by Gwynne Dyer
The great force on which we must rely is the hatred of the cruelty and waste of war which now exists. As soon as the war is over the process of oblivion will set in.… The chauvinists who believe that all foreigners are barbarians, the bureaucrats who think that whatever is, is right, the militarists who regard perpetual peace as an enervating evil, will … say “Can’t you leave it alone.” It is only, therefore, while the recollection of all we have been through is burningly fresh that we can hope to overcome the inevitable opposition and establish at least the beginning of a new and better organisation of the nations of the world.
Lord Robert Cecil, British War Cabinet, October 5, 1918
In every country there were people who greeted the League of Nations with all the enthusiasm of feudal barons in twelfth-century Britain or France confronted with a proposal to establish a central government and domestic peace. It could never work, they insisted, and perhaps they were right—in which case we are condemned to perpetual war, and perhaps eventually to terminal war. However, people like President Wilson, Lord Cecil and Prime Minister Borden were not naïve idealists trying to create a “world government”: they fully recognized the primacy of the sovereign state, the inevitability of conflicting interests and the fact that military force is the final international sanction. What they were trying to do was to regulate the ways that force was used and conflicts were settled, in order to break the cycle of great-alliance wars—world wars—that was coming to threaten civilization itself.
The essence of their approach was to replace the competing alliances that had flourished in traditional “balance-of-power” politics with One Big Alliance—the League of Nations—with universal membership. This all-embracing alliance of sovereign states would be bound together by quite new international rules: that no existing borders could be changed by force, and no aspects of the international status quo altered except by negotiation or arbitration. Status quo powers are always the large majority in the international community, so the new rules appealed to the fundamental interests of most nations.
These rules were to be enforced by a principle known as “collective security.” Members of the League pledged to “renounce war as an instrument of national policy,” and disputes between countries would be submitted to arbitration by the judicial organs of the League. But if any country defied the new rules and attacked another, all members of the League were bound to join in repelling the attack—and with this overwhelming preponderance of power at its disposal, the League should be able to deter or pick off aggressive governments one by one as they emerged. The basic purpose of the League was not to abolish sovereign states, but to safeguard every state’s independence while averting the world wars that had been the traditional result of that independence: it was really a pragmatic association of poachers turned gamekeepers.
There was a significant political price involved in accepting collective security (and perhaps even a moral price): it meant that no country could legally resort to the unilateral use of force even to rectify what it felt to be a flagrant injustice. In order to gain the cooperation of existing governments, the League had to guarantee all their possessions and borders—and so, in seeking to outlaw war, the League of Nations was automatically committed to slowing down the pace of change to whatever could be achieved by peaceful means. In a world whose borders were largely defined by past acts of military violence, that implied the indefinite perpetuation of a great deal of injustice.
Moreover, the peace treaties of 1918 created a whole host of new injustices by blaming the war entirely on the defeated nations, stripping them of much of their territory and imposing crippling “reparations” payments on them. The League’s Covenant meant that all those injustices would have to be defended against violent international challenge—even to the extent of going to war over them if necessary. It couldn’t be helped: any attempt to change the international system has to start from existing reality, which will always contain a great deal of injustice. But that is not, in principle, a valid objection to the creation of an international rule of law, especially if the result is an end to war. We have all made a similar compromise within our various national states, where we have outlawed private violence—even at the cost of denying some people “justice” because the rule of law is the price of domestic peace.
Collective security makes a high demand on the capacity of nations to act with enlightened self-interest, even at the cost of some short-term sacrifices. Nevertheless, in the immediate aftermath of the First World War the surviving European governments were so badly frightened by the ultimate consequences of not changing the international system that they were at least determined to try. However, the duty of League members to defend everybody’s borders against armed aggression, regardless of where they were or how those borders had originally been achieved, seemed particularly onerous to Canadians.
Canada, after all, had no disputed borders itself, and its geography made it virtually invulnerable to the effects of wars elsewhere if it chose to stay out. Prime Minister Borden supported the League in principle, but he tried hard to water down Article 10 of the Covenant, the clause that obliged all members to take automatic military action against any aggressor. As his adviser in Paris, Justice Minister Charles Doherty, warned him: “A way must be found, said and says Canadian Public Opinion, whereby Canada shall have … control over the events that in the future might lead her into war. If this be her view [even about] England’s wars, what will be her attitude to [a promise] that France’s Wars, Italy’s Wars are in future to be hers wherever and whenever such a war is initiated by territorial aggression?”
But if the League’s members were not willing to mobilize their forces against any aggressor, even when their own loyalties or interests were not directly involved, then the concept of collective security fell apart. Borden’s reservations about accepting this duty for Canada (which were shared by some other governments that also felt relatively safe from potential aggression) were disregarded, and the Covenant of the League was adopted unchanged. By it, Canada was formally bound to defend peace anywhere in the world. But that wasn’t very popular in Canada.
