Canada there are specific groups—quite small—which burn with the anger that makes it impossible for that small group to recognize the other as normal. But, as elsewhere, they are indeed small groups. I sense the same fear and anger in Mr. Harris’s government, which bears no relationship to the Progressive Conservatives of Bill Davis. Mr. Harris seems to have inherited part of the baggage of the old Orange Order.
The differentiations that I’m making between positive and negative nationalism all turn on the question of context. The positive nationalist is moderated by a conscious awareness of the larger real context. The negative nationalist expressly denies it. Or at least denies its relevance. The problems of the community the negative nationalist claims to represent are presented as their problems alone. Injury inevitably comes from elsewhere or from traitors within. The other does not exist as a human, let alone as a relevant human. Decisions are always to be made within and to be made without reference to what lies outside.
In a curious little incident after the 1995 referendum an American journalist went to Lac Saint-Jean and interviewed Lucien Bouchard’s mother. She said, “I’ve never met an English-speaking Canadian. But I’m sure they are as nice as any other foreigners.” Apparently she had been to Europe and Miami, but to no other province. I have no desire to comment on Mr. Bouchard’s mother. I’m sure she is a worthy fellow-citizen of mine and of yours. On the other hand, she did comment on me as a category.
Hers was an odd statement for someone whose son says in his memoirs that many of his friends at university were members of the old and new anglophone élite: Michael Meighen and Brian Mulroney, to name just two.11 And speaking for myself, I have often been to Lac Saint-Jean, an area I love and in which I have a number of friends (francophone). But the real point I can’t help making is the oddness of her attitude. Someone might have reminded her, for example, that Quebec women had had the vote since she was five, the federal vote, and that was because of a movement begun and led by fellow-citizens of hers on the prairies. In other words, not only were they not foreigners, they had had a concrete and, in that case, positive effect on the life of Mr. Bouchard’s mother. And if she has had the provincial vote in Quebec since her thirty-fifth birthday, it was the result of a victory won by a coalition of federalist francophone and anglophone women’s groups. The victory had been won over the negative nationalists, who opposed women getting the vote. And if there are more than three hundred thousand young anglophones, or English-speaking Canadians, to use her phrase, in French-language schools in the rest of Canada, it isn’t because they are nice foreigners. Whether she approves, disapproves, cares or doesn’t, it’s because they also are fellow-citizens.
None of that is to suggest that Mr. Bouchard’s mother doesn’t have the right to whatever her politics might be. Rather, it is to point out how a certain atmosphere erases the reality of the perfectly obvious other.
After all, education is not a romantic indulgence. It is the most important decision parents can make for their children. In the first years it is the parents who mark the child’s life forever with their choices. Then gradually, over the years, the child assumes or alters the direction set. Again, young persons are making key choices which will set the pattern of their lives. So if hundreds of thousands of anglophone adults choose to send their children to French-language schools every year and those children choose to accept this direction in their lives, they believe they are doing something important.
However, negative nationalism, since it has difficulty recognizing the reality of the other, simply goes on insisting that all is division and that all efforts by others are meaningless. In the end this has an effect on many anglophones. They feel demeaned, just as many francophones have felt demeaned at various times when their reality is ignored. The important thing in any democratic situation is to be careful not to demean the other. Otherwise bp Nichol’s poem takes on meaning for both sides.
& when you have such nothing
you love only yourself
you fill your poems with self-love & loathing
& it is not poetry
it is dead12
The reader can see that I am skating in these pages along the edges of the links between negative nationalism and racism. Frankly, I don’t find the question of whether McCarthy or Groulx or others in British Columbia or Ontario or Nova Scotia or Quebec were or are racists is terribly useful. Nor is a checklist of who was and who wasn’t. Racism was widespread, almost endemic in one form or another, from the second half of the nineteenth century to the end of the Second World War. Very few communities have reason to be proud of their attitudes, in particular during the 1930s. On the other hand, our understanding of the often tempting soft edge of racism became much clearer after 1945. Suddenly, throughout the west, most citizens and in particular most intellectuals and public personalities understood that the slightest ambiguity on the question of race could begin you on your way down a road towards disastrous actions. A new severe and unforgiving attitude thus became normal. None of which means racism went away. But it no longer had the advantage of even marginal respectability.
