Canada and UN Peacekeeping: Cold War by Other Means (review)

Sean Maloney examines Canadian peacekeeping from the first deployment in 1949 to 1970. It is not an operational history; that, the author says, will be the subject of a future study. The main argument is that the country's contributions to United Nations (UN) operations during the Cold War were not selfless. That is a national myth. Rather, Ottawa's participation was part of a strategy. In most cases, it was related to the need to bolster the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

Maloney chronologically examines the ten UN operations, a non-UN mission, and a few NATO-related "non-starters." For the large UN operations, to the Suez Canal in 1956, Congo in 1960, and Cyprus in 1964, one or both of the following factors were central. Regional conflicts needed to be controlled before the United States and Soviet Union were drawn in, and western base areas and lines of communication had to be protected in case of war. Maloney convincingly argues that Canadian peacekeeping was part of a western effort to support NATO and contain the Soviet Union.

In the process, he debunks the Canadian peacekeeping myth. It is underpinned by "Canadian exceptionalism" (p. 2). According to this nationalist ideology, the country is altruistic, nice, unmilitary, and without territorial ambition. Chiefly from this, the author suggests, the idea gained currency that Canada's approach to security revolved around peacekeeping. Maloney, in contrast, strongly argues that "UN peacekeeping was not the primary expression of Canadian national security policy during the Cold War" (p. 9), and that "Canada became involved in UN peacekeeping for reasons that are unrelated to the existing 'noble, selfless, and nice' mythology" (p. 246).

However, the criticism of the myth that is the backstop to this book is not just about Canadian peacekeeping up to 1970. It is directly related to the author's frustration with the high profile that the activity presently possesses, in contrast with NATO. The key concern is not only to discuss the operations, but also to attack the myth, and at times this colours the treatment of peacekeeping so that it appears useless and weak. Maloney is seemingly unaware of Norman Hillmer's strong paper on this subject, "Peacekeeping: Canadian Invention, Canadian Myth" (1995).

Finally, while very solid on the NATO aspects, the book could have devoted more space to the political function of some of the less important missions. The West New Guinea operation, for example, is described as a "lackluster solution" (p. 147). The Dutch, however, appreciated it as a face-saving mechanism. The Yemen mission is seen as a "fig leaf," "token," and as "contrived" (pp. 173-74). But serving as the barest political cover is a basic political function of peacekeeping, and one that can lead to success, provided the parties co-operate.