James Taylor

JAMES TAYLOR

*Interviewers: Hill, Cox

 

 

[HILL]* Good morning. Our guest this morning is Mr. James Taylor, Under-Secretary of State for External Affairs. Mr. Taylor, I am delighted that you could spare us the time to see us this morning, and we are very pleased that you are willing to participate in this project.

 

[TAYLOR] Thanks very much, I'm glad to.

 

[HILL] As you know, this project is an oral history of Canadian policy in NATO. We are examining the development of Canadian foreign policy since 1945 with particular reference to Canada's contribution to the work of NATO, Canada's pursuit of its own direct national interests within NATO, and the function of NATO in helping Canada to pursue some of its broader foreign policy goals, notably the enhancement of international peace and security. We are looking at the formulation of Canadian foreign policy, *at the work carried out inside NATO headquarters in Brussels, and at the evolving role of NATO in world affairs.

 

So in your own case, I would like to focus very strongly on your period as Ambassador to the North Atlantic Council between 1982 and 1985. However, we would like to obtain some idea of your work and the views you developed in other periods, so we will follow your career in a series of phases.

 

Part I – Early Years, to 1953

 

[HILL] If we could turn then to Part I, which is the early years up to 1953. I note that you were born in Hamilton, and afterwards received a B.A. from McMaster, another B.A. from Oxford University and an M.A. from Oxford, prior to joining the Department in 1953.

 

 

I just wondered if you could give us a little bit of your background and any impressions from the early years which you think have had a bearing on your work in the Department, particularly with respect to NATO and international security?

 

[TAYLOR] I suppose the only thing that is possibly of interest there is that the Department of External Affairs of those days had certainly come to public attention. It had a number of distinguished senior members, many of whom had begun their professional lives as academics. The first of them I ever met personally was Hugh Keenleyside, who came to McMaster when I was an undergraduate. My Professor, Chester New, introduced me to him. I guess that was a sign - at least in Professor New's mind and maybe in my own, although I cannot honestly remember too clearly - that the notion of entering the foreign service was a possibility then. But it was not that serious a possibility. I had intended then to be an academic. I think that was really what my professors thought I would be; and it was not until I had been at Oxford that I formed a different impression. Those who were supervising my studies in England also had the clear impression that I was more cut out to be a civil servant than I was to be an historian. By then, I had written the Foreign Service exam and been accepted.

 

The ties between academic life and the diplomatic career were perhaps closer then than they are in the present generation. The Department of External Affairs I entered had a number of senior officers who seemed rather closer still to academic life than is true at all of the present generation. We had certainly some men serving as senior officers who had had distinguished academic careers, as well as being distinguished diplomats. I guess that is something that has changed in my lifetime.

 

[HILL] That is a rather interesting comment because I think we have been reading a good deal about people like Escott Reid and so on. In fact, we hope to meet him shortly. David knows him. I think they seem to have had a great impact, in the early years, on Canada's policy towards NATO, and one has the impression that they were ideas people, as well as practitioners.

 

[TAYLOR] Yes, very much so.

 

Part II - Early career. 1953-61

 

[HILL] Mr. Taylor, after you joined the Department, presumably you spent some time in Ottawa, and then went to Hanoi in 1955-1956 as advisor to the International Control and Security Commission, if I have got the title correctly. I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about that experience. That was your first assignment overseas, and it was in Asia, a long way from Oxford or Ottawa. How did you find that experience?

 

[TAYLOR] First, I should say that, while it was by no means a matter of regret, it was not at all a matter of choice. I had, in fact, been loaned from the Department of External Affairs after only one year of preliminary training to the Cabinet Secretariat. I was working as a Junior Secretary in the Privy Council Office. This was a tiny little affair of six or eight people located at the back of the East Block. I mention this because I had the good fortune to work very closely with R. B. Bryce, who was then the Secretary to the Cabinet, so that within a year of coming to work for the Public Service, I was as a beginner being trained by one of the great public servants of this generation. That was an extraordinary piece of good fortune - as it happened, outside the Department of External Affairs. But on the other hand, for a foreign service officer, it was a bit of a disappointment when all my colleagues were being posted abroad: I think I was the last one of my promotion that stayed in Ottawa. My first posting had been from the front of the East Block to the back, but all of us who were healthy and unmarried knew from July, 1954 on, when Canada accepted at the Geneva Conference the invitation to participate in the International Commissions in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, that it was only a matter of time before we were sent to serve there because it was a tremendous drain on manpower. And indeed, that happened: the Department called in all its loans within a few months. I was brought back into the Department. In the end, I was sent to Indochina. I was only given three weeks' notice of the posting. In fact, I was told I was going to be assigned to Laos, although when I got to Indochina, I actually was sent on to Hanoi. In that sense, I got no notice whatsoever of my first posting. But in another sense, I had been mentally prepared to go for a year, because we all knew, as I say, that it was inevitable.

 

Hanoi was an extraordinary experience. I was not there as one of the first shift; I was really in the second shift of people who served there. It was a combined - well, a tri-national operation - under Indian chairmanship, and the Indian chairmen of the Commission (there were two while I was there), were both extremely distinguished men, whom I remember, again, as models of great public servants: M. J. Desai and G. P. Parthasaraty, who were both ICS men, and quite different but impressive men in their different ways. Desai and Parthasaraty I both saw again when I was subsequently serving in Delhi. But we were working also with a Polish delegation, an Indian delegation, and a Canadian delegation, each civil/military, as well as a little international secretariat. The headquarters of the Commission was in Hanoi. This was only a matter of months after what was then called the "Viet Minh", the Communist government, had taken over and created the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the North. Hanoi was a very small place. All the eminent figures of the Communist government were men whom we had a chance to see from time to time at quite close quarters: Ho Chi Minh himself, General Giap who was the great victor in Vietnamese eyes of the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, Pham Van Dong, Ha Van Lau who was at that time a mere Colonel and the head of the PAVN, the People's Army of Vietnam, Liaison Office to the Commission, and so on - so a number of figures who came to prominence when the Communists won their war against the French and subsequently. Because that generation of Vietnamese leaders lasted. They were a very durable lot. They hardly changed, apart from Ho's death, for a generation. People like Pham Van Dong and Ha Van Lau were still around - so that some of these names came again to prominence in North American consciousness at the height of the Vietnam war with the involvement of the United States. In that sense, I suppose, retrospectively - particularly to the extent that Canadians to some degree are marked by the trauma of the Vietnam War because we reverberate to things that happen in the United States - I was one of this group - which in the end included almost all single officers, and a number of others as well - a certain generation in the Canadian Foreign Service, and almost all of whom served in Indo China. Some of my contemporaries and some of the people who are still my best friends in the service are people I first served with in these rather extraordinary circumstances in Hanoi. I think that there was subsequently, when the Americans' Vietnam war was on, a difference, quite marked within the Department of External Affairs, which people commented on at the time, between those who had actually served on those Commissions and those who had not. Those who had served in Vietnam were on the whole less dewy-eyed about the nature of the regime. The reason for that was not that we thought the communists in the end were not likely to win. On the contrary, when we were there, the regime that had been put together in the South seemed such a shaky undertaking that I think you would have bet against its surviving for very long. So that it was not a matter either of believing that the Communists would not in the end take over all of Vietnam, nor of failing to understand what the roots of their ambitions were; but on the contrary, out of knowledge and out of watching them come and install themselves, and run their half, what was then just the northern half of the country from the 16th parallel north, people who were serving there at the time were given a pretty direct appreciation of the incredible degree of discipline, and indeed at times the ferocity with which these people were prepared to pursue their aims. Now some of the things that were going on at that time, I am speaking here of 1955, in the North were experiments that the Vietnamese themselves admitted subsequently were mistakes. But the kind of thing they were doing was pursuing a land reform on the original Chinese model, which was accompanied with something not much removed from lynch law. Anybody who was there and had experienced that, and who had dealt with the efforts that that regime put in place, above all - and this was a matter of direct concern to our Commissions - to inhibit the movement of people between the two halves of the country, was perfectly conscious that these were, to put it mildly, not a group of men to be dewy eyed about. They were extremely tough, extremely disciplined, extremely determined, prepared to make enormous sacrifices and in many respects, in that sense, admirable if you will; but certainly very far from being lovable.

 

That was a set of attitudes, I think, that was shared more or less by almost everybody who went to Vietnam. Whatever attitudes they may have had when they first went there, I think that that was the impact that dealing with that regime made on people; and that set of attitudes then, when 10 years on, the Americans were at the crisis of their war in Vietnam, led sometimes to quite a sharp difference in reactions between those who had had what they felt was in many ways an unpleasant direct experience of dealing with the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and those who were seeing this from a distance.

 

[HILL] Did it also leave you with a sense that, in dealing with Communist powers in general, that one would need to be pretty hard- nosed by and large?

 

[TAYLOR] Well, I would not say so entirely. For instance, we had a Communist government represented on the Commission, and the Poles obviously included people of a certain spectrum of attitudes.

 

Remember I am talking about 1955, so it is a long time ago; you have to go back to the atmosphere of Cold War and all the rest. But even then it was perfectly evident that some of the Poles at least were a pretty free-wheeling brand of Communist, and that you could not put some of them in the same category as you put a hardened Vietnamese revolutionary who had arrived in power after years of fighting a colonial war against the French in the jungle.

 

[HILL] I wonder if we could go on quickly to the next period, when you came back to Ottawa, and you were in the office of the Under-Secretary for three years. This, of course, was the period of the Diefenbaker government. Could you just tell us very briefly what your duties were at that time and something about the atmosphere surrounding the conduct of foreign affairs in that period, particularly with regard to such issues as nuclear weapons for the Canadian armed forces, policy towards NATO, and so on?

 

[TAYLOR] I was sent first to work for Norman Robertson as his Executive Assistant, and again this was extraordinarily good fortune. In fact, I cannot think of anybody who was as fortunate in such a short space of time to have worked for R. B. Bryce and then to have worked for Norman Robertson. I am afraid education of that kind does not exist anymore in the Public Service.

 

[HILL] Perhaps your junior officers see it differently.

 

[TAYLOR] I doubt it, because everyone thought of Norman Robertson, and rightly so, as an extraordinary man. It is often said of him, and Jack Granatstein had to cope with this in writing his biography, that those who had a chance to work for him, and hear him in private conversation and so on, had a sense of why in that generation he commanded such respect. But, of course, the mystery, or the difficulty rather, is that he wrote very little; he was not a good public speaker and did not speak in public very much, so that trying to reconstruct a personality like that and explain why he was such an enormous influence and why we went in such awe of him, is a little hard to do retrospectively. But nonetheless, I had the chance to work for him for a year, and I guess one learned by a sort of osmosis. He loaned me books from time to time. He was an omnivorous reader. Part of the extraordinary impact that he had on people (and this also, I think, has been commented on by people who contributed to the biography) was that he seemed to have read absolutely everything of any importance that had been published. You wondered how he ever found the time to do it. Well, that was just one way in which he appeared to set standards that were impossibly high for the rest of us. But at least you could admire them, even if you could not reach them.

 

He was placed - as all the senior public servants were - in a position of sensitivity and responsibility when the Diefenbaker government came to power because, of course, that was a revolution in our affairs after what - 22 years? - of Liberal government. Mr. Diefenbaker had some ideas of his own, and some initiatives of his own over a narrow range in foreign policy, that he wished to pursue. He had certain ideas about the Commonwealth and about the relationship with Britain, and Britain's early attempts to join the Common Market and so on. That was a set of issues at the time which interested Mr. Diefenbaker, aroused certain attitudes in him, and Mr. Diefenbaker was also interested in our relations with the Soviet Union, in the sense that he had carried with him from his Western background a sense of admiration for the Ukranian community in Canada. Certain of his feelings about the Soviet Union were, I think, very much influenced by the contacts he had in his lifetime with Canadian Ukrainians.

 

That was, in its way, as I say, a narrow range. The government had difficulties finding a Foreign Minister. (As I recall, there was only one minister in the first Diefenbaker government who had ever served as a minister before - there was one survivor from R. B. Bennett's government.) Initially the choice was Sidney Smith, the former President of the University of Toronto. Sidney Smith was a great public figure, and in his day, I think, one of the most renowned public speakers in Canada. Everybody knew him and he had a reputation of being a great administrator and a rather bluff, direct and jolly man, in addition to being university president, so that he had quite a considerable public image. But, of course, he was being asked to come into a difficult portfolio in late mid-life. I do not know how old he was at the time - I have forgotten - but in any event, it was asking a tremendous amount of him, and of course, his health as it happened was not certain, and he died in office, after a very short time. I can remember the day, being in the East Block in Norman Robertson's outer office, when we got the news that he had died, and Norman Robertson rushed out, I guess to go see the Prime Minister about it, and then came back.

