Life in a Canadian Foreign Policy generation long ago: The early evolution of a professorial sample of one

Contextual beginnings

My interest generally in foreign affairs (although not initially in Canadian Foreign Policy) did not begin until 1959–60 when I was in my third year as an undergraduate at Dalhousie University. Discussions of politics, domestic and international alike, over the dinner table at home had been regular fare, but while I found the chatter interesting and occasionally expressed an untutored opinion of my own, most of what went on was spectator sport. My father was no great fan of the British social culture. His exposure as an Royal Canadian Navy Volunteer Reserve (RCNVR) officer in World War II to the more tiresome mid-Atlantic attitudes of many of the regular force officers who had been influenced while training overseas in the 1930s by class-infected British ways of dealing with subordinates had put paid to that. But even in the 1950s he retained the view, then still widely prevalent in the English-speaking Canada of the day, that Great Britain was the leading home in international affairs of a moderate politics of pragmatic reason and common sense. In retrospect, we might think this opinion could not have withstood a rigorous analysis of the British performance either before the war or in the decade or so after it. But at a time when US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles seemed to be indulging in what was often called “brinkmanship,” and when the Eisenhower government was drawing on the alarmingly ruthless doctrine of “massive retaliation” to reconcile its desire to minimize military spending on the one hand with its need to maximize its security advantage on the other, it was easy to conclude that the British were sane old hands while the Americans were the dangerously inexperienced new kids on the block. Uncle Sam was the Bull, and the whole world was potentially the China Shop. Rash rhetoric was dangerous enough. Rash behaviour could easily kill us all.

I cannot claim that this background of family rumination affected my academic predilections, and I don’t want to over-dramatize its impact. A few Canadians in the late 1950s were building bomb shelters in their backyards in the hope of surviving a nuclear cataclysm, but I cannot remember any of what I knew keeping me awake at night. Nonetheless, it was an important ingredient of the context of the time, and it may have predisposed me to the fields of inquiry that later attracted my attention.

A second part of the 1950s context—the hangover from World War II—may have had a comparable influence, although in honesty I cannot really measure its impact. Few, if any, knew then what we have come to know now: that the war had killed well over 70,000,000 people, and maybe more. But everyone knew it had killed a lot, and everyone knew, too, that the Pacific War had ended with two agonizingly destructive atomic fireballs. Everyone had also come to know something of the ravages of the holocaust in Europe and elsewhere, and of the barbarisms inflicted on prisoners of war (POWs) and others by the Japanese. English-language films based on the war and produced for entertainment by both the Americans and the British in their respective styles, moreover, were common cinematic offerings in the post-war Anglophone world for a couple of decades and more. Even if sometimes romanticized, they conveyed a sense of the hellish scope of modern global warfare, along with the price that had been paid to prosecute it not only in World War II but also in the Great War that had preceded it.

I was only six years old when the Pacific War came to an end. I can remember racing home on my tricycle after hearing the news from a neighbouring farmer down the road to report it to my parents. I was disappointed to discover that I didn’t have a scoop. They were already up to speed. Obviously this means nothing in itself, but it reminds me now that even six-year-olds were at least dimly aware of what had been going on. One of the consequences a dozen years later was that the more thoughtful students of my vintage—male students anyway—would often debate what seemed to them like eternal questions of character assessment. Would we have been courageous in battle? If captured, would we have endured the tortures of the Gestapo and still kept our mouths shut? Knowing the miniscule odds of survival, would we have been reliable fighter pilots had we been among the few who had been called to defend London in the blitz? Most of us had doubts. Certainly I did. But the central point here is that in the late 1950s the experience of the war was still with us, even though we had not been in it ourselves. Now that we were alert to current events, moreover, the nuclear stand-off was ever-present as a reminder that yet another round of Manichean conflict could easily break out, and that its consequences would be cataclysmic. All that being so, I may have been ripe for the impact of an unexpected influence on the career, such as it was, that I was ultimately to follow.

