Geoffrey Pearson

GEOFFREY PEARSON

 

[HILL]* Good afternoon. Our guest this afternoon is Mr. Geoffrey Pearson, former Ambassador Pearson, the Executive Director of the Canadian Institute for International Peace and Security, which is sponsoring the present project. We are very pleased that you have agreed to participate in this work, Mr. Pearson, and to provide us with your own perspective on Canadian policy in NATO.

 

[PEARSON] I'm pleased also, because I don't think we've done enough work in Canada on Canadian defence and foreign policy from the point of view of the practitioners. We've done a lot on the basis of history, but we've done very little which is based on the memories of those who participated, unlike the Americans who have done a great deal. I think we need this in Canada if we're going to know our own history better. So the Institute was pleased to be able to help with this work, and we look forward to the additional work that will be done on the basis of grants we've made to York University and to others. Thank you.

 

[HILL] Mr. Pearson, as you know, what we're engaged in here is an oral history. We're trying to trace the development of Canadian interest in NATO over time. We are taking a look at the development of Canadian foreign and defence policies since 1945, and trying to see how NATO fitted into this framework. For example, we are trying to see how has Canada contributed to NATO. We are looking at the ways in which Canada's national interests have been served by membership in NATO and we're trying to determine how effective NATO has been as a mechanism for pursuing Canada's long term goals of international peace and security. These are the types of things we're trying to examine, as we look at the various stages of world development in the last 40 years, through the eyes of those Canadian ambassadors and senior officers and officials, some retired and some still serving, who played key roles in the formulation of Canadian foreign policy or in Canada's efforts inside the NATO organization. Mr. Pearson, the reason we're keen to have you involved in this project, is not only because of your present position as Executive Director of the Institute, but also because of your previous career in the Department of External Affairs, notably as a member of the NATO Secretariat from 1958 to 1961, then in various positions in Ottawa between 1973 and 1980, as Ambassador to the Soviet Union in 1980 to 1983, as Emissary of the Prime Minister during Mr. Trudeau's peace initiative of 1983-84, and in those various other phases of your career which we will touch on as we go along. As I may have mentioned, the way we are approaching these interviews is to look at the various phases of people's careers in more or less chronological order, posing one or two questions about their reflections on Canadian foreign policy, and the wider international scene, before focusing more closely on their periods of directly NATO-related activity. I think I should remark here that the way - we will be proceeding in these two interviews, is that we will deal first with the earlier years of your own life and your career at the Department, and then we will go on to some of the later years and then subsequently return to focus more on the NATO period. I think in fact most of the NATO period will be dealt with in the second interview. I should also say that we are aiming, in these tapes, to be reasonably structured and disciplined in our approach, but without discouraging the spontaneity which I believe is essential to a good oral history. We are looking at Canadian policy in NATO in terms of political and defence issues which arose in the various phases, but we are also looking at things as a very human endeavour, which was experienced by those diplomats, officers and others who were actually carrying out Canada's policies in NATO over time.

 

Part I - Early years, to 1952

 

If we could turn now to part 1 of the interview, this I describe as "the early years up to 1952". Mr. Pearson, you were born in Toronto, and educated in Canada and in England, I believe, completing your school career at Trinity College in Port Hope, Ontario. Subsequently, you went to the University of Toronto and graduated with a B.A. in 1950. Then you obtained a B.A. from Oxford in 1952. I wonder if you could tell us a little about those early years and how they have coloured your outlook on life and on the international scene. I should remark, as a preface, of course, that your family as we all know is a diplomatic one, and I suppose you must have spent some time in Ottawa and with Canadian missions abroad, where international affairs and Canada's role in the world would have been very much part of everyday life. So I really wanted to ask how your earlier experiences have affected your perception of the world scene and especially your views on international peace and security.

 

[PEARSON] Well, my early life was not typical of Canadians, because I did grow up in a diplomatic family and was educated partly in England, when I was young, between the ages of about 9 and 13, quite a formative age, and I grew up as an English school boy playing cricket and suffering in the cold, in the way English school boys used to do, probably still do, and trying to adapt from being a Canadian, to being an Englishman. So I learned early some of the first rules of diplomacy, which are to do with imitating our surroundings, anyway to the point that you can understand them. At the same time of course, as a diplomat, you have to retain your own sense of identity, or else you won't be able to express your own government's or country's views. But I quickly learned how to adapt to foreign surroundings, and they were very foreign. Anyone who has lived in England and especially gone to school in England, would know that just because they speak the same language doesn't mean that they understand you or you them. So, this was quite an - I was the only, I think, foreigner, certainly in the boarding school I went to, and I quickly learned how to speak and not quite think but speak the way they did with an English accent and learned how to play their games. I won a reading prize I remember, and that was a great triumph for a Canadian; we weren't supposed to be able to speak English. But also at home, of course, I was very conscious then and afterwards of my father's work, and the fact that he was in touch with various people, and one read about them in the press and so on, like the Secretary to the Queen and the various politicians. He was not the High Commissioner, but he saw a lot of English officialdom and I came to know some of those people and things like the Coronation of the King in 1938, I was at. That was a tremendous sort of occasion, the last, well not the last, but when the English were really still a top nation and the Coronation was a tremendous celebration. I remember that vividly. And the coming of the war, we were in England then, all of that struck home to somebody living there rather than here, and Munich, I was old enough to be aware of that and be interested in it; and I missed the war. I came home before the war, so that I spent the war years here, and my father went back to London. But that kind of background gave me an interest in, certainly in European affairs, and an interest in what happened in the war, that one wouldn't have had growing up here. Then I went back to Oxford in 1950, for two years. That was much the same, in some ways, because, although there were, of course, more overseas students than there were at school, they were a small minority and most undergraduates were English, who continued to ignore, really, their fellow students from other countries, especially the colonies, and thought of them mainly as good for rowing and some other sports, but not as scholars, rarely as scholars.

 

[HILL] Presumably by that time you'd more or less forgotten how to play cricket.

 

[PEARSON] I hadn't, really, because I had schooling in Ontario where I played cricket and I was good at cricket, so I quite liked going to at least watch it. My years at Toronto, where I was before I went to Oxford, were more satisfying for me. I preferred the Canadian environment and enjoyed the usual sort of undergraduate experiences. I lived in residence at Trinity, which was a tremendous experience, much better than living in some dreary rooming house which they seem to do now. I made a lot of friends. There was a very good history department at Toronto, then the best in the country, one of the best in the world probably, with Creighton, Underhill, and Martin. Frank Underhill in particular influenced me because of his views on the relations pertaining between London and Canada, which I knew about at first hand. I guess I was a bit of a radical then, because I didn't feel at all sympathetic to English causes.

 

[HILL] What about the consciousness of NATO and its emergence in this period. You must have been aware of that; it had been a fairly sizeable feature on the international scene.

 

[PEARSON] Well, I think the post war period largely passed me by. I was an undergraduate, and I really didn't think much about, for example, atomic weapons, although they were the great new thing. I suppose undergraduates probably accepted the war as over for good in a sense. Most people assumed that the war would not be repeated and that there couldn't be a third war to end war. So the undergraduates, more or less, accepted that this was finished and foreign affairs, therefore, was interesting but not vital. I went to Europe one summer to the World University Service Seminar in Holland. That revived my interest, I guess, in European questions, because of the German students who were there, and the Dutch students and the others who had been through the European war. Young Canadians really had so much to learn; we knew almost nothing about that; that experience helped me to sharpen my interest in foreign policy again. When I went to Oxford in 1950, NATO had just been born; again, I don't think it was a great subject for anxiety. We didn't talk very much about war. The Korean war began in 1950, but it didn't seem at the time as though it would amount to anything affecting England or Europeans. I suppose there were times when it might have expanded, but I don't remember it being anything which influenced me very much. Nor did NATO in that sense, because although Canadian troops came back to Europe in 1950, they went to Germany. There weren't any in England and we didn't have any sense of Canadians having to fight again. I hadn't decided then to join External Affairs. I was taking English literature and I was more interested in Shakespeare than in foreign policy. But I got married and so needed a job, and not having a doctorate, it would have been hard to find a job teaching English. So, I joined External Affairs, after doing my exams in London in 1952. So that sort of decided things. I couldn’t really change and go back to some other career after that. I have often wondered what I would have done if I had gone back to University to teach English literature. My father’s career was a bit like that; he started by teaching history. Anyway, I think my real interest in diplomacy began with my posting to Paris in 1953, to the Canadian Embassy.