The real question since 1945 has been whether negative forms of nationalism cannot help but carry racism within them in the manner of a Trojan horse. There was prolonged debate, for example, over the Jean-Louis Roux affair. The well-known actor and aggressive federalist had been named lieutenant-governor of Quebec. During an interview in 1997, he used as an example of unacceptable nationalism his own participation as a student in anti-Semitic activities in the Second World War. The result of this interview was a scandal during which he resigned his office. Much of the controversy was politically driven, on both sides. In the end, Irving Abella, who wrote the definitive book on Canadian anti-Semitism (None Is Too Many), rightly intervened to remind everyone that this had been a Canada-wide problem, not something limited to francophones, and that it was most serious in the élites.13
The origin of this sickness was not simply European-inspired anti-Semitism. In Canada, it rose in part out of the nineteenth-century Protestant nationalist movements. They were vulgar, triumphalist, indifferent to the law, vigilante minded, and saw Catholicism as an evil. They sounded a bit the way Ian Paisley sounds today. From their street-gang, jaw-busting tactics in the 1830s and 1840s on behalf of the Family Compact up to their attempts to capture John A. Macdonald’s agenda, they set the nationalist tone against which everyone had to react.
D’Alton McCarthy was the civilized voice of this movement and he came to prominence at the height of the Orange Order’s influence. Indirectly he gave them the kind of spiritual leadership which raised the debate above their normal bully-boy tactics. He preached cultural and linguistic uniformity as the only way to build a nation. He can claim, from his grave, much of the responsibility for two language crises in the West and the tensions surrounding critically exaggerated problems such as the Jesuits’ estates question, which is rightly forgotten.
On the positive side, the population never gave his movement the practical, real approval it craved. He captured no government and very few seats. What he and his friends did do was bully or destabilize successive governments into making mistakes which we are still paying for. They also created a current of intolerance which would re-emerge in the twentieth century at various moments on various issues—particularly those of minority-language education—to bedevil the more sensible wishes of what had always been a reasonably moderate society. It was a movement which would tie provincial autonomy to ethnic politics. Since provinces were usually constructed of a solid ethnic majority, those who had racial beliefs found it easier to apply them at that level of government. In British Columbia the Chinese and Natives were disenfranchised in 1874; the Japanese in 1895; the East Indians in 1907; the Mennonites and Doukhobors in 1931.14 There were elements of the same racial politics in Ernest Manning’s eugenics program in Alberta. Purity of race was a theory tied to your origins, but also to physical soundness.
This is the context in which I listen to Preston Manning’s portrait of provincial rights as a means of ensuring unity of language and culture on a regional basis. These are coded attacks on francophones. But what I hear are even more coded aggressive attacks on those who, for one reason or another, find themselves stuck on the margins of society. He claims, as I mentioned earlier, a parentage to prairie populism. But there is no relationship in his policies to those movements, from the Métis through the various farmers’ associations and parties to the CCF. And his is certainly not the voice of Peter Lougheed. It’s just pure nineteenth-century Ontario sectarianism. In fact, it’s quite amusing that he should present himself as the defender of the Western cause when what he is selling is the worst of Ontario’s nineteenth-century prejudices. Perhaps there is hope that irony is not dead.
As for the Ultramontane movement, it was every bit as unpleasant as the Orange Order. Catholicism at that stage had various forms of racism buried deep within it, particularly anti-Semitism. It was also profoundly reactionary and anti-democratic. The intentions of men like Bishop Lartigue and Bishop Bourget were depressingly clear. They and their supporters were unrelenting and unforgiving within the francophone Catholic community. At first they were not so aggressive towards those on the outside of their particular world. Bourget’s view was defensive and therefore somewhat limited geographically. However, the aggressive, insulting triumphalism of the Orange Order and McCarthyism—delivered with that conviction of absolute moral authority which is a sure sign of cheap prejudice—drew the Ultramontane beyond their local struggle against the democratic and liberal reformers in Quebec. The religious purity sought in this retrograde revivalist movement soon spread out into broader questions of language and culture. The endemic racism was soon expressed in ways which mirrored that of the Protestant movements.
