Creating Canada’s Peacekeeping Past, by Colin McCullough
| Date | 01 September 2017 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0020702017723557 |
| Published date | 01 September 2017 |
| Author | Michael K. Carroll |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Lajeunesse’s study should be mandatory reading for anyone interested in the
history of Canada’s Arctic policy and the basis of its Arctic maritime sovereignty.
This book should also prove useful to policy-makers. As Lajeunesse has shown,
holes remain in the sovereignty tapestry that covers Canada’s Arctic waters.
Questions will continue to arise. In providing a window into the past developments
that have shaped Canadian legal thinking and Arctic policy, Lajeunesse has done a
great service for those engaging in future discussions, deliberations, and debates
about these issues.
Colin McCullough
Creating Canada’s Peacekeeping Past
Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2016. 272pp. $32.95 (paperback)
ISBN: 9780774832496
Reviewed by: Michael K. Carroll, MacEwan University
Canada used to be a peacekeeping nation. The government’s rhetoric about peace-
keeping and the United Nations certainly waned under Stephen Harper’s
Conservatives, but the decline started much earlier. The election of Justin
Trudeau’s Liberals in October 2015, however, has led many observers to hope
for Canada’s return to a foreign policy based upon the tenets of liberal internation-
alism. ‘‘We need to focus on what brings us together, not what divides us,’’
Trudeau told the UN General Assembly in 2016. ‘‘For Canada, that means re-
engaging in global affairs through institutions like the UN.’’
1
Peacekeeping has traditionally been at the core of Canada’s post-World War II
foreign policy, an issue which Colin McCullough engages with in Creating
Canada’s Peacekeeping Past. To illustrate the introduction and solidification of
peacekeeping as part of Canada’s national identity, he looks at political rhetoric,
high school textbooks, newspapers, National Film Board (NFB) documentaries,
and editorial cartoons from 1956 to 1997. While some might expect the public
representation of peacekeeping to be hagiographic, McCullough demonstrates
that, at points, peacekeeping’s failures and inadequacies were plain for all to
see—as in the cases of Somalia and the former Yugoslavia—yet peacekeeping as
a national activity has maintained its popularity and survived particular missions
or the actions of individuals.
This work is a cultural history of peacekeeping as opposed to a diplomatic or
military history. McCullough does a good job of examining the ways in which
Canadians learned about peacekeeping (anyone who willingly goes back to study
high school history textbooks of a hundred authors deserves serious credit). The
1. ‘‘Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Address to the 71st Session of the United Nations General
Assembly,’’ Government of Canada, 20 September 2016, http://pm.gc.ca/eng/news/2016/09/20/
prime-minister-justin-trudeaus-address-71st-session-united-nations-general-assembly (accessed 6
February 2017).
Book Reviews 437
To continue reading
Request your trial