The college by the sea

I went to Dalhousie after finishing high school in Lachine, Quebec. It was expected that I would study Law, but an undergraduate degree in the Liberal Arts would come first. In pursuing it, however, I took very little Political Science—only two full-year courses out of 20. The first was Political Science 1, an introductory course taught by James Aitchison and devoted almost entirely to the study of Canadian government after the fashion of R. MacGregor Dawson’s textbook on the subject. ¹ The second was a class offered by Morris Davis, a political scientist of American origin who was then specializing in the study of pressure groups and gave his students a full-dress treatment of his subject. Davis’s case studies included one or two with international dimensions, but that aside, neither of these exposures had an international focus.

The discipline in which I pursued my Honours programme was not Political Science, therefore, but History. Even then, I took no courses in the history of Canada. The immensely charming and widely published Canadian historian, Peter Waite, taught one of my classes, but it was devoted to a survey of the history of Russia and had no Canadian content. All my others dealt with various phases of the histories of Great Britain and Europe, as did much of the material in a course on “Classical Literature in Translation” offered by the Classics Department as a rescuing substitute for what was otherwise required of all students in the BA programme (at least two courses in Latin or Greek).

These were all solid fare, and some of the material obviously dealt with wars, along with their causes and consequences. But for the most part they were wars of long ago. Studying them presumably improved the mind. Certainly it imparted a sense of perspective and perhaps an inclination to think that in politics a posture of moderation usually causes less killing. But in considerable measure the conflicts involved were distant phenomena. Accounts of them could inform; it was harder for them to excite.

For me there was one exception, and it had the most impact by far. It was a third-year lecture class offered by Guy R. MacLean (who years later became the President of Mt. Allison University) and was advertised as “The History of Europe from 1870 to 1945.” In practice his subject matter went farther afield because so much of it had to do with international conflicts embroiling a variety of statist enterprises around the globe. The enlargement and defence of the European empires and the consequent conduct of wars with pandemic dimensions were not least among them. The 1870–1945 time-frame was also stretched a little. For example, one of the great plagues of the era—rampant nationalism—had antecedents that originated much earlier, even if the phenomenon itself was most obviously manifested in the Europe of the late 19th century by the unification of Germany and Italy. The end of World War II, moreover, was closely entwined with the origins of the Cold War that succeeded it, and it seemed that MacLean, a specialist in the Balkans, felt an obligation to demonstrate how and why this was so. In any case, he knew we would be fascinated by the tale, just as he so clearly was himself.

The scope of MacLean’s undertaking was obviously very wide, but in those days most courses in the Liberal Arts subjects at Dalhousie were full-year enterprises. He had time with which to work, and he worked it well. A first-class expositor—clear, well-paced, and focused on the significant essentials—he was careful in his mix of coverage to include the analysis of influential ideas in his treatment of substantive events. We were exposed, for example, not only to what the Nazis, fascists, or communists under their respective regimes had actually done, but also to the origins and substance of their rationalizing doctrines, the ways they went about deploying them, and their purposes in doing so. MacLean had an extraordinary talent, too, for including in his expositions personality sketches that brought the players alive and integrated them into the workings of the more vast and impersonal of the forces of history. Causes were multiple, and some of them were idiosyncratic—rooted, that is, in the characters and personalities of influential individuals. Knowing at least some of this was part of what a nuanced understanding required.

The readings included a textbook by Carleton J.H. Hayes entitled Contemporary Europe Since 1870, ² but we were also assigned chapters from a variety of other secondary historical works, together with selections drawn from sundry political biographies, autobiographies, and commentaries by participants in great events—Harold Nicolson, ³ David Lloyd George, ⁴ and John Maynard Keynes, ⁵ for example. More occasionally we were referred to pertinent government documents, as in the case of the “Crowe Memorandum,” ⁶ or to other historically revealing disquisitions, even if some of them, like Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, ⁷ were inherently distasteful.

