bout de papier, Vol. 18, No. 1 (2001) — Spring 2001 // Printemps 2001, pp. 25–27
BLAZES ALONG A DIPLOMATIC
TRAIL: A MEMOIR OF FOUR POSTS IN
THE CANADIAN FOREIGN SERVICE
by J.C. Gordon Brown, Trafford Publishing,
Victoria, B.C., 319 pp., $24.95
One of the most persistent and disagreeable of the myths relating to the foreign service has it that “diplomats” spend most of their time in various forms of fancy dress at vacuous parties and pointless ceremonies. That the myth is based on more than spite emerged rather clearly during the experiments in budgeting and management by objectives of the 1960s. It was easy enough to describe and quantify the functions of officers such as consuls and foreign trade officers but it proved singularly difficult to define the work and objectives of the “nonspecialist” (traditionally considered the quintessential foreign service officer). What did they really do and how did this relate to the interests of the nation? Gordon Brown’s refreshing memoir provides one answer to this question and a healthy antedote to the myth.
This book falls into four parts of unequal length, each dealing with one of the posts at which Brown served between 1958 and 1969. At the first two, in the Union of South Africa and the Soviet Union, he was the second in command at the mission, serving for a time as chargé d’affaires. Subsequently, in the Congo (Zaire) and Cyprus, he served as Head of Mission. At all these posts, he was in a position to appreciate the totality of Canadian interests involved and to exercise some influence over the way in which they were served. Indeed, one of the most interesting implications of the book is the variability in the extent of that influence and the way it was exercised
One’s reactions to the memoir will necessarily be subjective. I found the first and longest section the most eloquent and gripping. Brown, arriving in South Africa with a typically Canadian antipathy for apartheid, found himself working with a Head of Mission, a most amiable gentleman, who was, however, by temperament and social contact strongly biased towards the ruling group. This hurdle was initially compounded by the need, a familiar one for newcomers at a foreign post, to establish that network of contacts, mainly in the international community and political opposition, on which the success of his work would largely depend. He succeeded admirably in doing so and the mission seems to have an enviable record of accurate political reporting and prediction — a tribute to his gift for friendship and the remarkable energy and tenacity he deployed in the pursuit of understanding of local political developments and trends. Thus, with him we follow the intricate interplay of forces as South Africa slides progressively into the bog of apartheid, through the Sharpeville crisis, the establishment of the Republic and its departure from the Commonwealth.
The South African memoir can be read as a good yarn with its quota of striking anecdotes such as the account of the stormy confrontation between the High Commissioner and the South African Foreign Minister over the detention of the Canadian journalist Norman Phillips (page 47). The book also has archival value in that many episodes are recounted in fine detail (drawn from Brown’s daily diary) and will serve the ends of future research. Interwoven with this narrative are accounts and comments of a more personal nature. Inevitably the disruptions and pleasures of the diplomatic life are mentioned: the enormous difficulties of providing some stability in the education of two young daughters as the mission shifts seasonally between Cape Town and Pretoria, the effort put into the social activities on which the contact network so importantly depends, the joys of friendship and travel. Some readers may find this personal element distracting, but it is so intrinsically a part of foreign service that to omit it would have turned the memoir into a treatise.
A question raised by Brown’s account of the mission’s activities is the influence that its evidently exemplary reporting had on the development of the Canadian position as expressed by PM Diefenbaker at the 1961 Conference of Commonwealth Prime Ministers. Unfortunately, there is scant reference to the relations between the mission and headquarters, and it may be that the mission was in effect preaching to the converted. This would appear to be the implication of the possibly abashed comment, on the eve of the Commonwealth Conference, that the mission was not surprised so seldom to be pressed for reports by Ottawa. There is, however, one contrary hint of oversight in Ottawa in the interview between Brown and the Under-Secretary reported on page 67.
The other three sections of the memoir differ significantly in style and content. They are, however, complementary in the sense that they show the author living and working under the very different conditions of his next three posts. The Soviet Union was a closed society in which the diplomatic corps lived in relative isolation and where the incumbent Canadian Ambassador enjoyed an unchallenged reputation as a Soviet expert. Under these conditions, Brown’s narrative leans rather heavily towards the challenges of life and security under the surveillance of the KGB, the deposition of Khrushchev and the first visit to the USSR of a Canadian Parliamentary delegation, both of which occurred while he was chargé d’affaires, and accounts of several trips he was able to make during the relatively short time before his appointment as Canada’s first Ambassador to the Congo (Zaire).
In Leopoldville, Brown, by his own account, reacted with vigour to the challenges of charting a course for Canada’s first diplomatic mission. The situation, both in the Congo and in neighboring countries, was volatile and Canadian interests, while clear in general terms, needed to be translated into specific objectives and projects. He gives a brief account of the history of the newly independent and troubled country and then devotes himself to the ways in which the new mission attempted over the next three years to put substance into the bilateral relationship. He recounts the effort to pin down an evasive Congolese government on participation in Expo 67, nurture of the aid programme, cooperation with Air Congo, controversies relating to la francophonie and, more mundanely, the problems of local administration and security. One is left with the impression of a great deal of constructive activity, undertaken with enthusiasm, to which full justice is perhaps not done in this account.
The memoir ends on a somewhat melancholy note with Brown’s closure of the Canadian High Commission in Cyprus at the end of 1969 some 12 months after his posting there as High Commissioner. In three chapters, he discusses his representational work and support for the Canadian contingent of the UN Force in Cyprus and concludes with an acerbic account of the events surrounding the closure of the mission which, at least in the manner of its execution, appears to merit his censure.
It is a pleasure to commend this perceptive but unpretentious account of the contributions of a mid-career foreign service officer to the good name and material interests of his country.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 18, No. 1 (2001) — Spring 2001 // Printemps 2001, pp. 25–27. Read the rest of this issue →
