Canada at the League of Nations
The League of Nations was founded on 10 January 1920. Mackenzie King and Ernest Lapointe, like Sir Robert Borden and many other Canadians, had initially viewed membership in the League as a vehicle to display to the world Canada’s postwar autonomy within the British Commonwealth of Nations. The significant contributions of the dominions and India in the First World War had opened the way to their postwar membership in the League and the International Labour Organization, membership which had been hailed by nationalists as, among other things, an assertion of sovereignty. Britain would no longer represent the dominions in international organizations, which would presumably in turn foster in Canadians a new and closer interest in international affairs.
Borden, who had clarified Canada’s evolving postwar international status by taking Canada into the League, remained for the rest of his life its advocate, eventually becoming in retirement the president of League of Nations Society in Canada, but he too had always kept Quebec in mind, with its deeply held misgivings about possible implications of collective security under the League. Both Borden and King were wary of becoming involved through League membership in European conflicts, distinct in their minds from shared imperial interests. The rub was that the League’s Covenant contained commitments no more welcome to isolationists than were the real or supposed imperial commitments of the past. Borden, Meighen, and King agreed broadly in their distrust of those clauses in the League’s Covenant that, in certain defined circumstances, would pledge member states to consider participating in collective sanctions, initially economic and ultimately military, against a deemed aggressor.
In the language of multilateral diplomacy, Article X of the League Covenant pledged member states to “preserve as against external aggression the territorial integrity and … independence of all Members.” Article XVI went on to say what should be done by the League in the way of sanctions against a recognized aggressor, forward commitments that had been too much for isolationists in the postwar United States. Partly for that reason, in March 1920, a final resolution seen as opening the way to United States membership in the League failed to receive the necessary two-thirds support in the Senate. The League had thereby been dealt a near-mortal blow at its inception, rendering it in time in the eyes of King and other skeptics a largely European and hence fundamentally limited organization. Yet a fellow Liberal, Newton Rowell, who had served as a minister in Borden’s wartime union government, saw European politics as the very reason why the League had to be supported. He told the first assembly of the League in 1920, “it was European policy, European statesmanship, European ambition, that drenched this world with blood.”1 The League of Nations was, in short, the only alternative to a second world war.
The absence of the United States also raised questions dating back to its architects’ original concept of economic and military sanctions. President Woodrow Wilson had been a principal author of Article X, believing it to be crucial to the League’s role as international peacekeeper, but Borden had from the beginning recognized the opposition in Canada. He understood well that most if not all of Quebec’s sixty-five seats in the postwar House of Commons would continue to elude the Conservative Party for a long time to come. To begin to counter Quebec’s deep suspicions of his party, Borden attempted to take a major role in the 1919 negotiations that finally led to a formal Canadian resolution – which failed by the single vote of Persia – that would have reformulated League sanctions and hence collective security.
For his part, Mackenzie King, having striven to convince Quebec that membership in the British Commonwealth of Nations carried no obligations to engage in imperial military excursions, eventually became equally vocal in his opposition to any such apparent obligations in membership in the League of Nations. In London in 1923, in line with his 1918 book Industry and Humanity, he described to Lord Robert Cecil, a major architect of the League, how much he valued it as a place to talk. “The great thing about the League of Nations [is that] it is teaching all countries a common language – using language in a broad sense, of like concepts and ideas.”2 Accordingly, he put through the House of Commons on 21 June 1926 a special resolution stating that “before His Majesty’s Canadian Ministers … signify acceptance of any … agreement involving military or economic sanctions [by the League], the approval of the Parliament of Canada should be secured.”3 Throughout the next decade, he remained determined to demonstrate to Quebec in particular that he had recognized on behalf of Canada no collective security obligations, however some might interpret the League Covenant. It would always be for parliament to decide. For King, with his eye on Quebec, membership in the League was not to be a case of out of the imperial frying pan into the League fire.
Given the failure of Borden and others to revise formally the League’s Covenant, King responded to isolationists in Quebec and elsewhere by rejecting any interpretation of the Covenant that committed member states to military sanctions against a deemed aggressor. His solution was not to pursue any further attempts to rescind the doctrine of collective security, but rather to regard the League as a forum for talk, for conciliation and negotiation, and not for coercion, just as he had long been convinced that industrial peace would emerge from conversations between employers and employees. In this light he wrote to a friend in the United States, “I am heart and soul for a League of Nations, imperfect as the beginnings of its organization must necessarily be.”4
At the same time, two of the more prominent supporters of the League in public life were Quebec Liberals: Ernest Lapointe, minister of justice, and Raoul Dandurand, government leader in the Senate. Both were convinced that while membership in the League affirmed for all to see Canada’s autonomy in the British Commonwealth, a close watch had to be kept on any ambitions of other League members to move from talk to action, to back collective security decisions with economic and even military sanctions. Lapointe, as a later president of the League of Nations Society in Canada (succeeding Borden and Sir George Foster), was tireless in presenting to Quebec Canada’s membership as underlining its freedom from anachronistic imperial centralist constraints. King, however, was in time to worry that Lapointe might project in Geneva an exaggerated interpretation of Canada’s independent place in the collaborative British Commonwealth, a stance that would be unwelcome in English Canada – and to King himself. In 1927, fearing that a French Canadian might go too far in proclaiming reservations about the League’s powers, King conceded reluctantly to Lapointe’s demand that Senator Dandurand be a candidate for a three-year term on a non-permanent seat on the League Council. Lapointe, who had himself been a delegate to the League Assembly in 1922 and 1923, went to the point of threatening King with resignation if he did not support the election of Dandurand, who would keep his eye on the League.
