Canada Among Nations 2001: The Axworthy Legacy

Graeme S. Mount is a professor of history at Laurentian University. He
is the author of Canada’s Enemies: Spies and Spying in the Peaceable
Kingdom and The History of Fort St. Joseph, and the co-author of
Invisible and Inaudible in Washington: American

The contributors to this 17th volume in the Canada Among Nations series
include mostly Canadian academic celebrities who debate a host of
questions. Should Lloyd Axworthy have devoted so much energy to the 1997
Anti-Personnel Mines Convention, signed in Ottawa by 122 countries, when
Canada’s major trading partner, the United States, disapproved? Human
rights were a high priority and again, despite U.S. objections, Axworthy
promoted the International Criminal Court. Should he have done so, and
gone to Cuba before the Canadian election of 1997, when American
goodwill was so important to Canada? Now that John Manley has replaced
Axworthy as Secretary of State for External Affairs, do Axworthy’s
causes matter?

Axworthy was a humanitarian who sought control over the manufacture and
distribution of firearms and a ban on the recruitment of anyone under
the age of 18 into military service. However, even when he held office,
he disappointed some idealists; he supported NATO’s 1999 bombing of
Serbia, and he remained in a cabinet that tolerated Talisman Energy’s
operations in Sudan.

If the volume has a flaw (other than the lack of an index), it is that
seven of the 15 submissions deal with events since Axworthy’s tenure
of office, and one of the other eight (by Earl Fry of Brigham Young
University) says more about the Clinton administration’s foreign
policy than about Axworthy’s. Nevertheless, there is good material on
Axworthy. Denis Stairs of Dalhousie says that for Axworthy, “the
proper objects of international politics are not ... the sovereign
states themselves, but the individuals who inhabit them.” Vincent
Rigby of the Department of National Defence provides a reminder that by
the beginning of 2000, more than 400 members of the Canadian Armed
Forces were serving overseas, “the largest number since the Korean
War.” (Presumably, in his zeal to demonstrate that Axworthy depended
on more than the power of persuasion, Rigby excludes those who served in
West Germany during the Cold War.) John English, a former Liberal MP
himself, disagrees with Norman Hillmer and finds Axworthy part of the
same Liberal tradition as Wilfrid Laurier, William Lyon King, and Lester
B. Pearson.