From the Prospect archive: read all of Michael Ignatieff's past Prospect articles, now available for free online.
When Michael Ignatieff left Britain in 2000 for a new career across the Atlantic, he sent a farewell poem to his friends. The poem, by one of his heroes, Czeslaw Milosz, ended: "Time for me to play hooky. Buona notte. Ciao. Farewell." Of course, Ignatieff wasn't off to play hooky. He was starting a new phase of his career: high-flying academic at Harvard and then leading Canadian politician, possibly future prime minister. And he wasn't just saying farewell to his friends. He was saying goodbye to his previous self.
How many intellectuals have had three distinguished but very different careers in three different countries? Ignatieff was a well-known broadcaster, writer, journalist and public intellectual in Britain for over 20 years. During that time he wrote two novels, one shortlisted for the Booker, and three screenplays. He was an Observer columnist and wrote for the best literary magazines on both sides of the Atlantic. He presented prize-winning documentaries for the BBC and serious discussion programmes for BBC2 and Channel 4. He also wrote six non-fiction books, on subjects from nationalism and war to Isaiah Berlin. Arriving a young, unknown Canadian historian, when he left he was one of the best known cultural figures in Britain.
Ignatieff's second career was in America, as director of the Carr Centre for Human Rights Policy at Harvard. Here he played a leading part in debates on contemporary war, terrorism and human rights. He was one of the most quoted liberal supporters of the Iraq war and defended "the American empire" in a series of long articles in the New York Times. Then in 2005 he left the US for Canada, and his third career, this time as a politician, first as a Liberal MP, then within three years as leader of the Liberal opposition party.
Two things are striking about these careers. First, the range. His interests cross many subjects. In Britain he wrote and presented programmes about psychoanalysis and the history of the prison, 18th-century political economy and late 20th-century war, nationalism and Aids. He could write a moving tribute to his friend the writer Bruce Chatwin and a drama about Boswell and Hume. He covered the waterfront. His critics dismissed him as a dilettante, but he wrote well, thought seriously and had an original agenda. He was drawn to quirky thinkers at a time when so many academics had lost their way in jargon and idol worship. He took on big issues—illness, community, nationalism, war.
Secondly, he kept moving on. He wrote about Isaiah Berlin because Berlin mattered to him, but he didn't write a second book on him, just as he never wrote a second book about Aids or prisons. His career has been marked by restlessness. "I think I have a good sense of endings," he told a Canadian interviewer, "when I'm no longer developing, when I've come to the end of something." The idea of making a break, moving on, is central. But amid the breaks—changing country, changing career, moving on to new subjects—there have been important continuities too.
There is the importance of anti-communism and liberal anti-leftism, which led to two sharp breaks with the mainstream left, first in Britain over Thatcherism and the miners' strike, then in America over 9/11, Iraq and the war on terror. His intellectual fathers, Berlin and Milosz among them, were famous anti-communists.
There is another continuity: the importance of service and public duty. His paternal grandfather, Pavel Ignatiev, a Russian count, was Nicholas II's last education minister. His great-grandfather, Count Nikolay Ignatyev, was the Russian minister of the interior under Tsar Alexander III. "My grandfather's favourite phrase," he writes in The Russian Album, was "Life is not a game, life is not a joke. It is only by putting on the chains of service that man is able to accomplish his destiny on earth." Ignatieff's father, too, put on "the chains of service" as a lifelong Canadian diplomat.
At the centre of Ignatieff's three careers are a series of turning-points, moments when he found his voice, realised he had come to the end of something and needed to move on. Sometimes the pattern took years to become clear.
***
He moved to Cambridge to work on the 18th-century Enlightenment and political economy. This may seem a dry and academic starting-point but it was crucial to what followed. Much of Ignatieff's subsequent thinking was about the clash between modernity and tradition, between new economics—whether the industrial revolution then or globalisation today—and traditional cultures and societies. It is there in his first series as a television presenter (Modernity and its Discontents, Channel 4, 1986) and in some of the most interesting exchanges in interviews with Eric Hobsbawm and Berlin, a decade later. You can see it in his writing for the New York Times and most clearly in his first article for Prospect: "Certain social anxieties are an inseparable part of the experience of being modern. One of these concerns the possibility of belonging. Is it possible to feel a sense of belonging to societies which change as rapidly as modern ones do…? Modernity and belonging just do not go together." ("Belonging in the Past," Prospect, November 1996).
These are the ideas that poured into his first breakthrough book, The Needs of Strangers (1984), and they are there in most of his big articles in the late 1980s. This interest in community and tradition and what happens when they are hit by economic and social change was clearly a response to Thatcherism. It also led to his first political break with the left. It started with "Strangers and Comrades," an article in the New Statesman in December 1984. The article was actually as critical of Thatcher as it was of Arthur Scargill, the miners' leader. But in 1984, on the left, you were either for or against the miners.
