Between Two Giants: Canada, the Coolidge Conference, and Anglo-American Relations in 1927

Abstract

1927 proved to be a difficult year in the efforts of William Lyon Mackenzie King, the Canadian prime minister, and his foreign and naval policy advisers to make their country ‘one of the powers of the world’.2 This arose from the established Canadian policy of trying to balance diplomatically in international politics between Britain and the United States, something seen by Mackenzie King’s remark about Canada’s role as a ‘friendly interpreter’. A nationalist and a politician sensitive to the domestic political base of his Liberal government in French Canada, the Prime Minister had long opposed a single foreign policy voice for the British Empire.3 In reality, such a voice would emanate from London, whilst the dominions and colonies, like some corps d’opéra, would be expected to give vocal support and occasional physical exertions to augment the efforts of the aging prima donna at centre-stage. This had been the tenor of British policies regarding the Turkish crisis in 1922, when David Lloyd George’s ministry struck a discordant policy note with Mackenzie King and his Cabinet by assuming publicly and without prior consultation that Canada would support Britain over the Chanak incident. Mackenzie King refused to help and, over the next few years, his government sought to distance Canada from the notion of a single Imperial foreign policy. At the 1926 Imperial conference, in large part because of Mackenzie King’s efforts for five years, the British conceded formally that the dominions were ‘autonomous communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate to one another in any aspect of their domestic or external affairs, though united by a common allegiance to the Crown, and freely associated as members of the British Commonwealth of Nations’.4KeywordsPrime MinisterForeign PolicyNational DefenceNational ArchiveExternal AffairThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.