The author is a researcher at the Center for International Studies and Research of the University of Montreal (CERIUM). He was political adviser to the Minister of Foreign Affairs in 2016-2017. He just published Canada in search of an international identity.
Canada does not weigh heavily in the crisis unfolding over Ukraine’s status. His unqualified alignment with the policies of the Ukrainian government excluded him from all diplomatic negotiations. However, its past as an active player in disarmament and arms control should allow it to play a role in the implementation of future agreements on the future of Ukraine and European security, which increasingly seem in addition to draw.
Russia has put forward proposals to put an end to the current crisis and to launch negotiations on the European security system designed thirty years ago and from which it was excluded. She asked NATO to commit to no longer admitting former eastern countries into the Alliance, to renouncing the deployment of bases or weapons in countries that have joined the Alliance since 1997 or non-NATO countries, to cease its military activities in the immediate vicinity of Russia’s borders, to no longer assist Ukraine militarily and to ban intermediate-range missiles in Europe.
There is nothing here that is not negotiable. For now, the Americans have already expressed their desire to discuss the military exercises of the two parties and to review the whole question of intermediate-range missiles.
Canada’s experience
Russian proposals on disarmament and arms control are not unrelated to those discussed between East and West in the 1980s. These discussions focused on the reduction of conventional arms in Central Europe, the adoption of measures confidence and surveillance, and the elimination of intermediate range missiles. Canada played a leading role in this thanks to its experience acquired during disarmament negotiations between 1945 and the end of the Cold War. His experience essentially concerned the legal and technical aspects of disarmament, which enabled Canada to become a reference in these fields. This benchmark was based on the hard work and expertise of a handful of individuals, both military and civilian, who all knew each other, more or less trained at the same school, and who gained the trust of all parties.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Canada made a qualitative leap in its commitment to disarmament by developing ideas that will be adopted by the international community. In February 1990, for example, he hosted the first post-Cold War Foreign Ministers’ Conference in Ottawa, bringing together the Warsaw Pact countries and NATO. On this occasion, he reworked and presented to the participants an Open Skies Treaty concept developed thirty-five years earlier by the Americans and whose main objective was to strengthen mutual trust by giving all its signatories a direct role in the aerial gathering of information about each other’s military forces and activities.
The implementation of the treaty has resulted in the development of Canadian-designed monitoring and verification techniques. These techniques allowed Canada, a few years later, to shine in another disarmament file, that of eliminating anti-personnel mines throughout the world.
The Mine Ban Convention signed in 1996 was the culmination of long-term fieldwork and great diplomatic audacity. We too often forget that it was also the fruit of a rare idea in the annals of world diplomacy. The question of mines had been debated for years in Geneva within the framework of the Conference on Disarmament. Noting the deadlock in the talks, Lloyd Axworthy, then Foreign Secretary, proposed bypassing the Conference and launching an initiative where interested states would share the same negotiating table with NGOs who had been campaigning for a ban for years. of this type of mine. The idea was to produce a treaty outside the usual formal framework and as quickly as possible. Lloyd Axworthy was aware of the difficulty of his enterprise. “I knew I was going to take Canada down a path that would disrupt the usual diplomatic niceties and procedures and challenge the positions of the permanent members of the Security Council,” he wrote in his memoirs.
be bold
Does Canada still have the political will, the intellectual resources and the technical means to act constructively in the current crisis? In a word, is he ready to be imaginative and daring? The test of the truth may come somewhere this week, when Washington provides Moscow with its written responses to the Russian proposals. Certainly not all of them will be formulated to be dismissed out of hand by President Putin. This could open a window for Canadian diplomacy. Circumstances create opportunities.