Transcript
Transcript: Reflections by Janice Stein
[00:00:10 The words "Leadership", "Policy", "Governance" and "Innovation" appear on the screen in sequence, followed by the words "Review and Reflection".]
[00:00:20 The logo of the Canada School of Public Service is shown.]
Narration: Public servants, thought leaders, and experts from across Canada are reflecting on the ideas shaping public service, leadership, policy, governance, innovation, and beyond. This is the Review and Reflection series produced by the Canada School of Public Service.
[00:00:25 The screen fades to Janice Stein.]
Taki Sarantakis: Professor Janice Stein, welcome. Thank you for joining us.
Janice Stein: What a pleasure to be with you, Taki.
[00:00:29 The text "Janice Stein Founding Director, Munk School / Global Affairs Expert / University of Toronto Professor" appears.]
Taki Sarantakis: Tell us a little bit about yourself. Where were you born?
Janice Stein: I was born in Montreal, the granddaughter of immigrants to this country from Eastern Europe, and my mother was the only child of one of those sets of grandparents and was among the first women admitted to the study of law at McGill in the 1930s when women were not admitted to the bar.
Taki Sarantakis: And what did your parents do? So, your mom was a professor?
Janice Stein: No, she couldn't practice because women were not allowed to practice until after the war, and by then, she had twins, but probably the most formative experience of my life was asking her, "Why would you go to law school if you couldn't practice?" And she said, "Because it was so interesting."
Taki Sarantakis: What did your father do?
Janice Stein: Lawyer.
Taki Sarantakis: Lawyer. So, he was a practicing lawyer because he was a man?
Janice Stein: That's right. He was a practicing lawyer because he was a man. And for any Montrealers or Quebeckers who are listening, my parents went to law school with Philip Vineberg. It's a very well-known law firm in Canada today, and my mother went to Quebec City with the two men, coached them both for their bar exam, and then stayed in the hotel room when they went to write their bar exam.
Taki Sarantakis: Where did you end up studying?
Janice Stein: So, I went to university at McGill, where my parents had been educated.
[00:02:21 An image of McGill University is shown.]
And then, history repeats itself, was the first class of women to go to Yale University.
[00:02:34 An image of Yale University is shown.]
This was the first class of women admitted to graduate school, and that was as late as 1964.
Taki Sarantakis: Who struck you as particularly impressive or memorable at Yale?
Janice Stein: They really had a wonderful faculty, and I chose a program that allowed me to avoid the choice between history and political science because I loved both. I did not want to choose. So, there was a marvelous, marvelous Southeast Asian historian called Harry Benda who had a huge influence on the way I thought about history, because it wasn't the history of war, the history of diplomacy, it was all of those, but it was the history of culture and pop culture and society and families and all of that, and it was one of those formative experiences where somebody opens your eyes. You never quite see the world the same way as you did before.
Taki Sarantakis: That's probably the best definition of a teacher, somebody that makes you see the world in a different way. So, it's a good thing you studied history because I'm going to quiz you on history and dates and what happened. You're going to give us kind of an intellectual tour of mostly the 20th century, but we'll talk about some others. So, we're going to start in 1648 with the Treaty of Westphalia.
[00:04:28 An image of the Treaty of Westphalia is shown next to text that reads "The Treaty of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years' War. It also recognized the Netherlands as an independent nation and promised religious tolerance in the Holy Roman Empire."]
Janice Stein: You didn't even need to tell me the name of the treaty, Taki, because 1648 is known really for that. It was quite a remarkable thing that happened. We could do a whole digression here on mapmaking and why maps matter, and they matter for the reason you and I just talked about. They matter in the same way that art matters. They make you see the world differently. If you look at medieval maps, the city is always at the centre, the villages are around the city, and that's how the mapmaker saw the world at that time, but what happens in 1648, huge change in mapmaking. All of a sudden, they draw lines which we today call borders. They bordered territory, they enclosed territory on maps, and there's fantastic research that the mapmaking, where they drew the lines and bordered territory, came before the Treaty of Westphalia and the creation of states. So, the mapmakers led the politics.
Taki Sarantakis: That's quite incredible because the maps and lines on maps we kind of take for granted today, they're relatively new inventions in the history of humanity. So, with the drawing of the lines, there also came something else. There also came this notion that you, whoever you are, are responsible for the things that happen within these lines, and you, who are outside of these lines, kind of have no business in what that other person is doing. Talk to us a little bit.
Janice Stein: It's called sovereignty.
Taki Sarantakis: It's called sovereignty. Talk to us a little bit about sovereignty.
Janice Stein: It's not an accident. Again, let's look at the root of the word "sovereign", king. There is a contract between a king, it's usually kings although there were some queens, but it was usually kings, and his people, and here was the deal that was struck in exchange for providing safety and security within these borders. That is the most fundamental bargain that exists between the rulers and the ruled. In exchange for that, you can collect taxes and we will accept that because you provide collective security to the people who live within these borders or lines. But by the way, nobody else can mess around with anybody inside those lines. No foreign sovereign gets to put their finger in and mess around with the people inside those lines.
