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Review Canada's Post-War Foreign Policy MARGARET DOXEY John W. Holmes, The Shaping of Peace: Canada and the Search for World Order, 1943-57. Volume I. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979. pp. xviii, 339. Index. The Shaping of Peace: Canada and the Search for World Order is the first of a two-volume study of Canadian foreign policy-making between 1943 and 1957, which has been eagerly awaited by members of the Canadian foreign policy community who are well aware of the exceptional qualifications the author brings to his task. John Holmes was a member of the Department of External Affairs for the whole period covered by the study; indeed, some of the memoranda he had occasion to read in his research were his own. He was close to Lester Pearson, whose liberal-internationalist views he shared; he also knew and respected Norman Robertson, Hume Wrong, Escott Reid and other senior Canadian officials who as a group made such a significant contribution to Canadian diplomacy in ·the post-war period. In 1960 Mr. Holmes became Director-General of the Canadian Institute of International Affairs; for many years, both in that position and later as professor of international relations at both the University of Toronto and York University, he has pursued more reflective and analytical paths while maintaining close contact with the practitioners in Ottawa. Earlier collections of essays, some originally presented as talks or conference papers, have provided readers with a distillation of Holmesian wisdom and wit; t the volume under review, together with its sequel, will provide a sustained account of the thinking behind Canadian foreign policy initiatives by a scholar who has both the insider's knowledge and experience and the outsider's capacity for balanced judgement. The Shaping of Peace emphasizes the theme of institution-building in the context of a general recognition of the need to deal convincingly with post-war problems. The democracies had signally failed to make appreciable headway in this area after World War I. The failure of the League of Nations had not destroyed confidence in a world organization and in many respects the United Nations Charter carried forward the principles of the League Covenant. But the need to include all major powers in the new organization - which meant the Soviet Union as well as the United States and the· need for greater emphasis on economic and social cooperation and development were well understood in Ottawa, Washington and London from the Journal ofCanadian Studies Vol. 17, No. 1(Printemps1982 Spring) beginning. When the chills of the Cold War began to affect western capitals, there was in addition a readiness to confront the new threat by building an Atlantic alliance. Professor Holmes deals with these cooperative endeavours in some detail, providing the reader with valuable insights into the processes by which agreements were reached between Canada and its major allies and within the Canadian government itself; as well he offers much greater understanding of the perspectives and objectives of those centrally involved in foreign policy-making in Ottawa. What emerges clearly in every chapter is their confidence that what they were doing was worthwhile and had some promise of success . As Jo Grimond, the former leader of the British Liberal Party, remarks in his Memoirs, apropos of this period and of Britain: "Parliament and Government believed in themselves and what they were doing.... that Parliament and the Government could solve the problems which faced us was taken for granted."2 In the light of the disillusionment of the 1970s and 1980s, such confidence may seem misplaced, and even naive; that it was a feature of the post-war world is not in question and its importance in conferring a sense of purpose and political will should not be discounted. In Canada there was a new commitment to participation in a number of contexts: in UNRRA; in the United Nations and its specialized agencies, especially the Bretton Woods 'twins' and the International Civil Aviation Organization; in peacemaking and peacekeeping ; in the 'new' Commonwealth and in NATO. This was in striking contrast to the pre-war Ottawa attitudes, characterized by John Holmes as "stifling negativism" (p. 25). He notes that the new team...

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