Plus ça change

In today’s difficult environment in the book industry, it is getting hard to convince publishers to bring out doctoral theses. This is a shame: very often, doctoral work represents the most intense research effort a scholar will make and, importantly, the work is supervised by those with broad experience of the topic itself, of writing and of the requirements of serious scholarship. Commercially, the reluctance to publish makes sense: doctoral theses must address as yet under-colonized or entirely unexplored aspects of their subjects, and these may attract few readers. In some disciplines, supplicants must genuflect before the altars of often faddish theory. But academic presses need to remain open to the potential of some such texts, as the University of British Columbia Press has done here, and granting agencies need to go on subsidizing superior examples of the genre.

Adam Chapnick, now a post-doctoral fellow in Carleton University’s history department, draws The Middle Power Project: Canada and the Founding of the United Nations from his doctoral thesis, for which his principal advisor, at the University of Toronto, was Robert Bothwell, well known to readers of these pages. Bothwell, whose classes I was privileged to sit in on during a year at Massey College in 1988–89 and who does not suffer fools gladly, invests himself heavily, if unsentimentally, in his very best students, seeking to develop respect for the tools of the trade and also breadth of vision and acuity of interpretation. History is an academic discipline that has been sadly undervalued in the rush to theorizing and modelling that has scarred political science for the broader public and nearly sundered the hybrid academic field of international relations since the 1970s. So it is a relief to see the discipline faring so well in the hands of a promising novice.

My one reservation on this worthwhile venture is that the author’s judgements, not to my eye always very well grounded in the text, sometimes intrude. More on this later.

World War II was the making of Canadian diplomacy. Its early years of institutional development under Joseph Pope and the legendary O.D. Skelton came to an end with Skelton’s death in 1941. This event coincided with multiple challenges and opportunities offered to Canada on the international stage by global war. A number of titans among mandarins then bestrode the Ottawa scene, among them Norman Robertson, Hume Wrong, L.B. (Mike) Pearson and Escott Reid. Inevitably, differences of style and view-point aroused both policy and personal disagreements. Because Mackenzie King served as his own foreign minister, and because he was such a dominant figure within government, his own interactions with senior officials, at least in the foreign policy field, went largely undisturbed by political interference, be it from Cabinet colleagues or from Parliament. The Canadian media in those years tended to act as a claque for Ottawa’s efforts at foreign policy assertiveness whatever the substantive outcome. The nowadays little-known but then powerful Wartime Information Board trumpeted Canada’s successes, real and “in development” as they say in Hollywood.

With Canada contributing meaningfully to the Allied war effort, and with British oversight of the dominions in foreign policy on the wane, the entrepreneurial functionaries mentioned above sensed and acted upon the possibility of influencing, not so much the conduct of the war (very much the province of the great military powers—the UK, the U.S. and the USSR, plus— very occasionally—China) but the slowly emerging post-war architecture, in effect the new world order. Proceeding chronologically, Chapnick outlines Canadian contributions to the design of allied relief efforts, the Bretton Woods system of international economic management and the United Nations.

Chapnick suggests that Ottawa woke up too late to the emerging collusion between London and Washington (and often Moscow) in the war effort, at the expense of secondary countries that nevertheless provided vital support. Because Canada could not hope to gain an equal footing within the Allied supreme command, with a “joint chiefs” arrangement in place that consulted with lesser allies only when this was useful to the great military powers, the Ottawa mandarin mind turned to schemes under which Canada’s voice could best be amplified internationally. Wrong championed the notion of “functionalism,” described by Chapnick as an “argument … that a state’s influence in international affairs should be commensurate with its interests and capacity to contribute to the issue in question,” an idea he amusingly traces to a junior British official.

Canada’s anxieties about its existing and potential marginalization, voiced most forcefully by Reid and Pearson, found expression in lobbying backed by Mackenzie King throughout the war years—although this lobbying was characteristically low-key and polite. Even Pearson, a relative firebrand among the mandarins, was reported by American interlocutors to have been more conciliatory in discussion than he might have admitted to colleagues in Ottawa. At one point, Chapnick quotes from Pearson’s diary that he “did not use as strong and undiplomatic language as that of the telegram [of instruction].” Chapnick is excellent at highlighting the role of human agency (and human mistakes) in the conduct of diplomacy; he can do so convincingly because he has examined records of the same transaction from different national vantage points.

On these matters and others, the British turn out to have been often more sympathetic and proactive on Canada’s behalf, frequently behind Canadian backs, than might have been supposed at the time, perhaps “because they had become dependent on Canadian economic support.” British likemindedness is still a frequent asset in the conduct of Canada’s multilateral diplomacy, particularly on security issues (as is, most notably on human security questions, our common ground with Norway). In these pages, the United States comes off as indifferent to many Canadian concerns, indeed indifferent to all those, including the British, who would constrain the exercise of American power and the advancement of its interests. This also has not changed much, as debates over Iraq policy at the UN and elsewhere in 2002–03 make clear. As to Russian views, they reach Chapnick distilled through London or Washington archives or from the very few Russian public pronouncements of the time, none of them surprising.