By the middle of my third year I had pretty well dropped the idea of pursuing a career in law, although I knew that going that route would probably generate a comfortable financial return while opening up opportunities for interesting community involvements of various sorts. But the practice of law itself, especially for larger firms (even in smaller cities), seemed to entail a heavy emphasis on providing support for the projects of the prosperous, and over time this seemed to become a less and less attractive prospect. Again, I am not entirely sure precisely how or why this change of heart occurred, but I think it had a lot to do with a strong sense of service that emanated from the university’s Liberal Arts professors. I don’t recall faculty members propagating public service values explicitly, but these nonetheless infused Dalhousie’s academic culture. A cynical explanation might be that professors of the day were paid so little for what they did that they could defend their enterprise, even to themselves, only on public service grounds. The obligations of public service were enunciated in more explicit style in the Medical School, perhaps, and even more obviously in the Law School, which prided itself then, as it still does today, in what came to be called the “Weldon Tradition,” named after the School’s first Dean, who served in the role from the School’s founding in 1883 until 1914. ⁸

In the humanities, however, the public service orientation was conveyed more by example (and perhaps by body language) than by exhortation. It should be understood that Dalhousie in the late 1950s still thought of itself largely as a “College by the Sea.” Its student population in my final undergraduate year (1960–61) was still shy of 2,500. The Liberal Arts departments were very small—some numbering as few as one or two faculty members. Perhaps most were in the range of four or five. In meeting the requirements of a decent undergraduate education in their respective fields, the professors therefore had to be prepared to teach classes that lay outside their own fields of primary expertise. In the third and fourth years especially, enrolments were often very small, in some cases as small as two, three, or four students. It followed that the latter came to know their teachers very well, and vice-versa. The professors often took their most promising charges under their wing, “mentoring” them, as we would now say.

In Oxford parlance, most of the faculty were “reading” dons, not “writing” dons. Some even thought that an emphasis on publishing was a sign of an unseemly and ill-founded vanity, since most academic writing, when compared with the contributions of the truly great, was unoriginal and pedestrian. I can remember well a conversation with George Wilson of the History Department, who was renowned for his extraordinary erudition. Fresh from one of Guy MacLean’s lectures on the rise of the Nazis, I expressed a pessimistic view of the notion of human progress. Wilson seemed to agree, but he added a qualifier: “Still, what makes it all worthwhile is that every now and then there’s a Socrates.” This was a trifle glib, perhaps, but he may have thought my expression of post-adolescent angst naïve and immature. Having said that, his own pessimism was rooted, 19th century style, in a life-long search for meaning through historical study, an enterprise that I would now regard as bound to fail, as indeed it ultimately did in the case of Wilson himself.

The pursuit of an academic career was not in my own case the initial intent, however. In the second year of my undergraduate programme I had decided to join the staff of the student newspaper, The Dalhousie Gazette. In my fourth year I became its Editor. From the vantage point of Dalhousie’s President, Alex Kerr, we must have been terrible pests, but we were young and had a lot of fun rattling his cage. In any event, by the end of my third year and my exposure to MacLean’s class, I had decided that I might conceivably make a defensible, if modest, contribution to my country if I became a political journalist. ⁹ My enthusiasm grew with exposure to the writings of sophisticated analysts like Walter Lippmann. ¹⁰ Canada had been served from time to time by some very impressive performers, too—John W. Dafoe, the Editor of The Winnipeg Free Press and a leading member of the Canadian Institute for International Affairs, for example, and in broadcasting during the war, Matthew Halton ¹¹ —but I knew little of this at the time. Meanwhile, there seemed to be a need for thoughtful reporting and analysis of both domestic and international affairs. Once I had learned the journalistic ropes, perhaps I could be of some practical use while gaining personal stimulus from being able to watch the progress of public policy and political affairs “close up.”

Oxford at work

As it happened, however, I was side-tracked again by the mentoring of Guy MacLean. Himself a graduate of Oxford, he pressed me to apply for a scholarship that would take me there. It was a very long shot, but I agreed to give it a try. To my everlasting amazement, I came away with the prize. I would go to Oxford, where I would read for another BA degree, this time devoted to Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE). The programme had been conceived as an alternative to the traditional Greek and Roman “classics” as a foundation for participation in public service. It would offer a grounding in general philosophy, as well as in political philosophy and ethics, and it offered tutelage, too, in the workings of a selection of modern political systems. The emphasis would be on the British example, supported by in-depth analysis of British political history after 1832. The programme would also greatly enrich the somewhat mixed exposure to Economics that I had received in three classes at Dalhousie. In addition, I would have the opportunity to choose two electives on International Relations. The first would provide a thorough review of the diplomacy and international politics of the period between the two world wars. The second would cover the two decades from 1945 to the early 1960s. If such an education were thought to be a useful preparation for government service, I thought, it would presumably be the same for a career in political journalism.

