Volume 16 (1950) - Introduction

As 1950 opened, there were "grounds for cautious optimism."¹ After the series of reverses suffered in Eastern Europe and Asia during the late 1940s, the Western democracies seemed at last to be making steady, if unspectacular progress, towards containing Communism. Canada and its North Atlantic allies made a moderate start in early 1950 on controlling exports to the Soviet bloc, on providing military aid to Western Europe and on determining North Atlantic defence requirements. Moreover, they began to re define the economic relationship that united Europe and North America. By the early spring of 1950, Canadian rhetoric reflected the country's renewed confidence. "The steps taken to implement the North Atlantic treaty," the Minister of National Defence, Brooke Claxton, asserted in March, "... have increased the improbability of military aggression and strengthened the faith of the western European nations in the possibility of preventing aggression by collective action."²

The apparent diminution of the Soviet threat in Western Europe allowed Canadian policy makers to turn their attention to Asia, where decolonization, economic under development and Communism were beginning to prove an unstable and dangerous mixture. Early in the new year, the Secretary of State for External Affairs, Lester B. Pearson, with a handful of advisors, climbed the wobbly steps of an RCAF North Star for the lengthy voyage to Ceylon for a meeting of Commonwealth foreign ministers. This conference and its aftermath, which this volume documents in considerable detail (Chapter 7), had important implications for Canadian foreign policy. It reinforced Ottawa's increasingly multilateral perspective on Commonwealth affairs and underlined Great Britain's waning attraction for the Canadian government as the centre of this historic association. In pioneering the transfer of Western capital to the developing world through what eventually became the Colombo Plan for Co operative Economic Development in South and South East Asia, these Commonwealth discussions drew from a hesitant and reluctant Canadian Cabinet the acknowledgement that the problem of world poverty was Canada's problem too.

More important, the Minister's trip to Ceylon and his subsequent tour through Asia added a Far Eastern orientation to Canadian foreign policy. Whether or not Indo Canadian relations were especially close during this period,³ there is little doubt that Pearson's exposure to the Indian Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, had a profound impact on the Canadian's thinking. Pearson, who later described Nehru as "an extraordinary combination of a Hindu mystic ... and an Eton Oxbridge type of Englishman,"⁴ was never entirely comfortable with the Indian premier, but he listened carefully to his views on Asian issues. As a result, Canadian policy towards Indochina (Chapter 11), Kashmir (Chapter 3) and China (Chapter 11) bore the unmistakable imprint of Nehru's influence. Canada's attempt to understand and respond to Asia as it became a new arena for Cold War conflict forms one of the major themes of this volume.

The early months of 1950 also carried the turmoil of revolutionary Asia uncomfortably close to home. The Soviet Union's decision to boycott the United Nations as long as the Security Council refused to assign the "China seat" to the new Communist government led to dangerous deadlock. In the United States, the collapse of Nationalist China produced an unsettling wave of national hysteria that grew increasingly virulent as Senator Eugene McCarthy launched his campaign against "Communists in government." As even routine contacts between East and West ground to a halt in the winter and spring of 1950, Pearson tried to curb the drift towards confrontation. His efforts at mediation and his views on the deepening international crisis are documented in a compelling exchange of letters and memoranda with his close friend, Hume Wrong, Canada's ambassador to the United States. (Documents 224 231).

From the Western perspective, at least one result of the Soviet boycott was fortuitous: when North Korea invaded its southern neighbour on the morning of June 25, the Soviet Union's absence from the Security Council allowed the United States to lead the United Nations into action. Convinced that the attack was a Sovietinspired challenge to the United Nations, whose prestige and authority were already ravaged by its inability to respond to Communist aggression in the late 1940s, Ottawa joined the international coalition after a series of lengthy and heated Cabinet discussions. At a time when Canada's economic and military strength was comparatively substantial, its reaction to this crisis mattered a great deal to both Canadians and their allies. This response revealed much about the attitudes of Canadian policy makers to the country's role in the Cold War, and its relations with its principal allies and with the United Nations. As each successive stage of the conflict unfolded, Canada's attempt to be a moderating influence in the Western alliance became more sharply defined,⁵ With good reason, then, fully one quarter of this volume documents Canada's involvement in the opening stages of the war and Ottawa's subsequent efforts to find a basis for peace.

