Michael Ignatieff Totally Explained

Everything about Michael Ignatieff totally explained

Michael Grant Ignatieff, M.P.,(/ɪgˈna.tʃəf/) (born May 12, 1947 in Toronto) is a public intellectual, historian, and Canadian politician. He has held academic positions at Cambridge, Oxford, and Harvard. An award-winning author, he's also worked as a journalist and documentary filmmaker.
Ignatieff was based in the United Kingdom from 1978 to 2000. During this time he was on the faculty at both Cambridge and Oxford Universities and worked as a film-maker and political commentator for the BBC. He lived in the United States from 2000 to 2005; there, he was director of Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. He returned to Canada in 2005 and took a position at the University of Toronto; in November, 2005 he was heralded as a possible Liberal candidate for the next federal election.
In 2006 he was elected as the Member of Parliament for Etobicoke—Lakeshore. Ignatieff was named associate critic for Human Resources and Skills Development in the Official Opposition Shadow Cabinet on February 22, 2006. He left this position on April 7, 2006 to become a candidate for the leadership of the Liberal Party. The front-runner for much of the campaign, he was defeated by Stéphane Dion on the leadership convention's fourth and final ballot. Ignatieff is currently serving as the party's Deputy Leader.

Biography

Ignatieff is the son of Canadian diplomat George Ignatieff (Russian: Георг Игнатьев) and Alison Grant, and the grandson of Count Paul Ignatieff (Russian: Павел Игнатьев), Minister of Education to Tsar Nicholas II and one of the few Tsarist ministers to have escaped execution by the Bolsheviks. His Canadian antecedents include his maternal great grandfather, George Monro Grant, the 19th century principal of Queen's University. His mother's younger brother was the political philosopher George Grant (1918-1988), author of Lament for a Nation. His great-grandfather was Count Nikolay Pavlovich Ignatyev (Russian: Николай Игнатьев), the Russian Minister of the Interior under Tsar Alexander III. In his book called The Russian Album, Ignatieff explores the importance of memory and obligation to ancestry in the context of his own family's history. Ignatieff is fluent in both English and French, and has a basic knowledge of Russian, the native language of his father.
Ignatieff's family moved abroad regularly in his early childhood as his father rose in the diplomatic ranks. But at the age of 11, Ignatieff was sent back to Toronto to attend Upper Canada College as a boarder in 1959. At UCC, Ignatieff was elected a school prefect as Head of Wedd's House, was the captain of the Varsity Soccer team, and served as editor-in-chief of the school's yearbook. He has a younger brother, Andrew, a community worker who assisted with Ignatieff's campaign. Although described as not a "church guy", Ignatieff was raised Russian Orthodox and occasionally attends services with family. (External Link

)

Recognition

Michael Ignatieff is a recognized historian, a fiction writer and public intellectual who has written several books on international relations and nation building. His sixteen fiction and non-fiction books have been translated into twelve languages. He has contributed articles to newspapers such as The Globe and Mail and The New York Times Magazine. Maclean's named him among the "Top 10 Canadian Who's Who" in 1997 and one of the "50 Most Influential Canadians Shaping Society" in 2002. In 2003, Maclean's named him Canada's "Sexiest Cerebral Man."
   Ignatieff's history of his family's experiences in nineteenth-century Russia (and subsequent exile), The Russian Album, won the Canadian 1987 Governor General's Award for Non-Fiction and the British Royal Society of Literature's Heinemann Prize. His 1998 biography of Isaiah Berlin was shortlisted for both the Jewish Quarterly Literary Prize for Non-Fiction and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
   His text on Western interventionist policies and nation building, Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond, analyzes the NATO bombing of Kosovo and its subsequent aftermath. It won the Orwell Prize for political non-fiction in 2000. Ignatieff worked with the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty in preparing the report, The Responsibility to Protect, which examined the role of international involvement in Kosovo and Rwanda and advocated a framework for 'humanitarian' intervention in future humanitarian crises. Ignatieff's general line is to highlight the moral imperitive to intervene for humanitarian and other high motives, rejecting isolationism, but then drawing attention to practical and systematic limitations to successful interventions. His 2003 book, Empire Lite, argued that the post-intervention efforts in Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan were under-equipped to deal with the near-intractable problems they were facing.
   His book on the dangers of ethnic nationalism in the Post-Cold war period, Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism, won the Gordon Montador Award for Best Canadian Book on Social Issues and the University of Toronto's Lionel Gelber Prize. Blood and Belonging was based on Ignatieff's Gemini Award winning 1993 television series of the same name.
   In 2004, he published The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror, a philosophical work analyzing human rights in the post-9/11 world. The book was a finalist for the Lionel Gelber Prize, and attracted considerable attention for its attempts to reconcile the democratic ideals of western liberal societies with the often-coercive nature of the War on Terrorism.
   Ignatieff also writes fiction; one of his novels, Scar Tissue, was short-listed for the Booker Prize. In addition to writing, he's been a guest lecturer in a variety of settings. He delivered the Massey Lectures in 2000. Entitled The Rights Revolution, the series was released in print later that year. He has been a participant and panel leader at the World Economic Forum in Geneva.
   Ignatieff was ranked 37th on the list of top public intellectuals prepared by Prospect and Foreign Policy magazines.

