Canada in the Great Power Game 1914-2014 (20 page)

Perhaps even worse (from the point of view of statesmen and diplomats), the popular passions that were aroused by such mass slaughter had turned the war into a total war, even politically: all the losing great powers in the First World War had their regimes overthrown and their empires entirely dismantled. Indeed, the strain of total war had even destroyed the regime in one of the great powers on the winning side, Russia, and both the French and the Italians had had some anxious moments in 1917. The traditional zero-sum game with limited risks and rewards, and a guaranteed place in the next round for almost all the players, had unexpectedly turned into a no-holds-barred struggle that killed regimes. That was bound to concentrate the minds of those who ran governments quite wonderfully.

The League would never have happened if the sovereign states that created it had not feared for their own future survival; nor, without the experience of the First World War, could any amount of political and historical analysis have persuaded whole populations to accept the decisive break with deeply rooted national reflexes that the League represented. Those who wanted to change the international system had a receptive mass audience for their views in 1918—but they knew they had to move quickly.

In every country there were people who greeted the League of Nations with all the enthusiasm of feudal barons in twelfth-century Britain or France confronted with a proposal to establish a central government and domestic peace. It could never work, they insisted, and perhaps they were right—in which case we are condemned to perpetual war, and perhaps eventually to terminal war. However, people like President Wilson, Lord Cecil and Prime Minister Borden were not naïve idealists trying to create a “world government”: they fully recognized the primacy of the sovereign state, the inevitability of conflicting interests and the fact that military force is the final international sanction. What they were trying to do was to
regulate
the ways that force was used and
conflicts were settled, in order to break the cycle of great-alliance wars—world wars—that was coming to threaten civilization itself.

The essence of their approach was to replace the competing alliances that had flourished in traditional “balance-of-power” politics with One Big Alliance—the League of Nations—with universal membership. This all-embracing alliance of sovereign states would be bound together by quite new international rules: that no existing borders could be changed by force, and no aspects of the international status quo altered except by negotiation or arbitration. Status quo powers are always the large majority in the international community, so the new rules appealed to the fundamental interests of most nations.

These rules were to be enforced by a principle known as “collective security.” Members of the League pledged to “renounce war as an instrument of national policy,” and disputes between countries would be submitted to arbitration by the judicial organs of the League. But if any country defied the new rules and attacked another,
all
members of the League were bound to join in repelling the attack—and with this overwhelming preponderance of power at its disposal, the League should be able to deter or pick off aggressive governments one by one as they emerged. The basic purpose of the League was not to abolish sovereign states, but to safeguard every state’s independence while averting the world wars that had been the traditional result of that independence: it was really a pragmatic association of poachers turned gamekeepers.

There was a significant political price involved in accepting collective security (and perhaps even a moral price): it meant that no country could legally resort to the unilateral use of force even to rectify what it felt to be a flagrant injustice. In order to gain the cooperation of existing governments, the League had to guarantee all their possessions and borders—and so, in seeking to outlaw war, the League of Nations was automatically committed to slowing down the pace of change to whatever could be achieved by peaceful means. In a world whose borders
were largely defined by past acts of military violence, that implied the indefinite perpetuation of a great deal of injustice.

Moreover, the peace treaties of 1918 created a whole host of new injustices by blaming the war entirely on the defeated nations, stripping them of much of their territory and imposing crippling “reparations” payments on them. The League’s Covenant meant that all those injustices would have to be defended against violent international challenge—even to the extent of going to war over them if necessary. It couldn’t be helped: any attempt to change the international system has to start from existing reality, which will always contain a great deal of injustice. But that is not, in principle, a valid objection to the creation of an international rule of law, especially if the result is an end to war. We have all made a similar compromise within our various national states, where we have outlawed private violence—even at the cost of denying some people “justice” because the rule of law is the price of domestic peace.

Collective security makes a high demand on the capacity of nations to act with enlightened self-interest, even at the cost of some short-term sacrifices. Nevertheless, in the immediate aftermath of the First World War the surviving European governments were so badly frightened by the ultimate consequences of not changing the international system that they were at least determined to try. However, the duty of League members to defend everybody’s borders against armed aggression, regardless of where they were or how those borders had originally been achieved, seemed particularly onerous to Canadians.

Canada, after all, had no disputed borders itself, and its geography made it virtually invulnerable to the effects of wars elsewhere if it chose to stay out. Prime Minister Borden supported the League in principle, but he tried hard to water down Article 10 of the Covenant, the clause that obliged all members to take automatic military action against any aggressor. As his adviser in Paris, Justice Minister Charles Doherty, warned him: “A way must be found, said and says Canadian Public Opinion, whereby Canada shall have … control over the events that in
the future might lead her into war. If this be her view [even about] England’s wars, what will be her attitude to [a promise] that France’s Wars, Italy’s Wars are in future to be hers wherever and whenever such a war is initiated by territorial aggression?”