 

Subsequently Mr. Howard Green, happily still alive, became our minister. Mr. Green's great focus was on disarmament. I remember a good deal about that period because by then I was taken out of the Under-Secretary's office and sent to work on disarmament matters. This marked, I think, the beginning of the period in which the Canadian government and the Department of External Affairs actually began to organize itself to provide a small nucleus of people who worked on disarmament as such. Up until that time it had been considered simply a part of UN affairs in general. People thought about it as a sort of intellectual off-shoot of the worrying and conceptualizing that had gone into creating the machinery of the Security Council, and so on. It was still a branch, a dimension of United Nations Affairs, and indeed organizationally it was treated that way. The first official who was more or less the director of the small group that worked on disarmament was Geoff Murray, who was the Head of the United Nations Division as it was then. He supervised initially Harry Jay, who went on to be our UN Ambassador in several capacities, and myself as the junior on disarmament matters. And then the Government brought in General Burns. He was the Government's advisor; that is, he had direct access to the Prime Minister. Some extremely interesting discussions at the time focused on Mr. Green's desire to contribute to the campaign to end all nuclear tests. That was one of the great issues of the time because of widespread public fears about fall-out from the explosions from the weapons tests that were then being conducted. Mr. Green wanted Canada to take a lead in bringing the tests to an end. So that was a principal thrust of policy.

 

Then there was also the notion that the Canadian government ought to be making a sort of independent intellectual contribution to the sum total of disarmament proposals, which at that time were negotiated bloc-to-bloc in a Committee of ten, I think it was, five East, five West. That is the ancestor of the present body in Geneva. But at the time, it was just straight East-West. This was also in the late days of the Eisenhower Administration, so it was not a period of great promise in disarmament matters. But at least it was a beginning. I think that created a kind of tradition which has gone on since of independent Canadian activity on a modest scale. But nonetheless, I think there was a sort of consciousness - raising, if you will, within the Government at the time about the importance of the issue, and the importance of this country's making its independent contribution to furthering disarmament. That has continued since, and in one way or another, we have gone on with separate structures. We still have today, of course, a special Ambassador for Disarmament. That is part of the machinery that traces its origins to that time.

Part III - Years in Paris, 1961-64

 

[HILL] Next you went to Paris, from 1961 to 1964, assigned partly to the delegation to the OECD and partly to NATO. The first two of those years were under the Diefenbaker government. What role did NATO play in Canadian policy under the Diefenbaker government?

 

[TAYLOR] In a sense, so far as Canada was concerned, we were dealing in Paris (where NATO was then located) with the European implications of the debate which was going on in Canada about nuclear weapons, about whether the Canadian Forces should have nuclear roles or not. That was an issue on which, as everyone knows, governments stood and fell in those days. Ultimately, that debate was decided. It was launched then and it was decided by a national consensus: in effect, that the Canadian Forces should be conventional forces, that the country should not have nuclear roles. And we got out of them. The decision really dates from that time. Because of the long lifetime of weapon systems, of course, it took years for all the nuclear roles to disappear. They disappeared fairly early on in Europe, so that our Forces have been conventional forces in Europe for - what? - two decades now. But it was only a very few years ago that the last of the nuclear systems here was phased out.

 

[COX] Right. The last year of the Trudeau government.

 

[TAYLOR] Yes, but not all that debate was stirring then. I guess the difficulty for the Government - well, for any Canadian government - I mean it was a problem both for the Diefenbaker government and for Mr. Pearson, at first, when he came to power also, was that the Forces had already had some of these roles. The Air Force in particular was, in the great Canadian tradition, very professional, highly trained, very good at its job, and therefore hard to replace. The major NATO commanders of the day were, I think, anxious to keep a high quality Air Force doing what it had originally been conceived of to do. With the replacement of the Sabres of the day, we had gone for the 104s, and, of course, the original thought was that they would have a nuclear role; and there was great technical debate at the time about whether it made sense to have invested in these expensive aircraft, only to convert them to a conventional role. I would have to refresh my memory about this, but speaking totally from memory and bearing in mind that I was not in Canada while a lot of this debate was on, my impression is that people did not fully realize that, in a sense, to take on the original nuclear role conceived of for the CF-104, we had to tear the Air Force out to the back wall. That is, it was an all-absorbing task right back to initial training, pilot selection and all the rest of it; it was something so delicate and difficult that you really had to orient a very large part of the Air Force totally from start to finish, from the base to the front line, towards perfecting this role. Therefore it was not just a matter of rejigging a few airplanes; it was changing the whole Air Force in a lot of ways. It was understandable, I think, that a lot of the professionals gulped about all the implications of changing from the nuclear to the conventional role, but there it was. In Europe, the main impact of the debate of these years was particularly in the air. We had some ground systems too. Honest Johns as I recall, but that was less significant. What was really militarily significant was the change in the role of the Air Force. That debate was paralleled by the debate here in Canada about the Bomarc and all that. The decision then, as you recall, was, in the end: "No, we must get out of all of these things."

 

There were parallel decisions taken about that time. For instance, it was the Pearson government, in, 1965, that said that there would be no further export of Canadian nuclear material to contribute to anybody’s weapons programme anywhere in the world. That was a fundamental shift in our nuclear policy, which has influenced the whole safeguards and non-dissemination issue ever since. So there were some very important policy shifts that took place around the nuclear question in the early and mid-1960s. We still live in the downstream of all that. My impression is that those were national decisions that Canadians on the whole are well satisfied with. It does not matter what government is in power or what debate you may have about defence policy, nobody wants to relive all that. Nobody has ever really suggested since that we should rethink it and get back into nuclear weapons roles in any sense. The future for our Forces remains a future totally in the conventional dimension. People simply accept that, I would say, almost without question, now. But it is of some interest to reflect on how it comes about that we are that way.

 

[COX] This gives a certain standing to Howard Green which he does not normally get. Officials tend to speak fondly but disparagingly of him, whereas you suggested in a way that he has a legacy.

 

[TAYLOR] Well, I will tell you one story which, because I have retold it over the years, may therefore be one of these things that did not happen quite this way. You can never be sure of your own memory. But I tell it because it illustrates how at the time officials may indeed have been in some sense bemused, maybe exasperated, at some of the instructions Mr. Green gave them, but where with the benefit of hindsight you arrive at a more admiring view. At least, that is the way I think of it. The story is this: Mr. Green, desirous, as I say, of having Canada make an independent intellectual contribution to the cause of disarmament, kept saying: "I want a Canadian disarmament plan." When he put that to us, you can understand that the officials were overwhelmed at the complexity and the appalling difficulty, in Cold War circumstances, as we still pretty well were then, of advancing this cause even at the margin of the margin. We were simply appalled at the notion of what it was we were supposed to be doing with the Canadian disarmament plan. I retold this story to General Burns once when he and I were both much older. He did not remember this incident but I remember it this way: Mr. Green called us all into his office. I was there because Mr. Green took everybody from the top to bottom, and I was at the bottom of a sort of vertical slice of the Department. There were there Norman Robertson, Ross Campbell, General Burns, Geoff Murray, Harry Jay and myself. Mr. Green was giving us the word, saying: ”1 can't understand why I can't have a Canadian disarmament plan." General Burns, by my memory anyway, put on, more or less his court martial face and gritted out: "It wouldn't take much to disarm Canada, Mr. Green."

 

As I say, I told General Burns that story from memory about fifteen years later. He did not recall it ever having happened, so maybe it did not. But that was the way I recall that people, even people as dedicated as General Burns, tended to react. Yet, after that meeting, something did happen that was not so crazy - that did square the circle, in a way. We went back to Geoff Murray's office. I remember Harry Jay and I were just shaking our heads and saying: "Well, what will we do? The Minister has ordered us to produce a Canadian disarmament plan. What, a Canadian plan to disarm the world?" I mean you could not get your mind around it.

 

Geoff Murray, who was really a marvellous boss, said, "Stop fussing. I'll will show you what we will do." He took what was then published as a UN document, which consisted of the latest set of Western proposals presented by the five Western countries then represented in the Ten-Nation Disarmament Committee. He took the staples out of the document, and divided it in three. He kept one third himself. He gave one third to Harry Jay, and he gave one third to me. As I recall, this was on a Friday. He said: "Look, we worked this out among the Western countries. You know that Canada made proposals about some of the clauses in these texts that were not adopted. So look at it this way: suppose we had had our way, what would this document have looked like? What would these proposals have looked like? Take your third home and amend the text, to correspond to the Canadian proposals, as they would have been had we not lost the debate within the Western group."

 

A great light dawned. All of a sudden, you knew exactly how, in a very simple and logical way, you could put together a Canadian disarmament plan. In a sense, it was quite simple to do. We went home and did our work over the weekend, came back Monday morning, put the three amended sections together, had it retyped, and sent it up to the Minister. And there was the Canadian disarmament plan, produced almost by a miracle within the space of a weekend.

 

Of course in those days, discipline within the Alliance applied even more firmly than it does now, and we will come to this later. My belief is that consultation has, in fact, made a great deal of progress in the years since. But then, of course, the great difficulty about that kind of exercise was that you were deliberately breaking ranks. I have honestly forgotten what the fate of that document was, but I am sure that our allies, in those days, would have been furious with us for advancing it too far because, of course, it would have meant competition with the agreed proposals that were standing in the name of the five Western countries in the Ten Nation Committee.

 

It was, as I say, not a period when much was stirring in the disarmament front anyway. But it was not a totally lost exercise. I think you can see from this that even though Mr. Green expressed himself in the simplest and most direct terms and left officials temporarily baffled about how to respond to his directives, there were ways in which it could be done. People ended up all very fond of Mr. Green because he left a memory of a very kind person, a very kind and decent man.

 

[HILL] Of course, in fact, in that period after the Cuban Missile Crisis, there was forward movement on the disarmament front, mainly partly resulting from general trends in East-West relations. But I think probably Canada did have some impact in that period, for example on the establishment of the nuclear test ban.

 

[TAYLOR] But if you want to make a bridge to the most intellectually sophisticated development of the notion of a ban, inserted into a completely intellectually integrated concept of how you would bring the nuclear arms race to an end and reverse it, the proposals that Trudeau made to the first Special Session on Disarmament have as one of the key elements in the "Strategy of Suffocation", as it was called, the notion of a CTB. But it is linked with a ban on the production of fissile material and so on. It’s all put together in a highly sophisticated way. Mr. Trudeau had his way of presenting disarmament matters and Mr. Green had his.

 

[HILL] Could I just ask you one question about your being on the delegation to the OECD in this period? At the time of the formulation of the North Atlantic Treaty, Canada pushed for Article II, and in a way the OECD was fulfilling some of the roles that Canada had hoped for on the economic side of Western alliance. Was that seen in those terms? Was there seen to be a linkage between NATO and OECD in those days? And was Canada satisfied with what OECD was doing, in relation to the kind of things that it had wanted to see done under Article II?

 

[TAYLOR] Well, certainly I had to think about it because there were not many people who worked in both the OECD and NATO delegations. Jules Leger was my ambassador then, and he was accredited to both the OECD and NATO, but in practice he spent most of his time on his NATO responsibilities. Peter Towe, now head of Petro Canada International, and subsequently Ambassador to the United States, was at that time, I have forgotten what he was called - Deputy Permanent Representative, I guess - but he was in practice our OECD ambassador even though he was technically second to Jules Leger.

 

Below that, there was really no link except I think my own; I was the only one in the NATO and OECD delegations who actually worked in both. So maybe I was the only one who was thinking about this, at least in terms of his own experience of being one day of the week in a NATO committee and the next day in an OECD committee. I thought the OECD really did fulfill a good deal of what we had in mind with Article II or at least it had the potential to do so.

 

I know that there was a great deal of argument. This kind of debate is well set out in Escott Reid's book about the founding of NATO. I recall from reading the files of the Department in the 1950s, where you came across material about the period of the founding, that there was a great deal of concern that NATO might be no more, as it was seen, than a mere military alliance; and that somehow or other it had to be more than that. And therefore there were many attempts, some of them to a degree strained or artificial, to add a non-military dimension by developing Article II.

 

I did not feel at the time that, at least so far as economic problems were concerned, there was anything wrong with saying: "Look, what we are really saying to ourselves is that we don't wish to repeat the mistakes of the 1930s. We recognize very well that the international community failed to cope with the economic crisis through creating effective international mechanisms; that the economic crisis and the security crisis of the 1930s were linked together; and that one of the reasons why we ended up in a war was because we failed to cope with the Depression." Because the two things were linked. Therefore, in the post-war period, you had machinery that was set up to solve not only the collective security dilemma but also the problem of excessive economic nationalism; you had to set up some kind of, at least consultative machinery - and it was hoped something more than that - which would prevent us from going back to the kind of dog-eat-dog competitive measures of the 1930s.

 

The OECD, when I was working in it, in fact, was not yet at the stage where it could do that. What was going on at that time, which was important and exciting and interesting for Canadians, was that, in effect, the post-war period had just come to an end, that is that what had existed up until that time was the OEEC, which was really the organization set up to supervise the disbursements of the Marshall Plan. That had come to an end; and in 1960, with the arrival in power of the Kennedy administration, there was a notion that either you had to say: "This is an international organization that has fulfilled its function and should now shut its doors", or, "You should take this and adapt it to the new period of economic cooperation that is opening." And that was what was decided, the OEECD was kept in being as the OECD. It was changed, notably by bringing Canada and the United States into membership. And of course, the membership of the OECD has increased since to cover an even wider circle, with the Japanese and the Australians, and so on.