Our policy for the next hundred years should be that laid down by … Sir Wilfrid Laurier: “freedom from the vortex of European militarism.”
C.G. “Chubby” Power, MP for Quebec South, Commons debate on the League of Nations, September 1919
There are 60,000 [Canadian] graves in France and Flanders, every one of which tells us that, for good or ill, we are in the world and must bear our part in the solution of its troubles.
John W. Dafoe, editor, Manitoba Free Press, 1919
In terms of short-term Canadian self-interest, Chubby Power was right in advocating what became known as “isolationism,” for it would be at least another generation before technology would end Canada’s physical immunity from European wars. (Americans, who enjoyed a similar geographical security, actually erected isolationism into a policy. The United States Senate saw no reason why Americans should make sacrifices to defend peace in areas of no immediate importance to them, and refused to ratify U.S. membership in the League.)
But in the longer term, it was John Dafoe who was right, for the “one world or none” dilemma was already implicit in the military, economic and technological trends of his own time. Dafoe was arguing specifically for a Canadian commitment to the League of Nations, not for the kind of reflex loyalty to the British empire that had killed 60,000 Canadians in France and Flanders. It was, however, a new idea in 1919, and a distinction too subtle for many to grasp. A lot of Canadians simply didn’t want Canadian troops to serve overseas ever again, whether in support of the British empire or the principles of the League of Nations.
French Canadians were especially unenthusiastic about the League, or indeed any foreign commitments. Their attitude was to have a lasting effect on William Lyon Mackenzie King, who was chosen as Liberal leader on Laurier’s death in 1919. King owed his position to the solid support of Quebec, and
he knew that it depended as much on his avoidance of foreign military commitments in the future as on his record of opposition to conscription in the past. In 1922, after a brief interval when Arthur Meighen succeeded the ailing Sir Robert Borden as prime minister and leader of the Conservative Party, King and the Liberals came to power.
The fox knows many things; the hedgehog knows one big thing.
Archilocus, c. 650 BCE
If Mackenzie King were a cartoon character, he would probably be Mr. Burns from The Simpsons. He was a dumpy, fussy bachelor with few close male friends (although power, as Henry Kissinger remarked, is the ultimate aphrodisiac, and King did not suffer from a lack of feminine companionship). He was a product of late-nineteenth-century Ontario, and so was sentimentally attached to the idea of the British empire—but he was also intensely proud of his grandfather, William Lyon Mackenzie, who had led a rebellion against that empire. Politically, he was a manipulator, perpetually balancing the conflicting demands of Britain and Anglo-Canadian imperialists against the instinctive isolationism of French Canadians. Personally, he was a fruitcake, communing regularly with his dear, dead mother and other denizens of the spirit world. But he knew One Big Thing: Canada must be kept united for the sake of its own future, the Liberal Party’s cohesion and his own political prospects—he was not a man to make petty distinctions among the three—and that meant keeping Canada’s foreign commitments down.
In September 1922, eight months after he assumed office to begin a prime ministership that would run, with only two interruptions amounting to five years, until 1948, Mackenzie King found the perfect occasion to display his new approach to Canada’s international commitments. It came, bizarrely, over Turkey.
STOP THIS NEW WAR!
Cabinet Plan for Great Conflict with the Turks!
France and Italy Against It!
Extraordinary Appeal to the Dominions!
Headlines, London Daily Mail, September 18, 1922
I confess [the British government’s appeal for military support] annoyed me. It is drafted designedly to play the imperial game, to test out centralization vs. autonomy as regards European wars.… I have thought out my plans.… No contingent will go without parliament being summoned.… The French Canadians will be opposed, I am not so sure of B.C..… I am sure the people of Canada are against participation in this European war.
Mackenzie King’s diary, September 1922
The crisis came out of the peace treaty that had been imposed on the defeated Turks after the First World War. Most of Turkey had been handed over to Greece and the European empires, but the Turks, under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk), refused to submit. Withdrawing to the interior of Anatolia, Kemal launched a war of resistance in 1919, and by the autumn of 1922 all that stood between Kemal’s army and the reconquest of Istanbul was a small British military force in the dingy town of Chanak, on the Asiatic shore of the Dardanelles.
Prime Minister Lloyd George knew perfectly well that the British public would not tolerate a full-scale war to stop the Turks from reclaiming their homeland, so he decided to run a bluff. His real aim was to force Kemal to accept an international conference on Turkey’s future: Kemal would still end up with most of what he wanted, but there would be some restrictions on Turkish sovereignty, and a great deal of face would be saved (much of it Lloyd George’s). To force the Turks to accept such a compromise, however, he needed a show of force at Chanak—and his bluff would be a lot more convincing if he seemed to have the whole British empire behind him.
Cabinet today decided to resist Turkish aggression upon Europe.… I should be glad to know whether Dominion Governments wish to associate themselves with the action we are taking.…
The announcement that all or any of the Dominions were prepared to send contingents even of moderate size … might conceivably be a potent factor in preventing actual hostilities.