While Korea is at the heart of only one chapter (Chapter 2), documentation on the crisis and its influence on Canadian policy is necessarily scattered throughout the entire volume. The war swept away the careful optimism that characterized Ottawa's international outlook during the first few months of the year. III a single stroke, the conflict transformed the Cold War from a tense but fairly stable diplomatic stand off into a much more precarious and dangerous confrontation. It altered completely the context in which Canadian foreign policy was developed and implemented. The effects of the conflict in Asia, for example, dominated Canadian preparations for the UN's 5th General Assembly and forced the international organization to debate the status of Formosa and the nature of collective security (Chapter 3). The conflict also provided new impetus for proceeding with the longdelayed Japanese Peace Treaty (Chapter 11), determined Canada's attitude towards the International Red Cross (Chapter 4), and influenced the Commonwealth discussions on capital assistance (Document 7).

The Korean conflict had perhaps its greatest impact on Canada's attitude towards its North Atlantic Treaty obligations (Chapter 5) and its relations with the United States (Chapter 8). It gave rise to the fear that a Soviet offensive in Western Europe was imminent and ended Ottawa's traditional reluctance to invest its scarce resources in peace time military preparedness. In July and August, American pressure helped convince the Cabinet to increase Canadian defence expenditures substantially. As North America and Western Europe hurried to rearm, Canada's efforts to supply its North Atlantic allies with mutual aid diffident in early 1950 became an enormous $300 million program. By September 1950, with the new alliance already straining under the weight of the crisis over the decision to re arm West Germany, the government agreed to send Canadian troops back to Europe as part of the new North Atlantic integrated force. "For those who assumed that participation in international institutions was going to be cheap," John Holmes recalled later, "1950 was a bad year."⁶

Most of the material on Canada's relations with the United States should also be read with one eye on the conflict in Korea and its wide ranging consequences. While Chapter 8 devotes some attention to such traditional "fence line" issues as the Niagara Diversion Treaty and fisheries management, substantial space is given over to the consideration of bilateral defence questions, which loomed larger than ever after June 1950. The difficult and awkward negotiations over defence procurement in early 1950 contrast strikingly with the rapid pace of military and economic integration that resulted when the United States with Canada forced to follow closely behind moved towards partial mobilization in the fall of 1950.

The new sense of urgency which infused Canada's defence relations with the United States propelled the government's concern for Canadian sovereignty to new heights. Washington's inclination to view its neighbour's northern reaches as increasingly vital for the defence of North America led to a growing requirement for bases and facilities. III acceding to the U.S. request to station a squadron of nucleararmed B 49s at Goose Bay in August 1950, Canada was confronted for the first time with troubling questions about its role and responsibilities in any American decision to deploy nuclear weapons from Canadian territory. This issue complicated bilateral relations for the rest of the decade.

As the Cold War entered a chillier period, other bilateral relationships paled in significance compared with the importance of Canada's relations with the United States. Indeed, the unexpected expenditures necessitated by the Korean crisis prompted Ottawa to suspend plans for opening new posts abroad, accounting for the brevity of the first chapter. Instead of the usual collection of documents on recognition and accreditation, this section has as its central preoccupation the impact of the Cold War on the conduct of diplomacy.

Similarly, the Cold War effectively eliminated significant bilateral exchanges with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe (Chapter 10). Isolated in his chancery, Canada's chargé d'affaires, John Watkins, even found it impossible to comment meaningfully on the nature and course of Soviet foreign policy. Relations with theSoviet bloc were virtually reduced to an exchange of propaganda. Elsewhere in Eastern Europe, the hardening of the Cold War compelled the Canadian government to consider how it might deal with a permanently divided Germany and the dissident Communist state of Yugoslavia. As the tensions dividing East and West reached their most acute phase in the winter of 1950 51, senior officials and cabinet ministers tried to assess the very real possibility of war in a series of memoranda that surveyed a year which ended "in crisis and in disappointed hopes."⁷ (Documents 629 to 636)

The personal, political and bureaucratic relationships that had shaped Canadian policy in 1949 remained largely unaltered.⁸ At the top, the Prime Minister, Louis St. Laurent, continued to work smoothly with his increasingly sure footed and selfconfident Secretary of State for External Affairs. However, as the sections dealing with the recognition of Communist China and the early stages of the Korean conflict make clear, occasional differences emerged in the way they approached Cold War issues. Pearson, who was still relatively inexperienced as a Cabinet minister, was sometimes inclined to overlook domestic considerations in pursuit of his foreign policy objectives. On the other hand, the Prime Minister, tutored by the cautious William Lyon Mackenzie King, was acutely aware of the need to proceed in step with domestic opinion.

