Review: Towards a Francophone Community

Abstract

TOWARDS A FRANCOPHONE COMMUNITY Canada's Relations with France and French Africa, 1945-1968 Robin S. Gendron Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2006. viii, 191pp, $75.00 cloth.Robin Gendron's new monograph on Canada and French Africa is a welcome addition to the growing body of literature on Canada's foreign policy beyond the narrow confines of the North Atlantic triangle. Grounded in sound archival research in Canada and France, Towards a Francophone Community is part of a new wave of scholarship-much of it still in the dissertation or manuscript stage-on Ottawa's response to postwar decolonization, a phenomenon that was as important as the Cold War that accompanied it in shaping the contemporary world.Based on Gendron's work at the University of Calgary, Towards a Francophone Community offers a fresh and provocative perspective. It challenges the view, put about in the mid-1960s by Quebec nationalists and their French allies, that Canada was fundamentally uninterested in French Africa, which was viewed primarily as an instrument with which to combat Quebec's claims to its own independent international status. Not so, insists Gendron. Canada followed events in Francophone Africa closely from the mid-1950s on, but too often deferred to French sensibilities to keep Paris a contented member of the western alliance at the height of the Cold War. Thus, when Canada needed friends in the Francophone world in the late 19605, few were available.The book opens with a very good account of Canada's general attitude toward postwar decolonisation. Gendron carefully outlines Canada's traditional liberal and anti-imperial views, before dissecting Ottawa's attitude toward three key colonial questions against the backdrop of the rapidly escalating Cold War: the debate over Algeria's status as part of metropolitan France during the North Atlantic Treaty negotiations; the question of western aid for French operations in Indochina; and the UN debates over independence for Tunisia and Morocco. Foreign policy interests easily triumphed over western democratic values. As Gendron demonstrates persuasively, Canada readily shelved its progressive rhetoric about self-determination and liberty, backing France, its north Atlantic ally, against colonial nationalists.Gendron argues this was true despite the instincts of Canada's leading diplomats, in a fine chapter on the Algerian War. As early as 1955, for instance, Canada's foreign minister, Lester B. Pearson, and his deputy, Jules Leger, recognized that Canada (and the west) needed to reach out to Arab nationalists and respond to their legitimate demands for independence. But there was always a long list of good reasons for compromise and delay. Pearson worried that abandoning France might provoke its withdrawal from NATO or topple yet another weak government in Paris. Extending Canada's diplomatic reach in north Africa might also undermine French power or, worse, strain Canada's perennially overburdened and underfunded diplomatic service. …