So off I went to Oxford, where I would read PPE for a second BA, in September 1961. Before leaving, however, I spent the summer on the re-write desk of the Canadian Press news agency’s bureau in Montreal. The bureau’s Chief gave me kind encouragement. On his advice, I went to see Walter O’Hearn, then the Managing Editor of The Montreal Star. As it happened, O’Hearn was a Haligonian who had attended Saint Mary’s University and had a long-standing interest in the United Nations, although I knew none of this at the time, and didn’t discover it until very recently. He was apparently reputed to have had a fine sense of humour, but his demeanour gave no evidence of it during my interview. He appeared to come from the “chasing firetrucks” school of apprenticeship for aspiring reporters. On hearing of my plans, he announced, plainly enough, that he was “leery of people with too many academic qualifications”—leery of them, that is, when they claimed to be interested in becoming journalists. Wisely, as later developments in Québécois politics were soon to confirm, he advised me that it would be helpful if I strengthened my knowledge of French, since he didn’t think it would be possible for much longer to do a decent reporter’s job as a unilingual Anglophone in Quebec. But in spite of his obvious reservations he sent me to see the editor in charge of book reviews. I could review a few titles. If they published them, it might be worth my while talking to them again when I had finished up at Oxford. I dutifully did the reviews. They were awful. But the Star was not primarily a literary periodical, and they published them. So I had at least a door upon which to knock when I returned to Canada.

The Oxford experience itself was largely as I expected it would be, and the approach in the two International Relations offerings was much the same as it had been with Guy MacLean at Dalhousie, except that it covered the ground in considerably greater detail than he had been able to do in a one-year class. The main thrust was devoted to what is commonly described as “diplomatic history,” and was imbedded in accounts of the evolution of international events in the first half of the 20th century and the political, social, economic, cultural, and personality forces that were driving them. Think Margaret Macmillan (although she is a much better writer by far than most of her antecedents seemed to me to be then). The material on offer provided a rich store of vicarious experience—the kind of experience that can foster judgment earlier and more safely and systematically than the slow-moving experience of real life. It was possible at Oxford to devote an entire course to the Paris Peace Conference, an option that the dons presumably favoured because they knew very well that the exposure could impart layer upon layer of understandings of how and why that state system came to have the problems, and cultivate the disasters, that it did. From this, lessons could be learned—not in the form of hard and fast theoretical hypotheses or postulates, but in the guise of stores of recognizable patterns upon which the properly tutored could draw in assessing the political world around them. Such patterns would need amending to accommodate both obvious and subtle differences in particular sets of seemingly similar circumstance. It would always be necessary to avoiding thinking an apple was an orange. But the historical learning would also help the mind to look for, and then detect, the variations that had to be taken into account, and how. Such, at least, was what I assumed the Politics dons had placed at the core of their educational purpose. Having said that, the construction here is really my own, and it is certainly possible that the dons themselves would have contested it. In any case, I liked it then myself, and I still like it now. ¹²

All this is to make it clear that there was little of what we would describe as explicit “theory” in the way Oxford taught International Relations. Marx and Lenin offered one reasonably “theoretical” possibility, perhaps, and E.H. Carr—influenced like so many others by the disastrous experience of the Paris Peace Conference—attempted to clear up a lot of the intellectual muddle that he thought had plagued discussions before and during the inter-war period in his widely read disquisition on the subject. ¹³ In it, he reflected on the possibilities of a “science” of international politics, and the difficulty of disentangling intellectual interpretations from the wishes and purposes of the interpreter. His approach led him to distinguish realism from utopianism and to place the former at the centre of his own analysis—a hardly surprising preoccupation given the fate, for example, of Woodrow Wilson’s 14 Points, and the disillusionment that flowed from the failure of the Paris negotiators to reach their agreements in the Versailles Treaty on the basis of high principle. The various collective security breakdowns generated by the League of Nations subsequently reinforced Carr’s growing skepticism. His eventual assessment was required reading, and it was as close to “theory” in the formal sense as Oxford students of the day were likely to get.

