Canada in the Great Power Game 1914-2014 (22 page)

The old strategic and psychological equation of dependence on Britain to protect us from American invasion lasted just long enough to deliver us smoothly into our new obsession with playing a role in the European balance of power. Once Sutherland Brown left his post as Canada’s senior strategic planner, his Defence Scheme Number One rapidly fell into disrepute. In 1933 every military district in Canada was instructed to burn all documents connected with the plan (which would have caused severe embarrassment if they had somehow fallen into American hands). However, the alternative plans to send Canadian troops to fight in Europe again in case of war did not change.

The descent into world war again at the end of the 1930s was premature in terms of the normal cycle: only twenty years had elapsed since the last one, rather than the more typical half century. The drastic shortening of the cycle was largely due to the way the First World War ended, but the failure of the League of Nations certainly did its part.

The Treaty of Versailles was a time bomb planted under the League of Nations. It heaped punishments on Germany—loss of territory, a large measure of compulsory disarmament, demilitarized zones, massive reparations and a “war guilt” clause that purported to justify the terms of the treaty by blaming the war exclusively on the Germans—punishments that were neither defensible in terms of justice nor (more important) sustainable over the long term. Britain and France were simply not capable of depriving Germany permanently of great-power status.

However loyally the League’s members upheld the principle of collective security—even if they did not take the escape route prepared for them by the Canadian “interpretation” of Article 10 in 1923—the League system was bound to come under severe pressure as a consequence of Germany’s resentment at its artificially subordinate status. If the great powers in the League did not move fast enough in removing what the Germans perceived as injustices (and they did not), then they were certain to face an eventual German challenge that could be stopped only by invoking Article 10 and resorting to military force. In fact, however, the challenge that effectively destroyed the collective security system came a little sooner than that, and not from Germany.

On October 2, 1935, Mussolini invaded Ethiopia, and an overwhelming majority of League members promptly declared Italy an aggressor. Mussolini’s crime was no worse than what every other great power had done in the late nineteenth century. Ethiopia was one of the last independent bits of Africa, and Italy, only lately arrived on the great-power scene, was belatedly seeking its share of the colonial spoils. But the international rules had been changed by the creation of the League in 1919, and Ethiopia was a member: either the rules had to be enforced or the organization was meaningless. Moreover, this was a crisis the League members could actually deal with. There was plenty of time to organize a response, since ten months elapsed between the first indication of Italy’s intention and the actual attack; the Ethiopians themselves
were determined to fight; and Italy’s sea communications with Africa were highly vulnerable to the stronger British and French navies.

Within a week, the League began to consider economic sanctions against Italy: nobody was talking about military measures yet, but economic sanctions could easily be the first step along that road. And Canada, to everybody’s surprise, actually sought and got a seat on the committee that had to decide what those sanctions would be.

In 1935 Richard B. Bennett, a former Calgary lawyer “of large displacement” (as they used to say of ocean liners), had been prime minister of Canada for five years. Bombastic in public and autocratic with his colleagues, he was one of those rare Canadian politicians (Pierre Trudeau is the only other one to achieve prime-ministerial rank since) who followed their private convictions quite heedless of popular opinion. In Bennett’s case, his intellectual independence was buttressed by considerable wealth and excellent connections in Britain (after he retired from politics he moved to England and acquired a peerage through the help of influential friends), but his support for collective security was quite genuine.

This attitude brought him into permanent conflict with most senior members of his own External Affairs Department, and most notably with Dr. O.D. Skelton, the permanent undersecretary, a gaunt scholar who had had a brilliant academic career before being seduced into government by Mackenzie King ten years before. Skelton had originally supported the idea of the League but had concluded that this particular league was not going to succeed, and he had no confidence whatever in the ability of British diplomacy to avoid another war.
So, in practice, Skelton was an isolationist, convinced that Canada at least might be spared the horrors of the next war if it kept out of overseas commitments.

Skelton did his best to talk Bennett out of having anything to do with League sanctions against Italy, but the prime minister simply wouldn’t hear of it. In one bitter discussion in September 1935 he called Skelton and his colleagues at External Affairs “welshers” because of their desire to evade Canada’s commitments under the League Covenant, and in October he heatedly overrode External’s attempt to have the Canadian delegation in Geneva abstain from the vote condemning Italy for aggression: “No one in Canada is going to deny Italy is guilty or object to our saying so. If they did, [I’m] not going to wriggle out of it if it meant I didn’t get one vote,” he shouted down the phone to Skelton. But Bennett was deliberately ignoring Skelton’s quite plausible reason for wanting Canada to abstain: in early October 1935 Canada was nearing the end of a long federal election campaign and Bennett was almost certain to lose that election to Mackenzie King—who would certainly not want to honour Canada’s commitments to the League.

