bout de papier, Vol. 17, No. 1 (2000) — Spring 2000 // Printemps 2000, pp. 26–28
The history of Canada’s Department ot External Attairs is one of uneven but nevertheless sustained growth over a period of nine decades. Created by act of parliament in 1909, the Department started life as little more than a small secretariat with a staff of five. The modern Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade is a major institution of government with a staff of over 8,000, deployed in centres across Canada and in some 160 missions and offices in 104 countries abroad. The Department’s growth closely paralleled Canada’s constitutional evolution, the diversification of its national interests and its ever increasing involvement in world affairs. In the history of the Department’s evolution, there are relatively few notable landmarks. One such landmark was Prime Minister Mackenzie King’s appointment of Dr. O. D. Skelton as undersecretary of state for external affairs in 1925.
By the time of his appointment, Dr. Skelton already enjoyed a formidable reputation in Canadian university and government circles. As professor of politics and economics, dean of arts and honorary president of the Alma Mater Society, he was a highly respected figure at Queen’s University. He was also a renowned writer and scholar, having to his credit a critical study of socialism and full-length biographies of Sir Alexander Galt and Sir Wilfrid Laurier. This academic background and stature were to prove of immense value as he went about one of the first tasks he set himself at the Department of External Affairs: the creation of a professional foreign service, and by extension a far more professional civil service for the government of Canada as a whole. The scope and importance of his achievements in this regard are aptly summed up by Professor Jack Granatstein in these terms:
“The modern civil service had its creator in Oscar Douglas Skelton. When he left Queen’s University in 1925 and became undersecretary of state for external affairs, Skelton brought with him the conviction that the government of Canada could be improved only by regular infusions of bright, talented
26 bout de papier Vol. young university graduates. Over the course of the next fifteen years Skelton used his contacts with the universities to recruit staff and did this with great skill and success. His efforts made his own department into a pool of talent and, equally important, he attracted able men to other departments and encouraged some of the more hesitant deputy ministers to experiment and to recruit from the universities. Skelton changed Ottawa; he and his recruits changed Canada.”
In the creation of the new Canadian foreign service, Skelton took a hand in every aspect of the process. Through his contacts with university professors he made sure that the foreign service competition was brought to the attention of their best students. In the first few years, he personally drafted the examination questions and marked the examination papers. He often chaired the boards set up to select candidates from among those who had successfully completed the two days of written examinations. And while he clearly recognized the importance of personal suitability in selecting candidates for a career involving a distinct set of challenges at home and abroad, Skelton also placed heavy emphasis on academic achievement and excellence. It was no coincidence that a majority of those who joined the service in the late 1920s had post- graduate degrees from prestigious universities and had experience teaching at the university level.
In thus establishing the foreign service, Skelton did not mould it for all time; the process of recruitment has undergone profound changes in the intervening years. What does persist from his work is a strong tradition of links between the foreign service and the university world, and an enduring tradition of foreign service officers with academic interests and scholarly leanings. These were epitomized in the early years by Herbert Norman, a pioneer in the study of modern Japan, whose scholarly work was influential in the drafting of the Japanese constitution after the Second World War.
The links between the foreign service and the university world were to persist for decades in many guises. No one embodied them better than John Holmes, who was not only one of the most illustrious practitioners of the so called “golden age” of Canadian diplomacy but was also a remarkable scholar. His wise guidance of the Canadian Institute of International Affairs and his teaching at the University of Toronto did much to stimulate public interest in Canadian foreign policy. His writings reached an even wider audience of students and teachers throughout the country and abroad. His major work, the two-volume Canada and the Search for World Order 1943-1957, remains one of the best and most used treatises on Canadian foreign policy to this day.
But if John Holmes was one of the best known of Canada’s scholar-diplomats, he was certainly not alone in this category. Many others left the service in the midst of promising careers to devote themselves to academic pursuits. Peyton Lyon, as both teacher and writer, became one of the pillars of the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs at Carleton University. Jean Ethier Blais became one of the founding members of the Centre for the Study of French Canada at McGill University, as well as literary critic for Le Devoir. Of more recent vintage is Robert Wolfe, who took up a teaching and research appointment at the school of policy studies at Queen’s, where he is establishing for himself a solid reputation as one of Canada’s leading experts on international economic relations and trade policy. Wolfe recently turned a searching spotlight on his former profession in his book entitled Diplomatic Missions: The Ambassador in Canadian Foreign Policy.