Writings

Ignatieff has been described by the British Arts Council as "an extraordinarily versatile writer," in both the style and the subjects he writes about. His fictional works, Asya, Scar Tissue, and Charlie Johnson in the Flames cover, respectively, the life and travels of a Russian girl, the disintegration of one's mother due to neurological disease, and the haunting memories of a journalist in Kosovo. In all three works, however, one sees elements of the author's own life coming through. For instance, Ignatieff travelled to the Balkans and Kurdistan while working as a journalist, witnessing first hand the consequences of modern ethnic warfare. Similarly, his historical memoir, The Russian Album, traces his family's life in Russia and their troubles and subsequent emigration as a result of the Bolshevik Revolution.
A historian by training, he wrote A Just Measure of Pain, a history of prisons during the Industrial Revolution. His biography of Isaiah Berlin reveals the strong impression the celebrated philosopher made on Ignatieff. The latter work explores social welfare and community, and also shows Berlin's influence. Philosophical writings by Ignatieff include The Needs of Strangers and The Rights Revolution. The latter work explores social welfare and community, and shows Berlin's influence on Ignatieff. These tie closely to Ignatieff's political writings on national self-determination and the imperatives of democratic self-government. Ignatieff has also written extensively on international affairs.
Ignatieff states that despite its admirable commitment to equality and group rights, Canadian society still places an unjust burden on women and gays and lesbians, and he says it's still difficult for newcomers (particularly of non-British descent) to form an enduring sense of citizenship. Ignatieff attributes this to the "patch-work quilt of distinctive societies," emphasizing that civic bonds will only be easier when the understanding of Canada as a multinational community is more widely shared.

International affairs

Ignatieff has written extensively on international development, peacekeeping and the international responsibilities of Western nations. Critical of the limited-risk approach practiced by NATO in conflicts like the Kosovo War and the Rwandan Genocide, he says that there should be more active involvement and larger scale deployment of land forces by Western nations in future conflicts in the developing world.
   In this vein, Ignatieff was a prominent supporter of the 2003 Invasion of Iraq. Ignatieff says that the United States had inadvertently established "an empire lite, a global hegemony whose grace notes are free markets, human rights and democracy, enforced by the most awesome military power the world has ever known." The burden of that empire obliged the United States to expend itself unseating Iraqi president Saddam Hussein in the interests of international security and human rights. Ignatieff initially accepted the position of the Bush administration that containment through sanctions and threats wouldn't prevent Hussein from selling weapons of mass destruction to international terrorists. Like many others, he'd been persuaded that those weapons were still being developed in Iraq. Moreover, according to Ignatieff, "what Saddam Hussein had done to the Kurds and the Shia" in Iraq was sufficient justification for the invasion.
   In the years following the invasion, Ignatieff reiterated his support for the war's aims, if not the method in which it was conducted. "I supported an administration whose intentions I didn't trust," he averred, "believing that the consequences would repay the gamble. Now I realize that intentions do shape consequences."
   Ignatieff has also spoken on the issue of Canadian participation in the North American Missile Defence Shield. Initially, he supported a Canadian role. But in the fall of October 2006, Ignatieff indicated that he wouldn't support ballistic missile defence nor the weaponization of space.