 

And in addition, the "D" was added for Development. There was a whole aid arm, an aid consultation dimension that was added, and that was important for us.. But the part of the machine that had more directly to do with economic co-operation (since after all, aid was not a problem in the 1930s), was the dimension which was perpetuated. It was to this that you had to look to decide whether you believed that this was the way by which we could, in effect, carry out the intentions of Article II of the North Atlantic Treaty.

 

I can only describe the kind of activities that went on. There were several working groups set up under the Economic Policy Committee of the OECD, and there were eminent, senior Canadian civil servants from the economic side of the government who participated very actively in the work of those committees at the time. I think they were satisfied that this was a constructive undertaking.

 

There was one working group which was in some ways the ancestor of the Group of Seven. It involved the notion of close confidential consultation with a view to harmonizing monetary policy. That group was very low-key. It was called Working Party II. It was given a banal kind of name. It was supposed to have no profile at all, and the secretariat was told "don't produce any documents; don't produce any agendas." It was just a bunch of the boys meeting in a back room, more or less. There were some very high-powered Canadian civil servants, and others from other countries, who contributed to those discussions; Wynne Plumptre was one of the senior Canadians who used to represent us, like Louis Rasminsky, so that we were very much present at the table. I had to learn to take notes in those meetings, because the only record you had were the records that were taken by some poor scribbler in the back row - no documents or anything else like that. For someone who was an ignoramus in these matters, it was no small challenge.

 

The proceedings went on, as I recall, both in French and in English. I do not know ... there may have been interpretation, but I have a feeling that everyone was expected to be able to discuss international monetary matters in both languages, or at least to understand. There was no official record beyond these delegation records. I remember Wynne Plumptre used to savage my notes; I had to work pretty hard to produce what was to him a respectable account of the proceedings.

 

Well, that was one piece of consultation that was going on. Of course, if that kind of thing works, then it obviously does represent a kind of co-operation among Western governments, in a most sensitive area of economic policy, that evidently did not exist - or did not exist in any effective form - in the 1930s. So that, yes, in that sense, I would say that what I saw of Working Party II was a kind of fulfillment, if you wanted to look on it that way, of the purposes of Article II.

 

Then there was a Working Party III, which you could not say was addressed to the problems of the 1930s quite. It was a sort of a growth group. The origin of this was that the Western European economies then had begun to take off, and they were registering quite impressive growth rates. I have forgotten - it was annual growth in the order of 4%, 5% and 6%, whereas the North American economies had been in recession and the growth rates were almost flat. Again, I do not recall the statistics but it was 1 1/2% or 2% or something like that; it was very modest. Then the Kennedy Administration came to power. Kennedy had some extraordinary people. You remember the New Frontier and all the rest of it. Well, some of the New Frontiersmen who came in with the Kennedy Administration were really extraordinary men. They were extremely dynamic and they were quite uninhibited, in the sense that they did not have any vested interest in the record of the previous Administration, obviously. They were there as new brooms, and with very open minds, and prepared to say, "Well, look, your economies grow. Our economy does not. What is the matter? What is the secret? Is there a secret to economic growth?" There were discussions in this working group, which in a way were designed to get at that question: is there a key to growth in the modern economy?

 

Well, the Canadian representatives in that group were David McQueen, now of York University but then with the Bank of Canada, and Sid Rubinoff of the Department of Finance. What I retain out of that experience, which I think was an idea that coloured public policy in Canada into the 1960s or through the 1960s, was the notion that when you did an analysis of the obstacles to growth in your own society, one of the things that emerged for instance was that an analysis of the structure of unemployment in Canada indicated that there was an obvious link between education and unemployment: that the people who tended to remain unemployed, the hard core, were people who were badly trained and who had no proper opportunities in their society to profit from openings to train themselves, to educate themselves better and so on. I guess the notion was that our educational structures were in part ill- adapted and that there were social rigidities, for example the notion that kids went to school when they were young, but that by the time somebody was an adult, he was fully-formed, and went into life and tried to make his living on the basis of what he had acquired as a kid. Adult education and retraining, recycling people and all that sort of notion were not as fashionable then as they have become.

 

I think that was an intellectual current of permanent value. I suppose now, looking back on it, people would say: "Well, Western societies in some ways may have overdone that link." I know there is a good deal of debate about this and I am not an expert on it. I know that there are criticisms now of some of the kinds of investment that were made in our education in Canada in, let's say, the 1960s. Certainly the universities now, of course, all complain about the reverse, of being under funded. Maybe these links are much more subtle than we thought at the time, but that was an intellectually exciting experience too.

 

[HILL] To come back to the question about Article II, does that kind of cooperation fulfill what we were getting at in Article II?

 

[TAYLOR] I think it does. I was a child in the 1930s, so I do not know, except from reading, what senior officials and ministers talked about by way of international consultation on matters of this kind in those days. But one cannot escape the impression that now there is a far more lively and automatic sense of sharing problems, and of the possibilities of learning from the experiences of others, and of even the need to do so.

 

[COX] You have described a situation in which the substance of Article II in fact took place outside the specific framework of NATO, but did anybody ever envisage a situation in which NATO would be a structure which contained the economic aspects which are described in Article II?

 

[TAYLOR] Yes. On that side of it, I think there were notions of that kind but they never came to very much. I did economic work in NATO too, but that was very strictly confined, even by the time I was doing it, to defence-related economic analysis. In particular at the time it was related to attempts to provide the economic dimension of threat assessment, to consider on some systematic basis the performance of the Eastern economies and what that threw up by way of military potential, what the Alliance had to cope with. There were some other exercises that went a bit beyond that in the economic field, for instance planning for economic counter measures on a contingency basis to deal with possible international crises, but that was about what it amounted to. Of course, that kind of thing is really nowhere near covering the range, or going to the heart of, what Article II, I think, was pointed at. If you had tried to give a complete fulfillment to Article II, within the NATO structure, it would have been vast.

 

[HILL] Yes.

 

[TAYLOR] I do not think I have any real regrets that that did not come about.

 

Part IV – Mid-career: Ottawa, Moscow and Paris, 1964-76

 

[HILL] Perhaps we might move on to Part IV, which I have termed: "Mid-career, Ottawa, Moscow and Paris." It is a long period. I think I would like to ask one question about Moscow, because that was the period of the Brezhnev era. I think that Khrushchev was already out at that time. I wonder, how do you see the Brezhnev era in the long-term development of Soviet policy? I think, while you were there, Ambassador Ford was still in Moscow? And he must have been a remarkable man to work with. Certainly he was a highly respected figure on the international scene in terms of interpreting Soviet affairs. I wonder how you would see this whole Brezhnev period and how you see the follow-on from Brezhnev which has come since?

 

[TAYLOR] Yes, once again I had great good fortune in working for one of the most distinguished Canadian diplomats of his generation, Robert Ford, and a man who was and is acknowledged as one of the West's most eminent experts on Soviet affairs. I was always fascinated by the experience of having lived and worked three years in the Soviet Union. I have done a fair amount of work related to the Soviet Union since, on our bilateral relations with the Soviet Union, and East-West matters generally; and the experience of having lived there is a permanent source of stimulation, even though I have to say that now, looking back on it, I was there in the full mid-Brezhnev period, and that is now seen as a period of creeping sclerosis, approaching stagnation, in Soviet affairs. Since I am not a Kremlinologist and did not have a chance to serve several times in the Soviet Union, I really do not have the kind of basis for comparison or the sense of contrast, change or lack of change that the real experts do; but certainly when I was there, I had colleagues who had served in Moscow before. There were even one or two around who were old enough to have served before the War in the Soviet Union; and they told us stories about life in Moscow even before the War, which were startling in that, while the purges and all those other appalling things were going on, in some respects life at the private level for foreigners and even to some degree apparently for Soviets if you escaped the awful attentions of the Secret Police and The Terror and so on - life went on in a way that was less restricted than the life we knew. The bureaucratic controls on the movements of foreigners and so on were apparently not as strict in Stalin's day, either just before the War or just after, according to some of the old hands, than the controls when we were there - the business of giving 48 hours notice of intention to travel and this kind of thing. There had been a time, apparently, when even the resident foreigners could pick up and travel around the Soviet Union much more easily, even in the worst of the Stalin period.

 

Then there were people who had also served there in the early period of Khrushchev's rule; and, of course, they had witnessed a period of considerable liberalization which was quite extraordinary. Some of the descriptions of that made you realize that you had missed something very exciting indeed. Well, of course, that did not last long. Khrushchev himself changed his mind about internal reform and then was ultimately displaced by the team including Brezhnev, of which Brezhnev was becoming clearly, more and more clearly while I was there, the primus inter pares. When I was there, Podgorni and Kosygin were still a triumvirate of a kind with Brezhnev, but Brezhnev was increasingly seen as the most powerful figure.

 

It was just before the shifts, notably over Germany, that really introduced the detente of the early 1970s. This included, so far as our bilateral relations were concerned, the sort of annus mirabilis about 1971 when Mr. Kosygin came here, Mr. Trudeau went to Moscow, we signed three important agreements with the Soviet Union inside of a year, and so on; and there was a sense of very rapid acceleration and exploitation of possibilities.

 

Well, unfortunately, I did not experience any of that period in Moscow. I was there just before all this in a period that was rather limited.

 

[HILL] You were there from 1967 to 1970, I believe.

 

[TAYLOR] I was there from 1967 to 1970. The first great public festival when I went was the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Revolution, and in my last year, they celebrated the centenary of Lenin's birth. So there was a good deal of ritual evocation of the Soviet past of a rather conventional kind while I was there. I think even the regime itself felt that some of the manifestations of the Lenin centenary, for instance, verged on the ridiculous - that it just got out of hand. Anyway, it was not an intellectual atmosphere that was stimulating, except in a negative sense. There were a few interesting things going on, nonetheless. I mean it is a huge country. While I was there, half the territory was closed to foreigners. Even the half that was open you could not travel in without giving 48 hours' notice, and very frequently - I suppose about half the time - you would apply to travel and your itinerary would be refused or modified in some way or other. But for all that, I did travel. There are large and important parts of the country that I have never seen, and that is a source of regret to me, but on the other hand, I have been in Armenia and Georgia. I have been to Lake Baikal. I have been to Tadzhikistan. But I have never been in the Soviet Arctic. I have been in the Baltic states. I have been a little bit in the Ukraine. Anyway enough in three years to gain a whole host of impressions, and that is invaluable. I have only been back to the Soviet Union once since, and that was ten years later, but just having lived there, and sensed the reality even in a period which was in may ways frozen, or virtually, it was nonetheless an education. And working for Robert Ford was once again very much part of the education.

 

[HILL] In light of your recollections of that period, and what you came to know of the Soviet Union, how important do you think is Canada's continuing membership in NATO, in terms of being part of a Western group which has some relationship with the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union?

 

[TAYLOR] I think it is extremely important. Broadly speaking, what it seems to me we are dealing with is this: a certain set of international arrangements emerged from the War. They were modified sharply and in unhappy directions by the onset of the Cold War in the late 1940s, and we have lived since, and are still living, with a modified version of those structures. I think that the structures themselves have proved remarkably stable. Some people might contest this, people who worry about the accumulation of arms, the level of armaments in Europe, the competition, as they would see it, between two military blocs, and so on. There are serious matters there to discuss. But what strikes me is that the heart of the problem we were dealing with in political terms was the problem of Germany. That was settled in a certain way by the outcome of the War, by the Germans being beaten and by the division of Germany; and the alliances are related intimately to that.

 

Are we arriving, after more than a generation, at a stage in which we are going to see more than marginal modifications of those structures? We have seen modifications, but up until now, looking back on 30 years, you would say that they are marginal. Are we now arriving in a period where they will be more than marginal? Who can say? Maybe, maybe not. But in any event, we have all the lessons of our own history to tell us that our national interests and our security are engaged in all this. And therefore it seems to me absolutely indispensable that we go on being part of NATO; in part it is a defensive military alliance, but also - and here I think this is the other dimension of NATO which has developed a great deal, where I think it is vital that we continue to be present - because of the political dimension, which people are not sufficiently conscious of.

 

It is sometimes said - as if it were a kind of criticism - that the NATO we have is not the NATO of our heart's desire, because Article II and all the Canadian hopes that were put into it, that would have made NATO something more than "a mere military alliance", have been frustrated over time. So that all we have is a mere military alliance. Well, there are two things to say to that: I do not think a defensive military alliance, considering the threat over time to our interests, which continues, and which has to be coped with, you can dismiss as "mere": it is much more than that. The problem of military balance is there, and it has to be coped with. But in addition, there is a whole dimension of political consultation within NATO. With whatever difficulties, with however much mutual exasperation, blown fuses and failure, nonetheless there is a valid process of political consultation that goes on and that does produce harmonized Western positions. And that to me seems absolutely indispensable - particularly so if now the political order and the terms of the European security equation are about to shift. If that is what we will be coping with in the next generation, then I think it is more than ever indispensable that Canada be very much present in the political councils of the Alliance, as well as present in a valid way on the military side. And while - who knows - we may find that whatever changes we can succeed in bringing about will only come about so slowly that it will be hard to sustain public interest and public support, I do not really have any doubts about the fundamental validity of those propositions. I do not think NATO is a sterile or out-moded institution in any way; on the contrary.

