In the past, a democratic, wealthy, militarily powerful country could count on having its voice heard on the international scene. Nowadays, a country’s diplomatic effectiveness rests as much on the power of its institutions as its consistent promotion of human rights and values. It’s becoming increasingly clear that a country’s national prestige is tied to the quality of its universities.

Harvard, Oxford, Bologna, Heidelberg and the Sorbonne have long occupied the spotlight as exemplars of the finest intellectual traditions of their home countries. In recent years, Beijing University and the Indian Institutes of Technology, among others, have earned a place on the same stage.

Canada has nothing to blush about regarding its own post-secondary education system, yet our country has not fully capitalized on the opportunities that our universities afford us on the world stage. It would be wise for Canada’s foreign-affairs strategy to include knowledge diplomacy, alongside the traditional soft-power tools of development aid and cultural outreach.

Knowledge diplomacy, defined loosely, is the diplomacy of ideas, and ideas are the raison d’être of universities. When Canadian professors deliver lectures in Tokyo or Toulouse, they are emissaries of our country’s values and expertise. When they collaborate with colleagues overseas, they bring new information and technology that can benefit the Canadian economy. And when our universities enter into partnerships with international NGOs, universities from the developing world or foreign governments to monitor human rights or train social workers, we advance Canadian values.

Universities are, and have always been, international in outlook even as they are traditionally local by nature. St. Thomas Aquinas, an Italian, studied and lectured in Paris and Cologne, imparting the wisdom of Aristotle that had, in turn, been saved from oblivion by academics in the Islamic world.

Knowledge has been a world traveller ever since, with universities the main ports of call. Canada is often the point of departure. It is estimated that fully 3.5 per cent of the world’s scientific knowledge created last year came from this country - a respectable showing.

Just as in Aquinas’s day, the knowledge we produce depends very much on partnerships that are global in nature.

About 40 per cent of Canadian research papers are co-authored with international scientists. The knowledge, techniques and technologies developed in the course of international collaborations accrue to Canada.

Universities world-wide are collaborating with each other, multinational companies and governments, forging relationships that amount to a complementary diplomacy that works alongside that conducted at the state level. These partnerships cover everything from student exchanges to democracy-building in the developing world.

Just last year, the Université de Montréal became a founding member of the International Forum of Public Universities, which aims to build partnerships among 20 leading universities from Latin America, Europe, Asia, Africa and North America. Each member of the IFPU is an access point for Canada to the brightest minds, present and future, of those countries.

Universities can and will pursue such activities on their own. But if Canada is serious about competing in the global economy, real commitments are required from both the federal and provincial governments to support and expand our knowledge diplomacy efforts.

One obvious first step would be for Canada to join the European Research Area. The ERA is designed to remove national barriers between researchers and their home institutions. The $54-billion fund aims to foster collaborative research initiatives ; it is open to non-European countries.

Like Thomas Aquinas before them, the brightest men and women of any country will always seek to be where their ideas can be put to the best use.

By investing in knowledge diplomacy, we can ensure that our ideas, and the ideas of the bright academics we need to attract, have access to the best ideas of the wider world. Success would result in the rarest achievement in international diplomacy : a win-win situation.

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LUC VINET

Luc Vinet is rector of the Université de Montréal.