The Rise and Fall of a Middle Power: Canadian Diplomacy from King to Mulroney

D.M.L. Farr is professor emeritus of history at Carleton University in
Ottawa and the co-author of Life and Letters of Sir Wilfrid Laurier.

Arthur Andrew served for more than 30 years as a member of Canada’s
Department of External Affairs, heading missions abroad as well as
divisions of the department in Ottawa. (He died in June 1994, a few
months after this book was published.) His account is not a history of
the department during his years of service, nor a memoir, although it
contains elements of both. It reports what it was like to be inside the
department during its “golden years,” while Canada was an active and
influential Middle Power (1945–57), and then to serve in later times
when the department’s former role was radically and, in Andrew’s
eyes, disadvantageously altered.

Andrew sees two damaging blows to External Affairs’ effective ad hoc
manner of handling Canada’s foreign interests. One came with Pierre
Trudeau’s accession to the prime ministership, when a far-reaching
review, Foreign Policy for Canadians (1970), laid down objectives to
guide the pursuit of Canada’s diplomacy. Andrew concedes that the
review was probably a useful exercise, but in his opinion it led to an
emphasis on management by objectives that undermined External Affairs’
former “undisputed primacy in matters of foreign policy.” More
serious was the decision in 1982 to amalgamate External Affairs with the
Department of Trade and Commerce. External Affairs assumed that it would
lead the new superdepartment, that officers with a broad political
viewpoint would prevail in running the department over those who spoke
for commercial ends. This was not to be, and the proof came in the
signing of the Canada–U.S. Free Trade Agreement in 1988. External
Affairs did not make the case strongly enough, states Andrew, that
economic integration with the United States would inevitably limit
Canada’s freedom of action in pursuing its foreign interests. The
Middle Power would become the team player, the loyal member of the
Western alliance led by the United States.

This is not a bitter book, although it tells its story with regret. It
is not an anti-American tract. There is plenty of nostalgia for the
“dear Department” of the author’s early career but there is also
an awareness of the shortcomings in the way the former department
operated. Andrew writes with wit and spirit. The final chapters of the
book set out changes that the author believes would restore the
department’s former purposes and serve Canada’s long-term national
interests.

There are some errors in Andrew’s account of the department and its
work, but these are minor. This is not a scholarly work, so there are no
footnotes and no bibliography (there is an index). The Rise and Fall of
a Middle Power is highly recommended for anyone interested in
contemporary Canadian foreign policy.