Meanwhile, Ignatieff had left Cambridge for a freelance career in London. He saw another part of himself—more creative, more wide-ranging—as unfulfilled in the ivory tower. His heroes were writers and thinkers who lived in a bigger world. Berlin, for example, was never just an Oxford academic. Ignatieff longed to be something in the larger world.
The second turning-point came ten years later, in the mid-1990s. He was still presenting The Late Show and writing. But Bosnia, and then Kosovo, changed everything. In 1993, Ignatieff wrote and presented Blood and Belonging, a six-part television series on "the new nationalism." From then on, through the 1990s, he was increasingly drawn to a new agenda: post-1989 nationalism, new kinds of war and the challenge both present to liberalism. In a later interview in the New York Times, Ignatieff told Kate Zernike, "being anti-war and anti-use-of-force was a kind of defining signature of being a liberal, but that was 30 years ago. In the 90s, being a liberal meant being in favour of military intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo. Human rights has come into this and complicated the picture."
Two things were going on in the mid and late 1990s, side by side. On the one hand, Ignatieff was going to Oxford regularly to interview Isaiah Berlin for the authorised biography. Many of these conversations were about liberalism and its enemies, including nationalism. At the same time, he was writing about the war in former Yugoslavia and then Kosovo which put these issues to the test.
There was something else which may explain the impact that the war in former Yugoslavia had on Ignatieff. In an essay in 2002, on the bridge at Mostar, in Bosnia, he writes: "[I] saw the bridge once in my childhood. In 1959, my family and I drove through Bosnia in a heavy black Buick." His father had been Canadian ambassador to Yugoslavia and later to the UN. He was the embodiment of UN ideals, which have such a powerful resonance in liberal Canada. For Ignatieff, Bosnia was not just about liberalism, it was about the values his father stood for.
*** Ignatieff was an intellectual media star in London, influencing debate on many of the big issues. So why leave his spacious flat near Old Street, with its quotations from Brodsky on the wall, to return to the ivory tower? Several reasons. First, Harvard wasn't just an academic post. He was to be the director of the Carr Centre for Human Rights Policy at a time when human rights was the biggest issue in town, even more in the US than Europe. He would be a bigger player at Harvard than in London and could influence the world's most powerful government.
Moreover, he knew that an era in British culture was coming to an end. The BBC was no longer interested in the kind of programmes he had presented for the past 15 years. He had interviewed Berlin, Milosz and Jung Chang, Marcel Ophuls, Edward Said and Hans Magnus Enzensberger. Those days were over, perhaps for good. The same was happening to the broadsheets. They were becoming shrill.
Finally, it was time to move on. "I want to be able to uproot myself when I get stuck," he wrote in The Russian Album. Perhaps it was because he hadn't realised himself as the fiction writer he had once hoped to be. His last screenplay was Onegin, with Ralph Fiennes, which opened just before he left London. He wrote only one more short novel, about a war reporter. Or perhaps, it was because his childhood, as the son of a diplomat, had been spent constantly on the move. Perhaps, now that his parents were dead he could return to North America. A bitter divorce may have played its part. Happily remarried, he was ready for a new phase in his life. This is all speculation, of course. But for whatever reason, like so many other writers and intellectuals of his generation—Linda Colley, Tony Judt and Simon Schama; Christopher Hitchens, Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis—he was drawn across the Atlantic.
He made his mark quickly at the Carr Centre. Genocide and torture were in the headlines. Then came 9/11. America was fighting terrorism and then in Iraq. How does a liberal intellectual face up to the choices and dilemmas of liberalism during a war on terror? He ended up siding with Hitchens, Amis and Paul Berman against most of his former friends on the left. "September 11th was not politics by other means," he wrote in the Guardian. "There were no demands and there never will be… Since the politics of reason cannot defeat apocalyptic nihilism, we must fight." But, and here came the voice of liberalism, "a war against terror must be discriminate, proportional and restrained."
And what if it isn't? This was the question he faced as 9/11 gave way to the war on terror and then the war against Saddam. In January 2003, he wrote a piece called, "The American Empire: The Burden" for the New York Times magazine. He declared his support for the invasion of Iraq. Sanctions weren't working. "The disagreeable reality for those who believe in human rights is that there are some occasions—and Iraq may be one of them—when war is the only real remedy for regimes that live by terror… The choice is between two evils, between containing and leaving a tyrant in place and the targeted use of force, which will kill people but free a nation from the tyrant's grip."
Two experiences influenced Ignatieff's support for Iraq. In 1999 he was filming in Belgrade. He was struck by the precision of the bombing raids on Belgrade. Particular buildings had been destroyed, leaving adjoining ones standing. This was a new kind of war. His next television project was Future War, a three-part series for BBC2, the basis for his book, Virtual War (2000). New technology was changing war. This was not Guernica or Dresden, or even Gaza.