 

Part II - The Embassy in Paris. 1953-57

 

[HILL] I’d like to ask you about that later, in part 2 of the interview. As I understand it, you spent a year or so in Ottawa after joining the Department, and then were posted to Paris, to the Embassy.

 

[PEARSON] Yes. I started in Ottawa with the usual round of assignments for three to six months in various Divisions. Work in Defence Liaison Division was of interest, especially vis-a-vis the United States. We were then beginning to negotiate the bilateral agreements with the United States which have since developed into the whole panoply of North American defence co-operation. But I wasn't high enough up to develop any great knowledge of them until later. Then I went to Paris.

 

[HILL] You were in Paris from '53 to '57.

 

[PEARSON] '53 to '57; at the time, France was still a very divided country. Having had the awful experience of occupation with people from amongst the same families who had supported either Petain or De Gaulle. It was a very sour mood, a difficult, impatient and humiliating mood. There was a very live Communist party to take advantage of it.

 

[HILL] It was the year also of Dien Bien Phu.

 

[PEARSON] And Algeria. *54 was a key year for the French, because they were defeated in Indochina, and the opening shots were fired in Algeria. These were taken to be simply the work of a few bandits who had caused trouble in some small town in Algeria. There was nothing to worry about. The "few bandits" increased to become the FLN which in turn became the government of Algeria in 1962. I was in Paris for most of that period. That was a time when NATO was truly divided. Disputes between NATO countries how are over minor questions mostly, although Greece and Turkey have major differences of opinion and conflicts of interest. But then, French policy in Indochina and in North Africa split the Alliance.

 

[HILL] Plus, of course, Suez.

 

[PEARSON] And Suez later, added to that. We forget when we talk about NATO solidarity, and so on, that there were times when there was no question of any solidarity. That had nothing to do with the Russians; it was a matter of decolonization and different views about what the right policies were, and it divided the allies at the UN on these questions. I think Canada tried to vote with France as long as we could, certainly on the Algeria question. But that was a time when the Soviet threat, as we have come to call it, was of less concern than these internal allied problems.

 

[HILL] So you arrived there in the year of Stalin's death and there was the whole period of de-Stalinization.

 

[PEARSON] That's right, and I took little interest in that, because of the greater problems the French were having just running their own country. Their governments lasted about a year on average, and the Communist party was the largest French party, with 27 or 28 percent of the vote. The Christian Democrats also got about that.

 

[HILL] They got to almost 30 percent, the Communists.

 

[PEARSON] They were very close to that, and the whole problem was how to keep them out of government. The Communist party was thought to be linked to the Soviet Union, and it was not the Soviet military threat, therefore, that people were concerned about; it was the political threat that if you had the Communist party in power in France or Italy, the Alliance would be undermined from below, so to speak. That was the main concern. The question of a Soviet invasion or Soviet use of force was less acute anyway because there was hope then for a change in Soviet policy. France was still a relatively poor country—we could only get meat about once a week in Paris. That was in '53, seven years or eight years after the War. It was still a country suffering from the effects of war, and trying, simply, to sort itself out, both politically and economically; France was then the sick man of Europe.

 

[HILL] What were your duties at that time?

 

[PEARSON] I worked on internal French politics and the domestic political scene, and went to the political party conferences.

 

[HILL] It must have been fascinating.

 

[PEARSON] I reported solemnly on all these goings on in France, but I don't think they were of much interest in Ottawa. We'd rather given up on France, as an unreliable country which didn't know how to run itself, whereas we Canadians had been electing Liberal governments for years and knew how to run things. Canadians had a double standard in regard to the world; there was no bilingualism in Ottawa to speak of (we weren't made to learn French) and France was rather on the periphery of our foreign policy, even though it was one of the two mother countries. Quebec was not active at the time in foreign policy and Ottawa paid little attention to Quebec views. It wasn't until De Gaulle came into office at the end of the decade that we sat up and began to take notice again. At the same time, of course, Lesage in Quebec was beginning to make a difference there. So the early years in Paris were strange, in retrospect, because aside from Indochina, where after 1954 we sent j peacekeeping troops, we did not have any common political/military interests outside Europe. We had the air division in the north of France in Metz, and I don't recall any major problems over that at all. The only problems came when we had our differences with the French on these colonial questions.

 

[HILL] What about the interest in the European movement and so on? Was there much interest in Ottawa in that?

 

[PEARSON] Yes, there was, in the sense that German re-armament was an issue. Efforts to bring Germany into a European Defence Community were very much favoured in Ottawa, but were rejected by France in 1954. So, the whole European movement, which the French had begun to lead earlier, was set back, and Germany took its place in the Alliance under different circumstances.

 

[HILL] The negotiations and protocols to the treaty allowing German accession to the Western European Union were when?

 

[PEARSON] In ’54; '54 was an important year. But on the whole defence questions were not the major ones in our relations with France at the time. It may well have been different in NATO.

 

[HILL] Did you have any personal connections with other Canadian diplomats serving with NATO? But then one does tend to live in rather different worlds, I think. Was that the case?

 

[PEARSON] Yes, we had lots of connections, but did live in quite different worlds; the people in NATO thought the embassy was unimportant. They quickly developed that superior mystique about international organizations compared to bilateral relations. We at the embassy thought what mattered was the bilateral relationship, although Ottawa showed little interest in it. Ottawa looked to international organizations as the leading edge of foreign policy, both in NATO and the UN, and in the Commonwealth. Bilateral relations suffered for that reason. Officials in External Affairs had become thoroughly multilateralized. That was the vision of the future. The embassy in Paris was never taken very seriously, because in Ottawa they preferred to do things through NATO, through the UN or some other way.

 

[HILL] That's a fascinating comment, because at that time I was . living in England and I know everyone there, I think, took a close interest in things like Dien Bien Phu and all French politics. I remember very clearly the night the French Assembly rejected the EDC, which was a big shock to everybody. Not that the British themselves were ready to join in it. I remember the election of M. Poujade. At that time France had seemed to become, as you said, virtually ungovernable in one way or another. Then the Algerian war broke out of course...

 

[PEARSON] Yes, poor France, and of course France was outvoted in the UN after the newly independent countries were admitted, the first in '58 I think—it was a very real problem for France at the time, especially over Algeria. The Algerian war was a priority for France, and it had almost nothing left for the defence of Europe. So it's helpful to keep a sense of perspective when we think today about whether we have enough troops to face this Soviet advantage in conventional weapons. In the '50s, there was nothing there, virtually nothing. The German army hadn't started yet, the French were in Algeria, the British were not doing very much; NATO thought they had no alternative but to turn to nuclear weapons.

 

[HILL] That was also a period of some very significant changes in East-West relations, in terms of the developments in Poland, and the Hungarian uprising, and so forth. It was a period of forward movement in a sense, but also remained touchy in other ways.

 

[PEARSON] Very sensitive, and difficult, especially after Suez in '56, which was the nadir in inter-alliance relations. I was in France then and our relations very rapidly deteriorated after Suez. Mr. St. Laurent was outraged by what happened and said so, and while most of the problems or the after-effects were with the British, the French were also part of the process of dispute. In . fact, they were the main cause of the problem, because the Israelis had been negotiating with the French before the British. We knew that in the Embassy, partly because of rumours, partly because of evidence we had been able to discover through contacts. We knew the Israeli Defence Minister had been in France and that sort of thing, and reported that. We didn't know they were going to attack Egypt, but we knew something was going to happen. Our relations with France recovered, but as they weren't very close any way, it didn't matter all that much. It didn't affect our forces in Europe.

 

[HILL] Of all the crises which have faced NATO since the beginning, that one probably came closest to tearing the Alliance apart.

 

[PEARSON] I think it did, because of the American reactions at the same time. The telegrams addressed to Eden by St. Laurent were very tough telegrams and so were the replies. So, that was a very interesting time to be there, although I spent more time on Indochina because of our involvement from '54 onwards with that. The main source of knowledge about Indochina was Paris, and Canada had to learn everything about Indochina from the French. One of the first telegrams I got after the agreement to go into the control commissions was : "Do the French have a good map of Vietnam?" Our people had to go out there, but they didn't know where they were going. I remember going down to the Ministere de la Guerre, to ask for a map, a good detailed map.

