Robert Spencer
| DOI | 10.1177/002070200806300303 |
| Published date | 01 September 2008 |
| Author | John English |
| Date | 01 September 2008 |
| Subject Matter | Canada-Germany RelationEssays in Honour of Robert Spencer |
Robert Spencer
An Atlantic man
Robert Spencer is an Atlantic man, part of a generation that fought the war
well, believed the Atlantic span was narrow and founded on common values,
and committed its professional lives to preserving the links to Europe when
it was in ashes and, during those more difficult years, when it thrived. At
earnest gatherings of the Canadian Institute of International Affairs (CIIA)
during the winter, at Christmas parties at the men’s clubs, at dinner tables in
Rosedale, and at Couchiching in the summer, they made their case when
the Cold War was young. Through the terrifying confrontations of the fifties
and early sixties, the détente of the later sixties and seventies, and the collapse
of communism in the late eighties, many Europeans and Canadians wa-
vered, but Bob Spencer remained an Atlanticist.
Last fall 86-year-old Bob Spencer journeyed to the rising hills just out-
side Frankfurt for the annual meeting of the Canadian-German branch of
Atlantik-Bruecke, an organization committed to the Atlanticist vision. Sitting
at the table with Bob, I wondered what he thought when Barry Cooper of the
John English is currently the executive director of CIGI, a think tank devoted exclusively to
the study of international affairs. He is concurrently university professor of history and po-
litical science at the University of Waterloo.
| International Journal | Summer 2008 | 533 |
| John English |
University of Calgary lamented that, despite his best efforts, he could not
convert a visiting German student from the pacifism that was so deeply and,
in Cooper’s opinion, unfortunately rooted among contemporary Germans.
Bob Spencer surely recalled other Germans. He fought them in north-
west Europe as a young man. After graduating from McGill in 1941, he
joined the Canadian army and served overseas in the 15th Canadian Field
Regiment. In 1945, he was mentioned in despatches, and in the following
year Spencer—now a captain—wrote the history of his regiment as a part of
Charles Stacey’s historical team in London. He then quickly completed a
master’s degree at Toronto followed by three years at St. John’s College at
Oxford, from which he received his doctorate in 1950. In the same year, he
returned to the University of Toronto as a lecturer and began his remarkable
career as a teacher and an academic leader.
Spencer was part of a postwar generation of teachers who came to a rel-
atively small university in a still provincial city. There were rumblings of ex-
cellence, even a Nobel prize in medicine and a cluster of remarkable
medievalists nurtured by the minority Catholic faith. Political scientists and
economists dwelt in the same department, and there were not yet language
barriers between historians and economists. Indeed, when Spencer returned
to Toronto, the historian Donald Creighton and his close friend the econo-
mist Harold Innis were bitterly lamenting Canada’s entry into the Korean
War. In their view, their former colleague Lester Pearson, now the secretary
of state for external affairs, was blindly leading Canada into the dangerous
embrace of the Americans. It was, in Creighton’s later phrase, a forked road
that would end in a catastrophic loss of identity and direction.
Bob Spencer, who had fought with the British, lived in London, and stud-
ied at Oxford, did not share these views, although in those days a junior lec-
turer probably would not have publicly dissented from the eminent
Creighton. Spencer was a German historian and a veteran who shared Pear-
son’s belief that the Cold War required a continuing American commitment
to Europe and that Canada should play its part, at America’s side, in con-
...
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