Secondly, like Hitchens, Ignatieff was hugely influenced by Iraqi exiles. He saw this as a humanitarian war against one of the most despicable tyrants in the world, not just the region. He was part of a generation haunted by Rwanda and Bosnia. Like Tony Blair, he was a humanitarian interventionist.
The articles Ignatieff wrote for the New York Times between 2000 and 2007 will come to be seen as a document of our times. In these essays one of the leading apologists for humanitarian interventionism argues the case for the war on terror and then the invasion of Iraq, from the highpoint of hope and optimism, through disillusion to repentance.
Some knew from the start, and many more know thanks to hindsight, that thousands would be killed under terrible circumstances. From the first deceptions about weapons of mass destruction, critics say, it was ill-conceived. Everything that followed, they say, was predictable. The duplicity and lies about WMDs, the arrogant lack of a post-invasion plan, the abuses at Guantánamo, all of that was built into the adventure from the start. No one who believes any of this will be convinced by what Ignatieff wrote during these years. His kind of liberalism looked compromised by his defence of torture, his talk of "lesser evils." According to Judt, he was one of "Bush's useful idiots." The ideals that drove his writing from the early 1990s took a terrible beating.
Then, just over four years after he supported the war, he wrote, "Getting Iraq Wrong: What the War has Taught me about Political Judgment" (New York Times, 5th August 2007). "The unfolding catastrophe in Iraq has condemned the political judgment of a president. But it has also condemned the judgment of many others, myself included, who as commentators supported the invasion."
This was written before the "Petraeus surge" was widely noticed, 18 months before the peaceful elections of January 2009. But by August 2007 Ignatieff was writing for a very different audience. Once again he had moved on.
*** In late 2004, Ignatieff was approached to enter Canadian politics. "It came out of the blue," he tells me. "Three Liberals who I didn't know came down to Harvard and said, 'Would you think of running? We could make it happen.' I was ready for a new challenge."
In March 2005 he was the keynote speaker at the Liberal conference. His speech was a huge success. "I'm not here to tell you something new. I'm here to remind you of something you've always known: the fundamentals of Liberal belief. I'm not going to talk about programmes and policies. We talk too much about them, frankly, and not enough about the fundamentals."
He confirmed in November 2005 that he intended to run for a seat in the House of Commons in the winter 2006 election. "[It] will be a test of whether principled intelligence can survive the Lilliputian reality of Canadian politics," wrote Robert Sibley in the Ottawa Citizen. But why did he do it? Why give up a chair at Harvard and life as an influential commentator? According to Randall Hansen, of the University of Toronto, Ignatieff "likes to move and conquer. He tends to move into town, do something and move on. He was a great success as an intellectual and a writer and then this was the next step: politics." John Richards, of Simon Fraser University, is more caustic: "He has a strong sense of his own ego and his own place in the world." That is pretty much how Canadian opinion was, and still is, divided.
As a journalist, he had spent time covering elections in Britain. He had seen power close up and now he wanted to be a doer not an observer. In 2006 he ran as the Liberal candidate for Etobicoke-Lakeshore, a safe Liberal seat. His critics felt he had been parachuted in. He was an outsider, who had lived abroad for 30 years. He was an egghead. He had supported the Iraq war. He had defended torture. Someone had even misspelled Ottawa on his Harvard website. But he won, beating the Conservative by nearly 5,000 votes.
What did he need to learn about politics? "I didn't know what I was getting into. I was learning an entirely new profession. I went back to school for a couple of very difficult years." What was the hardest thing he had to learn? The answer takes a nanosecond: "Keeping my mouth shut."
In February 2006 he entered the shadow cabinet. Two months later he announced he was going to run for the leadership of the Liberal party, but was defeated on the fourth and final ballot by Stephane Dion, a low-key figure from Quebec. According to John Richards, "it was a blessing in disguise that he didn't win the leadership in 2006. It gave him more time to establish his credentials." Ignatieff became deputy leader, put his head down and worked hard. In particular, he established himself in Quebec. Fluent in French, soaked in debates about nationalism, he talked about Quebec as a nation and took its aspirations seriously.
In October 2008 there was another general election. Ignatieff was re-elected, but the Liberals were trashed. They won only 26 per cent of the vote, one of their worst results ever. The next month there was another leadership race and this time Ignatieff won. From newcomer in 2006, to party leader and likely prime minister by the end of 2008.
What explains Ignatieff's success? He's good-looking, telegenic, used to the television camera from his time in Britain, super-articulate, bilingual, smart. He looks younger than his 61 years. "He looks plausible," said one Canadian insider. In politics, that is what it often boils down to.
There were other factors. Ignatieff came from an influential liberal family. And he had been a success abroad. "Canadians are insecure," says Hansen. "Success abroad is admired here." Then there's Trudeau syndrome. Some saw Ignatieff as the one who could match the charisma of Pierre Trudeau, prime minister from 1968-79 and 1980-84. These were important years for Canada, the time of the Montreal Olympics in 1976, the period when Canada joined the G7 group of major economic powers. Like Ignatieff, Trudeau had studied abroad and was seen as an ideas man.
