The Internationalisation of Canadian Economic and

Cultural Nationalism
Gordon Laxer
Sociology/Parkland Institute
University of Alberta
In the following, I discuss the export of Canadian nationalist/internationalist
resistance to corporate globalization by examining Canadian leadership in defeating the Multilateral Agreement on Investment [MAI]. Typically Canadians count
their successes only after hearing praises from outsiders. Addressing a Parkland
Institute conference in 1998, Ralph Nader said that Canadians were the opposite of
boastful Texans, but that too much humility hinders them from appreciating and
internationalising their unique contributions. Nader called Canadian anti-MA1 campaigns 'another Canadian first'' Maria Mies said the German and Austrian MA1
campaigns were "practically initiated" by Canadians. An Innsbmck University student wrote: "I want you Canadians to know that you all do really exemplary work
on the MAI." Janace Moira Graham said: "New Zealanders are talking about the
tremendous fight Canadians are putting up against the MA1 every day on national
talk back radio and on our newsgroups ... Each day I switch on my e-mail and there
you are, carrying the flag of freedom and democracy, and we're encouraged all over
again to keep going. Here's smiling at you, Canada."* Noam Chomsky wrote: "In
Canada and Canada alone, the veil [of secrecy on the MA11 was broken in mid-1997
and since then has become a big issue nationally."3 To understand why Canadians
led the defeat of the MAI, it is important to set the context.4
"We are writing the constitution of a single global economy," boasted Renato
Ruggiero, Director General of the WTO in 1996. The global capitalist constitution
was being constructed in one international agreement after another, enshrining U.Sstyle rights for corporations to directly sue governments. The U.S. successfully
exported their model, first to Canada, next to Mexico and then to the rest of the
world. But the wheel did not stop there. In movement, counter-movement fashion,
Canadian economic nationalists counterattacked and led the international battle
against the MAI. The MAI's defeat in 1998 was the first to puncture the aura of
inevitable triumph around capitalist globalism. It laid the basis for the spectacular
breakthrough in Seattle the next year. For a century, the United States' recognition
of corporate rights was unique. Although corporations do not appear in the
American Constitution, they gained the right to directly sue governments in a landmark Supreme Court decision in 1886, during the 'robber baron' era.5 The decision
had constitution-like implications and was a major factor in hindering the progres-

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24 1

sive expansion of public life in the U.S.

In Canada, corporate rights had been much more circumscribed. As the only
major country in this hemisphere not to make a revolutionary break from the old
order of Europe, the Crown had almost unlimited rights and powers, including the
power to 'expropriate. In this context, traditional conservatives and social democrats built strong institutions of crown corporations and public services. In part,
Crown corporations such as the CBC were set up to provide a Canadian voice,
where unfettered capitalism would have brought U.S. domination. Graham Spry, a
prime initiator of the CBC, said Canada's choice in broadcasting was - "the state or
the United States." When Pierre Trudeau and his allies repatriated the Canadian
Constitution in 1982, the Canadian Right tried to insert protection for property
rights in the Constitution. They failed and Canada seemed safe from constitutionalising corporate rule. The Constitution's amending formulae are so rigid, revisions
are unlikely. Yet seven years later, Canada was subject to the kinds of private property rights' clauses that were excluded from the Constitution. Why the about-face?
Did the Prime Minister and every premier have a miraculous meeting of minds? No.
Canada's Constitution was superseded by the Canada-US Free trade Agreement
(FTA), which, in 1989, imposed the U.S. corporate regime on Canada. This is why
observers have called such international agreements the "new constitutionalism" or
"corporate rule treaties."6
After losing the historic campaign against the FTA, Canadian economic and
cultural nationalists could have given up. They were devastated after convincing
52% of Canadians to vote No, but seeing Mulroney's Conservatives win a majority with only 43% of the vote. Blocked on their home turf, the nationalist activist
leaders picked up their marbles and their spirits and played an international game.
They took their technical knowledge about corporate rights agreements, their
movements' knowledge about how to build broad coalitions against the 'corporate
agenda', and their concerns about economic and cultural sovereignty to international fora. First Canadians went to Mexico to help form anti-NAFTA movements.'
Then the MA1 came along.
We need to distinguish between globalisation and globalism. A strong globalisation thesis posits that today's world is a qualitative break from the past. The thesis underestimates the extent of international integration in the past and overestimates it now. In the hands of writers like David Held, the globalisation thesis postulates the withering away of the nation state or at least its great diminution.8 Every
generation of intellectuals since the mid 1800s has made similar predictions. This
was and is wishful thinking.9 If there is not a truly globalised economy, there is
even less a globalised politics, especially at the level of citizens. But the corporate
elite and their supporters have a global politics and frequently meet at Davos,
Bilderberg, through the IMF, the World Bank, the FTAA and other fora. For them,
nations and nationalisms are pass6 and a threat. Neo-liberal globalism is their dominant paradigm and goes by several terms: Structural Adjustment Programs, The
Washington Consensus, the Wall Street-Treasury Complex, Liberal Productivism,
the New World Order. The prescription for every country is to: dismantle national