 

[HILL] Just one last question, if I could, on the Soviet period. In that period the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia. Did you form any particular impressions? Were you involved in analyses of why they did this?

 

[TAYLOR] Yes.

 

[HILL] And if so, what conclusions did you arrive at?

 

[TAYLOR] Absolutely fascinating; it was arguably the most important thing that happened in foreign policy terms while I was there (the other important event, which had taken place just before I went to Moscow, was the Six-Day War) . But while I was there, the Prague Spring and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia were by far the most important events that we had to observe and try to understand. Well, if I look back on that, I put it together with other reflections about the system that existed in Eastern Europe.

 

And my reflections would be these: the Soviet Union under any Soviet leadership faces an extraordinarily difficult problem, in that this is the area, presumably, where the Soviet Union would consider that its vital national interests are fundamentally engaged. The principal historic threat to their security, as the Soviets would see it, I am sure, has come from Germany. As a result of their victory in the Second World War, they have disposed of that threat, again as they would see it, permanently. That is a fundamental victory for Soviet policy and for Soviet security, and they wish nothing to happen that would ever upset it. Well, it may seem now increasingly in the era of the two superpowers - where Germany, particularly a divided Germany, appears on any analysis to be an important state, a state, alright, but still of the second rank - that the Soviet Union does not need to brood over the German problem in the same sense as it was perfectly justified in doing as a result of its experiences in two world wars.

 

Nonetheless, there is every evidence that perhaps still even today, the German question agitates Soviet minds more than it does ours. That is something we have to go on understanding; and one of the most important pieces of evidence is that the Soviets are prepared, as they were in Czechoslovakia in 1968, to ensure the stability of the strategic band of territory that lies between a divided Germany and the Soviet Union, if necessary by throwing out all the credit and goodwill they obtained from liberating a country like Czechoslovakia from the Germans, by invading it. They paid an extraordinarily high price for that. The Czechs and Slovaks also paid an extraordinarily high price. Westerners, I suppose, particularly as the memories of the War fade, would be inclined to look on that as simply a mindless kind of brutality.

 

These are brutal solutions. They are solutions by the application of force. But they are not mindless. The analysis may be incorrect but there are profound reasons there and we have to understand them. I suppose one of the things that is interesting now is to wonder whether that kind of mentality is changing at all in the Soviet Union; whether one of the things that stirs in the back of the minds of the new leadership is that it really is not necessary to go on thinking as Stalin did: that Eastern Europe had not only to be a sphere of influence or a conventional military alliance, but that you had to smash the structures and have states that were genuinely vassals with all their social, and political and economic structures, modelled on yours and tied to yours, in addition to the military structures.

 

Well, of course, even in the heyday of the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe, there still were national differences, and those national differences are still there. They have become more and more marked over time as you see if you go, I just did with Mr. Clark, to Poland and Hungary. You were made very conscious once again that these are nations with deep roots in a past, in a history of their own of which they are quite conscious and quite proud, and that there are many ways, even in this day and age and in their constrained circumstances, where what goes on in the Soviet Union is simply not relevant to their circumstances. They have national problems of their own that cannot be solved by any kind of increased co-operation or decreased co-operation with the Soviet Union. That is really not the point. The point is that they have problems of their own that they have to address in their own way.

 

That has led in the past to permanent structural instabilities. As we know, the Soviet Union is able to maintain the stability of this whole system only by the presence of what are in effect occupying forces, together with the capacity to threaten force at any time, and actually to use force - as it did in Hungary in 1956, and in Czechoslovakia in 1968; or to extract from one of its allies - as with Poland in 1980-81 - that the ally in effect suppresses itself. The whole basis of the system still, it seems to me, is flawed, in the sense that it has continued in every decade since it has been set up to throw up periodic crises. These instabilities have nothing to do with the West: we do not produce them and we cannot cure them. We get blamed for them because they can hardly admit that the causes are all internal to the system. Therefore, as in 1968, it was West German revanchists and American imperialists who were blamed for the Prague Spring.

 

Well, everyone knows, no one better probably than the Czechs, Slovaks and Soviets themselves, that this is nonsense. It was not true. The crisis had to do with Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union; essentially it did not have a thing to do with West Germans and Americans. So that while we in the West get blamed, and that exacerbates these crises when they occur, nonetheless everyone knows that the causes are internal to the structures that are in place in Central and Eastern Europe.

 

Those are problems that they have to sort out. All I can say about 1968, seen in that context, is that - and I do not know whether this is cause for regret or what: I hardly know how to characterize it - when it comes to suppressing what are in effect national revolts in Eastern Europe, the Soviets are improving their technique with the passage of time. Hungary in 1956 was a bloody exercise. It is inconceivable that that kind of thing could happen again today. Czechoslovakia was brutal enough, but at least there was not bloodshed. And Poland in 1980 was accomplished - however awful it may have been, and however much we criticized the nature of the Polish regime as it was originally established under General Jaruszelski - nonetheless, I suppose that in this kind of comparison (which is inevitably odious) it was some kind of improvement, that at least it involved the Poles themselves. The Soviets in that case were kept out of it and there was no bloodshed.

 

Well, these are problems that arose in 1968. That seems already a long way back for some people. But it seems to me these events are all linked. We are still dealing with the same set of problems, and there is something to be said for thinking about 1956, 1968 and 1980. And now in 1987, think what it means to have a new leadership in the Soviet Union facing what on the whole are an older generation of leaders in the Eastern European countries: all of them are still obliged to come to grips with these problems.

 

[COX] While you were there, could you ever have had anything like this kind of discussion with you Soviet counterparts?

 

[TAYLOR] During the Prague Spring and the invasion of Czechoslovakia, there were, broadly speaking, signs that a small group of people in the Soviet Union were really appalled by the notion of the Soviet Union invading the territory of its own allies - that this seemed a really shattering self-condemnation. There were signs that there was a small body of opinion - intellectuals and so on - who felt that way; and you could get, I suppose, traces of that in conversations with people. But that was not the general attitude. The general attitude of the public, I think, was that unfortunately they tended on the whole to swallow the official line. There was a tendency to say: "Well, what are those Czechs doing? We fought a war. We spilled our blood to liberate them from the Germans, and now they seem to be playing some kind of game with the West again, endangering our security. What the hell is going on? Those people live better than we do, and here they are playing fast and loose with our security. They are foolish and dangerous people." I think there were a lot of Soviets who believed that, and I had the impression that one of the difficulties in 1968 was that Dubcek, who after all began as a Slovak worker of the most conventional and orthodox Party upbringing - a dim figure, who could have been expected to be utterly square in his reactions - startled the Soviets because he ended up being a national hero - a hero even to the Czechs - and was peddling all sorts of ideas that must have seemed insane to the Soviets; and also that he turned out to be a man of some emotion, totally contrary to his original image. There may have been people who knew him intimately who thought: "Behind that rather grave facade lurks quite an extraordinary personality - you wait and see." But in Czechoslovakia he could respond to and evoke a past not just outside Soviet experience but outside Russian experience. While I cannot prove this, I realize that someone like Brezhnev simply could not understand someone who was coming to him and saying: "We want to modify the system profoundly - but we can do it in conditions that will not affect the security of our alliance. We are not like the Hungarians." (They declared their neutrality, you remember; they tried to leave the Warsaw Pact in 1956.) Well, the Czechs in 1968 thought: "We are not going to make that mistake". So they said very firmly and repeatedly: "We're not questioning the alliance with the Soviet Union. We are not doing anything - we do not propose to do anything - by way of our reform that is going to threaten Soviet security. So be reassured on that fundamental question." But then they began to talk about the reforms, and the Soviets had to listen to the kind of debate that bubbled up in Czechoslovakia. They heard about people who were going to reform Communism to the point where it appeared you were going to be able run a Communist state more or less by consent of the people; and that the role of the secret police was diminished then to nothing, because you would not need their power of coercion; and that there were going to be opposition parties, and a free press and no censorship - all this stuff. In Czechoslovakia there are enough Czechs around who remember "Of course, a country can be run this way! We ran this country with free institutions in the past." The Soviets know intellectually, of course, that the "bourgeois republic" existed. But to have Communists tell you that you can adapt Communism that way! I think for the Brezhnevs of the world, it just boggled their minds - it was totally beyond their intellectual and cultural experience, beyond Soviet history. There has never been anything like this in Soviet experience; so that I think the Soviets have an awful lot of difficulty particularly when their allies come to them and say, "We want to modify our societies profoundly.”

 

It is true that now we have a leader in the Soviet Union who sometimes talks about modifications that would make your hair stand on end. You wonder whether one of his problems is not that there are a whole lot of people - in fact, the rank and file of Communists and even a whole lot of Soviets - who have a hell of a time understanding what it is he is on about, because they really do not have any experience of a world that has ever been like the one that he appears to want to drive towards.

 

[HILL] Partly because of their isolation presumably, and because of the internal restrictions and so on within the Soviet Union itself, as you mentioned earlier.

 

[TAYLOR] Well, while I am not in all respects, to put it mildly, an admirer of Richard Pipes, he is awfully good on Soviet history. In his proper role as a professor of Soviet history, he is, I think, marvelous. "Russia under the Old Regime," is, from this point of view, an illuminating book. In it he analyzes the way in which Russia from its historic beginnings has faced problems of producing a livelihood from a land which, outside the Ukraine, is unforgiving, and where historically there has always been a problem of the flight of population from the land; and where therefore variants of feudalism and serfdom were designed, at heart, to nail the peasants to the land, so that the land would be worked, because otherwise they all ran off to the towns. The notion of controlling the population to keep it from running off to the cities (which of course any study of feudalism says was a problem in all feudal societies: Stadluft macht frei, and all that notion) - existed in Western countries also. But in Russia, because it is a poor country, I guess, except in the Ukraine, this was a particular problem. The deepest roots of their institutional and cultural history have to do with this. Serfdom was the fundamental social institution up until just over a century ago, and that had to do with nailing people to a place, most often a remote place, and making them live there, and putting police over them to make sure they did not run off, and all that.

 

Serfdom was only abolished in the last century, and the distinction between peasants and city people, which had disappeared in Western society centuries ago in terms of civil status, persisted past the Czarist days into Soviet days. The internal passport that you have to carry in the Soviet Union is really an evidence of that. It is a kind of 20th century survival of serfdom, in a way. The roots of it go very, very deep. And one of the aspects of this is that there is no tradition of free emigration in the Soviet Union because there never was any under the Czar. There never has been, and they do not know what you are talking about.

 

They understand intellectually that in other countries things are managed differently. Their view is, "Well, that is alright - you have your way of doing things, we have ours. This is what all our history teaches us: that you have to control people, and you do not let them run all around inside the country and live where they please or leave the country when they feel like it. No, you cannot run the state successfully unless you control them. We are controlling them internally. And of course it follows from that we are not going to let them pick up and go to other countries when they feel like it either.”

 

Then we come to them as we do and say: "That's not civilized. What about human rights and the CSCE and the Helsinki document and the UN Charter and all that." But those are our institutions, our cultural values, our history, our civilization, in many important ways, not theirs. One thing I think is profoundly true is that there are some European values, and a certain European civilization, that extends as far as Poland; and that beyond that, there is a Russia that is in some senses European but in other ways shows some really quite important differences. These are banalities of Soviet historiography, but it is an Orthodox country in its cultural origins, and the whole business of the Renaissance and the Reformation, and the end of feudalism as it came about in Western Europe, is all quite different in Russia. The end of feudalism is much more recent and the traces of it are still there in this incapacity to imagine a free society.

 

[HILL] Of course, I suppose another thing is that they have Russian nationalism or now Soviet nationalism, if one must use that term, as to some degree a substitute for some of these other ideas.

 

[TAYLOR] Yes, and people react differently; it is one of the reasons why it is hard to say things like this. I would be very hesitant to say things like this to many Soviets. Sometimes you could discuss it with people if you knew them really well. Of course, there are any number of highly civilized, highly sophisticated, highly intelligent people in the Soviet Union. It is a huge country and it has got enormous human riches and human potential - a great deal of it, tragically, rather frustrated and incapable of realizing itself fully. But if you say things like this, even someone who might know in his heart of hearts that it is true will be offended. People will say: "After all, this is some kind of racism. You talk about us as if we were inferior beings, and we won't have that!" So it is a highly sensitive area. The whole debate that you read about between Westernizers and Slavophiles which has gone on and still goes on is a reflection of that; and the Slavophiles tendency is the tendency to react to criticisms of this kind by saying: "No, our values are what they are, and they're different and they're just as good and in our view superior. This is a better society. We aren't interested in yours." And then in the Soviet days, this has been larded with Marxist-Leninist analysis and all the stuff which points to our social and economic black spots, to unemployment, racial discrimination and this kind of thing.