The effect of all of this was to encourage the pride which negative nationalists on all sides could take in their ignorance. A century later, leading intellectuals could still make arch nationalist assertions without any sense of how ridiculous they sounded. For example, Michel Brunet could reduce anglophones in one of his most famous books to “monarchists, British and Protestant.”15 All the creative initiatives of the preceding hundred years were simply brushed aside. He wrote this just a few months before the Suez Crisis when, under the guidance of Lester Pearson and a group of largely anglophone senior diplomats, Canada would act as the opponent of British foreign policy.
But negative nationalism is ideology and any reference to reality is no longer necessary. Abruptly it transports us into a Manichean world where everything is equally divided between good and evil. The concept of ‘equality’ comes with that of expelling the other into an unreal space where evil and niceness have no particular meaning, because, above all, they exist far away, on the other side.
If negative nationalism is built on these elements of solidarity, uniformity, the unreal other and the Manichean division of good and evil, then the crowning element is the leader. We have seen in this century how a certain school of nationalism seems to require an Heroic Leader, usually a false Hero. This trend has been developing throughout the west since Napoleon. But the particularities of the modern false Hero have evolved to the point of being clearly defined.
We talk of demagogues, but we would do better to talk of martyrs. There are elements of the father figure in these men, but more accurately they are like vestal virgins, devoting their lives to the nation. Theirs is the leadership of love, so that any suggestion of any other public emotion or love offered by a citizen in another direction is a personal betrayal. The modern false Hero is married to the nation and as such fulfils Euripides’ warning—
Power and eloquence in a headstrong man spell folly; such a man is a peril to the state.16
Federal politics don’t lend themselves easily to this formula. The country is too complex. A formula which might create an Heroic relationship with one region will probably just annoy people in the others. Prime ministers have tried and failed. With the exception of Laurier, who counterbalanced his speaking skills with a desire for consensus and a careful line of ideas, the other successful leaders have been more intellectual on their feet than eloquent. They have been survivors rather than lovers; careful balancers of competing interests while struggling to keep an eye on the main line of the public interests. And they have tended towards careful language in order to avoid creating divisions. The mistakes they have made, from LaFontaine through to Trudeau, can be catalogued, but they have tended to be errors of judgement more than a long trail of damage left by a Hero out of control. The prime ministers who are considered failures are usually those who tried to drive the citizenry onward with unrestrained, unbalanced rhetoric. Or they are people who never managed to identify the level of public good which might enable people with differences to live together. Faced with the impossibility of governing by love, they ruled instead by dividing us.
The provincial level, on the other hand, is designed for false Heroes. The greater ethnic cohesion of the populations combines with the last essential element needed for the Heroic leader—the existence of a permanent, inescapable and more powerful ‘enemy.’ Ottawa provides an automatic and permanent presence against which to develop the theme of victimization. And victimization is central to the emotional relationship upon which Heroic leadership is built. So our history has been peopled by men like W.A.C. Bennett, William Aberhart and Ernest Manning, Howard Ferguson and Mitch Hepburn, Honoré Mercier and Maurice Duplessis. They all, as Lapalme said of Duplessis, “had the monopoly on true patriotism.”17
But the key element for many of these men was their wounded quality. Like the male movie star, there was/is a vulnerability about them. They had wounded eyes. L’homme blessé. If they were Catholics, they inherited the sacrificial force which was breaking loose from a weakening church. If they were Protestants, they seized hold of that same sacrificial force, which the Reformation had turned into a more aggressive weapon.
At first glance it may appear that it was the model of Christ and the Crucifixion which set the pattern of modern political victimization and Heroic leadership. But there is something singular and final about the idea of crucifixion and resurrection. The Heroic leader must suffer humiliation and sacrifice on a regular basis—monthly, weekly, sometimes daily. Politics is repetitive and the more it slips down from ideas into mystification and Heroics, the more repetitive, as opposed to linear, it is. Successful political careers go on for years and years. How often can you be crucified or make reference to an earlier event of crucifixion-like importance?
