bout de papier, Vol. 3, No. 2 (1985) — Summer 1985 // Été 1985, pp. 36–38
Sidney Freifeld on THE MAKING OF A
PEACEMONGER: The Memoirs of George
Ignatieff, University of Toronto Press: 265
pages: $19.95.
I unhesitatingly commend to bout de papier readers — of whatever vintage and stream — that they read George Ignatieff’s shortish book. First, it is a highly entertaining and witty “good read” – quite a rarity among memoirs dealing with Canada’s foreign affairs; I couldn’t put it down over a weekend, and this was not just because I served under Ignatieff at Permis New York in the forties and again in the sixties and went through many of the crises and knew many of the players he describes. Second, bout de papier readers can hardly fail to profit from his exposition of the formulation and execution of Canadian foreign policy and the relationship between ministers and officials, during a career that started in wartime London as a fledgling Third Secretary and ended as a senior ambassador in Geneva in the early seventies, at which time he became highly critical of what was happening to External and to himself under Prime Minister Trudeau and suddenly departed from External to take up the post of Provost of Trinity College in the University of Toronto, of which he is now Chancellor.
In between, Ignatieff served, inter alia, as deputy to High Commissioner George Drew in London, Ambassador to Yugoslavia with responsibility for other Balkan countries, Ambassador to NATO, Ambassador to the United Nations in New York, including two critical years as Canrep on the Security Council coping with the Six Day War and its aftermath. Assistant Under-Secretary in Ottawa with responsibility for defence relations and other sensitive areas of departmental responsibility, and finally as Ambassador to the U.N. European office in Geneva, doubling at the same time as disarmament negotiator. If this sounds imposing, his book also recounts the humble chores he had to do as a junior, and judiciously brings in some of the hocus-pocus of domestic politics and bureaucratic infighting that conditioned Canada’s behaviour on the international stage during three critical decades: plus ça change.
All of this is studded by amusing anecdotes, less for the pure story-telling than shrewdly to illustrate some point or illuminate some character.
One gem is about Ernie Warwick, an Ontario pig farmer, who telephoned Canada House from London airport to complain that he had just landed with semen for artificial insemination in Romania and that British Customs was giving him a hard time. The Canada House operator promptly responded: “One moment please, I’ll connect you with the naval attache”
Then, when Ernie got to Belgrade and met Ignatieff, he asked “Are you one of those goddam ignoramuses from Ottawa who don’t know the difference between a bull and a cow?”. When Ignatieff took him to meet the Yugoslav Minister of Agriculture to promote sale of his pigs, Warwick had Ignatieff model as a pig. Then, Ignatieff goes on “slapping his own voluminous waist and hips, (Warwick) explained that he would make a bad ham and bad bacon; on the other hand, the leaner waist and thighs of a pig such as me would yield excellent pork products. While Ernie’s marketing efforts left me a bit deflated, I am bound to admit that they were effective. He sold his pigs.” Whoever said that External’s diplomatists didn’t do anything about trade promotion?
In a different vein is Ignatieff’s noting of a prophetic nuance by President de Gaulle at a dinner for Mr. Pearson in Paris, three years before “Vive le Québec libre” Proposing a toast to Mr. Pearson, de Gaulle said that one of the two things that unite our two countries is “le lien inoubliable avec notre peuple au Canada”. Mr. Pearson was so annoyed about de Gaulle’s reference to “our people” and a special relationship between France and Quebec that he ad libbed in his response a reference to “our people from all over Canada who lie buried near the battlefields where they died defending France in two wars”. And to reinforce his point, he than made an unscheduled visit to northern French battlefields and paid tribute to Canada’s dead. Ignatieff believes that Quebec separatism is not a short-term phenomenon that can be resolved by bilinguistic and bicultural compromise: “Wanting to be independent is an issue that goes much deeper than language or even culture. People who truly believe in independence won’t settle for anything less.”