 

But you can see with Soviet citizens who come to Canada or to any Western country that some of them are quite genuinely adrift in our society, do not like it and go back having had really quite an unhappy experience here, because they feel that our society is atomized. I think their society is rather more atomized. I mean that there is nothing but the individual facing the state, with no mediating organizations. There is no community life or social life outside the family, and the organizations are all really in one or the other manifestations of the state. That is what I understand by totalitarianism. It is totalitarian in that sense, and the mediating bodies that we have in our society, just do not exist, things other than the state to which you can attach your loyalty apart from your loyalty to yourself and your family. But there is a sense in which you are taken care of in these societies, by the state. If you are prepared to throw yourself in the arms of the state - up until now anyway - it will provide you with a job and a kind of life. This leads to a lot of cynicism and jokes along the lines of: “Yes we have a bargain with the government and our leaders: we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.”

 

At that level, you can have quite a stable existence. Yet you come here and even if you acquire English or French, and even if you have professional training that has equipped you and so on, nonetheless a lot of Soviet emigres are made - more than other immigrants to our society - quite uneasy at the degree to which they are personally responsible for their own fate. That is a value to us, and it is something that is intensely appreciated by some Soviets that come here. But you read every month or so in the papers, stories of people who have gone back because they cannot bear it. That I think is one of the measures of a different society.

 

Part V - Senior positions, Ottawa. 1976-82

 

[HILL] Mr. Taylor, between 1976 and 1982, you held a series of senior positions in Ottawa, including Director General of European Affairs, Assistant Under-Secretary and Deputy Under-Secretary of State for External Affairs. I wonder if you could say something about Canada's relations with the NATO allies during that period, particularly following the 1976 decision to re-equip the Canadian Armed Forces. Of course, that was also the period in which Canada established the Framework Agreement with the European Community.

 

[TAYLOR] The new element in that period was the Framework Agreement. The origins of that are traced back to Nixonomics and the decisions taken by the United States Administration in 1971 that produced in the course of 1972 a fundamental review of Canada's relations with the United States. One of the things that emerged from that was that the country always stood in need of counterweights to the relationship with the United States; it had to find ways of reducing its vulnerability to sudden changes in American policy which ignored our interests. We had somehow or other to create a network of international relations that permitted us to rely on other strong relationships, relationships you could build, which would cushion such shocks and make us less totally dependent on the American relationship.

 

That was, in essence, the so called "Third Option" which was much debated at the time. The one institutional expression it took in our relationship with European countries was the Framework Agreement. The whole affair was much misunderstood. I would not propose on this occasion to debate the history of the Third Option. The Framework Agreement with the European Community was designed to deal once again with a fundamental problem that has coloured Canadian attitudes in many relationships, and which lies at the heart of the political relationship in NATO; that is to say, that a smaller country is always at risk that larger countries will dispose of its interests in its absence and without its view being heard. That is why Canada goes on insisting year in, year out, on the importance of consultation in NATO. That is why we press the United States not simply to assume everything about a largely unruffled relationship with us - or at least a relationship that is relatively easy and friendly compared to most bilateral relationships in the world. And it is why with the European Community we wished to avoid situations of a kind, that up to that point we had often experienced: where the Community negotiated furiously over a particular problem within its circle and arrived half exhausted with a consensus with a view to negotiations, let's say, with other important trading partners, with the United States or with Japan; and would then try to do a deal with, let's say the United States, and at the end of it would come around to us having exhausted itself a second time, and say more or less: "Well, there is a signature blank at the bottom of the page that says 'Canada.' Would you please just append your signature here. We can assure you this is good for you."

 

There were instances with particular items - for instance, in agricultural trade, I remember - where that is not much of a caricature of what happened: that you were simply expected by the Europeans not to rock the boat; that it had been so hard for them to hammer out their own consensus, and so hard for them to reach an agreement with the United States, that they did not want any country with, as they would see it, a lesser interest to come along at the end and upset the whole deal by making waves and saying: "Well, nobody asked us about this!"

 

The purpose of the Framework Agreement really was to ensure in various ways that you enforced consultation with the Community, so that you had a chance - again, it is the NATO story - to influence the policy of your larger partners while the policy was being formed, and were not presented with a fait accompli at the end of the process.

 

Whether we have succeeded is another story. I think that the history of our relations with the Community since would suggest that this is an unending battle. It is always a problem for them, but it is a worse problem now in a way, as the Community expands its membership, than it was before. It is very difficult for them, once they have reconciled all the conflicting interests that exist within the Community, to come to the bargaining table with anything other than an absolutely immutable position. Nonetheless, Canadians I suppose ought to understand that. It has its parallel in our own difficulties in areas of provincial jurisdiction or shared jurisdiction, where Canada has to hammer out a Canadian position by agreement between the federal government and the provinces before it undertakes an international negotiation. We all know that is very complicated. Negotiating with the Community is that, but worse.

 

[HILL] So, in effect Canada was interested in some sort of arrangement or linkage with the European Community for its own sake. And one of the quid pro quos for this from the European point of view was that Canada should take greater interest in NATO. Canada, too, for a number of its own reasons, was coming around to taking a greater interest in NATO than it had in the immediately preceding period.

 

At any rate, it was from 1976, if I am not mistaken, that Canada started to build up again to some degree its armed forces. What sort of impact did this have on Canada's relations with NATO? Were relations more positive, from 1976 on, than they had been in the immediately preceding period?

 

[TAYLOR] Yes, if we can come to the NATO side of it, I think the NATO countries generally, in the later 1970s, were becoming more aware of two things. First was the need to take concerted measures to improve their collective defences. That led to the decision, for instance, to commit to a 3% real increase in defence spending. That was one aspect. And then in the last years of the 1970s and at the turn of the decade, of course, the hopes of the early 1970s about detente had really disappeared pretty well entirely and the international atmosphere had turned quite sour by comparison. By the time we came to the crisis over Poland, for instance, following on the crisis in Afghanistan, it really came to another very low point in East-West relations. So there was a change in the international atmosphere going on in those years. That totally removed any temptation there would have been to any NATO government to argue: "Well, the world of the alliances is dissolving before our very eyes; there isn't really any need to spend anything more on keeping our defences up to date because we are all going to be disarmed in a few years."

 

That is an exaggeration. Nobody even in the heyday of detente believed that that was going to happen soon. I do not think any serious person believed that. But nonetheless those hopes were part of the atmosphere of the earlier days of detente. It would have been more difficult, and it obviously was more difficult, in that earlier atmosphere, for a government to sustain a programme of increased defense spending than toward the end of the decade. And then, apart from anything else, the Canadian Forces all through these years had suffered from growing difficulties over the way in which, in an age of inflation, forces composed of full-time professionals - who therefore have to be paid at the market rate - had their wage rates driven up. These personnel costs had to be satisfied out of a budget that was not growing in proportion, so that the cost of military manpower became a relatively heavier and heavier charge in Canada. That alone was one of the reasons why the proportion of spending on capital equipment, on replacements for aging weapons of one kind or another, dwindled progressively. That was a structural problem of Canadian defence spending in those years; and that too eventually had to be turned around, or we would have had Armed Forces which were of a very high standard as far as the personnel was concerned and very well paid - potentially very impressive forces - except that they would not have had any modern equipment.

 

Those things were coining about in any event, regardless of what happened in the world. So I think there was a kind of conjuncture, and the government of the late 1970s really ordered its course to meet the mood of the times. It committed itself to the 3% real increase, and actually met the targets by comparison with other NATO countries. But by then there had been such a long period of under-funding of major new capital programmes that it took a long time to catch up. In a way, we are still dealing with that problem. But the process was begun then. The decisions about replacing the Centurion with the Leopard I, the decision to buy the Aurora long-range patrol aircraft, and the preliminaries to some of the later decisions, of which the Frigate Programme was the last in a long series - those were all either taken or gestating in that period; and, of course, our allies looked on that with satisfaction.

 

[HILL] Do you think that that made it easier for Canada to pursue its own particular goals inside NATO?

 

[TAYLOR] I think unfortunately it is easier to demonstrate the negative than the positive. There is a link. I am convinced of that. Beyond a certain point, you cannot hope within NATO to be listened to with any kind of respect, no matter how clever your diplomatic performance may be or how great your political wisdom, if you are quite plainly out of step with the majority of your allies on what the trend of defence spending should be. The two things go together. When you start trying, as you would hope, to play a constructive role in the diplomacy of the Alliance, and to influence the general conduct of East-West relations, from a position where you are increasingly out of step with the military arrangements, then the one is linked with the other. There may be some illogic in that. It may be unjustified. But it is a fact. Your influence melts away, and you can feel that.

 

What about the other side of it? The other side is very hard to judge, because there is no way of measuring political influence. There is no intellectually satisfying way of demonstrating that X many million more dollars spent in any one year on defence is going to buy, as a function, y much more influence. Therefore all this is subject to endless debate and challenge. I cannot prove that an improved defence performance results in greater political credibility in the counsels of the Alliance. I believe it does, but I cannot prove it; I don’t think anybody can.

 

One of the permanent difficulties is that people have not got the time or the patience to be bothered with the subtleties. Even people who are supposed to be quite knowledgeable about each others’ affairs in the Alliance, actually use rather crude measures of each other's affairs and are on the whole rather ignorant about each other's affairs. We are subjected to that from time to time within NATO, since everyone's defence effort is subject to reciprocal criticism; we have our go at other people, and they have their crack at us. There are a few people who become deeply knowledgeable in the NATO secretariat, NATO military staffs, and some other NATO governments about Canada's political and military standing, and the true nature of its problems, and about what it is reasonable to expect Canada to do by way of defence contribution and so on, but the number of people who have that kind of knowledge you can count on the fingers on one hand. Certainly it is a tiny number compared to the number of people who choose to have opinions on the subject and know very little about it. You can get really quite ill-informed judgements almost any day of the week on subjects of this sort.

 

One of the difficulties that Canada faces permanently is that the American system allows a good deal of liberty to public officials to speak out, to go on the public record when the spirit moves them. This creates a situation in which, over the years, you could virtually count on that there would be almost constant criticism and pressure, from the American military establishment, to the effect that Canada was not doing enough.

 

Well, that is a permanent American view. I think that what one would have to say against that is that all except a handful of very well-informed Americans are probably using something as crude as the GNP yardstick. Those yardsticks, which are very popular for measuring both defence effort and aid effort, are the beginning of analysis; they are not the end of it. Unfortunately they are frequently used as if the man who has the yardstick had discovered a kind of philosopher's stone, and was licensed to stop thinking once he had applied the yardstick. This is a pity because, intellectually, the GNP yardstick has holes in it you could drive a truck through. The difficulty is you have to have some kind of measure, and it is the only agreed measure we have. It is just that if it is to be used, it has to be used with a sense of its limitations. And that very frequently is not done.

 

What does that come to? I think it is another way of saying, that even if you could imagine Canada doubling, tripling or quadrupling its defence budget -if you could imagine us spending 4% or 5% of our GNP on defence - could you guarantee that the country would then become correspondingly more powerful - by some measure that is yet to be found - in international political or economic discussions? No, you could not. And even spending at that level would not make us a major military power.

 

Therefore, at whatever level we spend, we will be a relatively modest military power. We will not be totally insignificant in military terms, and, in particular, we will not be insignificant if we can find the most sensible niche in the collective arrangements of the Alliance. But there is no way in which even those unimaginable increases - which is what by implication some people in the United States appear to be urging us on to attain - would buy the country influence. We have never in our postwar history, except perhaps at the peak of the re-armament programme during the Korean War, spent at that rate. I have forgotten what the GNP figure was then, but I think probably we did get close to 4% of GNP or something like that. But these yardsticks really do not help. If they encouraged people to think, I would not mind, but too often they encourage people to stop thinking.

 

[HILL] I think that is very common. On another point, one of the major features of the international landscape in this period, 1976-1982, was NATO's decision on intermediate range nuclear forces, the INF decision, the two-track decision in December, 1979. Were you in anyway involved in that? And how well did you think that accorded with Canadian desires and intentions?

 

[TAYLOR] I was not as closely associated with the decision before it was taken as I was afterwards when I was at NATO, but there is one observation I would like to make about it. I have always thought that the whole INF debate, (and we are still in the INF debate) is probably the most important single example one can find to demonstrate that the Alliance is not, as its critics sometimes make out, totally dominated by the United States, with everyone else simply tied to the chariot wheels of American policy. My reason for saying that is that INF is really a European, and above all a German, issue. While I cannot prove this, I do not think that American strategists and political thinkers under any Administration, if left to themselves, would ever have defined the problem of the gray area, the Euro-strategic missile problem, in quite the way Helmut Schmidt initially defined it - that if Helmut Schmidt had not decanted the problem, so to speak, the Alliance countries would ever have been invited, by the United States anyway, to come to grips with it in quite the terms they did. At every turn of the INF negotiations - and we will come to that shortly - I think that you can see the evidence of the United States under successive Administrations, in effect deferring to its European allies, allowing them to define the problem, sharing with them in trying to find a solution, listening to them very carefully, and modifying its negotiating position as a function of consultation. You could say that even the events of the last month or so are a demonstration that, at a minimum, the United States cannot conceivably ride rough-shod over the views of its allies - that, at a minimum, they have to wait patiently for their allies to come to their own decision about what they think is right. We have just seen that once again in Germany. So that if you are looking around for a case study on the important issue of consultation at work - of consultation as a means of doing what it is designed to do, that is, ensuring that the decisions of our mightiest ally are taken after reflecting on how their decisions might affect our interests, and of how consultation works to cope with that problem - the whole history of INF, for ten years now, provides a number of interesting illustrations that, yes indeed, consultation works.