Taki Sarantakis: So, bang, instantly, we have kind of the modern nation state before lines were kind of more permeable, they were more fluid. For much of humanity, we were nomadic. We would go anywhere we wanted. But in 1648, generally speaking, the world started to congeal. It started to solidify.
Janice Stein: It did, and you're absolutely right. It's an invention. It is the result of human creation. It's new and it limits mobility, which we don't think about.
Taki Sarantakis: Yeah, because we think we live in the age of globalization but our ancestors, in some way, had more freedom of movement.
Janice Stein: We did. Just to make that story personal again, when my grandfather came from Ukraine to Montreal, no documents, no papers, got off the boat because he was seasick at the first place it stopped, and that was Montreal. He didn't know anything, no languages, no passport. Labour mobility was freer before 1914 than it is now.
Taki Sarantakis: That's quite incredible. Now, we're going to take a quantum leap in time. It will be our only quantum leap in time, so don't get dizzy, and then all the other ones will be in much smaller increments. So, we're going to jump forward 300 years. Talk to us a little bit about 1945. The war has ended, the Second World War.
[00:09:25 Multiple images of groups of people at the end of the Second World War are shown.
Europe is in what state? North America is in what state? Asia is in what state? Talk to us a little bit about 1945.
Janice Stein: 1945, at the end of World War II, there was this widespread conviction that this was the war to end all wars, and why was that? Because those 30 years, it's so hard for us to think about this, Taki, 100 million people were killed in those 30 years, over… the numbers change a little bit but around 60 million in the Second World War when you count civilian deaths. And so, out of that devastation, Europe was laid flat. To paint it in modern language, much of Germany looked something like Gaza. The streets were rubble.
[00:10:27 Multiple images of the remains of a destroyed building are shown.
There was no food. People were starving. It was not a defined battle space as it had been before these sovereign lines were drawn and kings and their royal armies fought each other in very limited ways and civilians were never involved, and you could, by the way, settle it all with a duel anyway if you didn't want to go to war. We were at the other end of the spectrum here in terms of the magnitude of the devastation, but what comes out of that? Two things. One, a set of international institutions, which defined, I think, to be fair, 1945 till 2015, that's the longest I can stretch it and that's probably too long, but that's a long period of time, the United Nations, UNICEF, which many, many people know, all the specialized agencies, the World Trade Organization.
Taki Sarantakis: Yeah, you're going way… we'll come back.
Janice Stein: That whole family of Bretton Woods institutions get stood up by people who are convinced that the solution to this is stand up great international institutions. This will not happen again. And then, a very different kind of institution in 1948, 1949, NATO, which was a collective security organization, an alliance which a little bit different, right? In feel. It says maybe we can't bet the house entirely on international collaboration, this still could go bad, and if it does, we have a group of like-minded and the line which is freedom-loving states, that will come together, and an attack against one of us is an attack against all of us, and what will we do? We'll consult.
Taki Sarantakis: Now, it's not an institution but there was something else that came out of that period.
[00:12:51 An image of General George C. Marshall is shown next to a quote by him that reads "It is logical that the United States should do whatever it is able to do to assist in the return of normal economic health in the world, without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace".
General Marshall, who was not a general at the time, he went, I think it was to Harvard, and he gave a speech, and tell us a little bit about that speech and the plan that came out of that.
Janice Stein: So, he was Secretary of State by that time. He had left the military, and in many ways, he was way ahead of his times because during that speech, it was a speech which was a call to provide massive financial assistance to a devastated Europe. And so, he understood that international institutions was not enough, that a collective security organization was not enough, that if it was not possible for Europeans to recover their economies, to rebuild their societies, they would be fertile ground for what he already understood as radicalization, which he effectively meant the appeal of communism, which was exemplified by Russia. So, you had to have thriving societies. The most important security guarantee were thriving, healthy societies and he knew Europe did not have the resources at that time to stand back up on its feet, and the Marshall Plan, which is what it was called, single most successful example we've ever had of development assistance, and this, by the way, at the very time that President Trump had just cancelled, put on hold, all development assistance.
[00:14:30 An image of U.S. President Donald Trump is shown.
Taki Sarantakis: Yeah, and to make it personal on my end, my father was a child, five, six, seven, eight, at the end of World War II and his number one memory over the years, and it was almost the only memory he said, was hunger, just hunger, constant hunger. Marshall Plan, very different, let's go back in time a little bit, very different at the end of World War II than it was at the end of World War I. At the end of World War I, kind of the victors, instead of helping to rebuild people or nations, they almost were punishing the aggressors, right?
