Canada and the Search for World Order

Abstract

IN LAUNCHING THE FIRST ANNUAL John W. Holmes issue, the editors of International Journal are paying tribute to the contribution that Holmes made to the practice of Canadian foreign policy-both during his service with the Department of External Affairs in the 1940s and 1950s, and also during his time as director of the Canadian Institute of International Affairs (CIIA) and professor at the University of Toronto after his resignation from External Affairs in 1960. But invoking Holmes's memory is also a means of questioning contemporary foreign policy-by asking what Holmes might have thought of Canadian statecraft today.I must admit that I accepted the invitation of the editors to explore how Holmes might have regarded contemporary foreign policy challenges faced by the Canadian government with considerable hesitation. For there is something quite presumptuous-and thus entirely impudent-in speculating about what John Holmes might have said about Canadian foreign policy in the mid-2000s, some 16 years after his death in 1988. After all, such exercises in reconstruction take people out of a particular time and place, fast-forward them into circumstances that surely will have changed since their deaths, and refashion their views and analysis for the present. Moreover, such ruminations tend to be highly political: all too often critics of contemporary policy invoke the putative views of the dead, safe in the knowledge that those who are said to be spinning in their graves are not able to offer either contradiction or clarification.But there is value in reflecting on what Holmes thought of his world, and his life and times, as a means of drawing lessons for the contemporary period in Canadian foreign policy. Indeed, as Denis Stairs has noted, Holmes had essentially pedagogical purposes in his writings,1 and this provides us with an opportunity to draw lessons for contemporary policy. In this essay, I explore two of Holmes's abiding concerns-the management of global conflict and Canadian relations with the United States-to see whether there might be lessons to be learned from his writings for the contemporary challenges for the Canadian government in foreign policy.ILike all those whose lives spanned the 20th century, John Holmes was deeply affected by global conflict. Born in 1910, his formative years were shaped by the long-term consequences of the Great War-the Great Depression and the onset of the global war that began with the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937 and had spread by 1941 to engulf all of Europe, the Soviet Union, and the United States. As an officer in the Department of External Affairs in the 1940s and 1950s, Holmes experienced both the second World War and the onset of the Cold War. As head of the CIIA and as a professor at the University of Toronto in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, he lived through the Vietnam War and the Cold War rivalries between the United States, the Soviet Union, and the People's Republic of China. Given his times, and his life as a Canadian diplomat and then as a scholar of Canadian foreign policy, it is perhaps not at all surprising that a central concern for Holmes was the issue of global conflict. But it is important to recognize that he approached the issue of political conflict at a global level from a very particular perspective.Although Holmes taught Canadian foreign policy at the University of Toronto for nearly two decades, he was rarely explicitly theoretical about his views on the world of world politics. In his writings he did not participate in any of the long-running debates in the discipline of international relations about how best to characterize world politics. Yet there is little doubt that his approach to international relations was informed by a particular normative and empirical understanding of politics. A reading of the four books Holmes wrote-two collections of essays, an exploration of Canadian-American relations, and his two-volume history of post-1945 Canadian foreign policy2-suggests that his views on world politics come closest to the perspective of the socalled English school of international relations-a perspective that enjoyed some currency among students of world politics in the period that Holmes was teaching. …