 

[HILL] And that applies presumably to Canadian interests, as well as to these of the Europeans. I mean in the specific case of INF.

 

[TAYLOR] On INF, of course, the fact of the matter is that to go right to the heart of it, since those missiles do not have a range that would touch Canadian territory, they are not a direct threat to Canada. The missiles that interest Canadians, in the end, of course, are the missiles with intercontinental range, because those are ones that could hit us. In that sense, INF for Canada has always been an issue where we were obliged to wait for our European partners to make up their minds, to try to understand their difficulties and their position, and reason our way through it, and then support the Allied position that emerged. I think under both the Liberal and the Conservative governments, this is really what we have done. But I do not think it has ever been for Canada to take a lead on that.

 

[HILL] No, I was not really suggesting that. I was thinking in more limited terms. Whatever views Canada had to express, whatever policies we had on this question, were they taken into account?

 

[TAYLOR] Oh, yes.

 

Part VI - Ambassador to the North Atlantic Council, 1982-85

 

[HILL] Mr. Taylor, if we might continue with the INF question, which I must say I find a matter of great interest, I think you mentioned just a minute ago it was a major issue in NATO while you were there. I wonder if you could tell us something about the treatment of that question, the whole question of implementation of the two-track decision. How effective were the consultations on this issue in NATO while you were there? How difficult an issue was it for the Allies? For example, what kind of role did Canada play in the consultations on this issue?

 

[TAYLOR] During the three years I was in NATO, I would say that the INF issue was the most important single political and military issue that the North Atlantic Council dealt with. It was the subject of intense consultation throughout. The basis for the policies of the Alliance throughout the period remained the two track decision, and the problem was to implement the two track decision; that is, to develop a negotiating position - or a succession of negotiating positions as it turned out - which the United States would negotiate on behalf of the Alliance with the Soviet Union, with a view to obtaining above all the removal of the SS-20s, to which the ground-launched cruise missiles and Pershing Ils were to be deployed in response; and failing success in the negotiations, to proceed with the other track, that is the deployment of the missiles.

 

Well, the negotiations in their initial stages were extremely difficult to launch. It was necessary to proceed with the deployment. This was highly controversial in most of the countries of deployment of the missiles at the time as we remember, and particularly so because there was a time when, in Britain, Germany and Italy, there were general elections all within the space of roughly a year. The issue of the deployment of the missiles was an issue in each of those elections. In Germany in particular there was a belief that the whole fate of the government turned on the question; and that if there were no alteration or dilution somehow or other of the German government's position, then it would pay for it at the polls. There were massive demonstrations in that election campaign that suggested that that might be so.

 

In any event, from the domestic political point of view, the whole issue of deployment was obviously highly sensitive for most of our European allies throughout that period. And it was sensitive to the point almost of obsession. That is, there were other difficult issues, which in other circumstances should have been tackled within NATO at the time, which really could not be tackled because people only had time and political energy and imagination to cope with the deployment business.

 

[HILL] That's quite fascinating. I've never heard that said before.

 

[TAYLOR] And for Canadians, I think, that while that was possible to understand intellectually, it was difficult to share emotionally, because the missiles were not being deployed on our territory, nor were we threatened directly by the SS-20s to which they were a response. The degree to which this issue agitated, say, Germany, is something that Canadians had to make a very considerable effort of imagination to appreciate. For Canadians at the time, I suppose if there was a comparable issue in terms of the public debate it aroused, it was the question of the testing of cruise missiles in Canada. That was in some ways our version at the time of the kind of debate that went on in some of the European countries.

 

In the end, the governments concerned stuck by the two-track decision, that is the negotiations failed, or appeared to fail, because the Soviets left the table, after we had evolved in the Alliance a perfectly acceptable offer. People sometimes forget this, that it was the West that offered the first zero of the zero-zero solution that is now being discussed: total elimination of this category of missile. It was the Soviets who, as I think they subsequently realized, made the mistake of walking away from the negotiations. Then successively the Germans, the British, the Italians, the Belgians and finally even the Dutch, who had very great difficulty also in domestic politics with the issue, proceeded with the deployment. At that stage, there were leaders in the Soviet Union, we thought, who were estimating that all they had to do was to stall the negotiations, and to play enough on domestic opinion in the West, and the Western governments determined to proceed with the two track decision would simply fall - public support would be withdrawn from them and the Soviets would have gotten away with it; that is, they would have left their SS- 20s in place, and paid no price for having deployed them. Meanwhile in the West, governments would have come to power that would have refused the counter-deployment of ground-launched cruise missiles and Pershing IIs.

 

Well, that did not come about. It was a great demonstration of political solidarity and of the willingness of our allies to run very considerable political risks and bear very considerable political burdens.

 

[HILL] Was it also an example of effective consultative practices?

 

[TAYLOR] Yes, I think that it was. I think it required intense consultation throughout, and it also required the United States to understand the position of its allies, to forbear and be prepared to accept negotiating positions that took a while to hammer out sometimes, and represented the solution that the Allies were comfortable with. Again, since the alternative was never tried, one cannot demonstrate this, but I am not sure that on any of these issues the United States, left to itself, would really have answered the strategic dilemma in the way that the European allies and the Allies collectively decided it should be answered.

 

[HILL] From what you say, I have the impression that the West Europeans really felt over-shadowed by the SS-20s. Were they really worried about being targets for these things?

 

[TAYLOR] Yes, I think that that was a particularly strong feeling in Germany, and I think there was a feeling also that Germany was naked to this threat; that is that Germany, because of the fundamental limitations on its national policies in the London and Paris agreements is, of course, permanently prevented from acquiring nuclear weapons of its own. Therefore to the extent that the East-West strategic balance is maintained in part by nuclear weapons, then Germany is protected by somebody else's nuclear weapons because it cannot be protected by its own.

 

I do not think there is any question at all in German minds or in anyone else's of altering those fundamental limitations. Therefore, so long as nuclear weapons exist, any federal German government has to look to its allies in this sense for protection. I think that in Germany the feeling when the SS-20s were deployed, whether this actually was the Soviet intention or not at the time, was that because of the characteristics of the SS-20, it posed a particular threat to Western Europe which was not posed to the United States because of the range of the weapon, principally. There was even an argument that it was deliberately designed to put the American nuclear guarantee to the test, and to have a decoupling effect, to break the link between the United States and Germany.

 

That, I think, is the heart of it as Germans would see it. Why didn’t others feel it quite the same way? Well, I think the smaller NATO countries had no ambitions at all to be nuclear powers themselves, so that the only nuclear weapons that they would have would be American weapons on their territory under double-key arrangements.

 

The British and the French, of course, not under the same kind of fundamental legal inhibition that the Germans are, are able to equip themselves with independent national strategic nuclear deterrents, and to that extent feel that they have dealt with a threat of this kind or at least they can feel somewhat more comfortable in these circumstances.

 

This is why this is above all a German problem. There is the additional obvious fact that German territory lies in the heart of Central Europe and is geographically exposed. So the whole issue appears, I think, in particularly dramatic terms in German eyes; and to a lesser degree - but nonetheless to a more lively degree than it was felt in Canada - the deployment of the SS-20s was seen everywhere in Western Europe as a particular threat to European NATO countries. Again, it was really German political and defence policy-makers who had to take a leading role in defining the problem and analyzing it. It had to be demonstrated that the response to the SS-20 had in the end to be land-based missiles on the territory of the Federal Republic. An American strategic figure might very well have said: "Yes, the SS-20s pose a threat - but it is very easy, we will just move some more ships into the area or we will move aircraft carriers, with nuclear weapons aboard or something like that. These are sea-based answers." But it would really require a German thinker, I believe, or a German spokesman to say: "No, I'm sorry that will not do. We really have to have the response based on our territory. It has to be land- based". And then beyond that, while that would have dealt very directly with the heart of the threat, it would have been politically unbearable to expect the Federal Republic to have borne . all of the burden of the total response by way of deployment.

 

[HILL] In other words, to have it installed solely on German soil.

 

[TAYLOR] So that there had to be a sharing of that political responsibility too, and it was shared by a number of other Allied countries.

 

[HILL] Another element of this is that the Soviets ran quite a diplomatic campaign to try and influence Western public opinion, I suppose particularly Western European opinion. They wanted to persuade Western publics to reject these missiles, that is to say the Pershing II and the cruise. How well do you think NATO responded to that?

 

[TAYLOR] I think the response had to come as it did from the individual Allied governments. I think that about all you could do in NATO itself, within the consultative machinery of the Alliance, was to recognize collectively that dealing with public opinion was going to be extremely important, and to compare notes, and to make sure that what was said in one country was not contradicted by what was being said in another. Beyond that, I think the lesson of all analysis of the problem of coping with public information, and public opinion, is that the central machinery of the Alliance has a useful but quite modest role to play. In the end on these great questions in democracies where you are responding to your own electorate, it is the local government that has to bear the burden of carrying a case to the public.

 

[HILL] Well, my impression is that the best thing to do is to tell it as it is. I do not think that highly orchestrated public information campaigns are really the way to go. How would you feel about that?

 

[TAYLOR] Well, certainly I think it takes a clear political lead. I think it takes heads of government and ministers who understand the problem, are convinced that they have the right answer and are prepared to go out and say this is the problem, and your government believes this is the answer, and this is our stand, and we are prepared to take our electoral chances on it. I think political leadership is really the key in all that. Successful, modern public relations techniques no doubt have something to do with it, but they cannot redeem bad policy.

 

[HILL] Given that this was such an important feature in the period when you were at NATO, this whole INF question, is there any other element that comes to your mind in terms of the operations of NATO or Canadian policy with regard to NATO?

 

[TAYLOR] You mean INF or other issues?

 

[HILL] INF in particular. Any lessons that you might draw from your experience in that period?

 

[TAYLOR] Yes, I think that, as we know now, we may be on the verge of the first actual nuclear arms reduction agreement that has ever been negotiated, and if that negotiation is successful, it will limit these very missiles, perhaps eliminate them totally. We would hope that. But if you stand back a little bit, I suppose that you would have to allow that historic accident has driven us to this. We did not decide to deploy the SS-20s, and I do not think people are entirely certain yet why the Soviets decided to make the weapon and then to deploy it. But the result of it is that, ten and fifteen years on, the superpowers are perhaps fairly close to an agreement which will eliminate this category of missile, and that will be, if it comes about, the first nuclear arms agreement of its kind that has ever been successfully negotiated. Well, we know equally that these things are all linked, that what you do about Euro-strategic INF missiles is linked, in some way or another, to what you do or would hope to do about intercontinental systems, what you do about shorter range systems, what you do about battlefield systems, what you do about conventional weapons, what you do about chemical weapons; there are links; and the trick is not to allow the whole process to be held up, if you can get it moving, by blockage of one particular negotiation, nor to say that: "We will negotiate agreements and then we'll keep them on ice until we negotiate the whole series."

 

That would be impossibly long. These things are all linked, and yet we will have to find ways of segmenting them. That is, we will have to seek negotiations that will attack some of these problems seriatim and which will, you would hope, result in establishing successively lower levels of armament, but without the stability of the system being disrupted at any point. That is very schematic but nonetheless it is extremely important.

 

I would also say, very much as a personal judgement, that the problem is not, as some people maintain, the accumulation of weapons. It is true, notwithstanding some unilateral decisions by NATO which have, for instance, sharply reduced the number of nuclear warheads that are held in Europe - and people often do not appreciate the extent to which this has happened - that notwithstanding this fact, the level both of conventional and nuclear forces in Europe is nonetheless unprecedented, certainly in absolute terms - for conventional forces, unprecedented in peace-time. But that accumulation has not really produced an unstable system.

 

People sometimes argue that the very accumulation of weapons is of itself dangerous. They speak as if this inevitably produces an increased risk of war. I think not - that it depends on what weapons are being introduced and in what circumstances, and whether they are destabilizing. That is really the question. The evidence is that the system that has been created, while it is the product of some of these purely random factors like the introduction of the SS-20s, is nonetheless quite a stable system. My reason for arguing that is that, in any other circumstances, how could the European security system, if you can call it a system - it is hard to call something that is such a random construct a system, but nonetheless, let's say that in effect East and West have conspired somehow or other through a maze of reciprocal actions over the last generation to create a system - how could that system have survived crises over Berlin in the 1950s, survived the crisis in Hungary in 1956, the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Polish crisis of 1980-81? Over and over again, the system shows where it is unstable: that it is inherently unstable in Eastern Europe. The relationship between the Soviet Union and Eastern European countries is flawed, and there is no way that system can be stabilized, at least by consent. They have not arrived at that yet anyway. When its stability is threatened, the stability is restored by actual applications of force, or at least the threat of force, and in any other circumstances - before the age of nuclear weapons let's say - political crises of that magnitude in Europe would have brought us much closer to war than I think we have ever been.