Intellectuals do well in Canadian politics, better than in the US or in Britain. Trudeau was an intellectual. Mackenzie King, who bestrode Canadian politics for 20 years, was an economist and university professor. Ignatieff's predecessor, Dion, was an academic. Charles Taylor, the great Canadian political thinker, ran for parliament four times.
Ignatieff's critics describe him as cold and elitist. So do some of his former colleagues. His ambition is not always well hidden. But he is also funny, charming and good company. Taylor Owen, one of his policy advisers, enthuses about Ignatieff as "a very effective retail politician, on the streets, talking to people, connecting with people." And he drives the national debate. "He drove every issue in the last leadership race," says Owen.
"He has learned the skills," says Richards, "to move from the intellectual life to small-town Canada." Especially in the west. "He is more sensitive to the western regions than most in his party," Richards adds. "The five western provinces now make up one-third of the population. They are thefastest growing part of the country, as in the US."
Not least, there's luck and good timing. According to one Liberal insider who preferred not to be named, "the Liberal party had been running out of gas for a long time when Ignatieff returned. It had reached the point Labour reached after Michael Foot, or the Tories after Iain Duncan Smith." The Liberals should have won the 2006 election. When they lost their leader, Paul Martin, resigned. Dion, "the weakest candidate" according to Hansen, emerged as leader. Then they lost the 2008 election and Dion was finished. Stephen Harper, the prime minister, leads yet another Canadian minority government—and it is not looking solid.
This has been a period of political instability in Canada: three prime ministers and three general elections in five years, and three leaders of the Liberal party since 2006. Harper very nearly fell in December and again in January. Jim de Wilde has been involved with the Liberal party over the past 20 years. In his view, Ignatieff "was the only person who was in a position to say, 'I am going to rebuild the Liberal party.'" He is still an unknown quantity. He's only been back in Canada for three years. People don't know him but they know he's not Dion or Harper. At a time of economic crisis and political muddle, that's not a bad thing.
"This is a serious man," says de Wilde. "He wants to work through the great issues of the time." And as we have seen with President Barack Obama, and as we may still see with Gordon Brown, this is the time for serious politicians who want to take on big issues.
I ask Ignatieff, what has surprised him most about politics? "Bad faith… People often attack you knowing full well that what they're attacking you for has no substance in fact." He pauses. "It was very innocent of me to think otherwise." The way he says "innocent" is surprising. He sounds harsh. But isn't that what happens when an idealist meets the real world of politics? "I'd put it more critically. It's what happens when an innocent meets the political world. I'm less innocent now. Canadians don't want an innocent in a position of leadership." Perhaps, but don't they want an idealist? Isn't that the lesson of Obama, that there's a longing out there for ideals? "You can't get through the daily grind of politics without a few simple and very passionate convictions." Such as? "To make my country more united, more of a leader in the world, more just." He pauses. "It's important that I had another life. If you're going to do this life you might as well do it for something worthwhile."
But what happens when such ideals clash with the hard realities of politics, when you have to make decisions about Iraq or Afghanistan, or torture, which clash with your principles. "There are honourable compromises and there are dishonourable ones and you have to know the difference." Pause. "There are some issues where no compromise is possible." Such as? "Afghanistan. We have to sustain and keep the mission there going. You do those things with the utmost seriousness. You owe your fellow-citizens the truth."
Listening to him, makes me think of the young Blair. Ignatieff had written about Blair in 1997, also then full of hopes and ideals. By the time he resigned, Blair looked as if he had taken a hell of a beating. The old Ignatieff, ten years ago, might have agreed. Now he's harder. "That's what you do this for: a sense of being responsible and a sense of being accountable. I am responsible to a large body of citizens and you either like that and take the consequences or not."
*** Everyone that I spoke to expects Ignatieff to be Canada's next prime minister, whether they like him or not. But what kind of prime minister would he be? Those who think they know him from Britain might expect a highbrow figure, idealistic and keen on the arts. Woodrow Wilson meets Havel or Jack Lang. But this is wrong. His sense of politics has changed. Words like "responsibility" and "accountability" keep coming up. He's more hard-nosed and cautious. The bitter attacks over 11th September and the Iraq war, and then the hard political lessons in Canada have had their effect.
And yet Ignatieff is seen to have a sense of change and new times about him. This is what many Canadians are hoping for. They look at an English-speaking world run from the centre-left by Obama, Brown, Ignatieff and Kevin Rudd, and think that it is a more hopeful and exciting place than one run by George W Bush and Stephen Harper. It cares more about social justice at home and human rights abroad. But this may also misunderstand Ignatieff, as well as the others. They have few illusions about the hard times ahead.
From the Prospect archive: read all of Michael Ignatieff's past Prospect articles, now available for free online.Plus: discuss this article at First Drafts, Prospect's blog.