Arnold Heeney continued to serve as the Under Secretary of State for External Affairs. Among his senior associates, the only significant change involved the rotation of Charles Ritchie from Paris to Ottawa, where he joined H.O. Moran and Léon Mayrand as one of the department's three assistant under secretaries of state for external affairs. Ritchie was primarily responsible for European affairs.

There were no changes in leadership at Canada's most important posts: Hume Wrong remained in Washington, Dana Wilgress in London, and Georges Vanier in Paris. Nevertheless, there were a few notable developments in Canada's representation abroad. G.A. Riddell became the Permanent Representative to the United Nations in August 1950, displacing John Holmes, who had served in an acting capacity for most of the year. At the same time, Sidney Pierce, the Associate Deputy Minister of Trade and Commerce, was sent to head the new mission to the Organization for European Economic Co operation.

The records of the Department of External Affairs and the Privy Council Office provided most of the material for this survey of Canadian foreign policy. They were supplemented where necessary by the personal papers of many of the Cabinet ministers and senior officials involved in these events and by the records of the departments of Defence, Trade and Commerce, and Finance. In preparing this volume, I was given complete access to the records of the Department of External Affairs and generous access to other collections. A complete list of the sources examined in the preparation of this volume may be found on page xxiii.

The selection of documents has been guided by the principles set out in the Introduction to Volume 7 (pp. ix xi) of this series. The editorial devices used in thisvolume are those described in the Introduction to Volume 9 (p. xix). A dagger (t) indicates a document which has not been printed and ellipses (...), an editorial excision.

The work on this volume had already begun when I assumed responsibility as editor in the fall of 1992. I am grateful for the early start made on this project by Gaston Blanchet. The staff at the National Archives of Canada was instrumental in bringing this project to completion. Paulette Dozois, Paul Marsden and Dave Smith of the Military and International Affairs Records Unit of the Government Archives Division consistently responded promptly, helpfully and, most important, cheerfully to my many inquiries. Michael Way, from the Access to Information Section, and Janet Murray at the circulation desk, both worked hard at keeping a steady supply of raw material flowing across my desk.

Chris Cook and Brian Hearnden served ably as research assistants throughout the enterprise. My colleague Ted Kelly, who helped edit the chapters on the conduct of diplomacy, civil aviation and relations with the Soviet bloc, provided indispensable assistance at all stages of the project from conception to publication. Angie Sauer helped with the selection of documents on Germany, and Robert Bothwell willingly contributed his knowledge on atomic energy. Former editors Norman Hillmer, Hector Mackenzie and Don Barry were always available to discuss the editorial challenges I faced and invariably offered sound and practical advice. The general editor of this series, John Hilliker, reviewed the entire manuscript with his usual attention to detail. His comments undoubtedly have made this a better book. The series would not be possible without the support I received from the two directors of the Corporate Communications Division under whom it prospered Mary Jane Starr and Alan Darisse. Despite all this help, I remain responsible for the final selection of documents in this volume.

For the first time in many years, the Historical Section furnished the supplementary text and co ordinated the technical preparation of the volume. The manuscript was typed and formatted by Aline Gélineau. Boris Stipernitz compiled the index and André Racicot of the department's translation bureau rendered into French the footnotes, captions and ancillary text. Gail Devlin, who proofread the entire manuscript, shared the insights garnered from her work on several earlier volumes. My work on this volume was helped in countless ways by the quiet support of Mary Donaghy and the vocal exhortations of Katherine Donaghy.

GREG DONAGHY

1. Report of the Department of External Affairs, Canada, 1950 (Ottawa: King's Printer, 1951) p. v.

2. Canada, House of Commons, Debates, March 17, 1950, p. 852.

3. See Escott Reid, Envoy to Nehru (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1981).

4. L.B. Pearson, Mike: The Memoirs of the Right Honourable Lester B. Pearson, Volume 2, 1948 1957 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973), p. 118.

5. Greg Donaghy, "The Road to Constraint: Canada and the Korean War, June December 1950", in John Hilliker and Mary Halloran, (eds.), Diplomatic Documents and Their Users (Ottawa: Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, 1995).

6. John Holmes, The Shaping of Peace: Canada and the Search for World Order, 1943 1957, Volume 2 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), p. 176.

7. Report of the Department of External Affairs, p. vii.

8. See A.D.P. Heeney, "The Conduct of Canadian Diplomacy," Statements and Speeches 50/2.