Review: Warming up to the Cold War

Abstract

WARMING UP TO THE COLD WAR Canada and the United States' Coalition ofthe Willing, from Hiroshima to Korea Robert Teigrob Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009. 288pp, $55.00 cloth ISBN 978-0-8020-9923-5Robert Teigrob' s is hardly the first book-length study of Canadian politics and foreign relations in the early years ofthe Cold War. The milestones he cites are familiar: Igor Gouzenko's defection and subsequent revelations about Soviet atomic espionage, the formation of NATO, and the Korean War. So is his preoccupation with the shift in Canadian attitudes, from expectations of great-power harmony under UN auspices to acceptance of American leadership in a bipolar world. Teigrob examines both the making of Canadian foreign policy and the domestic impact of anti- Communism, and promises a fresh combination of diplomatic and cultural history.But he largely misses the opportunity to advance a genuinely new interpretation of the period. His present-mindedness, which the book's subtitle evinces, is one reason why. In Teigrob's account, the creation of NATO and the UN-authorized police action in Korea were exercises in American unilateralism, much like the invasion of Iraq. In 1950 as in 2003, he argues, the preservation of Canadian national sovereignty required abstention rather than participation. But regardless of whether one agrees with his recommendations in each case, the analogy between Korea and Iraq is misleading.Teigrob's is a variation on the argument that Donald Creighton and George Grant advanced. Like them, he holds successive Liberal governments culpable of betraying Canadian independence by military alliance and economic integration with the United States. His additions to the original argument, including a wider apportioning of blame, hardly strengthen his case. He places less emphasis on direct American pressure than did Creighton or Grant, and suggests that the Canadian public - which, under the influence of American media and their Canadian auxiliaries, cloned America's Cold War consensus, albeit for homegrown reasons - was an accomplice rather than a victim. Public sentiment forced the government of Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent to follow American preferences more closely than ministers themselves wished, Teigrob concludes, culminating in the decision to send ground troops to Korea.Teigrob replaces the mock- Augustan cadences of Creighton and Grant with the jargon of cultural studies. Corporate media systematically smother social divisions in the interests of the ruling classes, he explains. American mass culture's dominance of the Canadian market, and American assumptions of ideological harmony across the 49th parallel, made official cultural diplomacy superfluous. Washington could rely on lime Magazine to provide the indoctrination that the American government had to furnish on its own elsewhere.A systematic study of the American media's effects on postwar Canadian opinion might be worthwhile, but would require extensive data on circulation, readership, market share, and editorial orientation. Teigrob opts instead for an impressionistic approach in which the representativeness (or otherwise) of an article is more often asserted than proven, with the nuances of individual editorials over-interpreted as if they were painstaking efforts to promote an official line, not immediate responses to daily events.Teigrob' s second modification of Creighton and Grant is chronological. He dates the great betrayal to the period between 1945 and 1950, not the Second World War. The nationalist revolt against American hegemony first became evident in objections to the direction of the Korean War. Subsequent disagreements over nuclear arms and Vietnam, Teigrob claims, intensified Canada's desire to escape American tutelage, but did not, as others claim, create it. He emphasizes the British connection's centrality to the traditional Canadian self-definition, with America the necessary foil, noting the coolness of many Anglo-Canadians to American anti-colonialism until Washington grew tolerant of empire as a bulwark against communism. …