When Michael Ignatieff left Britain in 2000 for a new career across the Atlantic, he sent a farewell poem to his friends. The poem, by one of his heroes, Czeslaw Milosz, ended: "Time for me to play hooky. Buona notte. Ciao. Farewell." Of course, Ignatieff wasn't off to play hooky. He was starting a new phase of his career: high-flying academic at Harvard and then leading Canadian politician, possibly future prime minister. And he wasn't just saying farewell to his friends. He was saying goodbye to his previous self.
How many intellectuals have had three distinguished but very different careers in three different countries? Ignatieff was a well-known broadcaster, writer, journalist and public intellectual in Britain for over 20 years. During that time he wrote two novels, one shortlisted for the Booker, and three screenplays. He was an Observer columnist and wrote for the best literary magazines on both sides of the Atlantic. He presented prize-winning documentaries for the BBC and serious discussion programmes for BBC2 and Channel 4. He also wrote six non-fiction books, on subjects from nationalism and war to Isaiah Berlin. Arriving a young, unknown Canadian historian, when he left he was one of the best known cultural figures in Britain.
Ignatieff's second career was in America, as director of the Carr Centre for Human Rights Policy at Harvard. Here he played a leading part in debates on contemporary war, terrorism and human rights. He was one of the most quoted liberal supporters of the Iraq war and defended "the American empire" in a series of long articles in the New York Times. Then in 2005 he left the US for Canada, and his third career, this time as a politician, first as a Liberal MP, then within three years as leader of the Liberal opposition party.
Two things are striking about these careers. First, the range. His interests cross many subjects. In Britain he wrote and presented programmes about psychoanalysis and the history of the prison, 18th-century political economy and late 20th-century war, nationalism and Aids. He could write a moving tribute to his friend the writer Bruce Chatwin and a drama about Boswell and Hume. He covered the waterfront. His critics dismissed him as a dilettante, but he wrote well, thought seriously and had an original agenda. He was drawn to quirky thinkers at a time when so many academics had lost their way in jargon and idol worship. He took on big issues—illness, community, nationalism, war.
Secondly, he kept moving on. He wrote about Isaiah Berlin because Berlin mattered to him, but he didn't write a second book on him, just as he never wrote a second book about Aids or prisons. His career has been marked by restlessness. "I think I have a good sense of endings," he told a Canadian interviewer, "when I'm no longer developing, when I've come to the end of something." The idea of making a break, moving on, is central. But amid the breaks—changing country, changing career, moving on to new subjects—there have been important continuities too.
There is the importance of anti-communism and liberal anti-leftism, which led to two sharp breaks with the mainstream left, first in Britain over Thatcherism and the miners' strike, then in America over 9/11, Iraq and the war on terror. His intellectual fathers, Berlin and Milosz among them, were famous anti-communists.
There is another continuity: the importance of service and public duty. His paternal grandfather, Pavel Ignatiev, a Russian count, was Nicholas II's last education minister. His great-grandfather, Count Nikolay Ignatyev, was the Russian minister of the interior under Tsar Alexander III. "My grandfather's favourite phrase," he writes in The Russian Album, was "Life is not a game, life is not a joke. It is only by putting on the chains of service that man is able to accomplish his destiny on earth." Ignatieff's father, too, put on "the chains of service" as a lifelong Canadian diplomat.
At the centre of Ignatieff's three careers are a series of turning-points, moments when he found his voice, realised he had come to the end of something and needed to move on. Sometimes the pattern took years to become clear.
***
He moved to Cambridge to work on the 18th-century Enlightenment and political economy. This may seem a dry and academic starting-point but it was crucial to what followed. Much of Ignatieff's subsequent thinking was about the clash between modernity and tradition, between new economics—whether the industrial revolution then or globalisation today—and traditional cultures and societies. It is there in his first series as a television presenter (Modernity and its Discontents, Channel 4, 1986) and in some of the most interesting exchanges in interviews with Eric Hobsbawm and Berlin, a decade later. You can see it in his writing for the New York Times and most clearly in his first article for Prospect: "Certain social anxieties are an inseparable part of the experience of being modern. One of these concerns the possibility of belonging. Is it possible to feel a sense of belonging to societies which change as rapidly as modern ones do…? Modernity and belonging just do not go together." ("Belonging in the Past," Prospect, November 1996).
These are the ideas that poured into his first breakthrough book, The Needs of Strangers (1984), and they are there in most of his big articles in the late 1980s. This interest in community and tradition and what happens when they are hit by economic and social change was clearly a response to Thatcherism. It also led to his first political break with the left. It started with "Strangers and Comrades," an article in the New Statesman in December 1984. The article was actually as critical of Thatcher as it was of Arthur Scargill, the miners' leader. But in 1984, on the left, you were either for or against the miners.