But if the League’s members were not willing to mobilize their forces against any aggressor, even when their own loyalties or interests were not directly involved, then the concept of collective security fell apart. Borden’s reservations about accepting this duty for Canada (which were shared by some other governments that also felt relatively safe from potential aggression) were disregarded, and the Covenant of the League was adopted unchanged. By it, Canada was formally bound to defend peace anywhere in the world. But that wasn’t very popular in Canada.

In terms of short-term Canadian self-interest, Chubby Power was right in advocating what became known as “isolationism,” for it would be at least another generation before technology would end Canada’s physical immunity from European wars. (Americans, who enjoyed a similar geographical security, actually erected isolationism into a policy. The United States Senate saw no reason why Americans should make sacrifices to defend peace in areas of no immediate importance to them, and refused to ratify U.S. membership in the League.)

But in the longer term, it was John Dafoe who was right, for the “one world or none” dilemma was already implicit in the military, economic and technological trends of his own time. Dafoe was arguing specifically for a Canadian commitment to the League of Nations,
not
for the kind of reflex loyalty to the British empire that had killed 60,000 Canadians in France and Flanders. It was, however, a new idea in 1919, and a distinction too subtle for many to grasp. A lot of Canadians simply didn’t want Canadian troops to serve overseas ever again, whether in support of the British empire or the principles of the League of Nations.

French Canadians were especially unenthusiastic about the League, or indeed any foreign commitments. Their attitude was to have a lasting effect on William Lyon Mackenzie King, who was chosen as Liberal leader on Laurier’s death in 1919. King owed his position to the solid support of Quebec, and he knew that it depended as much on his avoidance of foreign military commitments in the future as on his record of opposition to conscription in the past. In 1922, after a brief interval when Arthur Meighen succeeded the ailing Sir Robert Borden as prime minister and leader of the Conservative Party, King and the Liberals came to power.

If Mackenzie King were a cartoon character, he would probably be Mr. Burns from
The Simpsons
. He was a dumpy, fussy bachelor with few close male friends (although power, as Henry Kissinger remarked, is the ultimate aphrodisiac, and King did not suffer from a lack of feminine companionship). He was a product of late-nineteenth-century Ontario, and so was sentimentally attached to the idea of the British empire—but he was also intensely proud of his grandfather, William Lyon Mackenzie, who had led a rebellion against that empire. Politically, he was a manipulator, perpetually balancing the conflicting demands of Britain and Anglo-Canadian imperialists against the instinctive isolationism of
French Canadians. Personally, he was a fruitcake, communing regularly with his dear, dead mother and other denizens of the spirit world. But he knew One Big Thing: Canada must be kept united for the sake of its own future, the Liberal Party’s cohesion and his own political prospects—he was not a man to make petty distinctions among the three—and that meant keeping Canada’s foreign commitments down.

In September 1922, eight months after he assumed office to begin a prime ministership that would run, with only two interruptions amounting to five years, until 1948, Mackenzie King found the perfect occasion to display his new approach to Canada’s international commitments. It came, bizarrely, over Turkey.

The crisis came out of the peace treaty that had been imposed on the defeated Turks after the First World War. Most of Turkey had been handed over to Greece and the European empires, but the Turks, under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk), refused to submit. Withdrawing to the interior of Anatolia, Kemal launched a war of resistance in 1919,
and by the autumn of 1922 all that stood between Kemal’s army and the reconquest of Istanbul was a small British military force in the dingy town of Chanak, on the Asiatic shore of the Dardanelles.

Prime Minister Lloyd George knew perfectly well that the British public would not tolerate a full-scale war to stop the Turks from reclaiming their homeland, so he decided to run a bluff. His real aim was to force Kemal to accept an international conference on Turkey’s future: Kemal would still end up with most of what he wanted, but there would be some restrictions on Turkish sovereignty, and a great deal of face would be saved (much of it Lloyd George’s). To force the Turks to accept such a compromise, however, he needed a show of force at Chanak—and his bluff would be a lot more convincing if he seemed to have the whole British empire behind him.

It was not exactly a peremptory imperial summons to war, but it was just the kind of thing King dreaded. The Canadian General Staff, ever eager to be helpful, began making plans for the immediate dispatch of the entire Canadian regular army to Turkey, to be followed within a few months, if necessary, by an expeditionary force of 200,000 Canadian volunteers. However, King simply told Britain that Canada would take no action until Parliament had been consulted—and made no preparations to recall Parliament. It was, perhaps, the most muted declaration of independence any government has ever
made, for King had to be careful not to anger English Canadian imperial patriots.