Janice Stein: Yeah, and what an interesting contrast that is. Even though, by the way, the causes of World War I are much murkier, it is harder to find the aggressors than it is in World War II where it was frankly, naked aggression, there's no ambiguity in the debate, but that didn't matter. There was… in a sense, we won the war. We will extract punishment, and probably the most controversial aspect of strategy was these punishing reparations that were imposed on Germany which led to hyper inflation in Germany, led to the destruction of the German middle class, led to exactly what George Marshall was talking about. There were the impoverishment of Germany and the radicalization of Germany, and created fertile ground for the rise of the Nazis. You can trace the path.
Taki Sarantakis: And I think Lord Keynes called that the economic consequences of the peace.
[00:16:24 An image of John Maynard Keynes is shown.]
So, now, I forget what year this was. It was in the late forties after World War II had finished. Winston Churchill gave a speech.
[00:16:39 An image of Winston Churchill is shown.
Do you remember the phrase he said?
Janice Stein: Iron Curtain has fallen.
Taki Sarantakis: Tell us a little bit about the Iron Curtain.
Janice Stein: So, very quickly, during World War II, there was an alliance between Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. It was critical, by the way. As historians we know that it was… and this is not a popular thing to say, Russia won the war.
Taki Sarantakis: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:17:13 An image of Adolf Hitler is shown.
Janice Stein: It was when Hitler turned his armies against Russia and this massive land battle and this extraordinary capacity of Russians to endure pain, which is… and we see it again in our own time, but they can endure pain and suffering. And ultimately, this large, cumbersome, clumsy, second class, poorly trained Russian army triumphed over the far better trained, mobile, fast, blitzkrieg, German army because of mass. It's simply because of mass and because of strategic depth. Now, they were crucial partners during the war but already by the time of the Yalta Conference, it was obvious that Stalin had objectives, and very quickly, between '45 and '48, the Russian army occupies huge chunks of Eastern Europe. Churchill saw that coming and he talked… that's what he meant by the Iron Curtain and that name stuck, and that's partly what gave rise to NATO that within two years of the war, among people who were convinced that the Great War was the war to end all wars, all the energy was going into the realization that war could come again, even though the United States was still then the only nuclear power and that the goal was to prevent another war, but war was thinkable.
Taki Sarantakis: And I don't know if he wrote it at the time or later, but back to your point on Russia, Churchill wrote that World War II was won… now, remember, he's British, was won by British brains, American money, and Russian blood, and I always remember that because it's not necessarily completely factual true but it conveys a lot.
Janice Stein: It does, and I would say British stamina and British courage, because we forget that from the time World War II started with the invasion of Poland in September 1939, until December 1941, the United States, despite FDR and his understanding of what the stakes were, he had no degrees of freedom inside the United States or very few, very strong isolationist trend, and I make that point for a reason, because it will help us understand.
Taki Sarantakis: America first.
Janice Stein: America first, that's what that was. And until the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, I don't want to get entangled in those foreign wars, this is their war, not our war, as Donald Trump just said.
Taki Sarantakis: Now, one last thing before we go onto the Cold War, because I think it sets up the Cold War nicely, tell us about the long telegram? Telegraph? I forget if it was a telegram.
Janice Stein: It was a telegram. It was a cable. That's a telegram, except it's a secret telegram that an ambassador sends home and that was George Kennan.
[00:20:40 An image of George Kennan is shown.
And it was called, for many, many years, the X cable because it was classified and people couldn't write about it, but George Kennan was, again, an astute observer of history. I truly do believe that the best people (inaudible) are historians, even though I am not one professionally, and it was a very sophisticated argument. He was the one who advocated for a strategy, what he called containment, do not take the Soviet Union on in any kind of direct war, they will collapse of their own contradictions. So, look at the inversion of a Leninist argument, right?
Taki Sarantakis: Where capitalism is going to collapse.
Janice Stein: Yes, because the Leninist document is, of course, that late-stage finance capitalism would collapse of its own contradictions. George Kennan turned that on his head, no, no, no, it's the Soviet Union and communism that will collapse. So, what do you do? You contain them. Believe it or not, that was a moderate strategy compared to the cold warrior hawks who wanted to take the Soviet Union on in a direct confrontation.
Taki Sarantakis: And speaking of the Soviet Union, something happened in 1957.
Janice Stein: Just before we go to 1957, let's talk about one other thing that happened, 1948, '49, the Nuremberg trials, which is also relevant to where we are today.
[00:22:16 An image of the Nuremberg Trials is shown next to text that reads "The Nuremberg Trials, held by the Allies, prosecuted representatives of Nazi Germany for planning and executing invasions across Europe and committing atrocities during World War II.]
There were trials of Nazi figures by the victors, which was largely in the United States with token British involvement, but there were trials and people were held criminally responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Taki Sarantakis: Individuals.
Janice Stein: Individuals in their individual capacities, exactly right, for what they had ordered because this is the first genocide of the 20th century on a massive, massive scale, and the Nuremberg trials become… they are the formative place for a body of international law, which only gets replicated 50 years later.
Taki Sarantakis: 1957.