Lloyd George to Mackenzie King, September 15, 1922
It was not exactly a peremptory imperial summons to war, but it was just the kind of thing King dreaded. The Canadian General Staff, ever eager to be helpful, began making plans for the immediate dispatch of the entire Canadian regular army to Turkey, to be followed within a few months, if necessary, by an expeditionary force of 200,000 Canadian volunteers. However, King simply told Britain that Canada would take no action until Parliament had been consulted—and made no preparations to recall Parliament. It was, perhaps, the most muted declaration of independence any government has ever made, for King had to be careful not to anger English Canadian imperial patriots.
In the end, the crisis was defused and there was no war over Chanak. Lloyd George’s government fell, and Turkey regained its territory and its independence. At the Imperial Conference in London the following year, King was openly defiant. If the report of the conference committed the Dominions to the automatic support of British foreign and defence policies, he insisted, he would have to insert a special clause exempting Canada. So the conference closed with a statement that it was not an imperial cabinet but a conference of separate governments, each responsible to its own Parliament. Over the next few years King nailed down Canada’s separate and sovereign status by concluding the first foreign treaty that was not also signed by a British representative (the unromantic U.S.-Canadian Halibut Treaty of 1923), and by appointing Canada’s first diplomatic legations to foreign capitals (Washington, Paris and Tokyo) in 1927.
By the time the Statute of Westminster formally recognized the independence of all the dominions in 1931, Canada had already had it for years. In 1927, when Canada was elected to the Council of the League of Nations, Senator Raoul Dandurand, the Canadian delegate to Geneva, replied to American criticism that Canada was the puppet of Downing Street by declaring that Canada was “the spokesman of the North American continent’s ideals.” That was true enough, bearing in mind that the predominant North American ideal at the time was isolationism—for one of the first things King had done with Canada’s independence was to undermine the League.
[If the Council of the League should] recommend the application of military measures in consequence of an aggression … the Council shall be bound to take account … of the geographical situation and of the special conditions of each State. It is for the constitutional authorities of each Member to decide … in what degree the Member is bound to assure the execution of this obligation by employment of its military forces.
The “Canadian Resolution” on Article 10, League of Nations Assembly, September 24, 1923
Article 10 was the heart of the Covenant, committing all members not only to respect “the territorial integrity and existing political independence of all the members of the League,” but to defend each member’s rights by military force if necessary. That automatic obligation was exactly what King objected to, but he was more subtle than Borden, who had mounted a direct attack on the article and failed. Instead, the “Canadian resolution” appealed to every country’s secret desire for a private escape route from the general duty of maintaining the peace, by declaring that each member could decide independently whether it would take part in economic sanctions or offer troops to support any military action decided upon by the League.
After a year-long struggle, King’s “interpretation” was accepted, and Article 10 was effectively destroyed. Raoul Dandurand, one of King’s few really close associates, was brutally frank about the selfish rationale behind the Canadian resolution. Collective security was like fire insurance, he told the Assembly in 1924, and Canada should not be called upon to pay the heavy premium of military sanctions against a possible aggressor because Canadians faced little risk to their own property: “We live in a fireproof house, far from inflammable materials.”
This first attempt to reform the international system and break the cycle of world wars was probably doomed to fail in any event—almost as certainly as a child’s first attempt to ride a bicycle—but King’s wanton act of sabotage was a premature and unnecessary blow to the League. And
it was supported by the Canadian opposition parties as well: wars, most Canadians believed, were caused by wicked governments in Europe, and it was possible for Canada to stay out of them thanks to its fortunate geography. But since no serious crises came along to test the weakened machinery of the League for quite a while, it would be almost a decade before any Canadians began to worry about war again.
Lt. Col. Forde and Lt. Col. Hodgins and myself left Ottawa in a motor driven by Colonel Forde about 6:45 a.m. on the 10th July, 1922 … and crossed the St. Lawrence by ferry to Ogdensburg, New York at 10 a.m. The American Customs and Emigration Authorities passed us without delay … We then took the highway to Canton through a generally rolling country.… The country everywhere is passable by infantry.
Extract from Special Reconnaissance by the director of military operations and intelligence, marked “Secret,” H.Q. C.3487, Ottawa, November 17, 1922.
Colonel J. Sutherland (“Buster”) Brown, director of military operations and intelligence of the Canadian army from 1920 to 1927, was convinced, like his ancestors before him, that the main military threat facing Canada was an American invasion—and he had a plan for dealing with it. We should invade them first. If war with the United States seemed likely, his Defence Scheme Number One ordained that the Canadian army would launch pre-emptive attacks deep into the United States. Canadian forces from British Columbia would “advance into and occupy the strategic points including Spokane, Seattle and Portland.” Our troops from the Prairie provinces would “converge toward Fargo, North Dakota, and then continue a general advance in the direction of Minneapolis and St. Paul.” In the east, the Canadian army would cross the St. Lawrence and the Quebec border to occupy upper New England.