Mental maps and Canada’s post-war Asian policy
| Author | David Webster |
| Published date | 01 December 2020 |
| Date | 01 December 2020 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0020702020980771 |
| Subject Matter | Scholarly Essay |
Scholarly Essay
International Journal
Mental maps and
2020, Vol. 75(4) 548–562
! The Author(s) 2020
Canada’s post-war
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DOI: 10.1177/0020702020980771
Asian policy
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David Webster
Department of History, Bishop’s University, Sherbrooke,
Canada
Abstract
This article takes up the concept of mental maps as lens through which to survey
Canada–Asia relations. Before Canadians could embrace Asia politically and econom-
ically, they had to stop imagining Asia as culturally distant. Their mental maps—the way
they imagined the world—formed the invisible background to policy-making. Through
an engagement with Greg Donaghy’s work on Canadian relations with Asia, this article
makes the case for using mental maps to understand trans-Pacific relations.
Keywords
Canada–Asia relations, mental maps, Canadian foreign relations, Greg Donaghy, Lester
Pearson
“La carte est un secours que l’on fournit par les yeux a` l’imagination.” [The map is a
help that we provide through the eyes to the imagination]
– Henri Abraham Chatelain, Atlas Historique (Paris, 1705)
Canadian approaches to Asia have always been held back by “contradictory
impulses,” Greg Donaghy wrote in one of his many co-edited books, this one with
fellow trailblazer in research on Canada–Asia relations, Patricia Roy. While
Corresponding author:
David Webster, Department of History, Bishop’s University, 2600 College Street, Sherbrooke, Quebec, J1M
1Z7, Canada.
Email: dwebster@ubishops.ca
Webster
549
“Canadian traders, diplomats and missionaries maneuvered for access to the
fabled wealth (measured in dollars or souls) of the Orient,” he argued, “racist
restrictions” on migration into Canada undermined Canadian aspirations to
become a Pacific nation.1 If “Canadian international history is currently enjoying
an Asian moment,” as Donaghy wrote in this journal in 2019, it is in significant
part due to his own writing and encouragement to other students of Canadian
foreign relations to look beyond this country’s oft-assumed “destiny as a North
American nation,” one that Canadians have struggled to overcome, and to trade
foreign-policy myths and familiar paths for underexplored and less certain schol-
arly terrain.2
The study of Canada–Asia relations has been bedevilled by facile models, such
as claims that Canada was part of a “North Pacific triangle.” Donaghy rightly
avoided such simplistic frames. Yet his close archivally-driven studies of Canada–
Asia relations always left space for the power of images and perceptions. He
noted the way ideas of difference, assumptions that Asia was far-away and alien,
often hampered those who tried, like Pierre Trudeau, to see not a “Far East,”
but a “New West” beyond Canada’s coasts.3 Canadian mental maps needed to
shift before Canada could truly contemplate effective approaches to Asia.
In this article, I take up the concept of mental maps as lenses through which to
survey Canada–Asia relations. Before Canadians could embrace Asia politically
and economically, they had to stop imagining Asia as culturally distant. Mental
maps that centred the North Atlantic or a “Greater Britain”—still rendered now,
in a more up-to-date fashion as the “Anglosphere” or even “CANZUK”—shaped
the bureaucratic and business reluctance to engage Asia during the period before
the last quarter of the twentieth century. It took a new and “transformational”
mental map to “[sweep] away the traditional hesitations and confining North
Atlanticism” of old, and allow new policies with space for Asia, as Donaghy
wrote.4
1.
Greg Donaghy and Patricia E. Roy, eds., Contradictory Impulses: Canada and Japan in the
Twentieth Century (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2008), 2. This piece is ded-
icated to the memory of Greg Donaghy, whose career centred on thoughtful research, generosity,
and collaboration. He helped so many emerging scholars, then kept pushing us to be better
historians.
2.
Greg Donaghy, “Pierre Trudeau and Canada’s Pacific tilt, 1945–1984,” International Journal 74
(2019), 135; and Greg Donaghy, Tolerant Allies: Canada and the United States 1963–1968 (Montreal
and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002).
3.