The Canadian model of Heroic leaders seems to be drawn from the less demanding model of martyred saints, in particular, St. Sebastian. Bound to a stake, pierced by a hundred arrows, still—if we are to believe the paintings—he shows signs of a survivor’s wounded smile.
With time the religious origins of these political mannerisms have slipped from our consciousness. The lay version has been so often repeated throughout the western world in the twentieth century that we take for granted these are civil phenomena. Democracy itself is tarred with these characteristics of authoritarian false populism.
René Lévesque certainly had the necessary aura of vulnerability and it helped him electorally. But he was saved from exploiting it in an unacceptable manner by his democratic rigour.
Others have shown less restraint. They have played the role of the Heroic victim with great force because it is proper to the whole concept of negative nationalism, with its required humiliation and sacrifice. And so, through the vision of the Heroic martyr/leader, history becomes a line of defeats and catastrophes filled with guilty parties. The leader is constantly being humiliated by the leader of another group. An extreme language of sado-masochism accompanies these serial woundings, which are, in fact, minor martyrdoms, many of them the product of masochism not sadism.
Glen Clark is a quick learner on this front. He can scarcely open his mouth without falling into the classic language and attitudes of the martyred Hero. But Lucien Bouchard arrived in office already a champion of self-proclaimed humiliation. As his memoirs demonstrate, this is a skill which pre-dates his rise to office and his own personal tragedy. The book is filled with occasions of honour lost and honour saved, of humiliations and betrayals. He is “blessé et humilié comme jamais dans ma vie” over a little matter of expenses when he should simply have been more careful.18 A quick survey of the volume turns up twenty occasions for humiliation or saving honour. The same air of melodrama revolving around his person has stayed in place during his short time in office. In such an emotional context other people can’t help but be “irresponsables,” “provocateurs,” “incendiaire,” “ignare,” “un parfait crétin,” “un imbé-cile.” Following his example, other ministers have adopted the same sort of extreme language. Jacques Brassard: “une sorte d’opération de terrorisme politique,” “M. Chrétien aime jouer au despote.” Bernard Landry: “méprisant et injurieux,” “une aventure scabreuse,” “aberrante et absurde,” Ottawa “se comporte de façon plus autoritaire, plus mesquine et plus fermée que les anciens gouvernements communistes totalitaires.” I can understand someone disliking or even loathing the current federal government. But who would have thought that Mr. Chrétien was more evil than Stalin? And when anglophones question or attack Mr. Bouchard on an issue, he replies with sweeping references to “Canada anglais” as if it were a monolith. Given his belief in solidarity, perhaps it isn’t surprising that he interprets any voice raised to doubt him as the sound of the collective voice of ‘English Canada.’
When Laurier was under violent attack in 1886 for his courageous stand on the Riel question, he was careful not to play into the hands of ideologues or racists on the other side. He never referred to the opposing press by race or language. He concentrated instead on their party and their ideas. But then Laurier did not try to win power or to govern by self-humiliation.
I’m making two points here. The language of negative nationalism reveals an unconsciously or consciously intended display of personal insecurity. Either way it is a classic example of the victim as leader. The second point is more practical. If by chance the other really existed and were made up of average human beings, what would they think of this barrage of extremes? Language, I keep repeating, is about communication. Real language has a real effect on the individual who receives it, because that individual is as real as the one who delivers it. The deliverer may do so in the manner of rhetoric, but the receiver may well receive it as language, unless the receiver also slips into rhetorical rebuttals. In that case reality is abandoned on all sides and the worst becomes possible.
This raises an even more practical point: how can Mr. Bouchard expect a normalization of the atmosphere in Quebec if the government’s language is more dramatic and destabilizing than that used during the last world war by the leaders of countries fighting for their lives? To be precise, in June 1997 the city of Montreal announced that almost 50 per cent of its active population was dependent on government support. This astonishing statement is difficult to make sense of, but no one questioned it. What it indicates is not an economic recession or even a depression, but a social crisis.