 

[HILL] In this period, also, your father was involved in writing the report on improving NATO?

 

[PEARSON] Yes.

 

[HILL] Did you have much contact with him then?

 

[PEARSON] Yes I did, because he came to Paris to write most of it, and spent time there in a hotel trying to put it together. I saw him a fair amount. That report was written mostly by Canadians and a lot of it by him personally. His main help came from Lange, the Norwegian, who was a good personal friend of his, and also thought much like he did. The Italian, Martino, was a medical doctor, who was less interested in some of these political questions but was easy to cooperate with. But it was Lange and my father who wrote the report. Canadians had a vital interest in the whole process of consultation in NATO, and had thought much about it. It was just like writing out a script, one that you learned years before, so I don't think the report itself was all that original, at least for Canadians. It seemed to be new for Americans, and maybe some of the Europeans, but for us it was just a normal way to go about the conduct of an alliance. We put great emphasis on Article 2 again, on what NATO potentially could become. The emphasis on the non-military side of the Alliance was a helpful reminder, especially to the Americans and the British and the French, that the Alliance could break up if the smaller allies weren't treated more as equals. It is a document that is still relevant. But the problem always has been how to translate those principles into practice; and you know they haven't really settled such questions as whether you should have politicians around the NATO table, or civil servants, or whether these people should have special access to their governments at home.

 

[HILL] I think it smacks to me very much of good sound Canadian common sense, when you read the report. For example, the section emphasizing that the machinery may need a few adjustments but basically is satisfactory and that what really was required was proper implementation of consultative practices.

 

[PEARSON] Perhaps that was Canadian common sense, but we weren't prepared really, any more than anyone else, to give to the NATO Council decision-making authority about questions that we thought were vital to us. We weren't going to consult them on these bilateral arrangements with the Americans, for example, on defence questions. It looks sometimes as though Canadians are preaching without really being prepared to live up to the sermon. We have to be careful about that. But nevertheless, I think my father was realistic about these matters. He had been the Foreign Minister for eight years so he stopped short of laying down the law about consultation—the report was written in terms which were not offensive to the others. But whether you can ever expect the United States, in particular, to consult its allies about questions which it considers of vital national interest is a moot point. The Americans say: "All right, if we put these questions on the table you don't say anything, because you're afraid to commit yourselves. If we don't put them on the table, you complain to us because we're not consulting'*. And often that was true, Mr. Dulles would consult the Allies, and the Allies would be afraid to say anything - either they'd have to oppose it, which they didn't like to do, or if they said yes, they'd be in trouble at home. It was all very well to say, "please consult us", but then, they might have to do something.

 

Part III - Advisor on Arms Control and Disarmament. 1978-80

 

[HILL] Part III, advisor on arms control and disarmament, 1978 to 1980. We are now moving over the NATO period and some other phases in your career, and we'll return to those on the second tape. From 1978 to 1980 you were advisor to the government on arms control and disarmament: what about the reaction of the Canadian public to arms control and disarmament - how interested were they in that issue at that time?

 

[PEARSON] The trigger for public interest was the Special Session on Disarmament in 1978, which in fact led to my appointment. The Special Session was widely covered in the press, and was the subject of an address by Mr. Trudeau, that caught everybody's attention, when he elaborated his strategy of suffocation of the arms race. It was one of the more innovative proposals put to the Special Session, and I think was widely supported in Canada amongst the public, although not by all officials in Ottawa, some of whom thought it was too radical and utopian. I was left with the task of following up on that speech. I was appointed right after the special session as the first advisor on arms control and disarmament since General Burns. General Burns had been given greater authority, in that he was able to report directly to the Minister, whereas I was asked to report through the departmental process. Nevertheless, it was an indication of the Government's/ intention to try to implement some of the ideas that had been put forward in the Special Session. There was a good deal of public support for these. We formed a consultative group with non-governmental organizations, in order to have a continuing dialogue with the public, and we created the disarmament fund which was small, in the beginning, about fifty thousand dollars, but which grew over time to closer to a million dollars. So, we had the instruments in place for consultation and for help to research and to public participation. And these, I think, were the bases for subsequent Canadian policy in terms of initiatives and work on disarmament, especially in the realm of verification, which we have done now for ten years. So, that was an important beginning after some years of inattention after General Burns left, almost ten years. Apart from being members of the Committee on Disarmament in Geneva, we hadn't contributed all that much. The Government's attention was on other things. So this was a return to the period of initiative of the '60s. It wasn't easy, though, to follow up on Mr. Trudeau's ideas. They were difficult to implement anyway, and there was resistance inside the government. The Americans were not prepared to accept his proposals. The tragedy was, in a way, that the Carter presidency became embroiled in domestic problems over SALT, and Reagan, of course, rejected the whole outlook of Carter on relations with the Soviet Union. And our proposals therefore fell into a kind of vacuum in Washington. As a result there was decreasing interest in Ottawa. When I left in 1980, therefore, we hadn't been able to get the Allies to agree on any part of the strategy, which was a pity.

 

[HILL] Did you attempt to promote this through NATO consultation as well?

 

[PEARSON] Yes, we did. We promoted it through NATO consultations, -- especially the cut-off of production of fissionable materials, which was one of the four points of the strategy. We introduced resolutions in the Assembly on that subject which we asked our NATO allies to support. Some did, but the major allies abstained— the British, the French and the Americans—which meant that they weren't prepared to support it in a meaningful sense, and the idea of a cut-off gradually died. It would have meant all kinds of inspection and they weren't ready for that. The Soviets supported it in principle but nobody really believed that they were genuine about it. The Comprehensive Test Ban, which was another part of the strategy, was kept alive, but the Reagan Administration quickly abandoned that goal too. Other parts of the strategy involved a freeze on the testing of new strategic weapons and was bitterly opposed by the United States. So we didn't really stand much of a chance, and our disarmament efforts after the Second Special Session in 1982 fizzled out. We continued to work on verification of agreements but we lost the momentum that we had before. It wasn't really our fault; I think the whole climate changed.

 

[HILL] This was the time of the famous NATO two-track decision. Were you involved in any of that work?

 

[PEARSON] No, not directly. I was working more on the arms control side than on the NATO side. I was mildly opposed to the idea of introducing new weapons into Europe, new intermediate-range weapons, but, as you know, the Europeans were in favour of it, and the Americans went along. We didn't take any lead role in that; neither, at first, did the United States. So that was actually a European show, and when it comes to weapons in Europe, Canada doesn't have much reason to stand out. So I think that was a bit of a non-event for Canadians, who paid very little attention to it. We were then more interested in other subjects, questions of continental defence in particular. But I did go down to the UN every year for my two years as advisor, and apart from our resolution on fissionable materials, we took an interest in verification questions, and in the question of military budgets. We were interested in more transparency and more publicity about what was happening in arms control, and because of our initiatives in '78, we pushed for more studies of these questions, more public involvement, on the basis that if the public knew what was happening governments would find it more difficult--to increase military spending. Perhaps that was an illusion. But we did help the UN to give much more attention to these questions. The UN Disarmament Yearbook was one result of that period, and a great many UN studies which have since been done were partly a result of interest from countries like Canada. Aside from that, we generally followed the Alliance view on atomic weapons. We voted with our allies on almost all the major nuclear weapons questions. I think there were almost none that we stood out against. There were very few dissidents from the majority alliance view then, except occasionally the Danes or the Greeks. There was always tremendous pressure to vote together on major questions of security, and you had to have a good reason not to do so.

 

[HILL] I think that I’d like to close off this part of the interview by asking one or two further questions. It seems to me that in the mid '70s there was relatively little interest in Canada in disarmament, but then subsequently there was a great growth of interest in peace and so on. How do you rate the constancy of the Canadian public's interest in disarmament or arms control?

