Jonathon Tepperman, the managing editor of
Foreign Affairs, exhorted us to temper our pessimism over the doom and gloom
induced by our daily media diet. In his upcoming book, The Fix: How Nations Survive and Thrive in a World in Decline, he
describes countries with good news stories. Tepperman feels these countries offer lessons that could be
extrapolated elsewhere. This talk followed right on the heels of the uplifting talk by Monica Araya (described here), in this roundly optimistic session.
Instead of cramming too many examples into
his talk, Tepperman chose three to focus on. (Bravo for this approach.)
Tepperman started by describing Canada’s
immigration policy as brave and successful. In the late 60s, Pierre Trudeau, the current prime minister’s father, pulled off a great coup of progressive
transformation. Unlike many countries, Canada, a vast land with a small population, actually needed more people to
thrive. Past race-based immigration
policy had only admitted white Europeans and this wasn’t working any more because those waves of immigrants were drying up as recovery after the war took hold in Europe.
The new immigration policy established admission
requirements based on education, skills and language, plus a small number of
refugees. Canada has an enviable track record of immigrants integrating and
contributing to Canadian society. In fact, Tepperman told us that surveys show multiculturalism, the Canadian
cultural mosaic as it’s known, ranks second as the thing Canadians are most
proud of - before hockey!!! In fact,
one of the campaign promises of the recently elected Justin Trudeau was to
bring in 25,000 Syrian refugees, fully ten times as many as the US*. And with this platform, he won a resounding majority.
Tepperman concluded by saying Canada was
greatly admired internationally as a tolerant, accepting nation. The
audience greeted this with thunderous applause**.
Suharto had been a brutal dictator in Indonesia for thirty years when he was overthrown in 1998. One of the few positive attributes of his reign was that he had kept religion out of politics and had held together - by force - the interest of Indonesia’s 17,000 islands and 1,000 languages. With his overthrow, most
people feared a surge of religious intrusion into Indonesian politics, and an increase in intolerance and
perhaps even terrorism in the world’s largest Muslim country. The pot might boil over without Suharto's tight lid.
For a while, that was exactly what
happened. Islamic extremists garnered 36% of the vote. Yet, since then, while
individuals have become more deeply
religious, politics has become less so, with the Islamic vote declining
to 25% in 2014. Tepperman described some of Indonesia's successful approaches used to
combat terrorism, including reducing inequality to dampen enthusiasm for terrorism, using of police rather than army for enforcement, and making trials public. One metric of their success is the extremely small
proportion of ISIS fighters coming from the world’s largest Islamic nation, a
tiny fraction of Belgium’s for instance.
Mexico
Tepperman’s third example was Mexico, which
suffered such a chaotic, hostile political atmosphere after becoming a
democracy in 2000 that it seemed that the country might simply implode.
Then along came Pena. Pena was a member of
the corrupt PRI party. He looked like a lightweight dilettante – indeed
Tepperman's slide of Pena flashing a big smile would make you think he was a handsome airhead toothpaste model. Yet this unlikely man hammered out three-party agreements
which brought Mexico back from the brink. Immediately after election, he
initiated conversations with the opposition parties (in private), actually
listened to their issues, and passed some of their priority legislation before
his own party’s. When asked how he achieved this progress, his response was
‘compromise, compromise and compromise’.
Lessons Learned
This talk was again one of the hits of the
conference, another proudly Canadian speaker, Suzanne Simard (described here) being the first.
Gosh it was a nice introduction to Canada Day!
*(As an aside, one of the TED Summit
attendees I met was involved in the integration efforts for these refugees. She
is deeply impressed with the job Canada is doing, undertaking strict triage in
the origin territories, pairing all refugees with sponsor organizations, and
quickly getting them integrated into Canadian social structure). The Globe and
Mail has been running good-news stories about refugee families getting
established. Not surprisingly, others have complained about shortage of
resources, particularly language training resources.
** This was truly a global audience, with folks from 73 countries, many of whom had lived in more than one country, so their applause was based on a broad knowledge. Several attendees joked about their
growing interest in emigrating to Canada, particularly Americans with the most
pessimistic view that Trump might be elected. The Economist ran a Daily Chart
tracking the number of searches for ‘moving to Canada’. Many of these were
searches from the US, sparked by horror at the prospect of a Trump presidency,
while a roughly equal number arose after Brexit.