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Issues and DebatedEnjeux et de'bats

economic sovereignty over foreign ownership, investment and exchange; privatise
public enterprises and deregulate business; reduce public expenditures and corporate taxes, and balance budgets.10 The most controversial element - is the right of
corporations to directly sue all governments for almost any policy which advertently or inadvertently diminishes their profits or that has the potential to diminish
future profits. This clause - Chapter 11 in NAFTA - was the central element of dispute in the MAI, and at the WTO in Seattle.
Is globalism or the Washington Consensus merely one ideology freely competing equally with all the other ideologies in the democratic marketplace of ideas?
Or is it the ideology of global governance backed by the U.S.A. and its junior partners? In Dublin in 1999, Henry Kissinger said that "globalisation is a new word for
"America's dominant role in the world."ll Lawrence Summers, Secretary of the
Treasury under Clinton, called all critics of the ' ' 3 1 - h~0 ~ )~j l b ~
washillgton
~ ~ ~
Consensus "separatists." Our "ideology, capitalism, is in ascendance everywhere",
he contended. 'Separatists' is Summers' term for proponents of national sovereignty over their own resources, economy and cultures. For Summers, conformity to
"Globalist economic policy ... is the forward defense of America's deepest security
interest." l* Thinking his remarks would stay in the room, David Rockefeller, head
of Citibank, told fellow globalists at the 1991 annual Bilderberger Conference: "We
are grateful to the Washington Post, The New York Times, Time Magazine and
other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected
their promises of discretion for almost 40 years. It would have been impossible for
us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subjected to the lights of publicity during those years ... The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite
and world bankers are surely preferable to the national auto-determinationpracticed
in past centuries."l3
The MA1 and the Battle in Seattle were major victories for Lawrence
Summers' separatists against the Washington Consensus. That efforts to defeat the
MA1 were led largely by economic nationalists and environmentalists defending
national sovereignty from English-speaking Canada, should not surprise.14 The
U.S. corporate rights clauses were first applied to Canada to counter economic
nationalist measures of the late 1960s to early 1980s, which significantly reversed,
U.S. corporate domination. Canadian economic nationalists/internationalists could
not have defeated the MA1 on their own even if they reversed Canada's gung-ho,
pro-MA1 position. The country has too weak a voice at the OECD to have a veto.
Thus, the need for Canadians to find international allies. Before France pulled out
of the MAI, thus killing the deal, it issued the Lalumikre Report which argued that
the MA1 "marks a step in international economic negotiations. For the first time, we
are witnessing the emergence of a 'global civil society' represented by BGOs],
which are often active in several countries and communicate across borders. This is
no doubt an irreversible change." After making this bold claim, the Report argues
that the main basis for civil society's objections to globalization is the threat to
national sovereignty.

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Writing about the WTO battle in Seattle, Paul Hawken wrote;. "Those who
marched and protested opposed the tyrannies of globalization, uniformity, and corporatization, but they did not necessarily oppose internationalization of trade ...
Globalization refers to a world in which capital and goods move at will without the
rule of individual nations ... Nations do provide, where democracies prevail, a
means for people to set their own policy ... Globalization supplants the nation, the
state, the region, and the village. While eliminating nationalism is indeed a good
idea, the elimination of sovereignty is not."l5 If we combine the Lalumikre and
Hawken formulations, then the aim of global civil society is to defend national sovereignty, but without nationalist attachments. These apparent contradictory propositions are convoluted attempts to avoid the "nationalist" label and associations
with racism.16 Many Left intellectuals call for popular sovereignty and social solidarity, that I call nationalism / internationalism. For much of the Left today, positive nationalism dare not speak its name. Recently, there has been lots of rethinking of nations and nationalisms, but little exploration of the anti-globalism potential of Left nationalisms, which involve attachments to and support for the sovereignty of one's political community. Since nationalisms get most of their content
through the associations they keep.17 Left nationalisms are those that seek deep
democratic transformations in partnership with anti-colonial, socialist, feminist,
ecological and anti-racist movements. Primarily they work at the level of the nation,
the state and through international ties with similar movements abroad.18

