Abstract
Reviewed by: Michael K. Carroll, MacEwan University
Canada used to be a peacekeeping nation. The government’s rhetoric about peacekeeping and the United Nations certainly waned under Stephen Harper’s Conservatives, but the decline started much earlier. The election of Justin Trudeau’s Liberals in October 2015, however, has led many observers to hope for Canada’s return to a foreign policy based upon the tenets of liberal internationalism. “We need to focus on what brings us together, not what divides us,” Trudeau told the UN General Assembly in 2016. “For Canada, that means re-engaging in global affairs through institutions like the UN.” 1
Peacekeeping has traditionally been at the core of Canada’s post-World War II foreign policy, an issue which Colin McCullough engages with in Creating Canada’s Peacekeeping Past. To illustrate the introduction and solidification of peacekeeping as part of Canada’s national identity, he looks at political rhetoric, high school textbooks, newspapers, National Film Board (NFB) documentaries, and editorial cartoons from 1956 to 1997. While some might expect the public representation of peacekeeping to be hagiographic, McCullough demonstrates that, at points, peacekeeping’s failures and inadequacies were plain for all to see—as in the cases of Somalia and the former Yugoslavia—yet peacekeeping as a national activity has maintained its popularity and survived particular missions or the actions of individuals.
This work is a cultural history of peacekeeping as opposed to a diplomatic or military history. McCullough does a good job of examining the ways in which Canadians learned about peacekeeping (anyone who willingly goes back to study high school history textbooks of a hundred authors deserves serious credit). The examination of NFB documentaries and editorial cartoons is also a novel approach to the topic.
In setting out his methodology, McCullough criticizes historians who “hold that examining government documents is the sole way to get at the ‘true’ history of peacekeeping” (19–20). Yet to dismiss the documentary record, as he seems to do, misses much that it has to offer. It is only by a government’s actions that its policies may be truly discerned. For example, for all of Pierre Trudeau and Mitchell Sharp’s rhetoric about examining Canada’s place in the world and the need for guarantees before contributing to future peacekeeping operations (41–42), very little changed in the conduct of Canadian foreign policy. Surely cultural and diplomatic historical approaches can, and should, complement one another.
Less helpful is the study’s tendency to impose modern-day constructs on issues of the past. McCullough’s gender analysis of NFB documentaries (90) and his interpretation of the use of photographs to suggest to students “that Canadians were more important as peacekeepers than the people they were sent to help” (61) provide possible interpretations of material, but should not be treated as definitive. Without some form of documentation, it is impossible to ascertain the intent of an author, photographer, or director—not to mention the way in which their work was interpreted by readers or viewers at a particular place in time.
In his final chapter, McCullough looks at how peacekeeping was commemorated in Canada in the 1990s, and it is here that he most needed to take a wider view. Some are bound to take issue with his assessment that the commemoration of the peacekeeping monument on the loonie (Canadian one-dollar coin) is “without doubt an indication of how banal peacekeeping had become in Canada’s symbolic pantheon” (187). Many will see the loonie design as representative of peacekeeping’s importance to Canadians. Likewise, McCullough’s take on Garrison Green, the housing development on the former barracks in Calgary, is similarly open to different interpretations. To identify “Don Ethell” as the head of the Canadian Association of Veterans of United Nations Peacekeeping and “a man who participated in numerous peacekeeping missions” (194) does a disservice to Canada’s most decorated peacekeeper, one who participated in fourteen international missions and served as the lieutenant governor of Alberta. While McCullough may be correct that naming streets after peacekeepers like Ethell obscures peacekeeping’s meaning over time (194), street names also offer people the opportunity to wonder about a name’s origin and look it up.
McCullough also takes issue with the naming of Buffalo Park in Garrison Green, a commemoration of nine Canadian peacekeepers who were shot down over Syria while on duty with the United Nations Emergency Force II in 1974. “By drawing attention to 1974 – rather than 1956,” he sees an attempt “to tie peacekeeping to Canada’s martial past” (195). This explanation is possible, but no evidence is provided to support it. The fact that Captain George Garry Foster, the pilot of Flight 51, was from Calgary, is an equal if not more persuasive reason for commemoration. Peacekeeping’s links to 1956 are also well known, and so why should Calgary not look to another historical event for remembrance? Likewise, when discussing Donald McKeown’s statue of a peacekeeper and a child in Calgary, McCullough claims that the gun is “overtly phallic and claims an assertive masculine identity for peacekeepers that they are sometimes denied in how peacekeeping is remembered.” Again, this is one possible interpretation, but was it the sculptor’s intent, or the intent of the committee that chose the artwork for the park? Without documentation or evidence to back up interpretations, or further analysis to put them—and other possibilities—into perspective, sometimes a gun is just a gun.
While Creating Canada’s Peacekeeping Past examines how Canadians learned about and were exposed to peacekeeping, it brings us no closer to McCullough’s stated goal of “understanding why so many people became enamored of the idea” (20). Part of the problem is that the author’s goal is intangible. How can one truly measure what someone remembers from a high school textbook or a documentary, or the influence of a specific newspaper editorial or cartoon? While it does not provide definitive answers, what McCullough’s book does do is continue an important conversation about peacekeeping and what it means to Canadians. Through both the highs and lows associated with Canada’s peacekeeping past, there has been public support for government action. Modern peace support missions, however, bear little resemblance to the interpositionary-type force that Lester Pearson proposed in 1956 to bring about an end to the Suez Crisis. It is only by having a complete and realistic understanding of peacekeeping, and what it can—and, perhaps most importantly, cannot—accomplish that the current government will be able to responsibly embark on a fruitful international policy that also satisfies the domestic desires of Canadians to be a force for good on the world stage.
