because of their fear of the raw and unregulated force of others, because of their fear of persecution for ethnic or religious reasons, fear of government, fear of the local criminal or insurgent gang, and fear for their family, property, and safety and security. Societies driven by these kinds of fears are rarely well-functioning. And grinding poverty that makes life very hard and very cheap is usually the fellow traveller of societies where fear is all too present.
For Mr. Roosevelt, freedom from fear and freedom from want were numbers four and three on his list of the most important freedoms, behind freedom of speech and expression and freedom of religion. Those may well have been the inescapable conclusions that Nazi Germany and Imperialist Japan evoked. But today, after countless small wars, terrorist incursions, and outbreaks of civil strife, the evidence of the unavoidable overlap between violence and poverty as mutually supportive cancers in troubled places from Northern Ireland to the Middle East, from the Balkans to north of Africa, from the Caucasus to Afghanistan is clear. Likewise, the evidence of the foundational role of freedom from fear and want as the basis for all others is simply too pervasive and conclusive to allow any other freedom a higher status. There is a hierarchy of freedoms. Not all spaces between the lines of the concentric circle of freedom have equal width and depth.
This is why the freedoms that matter most and whose protection should be central to Canadian foreign policy are the freedom from fear and freedom from want. How these two freedoms are built, strengthened, attained, and defended should form the true nucleus of a modern foreign policy mission worldwide. The tools we use, the principles we embrace, the design and rights we employ, will be at once universal and timeless. It is only with these freedoms as a base that other freedoms, like those of expression, of assembly, of worship, of property ownership, of the press, can be built and sustained.
In the end, a rational world view is about preserving what matters most and what is best in one’s history and society and avoiding those changes and “innovations” that are hollow, destructive, or wasteful. The most likely source of unconstructive and often destructive change is the kind of violence that fear empowers, the kind of violence that is driven in explosive ways by both fear and the despair of want. Confronting fear and want by entrenching freedom from both as the centrepiece of a more engaged national and global order has never mattered more. From the Middle East to the South China Sea, from South and Central America to North Africa, from South Asia to the Caucasus, the balance between order and freedom will become more and more unsustainable unless the forces of fear and drivers of want are addressed.
This is not an abstract mission; it is one that must go beyond nobility, high intent, and fuzzy purpose. This is an explicit battle for national and global security, one that demands an all-out war on fear and want of the same depth and breadth as the one that has been waged on terrorism since 9/11 recently, or as was deployed in the defence of the West against the totalitarian Soviet empire of 1945–1985.
The multi-billion dollar expenditures now being invested in the reactive and anticipatory battle against terrorism by governments everywhere, though largely justified and necessary, will not succeed in preventing future attacks. Investing and redeploying resources in order to sustain vulnerable populations and so promote freedom from fear and want is vitally important if the terrorist threat is to be contained.
It is important, too, to recognize that there may be various threats to a population and that it may be necessary to remove a number of threats before that population ceases itself to be a threat, or to permit itself to serve as a harbour to a threat. There can be, and are, hierarchies of fear. When a people are accosted by multiple threats, it may be that lesser evils will attract those who feel unsafe. For example, Sunni communities in the Middle East, not terrorist or violent themselves, can look the other way when insurgents seek to confront an unfeeling and exclusionary Shia government, as has been the case in Iraq. They may not agree with terrorism or with the terrorists, but if there is no other defence against an oppressive government that uses the instruments of fear to marginalize and oppress, those under threat can and do look the other way, or to any port in a storm.
It is time to engage the best minds of every society and culture to shape a foreign policy deployed against the root causes of fear and want and the way in which they spawn violence, war, disorder, and dysfunction. This is not only an area where new leadership and fresh thinking is required. It is an area where the public, private, not-for-profit, and volunteer sectors must work together. Failure to engage in this struggle could well see enhanced unrest in many global locations threaten institutions and governments, and portend a rising instability that could usher in a period of darkness and setback to rival the Middle Ages. Failure here is not an option; the two freedoms that are at the base of all others, freedom from fear and freedom from want, must not only be defended, they must be enhanced and expanded. Any foreign policy that dilutes or diminishes that priority is less about reaching out to the world than it is about trying to manage relationships in order to take all that is possible from the world.
There can be no effective domestic or foreign policy strategy that does not target the protection of these fundamental freedoms — freedom from want and freedom from fear. The risk of getting diverted toward symptoms as opposed to causes, of focusing on lesser freedoms that are, in the end, utterly dependent upon the core freedoms, is just too great.
History conveys to us so many tragedies from the Middle East to Southeast Asia, from Central and South America to Africa, from the Balkans to Ukraine, where the collapse of one or both of these freedoms cost thousands of too-short lives and caused untold suffering.
While every foreign policy must have the scope in its delivery and intent to adapt to exogenous forces and unexpected events, a foreign policy of purpose must be about more than coping and accommodating. It must be about serving. It must be about more than muddling through. It must be about achieving measurable results.
2
Freedom from Want: A Definition
I know, I have seen, the desperation and disorder of the powerless: how it twists the lives of children on the streets of Jakarta or Nairobi in much the same way as it does the lives of children on Chicago’s South Side, how narrow the path is for them between humiliation and untrammelled fury, how easily they slip into violence and despair. I know that the response of the powerful to this disorder — alternating as it does between a dull complacency and, when the disorder spills out of its proscribed confines, a steady, unthinking application of force, of longer prison sentences and more sophisticated military hardware — is inadequate to the task. I know that the hardening of lines, the embrace of fundamentalism and tribe, dooms us all.[1]
— Barack Obama
It has always been my own observation, from the streets of Dhaka to the boulevards of Singapore, from the schools in the First Nations’ communities of the Canadian far north to the neighbourhoods of Kuala Lumpur or Dar es Salaam, that freedom from want is about more than poverty versus dignity; more seriously, it is about the survival of hope. Hope is the central foundation for life and is the fundamental component necessary for the determined progress for each person, their family, community, and nation. The absence of hope disfigures a society and can destroy a community.
The earnest belief that one has prospects, that one can maintain what is good about one’s life and reasonably expect improvement, whether the focus is freedom, health, material or social progress, more peace, less violence, more opportunity, less suffering, is at the essence of the human condition — at least when that condition is upbeat and constructive. The absence of hope, the fatalistic sense that nothing can improve, that you cannot do better for your family or that your children cannot aspire to make progress equal to or beyond your own, is inevitably the companion of despair and all the destructive pathologies — for individuals and communities — that despair brings with it.
The lessons of history are sadly and unavoidably clear: the collapse of freedom from want into a state of economic and social despair can produce huge, even cataclysmic consequences — not only for those living in despair but for their neighbouring communities and countries. A thorough look at the economic collapse of Germany during the Great Depression, or at the places on Earth where violence, war, and conflict have occurred most often since 1950, indicates how the collapse of freedom from want has