 

[PEARSON] Well, I do believe that the more information available, the more the public is going to take an interest, especially if the information is from Canadian sources. And over the last few years there has been more such information available, more money available for research, and this inevitably leads to greater public interest and a more informed, educated public. We still have a long way to go. I think we're still under-developed when it comes to knowledge of these kinds of questions, compared to the Germans, the French, the British, who have major newspapers that have full-time defence correspondents, and editorial writers who are experts in these areas. We have no Canadian correspondents still in New York, which is remarkable when you think of it. And we have only recently sent correspondents to Moscow. There is greater knowledge now than there was ten years ago, and there will be greater knowledge ten years from now. I think the long-term trend will be towards asking difficult questions about nuclear weapons, the kind of questions that McNamara and others have been asking since they retired. That's another possible stream of advice and information, the retired officials; although retired Canadian officials mostly disappear from the scene and they cultivate their gardens. But we are a lot more involved than we used to be in terms of public interest. The peace movement cannot be, and should not be, evaluated on the basis of demonstrations in the streets. That's not the point. The point is what are they learning, and writing about. Their publications are far better than they used to be. And you can see it in parliamentary committee reports, although the members of Parliament don't have the staff to do the research that they need. Senator Kennedy has more people on his staff than one-third of our M.P.s put together. We don't have to be like Senator Kennedy, but we do need to have parliamentary staffs which can feed questions into the media and into the House of Commons. We have been living off the capital of American strategic analysis now for 30 years, and it's only in the last few years that we've started to question this, and to ask whether the Canadian situation is somehow different from that of the United States or from that of Britain or Germany. This is a good sign, and should lead to more independent Canadian policies.

 

[HILL] Could you explain further? Is there change under way?

 

[PEARSON] Well, I think the public is beginning to influence policy in ways that they didn't before; but we still have quite a long way to go; you don't see in the current defence debate enough analysis, for example, of the need for things like new submarines and so on. The British Press would have chewed that over for months or years if that had been the issue. We haven't really come to that point yet.

 

[HILL] Here's another question linked to your experience in the 1978-80 period: how valuable, in your view, is NATO as an instrument for the promotion of international peace and security, for example through arms control and disarmament?

 

[PEARSON] I still think it's very valuable. It is the only instrument available to us to promote goals of peace and security in a forum where we have shared values. There were two original impulses for NATO. One was to shore up Western Europe which everybody thought was about to collapse, not because of the Soviets but because of the Communist parties; and the other was to get a hold of the United States, and somehow be able to influence and change American policies. The first reason is obviously no longer valid. Western Europe no longer needs to be saved from Communism. It is now a matter of deterring any military threat from the Soviet Union. But the second motive— of maintaining influence on United States policy—has become even more important. One can say that NATO had no influence on US policy in Vietnam for example, but in fact things would have been different if the Alliance hadn't existed. So in that sense, I think it remains extremely important. It's like any other instrument, you have to use it to keep it effective. The public, there too, tends to be left out, and I don't think knows enough about how the Alliance works or what actually happens. We don't have enough analysts, correspondents, academics and so on writing on the subject.

 

[HILL] We don't at this point have a correspondent in Brussels. Thanks, I think we will adjourn at this point.

 

Part IV - The NATO Secretariat, Paris, 1958-61

 

[HILL] Mr. Pearson, there are two parts of your career I'd like to cover now. The first one is when you were a member of the NATO Secretariat, from 1958 to 1961, and then the other period I'd like to touch on would be your time as Ambassador to the Soviet Union, from 1980 to 1983. If we might examine the first period, your time with the NATO Secretariat, between 1958 and 1961, that was of course in Paris, where you had just previously served with the Embassy. I wonder if you could tell us something about the main responsibilities that you had in that time and also about some of the key issues that arose, as you saw them.

 

[PEARSON] I went there partly because I had a French friend whom I had known while I was at the Embassy who was serving on the NATO Secretariat as the Chef de Cabinet of Mr. Paul Henri Spaak, who had just assumed his duties as NATO Secretary General, and he asked me if I would be interested in working in the Political Section. So this was arranged, and I went there shortly after Mr. Spaak became Secretary General. My time there was spent working with Spaak on the political side of NATO. In fact, Spaak only stayed three years; he went back to Belgium in 1961. But his three years were a very interesting time for NATO, and indeed Spaak brought to NATO the same qualities that he brought to the construction of the European Common Market. That is, he was a strong supporter of federal institutions or common institutions for both Europe and the West, and the most interesting feature of my time there was Mr. Spaak's attempt to persuade the United States and Canada to co¬operate with the Europeans on all matters of common interest, not just matters involving the Soviet threat, but also economic questions and colonial questions and indeed global questions. A factor which prompted him to resign was his disappointment at his failure to bring the United States and Canada (and France, for that matter) to co-operate with these objectives. There were two main reasons for that. One was the opposition of the United States, in particular, but also of others, to widening NATO political consultations to include the so-called colonial territories. This was particularly true, of course, of Algeria, where the French refused to consult anybody; Algeria was part of France; although during my time there, of course, De Gaulle was able to solve that question. The same French view applied to consultations about Tunisia and Morocco. The Belgians were also reluctant to accept any NATO interference, as they might see it, in the Congo.

 

The Americans, of course, took a quite different view of colonial problems than the Europeans. The Americans, especially under President Kennedy, had their eyes fixed on the global issues and were keen to disassociate themselves from the policies of their allies. They rejected Spaak's wish to have a NATO position on u. these questions. The same was true of Canada. Because of our relations with the new Commonwealth, and just beginning with, francophone Africa, we would have nothing to do with any so-called NATO position on these matters. We knew that such a position would be closer to that of the Europeans than to our own views. Spaak himself, I think, preferred the European views. He wanted NATO to. take a strong line against Communist penetration in Africa, especially in respect of the Congo, which was of course a Belgian problem. He wanted to enlist NATO's support for resistance to Lumumba, who as you know was the first Congo Prime Minister, and was thought to be a Soviet protege to some extent. Spaak was a social-democrat but like many European social democrats, strongly anti-Soviet. He ran into difficulties with President Kennedy and with Howard Green, the Canadian Foreign Minister, who would have nothing to do with that kind of policy.

 

[HILL] So then the colonial issue was felt very much inside NATO headquarters?

 

[PEARSON] Spaak felt that the NATO allies should take a global view of security and therefore of the implications of the end of colonialism in Africa. It was of concern to NATO, in Spaak's view, because of a potential Soviet threat to Africa. He lectured NATO foreign ministers on the need to work together to prevent any Soviet penetration of Africa. And he failed; that was not the view of the Americans at the time, although it may be now. That doctrine appalled the Canadians, especially, as I say, Mr. Green, who was busy cultivating new friends at the UN. The UN was where Mr. Green felt most at home, and he went so far as to vote at the UN in ways which he justified on the grounds that we needed the support of the new countries, and if that meant a split with our - Allies in Europe, too bad. Spaak couldn't understand this attitude; they couldn't have been more different, those two men, in the way they approached the value or significance of NATO.

 

[HILL] I believe there was a fair amount of disappointment with the progress of decolonization by '58 and by '60. But still there were differences of viewpoint as to how to proceed in this area.

 

[PEARSON] Yes, and there still are, as you know. The question of how NATO allies should vote at the UN on some of those issues is still a difficult one, whether it’s Nicaragua or Angola or other places. In those days it was Mr. Spaak's views, and the views of some of the other Europeans, which the Americans rejected.

 

[HILL] It seems to me that the Americans and many others in the West were looking for rapid dis-entanglement from colonial empire in that period. Once that had been done, it was felt, the Allies would be able to concentrate much more on security in Europe.

 

[PEARSON] Yes.

 

[HILL] That was felt particular[l]y about the French. Could you comment on that?

 

[PEARSON] One of the major issues in NATO then was the whole question of French policies in North Africa. Of course, the French refused to discuss Algeria, although it was voted upon at the UN. These votes at the UN caused major problems for the NATO allies, Canada in particular being strongly anti-colonial. Denmark and Norway more or less shared our views. The rest of the Europeans, pretty well agreed, if not to stand by the French at least not to vote against them. At NATO these issues were always under the surface. They weren't discussed openly unless the country involved wanted them discussed. Belgium wanted the question of the future of the Congo discussed after the failure of Belgium's efforts to bring about a peaceful transition of power. But Spaak pressed the Allies to agree to common policies and that proved to be impossible.

