Bill the Builder, Can We Fix It? Bill the Builder, Maybe Not!

Some guy named Tom Flanagan — I believe he’s Canadian — is really on a role lately. On CBC’s Power and Politics on Monday, January 25, in response to Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s ten year commitment to rebuilding the destruction in Haiti, Flanagan said,

I get very nervous when I hear people talking about then years, it seems to me that five tears might be what is required to help rebuild some basic infrastructure in Haiti. I mean, look, there’s heart rending suffering there and we have an obligation to help and that would include helping them rebuild bridges, ports, streets, railways, etc.

But, when you start talking ten years, it looks to me like people want to restructure the Haitian society. We have no mandate for that and we have no special wisdom on how to do that, I think we should define the mission modestly and do what we can in a practical way and then withdraw. These kind of open ended commitments make me extremely nervous, not just financially, of course, but also from getting involved in something we can never really get out of.

Those are the same kind of heebie jeebies I got reading Bill Clinton’s comments around Haiti almost two weeks ago,

When I work places, everybody knows I don’t tolerate corruption, I’m going to do the best I can to help them,” says Clinton, the former president and special United Nations envoy to Haiti. “But, they want to do this — they want to build a modern society, for the first time…

“Anybody who has worked with Haiti over the last 20, 25 years, will tell you that this is the best situation we’ve ever had,” Clinton said in an interview with FOX News Channel’s Major Garrett. “They are trying to turn a corner here, and together, we may find it even easier to take a path of openness and transparency.”

I mean, don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that Clinton has anything but the best of intentions for Haiti and Haitians and for all of the fist shaking I’ve given Harper over the past two months, I don’t ascribe any ill will to his actions either. In both cases, I think the men in question see an obligation for wealthy nations to assist a fellow nation of a more fragile foundation that has been torn apart by disaster.

That is a positive moral impulse to feel and I don’t want to discourage it, per se. But as Flanagan suggests, we need to be careful both around our intentions and how we go about carrying those intentions out. I’m not inclined to level allegations of colonialism here, as Chris did — though he was dealing with a fundamentally different interlocutor — but it strikes me how subtley pervasive this notion of nation building continues to be. It’s as though taking it out of a “democracy by the barrel of a gun” context all of a sudden mends the stiching of its theoretical and practical holes and makes it a conceptual framework of nobility, benevolence, and veracity.

I’m not at all convinced that it does and I think our fundamental unwillingness to auger with just how little we really understand about the generatin of a successful nation will continue to dog us in the best of our efforts to do right by nations like Haiti.

This whole notion of building a nation leaves me feeling like part — and an important part — of the story is being left out. It is a necessarily partial conceptual framework from which to act. And yet, this idea of “rebuilding Haiti” is about as prevalent in discussions about “what to do about Haiti” as received wisdom can be.

As Flanagan rightly notes, you can build bridges and you can build ports, you can build buildings and streets and sewers an the like, but I’m not sure how you go about building transparency and democracy as Clinton seems intent on doing. It’s not as though we fundamentally understand the constituent pieces involved in errecting those kinds of conceptual edifices and it’s not as though we can buy or order in the materials for the construction.

Part of what seems to underwrite successful nations like the United States or Canada or the Brazil is not just bricks and mortor, but ideas, concepts of what it means to be American, Canadian, or Brazilian. Those ideas and the entities that give birth to and sustain them — namely civil societies — aren’t the type of things that can just be constructed, they are, if we can continue to effectively use a metaphor to capture the process, more accurately grown and they are vital to the success of any nation. That we persist in believeing that we can build things that need to be grown (or some such other descriptor that ebtter captures what is going on here) belies Flanagan’s point that we do not have any “special widom” guiding our actions — we have, indeed, completely mischaracterized our endeavours — and for all our best intentions, will continue to undermine our efforts and result in unintended consequences of minor and major implications.

Which is not to suggest that we give up, not in the least. As I mentioned, I think the moral impulse to help here is a good one and it is to be embraced. But, at the same time, I think we are in real need of facing into and considering the failings of our conceptual frame when it comes to international development, even in what we consider to be the most altruistic of contexts.

The road to hell and all that…

Tagged as: haiti, nation building, Stephen Harper, Tom Flanagan