Janice Stein: 1957, the Sputnik year.
[00:23:21 An image of Sputnik 1 is shown next to text that reads "Sputnik 1, sometimes referred to as simply Sputnik, was the first artificial Earth satellite. It was launched into an elliptical low Earth orbit by the Soviet Union on 4 October 1957 as part of the Soviet space program".]
In which the Soviets and Sputnik, which was their name for what we would then call a very primitive satellite that circled the earth, but oh my God, the shock in the United States, we are laggards.
Taki Sarantakis: Because they were… we were supposed to be way ahead of them.
Janice Stein: We were supposed to be way ahead, and you know what? My goodness, somebody got there first, we're laggards, this is an issue of fundamental national security, but what do they do in '57 when this happens? They actually fund science and education at universities. Now, it's debatable how far behind, but let me tell you, when a massive infusion of funding goes into science education and advanced research, this jolts the American economy and American society forward. It is a remarkable story, really.
Taki Sarantakis: And that's how we ended up with DARPA, which continues to this day.
[00:24:35 The logo for DARPA is shown on a smartphone screen next to text that reads "DARPA (Defense Advance Research Projects Agency) is a research and development agency of the U.S. Department of Defense, focused on cutting-edge technologies. Founded in 1958, it has contributed to innovations like the early internet (ARPANET), stealth technology, and AI."]
Janice Stein: The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency which was… and this is actually, in many ways, a great story because government is not usually the font of innovation and creativity, but a group of people inside the Pentagon were given the mandate, find the best scientists outside, find the best ideas, fund them, and get out of their way, which is the really critical piece, get out of their way. But then, we partner once those innovations become meaningful for security, and probably the most well-known innovation that comes out of DARPA is the Internet, the information highway.
Taki Sarantakis: 1962.
Janice Stein: Oh my, our closest brush with extinction which is the Cuban Missile Crisis.
[00:25:31 An image of a missile is shown next to text that reads "The Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 was a direct and dangerous confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War."]
When Nikita Khrushchev, in order to defend Cuba against what he thought was a certain American attack and he had good reason to believe it, he was not delusional because they had tried there before in the Bay of Pigs and failed.
[00:25:45 An image of Nikita Khrushchev is shown.
So, I think it's very important for people to understand this was not a delusional strategy. He had nuclear weapons and ships, nuclear missiles, sent them to Cuba, and Russian soldiers helped the Cubans install them with camouflage. Now, they were discovered by, at that time, what was a relatively recent espionage aircraft, the U-2.
[00:26:11 An image of former U.S. President John F. Kennedy is shown.
And President Kennedy, probably the most famous address of any U.S. president, I would say, in the last 75 years, went on television, which was new at the time, and said we are in an existential crisis, the most dangerous period, the Russians have to withdraw those missiles from Cuba or we will invade. Now, a remarkable thing happened, which I just happened to be a part of. In 1987, a group of historians assembled all the living, surviving decisionmakers in Moscow and in Washington, and we held conferences, two in Washington and one in Havana because we had missed the Cuban boys, and it was one of the most remarkable experiences of my life. Neither side knew how close we had come to going over the edge. The most astonished person was Robert McNamara who was the Secretary of Defense at that time.
[00:27:17 An image of Robert McNamara is shown.
Taki Sarantakis: Fog of war, whiz kid.
Janice Stein: Yeah, all of that who believed that you could bring advanced science and engineering to improved decision-making, and everything was rational and you… and what is, in a sense, science bringing, especially engineering, science of control. And when he heard, I'll never forget the moment, that there was a local Soviet naval commander deployed and the orders that all these commanders had been given, and they had missiles, that if their ships, if they felt their ships were coming under attack, they had delegated authority to fire. He had no idea that that was the case. And of course, if they had fired, that would have probably…
Taki Sarantakis: We wouldn't have been talking today.
Janice Stein: We probably would not, and I could go on and on for the rest of our time together but there were two or three really near misses there, Taki, and what did I take away from that? Never, as John F. Kennedy said, and this is probably the best experience, I think, best statement of a senior leader about war, "There's always some son of a bitch who doesn't get the word." Right? As long as you understand that when you're a leader, there's always some son of a bitch who doesn't get the word, you do not have control, you never have complete control over anything. Plan on not having control and build in enough insulation so that you do not take everybody over the edge with you.
Taki Sarantakis: Now, that's a nice segue indirectly to somebody who loved the phrase
"son of a bitch". What happened in 1972 in Washington?
Janice Stein: Oh my (laughs), that was Watergate. That was Watergate.
[00:29:35 An image of former U.S. President Richard Nixon is shown next to the text "The Watergate scandal (1972-1974) was a political scandal involving President Nixon's administration, which began with a break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters by members of his re-election campaign. Nixon's attempts to cover up the involvement led to his resignation.
