The Further Shore

Abstract

IN CANADA THE VIETNAM WAR is primarily remembered as an episode in domestic politics - riots, protests, dissent - or as a peculiarly unfortunate period in Canadian-American relations. In some ways, this is appropriate. The war was, above all, a public phenomenon, in which diplomacy came up against the force of public opinion and lost. 'Quiet diplomacy,' as far as Canadian-American relations were concerned, was a lost cause, as politicians desperately tried to shore up their standing with an aroused and irritable public opinion. There was no policy choice except expedience and no alternative but surrender to the loud demands of many Canadians. It was, in some respects, the well-intentioned diplomat's worst nightmare.That story is true enough, as far as it goes, but it applies mostly to the second half of Canada's involvement with Vietnam, from 1965 until the fall of Saigon to the communists in 1975. It does not describe the first half of the Canadian experience in Southeast Asia, from 1954 to 1965. That episode was just as interesting because it, too, brought together contradictory elements in Canada's external policy. On the one hand was Western solidarity, surely the touchstone of Canadian foreign relations from the 1940s through the 1990s, and perhaps still. On the other was the sense of a world beyond the cold war - the emerging nations of Asia and later Africa - and that the Western position in the cold war might be damaged or imperilled unless the interests of the poor and populous countries of Asia were taken into account.Professor of History, University of Toronto. The author is at present working on histories of Canadian foreign relations and of the impact of the Vietnam experience on Canada.The 1950s thus witnessed the first serious engagement of the Canadian government in Asia. The Liberal government of Louis St Laurent and his foreign policy advisers was not indifferent to the logic of population statistics. China and India and the countries in between accounted for half of humanity, and they were steadily growing. With China overcome by chaos and then communism, it made sense to pay attention to India. Canada was linked to India through the shared history of the politics and culture of the British Empire and through the British Commonwealth.The story of that early experience is depressing as well. In 1954 Canada undertook to help clean up the aftermath of a colonial war that seemed to pit East against West, North against South, communism against democracy, and the emergent nationalism of the Third World against the colonial hangovers of European imperialism. The Canadian government of the day, Liberal in politics and liberal in temperament, was a firm member of the Western alliance. Yet it also defined itself as untainted by European - even British - colonialism and as unmoved by the sometimes hysterical and always strident anti-communism that in the 1950s disfigured American public life. At the time, these qualities were considered moral assets, and they were deployed in 1954 in formerly French Indochina. But vision and good intentions took policy only so far, for experience in Vietnam showed that Canadian-Indian differences were far greater than convergences.ORIGINSCanada's involvement in Indochina and its tangled diplomacy dated back to the collapse of French power in World War Two. Canadian policy during that war and after was to sustain French resistance and then restore France as a major component in the international system. As Canadian diplomats discovered, that meant accepting what the French government believed to be necessary for the restoration of French power. That in turn meant coming to terms with French policy in Indochina.(f.1)Indochina was the jewel of the French colonial system. Before the Second World War, it was exotic, isolated, and remote, and the French governed it with an iron hand. Its three components, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, were ruled either directly by French proconsuls or indirectly through local, powerless, monarchs. …