Political scientist Jocelyn Coulon has the style of a strong theme. With an elegant appearance, he always expresses himself clearly, in a delicate and somewhat formal manner, on complex international issues.
I was not surprised to learn, reading his memoirs entitled The course of history (Somme tout/Le Devoir, 2024, 256 pages), that, in his youth, members of his family imagined him becoming “parish priest, cardinal or even pope, so much so that they [le] found them serious and wise.
At the age when people are having fun, Coulon copied “in a notebook all the names of countries and territories, and those of towns with more than 10,000 inhabitants”. Raised in a broken family, notably due to the fault of a journalist father whom he describes as irresponsible, little Jocelyn takes refuge with Tintin, whose adventures become his “passport to dreams, [sa] window on the world and [sa] geographical map to discover its mysteries.
The one I imagine at the top of the class nevertheless confides that he was, from primary school to university, an average student, lousy in mathematics, but excellent in geography and history. At the age of 14, he consulted dictionaries to copy the biographies of the presidents and kings of the planet before writing to them, on their birthday, to ask them to send him an autographed photo.
The world, for Jocelyn Coulon, is a deep passion. It is the latter that he recounts, beautifully, in The course of historywith strong convictions, but without polemical intention.
The first issue that really interested him was “the tragic fall” of the socialist government of Salvador Allende, in Chile, in 1973, following the coup d’état led by General Pinochet. This event, he writes, will throw him “on the path of a short period of activism” in favor of the oppressed of Latin America and will introduce him to “the complexities of international relations”. Mao’s People’s China, in fact, then recognized the Pinochet government, a creature of the United States.
Coulon wanted to become a lawyer, but, after three rejections from the Faculty of Law at the University of Montreal, he enrolled in political science and found his way into journalism in international affairs. He will be the pillar of Duty in the subject from 1986 to 1999 and, later, columnist in the same field at The Press. A specialist in military issues and peacekeepers, Coulon will also direct the Pearson Center for Peacekeeping, especially active in Africa.
His conception of international relations has evolved over time and with the upheavals of the world. “During the 1990s,” he admits, “I was a good soldier in the service of Western hegemony. » In 1991, for example, he supported the military intervention of the multinational coalition against Iraq which had just invaded Kuwait. NATO interventions in Kosovo in 1999 and in Libya in 2011 shook his convictions.
It is above all, however, “the illegal and criminal invasion of Iraq by the United States and the United Kingdom in 2003” which, by trampling underfoot the international order, opened its eyes to the necessity of to hear other points of view than just Western discourse on the world.
Thus, even if he condemns Russian aggression against Ukraine, Coulon deplores the Western contempt reserved for Russian interests in this story. Negotiating a status of neutrality for Ukraine, instead of a threat of NATO membership, would probably have avoided war by reassuring the Russians, he believes. It’s worth thinking about.
A proponent of what he calls liberal internationalism in foreign policy, Coulon emphasizes that Canada has been and could be a mediator in international conflicts, a defender of human rights and a supporter of multilateralism.
According to him, it is important not to cut ties with regimes that we displease — Iran, Russia, China — and instead to use diplomacy, as Canada did with Gorbachev in the 1980s.
Advisor to Stéphane Dion, Minister of Foreign Affairs in the Trudeau government from 2015 to 2017, Coulon tried, without success, to promote this approach, before being fired along with his minister. He also passes a very harsh judgment on the foreign policy of the Harper and Trudeau governments, which he rightly describes as incompetent.
Although strong in international politics, Coulon disappoints on the national scene. A former independence activist, he says he converted to federalism because French, after all, is not threatened in Quebec — oh well! — and that a big country does better than a small one geopolitically. For us to accept this argument, it would still be necessary for this country to recognize us and for us to recognize ourselves in it.