Ivan Head and Pierre Trudeau, The Canadian Way: Shaping Canada’s Foreign Policy, 1968–1984
(Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1995), 276; Donaghy, “ ‘Smiling diplomacy’ redux: Trudeau’s
Engagement with Japan, 1968–76,” in Donaghy and Roy, Contradictory Impulses; Donaghy,
‘‘Pacific diplomacy: Canadian statecraft and the Korean War, 1950–53,’’ in Rick Guisso and
Yong-Sik Yoo, eds., Canada and Korea: Perspectives 2000 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press
and the Centre for Korean Studies, 2002); and Donaghy, “Canadian diplomacy and the Offshore
Islands Crisis, 1954–1955: A limited national interest,” International Journal 68 no. 2 (2013):
242–254.
4.
Donaghy discusses the reluctances in “Smiling diplomacy” and the transformation in “Pacific tilt.”
550
International Journal 75(4)
Why do these mental maps matter? Policy decisions are made, as Alan
Henrikson argues, “in the more amorphous, nuanced world of the mental map,”
an image of the world held in the mind of the policy-maker.5 The idea of a mental
map itself is straightforward. Such popular images as “the world as seen from New
York” are easy to grasp. A mental map need not be wrong, but it cannot be
complete: by its very nature it is selective. Through the mental map, “an ordered
but continually adapting structure of the mind,” a policy-maker “acquires, codes,
stores, reorganizes, and applies, in thought or in action, information about his or
her large-scale geographical environment, in part or in its entirety.”6 It is how
people orient and re-orient themselves, there in the mind, a repository of ideas
and beliefs ready to be drawn upon when the time comes to make a policy decision.
Invisibly, mental maps affect and inform policy.
Early Canadian mental maps: The New World and the North
There are certain mental maps embedded in the history of the United States and
Canada. European explorers coined the term “the New World” to describe the
Americas, yet the term’s power derives from the way it was used by settler societies.
The New World, like Edward Said’s Orient or Maria Todorova’s Balkans, was
first created in the mind, not on the map.7 The geographical symbol “New World”
was also a potent mental map for its settler inhabitants, a place of purity and
refuge, distant from Europe’s countless wars, and home to the world’s longest
undefended border.
Canadians read the map of North America differently, diverging from
American believers in a “manifest destiny” to fill up the continent from Atlantic
to Pacific. English Canadians, Carl Berger has argued, “came to see themselves not
as the agent of an Old World culture charged with civilizing the New, but as beings
uplifted and restored by their New World environment whose duty it was to
regenerate the Old.”8 Canada was British, but also North American, and had a
destiny of its own. Mackenzie King summed up this dilemma in a poem on
Canada’s diamond jubilee: “A land of scattered huts and colonies no more/But
a young nation, with her life beating full in her breast/A noble future in her eyes—
the Britain of the West.”9
5.
Alan K. Henrikson, “The geographical ‘mental maps’ of American foreign policy makers,”
International Political Science Review 1, no. 4 (1980): 497.
6.
Alan K. Henrikson, “Mental maps,” in Michael J. Hogan and Thomas G. Paterson, eds.,
Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1991), 177.
7.
Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979); Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
8.
Carl Berger, The Sense of Power: Studies in the Ideas of Canadian Imperialism 1867–1914 (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1971), 31.
9.
King, cited in Norman Hillmer, “The Canadian diplomatic tradition,” in J.L. Granatstein, ed.,
Towards a New World: Readings in the History of Canadian Foreign Policy (Toronto: Copp Clark
Pitman, 1992), XX.
Webster
551
Canadian mental maps also had to make space for differences from the United
States. Spatially, these were presented by the idea of being a “Northern” nation
whose destiny lay in a great future among the nations. “Who, considering our
present and looking back upon the past, can doubt but that a great future is before
these colonies?” asked Alexander Morris as the Northwest was joined to the small
Dominion of Canada. “Nay, is it not manifest that the day must come when they
will play no mean part in the world’s history, and amid the ranks of nations?”10
There was also the continued idea of an imperial tie with Britain, a mental map
that reinforced the idea of Canada as living “between” the United States and
Britain. The 1898 postage stamp that inspires the cover of Asa McKercher’s
new synthesis of Canadian foreign relations history is a powerful representation
of this mental map—and of Canada’s place in that world. A global map, with the
British empire coloured red, the stamp puts North America at the centre, ensuring
that Canada dominates the frame: the largest and most central red tract, topped
with the royal crown. George Parkin, the leading Toronto imperialist, wrote of
Canada as “the keystone of that great arch of outer Empire,” linking the world and
British Empire as “a halfway house and through route of Empire” through its
rivers, its railways, and its frontage on two great oceans.11
After Europe descended into the...
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