I will say, and I'm not a clinician, but when a person, a President, Richard Nixon, who clearly exhibited symptoms of paranoia and was an alcoholic, by the way, not an alcoholic technically, but it's very interesting. He could not tolerate alcohol. So, when he got… he had two drinks, he would be drunk, and he was drunk many of those nights in the White House, beginning with Watergate right through to the Yom Kippur War, the October war in 1973 when nuclear weapons came back into the picture. He was drunk that night. He encouraged his staffers to break into the Watergate apartment complex to get documents that he thought would compromise the Democrats, and they were discovered and he denied it, and we had a year of conversation about what the President knew and when, and there was exposé after exposé, riveting television, and the first time that public trust of decisionmakers begins to weaken.
Taki Sarantakis: That's where I was going to go. I was going to ask you, what did it do to kind of the American psyche, the North American psyche, to see kind of raw politics, raw power, burglaries, lying under oath, etc.?
Janice Stein: I would distinguish between the raw power and the burglary. So, I put them in one basket, and then in the other basket, I would put lying. Up till then, people believed the President, and lying under oath as some of… there were famous phrases.
[00:31:34 An image of Attorney General John Newton Mitchell is shown.
The Attorney General, Mitchell, had a wonderful phrase, I don't know if you remember this, in which he would start every sentence "to the best of my recollection", which really meant, I'm going to say whatever I want because I'll always tell you that I don't remember, right? It was a get-me-out-of-jail card. The most corrosive thing, and it's had terrible, terrible consequences over the next, frankly, 50 years, all of a sudden, you didn't trust what the most senior officials in the government said, and Canadians, as always, were riveted to their televisions. We've always had this very porous boundary between Canada and the United States, and we begin to lose faith in the honesty and in the integrity of our leaders. That is corrosive of democracy.
Taki Sarantakis: Yeah, and I'm not sure we ever got it back.
Janice Stein: No, no.
Taki Sarantakis: 1989, something ended, in theory or in practice.
Janice Stein: Something ended. That was… let's just put this in context.
[00:32:43 An image of former U.S. President Ronald Reagan Mitchell is shown.
Where Ronald Reagan, an actor with a profound sense of theater, no matter what else he did have or didn't have, goes to Berlin and makes a famous speech, "Tear the wall down, Mr. Gorbachev."
Taki Sarantakis: Which all of his advisors said don't put it.
Janice Stein: Don't put that in, it's provocative, right? No, he made the speech, "Tear the wall down".
[00:33:11 An image of the Berlin Wall is shown.
Well, that Berlin Wall, which was built in 1962 by the Russians, actually stabilized the most dangerous crisis, got a bad rap, that wall. It really does have a bad rap, because Berlin was a flashpoint at the height of the Cold War, and when he built that wall, the whole… their fear that Eastern Europeans would flood across that border into West Germany and would escape the Iron Curtain, it just went away. And so, it served to lower the temperature. Now, it also was an insuperable barrier for East Europeans who lost whatever chance they had, really, of escape. Well, that wall comes down in 1989 after four years of Gorbachev's leadership.
[00:34:09 An image of former Soviet Union President Mikhail Gorbachev is shown.
Where he did open up the system (inaudible) two famous concepts, glasnost and perestroika, but it came down by accident, by the way, again, not planned. East European… East German border guards didn't get the message.
Taki Sarantakis: Yeah, they didn't know what to do.
Janice Stein: Didn't know what to do, and it was wholly coincidental that they allowed a group of young people to go forward to that wall.
Taki Sarantakis: There was a young KGB officer stationed there.
Janice Stein: Yeah.
Taki Sarantakis: What was his name?
Janice Stein: What was his name, Taki?
Taki Sarantakis: Vladimir Putin.
Janice Stein: Yes, that KGB officer, because there's another officer and that's who I thought you might be asking me about, but that was not… now, you know the great story of Petrov in 1983? Oh my god, you have to tell the story. It's such a super story. He, Petrov, was in the Central Nuclear Command and Control in Moscow… outside of Moscow, and he got an alert over the system that the United States had launched seven missiles toward Moscow.
Taki Sarantakis: In '83.
Janice Stein: In '83, right? A time of high tension between Reagan, and Gorbachev was not yet in power. It was… and he's legally obligated. He gets that alert coming into the nuclear command and control centre. He has to tell, he has to tell because there's only 30 minutes between launch and arrival of the missiles at that time. And so, he agonizes and he makes a decision. He is not going to send notice up the chain of command that these missiles were on their way because he doesn't trust what the Russian leadership will do. He was positive that they would (inaudible) the launch of Russian missiles, and he waits for the 30 minutes and nothing happens. He alone probably single-handedly saved all of us, and what was it, by the way? We know now it was a malfunctioning radar system (inaudible). He's court-martialed by the Russians.
Taki Sarantakis: Because he didn't follow the chain or the protocol.
