Foreword: Pearson’s Ambiguous Legacy
Robert O. Bothwell · University of British Columbia Press eBooks · 2010
In the spring of 1945, a Canadian delegation took its place in the San Francisco opera house, under the careful supervision of Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King.They were there as members of "the United Nations," the title given to the coalition of countries that was fighting Germany and Japan.They had come to the Pacific Coast city to celebrate the end of the Second World War, not by concluding a peace treaty, but to found an international organization that would prevent another war.Mindful of the importance of the occasion, King had carefully included representatives from the opposition parties, who would be symbolically useful in signifying the unity of the Canadian people behind this new effort to secure the peace.But the politicians -those from the opposition, anyway -would not be doing the real work of the conference.That was reserved for the civil servants who, with civil servants from other countries, would hammer out the details, prepare the speeches, and advise their political masters on what to do, how to do it, and when.Prominent among the civil servants was Lester B. Pearson, the Canadian ambassador in Washington, one of Canada's most effective and experienced diplomats.For Pearson the stakes were high in San Francisco.Bitter experience -the disunity and drift to war in the 1930s, and the failure of the League of Nations -drove him to embrace the new UN organization.Yet at the same time, Mackenzie King issued strict instructions as to how far the UN could or should go -reserving absolute sovereignty (with Canada in mind).Consent and consensus ruled, in King's mind, and the actions of the UN should be made as non-automatic as possible.And, it should be said, King's view was in the overwhelming majority at San Francisco.The UN would be a collection of sovereign nations, but simultaneously, and officially, it was also an organization designed to prevent war -the ultimate sovereign act.That was a significant power, but as one early observer of the UN put it, "The greater the power which is prematurely given to an international organization, the more severe will be the checks which the Member states