 

The other major issue at the time was the question of nuclear strategy, after short-range nuclear weapons were introduced into Europe in the late '50s. The NATO Council took that decision in December, 1956. Thereafter the whole question of the control of these weapons was a central policy issue, and it was never settled. The United States insisted on retaining control of any decision to use such weapons. They were American weapons. But the other allies wanted a say in their use. The military objective was obviously to have a decision-making process which was as effective and as rapid as possible, but the political issue was that there should be more than one finger on the trigger. These were contradictory requirements. The issue was of particular interest to Canada at the time because of the introduction into Canada of nuclear weapons as well, the Bomarc missile. What should Canada do? Should Canada have a veto on their use, or should they be brought under NATO? The Canadian government agreed more or less with the other allies that there should be some form of shared control, but the United States really never could accept that. The NATO commander, Norstad at the time, also wanted some form of shared or NATO control. The issue remains alive today. In December 1956, the Council agreed that any attack by the Soviet Union on NATO forces in Europe should be met by the use of nuclear weapons from the beginning. That meant that the question of who took the decision was vital. But it was never spelled out.

 

[HILL] Because this was the time when De Gaulle also called for the Three-Power Directorate.

 

[PEARSON] That was the third issue which emerged from the other one, because the French solution was to say, "We'll forget the rest of them and we three will decide what to do in an emergency or indeed in matters of high policies generally". But that was never feasible, and I don't think the United States was prepared to accept it. It created a lot of tension. It was never formally proposed, so it didn't lead to NATO decision of any kind.

 

[HILL] Where did the discussions on these issues take place inside NATO?

 

[PEARSON] There were private sessions of the Council with no staff present. There was also an arrangement under which the Standing Group could discuss some of these matters, but that was in the military net and we weren't privy to any of that. We were civilians working in the political section, so we were more concerned with political consultations about these colonial questions and about any other questions that arose in Council at the time, especially Soviet policies. Krushchev was a relatively new leader and inspired a certain amount of hope for progress. He came to Paris in 1960 for the Summit, which broke down because of the U2. I remember writing a letter to my father at the time saying what a good thing it was that it broke down because, for us, in NATO, Summits were dangerous. We couldn't be sure what would happen, or how much we would be told. But that was the sort of thing we did - analysis of Soviet policies in Europe and elsewhere. Cuba was an issue then too, of course, after Castro took power in '59, and that was discussed.

 

[HILL] Was this discussed in various committees?

 

[PEARSON] Well, the Group of Three Report in '57 led to the establishment of the Political Committee and the Economic Committee. The Political Committee was where we discussed all of these issues and then recommended action to the Council. Political consultation was greatly increased after '56, as a result of that report, and because Spaak was very keen that it should take place. But it ran into real obstacles over colonial questions and questions of global politics. The Americans under Kennedy were not prepared to submit their global interests to Alliance scrutiny. Apart from that, I helped to write speeches and to brief the Secretary General. I was working for an Englishman who had been the head of the political section in the foreign office; we had a German who was the Deputy Head, two Frenchmen and an Italian - we were quite an international group. We worked mainly in French and English. We were in Paris then of course... beginning at the Palais de Chaillot and then at the Porte Dauphine, just outside Paris.

 

[HILL] So, it was a group of about ten, was it?

 

[PEARSON] Yes, about eight to ten people in the Political Section, of about five or six nationalities. Canada usually had a job or two on the secretariat. When I left, D'Iberville Fortier became the Canadian representative on the Secretariat. He dealt mainly with press and information. There was a lot of competition for jobs on the Secretariat, and on the whole Canadians were not conspicuous by their presence. We were very few. They were mostly Europeans, as I remember. The Americans didn't have many people there, but dominated the military structure.

 

[HILL] I think when I was there the Americans had only seconded people, so they were still a rather limited group, whereas, say, the British and some others, were directly hired by the Secretariat.

 

[PEARSON] That's right, I was seconded for three years. I must say I enjoyed it, because I learned a great deal about Alliance politics. And I became somewhat of a critic of Canadian policy, because we on the whole tended to attach more importance to the Commonwealth and to the UN, or at least so it seemed to me, than we did to Europe or NATO, and I objected to that. Mr. Green was very strong on disarmament and on the UN, and he tended to lecture his colleagues at NATO on the importance of the UN and so on, and they didn't like that. The UN then was just becoming the greatest critic of British policies, French policies, Belgian policies and especially of Portugal. Portugal was the black sheep. His views (Green's) about the importance of the UN were not reciprocated, except possibly by the Scandinavians.

 

[HILL] What would you say about the quality of consultation in NATO and the quality of analysis, for example on Soviet issues?

 

[PEARSON] We had one or two good people on Soviet issues. I'm not sure that the quality was high, though, because our bread and butter was to be anti-Soviet. That was the reason that we thought NATO existed, to act as a shield against Soviet aggression. We tended to interpret Soviet policies in a very cautious - not to say aggressive manner, we were not willing on the whole to accept evidence of Soviet good will, and Spaak certainly wasn’t.

 

[HILL] What about analysis of Third World issues. I mean not necessarily directly related to the decolonization issue, but shall we say the state of affairs in southeast Asia. I'm just looking for some area which is other than of direct interest to NATO.

 

[PEARSON] We were not good at that. We had no experts on regional affairs on the Secretariat. Most of us had served in Europe, and we were not familiar with Africa or Asia. I don't remember writing a single piece on anything outside Europe; although, I did try at one time to explain to Mr. Spaak why Canada was so attached to matters of Commonwealth importance— like our relations with India and our relations with the emerging countries of Africa. I did my best to give him some sense of the Canadian view. But I'm not sure he ever understood it, and he always thought of us as being slightly disloyal in some way; as he once said to me, a kind of North American ''Yugoslavia". His successor, Stikker from Holland, was more understanding of these questions, although not much more. I think, generally speaking, NATO's Secretaries General have not being very understanding of Canadian issues and views of the world; Luns certainly wasn't.

 

[HILL] Were there, at this time, meetings of experts on, for example, South East Asia or Soviet policy?

 

[PEARSON] On Soviet policy, there were occasional meetings but they were not organized in the way they've since become as an annual matter. We'd just established a Political Committee and it dealt with all questions of this kind. The Political Committee was made up, usually, of counsellors from each NATO delegation, "the number twos", and there were only rarely visits from Ottawa or from other capitals. They'd certainly come for the meetings of the ministers, but otherwise we were pretty well on our own. So it was only afterwards that consultation developed into consultation between the officials from capitals. The Canadian delegation got their instructions from Ottawa, on each issue.

 

[HILL] The reason I asked that was because it does seem to me that there is very little research capability inside NATO headquarters, I mean on political issues. That’s still the case. But of course one could say that to some extent there's a vehicle for that in the meetings of experts, where NATO can draw on expertise from all the allied capitals. But one really wonders how effective that is.

 

[PEARSON] Well, I think it helps to be able to speak directly to the experts, especially on issues of Soviet policy. You have an immense analytical establishment in Washington, for example, and somewhat less but still significant resources in London, Paris and Bonn. And when these people come, the other allies can learn a good deal. But at that time that kind of expertise wasn't available, with some exceptions e. g., Jean Laloy of France. I don't remember the Americans producing the kind of people they have since. There was no one in particular that stood out. George Kennan, I suppose, had left the State Department by then. They were more interested in the rest of the world then; Kennedy was very much a man to problem-solve, as a global statesman. And of course they were deeply anti-colonial.

 

[HILL] What about the Canadian contributions to NATO consultations. I mean, we are looking at it a little from the viewpoint of the Secretariat. How would you see the value of Canada's contribution? And also what did Canada get out of it?

 

[PEARSON] I think you have to think of that period, in particular, in terms of Howard Green; he was the Minister who dominated foreign policy after the death of Sydney Smith. And he was, as you remember, critical of the previous government's role in the Suez crisis, for deserting Britain in its hour of need. Which was strange, because after he became Minister, Mr. Green did not take that view; he was very critical of some aspects of British policy. But, he really was Canadian policy, as far as NATO was concerned, and his over-riding goal was to make progress on disarmament, and that’s where we got into trouble in the UN, for example. We would vote on disarmament issues there, with a small minority in NATO—on nuclear tests, for example. Testing in the atmosphere was abolished in ’63. Before that, we voted in the UN to abolish all nuclear tests. We were one of the few countries in the Alliance who did. That was Green's priority. And the other preoccupation of Canadians, aside from the colonial issues, was North American defence—NORAD—and the whole question of introducing nuclear weapons into Canada, and that was not an issue of great interest to the other allies at the time.

 

[HILL] Except that it was a bit linked to the question of equipping the Canadian forces in Europe? Hadn't Canada acquired the CF104 by this time?