Meanwhile, Ignatieff had left Cambridge for a freelance career in London. He saw another part of himself—more creative, more wide-ranging—as unfulfilled in the ivory tower. His heroes were writers and thinkers who lived in a bigger world. Berlin, for example, was never just an Oxford academic. Ignatieff longed to be something in the larger world.
The second turning-point came ten years later, in the mid-1990s. He was still presenting The Late Show and writing. But Bosnia, and then Kosovo, changed everything. In 1993, Ignatieff wrote and presented Blood and Belonging, a six-part television series on "the new nationalism." From then on, through the 1990s, he was increasingly drawn to a new agenda: post-1989 nationalism, new kinds of war and the challenge both present to liberalism. In a later interview in the New York Times, Ignatieff told Kate Zernike, "being anti-war and anti-use-of-force was a kind of defining signature of being a liberal, but that was 30 years ago. In the 90s, being a liberal meant being in favour of military intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo. Human rights has come into this and complicated the picture."
Two things were going on in the mid and late 1990s, side by side. On the one hand, Ignatieff was going to Oxford regularly to interview Isaiah Berlin for the authorised biography. Many of these conversations were about liberalism and its enemies, including nationalism. At the same time, he was writing about the war in former Yugoslavia and then Kosovo which put these issues to the test.
There was something else which may explain the impact that the war in former Yugoslavia had on Ignatieff. In an essay in 2002, on the bridge at Mostar, in Bosnia, he writes: "[I] saw the bridge once in my childhood. In 1959, my family and I drove through Bosnia in a heavy black Buick." His father had been Canadian ambassador to Yugoslavia and later to the UN. He was the embodiment of UN ideals, which have such a powerful resonance in liberal Canada. For Ignatieff, Bosnia was not just about liberalism, it was about the values his father stood for.
*** Ignatieff was an intellectual media star in London, influencing debate on many of the big issues. So why leave his spacious flat near Old Street, with its quotations from Brodsky on the wall, to return to the ivory tower? Several reasons. First, Harvard wasn't just an academic post. He was to be the director of the Carr Centre for Human Rights Policy at a time when human rights was the biggest issue in town, even more in the US than Europe. He would be a bigger player at Harvard than in London and could influence the world's most powerful government.
Moreover, he knew that an era in British culture was coming to an end. The BBC was no longer interested in the kind of programmes he had presented for the past 15 years. He had interviewed Berlin, Milosz and Jung Chang, Marcel Ophuls, Edward Said and Hans Magnus Enzensberger. Those days were over, perhaps for good. The same was happening to the broadsheets. They were becoming shrill.
Finally, it was time to move on. "I want to be able to uproot myself when I get stuck," he wrote in The Russian Album. Perhaps it was because he hadn't realised himself as the fiction writer he had once hoped to be. His last screenplay was Onegin, with Ralph Fiennes, which opened just before he left London. He wrote only one more short novel, about a war reporter. Or perhaps, it was because his childhood, as the son of a diplomat, had been spent constantly on the move. Perhaps, now that his parents were dead he could return to North America. A bitter divorce may have played its part. Happily remarried, he was ready for a new phase in his life. This is all speculation, of course. But for whatever reason, like so many other writers and intellectuals of his generation—Linda Colley, Tony Judt and Simon Schama; Christopher Hitchens, Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis—he was drawn across the Atlantic.
He made his mark quickly at the Carr Centre. Genocide and torture were in the headlines. Then came 9/11. America was fighting terrorism and then in Iraq. How does a liberal intellectual face up to the choices and dilemmas of liberalism during a war on terror? He ended up siding with Hitchens, Amis and Paul Berman against most of his former friends on the left. "September 11th was not politics by other means," he wrote in the Guardian. "There were no demands and there never will be… Since the politics of reason cannot defeat apocalyptic nihilism, we must fight." But, and here came the voice of liberalism, "a war against terror must be discriminate, proportional and restrained."
And what if it isn't? This was the question he faced as 9/11 gave way to the war on terror and then the war against Saddam. In January 2003, he wrote a piece called, "The American Empire: The Burden" for the New York Times magazine. He declared his support for the invasion of Iraq. Sanctions weren't working. "The disagreeable reality for those who believe in human rights is that there are some occasions—and Iraq may be one of them—when war is the only real remedy for regimes that live by terror… The choice is between two evils, between containing and leaving a tyrant in place and the targeted use of force, which will kill people but free a nation from the tyrant's grip."
Two experiences influenced Ignatieff's support for Iraq. In 1999 he was filming in Belgrade. He was struck by the precision of the bombing raids on Belgrade. Particular buildings had been destroyed, leaving adjoining ones standing. This was a new kind of war. His next television project was Future War, a three-part series for BBC2, the basis for his book, Virtual War (2000). New technology was changing war. This was not Guernica or Dresden, or even Gaza.