Dual Enemies: Democracy and Nationalism

The shift in power away from nations is not inevitable. The U.S. has worked
for this end. At a Western Hemisphere conference in 1945, Noam Chomsky noted
that the U.S. was deeply concerned with "the philosophy of the new nationalism"
that was over spreading Latin America and the world. That philosophy, according
to U.S. internal records, now available, aimed to bring about a wider distribution of
wealth and raise the living standards of the masses. "Radical" or "economic nationalism" operated on the heretical principle that the first beneficiaries of a country's
resources are the people of that country rather than U.S. and other foreign investors,
and locally allied elites. The U.S. view prevailed and the conference called for an
end to economic nationalism in all its forms. Chomsky concludes that in the cruel
and bloody half century since, these remain central themes.19
Similar concerns reappeared in the early 1970s.After emancipation from colonial rule, national liberation movements confronted the "neo-imperialism" of multinational corporations. Citizens were mobilized by appeals to democracy and
nationalisms, couched in anti-Western or anti-American discourses. In Canada, the
Waffle movement for an Independent Socialist Canada, the Committee for an
Independent Canada and the New Democratic Party, urged the takeover of foreignowned oil and potash companies and campaigned against "corporate welfare
bums." Similar campaigns elsewhere resulted in 336 takeovers of transnationals
during the first half of the 1970s.20 Thus, transnationals have been de-globalised in
the past. Who's to say it won't happen again.

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Issues and Debates/Enjeux et de'bats

Alarmed at the wave of de-globalizing the transnationals, corporate leaders
and bankers counterattacked, founding New Right organizations, such as the
Trilateral Commission. Set up in 1973 by David Rockefeller, head of Citibank,
Zbigniew Brezinski and others to create ruling class partnerships in North America,
Western Europe and Japan,21 Trilateralists decried an "excess of democracy" in
which " the democratic spirit is egalitarian, individualistic, populist and impatient
with the distinctions of class and rank."*2 Nationalism was the other target.
Rockefeller called for "a massive public relations campaign" to explain the necessity for the "withering of the nation-state." Recent talk about the "borderless
world", the "end of nations and nationalisms7',and the "inevitability of globalization", shows the effects of these campaigns even on the Left.
The Indian theorist, Aijaz Ahmad,23 notes that the prominent nationalisms of
the past 25 years have been narrowly ethnic, often racist and vicious, leading the
Left to dismiss nationalisms as irrational, masculinist, Western and reactionary.
This contrasts with the 1950 to 1975 period, when national liberation was seen as
essential in breaking from colonial and neo-colonial rule and in making socialist
societies. Ironically, left critiques of nationalisms as reactionary fit closely with
New Right discourses which deified Adam Smith's anti-nationalist critique of mercantilism. Free trade was "directed precisely against [the] concept of national economic development", writes Hobsbawm.Z4 Economic theory was based on the individual enterprise and world market and there was "no place for the nation, or any
collectivity larger than the firm." Observers, therefore, tend to view ethno-cultural
nationalisms negatively and civic nationalisms positively. But nationalisms cannot
be neatly evaluated as "civic good, ethnic bad." Every nationalism is unique, continually evolving and gets its content by association with other movements. I view
as positive, nationalisms that come closest to inclusiveness, embracing deep diversity, being substantively democratic, refraining from expansionism and supporting
inter-nationalism. 25

Nationalisms in Canada and France and the Defeat of the MA1

A key element to defeating the MAI, were alliances between citizens groups
in North and South (Goodman, 2000). Martin Khor, head of the Third World
Network, which has ties to governments in the South, first told Northern activists,
including Tony Clarke, about the coming of the MAI. International opposition to
the MA1 first coalesced in Paris in October 1997 where NGOs were invited to meet
OECD negotiators in an attempt at cooptation. The attempt failed and NGO's took
a unanimous and uncompromising position. However, Tony Clarke, former head of
the anti-free trade group, the Pro-Canada Network and Lori Wallach, of Ralph
Nader's Public Citizen in the U.S., felt that to defeat the MAI, opposition could not
be based in transnational NGO's. For Clarke such groups had absolutely no relationship to an authentic constituency and are the ones that make compromises, such
as NAFTA's ineffective, side-bar deals on the environment. Working on behalf of
the International Forum on Globalization, based in San Francisco, Clarke's and
Wallach's strategy shifted to country campaigns, because citizens movements tend