It should be noted that in all this the perspective was insistently “statist” (as we would now put it). International law was often described as a “law of nations,” and no one I encountered at Oxford suggested that we might usefully think of the study of international politics in any other way. In the international context of the time, it was the behaviour of governments in the international arena that seemed to be what really counted, whether for good or bad. Their actions were certainly affected by other things, the tribal nationalisms of domestic publics (most of which the governments themselves had helped to foster) not least among them. But the problem of international politics was really the problem of inter-state relations. The rest of politics came under different rubrics (comparative government or comparative politics, for example).

Carr aside, the prevailing certitude in Oxford on the limitations—even the futility—of chasing after formal theoretical constructs in attempting to understand international politics as a whole was reflected in an exchange that I and an American friend (a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point) had at the end of one of our joint sessions with Wilfrid Knapp, our International Relations tutor. Knapp was a prolific and highly respected specialist in the politics of the Middle East (a region to which he later added North Africa). He probably became better known to subsequent undergraduates, however, when he completed his survey entitled, A History of War and Peace, 1939–1965, ¹⁴ upon which he was working while tutoring us. In any case, my friend and I had become vaguely aware that a new and more formally “theoretical” International Relations literature was expanding rapidly, particularly in the United States. Should we not be exposed, we asked, to some of this new material? There was a pause, followed by an arched eyebrow and a quizzical expression. “But why,” Knapp asked in reply, “would we waste our time on such an obvious mistake?” That was that.

By this time I had given up the idea of developing a career (full-time, at any rate) in political journalism. Instead I would pursue a PhD in Political Science at the University of Toronto. This was partly because journalistic books on political subjects were beginning to appear more regularly in Canada. Authors like Blair Fraser, James M. Minifie and (most prolifically of all) Peter C. Newman were starting to fill the void. Guy MacLean, moreover, had earlier drawn my attention to James Eayrs’ stimulating and arrestingly crafted 1961 volume of short essays and commentaries on current issues in Canadian foreign and defence policy, ¹⁵ thereby establishing not only that the University of Toronto housed the leading authority in the field, but also that writing instructively for a wider public was possible from an academic lair. Eayrs had previously contributed a volume to the Canada in World Affairs series, ¹⁶ but I knew nothing of this, or even of the series as a whole, until after I had arrived in Toronto and began to explore the nearby headquarters library of the Canadian Institute of International Affairs. On the other hand, I had certainly become familiar, after some preparatory digging in Oxford, with Eayrs’ landmark treatment of the institutions and processes of Canadian Foreign Policy entitled, The Art of the Possible: Government and Foreign Policy in Canada. ¹⁷ In the circumstances, there was clearly little point in trying to complete my formal education by applying to do graduate work in the United States (a fairly common educational strategy at the time), even if a handful of American institutions (like Duke) were homes to a measure of pertinent Canadian expertise. If the subject was Canadian Foreign Policy, Toronto was the obvious place to go. In some trepidation, therefore, I wrote to Eayrs to ask whether he would be willing to take me in hand. He provided an encouraging response, and the Department of Political Economy replied favourably to a formal application. So off I went.

Refinement in Toronto

It may be worth noting here that, while I nursed a presumptuous ambition to contribute to the education of Canadians on their country’s foreign affairs, this inclination was not rooted in the nationalism that was beginning to percolate among Liberal Arts academics, most notably in the universities of central Canada. My three-year stay in Oxford had left me largely ignorant of this phenomenon until I arrived in Toronto, and even then the nationalist disposition was still in its developmental phase. My own preoccupation was very simple. Under the influences (in addition to others) that I have tried to describe, I had become interested in foreign affairs, and one of the main purposes of the endowment that had taken me to Oxford was to expose those whom it supported to a top-level “old country” education that would equip them to be more contributive when they returned home. To that extent, my being “Canadian” was a determining factor in what I decided to do. But my career choices were made quite independently of any particular concern about American penetrations of Canada, whether political, cultural, economic, or otherwise. The worries that were beginning to preoccupy intellectuals in Ontario were not, in any case, widely evident in Atlantic Canada. Maritimers and Newfoundlanders had no identity-doubts, and even if they did think of their interests as being somehow at risk, the problem appeared to most of them to be rooted, not in the American monolith, but in the power-centres of Canada itself.

