Sir Robert Borden: Canada (review)

Sir Robert Borden: Canada is one of more than two dozen slim books focusing on the post–First World War peace conferences and their aftermath that Haus Publishing has produced in its Makers of the Modern World series. Companion volumes in the series feature the major peace conference figures, Wilson, Lloyd George, Clemenceau and Orlando; Empire-Commonwealth spokesmen like J. C. Smuts and Billy Hughes; and many other national leaders attending the conferences such as Afonso Costa of Portugal, Tomáš Masaryk of Czechoslovakia, and Wellington Koo of China. Martin Thornton, author of the Borden volume, is senior lecturer in international history and politics at University of Leeds.

Setting the scene, Thornton quickly gives his readers an introduction to Canada from the earliest European settlement days to the beginning of the Commonwealth, in fifteen pages. Borden’s life prior to his party’s victory in the 1911 election is covered in twelve pages, his pre-war years as prime minister in a mere six. The emphasis here is on Borden’s work and achievements at Versailles and later, sketched in a two-chapter section on the Paris Peace Conference and a section entitled ‘The Legacy.’ The story is familiar to many Canadian readers: the commitment of Canadian troops to the war effort; early, unsuccessful attempts by Borden to acquire more information about the war and a greater voice in its conduct; the emerging partnership of Lloyd George who needed Canada’s men and Borden who needed Lloyd George’s favour; the struggle to win recognition at Versailles and later; and Canada’s hesitant role in the postwar League of Nations. Thornton tells it clearly and succinctly. In doing so, he relies on his own research in the Borden papers at Library and Archives Canada and Lloyd George’s papers at the House of Lords Record Office in London. He effectively uses the relevant volumes of the Documents on Canadian External Relations series, Borden’s and Lloyd George’s Memoirs, the Borden biographies by Brown and English, Bothwell’s Loring Christie, Margaret MacMillan’s Peacemakers, and the many other standard studies on Canada’s external policies during the period.

Like most Canadian scholars of Borden’s leadership in the Great War and its aftermath, Thornton’s assessment of Borden’s role at Versailles and what he achieved is sober and realistic. Borden’s place among Canada’s prime ministers, he asserts, ‘hinges on his advancement of sovereignty for Canada’ (85) which took place in Paris, London, and Ottawa in the immediate postwar period. And yet, Thornton notes that a strong argument could be made that ‘rather than Borden, it was the Canadian dead at Ypres, Vimy Ridge and Passchendaele that changed attitudes inside and outside Canada toward how Canada should be treated on the international stage’ (89). But it was Borden who got the job done by seizing the opportunity in the War Cabinet, then the British Empire Delegation (bed), and then within the Peace Conference and back in Ottawa, insisting on Canadian ratification of the Versailles Treaty. Was there more that might have been accomplished? A more decisive role that Borden and Canada might have played at Versailles and later? Thornton suggests otherwise: Versailles was dominated by the major powers and ‘an unhappy compromise was struck between the aims of the victorious powers of the First World War. . . . Canada could not solve the world’s problems, only receive recognition within it’ (89). And what of the collaboration between the charismatic Lloyd George and the arduous Borden in London and Paris in 1918–19? ‘Lloyd George,’ Thornton observes, ‘had more new ideas than Borden, but Borden was good at getting things done’ (92).

In the immediate postwar period, Arthur Meighen appointed Borden to represent Canada on the British Empire Delegation at the Washington Naval Conference (1921). And the work of the delegation followed the pattern of responsibilities that the bed established at Versailles, reaffirming for Borden the idea that there could be a common foreign policy, based on consultation and cooperation, for the British Empire. Meighen...