Creating Canada’s Peacekeeping Past, by Colin McCullough

Abstract

Reviewed by: Michael K. Carroll, MacEwan UniversityCanada used to be a nation. The government's rhetoric about 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. Canada, 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 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 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 as a national activity has maintained its popularity and survived particular missions or the actions of individuals.This work is a cultural history of as opposed to a diplomatic or military history. McCullough does a good job of examining the ways in which Canadians learned about (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 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 it has to offer. It is only by a government's actions 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 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 was commemorated in Canada in the 1990s, and it is here he most needed to take a wider view. Some are bound to take issue with his assessment the commemoration of the monument on the loonie (Canadian one-dollar coin) is without doubt an indication of how banal had become in Canada's symbolic pantheon (187). …