As it turned out, I was unable to take a course in Canadian Foreign Policy even at the University of Toronto. Eayrs at that point wasn’t teaching the subject, and in the Department of Political Economy, neither was anyone else. I was given some “advanced standing” in the doctoral programme on the ground that the work I had done in Oxford tutorials had been extensive and was presumably equivalent to MA-level seminars in Canada. A PhD prerequisite course in a third language (Spanish in my case) aside, my four full-year courses at the University of Toronto were thus confined to a seminar class with Paul Fox on Canadian politics, a review of modern political theory with Alexander Brady, a course in International Law at Osgoode Hall (offered by the Dean, Ronald St. John Macdonald), and Eayrs’ own graduate seminar, which was simply entitled “International Affairs.” I had not been exposed at any point to the study of International Law, so the Macdonald course filled an important gap, and Brady and Fox both helped to thicken up my slender and highly selective knowledge of Political Science generally.

Obviously it was the Eayrs class that was closest to my interests and had the most impact. The latter resulted from its introducing me, at long last, to the study of International Relations not simply as history, but as a field that could be subject to the sorts of inquiries that political scientists initiate. The flavour was generally “realist.” Hans J. Morgenthau’s Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace ¹⁸ and E.H. Carr’s The 20 Years’ Crisis were prominent among the handful of books suggested as basic reading at the beginning. But the realist orientation was qualified. Eayrs was careful to point out that an increasing variety of “actors” were becoming directly involved in international politics, so that a focus solely on the relations of states was not sufficient as a foundation for understanding the processes at work. The ingredients of “statehood” and sovereignty were carefully explored, as was the notion of “power” (as distinguished particularly from the much simpler concept of “strength”). But the role of “ethics” in international politics was also examined, not with a view to dismissing its importance, but to demonstrating its complexity. The concepts of “reason” and “rationality” in the statecraft context were similarly dissected.

These preliminary topics having been considered, Eayrs went on to lead discussions in depth on the ingredients of policy-making and the challenges they involved (notably intelligence and policy planning), together with an elucidation of the practical instruments of statecraft. The latter included the many forms and facets of negotiation, arbitration, and judicial settlement (much of this anchored in Fred C. Iklés treatise on How Nations Negotiate), ¹⁹ along with propaganda, a variety of economic instruments (both positive and negative), and the use of force. Related issues bearing on the kinds and causes of war, the notion of “just war,” the legitimacy (or otherwise) of warfare, and the concept of “limited” war were also addressed.

The final topics reflected the other side of the coin. The instruments of foreign policy were vehicles through which individual states (or groups of them) could attempt to get what they wanted. Since this could lead to conflict, what were the means and mechanisms that might be deployed to constrain their behaviour? The application and development of international law was one. Arms control and/or disarmament were others. Management by a concert system dominated by co-operating great powers was still another. Manipulations of the balance of power and the construction of alliance systems might also be attempted, as could collective security systems. Public opinion, too, could sometimes be mobilized in constraint of statecraft.

As in the case of the policy instruments, the concepts involved here were dissected with rigour. The vaults of history were raided for illustrations of the various mechanisms in action, and for demonstrations of their strengths and weaknesses and the circumstances that could lead to their success or failure. Books like Inis L. Claude Jr.s’ Swords into Plowshares: The Problems and Progress of International Organization ²⁰ reflected approaches to analyzing international affairs that complemented those of Eayrs, and similarly drew heavily on historical examples for purposes of illustration. Not surprisingly, works by Claude and others like him, showed up prominently in Eayrs’ reading lists. ²¹ The package as a whole seemed systematic and persuasive, and it added enormously to what I could make of the historical exposures that I had received earlier at Dalhousie and Oxford. The effects, moreover, were permanent. In broad terms, the approach influenced the ways in which I later taught both Canadian Foreign Policy and International Relations subjects throughout my time as an educator.