Other foreign service officers chose to complete full and distinguished careers before succumbing to the lure of academic life. Particularly notable among these was John Halstead, who served as deputy undersecretary and as ambassador to Germany and to NATO. On retiring from the service, he taught at Georgetown University, Carleton University and Queen’s, and published numerous articles on Canada’s international security policy and on trans- Atlantic relations.
At least three former undersecretaries of state for external affairs have made significant contributions to the literature on Canadian foreign policy and international relations. Marcel Cadieux, who was for many years a professor of law at the University of Ottawa, not only produced a pioneering little book entitled The Canadian Diplomat, but also published numerous scholarly articles in the field of international law. Similarly, Allan Gotlieb has written extensively on issues in international law and produced a light-hearted but invaluable book on the practice of diplomacy in the Washington of the 1980s, I’ll Be With You in a Minute, Mr. Ambassador. Finally, Basil Robinson’s Diefenbaker’s World is an astute and thoughtful assessment of a particularly tumultuous period in Canada’s external relations.
All undergraduates taking courses in Canadian foreign policy owe a special debt of gratitude to two former members of the foreign service who undertook the arduous task of collating, editing and annotating four volumes of documents and speeches in Canadian foreign policy. The first volume, covering the period 1945-1954, was the work of R.A. McKay. The next three volumes, covering the period 1955-1992, were produced by Arthur Blanchette, who not only held senior positions abroad in Athens, Tunis and Washington but was also a particularly gifted and dedicated director of the Department’s Historical Division, where he did much to make the Department’s records more readily accessible to scholars.
Two volumes published in 1996 by the Carleton University Press indicate that the tradition of scholarly or semi-scholarly writing by former members of the foreign service is alive and well. The first, Direct Intervention, is an incisive and fascinating account of Canada-France relations in the period 1968-1974, written by Pat Black, who served as Minister in Paris and head of the European Bureau in Ottawa during those especially trying times in the bilateral relationship. The second, Special Trust and Confidence, is a collection of some 15 essays by former heads of mission, edited by David Reece. Although rather uneven in quality, as many such collections are, this book casts some interesting light on Canadian diplomacy as it is actually practiced in the field. Another vehicle for the scholarly output of serving or retired members of the foreign service has been the annual series Canada Among Nations, produced by the Norman Paterson School at Carleton University. Recent volumes in this series have included chapters by Michael Shenstone on population and immigration issues, by John Graham on Latin America, by John Fraser on Central Europe and the Balkans and by Michael Hart and William Dymond on international economic relations.
At least two very senior members of the foreign service were also highly gifted writers, whose contributions to Canadian literature were recognized with the attribution of Governor General’s awards. Charles Ritchie, who served as high commissioner to the United Kingdom and ambassador to the United States, published four volumes of diaries, which were full of grace and wit and evoked in reviewers comparisons to Samuel Pepys. Robert Ford, who served as ambassador in Moscow for sixteen years, became well known not only for the craftsmanship of his diplomatic dispatches and memoirs, but also for several volumes of poetry, including A Window on the North.
But the contributions of members of the foreign service are also to be found beyond the realms of teaching, research and writing. Several senior officers went on to assume positions of leadership in Canadian universities. In addition to his published work on the foundations of the United Nations and NATO, Escott Reid became principal of Glendon College at York University. For many years, Douglas Le Pan served as principal of University College, Toronto. George Ignatieff, who gained fame as a diplomat and a peace activist, became provost of Trinity College and then chancellor of the University of Toronto. William Warden, who served as high commissioner to both Pakistan and India, was director of the International Centre at the University of Calgary for over a decade. James Taylor, after having served as undersecretary and ambassador to NATO and to Japan, became chancellor of McMaster University. In 1996, Thomas Delworth, a former ambassador to Germany and one of the Foreign Service’s leading experts on European affairs, was installed as provost of Trinity College at the University of Toronto. And most recently, Gordon Smith, a former deputy minister and ambassador to NATO and to the European Union, became director of the Centre for Global Studies at the University of Victoria.