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245

to self-organise most densely and effectively at national levels and in the end, governments decide on international treaties. They care about domestic, not foreign
public opinion.
That the greatest opposition to the MA1 came from Canada and France, where
Left nationalism and cultural nationalisms are highly developed, is not surprising.
The nationalism that supports Canadian economic, cultural and political sovereignty is associated with progressive internationalism. Its leading proponents, Maude
Barlow and Tony Clarke, took the initiative in defeating the MAI. Clarke found the
MAI's draft text, framed the issue as "Corporate Rule", and released it to the world.
Barlow and Clarke wrote the first books on the MAI. After completing a Canadian
edition, subtitled "threats to Canadian sovereignty7',they wrote the only U.S. book.
Only in France, and perhaps Australia, was public consciousness of the MAI, at
anywhere near a comparable level. The CBC sent two television crews to cover
Maude Barlow and MA1 opponents' meetings in Paris in October 1997. No other
country sent television crews to cover them. Elizabeth Smythe and Jay Smith examined the 400 web sites focussing on the MA1 in English, French, German and
Spanish. The OECD had the highest number of links. The next four were
Canadian.26 Six of the top 12 were Canadian, all in opposition.
Clarke attributes the greater resonance of the MA1 in Canada to the fact that
"we are still the first country to have gone through a comprehensive free trade
agreement with the U.S. ... and the first country to be exposed to the investor-state
mechanism in chapter 11 of NAFTA". In France, opponents of the MA1 formed a
coalition of 70 associations. Opposition came largely separately from the cultural
community, including its Minister of Culture, environmentalists, the Communists,
junior partners to the Socialist government. The sum of oppositions built to the
point where France pulled out of the MA1 talks in October 1998. Strongest resistance came from the cultural community, which, as in Canada, has long fought
against Americanization. The emcee of the Cesar's, France's academy awards, read
a statement to millions of television viewers condemning the MAI, to prolonged
applause.27

Conclusion
It is no accident that Tony Clarke and Maude Barlow alerted the world to the
dangers of the MAI. Their embeddedness in positive nationalist circles enabled
them to be effective internationally. There is no contradiction. Positive nationalism
and internationalism were complementary. It is unlikely that one-worlder cosmopolitans would have led an anti-MA1 struggle against the loss of national sovereignties. In most cases, popular sovereignty coincides with national and sub-nationa1 sovereignties. Citizens' movements are primarily nationally, regionally and locally rooted and bring their own wisdom to the international community by virtue of
their roots in communities of place. Instead of globalisation from above to uphold
corporate rights, we need, not globalisation from below, but positive nationalisms
and genuine internationalism and transnationalism from below. The global market
is the arena for transnational corporations, business professionals and the rich,
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where power is based on unequal command o f property. The political arena for
most wage-earners and peasants are countries and regions where aspirations for
democracy and equality are widely-held, if not always practised. If most people are
immobile and do not want to cross borders to find work, the sovereignty o f their
political communities is fundamental. Imagine the alternative: vast international
mobility; workers roaming the world in search o f work and aggregations o f transients with no common collective memory and little ability to communicate. Such
conditions exist in many Persian Gulf States and are ideal for manipulation and dictatorship. As Milan Kundera said "The struggle o f man against power is the struggle o f memory versus forgetting.'Q8 Collective memory is built slowly in democratic struggles, largely at national and local levels. Instead o f globalisation from
below, we need to de-globalise transnational corporations and build people to people international solidarities. Iwant to end with Naomi Klein's formulation which
is very different than 'think globally, act locally'. I t is 'defend the local, nationally'.

Notes
1. Marlow, Maude (1998), The Fight of my life, Toronto, Harper Collins.
2. Nelson, Jeremy (1998), "Toppling the MAI", Canadian Dimension, MarIApr,
32,2.
3. Chomsky, Noam (1998), 'Power in the Global Arena", New Left Review,
Summer Amiel Lecture, London, 28.
4.This paper is a summary of Gordon Laxer (2001), "Surviving the
Americanizing New Right", Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology,
37, l , February and Josee Johnston and Gordon Laxer (2001), Solidarity in the
Age of Globalisation: Lessons from the anti-MA1 and Zapatista Struggles,
Manuscript.
5. Korten, David (1995), When Corporations Rule the World, West Hartford,
Kumerian Press, 59.
6. Clarke, Tony (1997), Silent Coup: Confronting the Big Business Takeover of
Canada, Toronto, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, Lorimer.
7. RMALC, the Mexican network against trade liberalization was formed in 1990
after a visit of Canadian anti-FTA activists.
8. Held, David (1995), Democracy and the Global Order, Stanford, Stanford
University Press.
9. Calhoun, Craig (1997), Nationalism, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota
Press.
10. Williamson, John (1993), "In Search of a Manual for Technopols", in John
Williamson, ed., The Political Economy of Policy Reform, Washington, Institute
for Economic Research.
11. Kissinger, Henry (1999), Globalisation and World Order, Lecture to Trinity
College, Dublin October 29. Posted on the web by O.C. Obaro, October 30.
12. Summers, Lawrence (1996), America's Role in Global Economic Integration,
Talk to the Brookings Conference on Integrating National Economies: the Next

