bout de papier, Vol. 22, No. 4 (2007) — Winter/Spring 2007 // Hiver/Printemps 2007, p. 18
PEARSON’S PRIZE: CANADA AND
THE SUEZ CRISIS by John Melady,
Toronto: The Dundurn Group, 207 pp.,
20 b/w photographs, 2006, $30.00.
Over the last few years, it has become almost de rigueur for world weary policymakers and hip international analysts to dismiss Pearsonian peacekeeping as quaintly old-fashioned. In the post-Cold War, post-9/11 world, peacekeeping has been replaced by peace building and peace enforcement and other meatier missions designed not to preserve an unhappy status quo but to reshape the social order. But old-fashioned peacekeeping, as dull and dreary as it often was, served Canada well. From the late 1950s until the early 1990s, it gave Canadians a distinct role in a world sharply divided into east and west, north and south. It often united us at home during periods of domestic turmoil and buttressed our reputation abroad as a fair and judicious people. It is unfortunate that the 50th anniversary of the Suez Crisis, when Mike Pearson won the Nobel Prize that made Canada synonymous with peacekeeping, passed so unremarked in November 2006.
Historian John Melady thought so too and his new book, Pearson’s Prize: Canada and the Suez Crisis, is a timely effort to remind Canadians of Pearson’s accomplishments 50 years ago, when France and Great Britain conspired with Israel to invade Egypt and seize the recently nationalized Suez Canal. Melady’s work outlines the history of the Suez Canal from the 13th century BC on, properly highlighting it as a contested symbol of a fading European imperialism by the middle of the 20th century. Lacing his text with entertaining anecdotes, Melady marches predictably though all the familiar landmarks: Nasser’s nationalization of the canal in July 1956; the fruitless efforts to seek a settlement in August; the Anglo- French-Israel plotting at Sevres in October; their fateful assault on Egypt; and finally, Pearson’s diplomatic demarche, leading to the creation of the peacekeeping force that resolved the crisis.
Drawn to the colourful and readily accessible, Melady’s account includes plenty of Nasser and Eden and Dulles, and many useful reminders of the role that chance — Dulles’s bad breath or Eden’s gallstones — plays in history. But sadly, and surprisingly, there is little Pearson. Partly, of course, this is because Canada’s genial foreign minister, unlike Eden, who threw an inkstand at one of his military advisors, was not given to dramatic gestures (though Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent reportedly threw a telegram from Eden across the room in anger). Perhaps too it reflects the fact that Melady, a popular and successful writer of military history, knows little about the environment in which Pearson operated. He repeatedly misidentifies key Canadian personnel (there is a world of difference in Canada between a secretary of state and a secretary of state for external affairs) and badly misconstrues Washington’s role in Ottawa’s decision to sell fighter aircraft to Tel Aviv on the eve of the crisis. Most of all, Pearson’s relative absence reflects Melady’s reluctance to come to grips with the detailed negotiations and diplomatic considerations involved in crafting the United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) that resolved the crisis. Pearson, presumably, was active somewhere amidst all the “hours and hours of negotiations” or the “frantic non-stop negotiations” that litter the book, but we will never know from this account. He, and Canadian peacekeeping, deserves better.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 22, No. 4 (2007) — Winter/Spring 2007 // Hiver/Printemps 2007, p. 18. Read the rest of this issue →
