Michael Ignatieff
Michael Ignatieff
Michael Grant Ignatieff, PCis a Canadian author, academic and former politician. He was the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada and Leader of the Official Opposition from 2008 until 2011. Known for his work as a historian, Ignatieff has held senior academic posts at the universities of Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard and Toronto...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionPolitician
Date of Birth12 May 1947
CountryCanada
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Belief in liberal freedom and democracy is always belief in it in a particular place, in a national home with histories that only those who are born in a place or who adopt its citizenship can hope to understand.
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Affirming belief that America is an exceptional nation has become a test of patriotism in American politics.
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Since Franklin Roosevelt's leadership in setting up the United Nations and the Nuremberg trials, the U.S. has promoted universal legal norms and the institutions to enforce them while seeking, by hook or by crook, to exempt American citizens, especially soldiers, from their actual application.
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When we say, even in a global village, that all politics is local, we mean that national sovereignties are the only reliable source of political authority.
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Conservatives believe that international institutions such as the United Nations are anti-American and anti-Israeli cabals. Progressives do not like the economic medicine that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank force down the throats of developing countries.
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Commerce has changed the ethics of citizenship and the incentives for national service. America now buys private contractors - we used to call them mercenaries - to do the country's fighting.
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If we are a national institution, we must as a party reunite in rural and agricultural Canada. We can't be a national institution if we're only going for votes in Vancouver, Montreal and Halifax.
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What makes the United Nations an appropriate source of legitimacy for intervention is that it is the only place where the claims of the strong are put through the test of justification in front of the weak.
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Nationalism could almost be defined as intense national feeling for a country that does not yet exist, or for someone else's country.
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I distinguish, between nationalism and patriotism.
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The core of human rights work is naming and shaming those who commit abuses, and pressuring governments to put the screws to abusing states. As a result, human rights conventions are unique among international law instruments in depending for their enforcement mostly on the activism of a global civil society movement.
I'm a Canadian. I've always been a Canadian.
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I had no inkling of how crazy the political life would turn out to be. You shuttle between your constituency and Ottawa, you try to make every barbecue, festival, parade and charity run, but sometimes you feel pulled in 14 directions at once.
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I had the vocation for politics. What I didn't have was any aptitude for political combat. I took the attacks personally, which is a great mistake. It's never personal: It's just business. It was ever thus.