No. 48,2001

247

Step, January 9.
13. Draffan, George (2000), The Corporate Consensus, A Guide to the
Institutions of Global Power, Fossil, Oregon: Blue Mountains Biodiversity
Project, 34.
14. In Paris in October 1997, Elizabeth May, head of the Sierra Club of Canada,
said "we must mount a tremendous campaign to defend the sovereignty of the
nation-state." France,"Report on the Multilateral Agreement on Investment
(MAI) Interim Report - September 1998", Ministry of Economy, Finance and
Industry. Authored by Catherine Lalumiere (MEP), Jean-Pierre Landau,
Emmanuel Glimet. This version was posted in English on the Council of
Canadians' website.
15. Hawken, Paul (2000), The WTO: Inside Outside, All Around the World,
Published on the lnternet by Hawken, Natural Capital Institute, January 16, 10.
16. Mouffe, Chanta1(1992), "Democratic Politics Today", Dimensions of Radical
Democracy, London, Verso, 11-12. For an entry into this debate, see July 1999
debate in The Monist, Vol. 82, No. 3.
17. Lloyd, David (1995), "Nationalism Against the State: Towards a Critique of
the Anti-Nationalist Prejudice", in Timothy P. Foley et al, eds., Gender and
Colonisation, Galway, Galway University Press, 256-281.
18. Think globally, act locally is the overused slogan that crowds out Left nationalism. In another paper, I probe why many in the Left fail to defend the need for
strong citizen commitment to the national polity and its sovereignty (Laxer, 2001,
"The Movement that Dare not speak its name. The return of Left
nationalismlinternationalism", Alternatives, 26). The heart of the paper is an historical analysis and critique of civic and ethno-cultural nationalisms and an evaluation of their positive and negative features. An historical section on Englishspeaking Canada examines how, contrary to much European experience,
racism and recent Canadian nationalisms have been opposing tendencies.
19. Chomsky, Noam (1998), Power in the Global Arena, New Left Review,
Summer, Amiel Lecture, London, 28; Chomsky, Noam (1999), Profit Over
People, New York, Seven Stories Press.
20. Stopford, J.M., Susan Strange and John S. Henley (1991), Rival States,
Rival Firms, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 21.
21. Sklair, H. (1980), Trilateralism: The Trilateral Commission land Elite
Planning for World Management, Montreal, Black Rose, 2.
22. Crozier, M. et al (1975), The Crisis of Democracy, New York, New York
University Press, 162.
23. Ahmed, Aijaz (1998), Nationalism. Between History and Ideology, Lecture,
University of Alberta, March 13.
24. Hobsbawm, E.J. (1990), Nations and Nationalism Since 1870, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 26.
25. 1 evaluate nationalisms by the following criteria: First, how inclusive are
they?All states restrict who can enter and who has full rights, but there are great
variations. How open are they to in-migration and how colour blind are they? Do
nations base membership 1 citizenship on presumed descent or long-term resi-

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Issues and Debates/Enieux et dkbats

dency? Second, how much respect is there, in law and in practice, for "deep
diversity"? Are unity and conformity compulsory and in which areas of socialpolitical life? Are they nation-states or multi-nation states? What collective rights
and recognition do minority nations have? Do they have the right to secede?
Third, how deeply democratic are they? Fourth, are they expansionist, sovereignty seeking or neither? Fifth, are they inward-looking or inter-nationalist?
Amongst those invited were the World Wide Fund for Nature, Friends of the
Earth and Consumers International. Interview with Maude Barlow, Ottawa, Aug
4, 1999.
26. Smythe, Elizabeth and Jay Smith (1990), "Globalization, Citizenship and
Technology, The MA1 meets the Internet", Canadian Foreign Policy, 7.2.
Interview, Clarke, Ottawa, Aug. 4, 1999. Collectif Franqais contre Les Clones De
L'Ami, "Accord Des Citoyens et Des Peuples Sur Les lnvestissements et les
Richesses", sixieme version, 1999, p. 23. From the Home Page of Susan
George.
27. Barlow, Maude (1998), The Fight of my life, Toronto, Harper Collins, 219. In
1990, foreign workers were 70% of the labour force in Saudia Arabia, United
Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and Bahrain. Many left before the 1990
Gulf War.
28. Kundera, M. (1986), The Book of Laugher and Forgetting, Translated by
M.H.Heim, Markham, Ontario, Penguin.

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