For Ontario, the ever-cautious King, wanting to keep his own eye on Dandurand and on the League itself, and after a visit to Ottawa by British prime minister Stanley Baldwin, stood for election in 1928 to one of the honorific six vice presidencies of the League Assembly. To the House of Commons in February 1929, he set forth for the benefit of English Canada his government’s attitude toward the League. “Canada perhaps as much as any country in the world is united in its efforts to further the work of the League of Nations … We, who are supporting so splendidly the work of the League in all its activities, will wish to see that work strengthened and furthered.”5 In the election of July 1930, the Conservatives defeated King’s Liberals, so it was for the new prime minister, R.B Bennett, to show how splendidly or otherwise Canada was supporting the League. Although Bennett himself was later determined to display support for the League, despite contrary advice from isolationists and Skelton in particular, his government got off to an uncertain start in its League policy.
On the other side of the globe, the military dictatorship in Japan, intent on garnering essential raw materials wherever and however it could in what it presented as a “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,” staged the Mukden incident in September 1931, following conflict between Russian and Chinese forces in Manchuria. After seizing the city, Japanese units spread out across the ill-governed Chinese territory of Manchuria and also later clashed with Chinese forces in Shanghai, aggression that was in time to lead to a full Sino-Japanese war. In September 1932 the Chinese government brought Japan’s seizure of Manchuria before a special assembly of the League of Nations, but amid the distractions of the economic depression, little consensus or even interest emerged in Geneva concerning what, if anything, should be done. The United States, long committed to China, at least via its missionaries and entrepreneurs, and not a member of the League, attempted to cooperate with it, but the League’s major members displayed little enthusiasm for engaging in an unedifying dispute in a remote corner on the other side of the world from Geneva.
Canada was soon seen as pro-Japanese. Its delegate to the special assembly was Charles Cahan, Bennett’s secretary of state (not to be confused with secretary of state for external affairs, a cabinet post which the new prime minister, like his predecessor, had retained for himself). Walter Riddell, who from 1925 had served as Canada’s advisory officer at both the International Labour Organization and at the League of Nations, later recalled, “Many years previously he [Cahan] had represented Canadian financial interests in certain hydro-electric developments in Mexico and had very decided views regarding countries with weak or unstable Governments. He shared the common view that China was one of these countries and therefore he had a great deal of personal sympathy with Japan.” Riddell, disconcerted by Cahan’s independent stance, informed Ottawa that upon the minister’s arrival in Geneva,
I gave him a copy of our instructions … and said that they seemed to cover the ground very well as I felt the chief task of the Assembly was to try to uphold the new system of peaceful settlement of international disputes … I also told him that the Government desired to be kept continuously informed of the progress of the negotiations … From the standpoint of collective security the result [of the Assembly’s deliberations] was bad. It had given comfort to an aggressor who had taken the law of nations into its own hands … This is the very opposite of what our instructions had been intended to do. I therefore took the first opportunity to urge upon the Canadian Government that they should correct the misleading impression regarding their attitude.6
Bennett accepted the advice of Riddell and that of the acting undersecretary for external affairs, Norman Robertson (Skelton being absent in London), to correct the misleading impression left by Cahan’s speech. In a statement to the League Assembly, Riddell voiced Canada’s support for an ad hoc commission (the Lytton commission) that eventually condemned the Japanese aggression, but did little else. Japan created the puppet state of Manchuko and withdrew from the League.
In a brief debate in the House of Commons, both King, now leader of the opposition, and J.S. Woodsworth of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) endorsed Riddell’s statement in Geneva, in some part as a means of embarrassing the new Conservative government. King did not draw on his prewar understandings of Japan and China or his acceptance of the traditional conviction in London that the friendship of the industrial and militaristic Japan was key to the maintenance of the British Empire across Asia, particularly through lightening the load on the Royal Navy. Short of publicly disavowing one of his senior ministers, Bennett was left with no option but to explain that “he did not think it would be wise … that we should endeavour, with the slight knowledge that we possess, either to blame or praise this country or the other in matters so serious as those involved in the differences between Japan and China.”7 The failure of the League membership to support a decisive collective security response to Japan’s aggression was not lost on Mussolini and the leader of the ambitious Nazi party in Germany, Adolf Hitler.