An economic crisis has limited and identifiable implications. It is usually accompanied by a belief in recovery; that is, a belief that in some way things will again be what they once were. A social crisis is much more destabilizing. It has unpredictable effects on society and offers much less of a hope for recovery. It is a time of unknowns, in which it is difficult to identify directions.
For example, statistics indicate that, since the arrival in power of the first PQ government in 1976, 506 head offices have left Montreal for Toronto, while 122 have gone from Toronto to Montreal. The vast majority of the large group leaving Montreal were big employers. The vast majority of the smaller group going to Montreal were small employers. We are also told that almost half the immigrant entrepreneurs admitted to Quebec in 1993–94 have already left for Ontario or B.C. and that the retention level has been dropping steadily since 1990.
I repeat, this is a social not an economic crisis. For example, the Official Languages Act, the most important formal progress made by French in Canada in this century, and one of the, if not the, most important formalized progress made by French in the world in the last half-century, isn’t even mentioned in a large number of Quebec school textbooks. And those which do mention it tend to do so in passing or in a manner which suggests that anglophones were against it.19 How is this related to the economic numbers? In both cases these are indicators of a destabilized society in which it is difficult to grasp onto reality.
This is the sort of atmosphere in which false populist rhetoric often prospers. But we know that if it does, it can only play a negative, manipulative role. It prospers by rolling through fear, anger and joy, guided by leaders who specialize in the emotions of public love and solidarity.
What we know from experience over the last century is that this is not the way to deal with a social crisis. I say this fully aware that Mr. Bouchard’s government has its quota of good ministers and that a few of its policies—child-care, for example—are admirable and should be copied by the other provinces.
But the fundamental problem remains one of false populism in a growing crowd of false populist provincial leaders—a trend which is not balanced by any solid social leadership in Ottawa. The federal government resembles that of Louis St. Laurent’s second term. A low-key, feel-good atmosphere distracts us from a general passivity before corporatist interests. A more accurate description might be complicity with corporatist interests. There appears to be little opportunity for the development of a positive nationalism which could address the social situation.
A small example: there is a slow rumble of concern outside of the political parties and the main media about an ongoing international negotiation on investment rules, or rather the removal of them. It is called the Multilateral Agreement of Investment (MAI). No one with power or a stable platform from which to communicate will engage the citizenry in a debate on the subject. When pushed, they may utter reassuring sounds.
The last decade has been filled with events of this sort; each of them representing another managerial step towards profound international restructuring. When you read the MAI texts—which as yet have no validity—it is clear that they represent an important move towards asserting the primacy of corporations or interest-based structures over citizen-based structures. And yet there is virtual silence from our elected representatives. They are, after all, the chosen leaders of the citizen-based structures.
Positive nationalism would involve the initiation of an open debate by those in positions of responsibility. Instead, the experienced citizen senses that we are now passively waiting for the initiation of a public-relations campaign designed to instruct us on the immense and inevitable good which will be done by our ceding another slice of our democratic legitimacy.
Of course, it won’t be put that way. Instead there will be a chorus of received wisdom in the economic-administrative manner. This is now classic rhetoric, delivered with the assurance of religious texts.
You might ask if I am sure that the MAI will be so bad. Frankly, I have no idea. But why do I have no idea? Where is the debate which would enable me to make up my mind in a dignified adult manner? This is what I mean when I say we live in a corporatist society. Where are our elected representatives? Why do they see their role to be that of the protectors of the various interests against the citizens who elected them? In private they express a weariness with the citizens’ naïveté. They, the leaders, know. Know what? The truth, of course! But how can they get the public, who understand so little, to go along with them? With this self-righteous burden on their shoulders, they dutifully do endless private polling and hire serial management consultants to advise them on how to get the public to go along with the truth they already possess.
My point is that whether or not those with power are right is actually of secondary consideration. The primary consideration is that in a democracy legitimacy lies with the citizenry. That’s what makes a democracy superior to other forms of social organization. And the process which leads to important decisions is not simply supposed to include the citizen. It is supposed to use the intelligence of the society—which lies within the legitimacy of the citizen—in order to minimize the chances of making major mistakes. That is the primary characteristic of a democracy. That use of the citizenry’s intelligence is what differentiates a democracy from the various sorts of dictatorships, whether direct and brutal or sophisticated and managerial in the corporatist mode.