Ignatieff’s insights into such diverse characters as Mike Pearson and Hume Wrong, Vincent Massey and Howard Green, U Thant and Bernard Baruch, President de Gaulle and Marshall Tito, are perceptive and revealing, and in some instances uninhibitedly frank. His memoirs display a wry and healthily self-deprecating sense of humour and they mirror the intellectual agility and versatile personality of the author. Although he was a hard taskmaster, it was these qualities that made working for him a pleasure; and he himself worked harder than any of us — never a dull moment! The memoirs are superbly crafted from the editorial and literary point of view, the product of Ignatieff’s co-operation with Sonje Sinclair.
When I was at the National Defence College in 1962, our class visited Turkey, where our first session was with the Chief of Naval Staff. When our Commandant presented us one by one to the Turkish admiral, he eventually came to “Mr. Freifeld, Department of External Affairs” The admiral must have been waiting for this; to everyone’s astonishment he said “so you are from External Affairs?” and he led me across the room to point to an imposing historic document framed on the wall and, pointing to the signature on it, said “Ignatieff, a BAD name for Turkey”. I gather from Ignatieff’s book that the same thing might have happened in Peking and perhaps Moscow although, on the other side of the ledger, I should note that when a new Bulgarian ambassador made his call on me in Bogota, he hailed the name Ignatieff for its part in liberating Balkan Slavs from the Ottoman yoke. In Tel Aviv, the name Ignatieff would probably get mixed reviews, depending on which generation you are talking to.
All this has to do, of course, with George Ignatieff’s famous grandfather, Nicholas Pavlovich Ignatiett, a legendary mid-19th century Czarist soldier and diplomat, who was responsible for the 1860 Treaty of Peking and who served as Russia’s ambassador in Constantinople, where he championed the liberation aspirations of Bulgarians and Serbs, pushed mightily for Russian access to the Mediterranian, and nearly succeeded in changing the map of Europe and part of Asia. At another time he was the Czar’s Minister of the Interior. George’s father, Count Paul Ignatieff, was Governor of the Province of Kiev, Deputy Minister of Agriculture, and Minister of Education in the last Czarist government before the Bolshevik revolution. George describes his father as a progressive who sought not only to reform education in Russia but also to alleviate the plight of the Jews, who suffered from dreadful pogroms in his part of the Ukraine; and he made it possible for Jews to become university professors for the first time in Russian history.
George, born Count Georgi Pavlovich in St. Petersburg in 1913, was an infant witness to the Russian revolution and civil war. His first four chapters deal with the aristocratic family background in Czarist Russia, the vicissitudes of hasty flight and emigration to Britain and thence to Canada, the process of Canadianization, which included working as an axman on a railroad construction site around Kootenay, B.C., which helped him earn the wherewithal to attend the University of Toronto and win a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford
Ignatieff professes great admiration for Howard Green who, nevertheless, when he was SSEA, caused “one of the most embarrassing episodes in my career”. While in Belgrade Ignatieff had become very friendly with, and admired greatly, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Koca Popovic. Later, Green wanted to invite Popovic to visit Canada, but George advised that this would cause a howl from new Canadians who had suffered at the hands of the Yugoslav communists; such a visit had been explored before but the risks were always considered to outweigh the benefits. When Green persisted, Yugoslav Canadians indeed howled to Prime Minister Diefenbaker that, if he received this “Communist murderer” no Canadian of Yugoslav extraction would ever again vote Conservative. Diefenbaker told Green he would not meet Popovic during the visit.