The Lesser Evil approach

Ignatieff has argued that Western democracies may have to resort to "lesser evils" like indefinite detention of suspects, coercive interrogations, targeted assassinations, and pre-emptive wars in order to combat the greater evil of terrorism. He states that as a result, societies should strengthen their democratic institutions to keep these necessary evils from becoming as offensive to freedom and democracy as the threats they're meant to prevent. In the context of this "lesser evil" analysis, Ignatieff discusses whether or not liberal democracies should employ coercive interrogation and torture. The 'Lesser Evil approach' has been criticized by some prominent human rights advocates, like Conor Gearty, for incorporating a problematic form of moral language that can used to legitimize forms of torture. But other human rights advocates, like Human Rights Watch's Kenneth Roth, have defended Ignatieff, saying his work attempts a difficult balance between competing values. Ignatieff has adamantly maintained that he supports a complete ban on torture.

Political career

In 2004, two Liberal organizers, Ian Davey (son of Senator Keith Davey) and lawyer Daniel Brock, travelled to Cambridge, MA, to convince Ignatieff to run for the House of Commons and consider a possible bid for the Liberal leadership should Paul Martin retire. As a result of the activities of Brock and Davey, assisted by former Liberal candidate Alfred Apps, in January 2005, speculation began in the press that Ignatieff could be a star candidate for the Liberals in the next election, and possibly a candidate to succeed Paul Martin, then the leader of the governing Liberal Party of Canada.
After months of rumours and repeated denials, Ignatieff confirmed in November 2005 that he intended to run for a seat in the House of Commons in the winter 2006 election. It was announced that Ignatieff would seek the Liberal nomination in the Toronto riding of Etobicoke—Lakeshore.
Some Ukrainian-Canadian members of the riding association objected to the nomination, citing a perceived anti-Ukrainian sentiment in Blood and Belonging, where Ignatieff discusses Russian stereotypes of Ukrainians. Critics also questioned his commitment to Canada, pointing out that Ignatieff had lived outside of Canada for more than 30 years. When asked about it by Peter Newman in a Macleans's interview published on 6 April 2006, Ignatieff apologized for referring to himself as an American and said: "Sometimes you want to increase your influence over your audience by appropriating their voice, but it was a mistake. Every single one of the students from 85 countries who took my courses at Harvard knew one thing about me: I was that funny Canadian." Two other candidates filed for the nomination but were disqualified (one, because he wasn't a member of the party and the second because he'd failed to resign from his position on the riding association executive). Ignatieff went on to defeat the Conservative candidate by a margin of roughly 5,000 votes to win the seat.

Leadership bid

After the Liberal government was defeated in the January 2006 federal election, Paul Martin resigned from party leadership. On 7 April, 2006, Michael Ignatieff announced his candidacy in the upcoming Liberal leadership race, joining several others who had already declared their candidacy.
Ignatieff received several high profile endorsements of his candidacy. His campaign was headed up by Senator David Smith, a powerful Chrétien organizer, Ian Davey, Daniel Brock, Alfred Apps and Paul Lalonde, a Toronto lawyer and son of Marc Lalonde. Financing for the campaign was secured by Brock, former Ontario Premier David Peterson, Abe Schwartz and Giovanni Rizzuto.(External Link

) Ignatieff assembled an impressive team of policy advisors, led by Toronto lawyer Brad Davis, and including Brock, fellow lawyers Mark Sakamoto, Sachin Aggarwal, Jason Rosychuck, Jon Penney, Nigel Marshman, Alex Mazer, Will Amos, and Alix Dostal, former Ignatieff student Jeff Anders, banker Clint Davis, economists Blair Stransky, Leslie Church and Ellis Westwood, and Liberal operatives Alexis Levine, Marc Gendron, Mike Pal, Julie Dzerowicz, Patrice Ryan, Taylor Owen and Jamie Macdonald.(External Link

) Following the selection of delegates in the party's "Super Weekend" exercise on the last weekend of September, Ignatieff gained more support from delegates than other candidates with 30% voting for him.
On Wednesday 11 October 2006, Ignatieff described Israel's attack on Qana during its recent military actions in Lebanon as a war crime. Susan Kadis, who had previously been Ignatieff's campaign co-chair, withdrew her support following the comment. Other Liberal leadership candidates have also criticized Ignatieff's comments. Ariela Cotler, a Jewish community leader and the wife of prominent Liberal MP Irwin Cotler also left the party following Ignatieff's comments. Ignatieff later qualified his statement, saying "Whether war crimes were committed in the attack on Qana is for international bodies to determine."
On 14 October, Ignatieff announced that he'd visit Israel to meet with Israeli and Palestinian leaders and "learn first-hand their view of the situation". He noted that Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Israel's own B'Tselem have stated that war crimes were committed in Qana, describing the suggestion as "a serious matter precisely because Israel has a record of compliance, concern and respect for the laws of war and human rights". Ignatieff added that he wouldn't meet with Palestinian leaders who didn't recognize Israel. However, the Jewish organization sponsoring the junket subsequently cancelled the trip, because of too much media attention.

