ORILLIA, ONT. – For 79 summers, Canadians have been coming to Geneva Park on Lake Couchiching to listen to the country’s wise people talk about national and international affairs. They lucked out Thursday with Margaret MacMillan.
The historian, warden of Oxford’s St. Antony’s College and former provost of University of Toronto’s Trinity College has a command of language, ideas and intelligence that has few equals in the Canadian academic world.
She delivered a state of the world message to open the annual Couchiching Conference on public affairs that had her audience captivated. “You listen to her speak and you want to engage with her for the whole day,” said Julie Dzerowicz, executive director of Toronto’s Empire Club.
This year’s conference 140 kilometres northeast of Toronto in cottage country is titled “Watershed Moment or Wasted Opportunity,” an exploration of the global financial crisis and its aftermath.
Prof. MacMillan presented a historical tapestry stretching back 400 years to illustrate how humans have used crises – wars, pandemics and financial catastrophes – to innovate, create new institutions, invent previously unachievable drugs, machines, domestic policies and international rules to better the world.
She continuously reminded her listeners of how close the planet had come to economic collapse following the summer of 2007 – a total meltdown that was weeks, days away, and is still far from being remedied.
The focus on the financial crisis has left three other crises untended – the growing gap between rich and poor that is eroding social cohesion and leaving too many people without hope, as U.S. polls increasingly indicate; the huge environmental threat that is not going away and leading people to throw up their hands and say, “What can I do?” and the international political stage that shows the United States clearly in decline with no one certain about how power is shifting but concerns growing about how the narrative will unfold.
She referred to a recent article in the Beijing People’s Daily that asked with a new and unfamiliar belligerence, “Is the U.S. ready for China’s rise?” and predicted a collision if the United States “doesn’t give way.” She spoke of fears among international scholars that Washington either will try to use power in circumstances where it shouldn’t or turn its back on the world and become isolationist.
She listed the issues the global community has failed to adequately address: failed states like Somalia, terrorism and cyber-terrorism, nuclear proliferation, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the bottoming out of European unity, the questioning of whether the world has the right leaders, the continuing conflict between India and Pakistan, both nuclear-weapons states.
“Do we try to deal with them all at once?” Prof. MacMillan asked. “Certainly they won’t go away if we’re focussed only on the financial crisis.”
She questioned whether there has been a financial recovery.
“Confidence has been shaken. Trust has been removed. We’ve paid the price of bailing out the financial institutions. There is now a moral hazard: if banks are too big to fail [and thus will have a public bail-out] does that take away prudence?’
Frayed social safety nets and persisting pools of unemployment have led to a loss of hope and unfocussed anger against the state and authority. “People without something to do will be unhappy.”
Increasingly, she said, academic and political discourse on the economy begins with commentary on technology and ends with questions of morality and an exploration of what is society for.
“The crisis is forcing us to ask fundamental questions” – the questions Prof. MacMillan asked.