Chapnick’s rather gloomy assessment of Canadian diplomatic prowess in those early years of expansion can be gathered from chapter titles such as “Private Failure: Canada and the UNRRA” and “Disappointment at Dumbarton Oaks.” And he is right that Ottawa’s attempts to matter often did not work out well. Stephen Schlesinger’s 2003 Act of Creation: The Founding of the United Nations, the most recent major book on the 1945 San Francisco Conference at which the UN Charter was negotiated—and admittedly a book focused on the U.S. role—does not mention Canada or any of the Canadians involved even once in its index (unlike Australian foreign minister Herbert Evatt, an articulate but ultimately ineffectual figure). Ottawa’s concern that “middle powers” be recognized as something other than non-great or small powers involved a good deal of rather tedious inter-mandarin debate. The great contemporary Canadian foreign policy debate over whether Canada can aspire to be something other or greater than a middle power is perhaps no more than a self-absorbed reflection of this earlier, more action-oriented discussion among officials aiming to advance Canadian influence and interests.

So where did Canada make its mark? Chapnick points to several instances in the development of the UN Charter on which Canadian views were decisive. The first relates to access to the elected (non-permanent) seats on the Security Council. Even before the era of decolonization produced many newly independent countries swelling the UN ranks, Canada feared that representation on key committees, particularly the Security Council, could be decided either by rote or by a geographically dictated compromise to its disadvantage. In keeping with the functional principle, Canada (working closely with London) ensured that the language of Article 23 instructs that due regard be “specially paid, in the first instance to the contribution of Members of the United Nations to the maintenance of international peace and security and to the other purposes of the Organization, and also to equitable geographical distribution.” In other words, Nigeria may be a more useful frequent member of the Council than Guinea-Bissau and Canada more so than Luxemburg. Canada’s continuing dislike of permanent seats in the Security Council (and of the veto privilege attached thereto) was strongly reflected in a speech delivered by Allan Rock, Canada’s former ambassador to the UN, in New York in July 2005. Rock advocated electoral democracy as an antidote to the tyranny of the self-appointed. Hume Wrong would have been proud.

Chapnick is fascinating on the prominence of the Canadian Institute of International Affairs in pressing very effectively for a larger Canadian role in international relations at that time. Although the CIIA is now a shadow of its former self, only occasionally producing useful contributions to the public debate, it is good to be reminded how active civil society could be in shaping international relations 60 years ago. It is also striking to learn how many academics joined the Department of External Affairs during the war years (20 or so) to help boost its limited capacities—and how eager many were to return to the more sedate, predictable and less taxing university life after the war ended, having sampled the often frenetic pace of activity (and the futility of some of this effort) at the practitioner coal-face. It is unfortunate that recent efforts by Foreign Affairs Canada to attract young scholars for brief—generally sabbatical or post-doctoral—fellowships have waxed and (more often) waned, reducing the understanding each community has of the other today. (1)

Chapnick lists only three interviews. Virtually all of the people of whom he writes are now dead. (Two of those interviewed are lucid and authoritative daughters of principals in the book.) Rather, he has drawn extensively on archives. I fear this may not be so easy for future historians. Archives of foreign policy have in recent years become spotty for all sorts of reasons, ranging from the temptations of instant telecommunications, particularly by e-mail (mostly unrecorded archivally) to fears of access to information inhibiting some officials from writing much at all. This trend coincides with a steep decline in the quality of political and diplomatic memoirs, as evidenced, for example, by Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s disappointing record of publication after his retirement. (An egregious example of the diplomatic memoir gone wrong is Christopher Meyer’s new sensationalist and cringe-inducing volume on his years as British ambassador in Washington, D.C. Confidential, marked by below-the-belt preoccupations more than by insights into policy.) This suggests that interviews of key actors, preferably while matters of interest are still fresh in their minds, will assume greater importance in the future, a contingency on which historians need to act as of now.

Chapnick is sometimes harsh in his judgements. He seems irritated that Pearson, not purportedly the intellectual equal of Robertson or Wrong, should have received the lion’s share of historical attention in subsequent decades. Pearson does not come off in the historical material cited here as a lightweight, even if he “like[d] to be liked,” but Chapnick chafes at his place in history. And yet those who observe politics and diplomacy closely over time know that sheer intelligence is only one ingredient of professional success, temperament and character being equally important. All the men reported upon here (no women, of course, given the times) were clearly very bright. But Pearson possessed qualities the others did not in equal measure: a strong interest in people and their foibles (a quality he shared with Charles Ritchie, who makes only a fleeting appearance here), a capacity to bend people to his designs, a sense of what in foreign policy might interest the public and ambition less repressed than that of his colleagues. Is there anything wrong with these traits?

In his epilogue Chapnick notes:

That Chapnick himself in this volume falls headlong into the trap he denounces takes nothing away from the salience of his critique. Much Canadian foreign policy writing tends to see the relevant politicians (prime ministers, foreign ministers and colleagues in the finance, defence, development assistance and trade portfolios) as boobies cleverly ventriloquized by urbane officials. This caricature does not accord with my experience of the formulation and conduct of Canadian foreign policy. In Chapnick’s book, Mackenzie King hovers above the fray, intervening occasionally (and nearly always wisely) in the manoeuvres of other actors, Canadian and foreign. That his diaries cited here are self-serving is unsurprising. That he was so often right, not only on substance but in measuring how far Canadian arguments could take Ottawa in international negotiations, is reassuring.

This book provokes thought. The historical research is tremendously impressive, as the well-organized footnotes and bibliography, accounting for in excess of 25 percent of this concise text, attest. (The index is wretched, however.) Having perpetrated a number of books on the UN, I am ashamed of how little I knew about Canada’s early role therein. I am grateful to Adam Chapnick for teaching me how, why and where Canadian influence over the UN Charter can be discerned. The continuities to which his text points are valuable reminders to those of us involved in developing options for Canada’s stance at the UN that there is little new under the sun.

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