 

[PEARSON] That's true. That was not a great issue in NATO or in Canada. We were prepared to accept a nuclear role in NATO, but not in North America. At least Mr. Diefenbaker was not prepared to take the last step of stock piling the warheads.

 

[HILL] Even in Europe the aircraft was not equipped with nuclear weapons, if I'm not mistaken? There was some strange arrangement whereby, to actually serve in that role, they had to go and pick up the weapons at the last minute, or something like that.

 

[PEARSON] I do not recall that being a big issue in NATO. I don't know why. I can't remember why.

 

[HILL] Canada's reluctance to follow through on equipping itself with nuclear weapons didn't poison the relationship with the other allies then, presumably?

 

[PEARSON] Only with the United States; and, then, of course, Norstad, the Commander, jumped into that argument with a press conference in Ottawa which was regarded as interfering in Canadian affairs. He said, "There is no point in Canada accepting nuclear missiles, if they are not prepared to accept the warheads". It's a pretty logical statement, but, that was the only direct incident I recall, in NATO's role in our nuclear troubles. But then I left NATO in '61, and that came later.

 

[HILL] In the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis, I think.

 

[PEARSON] Yes. I wasn't there during the Cuban Missile Crisis, which, I think, was regarded by our allies as some kind of Canadian abdication of responsibility. We refused to go on alert, and so on. I don't remember if the Europeans ever went on any alert, but we were bound by the NORAD agreement. The Canadian defence debate in the early '60s was part of the NATO debate over the control of nuclear weapons. But that developed after I left. So my main impression is, Canada was regarded as a kind of free rider, in some respects. Our military contribution was not very high, and we were not prepared to discuss any of the subjects that Spaak and others wanted discussed, and so on. It was a low period for Canada's reputation in NATO.

 

[HILL] At the same time, as you mentioned earlier, there was not very much comprehension of Canadian points of view on the part of the Europeans.

 

[PEARSON] No, there wasn't, except for the Scandinavians. We always had good relations with Norway, and those continued. The Norwegians had refused to accept nuclear weapons or, indeed, any foreign troops on their soil. We weren't completely alone, but it was not a time of Canadian leadership, certainly not in NATO. That recovered to some extent, later, in the sixties. And then, of course, Mr. Trudeau pulled us back again with his decision to reduce our forces, so there has been, over time, a fairly constant , Canadian withdrawal and return, and withdrawal and return, to NATO, as a centre for our foreign policy. If you looked at the history of our NATO policies, you would be struck by the way that the graph goes up and down. Clearly there is a tension in Canada whatever government is in power, between our NATO obligations and our sense of ourselves as having global interests, including our relations with the Commonwealth and with other countries outside NATO. In that sense, we are unique.

 

[HILL] Of course, it is also the fact that, in the mid-50s, Canada was still in the position of being a major military power, since Europe had not recovered yet. Whereas by the 1960s, particularly with the cancellation of the Avro Arrow, the indecision about nuclear weapons, and the change in the whole strategic equation, the situation was already changing.

 

[PEARSON] In the early '60s we were spending more on defence, a higher percentage of our budget and GNP than we are now. In the '50s, a good deal more. So our reputation as a contributor to NATO's military role declined after about the mid '60s and into the '70s. Before then, we were making quite a respectable contribution. And we weren't criticized for that.

 

[HILL] We were not criticized for the size of the military?

 

[PEARSON] We were thought to be making a respectable contribution. We had a division there. There was no great quarrel about that. NORAD accentuated the process of splitting our interests between Europe and North America, and the Europeans did not take much interest in North America.

 

[HILL] So, it's more a question of attitude, really, than of policy thrust?

 

[PEARSON] I think it was more a matter of attitude and a reluctance to be involved in European colonial policies, which we did not like. That was the essential difference between Canada and the rest, with, as I said, the exception of Norway and Denmark; all the others supported, more or less, European polices - Greece, Turkey, and so on. Portugal was the black sheep. Only a little blacker as far as we were concerned.

 

[HILL] And yet, when the Conservative government and Mr. Diefenbaker came to office in '57 or '58, they did devote some effort inside NATO to drawing up a declaration, or something of that kind, to reiterate allied solidarity and Canadian interest in NATO. But, as Mr. Green took charge of Canadian foreign policy, that impulse declined. Or is that an incorrect reading?

 

[PEARSON] Well, as I say, I think Canada’s reputation and interests have varied over time in NATO. Mr. Trudeau took a view of NATO that was not very different from that of Mr. Green. In addition, Mr. Trudeau thought that our military contribution was redundant. Mr. Green never challenged the military contribution. What he challenged was the political interest in maintaining solidarity with many of our NATO allies. He was not the only one. There were many in the Department that agreed with him. Norman Robertson was a strong believer in disarmament, for example. So this is a Canadian phenomenon, if you like, that we back away from NATO every ten years or so, and then show new interest, as we are now. But we find it hard to maintain the kind of solidarity that the Alliance expects. So perhaps this is a pattern in Canadian policies, which is not surprising when you think about it. We are on the other side of the Atlantic. The United States is also, but has global commitments we don't have. We have global interests, but we don't have global commitments. We have to divide our time and resources between many different kinds of interests. NATO has always been only one of the several strands involved in policy. Whereas for a country like Belgium, or Holland, or Spain, to a lesser extent Italy and maybe Turkey, it's their major concern.

 

[HILL] I suppose if the Europeans, in general, expect Canada to behave like the Netherlands, they are always going to be rather disappointed.

 

[PEARSON] I think they've given that up. We had a quid pro quo. We could say "All right, we will assist in the defence of France, but we have a large country and we have some of our own defence priorities. We would also appreciate it if you would help us from time to time"; and of course, nothing ever came of that. We are the only country in the Alliance which has a separate arrangement with the United States for air defence, for example, and this kind of continental engagement. And this is going to continue to affect policy... the current, in my view, is now running away again from Europe, even though we are reinforcing our forces there. The medium and longer term outlook is for a gradual decrease in our contribution, because of our increasing responsibilities for our own defense.

 

[HILL] In a way, there is never going to be any return to a sort of golden age like the early 1950s.

 

[PEARSON] Yes, I think if you look back, probably, it will be seen to be more of a continuity than it seems, because even in the '50s, we were still pre-occupied with our relations outside NATO. Our relations with India, for example, were more important in the '50s in some ways than our relations with France, which is extraordinary when you think of it. When I was in the Paris Embassy, our telegrams were not of nearly the same significance as the telegrams from New Delhi. So we have always had this tension, I think, between our Commonwealth and NATO commitments, and our aid programs and our sense of ourselves being a new country and one that is sympathetic to the problems of new countries, problems of identity, problems of colonialism. There are real differences between the countries of Europe and of North America, so I don't see any great break between 1956 and 1986. It was just that in the early days we were more important as a military power, and more important as a centre for political consultation. Our views were highly respected and we had a very good diplomatic service.

 

[HILL] What about the whole question of Article 2 and the non-military side of NATO. What did Canadians feel about the state of that issue in the period you were at NATO?

 

[PEARSON] We were proud of our contribution to the non-military side of NATO and to political consultations. Even though we dragged our feet on colonial issues, we otherwise contributed fully. We were one of the leaders in trying to bring the Americans to consult more often about their policies, and under Eisenhower and Kennedy we succeeded to some extent. Dulles hadn't consulted much, but later there was greater dialogue in NATO on political questions. So we were leaders in that respect, and that was all we could really do with Article 2. The only other aspect of Article 2 that made good progress was consultation on Soviet economic policies and what we could do about them. In what way should we pool our knowledge of military exports to the Soviet Union, what kind of trade relations should we have with them? But we pretty well gave up trying to convince the others that NATO should act itself as an organization for economic consultation on matters of trade and payments and so on between western countries. The Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC) played that role and then the Common Market, so in that respect, we were never able to accomplish what we had hoped to do in the beginning, that was to make the treaty into a basis for collaboration on all aspects of western policies.

 

[HILL] The whole idea of an Atlantic Community had run down somewhat, in comparison with the hopes of an earlier time.

 

[PEARSON] It ran out of steam because the Europeans did not want it. They had their own interests.

 

[HILL] What about the Twin Pillars concept. It seems to me that when President Kennedy came in, or maybe slightly afterwards, he issued a call for a new effort to re-organize the Alliance, basically on a Twin Pillars basis. And of course, that had serious implications for Canada.