Janice Stein: Because he didn't follow orders and he's… how do we know all this? He's finally released it in 2016, and we, several of us, had the chance to interview him. These are these incredible stories of the roles that individuals can sometimes play, but there's a larger message here and it's one for our times, how important it is to leave humans in the loop, right? Even though humans are flawed decisionmakers and there's always somebody who doesn't get the word, there's often somebody who exercises judgment that is belied by what the machines are telling you. And if you remove the human from the loop, you increase the risk that we will have a terrible, terrible accident.
Taki Sarantakis: Now, coming back to the young KGB officer.
Janice Stein: Vladimir Putin.
Taki Sarantakis: Do you remember the famous phone call he made and kind of what his takeaway was?
Janice Stein: Well, even at the time, as he saw this wall come down, he was so shocked after everything he had worked for through his whole career, and he described it as the greatest catastrophe that had ever befallen. The greatest… I think he said the greatest catastrophe that ever happened in history.
Taki Sarantakis: And the line was "Moscow is silent".
Janice Stein: Yeah.
Taki Sarantaki: Which to him kind of came back as, we've collapsed, we're on our own.
Janice Stein: We failed.
Taki Sarantakis: There is no Soviet Union.
Janice Stein: Well, he was right because two years later there was no Soviet Union, but he never recovered from that. He never recovered from it.
Taki Sarantakis: Now, it's the 1990s, Bill Clinton is President, not the war hero George Bush. Sometimes we think of the eighties as rocking but it was the nineties that were…
Janice Stein: The nineties.
Taki Sarantakis: Tell us about globalization. Tell us about the nineties. Tell us about…
Janice Stein: The nineties were the golden age, frankly. If you were lucky enough to be young in the nineties, this was the best time to be alive. History had ended. Francis Fukuyama told us history had ended. Democracy had triumphed. Trade was going to unify the whole world. Free trade was going to… peace was at hand. There was an enormous peace dividend. China was admitted ten years later, 2002, to the WTO. The whole world was knitted together.
Taki Sarantakis: Exactly, but knitted together, Coca-Cola, Disney, McDonald's. It was almost like the American knitting together.
Janice Stein: That's right, because the big global firms were all Americans. The American economy went on a tear, not for the first time. It's a remarkably innovative economy despite its leadership. It's really incredible, the dynamism of the American economy. It had these global firms, and probably Thomas Friedman's worst article (laughs), because he's written some really good ones but this was his worst one, was his indicator, do you remember, of the arches of McDonald's. Wherever he went in the world, if there were McDonald's M arches, those countries were not going to attack anybody else. So, globalization brought, they thought, peace to the world.
Taki Sarantakis: Now, that peace was shattered with a literal bang on a beautiful September day where the skies were clear. What happened on that day? Actually, we all know what happened on that day. What were the consequences of that day?
Janice Stein: So, think about this, the United States had not been attacked, the homeland had not been attacked, since we in Canada, along with our British friends…
Taki Sarantakis: 1812.
Janice Stein: That's right, went to Washington.
Taki Sarantakis: And Detroit, we took Detroit.
Janice Stein: We took Detroit, and we went all the way to Washington and burned large chunks of Washington.
Taki Sarantakis: Which I don't think is taught in the U.S., but that's another…
Janice Stein: No, but we actually need to do that, because no wonder we're having trouble with the United States. They have law. They teach it.
Taki Sarantakis: They do.
Janice Stein: They do, but we don't teach it, and it was traumatic for the United States.
[00:41:30 An image of the World Trade Center collapsing on 9/11 is shown.
3,000 people died when the World Trade Center collapsed. It wasn't the number of casualties. It was, oh my God…
Taki Sarantakis: It happened here.
Janice Stein: It happened here. Don't forget, World War II never came to American shores. Pearl Harbor…
Taki Sarantakis: Vietnam, never came here.
Janice Stein: Never came.
Taki Sarantakis: Korean War, never came here.
Janice Stein: Nothing, nothing, and how did this happen? Somebody was inventive enough to think of using civilian airliners against us. That's where this whole discussion, Taki, starts of immigration as a threat. It starts on 9/11. We securitized the United States. That starts what globalization did. That was another of Tom Friedman's less good lines, "The world is flat." It wasn't flat, but he thought it was erasing those lines we talked about. 9/11 put them right back on the map, and we in Canada understood that because we had thinned out the border with the United States. If you were Canadian, you could drive across the border, you roll down your window, the border inspector says, "Hi, how are you? What's your name and how long will you be in the United States?" No documents, no papers, bye, have a great time.
Taki Sarantakis: I remember one time when I was coming back from Buffalo at the border, the border guard asked me, "What's the phone number for Pizza Pizza?" And I said "967-1111" and he said "Have a great day, sir."
Janice Stein: Yeah.
Taki Sarantakis: And you just drive by, no passports, nothing.
Janice Stein: And so, that put the lines back on the map.
[00:43:13 An image of John Manley is shown.
And if you remember, our own leader, John Manley, worked night and day with the Americans to prevent the thickening of the border and to assure them, by the way, of two things, we could control the border and there would be no terrorists that would cross from Canada into the United States, you can count on us, we can reliably control this border.