Montreal Convention

At the leadership convention in Montreal, taking place at Palais des Congrès, Ignatieff entered as the apparent front-runner, having elected more delegates to the convention than any other contender. However, polls consistently showed he'd weak second-ballot support, and those delegates not already tied to him would be unlikely to support him later.
   On December 1, 2006, Michael Ignatieff led the leadership candidates on the first ballot, garnering 29% support. The subsequent ballots were cast the following day, and Ignatieff managed a small increase, to 31% on the second ballot, good enough to maintain his lead over Bob Rae, who had attracted 24% support, and Stéphane Dion, who garnered 20%. However, due to massive movement towards Stéphane Dion by delegates who supported Gerard Kennedy, Ignatieff dropped to second on the third ballot. Shortly before voting for the third ballot was completed, with the realization that there was a Dion-Kennedy pact, Ignatieff campaign co-chair Denis Coderre made an appeal to Rae to join forces and prevent the ardent federalist Dion from winning the leadership, though Rae turned down the offer. With the help of the Kennedy delegates, Dion jumped up to 37% support on the third ballot, in contrast to Ignatieff's 34% and Rae's 29%. Bob Rae was eliminated and the bulk of his delegates opted to vote for Dion rather than Ignatieff. In the fourth and final round of voting, Ignatieff took 2084 votes and lost the contest to Stéphane Dion, who won with 2521 votes.
   Lauren P. S. Epstein, the former prime minister of the Harvard Canadian Club, commented on the loss: "What it came down to in the final vote was that the liberal delegates were looking for someone who was more likely to unite the party; Igantieff had ardent supporters, but at the same time, he'd people who would never under any circumstances support him."
   Ignatieff confirmed that he'd run as the Liberal MP for Etobicoke—Lakeshore in the next federal election.

Extension of Canada's Afghanistan mission

Since his election to Parliament, Ignatieff has been one of the few opposition members supporting the minority Conservative government's commitment to Canadian military activity in Afghanistan. Prime Minister Stephen Harper called a vote in the House of Commons for May 17, 2006 on extending the Canadian Forces current deployment in Afghanistan until February 2009. During the debate, Ignatieff expressed his "unequivocal support for the troops in Afghanistan, for the mission, and also for the renewal of the mission." He argued that the Afghanistan mission tests the success of Canada's shift from "the peacekeeping paradigm to the peace-enforcement paradigm," the latter combining "military, reconstruction and humanitarian efforts together."
The opposition Liberal caucus of 102 MPs was divided, with 24 MPs supporting the extension, 66 voting against, and 12 abstentions. Among Liberal leadership candidates, Ignatieff and Scott Brison voted for the extension. Ignatieff led the largest Liberal contingent of votes in favour, with at least five of his caucus supporters voting along with him to extend the mission. Following the vote, Harper shook Ignatieff's hand.
In a subsequent campaign appearance, Ignatieff reiterated his view of the mission in Afghanistan. He stated: "the thing that Canadians have to understand about Afghanistan is that we're well past the era of Pearsonian peacekeeping."

Quebec as a nation

On October 21, 2006, the Quebec wing of the Liberal Party of Canada adopted a resolution that called for the entire Liberal Party of Canada to recognize "the Quebec nation", and to form a task force to find possible ways to "officialize this historical and social reality." Ignatieff endorsed the resolution and suggested that it may need to be entrenched into the Constitution of Canada at some point down the road. Two of his former leadership rivals, Bob Rae and Stéphane Dion have agreed on the nation label but don't want to reopen the Constitution. Recognizing Quebec's "distinct" nature in the Constitution was attempted previously by Prime Minister Brian Mulroney with the Meech Lake Accord and the Charlottetown Accord, as well as by a motion by then-Prime Minister Jean Chrétien in 1995.
On November 22, 2006, Prime Minister Stephen Harper declared his support for the Québécois being recognized as a nation within Canada. This recognition of the "Québécois nation" is essentially of symbolic political nature, and represents no constitutional changes or legal consequences. Prime Minister Harper introduced a motion to the House of Commons that called for the recognition "that the Québécois form a nation within a united Canada". The motion was carried by the House of Commons on November 27, 2006, by a vote of 266-16, with every party supporting the motion, and a handful of Liberal members voting against, as well as Independent MP Garth Turner. Following the adoption of this motion, the Liberal motion was withdrawn, and not presented to the convention.

