The North Atlantic Triangle

Abstract

John Baitlet Brebner's notion of a Atlantic is now 65 years old, but it shows no signs of being ready for retirement - although there are certainly critics who believe that it should be put out to pasture.1 To its supporters, it is a key concept that reveals important insights about Canadian foreign policy and its historical with the United States and Britain. To its detractors it gives, at best, an exaggerated view of Canada's role in international relations and, at worst, conveys a complete misunderstanding of its with the US and the United Kingdom. A few historians have even doubted the very existence of a north Atlantic triangle, in any meaningful sense. And yet the term is still one that interests historians and political scientists, not only in Canada but also in Britain and the US. Indeed, there a revival of interest in the Brebner thesis in the mid-1990s, when it turned 50, and it has been engaging scholars on both sides of the Atlantic ever since.2 A recent manifestation of this trend a conference on the north Atlantic triangle, attended by academics from all three countries and hosted by the Institute for the Study ofthe Americas at Senate House, University of London, in July 2010.3In some ways the contested meaning - and even validity - of the north Atlantic triangle concept is not unlike that of the so-called special relationship between Britain and the United States. While many scholars - especially in the UK - find the special relationship a rewarding subject of study, others regard it as little more than a myth, kept alive by those who like to think of Britain as able to punch above its weight by being associated with the American superpower. Both phrases were first used in earnest at the end ofthe Second World War. Brebner's book published at the end of the war and Churchill's use ofthe term special relationship came in 1946 during his speech in Fulton, Missouri, when he referred to an iron curtain descending across Europe. Thus both terms were the product of the same historical epoch and, indeed, they are interrelated, as the Anglo-American special relationship can be viewed as part of a Atlantic triangle.4BREBNER'S NORTH ATLANHC TRIANGLEThe starting point for arriving at a definition of the north Atlantic triangle is, of course, John Bartlet Brebner's book, published in 1945. Brebner a distinguished Canadian historian who studied at the University of Toronto and then Oxford before obtaining a doctorate at Columbia University in 1925. His early work on the maritime colonies in Canada, especially his book Neutral Yankees of Nova Scotia, written in 1937 and still regarded by many as a classic study of why that particular colony did not join the American revolution.5 Brebner later went back to England as a professor of history at Cambridge in the 1950s before returning to New York, where he died in 1957. Thus he lived and taught in Canada, the US, and Britain.6His book on the north Atlantic triangle the last in a series edited by his friend and mentor, James Shotwell, director ofthe division of history and economics at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. central focus of this series of no fewer than 25 volumes the between Canada and the US. But Brebner' s book intended to provide a missing ingrethent - the role of Britain in the development of U S -Canadian relations. Brebner stated in his preface: My primary aim to get at, and to set forth, the interplay between the United States and Canada - the Siamese Twins of North America who cannot separate and live. By he said he meant not just issues in the field of international relations but also the social and economic interaction between the two countries. The great obstacle to a simple account of this interplay, he continued, was that many of these activities could not be explained in merely North American terms. …