 

[PEARSON] Well, we thought it did, and naturally we were opposed to any arrangement which would imprison us in North America as one pillar, with the Europeans being the other pillar. We resisted any political directorate. This was partly a matter of Canada's history and experience. During the Second World War we were treated as a minor partner, even though we had a million men in the armed forces. So none of that would we accept. In a way, we were contradicting ourselves. We wanted a strong alliance which involved both economics and politics but we wouldn't agree to any arrangement which might lead in that direction, either a directorate or strong pillar. I think, to some extent, we showed ourselves to be ambivalent about the future of the Atlantic Community. The Atlantic Community was always our concept as long as we had a major role in its construction, but if somebody else, like the French or Americans, left us out, we did not want it.

 

[HILL] I have just a couple of other questions on this period. One point I have in mind is this: in doing these interviews and preparing for them, I have been struck by the fact that in the immediate post-war period, there seemed to be a group of people in External Affairs and some other government departments, who had a very strong sense of wanting to do something about the state of the world. They were not unified in their objectives, exactly; but they had a very strong sense of a need to do something. They seemed to be intellectually pretty capable people and very astute as diplomats. What about this period, while you were at NATO, did you have a sense that people in External, especially the senior people there, had a strong sense of a need to do something and that they were very capable people, or how would you assess that?

 

[PEARSON] It's difficult for me to comment, because of my father's role in the early period, but when I was at NATO, he was out of office. I remember telling him, at the time, that he had the opportunity, now that he wasn't in office, and as an elder statesman or a former statesman, drawing on his experience, to put forward initiatives and proposals. He did to some extent. But the sense of excitement of the early '50s was lost later, and with the minority governments of the '60s, we were more concerned about our own affairs, especially with Quebec and the whole question of the future of the federation and bilingualism. Leadership in the Department changed and there was a kind of withdrawal. There wasn't in the civil service, at that time, the same spark that we had had before.

 

[HILL] One could categorize it as a sort of intellectual ferment, and a high level of commitment.

 

[PEARSON] There was. In the early period of construction of the UN and of NATO, the Commonwealth, these pieces of the post-War World were put in place. Now we are beginning to wonder whether they have served their purpose, and you could argue that now we are facing another time of reconstruction and new thinking. Canada could, once again, contribute, but not in the same way. Our relative weight has changed compared to other countries: Brazil, India, China. But now that we have our constitution in place, we should be able to devote more time to these matters, and as one of the Summit Seven we still have influence.

 

[HILL] I think, also, sometimes, there is a role for intellectual input. You mentioned Brazil and China and so on. While it is true that they are very major powers these days, each in their own way, on the other hand they don’t necessarily always seem to have the impact on the rest of the world that they might have. I was struck by something that Arthur Menzies said about China—and of course, he knows China very well—that part of the problem with China is simply to keep them in contact with the rest of world. They have a tendency to be off in a world of their own, and they find the rest of the world very difficult to understand.

 

[PEARSON] I didn't mention Japan and Germany as two of the powers of the future who can be expected to show this kind of leadership. The role is there if Canadian governments want to take it, but, until recently, we have been so concerned with our own affairs that we haven't wanted it. Now we are moving out of that phase, and I expect we might find a new generation of officials who will step into those shoes again, provided there is political leadership.

 

[HILL] Before we leave the NATO period, are there any thoughts, or recollections, that you would like to mention at this point?

 

[PEARSON] Well, later on in life, I became a member of the Atlantic Policy Advisory Group which was made up of the policy/planning units of each country. We met once a year and looked at the longer term. Our reports didn't have much influence, but it was a very useful way of thinking with our allies about common problems of the future. NATO does have this familiarity, and informal capacity for the Allies to meet, in various different guises, whether it is policy/planning or regional conflicts or relations with the Soviets, which gives it a continuing vitality. We don't have that in the Commonwealth, we don't have that at the Summit meetings. There are ways of talking to each other which are hidden from the public view, but which are vital to the continuing life of the Alliance, and which are, I think, probably its most important attribute. We can exchange views at almost every level and build up contacts so that in a crisis, consultations can be held very quickly. I think one of the interesting studies which could be made is how, through this process of consultation, crises have been avoided. We tend to think about the crises that have taken place, but it would be useful to study the crises that have not taken place, because of NATO consultations and the role of the Alliance in finding compromises amongst different views. One could take the potential crises that have been dealt with, the potential crisis in the Gulf, for instance—there must have been hundreds of hours of consultations in NATO on that subject and who knows what will happen. But the point is that the Alliance provides the vehicle for undertaking this kind of consultation, and there is no substitute for it. So I think that NATO will remain essential, even if its original purposes are lost, and there is a kind of continuing detente with the Soviet Union. I imagine that these functions of consultation and cooperation will continue. There is no other way of doing that.

 

Part V - Ambassador to the Soviet Union. 1980-83

 

[HILL] I wonder if we could go on to your period as Ambassador to the Soviet Union, which was from 1980-1983. I have one question initially which-is: looked at from Moscow, what sort of role do you think Canada should play within NATO in order to deal with the Soviet Union in the best kind of way?

 

[PEARSON] Well, I think that we should use the NATO forum as an opportunity to put forward our own views on what is happening in the Soviet Union, partly to balance the views of others, particularly the United States, and in an attempt to come to some consensus on the future of the Soviet Union. That means that we have to have views, and we have to be willing to express them. We need to strengthen our capacity to understand the Soviet Union. We have tended to neglect that in Canada. We don't have the kind of expertise that some of our allies do. We are now beginning to develop that, but until we do, it will be hard for us to have real influence on the policy questions of how to deal with the Soviet Union. I hope that in five to ten years we will have enough people who have served there two or three times to be able to contribute in a major way to this process of analysis. It's not something that you can learn overnight. It means speaking the language, it means keeping up with the Soviet press and with the speeches of the leaders, etc. So that I think we have (a) to improve our capacity for analysis and (b) have the political will to express views which may be contrary to those of others, or at least those of our neighbour. If you confront the United States on questions of Soviet policy, you are touching a sensitive nerve, and this is particularly true over questions involving the rest of the Communist world: relations with Cuba, relations with Nicaragua, relations with Vietnam and others. Those are the questions that are most troubling and difficult, where some understanding of the relations inside the Communist world are important. At one point, we tended to assume that it was a bloc which included China, but the Chinese defection exploded that myth. But we still tend to think in terms of a kind of monolith with orders coming from Moscow, and we've got to overcome that image in order to understand what goes on. In addition, we have to understand what happens inside the Soviet empire, the land mass of the Soviet Union, and what that means for the future. And that requires understanding of Soviet Asia, the Baltic Republics, Trans-Caucasia, and the rest.

 

The major allies: the Americans, the British, the French and the Germans, are ahead of us in terms of this analysis. Part of the reason is that our universities have not yet produced enough scholars.

 

[HILL] Looking at your own period in the Soviet Union, during the Brezhnev period, how would you see the long-term development of the Soviet Union, and how would you situate the years that you were there?

 

[PEARSON] I was there at the beginning of the end of the Brezhnev era. It was a time, therefore, of speculation about the future. People tend to think that Gorbachev is a new phenomenon, but there were signs of change when I was there as well. A key figure in that period was Andropov. He initiated the period of change but died before he could implement much of what he wanted to do. Almost any leader after Brezhnev would have had to initiate change, because, like any leader long in power, he was reluctant to face the facts of change in Soviet society—the decline in the rate of economic growth, the stagnation in agriculture, the corruption amongst the senior officials, some of whom who had been for thirty years in one place. Gromyko had been made Prime Minister in 1957, and he was still there in '84, and he wasn't alone. There were many who had been in office almost as long. So there was almost bound to be change. It was not a sudden transition; there were signs of change even then, there had to be. So I think we tend to exaggerate the Gorbachev phenomenon. On the other hand, he has surprised everyone by the speed with which he is acting and that couldn't have been predicted.

 

[HILL] I think one thing I have been struck by over the last few years, has been a series of articles talking about the fact that it is not just the senior leaders who have to be replaced in the Soviet Union, it is the entire middle management throughout the whole society, because it's simply the fact that many of them have been in their present positions for nearly thirty years. So there was bound to be a.generational change there. And one wonders if Gorbachev is obliged to run fast simply because otherwise the thing can get out of hand.

