Canada’s Global Villagers: CUSO in Development, 1961–1986 by Ruth Compton Brouwer (review)

For many, “Canada’s Peace Corps” brings to mind the controversial federally sponsored community development program: the Company of Young Canadians. However, as Ruth Compton Brouwer reminds us, before there was a domestic “Peace Corps,” or even an American Peace Corps, there was Canadian University Service Overseas (cuso), Canada’s foremost international youth volunteer organization. Through more than one hundred interviews and extensive archival research, Brouwer’s study hopes to rescue cuso and its volunteers from this collective amnesia. Though she claims not to want to romanticize the good old days, she does contend that its efforts were indeed part of a “better time” in Canadian foreign and development policy.

The opening two chapters of the book, which document cuso’s origins and first forays overseas, cover ground familiar to those conversant with the great outpouring of youthful idealism during the 1960s. cuso, like other youth organizations of the 1960s, attracted middle-class young people motivated by the call to service on behalf the disenfranchised. Brouwer notes that while religious motivation was a chief factor behind this flowering of volunteerism, by the end of the decade much of the rhetoric of the “brotherhood of mad” was expressed in secular terms. Most interesting, though perhaps underexplored, is Brouwer’s revelation that women often composed the majority of cuso volunteers. She argues that the presence of “women in development” revealed both the limits and the possibilities for young women in a period of rapid social, cultural, and sexual change.

Also central to Brouwer’s analysis is the turbulent relationship that developed between cuso and the Canadian International Development Agency (cida). While cuso volunteers originally distinguished themselves from their Peace Corps cousins by their independence, like many future ngos, cuso eventually became heavily dependent on state support. By the early 1970s, that relationship became, for both good and bad, symbiotic; cuso depended on cida for funding and legitimacy, while cida relied on cuso for advice, policy direction, and most of its key personnel. However, as the innocence and naïveté of the original cohort wore off, tensions in that relationship grew. Brouwer documents how cuso, no longer satisfied by establishing “goodwill” across the North-South divide, became divided between the “socialist roaders,” who threw their support behind liberationist struggles, and pragmatists, who argued that a more professional and business-like approach was key to improving the fortunes of the world’s poor. By the end of the 1970s, these tensions jeopardized its public support and led to a permanent division between its French (suco) and English wings. Only the “cuso mafia,” which had come to inhabit key posts at cida and within the wider ngo community, saved the organization from an early trip into the history books.

Brouwer ends by examining cuso’s long-term impacts, which she claims, not surprisingly, were more significant at home than overseas. Taking umbrage with popular declension narratives about sixties idealism, Brouwer argues that most volunteers never lost faith in the righteousness of the cause, and they continued the fight for justice, equality, and human dignity in a whole range of activities and organizations upon their return. Through such work as development education, cuso’s returned volunteers were, and continue to be, crucial in compelling Canadians to live up to their image as humane internationalists.

Though the book will be of greatest interest to scholars of Canadian foreign aid and development policy, there is a lot here, particularly in the details of the volunteer testimonies, that will be useful to anyone interested in the changes that swept through Canadian society in the post-1960 period. Her study does much to fill the lacunae of empirical studies in a literature that has focused almost exclusively on institutional and policy development. She also does well to place her study in current debates about the effectiveness of aid and ngos, and within the larger intellectual history of development itself.

That said, there are a couple of...