That was precisely Canada’s role (and everybody else’s) under the League’s Covenant. Only collective security offered any hope of preventing another great war from occurring in Europe sooner or later—but it did involve running the risk of at least a small war to deter aggression. Canadians had paid a high price for their intervention in the last European war, and an isolationist policy was a tempting alternative. The Atlantic was a broad moat, and Canadians could still shelter behind it if they wished.

King instinctively distrusted the League of Nations, in large part because he saw avoiding overseas commitments as a stark political necessity for the Liberals. French Canadian opinion was virtually unanimous in its opposition to foreign military involvement of any kind (not a single French-language newspaper in Quebec supported Canadian participation in League action over Ethiopia).

He needed English Canadian votes too, and he was English Canadian himself. As early as 1923 he had declared: “If a great and clear call of duty comes [to fight by Britain’s side], Canada will respond, whether or not the United States responds, as she did in 1914.” King was unwilling to risk even the remotest chance of war for the right cause, the League. Yet he was ultimately willing to fight for the wrong one, British imperial interest, if he had to.

With King’s overwhelming election victory on October 14, 1935 (the Liberals won 173 seats out of 245), Canada’s man on the League sanctions committee at Geneva, Walter Riddell, was put in a very awkward position. Riddell had been Ottawa’s permanent representative at Geneva for ten years, and he saw the way things were going: everybody was afraid to ban the export of really vital commodities to Italy for fear of driving Mussolini into a corner and provoking a war. It was one of those situations, not uncommon in diplomacy, where each nation knew what its duty was, but hung back nervously for fear that other countries would not do their duty and it would find itself out front all alone. But mere wrist-slapping would not stop the Italian dictator, so Riddell decided Canada should take a lead.

Riddell took a very big chance. He knew perfectly well that Mackenzie King, in full harmony with his old appointee, the isolationist Skelton, would forbid any Canadian initiative that might ultimately involve Canada in the application of military sanctions by the League. Yet he feared that if nobody took a strong line in Geneva, the principle of collective security would slide ignominiously into oblivion amid timid half measures and shabby compromises. So on November 2 he leapt in at the deep end: he formally proposed that League members ban the export of oil, coal, iron and steel to Italy, knowing full well that Mussolini was threatening to go to war with anybody who applied such pressure to Italy.

Riddell’s initiative put some spine into the hesitant members of the committee. On November 6 they unanimously recommended the full list of Riddell’s sanctions to all League members. If those sanctions had been applied, Italy would have had to stop its attack on Ethiopia or grind to a halt, since it produced no oil itself and had only about two months’ reserves. But meanwhile Riddell was having to play a double game, disguising the extent to which he had committed Canada in his telegrams back to Ottawa and pretending to misunderstand the instructions he was getting from there to do nothing conspicuous. It could not last, for newspapers around the world were calling the initiative that had galvanized the committee into action the “Canadian proposal.”

King, shocked by his representative’s daring action, instinctively ducked for cover. He and Skelton were on vacation together in Sea Island, Georgia, but he sent instructions back to his deputy, Ernest Lapointe, to repudiate Riddell. On December 2, 1935, while the League was still waiting for all the members’ replies to the “Canadian proposal” on sanctions, Lapointe issued a press statement: “The suggestion … that the Canadian Government has taken the initiative in the extension of the embargo upon exportation of key commodities to Italy … is due to a misunderstanding.… The opinion which was expressed by the Canadian member of the Committee—and which has led to the reference to the proposals as a Canadian proposal—represented only his personal opinion … and not the views of the Canadian Government.”

It was an act of gross vandalism, motivated by sheer timidity. It cannot be said for certain that King’s disavowal of the Riddell proposal was the decisive factor in the League’s ultimate failure to impose sanctions on Italy. The British and the French, who would have to do most of the fighting if an oil embargo against Italy had led to war, were wavering in their commitment anyway, especially as they still hoped that Italy might be an ally if they ultimately had to fight Hitler. But King’s action was certainly a major factor—and once the impetus given
by Riddell’s initiative and the apparent (although nervous) unanimity with which it was met had been lost, so was the League of Nations. The question of effective sanctions was repeatedly postponed until Mussolini completed his conquest of Ethiopia in mid-1936 and it became simply irrelevant. The League staggered on for a few more years, but it was only a husk. Collective security had been put to the test, and everybody had run away.