 

[PEARSON] He did not have any choice. One forgets that the people who were then in power came to office in the ‘50s and even in the '40s. Stalin had killed off all the older people. Gromyko became Ambassador to Washington when he was thirty-four, and other people of that generation assumed high office very young. That generation is now disappearing. There is a new cycle of younger people, but they are not as young as their predecessors were. They are in their fifties now, the new men, and in the 1940s the leadership tended to be a decade younger. What is important now is that for the first time, the leaders are able to embark on a new course. These new men owe nothing to Stalin, and have no particular loyalties to Stalin's system.

 

[HILL] You see quite a difference between the current situation, then, and that at the time of Khrushchev.

 

[PEARSON] Indeed, a completely different situation, because Khrushchev and Kosygin, and all those people, were trained by Stalin and grew up in positions of responsibility under Stalin and there was no way they could renege or disclaim responsibility— they were there. What these people now can do, and they are doing, is to de-Stalinize the system, which is a real change. Somebody has called it the Third Revolution. There was Lenin's, then Stalin's and now there is the third one. So in that sense, one can hope for permanent change. I don't see how they can go back. They are an educated elite, all of whom have been to trade schools or universities. Khrushchev never got past grade 10, if that, and Brezhnev had certainly never been to university. Now they have a generation that will not be willing and could not be brought to accept a return to the past. The only alternative is a military take-over and I don't think that is in the cards. The military are loyal party members, and are probably incapable of becoming political leaders. It is simply not in their genes. So I don't see any alternative to continuing change in the way Gorbachev is proceeding, except that if he goes too fast, the others may turn against him and look for a more cautious leader. But they won't change direction. It is rather a matter of the pace of change, I think. They can't stop the young from wanting western life styles, and they can't stop communication with the outside world. So I guess it is a question of the kind of regime, whether—it is not going to be democratic in our sense—whether it will continue to tolerate opposition or not, and whether it will be prepared to make the changes in economic organization which lead to greater productivity. I think the Soviet people will support any leader who will be able to give them the kinds of things they expect, which is a standard of living that is in some sense comparable to ours. Right now, it is about half our standard of living and, given the high standards of education they have—they will not tolerate or accept the continuing lack of the most basic resources. You can't buy a decent pair of shoes in Moscow. You can't eat meat more than three or four times a week. Unless they can get their economic system to work, who knows, they might go all the way for some kind of free enterprise.

 

[HILL] Even if it was done in a limited degree, there is plenty of room for change there. How do you think that NATO should respond to whatever is going on in the Soviet Union?

 

[PEARSON] Well, I've said that we should follow a policy of constructive engagement, a term first used by the Reagan administration about South Africa. If we show ourselves willing to trade with them and to communicate and to exchange people and so on, their borders may begin to open, they will allow more innovation and they won't put people in prison for political views. Gradually, we may be able to affect the pace of change inside the Soviet Union by the policies that we follow. That means first of all turning back the arms race in some way. They have offered ideas and are certainly willing to compromise. We have to accept that they are not the enemy in the old sense, just as we've accepted this about China; to deal with them as people. New weapons systems and everything which leads to greater military competition between us and the Soviet Union will tend to block that. I put arms control and arms agreements at the top of the list of the process of engaging them on all fronts. They are also talking about converting the ruble; they want to join the IMF, and once they convert the ruble there is no reason why they can't. We should pursue common enterprises of all kinds: space, the oceans, the Arctic, and so on. I think there is a chance of constructive co-operation in all these kinds of ways. Gorbachev says that he wants the USSR to become an exporter of wheat again. In that case, there are other kinds of things we could do in common. But all these possibilities could be blocked by political developments in Eastern Europe: if Poland or East Germany, etc. reject the system imposed on them, the opportunities for detente would disappear. There is no way, no matter what Gorbachev does or whatever the leadership is, that they will allow, in the foreseeable future, the countries of Eastern Europe to become allies of the West.

 

[HILL] It puts a particular onus on the West, also, to make sure that the situation in Europe as a whole is managed as well as possible. In the past, when there were explosions, the ones who suffered the most were the peoples of Eastern Europe.

 

[PEARSON] Well, I think they continue to fear that Eastern Europe will try to go its own way.

 

[HILL] I wonder if you'd like to say a brief word about Soviet policy towards Eastern Europe and towards Germany.

 

[PEARSON] One of the keys to change in Soviet policy is their capacity or ability to overcome their fear of a united Germany, allied to the West. I don't think there's any way they will accept that now. They have to allow a certain amount of creative freedom in Eastern Europe simply to prevent further revolt, and on our part we have to be careful not to encourage Eastern Europeans and particularly East Germans to believe that they can, in a sense, join the Western alliance, whatever form it has. The Soviet Union would then, I think, abandon all co-operation with the West, and re-arm, and we would be back where we were in 1950. The management of the process of change in Eastern Europe is the key to the future of East/West relations. We must avoid the mistake of appearing to want Eastern Europe to become part of the West, and encourage, rather a process of non-alignment, of Finlandization, that is internal freedom but external constraints. That would serve our purposes and serve their purposes. They have accepted Finland; there is no pressure on Finland in regard to its internal policies. Indeed the Communist party in Finland is losing ground rapidly. They have accepted Austria, and I see no reason why, in the long run, they couldn't accept a quite different system in Eastern Europe.

 

[HILL] What about the attitude of the Soviet military? Jonathan Dean, a former US ambassador to the MBFR negotiations, remarked in an article two or three years ago that an MBFR agreement could be completed in a matter of months, provided that the Russians could be reassured about the situation in Poland, or reassure themselves perhaps, and also provided that the Soviet military was willing to accept some reductions; he clearly saw the Soviet military being a major problem here. But do you think that is the case? Will Gorbachev and people like him be able to persuade the Soviet military to accept arms control deals in Eastern Europe?

 

[PEARSON] I think the party is willing to compromise, and the military will have to go along. They will draw the line at deep reductions in the Soviet armed forces, say a 50 percent reduction. I don't think they will accept that (I'm talking of troops, not of nuclear weapons). But anything other than that I think they could accept, provided they believe that the West was not a threat to their security, and they would have to be convinced of that. For example, if the United States withdrew its forces from Europe, and the German army was under some form of constraint in terms of numbers, I see no reason why the Soviet military would not withdraw from Eastern Europe. They have no particular reason to be there, except in the sense that they fear attack, and would prefer to defend their country outside their borders. The big nightmare is that they would have again to defend their country inside their borders. But if they could be convinced that there was no great threat to their security—then I see no reason why they shouldn't agree to disarm up to a point.

 

[HILL] So, for example, just to take one instance, that of East Germany, where the Soviets have 20 divisions, if you get something comparable in the west, would the Soviets be prepared to cut their forces there, do you think?

 

[PEARSON] People have argued that they keep those forces in Eastern Europe to control the Eastern Europeans, but I personally think that is not the primary reason for them being there. The primary reason is for defence against attack, or forward defence. They want to prevent any attack on their homeland by defending themselves as far west as they can. And if they were satisfied that this was no longer a threat, then they would withdraw.

 

[HILL] How would they then control Eastern Europe?

 

[PEARSON] I think they are prepared to accept the Findlandization of Eastern Europe over time. Now that may be optimistic, but I think it is worth exploring.

 

Part VI – General

[HILL] One last question: is there any last comment you would like to make about Canadian policy in NATO, and on the role of NATO in Canadian policy?

 

[PEARSON] Originally, I think, our objective was to bring the United States into an alliance with Europe and to break the isolationist tradition of American policy, and obviously that has been accomplished. In so far as NATO did not and has not developed into an Atlantic community, then I think we could accept, given relations with the Soviet Union which were relatively stable, that NATO become a purely political alliance, if you like, and for the purposes I have mentioned of consultation and co-operation. Whether it could survive as such, I don’t know. But I think we could live with that, and it would enable us to do other things, such as help the UN in its peace-making tasks, do our share of the defences of the continent, etc. In the long run that would be our best posture. Certainly, from a military point of view, it makes little sense in my view for Canada to have forces stationed permanently in Europe; they contribute very little, but it's expensive, and it distorts our defence priorities. So I think we could live with a non-military NATO, though whether that is a feasible concept I don't know. I think it's something we might work towards, and if relations with the Soviet Union continue to improve, then I think it's something that might become feasible.

 

[HILL] Well, thank you very much indeed.