Taki Sarantakis: 2008, the world starts to go wonky. General Electric, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, insurance companies. What's going on?
Janice Stein: So, we had probably the worst global financial crisis, and let's just distinguish global financial crisis from recessions, right? They're not the same things. Recessions are slowdowns. I think the technical definition, as you'll tell me, I think it's two successive quarters which…
Taki Sarantakis: Of negative economic growth.
Janice Stein: Of negative economic growth. Global financial crisis, totally different order. What that is is the global financial system freezes and they are much, much more serious and their consequences spread, and by the time this happened in 2008, it became global within a matter of days because banks are global institutions. How did that start? Greed, greed of local bankers who lent mortgages to people they knew could not pay them back.
Taki Sarantakis: What were they called? Collateralized?
Janice Stein: No, that's after. First, they lent the mortgages to people they knew had no chance of paying them back and they would just take over their houses in default. After that, they sliced up these local mortgages and they were called Collateralized Debt Obligations. That's right, and what was the… and then you could repackage (inaudible), and what was the advantage of doing that? One, you could diffuse the risk, but even better, nobody knew what was in those packages. You had to do an incredible amount of due diligence, and we sold them.
Taki Sarantakis: They would also get fees.
Janice Stein: Each time you sold, you got fees, right? And so, the biggest banks bought securities and they had no idea what was in the package. And then, when these mortgages collapsed, that global financial crisis was like a house of cards and the United States cratered, nearly cratered.
Taki Sarantakis: Now, we talked about kind of the Watergate and the trust factor on the politicians' side. Was that… was the financial crisis kind of very similar as an analog on kind of the system, the economic system, that this is rigged, that I can't play or win in this system because the banks always win, the insurers always win? They're not bailing out the mortgage holder. They're bailing out the owner of the mortgage.
Janice Stein: That's exactly right. So, what did Watergate do? My goodness, leaders lie. The global financial crisis, not only do leaders lie but the system is rigged against the little person. They're not doing this for the bank depositors. They're not doing this for the people who lost their homes, which they never should have been able to buy anyway because it was so transparent that they were going to lose their homes. Who got bailed out? The richest people in society, the bankers. And so, the phrase which economists coined at that time, which is so true, you socialize the risk, in other words, we all bear the risk, and you privatize the gains. I believe, Taki, that is the beginning of the populist wave that we have today. You can trace it directly back to that fact, and the fact that the Obama administration did not prosecute a single banker for malfeasance is what triggered… those are the earliest sprouts of populism.
Taki Sarantakis: Well, we're going to close on populism and that's our last topic. But before we close on populism, our penultimate topic, the 2015 Syrian refugee crisis.
[00:48:02 Images of group of people during the Syrian Refugee Crisis are shown.
I think it's one, two, three million people are leaving Syria, horrific, horrific.
Janice Stein: And Afghanistan.
Taki Sarantakis: And Afghanistan, horrific things that they're suffering, and they're trying to get mostly to Europe. What's going on here?
[00:48:24 An image of a group of refugees on a boat is shown.
Europe kind of says… what does Europe say as two, three million people are knocking on the door?
Janice Stein: So, this is the Europe of the Schengen treaty where borders are eradicated inside Europe. This is the Europe that believes that it is the vanguard of civilization, that although the rest of the world has failed, Europe has succeeded in ending war in Europe. It is enlightened. It is the arc of history will bend and Europe will set the direction. There was no lack of self-confidence in Europe at that time, and Europeans looked at, we North Americans, junior cousins. We didn't quite get it in the way that the Europeans did, and a million refugees show up on the doorstep of Europe, largely in two countries, in Italy and Greece, and they are overwhelmed by the flow of refugees.
Taki Sarantakis: Is it fair to say they brought Europe to its knees, one million people?
Janice Stein: Well, here's what happens, and it's worth spending a minute or two on this.
[00:49:42 An image of Chancellor Angela Markel is shown.
Chancellor Angela Merkel, who is the Chancellor of Germany says we can do this and she admits a million refugees to Germany, and there's a public reaction against it, a million refugees where there were no plans for absorption, there weren't adequate plans for housing, there weren't adequate plans for re-training, and it was all at once. That ignites the wave of anti-immigrant, right-wing populism in Europe, and in some way… and Europe today is bordered. It doesn't matter that there's a European Union. All of a sudden, those lines are back on all those maps, just like they were in 1648. Borders are controlled. So much of the progress in Europe was rolled back, and look at the Europe of today. In Germany, the AfD has been strengthened. This is a crypto-fascist party. Let's call it what it. That's what it is. It's a right-wing, crypto-fascist populist party.
[00:50:56 An image of Marine Le Pen is shown.
In France, Marine Le Pen and the Rassemblement National is a right-wing populist party and there are fascist roots in that party. Her father, who was the founder, was expelled from the party but we know its genealogy, and Prime Minister Meloni in Italy.
