Canada and other democracies - 10 July 1992

Talk about coming down to earth. I was just about to go on about the sorrows of Mr Bush, how since the election is getting closer all the time, how he has to grit his teeth and swallow hard and pretend that the economy is really coming awake like a late sleeping giant. When he gets the word that unemployment has risen to an eight-year high, the stock market drops 44 points, interest rates keep falling and falling and where is the brisk new investment and where are all the happy people spending more but also saving more.

When Mr Yeltsin arrives in Munich to break bread with the seven benefactors and discloses that the inflation rate in the new liberated Russia is and has been for the past four months 640%. No wonder they had to make a place at the table for Mr Yeltsin and feed him pumpernickel and Bavarian beer, nobody perhaps including Mr Yeltsin seemed to know who was going to pay his $400 a night hotel bill, which is three times his monthly salary. In other words, in theory on paper, a stay of four nights would cost him or somebody his annual earnings. How do you explain all this? Whenever I ask a politician how the United States can go on thinking and spending and living like the world's credited nation, which it was not too long ago when it is now the world's principle debtor nation, I always get the same treatment a kindly tolerant smile such that you'd give to a seven-year-old who asked you if its true what they say about the birds and the bees.

What was the point of the Munich meeting? Well nothing new, this is the 17th year they have been meeting, mainly like a team of doctors pooling their great wisdom to say usually how to restore the world's economy to health? I don't remember a time when they ever left a meeting saying to the patient "you're doing just fine, keep on taking one aspirin a day and lots of liquids". This time, the doctors disagreed more than usual. Oddly enough, the one thing they could agree on was to help Mr Yeltsin reschedule his debt and they did agree on something else – something that had nothing to do with their main purpose – which was to agree to use air and naval power if that's what it takes to get food and medicine into Bosnia, if the Serbs try to block the United Nations airlift.

Incidentally, we've been seeing most evenings for the past week or two pictures of even short interviews with General Mackenzie, the Commanding Officer of the United Nations Forces, which as always are called peacekeeping but this time are equipped to become a fighting rather a defensive force if the worst happens.

My by the way was meant to comment on the fact that General Mackenzie is a Canadian as is the main body of United Nations troops called on for this dangerous mission. It occurs to me, I must say a little late in the day that for most of the 45 years that United Nations peacekeeping forces have been mustered, the Canadians have provided a greatly disproportionate number of men. I can't recall now whether they volunteered a force for the first United Nations intervention, which was to persuade, shall we say, the Soviet Union to withdraw its troops from Iran so far back as 1946, but I do know that during the '50s and '60s, Canadian forces under UN direction served in the Gaza Strip, in Cyprus, in India, Pakistan.

I think you can make a good case for saying that more than any other country, Canada has carried out the promise, which 50-odd nations gave at San Francisco in 1945, the promise to make available troops, material, weapons to the Security Council whenever it called for them. That promise which I've mentioned before as the tragically failed promise of the United Nations was set down in Article 43 of the UN Charter. That Article was to be ratified by each member nation as soon as possible unquote. After all the delegates left the founding conference of the United Nations in June 1945 soon as possible meant never. Nations came to pick and choose where and when to help if at all when there was an outbreak of what the Security Council could define as aggression, most did nothing. Of course, career wise you could say the first United Nations War, a fact that seems to have been mislaid when Americans write or mention that war.

Alert watchers of the immortal M*A*S*H will spot the occasional introduction of an Australian or a Swede, but the usual assumption in this country, one either deplored or rejoiced in, is that the defence of South Korea was an exclusively American effort. Of course, Canada was there with large forces, which reminds me of a question, the answer to which astonishes most people and is hardly credited at all by Americans. Of all the nations that voluntarily entered the First World War, the Second World War, Korea and Vietnam, which was the one that suffered most casualties in all of them, meaning the highest percentage of its male population lost, and the answer is New Zealand. Many New Zealander's don't know it, just as I've never heard a Canadian mention his country's being ever ready to dispatch peacekeeping forces on the UN's corps.

Canada indeed has set a splendid record and American ignorance of it is yet another symptom of the affliction of insularity, which seems to me to have become in the past decade or so more pronounced than ever, at least among American public men. I suppose that insularity, chauvinism, is a recognisable characteristic of any big power top dog. Certainly Englishmen between the wars were famously obnoxious when they went abroad, they owned more than a quarter of the earth, they knew it, they hoped you knew it and would behave deferentially accordingly.

This I hope I'm right has gone with the wind and the empire, but now America and American politicians most of all are becoming almost suspiciously shrill in their assertion of American superiority in most things, could they have doubts about it? How strange that President Bush in a speech the other day grew positively choleric, the veins in his neck swelling like snakes when he shouted at his audience they should never forget they belonged to the greatest goddamn country on the face of this earth, what does it mean the greatest country, greatest for what?

Well we've noticed before that there is a contradiction that afflicts every nation at the stage of its history when it's beginning to loose its best reputation, it grows nervous therefore it begins to protest too much.

America in the 1950s was the first power of the earth, there was no dispute about it. Therefore, America could be generous pouring out its billions as the American secretary of state said "to restore the fabric of European life", it could open its doors and factories to so called productivity teams coming over from Europe to learn the magic of American inventiveness and give for converting good imitations of luxuries for the few into conveniences for the many the dollar watch, America could relax in being top dog.

But it no longer knows it in its bone, but in its rhetoric, its public declarations and you're going to get a load of it at the Democratic's dull coronation ceremony during the coming week – they must stress over and over that America is great, is unique, is best. This is a strain and it is a strain more noticeable to me than at any previous time and I don't think its an accident that going along with this lonely assertion of being best is a disinclination to consult or quote the experience of other countries, let me try and make that clear.

I have wished more and more in the past few years that American universities would set up for that matter European universities too would set up chairs of comparative democracy. These would be for the study of how things were done in the country or countries not your own, maybe they exist I'd be delighted to hear that they do. For example, there's a continuing strenuous public hassle, it started academically in 1938, but has been gathering steam and violence for 20 years since the war, its about having a free national health system, such a thing exists in at least 20, 30 other countries, but in all the discussions the only other country who system is quoted and studied is that of Canada, but for reasons we can't go into now, the United Kingdom system was never seriously considered as a role model.

And if you read or pick up any American news you must surely that the republic has been tormented, racked, deranged, plagued for about a quarter of a century by opposing armies in the matter of abortion. The warrior forces squared off long ago to diametric extremes, Pro Choice for abortion for everybody on demand, Right to Lifers against abortion under all circumstances. Night after night, day after day we have parades, scuffles with police, small riots, clinics bombed, interminable discussions, spitting arguments, it goes on and on. And about twice a year, the Supreme Court tries to compromise, which is tough for little bit of abortionists is about as hard to define as a little bit pregnant, so the court hands down decisions that count the number of angels that might fall off a needle and nobody is satisfied. And so on our best nightly news discussion programme the other evening, a man opposed to abortion said that "the United States has the loosest, the most permissive law on abortion of any country", can it be true? Nobody took him up on it; it would have been a welcome shock to hear someone say "well in France, the law says, in Holland this is what happens, in the United Kingdom it never happens".

By the way, after I talked the other week about the rapid decline in sport of what we used to call manners, I came on and did an hilarious account of a little boy picked up with other slum children to be taught in a day-care centre the elements of laying a table, knife on the right, fork on the left, desert spoon and fork in opposite directions above the plate and so on and so forth. At the end, the boy was asked what he thought of the lesson. He said "weird, sort of interesting though". Did he mean to go home and teach it to his buddies? He gasped. "No way, you've got to be kidding."

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