Deputy Leader

On December 18, 2006, new Liberal leader Stéphane Dion named Ignatieff his Deputy Leader, in line with Dion's plan to give high-ranking positions to each of his former leadership rivals.
During three by-elections held on September 18, 2007, the Halifax Chronicle-Herald reported that unidentified Dion supporters were accusing Ignatieff's supporters of undermining by-election efforts, with the goal of showing that Dion couldn't hold on to the party's Quebec base. Susan Delacourt of the Toronto Star described this as a recurring issue in the party with the leadership runner-up.Although Ignatieff called Dion to deny the allegations, the Globe and Mail cited the NDP's widening lead after the article's release, suggested that the report had a negative impact on the Liberals' morale.(External Link

) The Liberals were defeated in their former stronghold of Outremont.
Since then, Ignatieff has urged the Liberals to put aside their differences, saying "united we win, divided we lose".

Bibliography

Drama

Dialogue in the Dark, for the BBC

Fiction

Asya, 1991

Scar Tissue, 1993

Charlie Johnson in the Flames, 2005

Non-fiction

A Just Measure of Pain: Penitentiaries in the Industrial Revolution, 1780-1850, 1978

The Needs of Strangers, 1984

The Russian Album, 1987

Blood and Belonging: Journeys Into the New Nationalism, 1994

Warrior's Honour: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience, 1997

Isaiah Berlin: A Life, 1998

Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond, 2000

The Rights Revolution, Viking, 2000

Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry, Anansi Press Ltd, 2001

Empire Lite: Nation-Building in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan, Minerva, 2003

The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror, Princeton University Press, 2004 (2003 Gifford Lectures; sample chapters

)

American Exceptionalism and Human Rights (ed.), Princeton University Press, 2005.

Recent articles

Getting Iraq Wrong, The New York Times Magazine, August 5, 2007.

The Broken Contract, The New York Times Magazine, September 25, 2005.

Iranian Lessons, The New York Times Magazine, July 17, 2005.

Who Are Americans to Think That Freedom Is Theirs to Spread?, The New York Times Magazine, June 26, 2005.

The Uncommitted, The New York Times Magazine, January 30, 2005.

The Terrorist as Auteur, The New York Times Magazine, November 14, 2004.

Mirage in the Desert, The New York Times Magazine, 27 June 2004.

Could We Lose the War on Terror?: Lesser Evils, (cover story), The New York Times Magazine, 2 May 2004.

The Year of Living Dangerously, The New York Times Magazine, 14 March 2004.

Arms and the Inspector, Los Angeles Times, 14 March 2004.

Peace, Order and Good Government: A Foreign Policy Agenda for Canada, OD Skelton Lecture, Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, Ottawa, March 12, 2004.

Why America Must Know Its Limits, Financial Times, 24 December 2003.

A Mess of Intervention. Peacekeeping. Pre-emption. Liberation. Revenge. When should we send in the Troops?, The New York Times Magazine [coverstory], 7 September 2003.

I am Iraq, The New York Times Magazine, 31 March 2003 [Reprintedin the The Guardian and The National Post].

American Empire: The Burden, (cover story), The New York Times Magazine, 5 January 2003.

Acceptance Speech from the 2003 Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thinking

Mission Impossible?, A Review of A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis, by David Rieff (Simon and Schuster, 2002), Printed in The New York Review of Books, 19 December 2002.

When a Bridge Is Not a Bridge, New York Times Magazine, 27 October 2002.

The Divided West, The Financial Times, 31 August 2002.

Nation Building Lite, (cover story) The New York Times Magazine, 28 July 2002.

The Rights Stuff, New York Times of Books, 13 June 2002.

No Exceptions?, Legal Affairs, May/June 2002.

Why Bush Must Send in His Troops, The Guardian, 19 April 2002.

Barbarians at the Gates?, The New York Times Book Review, 18 February 2002.

Is the Human Rights Era Ending?, New York Times, 5 February 2002.

Intervention and State Failure, Dissent, Winter 2002.

Kaboul-Sarajevo: Les nouvelles frontiers de l'empire, Seuil, 2002.

Notes and references

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