North Atlantic — Community or Treaty

Abstract

The June Conference of the Canadian Institute of International Affairs at Quebec on the subject of the North Atlantic Community may not have developed any great amount of agreement on many of the different aspects of that subject, but it did seem to produce almost complete unanimity on at least two points : that the policy of the Canadian Government in regard to NATO was considerably ahead of Canadian public opinion in the mass, and that it was the duty of all serious students of international affairs in Canada to lead that public opinion to a livelier realization of the urgency of the situation. Even so, there was protest at the closing general session that the temperature of the Conference itself had not been urgent enough, that it had shown too little sense of the perilous character of the times. NATO however was not the subject of the Conference. There was practically no division of opinion as to the propriety and necessity of NATO, and of the general policy of from strength/' Differences arose over the question of how strength was best to be obtained by the North Atlantic powers and Canada in particular, and still more over what was meant by negotiation and how it was to be conducted. And upon what was actually the announced subject of the Conference, namely the North Atlantic Community, there was a very wide range of difference between the opinions enunciated, and little evidence that they had been conciliated or modified by the discussion. The North Atlantic Community is obviously a quite different concept from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, even if one regards the two as containing identically the same list of nations which it is difficult to do seeing that Ireland (Eire) cannot well be left out of the concept of the Community and cannot at all be brought within the scope of the Organization. The Conference, which was so well attended as to allow of its being divided into no less than four round tables, developed a great diversity of opinion as to the amount of accent that should be placed on the Community, ranging from the view which regarded it as the real foundation of the Organization to that which regretted that anything had ever been said about it and wished to have NATO treated as a purely military alliance or regional pact. The view of the Canadian Government, which incidentally was reiterated to the Conference by Mr. Pearson at the formal dinner, is that the historic existence and present spiritual importance of the Community are vital factors in the genesis and development of the