Continentalism fulfilled

servative Thought in the Twentieth Century (1970). 23. Where the Macdonald Syndrome can lead is well enough shown by Professor Donald Creighton's current flirtation with the anti-American Left, a trap in which Professor Grant himself languished for a while. Socialism, the collectivist liberalism of the masses, would destroy historic Western and Canadian values far more completely than would absorption into the United States. Nor would it Review article: Continentalism fulfilled W. F. W. NEVILLE The mountain in the East Block has brought forth its mouse. After two years we finally have the White Paper on foreign policy;1 it was hardly worth waiting for. It boldly abandons Pearsonian diplomacy but there the boldness stops. Nonetheless, Foreign Policy for Canadians is not without some interest for it brings into sharper focus two obvious but important points. The first is the crashing irrelevance of setting foreign policy goals when our foreign policy seems increasingly to concern itself with the role of province within the American empire, or, as a surrogate for the United States outside it. The more substantial point relates to the Paper's assertion that foreign policy is the extension abroad of national policy and that national policy is concerned with fostering economic growth, safeguarding sovereignty and independence, working for peace and security, promoting social justice, enhancing the quality of life, and ensuring a harmonious natural environment. The view that foreign policy is an extension of national policy is a commonplace. What is new is the degree to which national policy, and hence foreign policy, is now defined in terms of our own economic and material well-being. Apart from the rather naive assumption that we are actually free to chart our own economic development , there is little in this that is surprising. The primacy of economic growth, material affluence and the business ethos are quintessentially American, and this is an American document stripped, happily, of most of the grandiloquent idealism common to American state papers. It does not actually say that the business of Canada is business (which would be untrue anyway: the business of Canada is 58 leave any distinctly Canadian Identity, since the socialist Ideal Is a homogenized socialist world. (Indeed, the most honest of the New Patriots admit that they would join a socialist United States In a monute.) Guileless conservatives should be warned that the Left Is not Interested In using socialism to preserve Canada. It wants to use Canada to build socialism. American business) ·but there can be little doubt that what is good for General Motors (of Canada) is good for Canada is good for the world. And if the white paper does not speak of our having a civilizing or messianic role to play (a lack of idealism some critics have called this), one can only reflect that it would be pretentious for a province to aspire to a role which the metropolitan power is presently playing so badly. If these seem like rather lugubrious reflections on Mitchell Sharp's magnum opus, they are prompted in part by another, more realistic work, published this year, Close the 49th Parallel Etc., edited by Ian Lumsden.2 Professor Lumsden is also concerned with Canada's national interests, but his concern, and that of the contributors to this collection of essays, is with the way in which Canada and Canadian interests have been subsumed into the larger interests of the American empire. The American empire. It is an arresting phrase and a distressing concept with unhappy connotations for Americans on both sides of the 49th parallel, but is it one that we can avoid? At the beginning of his essay in this collection, John W. Warnock quotes William Appleton Williams' The Tragedy of American Diplomacy on the nature of the modern imperial relationship: When an advanced industrial nation plays, or tries to play, a controlling and one-sided role in the development of a weaker economy, then the policy of the more powerful country can with accuracy and candor only be described as colonial. The empire that results may well be informal in the sense that the weaker country is not ruled on a day-to-day basis by resident administrators, or increasingly...