Resisting Rights: Canada and the International Bill of Rights, 1947–76 by Jennifer Tunnicliffe
| DOI | 10.1177/0020702020912494 |
| Author | Lucie Lamarche |
| Published date | 01 March 2020 |
| Date | 01 March 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
architecture unifying Germany and setting Europe on its path to integration. A few
questions naturally arise about the connections between rhetoric and reality: how
much did the Helsinki negotiations affect other major international issues and
conflicts? While Morgan states that the shocks of the 1970s did not have a signif-
icant impact on the CSCE, did the East–West negotiations matter beyond Europe,
such as in the Arab–Israeli conflict or the Angolan Civil War? Did Helmut Kohl’s
invocation of “peaceful change of frontiers” mean that the Final Act really
anchored the very idea of Europe into the 1980s and 1990s (16)? Relatedly, how
much did the CSCE unravel the Brezhnev Doctrine when it was Mikhail
Gorbachev’s reformist program that decisively pushed the Soviet Union away
from territorial invasion? Moreover, readers will find that in spite of the frequent
mention of human rights, any longer engagement with more recent historical
interpretations of human rights in history is absent. While Morgan guides us to
think about the connections between the negotiations and the stakes for interna-
tional order and peace at large, we are left to apply those lessons to specific
international questions, lest this book balloon in size.
Neither procedure nor biography, The Final Act does what the best internation-
al histories do and charts the evolution of the idea of peace itself through its
contingent and unpredictable crucible at Geneva and Helsinki, in a process that
Morgan argues amounted to “the most ambitious undertaking of an era of ambi-
tious diplomacy” (2). This rich account weaves together diplomatic, political,
economic, and intellectual histories to raise the CSCE to a level of historical
significance that specialists of international history and international relations
would be remiss to ignore.
Jennifer Tunnicliffe
Resisting Rights: Canada and the International Bill of Rights, 1947–76
Vancouver: UBC Press, 2019. 328pp. US$89.95 (hardcover)
ISBN: 978-0-7748-3818-4
Reviewed by: Lucie Lamarche (lamarche.lucie@uqam.ca), Universit
eduQu
ebec a
`Montr
eal,
Canada
Jennifer Tunnicliffe teaches history at McMaster University. She presents a book
that debunks the myth of a Canadian official’s “dream team” being at the forefront
of international human rights since the Second World War. This is not a new
thesis, and the author herself acknowledges the relevance of previous work accom-
plished namely by William Schabas in 1998 (18).
2
Also, she abundantly relies on
historian Dominic Cl
ement, whose work is along the same lines.
3
In fact, until
almost the last minute before the vote at the UN General Assembly on 10
December 1948, Canadian officials considered all options available to avoid
2. See W.A. Schabas, “Canada and the adoption of the universal declaration of human rights,” McGill
L.J. 43, no. 2 (1998): 403–444.
3. D. Cl
ement, Canada’s Rights Revolution: Social Movements and Social Change, 1937–1982
(Vancouver: UBC Press, 2008).
108 International Journal 75(1)
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