A large audience of academics from across the country gathered in the University of Manitoba’s Fletcher Argue Building lecture theatre June 2 when Amitai Etzioni, known as the ‘guru’ of communitarian studies, delivered the Research in Society lecture at the 2004 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences.
The event was one of hundreds of lectures, seminars, and meetings which took place at the U of M from May 29 to June 6 as part of Congress, an annual national mega-conference organized by the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences and a host university since 1930. Over 6,000 academics of various disciplines swarmed the university for the event, occupying all dorm rooms on campus and shutting down summer session classes for the week.
Many of the audience members were clearly in awe of Etzioni, a sociologist with 24 books under his belt who is known as a founder and figurehead of communitarianism, a philosophy that emerged in the 1980s and which attempts to mediate between the need for individual rights and community responsibility in a healthy society. He is currently the director of the Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies at George Washington University and director of the non-profit Communitarian Network.
Etzioni’s lecture was a summary of his new book, From Empire to Community: A Communitarian Approach to International Relations, which applies his communitarian philosophy to the international system.
Etzioni began his remarks by thanking Doug Owram, president of the Canadian Federation of the Humanities and Social Sciences, for specifying in his introduction that the author advised the White House of Jimmy Carter, and not the current U.S. president.
“I’m not here to defend President Bush’s
policies directly, indirectly, or any other way,” he chided.
He quickly moved on to summarize the main thrust of his book by explaining
his communitarian philosophy and how it applies to international relations
in the contemporary world.
“A good society is not one based totally on liberty or the common good … we need a careful balance,” said Etzioni, claiming that the ideas of communitarianism should be applied to the international community if its members hope to effectively deal with global problems. “The notion that we are a global village … really does have a growing reality.”
Etzioni claimed that international reform is particularly urgent because while a growing number of issues such as terrorism, ‘loose’ nuclear weapons, genocide, and environmental problems must be dealt with on an international level, the current institutions for decision-making and enforcement are too weak in terms of capabilities and because of disagreement among their country members. He said that a “new layer” of decision-making was necessary “on top” of existing international organizations, but went into limited detail about what those structures would look like.
Balancing the discussion between theoretical considerations
and some potential policy prescriptions, Etzioni advocated the creation
of several new international institutions. These included an organization
to determine when and how to intervene in a country’s domestic
affairs to prevent genocide or other harm against its people, and another
to prevent the theft and spread of nuclear weapons around the world.
Following his talk, audience members lined up at the microphones for
a lively discussion period that extended well beyond the event’s
scheduled time slot.
One audience member, after praising his ‘guru,’ asked Etzioni about the prospects for international cooperation after the recent spat over the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Etzioni felt that the United States learned a hard lesson by ignoring its allies in the UN and that there would soon be another rise in international institution building, joking, “We just witnessed the shortest empire in human history.”