[00:51:18 An image of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is shown.
Taki Sarantakis: Hungary.
Janice Stein: Hungary. So, you have a Europe today in 2025 that would be unrecognizable to the European leadership of ten years ago. Why? Triggered by what? By a million Syrian immigrants and Afghan immigrants.
Taki Sarantakis: Coming into a population base of what? 400 million?
Janice Stein: Yeah.
Taki Sarantakis: 380?
Janice Stein: Yeah, the richest in the world, the richest in the world with thriving economies, met most of them with, of course, the capacity to absorb.
Taki Sarantakis: And some horrific, awful things and what you called a moment ago kind of the enlightened vanguard of the world. I mean, people in Greece, where my parents are from, being caged.
Janice Stein: Yeah.
Taki Sarantakis: In the Mediterranean, boats being overturned, quite remarkable. I think it shows how kind of thin the veneer of civilization is. We're going to…
Janice Stein: One last one, Taki, again. The Europeans paid President Erdogan.
[00:52:26 An image of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is shown.
Paid him to arrest and to contain those immigrants from reaching European shores. What does that tell you?
Taki Sarantakis: Exactly. We're closing here, we're closing on the P word, populism. Now, populism has been with us for a long time but it seems to be particularly strong as we're talking here at the beginning of 2025. First of all, what is populism? And second, why is it coming back with a vengeance now?
Janice Stein: So, of course, historians and political scientists and sociologists argue about what is populism. As to whatever definition I give you, Taki, there are five others, let me put it to you that way, and there can be populism of the left and populism of the right. It is not a monopoly of right but it is a public of the people populism revolt against elites. That is, I think, it's core, driven by a distrust of elites.
Taki Sarantakis: And institutions?
Janice Stein: And institutions that they believe are rigged against them. What provides the oxygen for populism is a belief that the system is unfair, that it is, by definition, unfair, and that hardworking, decent people cannot succeed because the rules of the game are unfair and they're jiggered by rich people who manipulate the system, by elites.
Taki Sarantakis: I don't want to close on a negative tone. So, tell us something positive as we're sitting here again in 2025.
Janice Stein: To be candid with you, I think these are difficult times. War is back, in Europe, in the continent that ended war, and we've just been through 75 years of history. We've seen a war where Russians are losing, dead and wounded, 1500 people a day and Ukraine is fighting for its survival. We've just seen a godawful war in the Middle East. So, war is back. International institutions are their weakest ever, and I actually believe, Taki, that some of them will not survive this period and that we're going to have to have a period of institutional creativity, but we cannot continue to rely on institutions that are all but dead. It's a mistake. Democratic institutions are under assault. It has to be alarming that a President of the United States pardons people who assaulted and in some case participated in the murder of a policeman and sees nothing wrong. That has to undermine confidence in the rule of law, and there is a lot of worry about the trajectory of the United States. And so, I think it's very important for people to understand the gravity of the moment, to take it very seriously, and to think very hard about what kind of… how they can contribute to the strengthening of civil society and to the rule of law in their own local communities because these are very, very demanding times.
Taki Sarantakis: Maybe we can be those people in the Cuban Missile Crisis. In 1983, we didn't launch.
Janice Stein: We have one moment from Canada before we finish. Paradoxically, I think we're in an interesting moment in Canada, and we'll see if I'm right. But for the first time, Canadians are in the eye of the storm. Donald Trump has pushed us to the top of his agenda for reasons unknown to all of us. We could speculate and we do, but nevertheless, that's where we are. We have risen right to the top of the agenda and he's threatening tariffs that, one, would wholly violate the free trade agreement we have with the United States and Mexico, but beyond that, would push our economy into a severe recession, but what's happening as a result of this? This may be a moment when Canada wakes up, when it begins to take seriously the argument that the world is not a safe place, that in order to navigate this world, you have to be an adult, you have to invest in your own security and your own institutions and your own prosperity, that the free ride is over and that engaging in banal partisan stupidities is a luxury that this country can no longer afford. I'm hearing that from Canadians over these last several weeks, and if what I'm hearing is correct, this paradoxically may be a moment, a crisis that's too good an opportunity to waste, and maybe Canada will not waste this opportunity.
Taki Sarantakis: Professor Janice Stein, thank you for your time, thank you for your wisdom, and thank you for the wealth of knowledge that you have brought to this audience. I'm not sure there are too many human beings who have all of the breadth to be able to speak to that sweep of history, and we're very lucky that you are one of them and that you are (inaudible).
Janice Stein: Thank you, Taki, and I've lived through most of what you talked about but that's the advantage of not being elderly but being old. Now, not through 1648, but through almost everything else that we talked about, I can remember. So, it's a pleasure to be with you.
Taki Sarantakis: Professor Janice Stein, thank you.
[00:58:56 The CSPS logo appears onscreen.]
[00:59:02 The Government of Canada logo appears onscreen.]