Secondly, like Hitchens, Ignatieff was hugely influenced by Iraqi exiles. He saw this as a humanitarian war against one of the most despicable tyrants in the world, not just the region. He was part of a generation haunted by Rwanda and Bosnia. Like Tony Blair, he was a humanitarian interventionist.
The articles Ignatieff wrote for the New York Times between 2000 and 2007 will come to be seen as a document of our times. In these essays one of the leading apologists for humanitarian interventionism argues the case for the war on terror and then the invasion of Iraq, from the highpoint of hope and optimism, through disillusion to repentance.
Some knew from the start, and many more know thanks to hindsight, that thousands would be killed under terrible circumstances. From the first deceptions about weapons of mass destruction, critics say, it was ill-conceived. Everything that followed, they say, was predictable. The duplicity and lies about WMDs, the arrogant lack of a post-invasion plan, the abuses at Guantánamo, all of that was built into the adventure from the start. No one who believes any of this will be convinced by what Ignatieff wrote during these years. His kind of liberalism looked compromised by his defence of torture, his talk of "lesser evils." According to Judt, he was one of "Bush's useful idiots." The ideals that drove his writing from the early 1990s took a terrible beating.
Then, just over four years after he supported the war, he wrote, "Getting Iraq Wrong: What the War has Taught me about Political Judgment" (New York Times, 5th August 2007). "The unfolding catastrophe in Iraq has condemned the political judgment of a president. But it has also condemned the judgment of many others, myself included, who as commentators supported the invasion."
This was written before the "Petraeus surge" was widely noticed, 18 months before the peaceful elections of January 2009. But by August 2007 Ignatieff was writing for a very different audience. Once again he had moved on.
*** In late 2004, Ignatieff was approached to enter Canadian politics. "It came out of the blue," he tells me. "Three Liberals who I didn't know came down to Harvard and said, 'Would you think of running? We could make it happen.' I was ready for a new challenge."
In March 2005 he was the keynote speaker at the Liberal conference. His speech was a huge success. "I'm not here to tell you something new. I'm here to remind you of something you've always known: the fundamentals of Liberal belief. I'm not going to talk about programmes and policies. We talk too much about them, frankly, and not enough about the fundamentals."
He confirmed in November 2005 that he intended to run for a seat in the House of Commons in the winter 2006 election. "[It] will be a test of whether principled intelligence can survive the Lilliputian reality of Canadian politics," wrote Robert Sibley in the Ottawa Citizen. But why did he do it? Why give up a chair at Harvard and life as an influential commentator? According to Randall Hansen, of the University of Toronto, Ignatieff "likes to move and conquer. He tends to move into town, do something and move on. He was a great success as an intellectual and a writer and then this was the next step: politics." John Richards, of Simon Fraser University, is more caustic: "He has a strong sense of his own ego and his own place in the world." That is pretty much how Canadian opinion was, and still is, divided.
As a journalist, he had spent time covering elections in Britain. He had seen power close up and now he wanted to be a doer not an observer. In 2006 he ran as the Liberal candidate for Etobicoke-Lakeshore, a safe Liberal seat. His critics felt he had been parachuted in. He was an outsider, who had lived abroad for 30 years. He was an egghead. He had supported the Iraq war. He had defended torture. Someone had even misspelled Ottawa on his Harvard website. But he won, beating the Conservative by nearly 5,000 votes.
What did he need to learn about politics? "I didn't know what I was getting into. I was learning an entirely new profession. I went back to school for a couple of very difficult years." What was the hardest thing he had to learn? The answer takes a nanosecond: "Keeping my mouth shut."
In February 2006 he entered the shadow cabinet. Two months later he announced he was going to run for the leadership of the Liberal party, but was defeated on the fourth and final ballot by Stephane Dion, a low-key figure from Quebec. According to John Richards, "it was a blessing in disguise that he didn't win the leadership in 2006. It gave him more time to establish his credentials." Ignatieff became deputy leader, put his head down and worked hard. In particular, he established himself in Quebec. Fluent in French, soaked in debates about nationalism, he talked about Quebec as a nation and took its aspirations seriously.
In October 2008 there was another general election. Ignatieff was re-elected, but the Liberals were trashed. They won only 26 per cent of the vote, one of their worst results ever. The next month there was another leadership race and this time Ignatieff won. From newcomer in 2006, to party leader and likely prime minister by the end of 2008.
What explains Ignatieff's success? He's good-looking, telegenic, used to the television camera from his time in Britain, super-articulate, bilingual, smart. He looks younger than his 61 years. "He looks plausible," said one Canadian insider. In politics, that is what it often boils down to.
There were other factors. Ignatieff came from an influential liberal family. And he had been a success abroad. "Canadians are insecure," says Hansen. "Success abroad is admired here." Then there's Trudeau syndrome. Some saw Ignatieff as the one who could match the charisma of Pierre Trudeau, prime minister from 1968-79 and 1980-84. These were important years for Canada, the time of the Montreal Olympics in 1976, the period when Canada joined the G7 group of major economic powers. Like Ignatieff, Trudeau had studied abroad and was seen as an ideas man.