Ignatieff advised that this would create an impossible situation and urged Green to persuade the P.M. to change his mind or call off the visit. But the SSEA and the P.M. came up with a “typically Canadian compromise”. The president of the Senate would host a luncheon for Popovic. Meanwhile, Diefenbaker ostensibly on his way to the House of Commons, would pass the Senate chamber and rustle the curtain as a signal, “rather like Polonius in Hamlet” “At that point I was to say to Popovic I believe that’s our Prime Minister passing by Let me take you over and introduce you” The curtain rustled on cue, I mumbled the prearranged lie and rushed Popovic in the direction of the rustle. There was the Prime Minister of Canada, shaking his jowls at the mystified visitor. He said “Welcome to Ottawa” and promptly took his leave. When Popovic later asked George what on earth had been going on, he replied “I’d rather not explain. You have your domestic problems, to which I never referred while I was in your country; please don’t ask me to talk about our’s”
In his last chapter Ignatieff assails Prime Minister Trudeau’s “deliberate and systematic downgrading of the skills and expertise which to us were the essence of diplomacy”. Henceforth, Externalites were to be appraised “according to our salesmanship rather than our ability to analyse international problems, negotiate under pressure, make technical decisions concerning strategy and timing, know whose advice to trust and whose to reject, when to insist and when to concede a point. External Affairs was to become a stable for efficient administrators, people adept at reading computer printouts and skilled in managerial techniques, who could be transferred at a moment’s notice to other departments and replaced with instant diplomats from the four corners of the public service. technocratic approach to diplomacy”. Furthermore, he writes, Mr. Trudeau expected ambassadors to confine themselves to administrative routine and act as professional greeters to VIPs dispatched from Ottawa to negotiate or speak for Canada.
In response to Ignatieffs plea from Geneva for help in carrying out a backbreaking dual workload, External sent him a man who had previously been employed as assistant manager at the Chateau Laurier. “I had asked for someone with experience in economics or modern technology, in international law, or the problems associated with relocating millions of refugees, and I got a hotelier. All things considered, it may have been an appropriate choice.” The “hotelier” must have learned a lot in Geneva with Ignatieff; today he is Deputy Auditor-General of Canada and is consulted by the Department for his expertise on U.N. administrative and budgetary matters and on the Specialized Agencies.
When dealing with the Korean question at the U.N., Ignatieff notes that to implement the Moscow agreement that an independent, united Korean state be established after World War II, the U.S. proposed that elections be held in North and South Korea under U.N. supervision. This was in 1948. “It was in effect” he goes on “an attempt to prevent the country from becoming another Germany, permanently divided into two hostile camps.” This is not a valid analogy; Germany had not yet, in 1948, become permanently divided into two hostile camps.
On page 150 Ignatieff writes: “I was frankly proud to be the first foreign-born Canadian to be appointed ambassador” (i.e. to Yugoslavia). A number of individuals born in Commonwealth countries were appointed ambassador earlier than he, and a number of other earlier appointees were born in foreign countries, including Merchant Mahoney (U.S.A.), Herbert Norman (Japan), General Laflèche (U.S.A.), Edmond Turcotte (U.S.A.), Chester Ronning (China). However, most of these persons were born of Canadian parents.
Quoiqu’il en soit, Ignatieff’s memoirs make fine and instructive reading. It seems a pity that the immigrant from Russia, who contributed so greated to Canada’s and External’s international reputation, should have left External in such bitterness. Surely External Affairs, not Ignatieff, was the loser. I find it strange, and disappointing, that he cuts off his memoirs at 1971-72, i.e. when he went off External’s payroll; life did not end for him then, by any means. The years since, as he himself suggests, have been no less exciting and fruitful, and it seems a pity that he had not given us his pithy and uninhibited views on the passing scene down to more recent times. It would also have been interesting to learn more about what caused the apparent metamorphosis in his thinking on defence matters, i.e. the shift from the views he expoused as Ambassador to NATO and as Assistant Under-Secretary responsible for External’s defence relations to the “Peacemonger” of today, supporting the unilateral disarmament activists.
Ignatieff may have been a BAD name for Turkey, but it has been a darned good one for Canada, and for External Affairs, during three tumultuous decades.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 3, No. 2 (1985) — Summer 1985 // Été 1985, pp. 36–38. Read the rest of this issue →
