Haiti and Cuba
| Date | 01 September 2006 |
| Author | Hal Klepak |
| Published date | 01 September 2006 |
| DOI | 10.1177/002070200606100310 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
Haiti and Cuba
Test cases for Canada, but tests of what?
The many complications for Canada of its relationships with Haiti and
Cuba are often seen as a test of the firmness of its decision to “join” the
Americas. This “decision” was in fact a series of them, taken in the late
1980s, first to enter into a free trade arrangement with the United States,
then to expand it to include Mexico, and finally, abandoning a century of
aloofness, to connect itself to the inter- American system formally by becom-
ing a member of the Organization of American States. Such far-reaching
changes in Canadian foreign policy were not made in a vacuum, but were
part of a fundamental restructuring of Canadian international politics in
line with new international realities the country may well have been avoid-
ing facing for a great many years.
This article will suggest that these decisions were and are in many
senses hedging the nation’s bets about the future and are faute de mieux
rather than long hoped-for stances. In this regard it will further argue that
in Haiti and Cuba one sees tests of the resolve behind this much-heralded
“joining the Americas” and one may well see much more serious tests in
the future. Finally it will be suggested that recent policy decisions regarding
Hal Klepak is professor of history and war studies at the Royal Military College of Canada
and head of the security program for the Canadian Foundation for the Americas
(FOCAL).
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| Hal Klepak |
those countries are reflective of even newer realities Canada can no longer
avoid facing and that this situation will be charged with importance in the
country’s future relations with the hemisphere.
A W O R D O N T H E A M E R I C A S A N D C A N A D A
Canada has until recently considered itself anything but a full part of the
Americas. Tied closely to Europe for centuries, politically and economical-
ly, that connection ensured its physical security from its powerful neigh-
bour, allowed breathing space for national development, provided cultural
counterpoise within the North American context of dramatic asymmetries,
and anchored the body politic as something somehow “different” in the
hemisphere. Monarchical, bilingual, with a Westminster model of parlia-
mentary democracy, with two mother countries, in a rather loose confeder-
ation, Canada was a unique nation within the Americas.
Created essentially by the same war that made the United States a
nation, the British North America that was to become Canada, when not fix-
ated on Europe, was mesmerized by the United States to the south. Source
of two waves of immigration (the Loyalists after the American Revolution
and the land-seekers of the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th cen-
turies), the US was not only frequently a direct military threat but also a
major trading partner with which, from its independence, there was a grow-
ing and mutually profitable link.
The American threat remained for many decades the anchor of
Canadian unity, providing the stimulus to national defence and even
national identification. The fear of being taken over, especially after two
wars of conquest and many raids and border incidents, was slow to go
away.1 And if that threat obliged a willing population to look eastward to
the mother country as a result of being forced to look south as well, it
meant that Canada avoided the fate of Mexico, whose neighbour was of
course less deterred from seizing its territory in a series of moves in the
19th century. The Americas thus represented to Canadians their home but
also the main threat to their peaceful and independent development. They
were appalled by what they saw to the south of the United States: countries
seemingly always in the grip of internal or even external strife and at the
1 Gwynne Dyer and Tina Viljoen, The Defence of Canada: In the Arms of the Empire, 1760-1939
(Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1990), 12-14.
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| Haiti and Cuba |
mercy of Washington whenever its interests seemed threatened by what
was happening within their borders.
In this context, the development of Pan-American institutions held lit-
tle allure for Canadians. The Pan American Union (PAU) seemed, as its
successor the Organization of American States (OAS) was later to appear, to
truly be what Latin Americans called it—either the US ministry of
colonies or ”a congress of mice presided over by a cat.” While Canada
early on developed that affection for multilateralism that brought it into
the Commonwealth and Francophonie, NATO and the United Nations,
the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)
and the G8, and all the rest, the Americas did not seem to offer the same
attraction. The other multilateral groupings were means to an end and
offered potential for “multilateralizing” our relations with the US or at
least for diversifying our linkages with the world. In the Americas, joining
multilateral organizations seemed the opposite and even a risk to national
independence.
Little wonder then that the subject of PAU or OAS membership rarely
came up in Canadian official or public circles. When it did, it was as a result
of trade considerations or in wartime where other issues were in play.2 And
in any case, the United States was not interested in Canadian membership,
fearing a Trojan horse for the British if Ottawa joined. The result of little
“pull” in the Americas for Canada joining and of even less “push” among
Canadians to do so meant that from 1889 at the Pan American conference,
which provided the origins for the inter-American system that we know
today, to 1948 when the PAU transformed itself into the OAS, Canada held
aloof from a Pan American movement that it saw as meaningless for itself,
or even sinister.
By this latter date, however, things on the world scene were changing
in ways that over the long run would have an impact on Canadian views of
the hemisphere. In the short period 1945-47, it became clear that British
power had been simply exhausted by the Second World War (and the first,
of course) and that London could in no sense entertain the idea of taking on
the imperial and international burdens that its world power status had
2 See the treatment of this in various chapters of J.C.M. Ogelsby, Gringos from the Far North:
Essays in the History of Canadian-Latin American Relations, 1866-1968 (Toronto: Macmillan,
1976).
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| Hal Klepak |
previously imposed on it. At the same time, the United States had come out
of the war with superpower status, completely outstripping the traditional
great powers in military and especially economic strength.
The impact on Canada was enormous even if all its ramifications were
only slowly understood. There would, from now on, be no counterpoise
conceivable in North America where US dominance was to be total. London
would no longer seek to have a role there and Canada would be on its own.3
At first Canadians were confident that their own enormously increased
strength and importance, coming out of their extraordinary wartime role at
Britain’s side, would help keep a balance, and that in any case the United
Nations was creating a better world where power politics would be less cru-
cial. But this became clearly a dream as US power came to be absolutely
overwhelming in political, military, economic, and even cultural terms and
Canada’s relative position declined markedly.4
In this context, membership in what seemed a United States-dominat-
ed inter-American system seemed to most Canadians to be little short of
madness. US behaviour in its basic organizations during the cold war
seemed to confirm this negative analysis. Instead, Canada quickly moved to
seeing NATO as the answer in the wake of the increasing irrelevance of the
UN and the dangers of having to “bilateralize” key elements of the rela-
tionship with the US, especially in the thorny matter of North American
defence.
Reality sets in
By the mid-1980s, trends that would put paid to much of Canada’s aloof-
ness from the Americas and especially to “national” policies in existence
since the birth of Confederation in 1867 had become irreversible. The
growth of a North American market, a trend of many decades’ develop-
ment, was by now inescapable. The United States was dominating
Canadian trade to a degree previously unimaginable, with rates between 70
and 80 percent of totals. Protectionism appeared to be gaining ground in
key circles in the US. Still worse, the world at large seemed to be breaking
3 An account of these trends can be found in Jack Granatstein, How Britain’s Weakness Forced
Canada into the Arms of the US (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989).
4 Desmond Morton, Canada and War (Toronto: Butterworths, 1981), 151-56; and John W.
Holmes, Canada and the Search for World Order, 1943-1957, (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1979), 141-95, 229-68.
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| Haiti and Cuba |
down into regional blocs, taking as their model, to at least some degree, the
spectacular success of the European Economic Community. Where could
Canada seek its place in this new and frightening context?
Only the Americas, and especially the US, beckoned Canada, and they
did so with some alarm bells sounding and with an obvious faute de mieux
character as far as Canadian options were considered. After all, the “choice”
of the Americas as Canada’s now real home found a US neighbour more
powerful than ever. Yet the new government...
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