The linkages which have developed between the Canadian Foreign Service and the university world have been, however, more than the sum of the achievements, interests and inclinations of individual officers. They have also been fostered institutionally by the Department in a number of ways. First and foremost was the creation of the Department’s Academic Relations Division in the late 1960s. This division’s primary responsibility was to encourage and promote academic exchanges and the development of Canadian studies abroad as part of the government’s programme of international cultural relations. In this it has been highly successful, and Canadian studies networks involving hundreds of foreign academics represent one of the most enduring and valuable assets available to Canadian diplomats serving in the United States, Europe and certain parts of Asia. (This success was in large measure due to the drive and imagination of the division’s long serving director, Brian Long, also a former foreign service officer.)
In carrying out its mission abroad, the Academic Relations Division has inevitably developed ever closer contacts with the Canadian university community from coast to coast. These have been put to good use by the Department whenever the need has arisen to seek policy advice from outside government, and when prestigious venues have been required for ministerial speeches. In addition, the division has also developed a visiting lecturers programme whereby serving officers speak before university audiences on issues of contemporary interest in foreign policy and international relations. This programme has proved remarkably successful in exposing officers to the views of students and professors, and in exposing the latter to reasoned explanations of government policies and actions. Much the same purposes have been served by the Department’s foreign service visitors programme, whereby senior serving officers spend a year in residence at Canadian universities. Their presence in academic milieux from Victoria to Dalhousie, as well as their teaching and writing, has done a great deal to stimulate interest in careers in the foreign service and to develop understanding of Canadian foreign policy objectives; it has also done much to cement lasting contacts and friendships between academics and foreign service officers. The linkages were further strengthened in the mid-1990s when the Minister of Foreign Affairs created the Centre for Foreign Policy Development. Among the Centre’s functions are consultations with academic experts on international relations and the commissioning of research on issues of current interest to the government.
The interaction between the foreign service and the Canadian university community has been very much a two-way street. Many of Canada’s most eminent historians, political scientists and economists have participated in panels, consultative committees and policy forums organized by the Department of External/Foreign Affairs. They have also taken leading roles in ongoing joint projects such as the Canadian Consortium on Asia- Pacific Security (operated by scholars and institutes at UBC, York and Toronto) and the annual Canada-United Kingdom colloquium (now run by the School of Policy Studies at Queen’s). A number of scholars have spent sabbatical years in the Department’s policy planning bureau, while others have been seconded to the staff of the Canadian embassy in Beijing. Yet other scholars have made a practice of inviting members of the foreign service to participate in the annual or semiannual conferences and symposiums organized by the institutes and centres for international relations at universities such as Laval, Queen’s, York and UBC.
It would, of course, be highly misleading to suggest that all of these contacts between diplomats and scholars have produced nothing but mutual understanding and admiration. Neither community has in the process shelved its critical faculties, nor for that matter totally abandoned cherished stereotypes. It is still possible to hear foreign service officers, confronted with what they regard as totally impractical academic policy proposals, exclaim with impatience “when will these eggheads get out of their ivory towers and find out what the real world is all about?” Academics, for their part, have counted among their ranks some of the severest critics of the foreign service. Who can forget Professor James Eayrs, who in the late 1960s wrote that:
“All bureaucracy’s conservative, but the conservatism of diplomatic bureaucracy is in a class by itself. The ethos of diplomacy is an ethos of suspicion — suspicion tempered by scepticism, snow tempered by ice. The foreign service officer is a nay-sayer in statecraft, the abominable no-man of diplomacy. His mission in life is to preserve the status quo from those who would propose to alter it.”
Although contemporary academics appear to eschew such vitriolic eloquence, references to lack of imagination or intellectual constipation in “Fort Pearson” are not absolutely unheard of.
But such occasional bouts of criticism are to be expected, and are in some ways a tribute to the liveliness of the interaction between scholars and diplomats in Canada. They are certainly insufficient to obscure the fact that interactions between the university world and the foreign service have proved mutually rewarding and enriching in the past. They could, indeed, well prove to be of even greater value in the future. At a time when both sets of institutions find themselves financially constrained due to budgetary cutbacks, the case for enhanced cooperation and joint ventures would seem self evident. And both can certainly benefit from the support of “outside constituencies” in justifying their missions and activities to the barbarians wielding the budgetary axes.
For the Canadian foreign service, the preservation of the Skelton legacy is of capital importance. In an era in which managers and the concept of management have come to occupy pride of place in the Canadian government system, the foreign service must continue to find a place in its ranks for “thinkers” if it is to properly discharge its duty to Canada and Canadians.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 17, No. 1 (2000) — Spring 2000 // Printemps 2000, pp. 26–28. Read the rest of this issue →