 

So you could argue that in fact, however much we want to get rid of the weapons, it is quite a stable system; that it is capable of withstanding very severe shocks. So it seems to me the problem then is not the lack of stability, the problem is to retain the stability. The stability is there. It is one of the virtues of the system. I know this may seem almost a perverse logic, but I think it has some force: that the system has the virtue of stability and that we want to maintain that stability; that the criticism is that it is stability established at a very considerable political price in Eastern Europe, and it is stability established at a very high level of armament. So that the object over time is to produce a more civilized political order - and that really is what we are seeking in CSCE - and to seek through arms control and disarmament negotiations progressively to reduce the level of armaments to something that is at a more sensible level, without at any stage in the downward track destroying the stability of the system. That is really the European security programme. If you look at it in that perspective, the fact that we happen to have hold at the moment of one particular negotiation affecting one particular category of nuclear weapons strikes me almost as another one of these random happenings; it is not necessarily the point at which you would attack this massive complex of problems if you could start tabula rasa. Let's say, for instance - some people have argued this - that it would have been far more sensible to start with negotiations covering battlefield weapons. Anyway, one way or another, we are where we are. We start from where we start. Alright, the INF thing may on one logic be an odd place to attack the problem. Nonetheless, history has brought us there, and if we can register success with that particular category of weapons, that success itself I think is far more important than the fact that by some arguments the two sides really ought to be talking about something else first.

 

[HILL] It's an interesting point. It brings us around also to another point. One of the things which arose while you were at NATO was the question of the Strategic Defense Initiative. I think this was announced by President Reagan while you were at NATO. My impression was that most people could not quite figure out at first what this was all about, but then when it dawned on people what it was about, then they began to worry about it. That is what happened in Canada, I think. And I have a feeling that it was not dissimilar in Europe. And when they started to worry about it, the Europeans began to wonder where would they stand in relation to the American defensive shield that was going up. Could you tell us something about the discussions that took place on this issue? Was there much discussion?

 

[TAYLOR] There was no conclusive discussion at all while I was there, and I do not think that there was anything that you could call more than the beginnings of a process of consultation about SDI and its implications. The President's announcement came really as quite a surprise to everybody. It surprised a lot of people in the United States. Unlike INF and the two track decision and all the rest of it, it was not something that people had had a long time to work up to. On the contrary, it was more or less dropped on the Alliance, and people had to start from there.

 

Well, the United States sent a number of extremely expert military and civilian defence advisers to Brussels, and there were frequent briefings about what was involved in the programme. General Abrahamson came several times for instance, and there were other senior officials from the Defense Department; and of course the Secretary of Defense himself appeared regularly in NATO meetings, and would speak to the progress of the programme.

 

One of the great difficulties, at least so long as I was there - and I take it this is still a difficulty - is that it all depends on what SDI you are talking about. If the most ambitious form of strategic defence could be realized, the kind that the President appeared to be talking about and appeared to believe in - he seemed to believe in the most ambitious form - that is something that would be a kind of double dome. That is, it would protect the United States, but it would also protect the territory of the Allies. That was part of the answer to European worries about is SDI just Fortress America?

 

In principle, the President appeared to be saying that the protective umbrella would cover all the Allies. But then there was also, you will remember, the offer to share the technology with the Soviet Union. So, the Soviet Union would be protected by another dome or umbrella as well. Well, the implications of that are breathtakingly vast; they would obviously be in a class by themselves. Now between that extreme vision of what might be possible, and whatever the United States may eventually come to as a result of the research that is going on now, there is a whole range of possibilities. Just in the last few months, of course. Secretary Weinberger has talked again about the possibilities of an early deployment of something much less ambitious. Your judgement about whether these things are possible or impossible, wise or unwise, destabilizing or not, depends in the end on what SDI is. While people use SDI as one of these very convenient labels, in fact, you know, SDI is a label like "middle class": it means all sorts of things - so far as I can see, anyway. It depends on what you mean by SDI whether you find it acceptable or unacceptable, possible or impossible.

 

In any event, as you know, the Canadian government has taken a rather modest and prudent line about it and said that research is justified because we know that the Soviet Union is carrying on research in the field of strategic defence but the Canadian government for its part is not going to set up a research programme of its own to respond to the American invitation, which was extended to the Allies to join in the venture. It seems to me that the jury is still out on SDI. In fact, there are all sorts of juries, and they are all still out. You read accounts of, lets say, congresses of computer experts who debate whether the United States can or cannot find the small army of software specialists to write the software for the system. And you are aware of all the range of alternative weapons that are being considered, some of which, as research progresses, seem to be somewhat more promising, and others which it seems are being abandoned because the testing programme suggests that no, they will not pan out.

 

There are so many unknowables in it that I think it is very difficult to make more than the most tentative or preliminary kind of judgement. I think that all would agree, from President Reagan on down - it's so obvious, you wonder if it is worth saying - that it would be utterly foolish for any United States President, even if a particular system becomes technically possible, to authorize the deployment of a system which is quite plainly going to be destabilizing. You cannot imagine the American President doing that.

 

There we are. We are presumably years away from decisions of that kind. Meanwhile it seems to me that everybody is agreed on that. Whether you are justified in going from there to a quick conclusion that strategic defence is not going to be any more important in the next generation than it has been in the last decade or so, and that in the end there will never be a substitute for mutually assured destruction, and virtually total reliance on mutual deterrence of offensive systems, that I do not know. Personally, I would be reluctant to make a judgement of that kind. It may be that we can find ways to go at least some distance toward the goal that President Reagan has talked about, which involve us in finding some substitute system for guaranteeing our security other than relying on these threats of massive mutual annihilation.

 

[HILL] Anyway, while you were there there was no sort of programme of consultation, of analysis, on SDI, in NATO? There was no sort of SDI working group set up?

 

[TAYLOR] Not as such. There were pieces of consultative machinery that had been set already for other purposes which locked onto the SDI problem simply as one more element in the nuclear dilemma, and certainly some of our allies pressed very hard for a discussion of the strategic implications of SDI as such - a sort of special debate on the subject - but that had not been arranged by the time I left.

 

[HILL] Was there a lot of discussion in NATO in this period on the nuclear dilemma? I mean many people have argued that if the US contemplates using nuclear weapons in defence of Europe, that means that potentially the Soviets might retaliate against the United States. In earlier periods people talked about "Windows of Opportunity", because of Soviet deployments of new types of missile systems and the failure of the Americans to deploy equivalent types. Dr. Kissinger got into a great phase of questioning Western nuclear credibility at one time, and then the whole debate seemed to die down.

 

Of course, while you were in NATO, a strong build up of American forces was going on under President Reagan. I just wondered if the particular problem of the nuclear dilemma was a major issue in that period?

 

[TAYLOR] The form that the nuclear dilemma took while I was there that was most debatable, centered on the question of first use, and of course that is still an unresolved problem. The SACEUR throughout the period I was in NATO was Bernard Rogers and he many, many times said in public that with the forces he had and the mission that had been given to him, if there were a war, ammunition stocks and reserves and so on would be run down to the point where in fairly short order he would be obliged to turn to Allied governments and request authority to use nuclear weapons.

 

He was accustomed to make a number of other observations that set that in context. For instance, he often said also that he did not himself believe that there was a very high risk of a war breaking out, that he really did not think that the major threat arose from a direct threat of war, that it was much more likely that, if imbalances between East and West were allowed to grow, the result would more likely be that Soviet diplomacy, backed by Soviet military preponderance, to which there would no longer be a satisfactory Western response, would leave the West open to blackmail and pressure of various kinds; and that that was really a more serious risk than war itself. That was also an argument for maintaining a military balance. It was also an argument for lessening the relative dependence of the Alliance on nuclear weapons, and increasing the relative dependence of the Alliance on conventional weapons. We are still there, really. That debate is still going on. General Rogers is now departing from his position, but I would think that is a debate which his successor will take up, and I doubt if on that point he will see much differently; that is, that the key words are, I think, stability and balance. You can maintain a balance at different levels, and we must try to maintain it at the lowest level we can arrange, but if it has to be maintained at a relatively high level, for reasons not of our seeking, then really you have to find the resources to do that. It does not mean that you have to maintain forces on a one for one basis. No one in NATO has ever argued that and NATO never has maintained forces on that basis. It simply means that you have to maintain some adequate combination of nuclear and conventional forces to constitute a credible deterrent. Our problems would arise if we allowed our forces to become weakened to the point where they no longer constituted that credible deterrent. That is what military commanders like General Rogers would urge on the political leadership of the Alliance, and that is still our problem. This is why we have to contribute to the maintenance of our share of a credible deterrent, in circumstances where you hope you will be able to negotiate a balance of forces over time at lower levels and with a mix of forces that is relatively less reliant on the nuclear component of the deterrent, therefore relatively more on conventional forces; but that you do not put yourself into the poor house in that way, because conventional forces are expensive forces. This is sad but true, that one of the advantages we have had from having relied on nuclear weapons is that it has been a relatively cheaper form of defence. If we had to maintain forces anything like the size of Soviet forces on the basis of, say, full-time volunteers, pay them at the going wage rates in Western economies and equip them accordingly, we would all be in the poor house. That kind of force structure is probably beyond our means. But those arguments were beginning to weigh on people. I think that there was a gradual realization in the public debate that went on while I was in NATO that, to use a North American expression: "There's no free lunch", that if you are going to depend less on nuclear deterrence, then you have got to depend more on conventional deterrence, and if we want to get away, progressively, from reliance on the nuclear weapons that produce the first-use doctrine in the first place, then that is really the road down which you have to go. We are not at the stage yet where anyone, I think, can feel safe - any military advisor anyway - in advising Western governments to abandon the doctrine of first use.

 

[HILL] Was this the period in which General Rogers was beginning to advocate a 4% increase in defence spending, or did that come later?

 

[TAYLOR] Yes, I think the 4% figure was launched while I was there.

 

[HILL] What kind of response did that meet with?

 

[TAYLOR] Well, of course 4% is generally beyond the capacities of all but a handful of Western governments. I do not think they have the financial resources and I do not think they have the political strength it would take to screw down other programmes for the sake of raising increased sums of that kind.

 

[HILL] You mentioned the no-first-use issue. Of course, another question that was under very active discussion in the period you were there was the whole idea of a nuclear freeze. This was the period of the big peace demonstrations in North America and in Europe. Did that movement have an impact on your own work?

 

[TAYLOR] Well, yes, although not so much the freeze. The freeze was really a sort of rallying cry in the United States. And I suppose it had its impact in Canada also, where to some degree the debate about cruise missiles and so on was linked with the notion of a nuclear freeze, I do not think Europeans were debating a nuclear freeze so much as those who disliked the notion of course were arguing against the deployment of the INF missiles. That was the focus of the counterpart debate in Europe; and that debate, as I have already said, was of course very much the essential political background to a lot of the discussions that went on in the NATO Alliance.

 

[HILL] Was this the period also in which Mr. Trudeau launched his Peace Initiative? I was just wondering how much impact that had on NATO headquarters as well as on the allies?

 

[TAYLOR] Yes, Mr. Trudeau undertook his Peace Initiative - I am trying to think - when I was first in NATO. In any event, in a sense it did not have anything to do with NATO. That was Mr. Trudeau's deliberate choice. He wanted to make it an individual thing; it was not something he wanted to push through the machine of NATO consultation. I guess his judgement was that what he wanted to say, the message that he wanted to convey, was best conveyed by pursuing quite a different route, in which one man made a kind of pilgrimage of his own; and that he was a voice crying in the wilderness, as he conceived it, because it did seem, at the time he made the trips connected with the Initiative, that there was no negotiation going on, and no possibility of a negotiation.

 

Well, of course we have come an enormous distance. I suppose you cannot blame people for pooh-poohing the history of all the abortive attempts to negotiate nuclear disarmament, because people can always say: "Well, yes, you say that the superpowers have tried and so on, but what's it ever come to?" That's a good question. Because after all, the best the superpowers have ever got, with all the urging from all the rest of us, are SALT I and SALT II, which were not reduction agreements, which were encapsulations of the existing plans of the two sides, in effect, which at best capped the race but did not actually reduce nuclear weapons. And SALT II, of course, ended up, as we know, being an agreement which the present United States Administration characterized as fundamentally flawed at the outset; and then - while it continued largely to observe the limits in practice - pointed out it was defective and had never been brought into force; and then finally with the passage of time, even had it been ratified, would have expired. Yet that is one major piece of whatever structure the superpowers have managed to erect. And the only piece that has full effect as a treaty binding the two superpowers now is the ABM Treaty.

 

Well, seen in that light, it is a very modest accomplishment. Public opinion is entitled, I suppose, to be jaded to a degree when it hears people say, "Well, we're maybe on the verge of actually negotiating the reduction - perhaps the elimination - of a whole category of nuclear weapons." But as against that, it is worth recalling that the first proposal for deep cuts in strategic weapons was made by President Carter; and that the offer to negotiate on that basis was rejected by the Soviet Union at the time, more or less without even opening the mail. It was rejected out of hand.

