Independence or quiet diplomacy?

Review article: Independence or quiet diplomacy? DAVID R. MORRISON Stephen Clarkson (for the University League for Social Reform), ed., An Independent Foreign Policy for Canada?, McClelland and Stewart, 1968. During the last decade, more and more Canadians have begun to voice demands for changes in the procedures and priorities guiding the formulation and implementation of our foreign policy. From the New Democratic Party, minorities within the old-line parties, associational groups such as labour unions and churches, the mass media, and other sources have come pleas and suggestions for new approaches to international relations to replace those which many observers regard as complacent, unimaginative , and rigidly tied to outmoded conceptions of the world order. With a few notable exceptions, the active participation of Canadian scholars has been lacking in the processes of redefining goals and reevaluating specific policies. The Canadian Scholar and Public Policy Throughout the twentieth century, the academic community in Canada has produced several eminent scholars who have devoted considerable time and energy to the study of public affairs and political issues both in historical and contemporary perspectives. In most cases, however , the dominant conceptions of detachment and objectivity have precluded serious and searching critical analysis of the norms and values upon which our political life is based. To be sure, the literature of Canadian history, economics, and political science contains numerous studies that are explicitly policy-oriented, but most of these have been lengthy descriptions of institutions and their interrelationships that conclude with a series of recommendations of limited scope. The prescriptions, in turn, 32 have tended to centre upon an evaluation of the discrepancies between the way in which institutions appear to work and the mode in which they should work according to inference to the presumed basic goals of the political community or reference to specific legal arrangements (or governmental aims ). In other words, there has been an implicit ideological commitment to the preservation of the status quo among many scholars who have studied aspects of Canadian society. In the last ten years or so, carnage in Vietnam, mounting tensions based on race and material inequities both within and among nations, the global spread of revolutionary fervour and activism , and several other factors (notably external and internal attacks upon traditional conceptions of the role of the university) have contributed to a growing sensitivity among academicians towards the need to question and explore more fully the basic postulates underlying many aspects of social behaviour in the West. James Eayrs, in his characteristically pungent fashion, offers two alternatives: Before the intellectual are two lifestyles , and two alone. One is the lifestyle of detachment. The other is the life-style of commitment. . .. It is the intellect of commitment which ... I must finally commend . . . because it alone enables the intellectual to do his job. A detached mind may keep watch upon itself, but it watches over a wasteland . Only a mind ethically anaesthetized , morally lobotomized, remains detached from what statesmen are doing to our world.1 Eayrs' life-style of commitment may or may not lead to one's taking a radical stance on the need for change; however, it does involve the intellectual in a search for a broader and deeper comprehension of values - his own, those of other individuals, and those of groups and societies . It substitutes focussed concern for detached complacency. The University League for Social Reform (ULSR), a group of university professors based Revue d'etudes canadiennes mainly at the University of Toronto, was established a few years ago to provide a forum for the discussion of contemporary issues in Canada. One might have expected this group, which defined as its task the adoption of a "broad left-ofcentre approach to current problems,"2 to undertake a fresh and imaginative analysis of social and political relations in order to develop new approaches to the solution of Canadian problems . Some of the contributors to the ULSR's first two books - The Prospect of Change: Proposals for Canada's Future3 and Nationalism in Canada4 - lived up to this expectation, but others tended to rephrase well-worn formulations that reflected an uncritical acceptance of the dominant Canadian intellectual ideology of liberalism. Although a dialectic between competing points of...