Conflicting Visions: Canada and India in the Cold War World, 1946–76 by Ryan Touhey (review)

As one who has used the cliché several times myself, it is now becoming trite to point out that historians of Canada’s international relations have begun to look beyond the North Atlantic, and, in breaking out of this traditional ground, they have reached new conclusions about the nature of Canadian foreign policy. Those more traditionally minded historians, interested in Canada’s relationships with Britain and with the United States, had concentrated largely on questions of Canadian autonomy and independence, as well as on the matter of the extent of Canada’s influence with its great power guarantors. These issues are still relevant to the new scholarship. But in looking at Canadian relations with the non-western world, particularly in the period after the wave of post-1945 decolonisation, historians such as David Webster, Kevin Spooner, and Robin Gendron have posed other questions about Canada’s engagement with the world. Often, they have drawn troubling conclusions, especially once cultural factors and economic power have been thrown into the mix. Canada, these scholars have reminded us, is a western country, with policymakers who thought in western terms. The point is worth stressing because many Canadians had – and have – seemingly bought too much into the rhetoric that Canada is a nation of mild-mannered, tolerant ‘honest brokers’.

Yet as Ryan Touhey stresses in Conflicting Visions – perhaps the best of this superb new crop of historical work on Canada’s international relations – Canadians took seriously the notion that they could act as a bridge between the west and the rest. In this well-written and richly detailed book, Touhey makes the convincing case that India was central to this ‘bridge thesis’ (p. 3), which fits Canadians’ self-aggrandising view of their country as a ‘middle power’. Since it was the first major country to emerge out of the post-1945 collapse of empire, and since it played a central role both in defining non-alignment and in leading the Non-Aligned Movement, it was natural for Canadian officials to put great stock in India and in their relationship with their Indian counterparts. Touhey’s coverage of Indo–Canadian relations extends from the months just prior to India’s emergence as an independent state to the souring of bilateral relations in the wake of India’s 1974 test of a nuclear bomb, a device built with plutonium from a Canadian reactor. He shows that except for a few brief years in the mid-1950s, there was not much warmth between the two countries.

As Touhey makes clear, preconceived cultural, religious and racial notions about India, many of them the result of Canada’s British imperial heritage, influenced Canadian notions about the subcontinent and its peoples. Moreover, he stresses – as the book’s title suggests – that much of the reason for the lack of a strong bilateral relationship was that Canada and India embarked on separate paths, with both countries keen on advancing their own interests, as well as those of their respective Cold War blocs. Like other recent books on Canadian international history published by UBC Press, Conflicting Visions draws on a source base that is not just multi-archival but international. The result is an exemplary work of history.