 

Then in its last year, the Carter Administration, of course, was totally preoccupied by the hostage situation in Iran. The Reagan Administration came to power with the view it had of the SALT II Agreement and with great reluctance even to embark on negotiations. I remember very well having been present at the first visit President Reagan paid, I think it was in March, after his inaugural, to Ottawa. Mr. Trudeau was then our Prime Minister. One of the things that Mr. Trudeau was pressing on him was that the allies of the United States expected the new United States Administration to re-open negotiations on nuclear arms reduction with the Soviet Union. President Reagan at the time smiled and was affable and pleasant and committed himself to absolutely nothing. You will recall it took a long, long time, in fact, before negotiations were even launched. Therefore, I think that Mr. Trudeau was entitled, at the low point, to feel that somebody had to say something dramatic on the subject to try to shake people out of their torpor. He was trying I think to encapsulate a certain mood, and to send a message in that sense. He chose to do it without consultation and as an independent move. But I guess he felt the circumstances were so extraordinary that they justified that. But look at the distance we have travelled since: the Administration which spurned SALT II at the outset, and would not consider in the first year or so even the thought of nuclear negotiations, is now deep in negotiations of various kinds with the Soviet Union. And - who knows? - we may actually see by the end of this year the first fruits. Well, that is what we all hope. Maybe it will not happen. Maybe there will be frustration and disappointment again. But for all that it's a damn sight better than what we were looking at, let's say, five and six years ago.

 

[HILL] There are a whole lot of other questions I would like to ask but I know your time is limited, and I would just like to ask one further one about this period when you were Ambassador to NATO. How useful a focus for Canadian foreign policy is NATO, in your view? For example, I mean, how good an instrument is it for Canada to work through in order to pursue its goals of international peace and security, as well as its own particular national interests? In your response, could you say why, based on your experience of that period?

 

[TAYLOR] Yes, I think it is indispensable. Of course, there are a number of important Canadian goals that cannot be pursued usefully in NATO. There are some hopes that we had of the organization in its earliest days that have not been realized. To the extent that these hopes were based in permanent Canadian interests, we have to pursue those interests in other international bodies and in other ways. NATO turned itself, over time, into a defensive military alliance, which, with its important political dimension, is really the key consultative agency for preparing the Western position in debates on European security and Atlantic security.

 

That's far from saying it is the only forum in which we can pursue our interests. Obviously we are also active participants in the CSCE and the MBFR negotiations. We have a whole set of well-established bilateral relations with all the European countries. So far as defence matters are concerned, we have special arrangements for North America and the United States. So NATO is by no means the only device available to us. Nonetheless, it is the most important in that circle. In that sense, it remains an indispensable forum. Unless the international system changes radically in a generation or so, I do not really see it ever losing its importance as a focus for dealing with the management of the East-West relationship, and with preparing coordinated positions to deal with the arms control and disarmament issues we hope will be successfully negotiated over the next decade or so.

 

[HILL] How about the pursuit of Canada's own particular interests? For example, what about this problem of the Europeans acting more and more together, and then dealing directly with the Americans, within NATO? Is this making things more difficult?

 

[TAYLOR] It is always a risk. I suppose the beginning of wisdom is to recognize the risk is there. Once you have recognized it, then you immediately start taking steps to ensure the risk is minimized. I guess we will just have to go on doing that. It is hard to imagine that a country with Canada's assets will ever be totally disregarded and negligible weight in the international system. The country has the weight it has. It is one of the strongest and freest countries in the world. It has tremendous assets, and these weights show up in international discussions. Canadians are not perhaps totally conscious of that, because we live, almost as a national obsession, in the shadow of the United States. The easiest - in fact, sometimes the only - international comparison that comes to Canadian minds at all is a comparison with the United States. But the United States is ten times as populous as we are; it is ten times as rich; and it is a nuclear superpower. Of course, people know this. These things are all cliches. But nonetheless it is material for reflection that our instinctive standard of international comparison is with a country that itself is unique in the international order. We are inclined perhaps to view ourselves through a distorting prism as a result of making that kind of comparison so often. We appear rather differently to many people outside the country. In any event, I have no doubt that we have the wit and the ability and the resources to defend our interests.

 

Europe goes on coalescing. We knew from the time of the debate in Canada thirty years ago over the first British application to join the Common Market, that an expanded European Common Market in a lot of ways was going to produce short-run damage to specific Canadian interests. That was true. That has happened. We would not have spent all that time worrying over and arguing against the Common Agricultural Policy if that were not true. Our interests in some ways, and in some important ways, have been damaged. Nonetheless, I suppose the broad feeling of people - and here I think we probably share a certain commonality of view with the United States - is that, seen in a broader perspective, the movement in Europe lies in the logic of history, and that it is a movement broadly speaking to be applauded, not to be resisted. Our attitude - and I think this, on reflection, has been the attitude of Canadian governments for a generation now in the face of the European movement - has been, on the whole, not to be grudging about it, but to applaud and to wish the Europeans well, to be perfectly prepared to let them see their interests and work their way through to new forms of political and economic association, and to adjust our own relations with them as a function of that; but to go on pointing out at every stage that, before they make up their minds and cast everything in concrete, we would like an opportunity to be heard, and to point out where particular steps that they are proposing to take, or particular policies that they adopt, are damaging to our interests. I think we should go on doing that. Our objection to the European Community that exists now - and it is an objection a whole lot of Europeans have themselves to the Community that has been created - is, for instance, that it has a massively distorted common agricultural policy, which is profoundly damaging to world markets and price structures, to the economies of countries with an important agricultural sector like Canada; and that all this really is iniquitous. It should be attacked, and anything that could be done about it by way of direct negotiation with the Community or in the GATT we shall go on pursuing.

 

Part VII - Under-Secretary of State for External Affairs. 1985 onwards

 

[HILL] Perhaps I might ask just one last question, which is a rather broad one. Since 1985 you have been Under-Secretary of State for External Affairs, and I wondered whether, reflecting on your experience in that position, you have any comments to make about Canadian foreign policy, about the role of NATO in world affairs, and about current changes in the general pattern of world affairs?

 

[TAYLOR] Yes, I think I have said all I need to about Canada and NATO. I do believe that it will go on being an indispensable organization for us for another generation both in political and defence terms. In that period, we may see some very important changes in the Soviet Union which will require a Western response; and that Western response is going to have to be found by the NATO countries - still, I think, as an Alliance. How far will all this go and what changes might be produced? It is very hard to speculate about. What is happening in the Soviet Union is absolutely fascinating. We spent the latter years of Mr. Brezhnev’s life speculating endlessly on the question: "After Brezhnev, what?" One of the things that was recognized was that there would eventually be a generational change - time alone would take care of that. Even if all else was unpredictable, we knew that would happen sooner or later; and given the advancing age of the older generation of Soviet leaders, it looked like sooner. We would be faced with people who would represent a different expression of Soviet power. Whether that was going to be favourable or harmful to our interests - well, that remained to be seen. We have at least got this far, that after several interim stages, what is plainly the successor generation has arrived. I do not think you could say that the present leadership is firm and fixed yet, that is to say that five years from now the composition of the Politburo is going to be the same as it is now. We are bound to see further changes. There have been at lower levels very considerable changes, and presumably time too will work further changes. It seems that, naturally enough, as with any leader, Mr. Gorbachev sees his principal responsibilities as being domestic: the improvement of his own society, that he is responsible for bringing about if he can.

 

We see some of the extensions of this in changes in Soviet foreign policy. Since I have been in my present job there has certainly been a total change in the style of Soviet diplomacy. We have had evidence of that - a kind of precursor - with the visit several years ago paid by Mr. Gorbachev himself to Canada before he arrived at his present eminence. Since the new leadership has been in power, we have had above all Mr. Shevardnadze’s visit to Canada last autumn. This gave people in Canada a direct experience of what a different style, in the conduct of Soviet affairs, we are seeing.

 

Well, people can say: "Yes but that is only a change in style, and we must not be gulled by people who are merely charming." Well, alright. I would say that the change in style is already an improvement. It is far easier to do business with people with whom one can have a decent and civilized dialogue than it was sometimes with people who were as obdurate as some of the conservative spokesmen of the former generation. However that may be, what matters - and I would certainly agree with the cautious people about this - is the substance, and in substance, what have we seen?

 

Well, in terms of Canada's own relations with the Soviet Union, some quite interesting changes. The first notable improvement in years, for instance, in dealing with family re-unification cases including some of the most longstanding like the case of Danila Shumuk. That is noted and appreciated. There again, people could say: "Well, all right, we all applaud that development, but why should anybody give the Soviet Union credit for letting people leave the Soviet Union to be reunited with their families at long last, who should never have been prevented in the first place? They don't deserve any credit for that." There is some justice in that observation, and also there are still some unresolved cases.

 

Here all I can say is, there is evidence of an important change. It is undeniable evidence. I think we have to register it, and I want to weigh it in as balanced a way as I can.

 

There have been other aspects of our bilateral relations with the Soviet Union which have also altered for the better in the last little while. Exchange programmes with the Soviet Union, for instance, were largely emptied of content in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and now the content is being restored - restored, we hope, in a way that makes more sense, and creates more genuine benefit both to the Canadians who are involved in the exchanges and to the Soviets, because these things will only work on a basis of reciprocity, of more mutual benefit than we were able to get out of such programmes in previous years. Well, again, there have been some extremely interesting instances of successful exchanges that have allowed Canadians really to see parts of the Soviet Union that have been very difficult to see before, to have contacts with people, to have conversations with people in the Soviet Union, in a much more candid way than was true in the past, about problems that are matters of common interest.

 

Those are further interesting signs. They are real. They are modest but real signs of alterations in the relationship. If, however, you look over the period, say, since 1985, at Soviet foreign policy in general, it seems that you can see the signs of what? - soundings, experiments, tentative probes here and there in areas of traditional Soviet concern: relations with Japan, relations with China, even the Afghanistan question. There have been signs that perhaps new minds were looking at these problems, and that things might change.

 

But you have to say that the most important accomplishment - and it's not yet an accomplishment - in Soviet foreign policy, lies in the area we have already discussed, that is the fact that the superpowers have brought themselves and their allies to the point where we may yet see by the end of this year the first actual nuclear arms reduction agreement. Now that is not yet a bird in the hand, but if you are looking around for hopeful signs, that is what you can say. You can say no more and no less than that right at the moment.

 

On the other hand, there are other areas where you really do not see any signs of change. It seems, for instance, as between the Soviet Union and Japan, that the two sides have looked at the relationship. Perhaps the Soviets have taken a new look at the relationship; there were some signs of that. But in the end, on key questions for the Japanese like the status of the Northern Islands, there is no sign of any change in the Soviet position. And when you run through some of the other items on the list: Cambodia, Afghanistan, and so on - you cannot really say that anything has happened yet which justifies the conclusion that the new leadership has also produced a revolution in Soviet foreign policy. On the contrary, the essence of most classic Soviet positions has been preserved up to this point. That also, I think, is material for reflection so far as the thrust of the domestic reform is concerned. Of course, that is more a matter of their internal affairs. While the world watches with interest, and while no doubt whatever happens - in addition to its fascination - has long-run implications for us, nonetheless it is a process that is relatively harder for people at our distance to penetrate and to understand. The Soviet economy and Soviet society are vast and complicated affairs. How much success the leadership can hope to have in reforming them is very much an open matter of question. I imagine it is a question they ask themselves. Certainly outsiders who know their system less well are bound to ask: "With problems as deep rooted and intractable as the Soviet leaders themselves admit these problems to be, how can anyone reasonably expect that they will be cured or attacked, or altered, to any important degree, in a short time?” I guess that must surely be a major problem for the Soviet leadership: that in the end, the people who want change in the Soviet Union, will become impatient to see it, and those who do not want change will have a chance to rally their forces to resist.

 

[HILL] I guess that was the thought that came to mind when we were speaking about generational and other changes. The process is bound to be a long one if it is to go anywhere.

 

(TAYLOR] Yes, I would not say it is without hope, and I would be perfectly prepared to say it is too early to judge. But nonetheless people from the West where societies evolve much more rapidly, are in a way impatient for change. I think this is a particularly North American cast of mind: that life consists of problems and problem-solving, and that to problems there are solutions. You do not take the attitude that the problems have always been there and you live with them, or that certain problems are insoluble. You are much more inclined to say, ’’Well, what's the answer? And why haven't you got it yet?"

 

I do not think that that is so much the Soviets mentality, although it is perhaps silly to generalize. Obviously, the Soviet , people have had to learn to live with burdens that we can hardly understand and would never accept. On the other hand, we have by comparison a free and flexible society. We are accustomed to adapting it rather quickly; and even though by our own standards we may appear to deal with social and economic problems rather slowly and unsuccessfully, nonetheless by comparison with other societies, our society changes very, very rapidly. Change and flexibility are built into our attitudes. When we look at something like the Soviet Union, I think we are all too inclined to say: "Well, what's Gorbachev done today? Why hasn't he produced thorough going reform yet? How long do we have to wait?"

 

Well, I think that probably we will have to be patient a long time about some of the things we would like to see happen.

 

[HILL] Thanks very much indeed. I am very grateful to you for taking the time to do this interview.