Intellectuals do well in Canadian politics, better than in the US or in Britain. Trudeau was an intellectual. Mackenzie King, who bestrode Canadian politics for 20 years, was an economist and university professor. Ignatieff's predecessor, Dion, was an academic. Charles Taylor, the great Canadian political thinker, ran for parliament four times.
Ignatieff's critics describe him as cold and elitist. So do some of his former colleagues. His ambition is not always well hidden. But he is also funny, charming and good company. Taylor Owen, one of his policy advisers, enthuses about Ignatieff as "a very effective retail politician, on the streets, talking to people, connecting with people." And he drives the national debate. "He drove every issue in the last leadership race," says Owen.
"He has learned the skills," says Richards, "to move from the intellectual life to small-town Canada." Especially in the west. "He is more sensitive to the western regions than most in his party," Richards adds. "The five western provinces now make up one-third of the population. They are thefastest growing part of the country, as in the US."
Not least, there's luck and good timing. According to one Liberal insider who preferred not to be named, "the Liberal party had been running out of gas for a long time when Ignatieff returned. It had reached the point Labour reached after Michael Foot, or the Tories after Iain Duncan Smith." The Liberals should have won the 2006 election. When they lost their leader, Paul Martin, resigned. Dion, "the weakest candidate" according to Hansen, emerged as leader. Then they lost the 2008 election and Dion was finished. Stephen Harper, the prime minister, leads yet another Canadian minority government—and it is not looking solid.
This has been a period of political instability in Canada: three prime ministers and three general elections in five years, and three leaders of the Liberal party since 2006. Harper very nearly fell in December and again in January. Jim de Wilde has been involved with the Liberal party over the past 20 years. In his view, Ignatieff "was the only person who was in a position to say, 'I am going to rebuild the Liberal party.'" He is still an unknown quantity. He's only been back in Canada for three years. People don't know him but they know he's not Dion or Harper. At a time of economic crisis and political muddle, that's not a bad thing.
"This is a serious man," says de Wilde. "He wants to work through the great issues of the time." And as we have seen with President Barack Obama, and as we may still see with Gordon Brown, this is the time for serious politicians who want to take on big issues.
I ask Ignatieff, what has surprised him most about politics? "Bad faith… People often attack you knowing full well that what they're attacking you for has no substance in fact." He pauses. "It was very innocent of me to think otherwise." The way he says "innocent" is surprising. He sounds harsh. But isn't that what happens when an idealist meets the real world of politics? "I'd put it more critically. It's what happens when an innocent meets the political world. I'm less innocent now. Canadians don't want an innocent in a position of leadership." Perhaps, but don't they want an idealist? Isn't that the lesson of Obama, that there's a longing out there for ideals? "You can't get through the daily grind of politics without a few simple and very passionate convictions." Such as? "To make my country more united, more of a leader in the world, more just." He pauses. "It's important that I had another life. If you're going to do this life you might as well do it for something worthwhile."
But what happens when such ideals clash with the hard realities of politics, when you have to make decisions about Iraq or Afghanistan, or torture, which clash with your principles. "There are honourable compromises and there are dishonourable ones and you have to know the difference." Pause. "There are some issues where no compromise is possible." Such as? "Afghanistan. We have to sustain and keep the mission there going. You do those things with the utmost seriousness. You owe your fellow-citizens the truth."
Listening to him, makes me think of the young Blair. Ignatieff had written about Blair in 1997, also then full of hopes and ideals. By the time he resigned, Blair looked as if he had taken a hell of a beating. The old Ignatieff, ten years ago, might have agreed. Now he's harder. "That's what you do this for: a sense of being responsible and a sense of being accountable. I am responsible to a large body of citizens and you either like that and take the consequences or not."
*** Everyone that I spoke to expects Ignatieff to be Canada's next prime minister, whether they like him or not. But what kind of prime minister would he be? Those who think they know him from Britain might expect a highbrow figure, idealistic and keen on the arts. Woodrow Wilson meets Havel or Jack Lang. But this is wrong. His sense of politics has changed. Words like "responsibility" and "accountability" keep coming up. He's more hard-nosed and cautious. The bitter attacks over 11th September and the Iraq war, and then the hard political lessons in Canada have had their effect.
And yet Ignatieff is seen to have a sense of change and new times about him. This is what many Canadians are hoping for. They look at an English-speaking world run from the centre-left by Obama, Brown, Ignatieff and Kevin Rudd, and think that it is a more hopeful and exciting place than one run by George W Bush and Stephen Harper. It cares more about social justice at home and human rights abroad. But this may also misunderstand Ignatieff, as well as the others. They have few illusions about the hard times ahead.
From the Prospect archive: read all of Michael Ignatieff's past Prospect articles, now available for free online.Plus: discuss this article at First Drafts, Prospect's blog.
