The Rights Revolution

A
LSO BY
M
ICHAEL
I
GNATIEFF

N
ONFICTION

A Just Measure of Pain

The Needs of Strangers

The Russian Album

Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism

The Warrior’s Honour: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience

Isaiah Berlin: A Life

Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond

Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry

Empire Lite: Nation-Building in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan

The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror

American Exceptionalism and Human Rights

True Patriot Love

F
ICTION

Asya

Scar Tissue

Charlie Johnson in the Flames

T
HE
R
IGHTS
R
EVOLUTION

Copyright © 2000, 2007 Michael Ignatieff and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

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LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Ignatieff, Michael
The rights revolution / Michael Ignatieff. — 2nd ed.

Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN
978-0-88784-892-6

1. Civil Rights – Canada. 2. French language – Quebec (Province).
3. Language policy – Canada. 4. Indians of North America – Canada – Claims.
5. Indians of North America – Canada – Land tenure.
I.
Title.

JC599.C3146 2007     323.0971     C2006-904288-8

Cover design: Bill Douglas at The Bang
Cover photograph: David Levenson/Getty Images

We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

For S. Z.
as always

W
HEN
I
FIRST DELIVERED
these Massey Lectures on
CBC
Radio in 2000, I was a professor at Harvard University. Looking back now, I can see that
The Rights Revolution
began the process that led to my entering public life here at home in 2005. Like every Canadian, I carry within me a certain idea of Canada. This book outlines that idea.

As Canadians, we have managed to create a single political community of equal citizens out of Aboriginal peoples, francophones, anglophones, and all the people like me whose families came here as emigrants from other countries. Out of those different languages, traditions, and cultures, we have forged a political system that holds us together and keeps us talking through our differences peacefully. We have also succeeded in maintaining a distinctive culture and a tradition of proud independence next door to the most powerful state in the world. All of this is no mean feat.

Canada’s political achievement is important. The world’s deepest problem is not climate change or the supposed clash of civilizations or inequality between rich nations and poor ones — as important as these problems are. The fundamental problem facing humanity is political: how to create stable political order among people of different religions, cultures, and economic classes. As long as states can cohere as viable political communities, all their problems can be managed. But if they cannot maintain order and freedom, they cannot solve any of them. Here Canada has shown the way: maintaining freedom among peoples who value their differences yet desire to live as equals in a political community.

Being Canadian, we do not shout our achievement from the rooftops. We know we still have a long way to go before the achievement is complete. Many of our people do not share in the promise of Canadian life; many of our regions feel left out of our prosperity; our national unity is a permanent work-in-progress. But we know what we have to do. The rights enshrined in our Charter of Rights and Freedoms exhort us all to narrow the gap between the Canada we actually live in and the Canada we know we can build together.

Other countries have also managed to maintain successful political communities. What makes Canada’s achievement distinctive? While all modern democracies protect rights, our system is special in the way it reconciles individual and group rights. Both our provincial and federal charters protect group rights to language in order to guarantee the preservation of the French fact in North America. These charters also protect the treaty and Aboriginal
rights of our First Nations, Inuit, and Metis peoples. Reconciling group and individual rights is not easy. Canadians want both their equality recognized and their differences respected. They want to be acknowledged as equal individuals and as members of communities. Recognition of equality points one way; recognition of difference can point another. Moreover, while all communities in Canada should be equal, not all communities are the same. Aboriginal Canadians claim the status of first nations, in recognition of the fact that they maintained political order before European settlement. The Québécois see themselves as a national group within Canada, in recognition of their distinctive language and history as a French colony. There is no reason in principle why acknowledging the national character of certain communities in Canada should put the unity of the whole at risk. We have been working at reconciling these competing principles since Confederation, and while constitutional reconciliation of equality and difference remains elusive, our arguments have not broken up our country. Indeed, we have become a model for the world of how to balance majority and minority interests and how to maintain the unity of a complex federation. Our vocation in the world is to help other countries deepen and develop their citizenship as we have deepened and developed our own. Just as we seek to promote “peace, order and good government” at home, we should seek to do the same abroad.

We have also established the most progressive political culture in the Americas. Our laws protect the equality rights of all Canadians regardless of sexual orientation,
including rights to marriage. Our laws guarantee a woman’s right to choose. The Canada Health Act commits the federal and provincial governments to guarantee equal rights of access to health for all citizens. Our constitution commits the federal government to use its authority and spending power to maintain rough equality of services among all regions and among all citizens. There are some other distinguishing marks as well. Unlike the United States, Canada does not recognize a constitutional right to bear arms. Canada does not practise capital punishment. In these and other ways, our rights culture entrenches our national identity as a progressive people.

Maintaining these commitments is not easy. There is no stable political consensus in favour of them. It takes political leadership to articulate why these values matter, and why we need to make sacrifices in order to keep them flourishing. It is also the work of political leaders to hammer out compromises when the rights and interests of competing groups conflict. Active engagement in politics — by citizens and by leaders — is essential if we are to maintain our distinctiveness as a progressive people and to find the compromises that keep us together.

Since this book was first published, much has changed in the world. With the devastating attack on the United States on September 11, 2001, most countries, including Canada, have had to learn how to live with the threat of terrorist attacks. All governments enacted new security legislation which changed the balance between liberty and security. In another of my books, published in 2004,
The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror,
I review the challenges that terrorism poses to the fabric of democratic societies. While all democracies have to protect themselves against terrorist attack, they must do so in a way that does not betray their principles. Being democracies, they have to fight with one hand tied behind their back, and being democracies, they win because they exercise restraint. Thus torture should be prohibited in any democratic society. Interrogations must be rigorous, but they must always be lawful. Short periods of preventive detention of terrorist suspects can be lawful, but indefinite detention of anyone, citizen or otherwise, cannot be. Offensive military action against terrorist militias who have attacked a state is justified, but the killing of civilians and indiscriminate attack on civilian infrastructure are not. In every case, both ethics and strategic selfinterest should compel democratic leaders to seek a balanced and controlled approach to the problem of terrorism. Such an approach helps avoid falling into the trap that terrorism always seeks to set: provoking democracies into repressive actions which give terrorists the political victory that they cannot hope to win by military means alone.

As a democratic state, Canada cannot be a neutral bystander in the battle against terrorism. As we have discovered, terrorist organizations will not allow us the luxury of being bystanders. The challenge in defending ourselves and our allies is to remember that we are a free people. We cannot defend our values unless we truly respect them, unless we allow them to restrain our
impulses and inspire us to the highest standards of conduct. Rights matter not just because they protect us from abuse by governments. Rights also protect us from ourselves, from the self-righteous belief that everything is permitted in our own defence. Not everything is permitted. We must respect these limits, if we are to respect ourselves and the immense achievement that Canadian freedom represents to all our citizens and to the world.

I
N THESE LECTURES
, I am going to talk about a fundamental change that has come over us in our lifetime. I’m calling this change the rights revolution, to describe the amazing way in which rights talk has transformed how we think about ourselves as citizens, as men and women, and as parents. The rights revolution took off in the 1960s in all industrialized countries, and it is still running its course. Just think for a minute about how much rights talk there is out there: women’s rights, rights of gays and lesbians, aboriginal rights, children’s rights, language rights, and constitutional rights. In one sense, the rights revolution is a story of inclusion, of how previously excluded groups obtained rights of equality. In this regard, the extension of rights has widened and deepened our democracy. In a second sense, however, the rights revolution has been about protecting certain groups from the effects of democracy. Group rights to language and aboriginal rights to land and resources are designed to
enable minorities to protect that which is essential to their survival from the power of elective majorities.