What is most surprising about our élites is that they are unable to identify the effects of their actions. They don’t see how their upcom-ing successful manipulation to put in place the MAI will simply increase the effect of their putting in place of the trade deals. That is, they will weaken the confidence of the citizen in the system and therefore favour the rise of negative nationalism over the positive. Perhaps most fascinating is the low level of confidence they have in the democratic process. I’m not referring to the short-term excitement of occasional elections. In effect, they identify more with the managerial idea of controlling power than the democratic idea of examining power and using it constructively. The attitudes of our elected representatives before these major questions resemble, if anything, those of senior courtiers in the eighteenth century.
In such an unstable atmosphere, a PQ premier might well be able to win a referendum to break up the country, or an Alberta premier a referendum to cripple the province’s power to raise taxes—that is, to govern. They might succeed if they were to choose the right date and prepare the “winning question” with care and if they were to work on incidents which might speed everyone along through the emotions of fear, anger and joy. So long as the federalists remain mired in their unnatural position to the right of centre and continue to work on a corporatist agenda, they will play the PQ’s card and indeed that of Mr. Klein. Only by occupying the great centre/ left-of-centre can they demonstrate the healthy role of federalism. But that would also mean adopting the politics of positive nationalism and the public good.
Rather than deal with the realities of the public good, they are about to plunge into another round of shadow-boxing over the legalities of mythological terminology. From distinct society we are about to move on to a debate over whether or not Quebec is a nation. A great deal of time will be spent on the meaning of the word. Other words will also be proposed.
What isn’t clear is where these sorts of false debates lead. After all, if you go back through the last two centuries you will find all of our leading public figures happily and frequently using such terms as nation and people to describe the French Canadians. Suddenly, late in the twentieth century, terms such as these are held up as if they were a test. Everyone is required to take a position for or against. What can that possibly mean? Isn’t this a prolongation of the old character-specific view of nationalism? Are Armenians courageous? Are the Slovakian Hungarians to be considered . . .? Are the Russian Latvians . . .?
The problem is not whether these terms are accurate or appropriate. They and others are perfectly satisfactory. Why not be distinct? Why not think of yourself or others as a nation? People should call themselves whatever they want; whatever they feel is appropriate.
The only difficulty is whether such terms have any constitutional or legal meaning. To try to turn such words or equivalent phrases into legal terminology is to go down the all-consuming road of negative nationalism. Constitutions and laws are utilitarian documents dealing with specific, concrete powers and obligations. Even so, it is difficult to define terms clearly enough. That’s why there are endless disagreements in most countries over the meanings of constitutions. That’s why France has a high court devoted to nothing but that. That’s why the United States Supreme Court is endlessly reinterpreting the concrete clauses of their constitution. And that’s why real constitutions avoid abstract terms which have enormous mythological meaning, but very little legal meaning. The law is not mythology and mythology is not law. Only false populists attempt to advance one under the cover of the other.
Would it not be better to return to a more relaxed public discourse, which on a daily basis reconfirms the respect which people feel for the phenomenon of the francophone role in Canada? If francophones appear to want to be called a nation, do so. Make it part of the ongoing public discourse as it was a hundred years ago. Jean Paré has rightly pointed out that the needs of francophones to advance and solidify their position in the legal framework of the country will come in the form of increased legal clarity, not legal mystifications.20
Why then do we keep finding ourselves back at the stage of attempting to legalize mythology? In part this is because we do not deal with the mystifications which pursue us like demons, dominating the public discourse. That is, we do not deal with the need to separate the mythologies and laws, upon which positive nationalism is based, from the confusing of those two elements, which is the political trick upon which negative nationalism feeds.
Séguin wrote that “to be a minority people in a federation is to be an annexed people—être un peuple minoritaire dans une fédération, c’est être un peuple annexé.”21 This is not only wrong, it is nonsense. But if we cannot express a positive nationalism and lay out how a federation works and has worked, then we will remain the victims of just such pathological mystery-plays of victimization.