Keeping up after take-off

In succeeding years, of course, the sources of stimulus and refinement became more plentiful as Canadian universities grew in size and were more generously fed, and as more scholars entered the field. For me, as for so many others, John Holmes was a major inspiration and source of help, and in my case suggested that a study of the diplomacy of the Korean War from the Canadian perspective could be a promising topic for a doctoral thesis. His elegant essays, as well as his major historical works, like those of other scholar-diplomats (Escott Reid, for example), contributed enormously to our understanding of Canadian Foreign Policy, and complemented the histories offered by James Eayrs, Jack Granatstein, Bob Bothwell, Norman Hillmer, and a battery of others. Kim Nossal’s textbook ²² became for me, as for so many in the emerging field, an indispensable resource. Specialized literature in particular policy areas (defence, trade, the environment, and development assistance, for example) also proliferated. With the arrival in Canada of an increasing array of graduate programmes, and under the influence of more elaborate “theoretical” work originating most notably in the United States (but not only there), at least some Canadian Foreign Policy literature began to reflect the invention of new methodologies, analytical frameworks, “pre-theories,” and the like. Various categories of what came to be described as “critical literature” also appeared, some of it potentially relevant to public policy, but a lot of it not.

If the writing was intelligible, I tried to take in a reasonable sampling of this material. Early rounds of conferences for International Relations specialists organized by Janice Stein at McGill and Naomi Black (as she then preferred to be called) at York were particularly helpful in this respect, as was the day-to-day stimulus that I received from my more theoretically sophisticated colleagues (the Sinologist, Roger Dial, for example) at Dalhousie. But in the end I remained convinced that the most useful way to teach a subject like Canadian Foreign Policy was to ensure, first, that students would be exposed to a reasonable measure of historical and contextual background, and second that such generalizations as might be worth serious discussion for pedagogical purposes were ones that were designed to arouse partial flashes of recognition in specific situations, rather than those rooted in abstract levels of theory and method that reflected a search for truths of a deeper or more comprehensive sort. In the end, these would probably look after themselves. Government policy, from my point of view, was ultimately a practical matter. It could have good or bad consequences. A significant portion of the citizenry needed to have an understanding of the pertinent challenges and possibilities. This would help them to know which government behaviours (and citizen exhortations, too) were likely to be ill-founded and which were not. At the very least, they would be better able to understand what might lie behind the daily news. In none of this did I see any need for, or plausible prospect of, a single school of Canadian Foreign Policy analysis, however conceptually and theoretically adorned it might be. The analytical approach should be governed, I thought, by the question, not by some a priori notion of what respectable scholarship in the field should look like or what methodology it should employ. While I remain convinced of the importance of historical and contextual detail to a nuanced understanding of how foreign policy and international politics in specific cases are actually working, I accept that some varieties of theoretical exploration can contribute important illumination. I insist only that thinking, for example, that bombing the daylights out of the leaderships of other societies, even if they are vicious autocrats whose treatment of their own citizens is brutal, will necessarily result in the replacement of their regimes by liberal democratic ways of governance is simple-minded nonsense. The theoretical premises upon which such assumptions have been founded may seem plausible. But they have long been shown to be ill-founded in the extreme, and their weaknesses should not have required field experience to be exposed.

Theories, in short, can help. But they can be a source of grievous error, too. The devil here, as elsewhere, is in the contextual details. We need, always, to seek them out. Now in my creaky years, I am still of the same mind. Indeed, as I currently survey the impact on international affairs of rampant and vainglorious ignorance at work in the highest offices of American government, my pedagogical prejudices have been reinforced. Students taught in the way I think they should be taught would quickly recognize the dangers inherent in the behaviour to which we are now all witness, and they would have a better sense of the kinds of remedies that might both improve the governing performance and safeguard the most vital foundations of their Republic. Or so I would fervently hope.