Introduction: The North Atlantic Triangle: ‘For and Against?’

It has been 80 years since Toronto-born historian John Bartlet Brebner (‘Bart’ to his friends) published North Atlantic Triangle from his vantage point at Columbia University in New York, and in doing so, launched a new approach to teaching Canadian history.¹ Before this time, conventional versions of Canadian history emphasised Britain’s dominant role and Brebner challenged this in 1931 with a paper he presented to the Canadian Historical Association. He saw Canada as being shaped by both Britain and the United States, and he proposed the need for this perspective to feature in a continental study on Canadian–American relations. This struck a chord among his generation of Canadian historians, which included Frank Underhill, Arthur Lower and Harold Innis.² Together with James T. Shotwell, an academic series of volumes was launched, sponsored by the Carnegie Endowment in 1933. Brebner’s own contributed manuscript covered a broad expanse of history and completed the tremendously successful 25-volume series.

The title is arguably the most compelling part of the book and was created as an afterthought. Shotwell had written to Brebner in 1942 with counsel to change its original title, Rival Partners: ‘I am not wholly carried away by the title “Rival Partners”. It seems to me that it may be just a little too challenging in wartime. It is the “rival” part of it that bothers me. We historians have a tendency to be too honest!’ Later on, the reminder reached him again: ‘Again let me say that I do not like “Rival Partners”. It has an air of smartness that does not befit so serious a book. The word partners is a bit unctuous, and I do not believe most Americans have ever once thought of Canada as a rival to the United States.’³ In a simple alteration that would have considerable impact on the book’s popularity, the title was changed from Rival Partners to North Atlantic Triangle.

Yale University Press delayed its publication for a year and in the post-war atmosphere there was an overwhelmingly positive reception. Praise poured in from reviewers and Brebner was congratulated for having provided Canadian history with a ‘true three-dimensional solidity’.⁴ F. Cyril James of McGill University commended the book as ‘the final flower of a splendid effort’, which ‘should be required reading for every intelligent citizen of the three countries with which it deals’.⁵ North Atlantic Triangle has endured, not just on the shelves of historians but in their minds, too, because questions remain over the metaphor’s conceptual accuracy. Did Brebner imagine a social reality, juxtaposing fiction over fact? Contemporary historians are in dispute as to whether a ‘triangle’ ever existed or whether it existed at particular times only. There is enjoyment to be had for scholars who are lured by the promise of a good hunt, as their pursued subject appears intermittently before it is obscured and challenged once again.

Some imaginings are so widely believed that they seem to be real. Falsities linger in the minds of men and simplified images prevail, as it is far easier to compress the complexities of the world. The quest to discover what truth there is in the ‘triangle’ has been embarked on by several of Brebner’s descendants in the scholarly community. Records are pored over, ‘gut feelings’ are followed but even the rewarded scholars emerge with evidence that is intangible or contestable. In the mid-1990s, historians opened the debate with two volumes of collected essays that addressed the relations between the three countries. Lawrence Aronsen and B. J. C. McKercher concluded in The North Atlantic Triangle in a Changing World: Anglo-American-Canadian Relations, 1902–1956 that a ‘special relationship’ between Canada, Britain and the United States did not exist ‘much – if ever – in the political realm’.⁶ Whereas, in contrast, Colin Eldridge maintained in Kith and Kin: Canada, Britain and the United States from the Revolution to the Cold War that Canada’s destiny depended on the relationship that existed between the two other powers.⁷

The separate conclusions reached by these scholars are compounded by the contention over the use of the ‘triangle’ designation. Its historical authenticity provided the theme for two academic events held in England. In October 2004, academics came together at a conference in Canterbury organised by Tony McCulloch to focus on the validity of the concept of the ‘North Atlantic Triangle’. A pragmatic conclusion was reached by the keynote speaker, Hector Mackenzie, Senior Historian at the Canadian Department of External Affairs, that the triangle was only ‘visible’ from the Canadian perspective, ‘a peculiar geometric form apparently visible from only one of its vertices’.⁸ The air of scepticism that surrounded the historical authenticity of the triangle is indicative of the second event. Held in February 2005 and hosted by Phillip Buckner at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies in London, Gordon Stewart delivered a seminar paper entitled ‘What North Atlantic Triangle?’. It is the fascination with the topic that binds historians together and their output has sparked intelligent debate, in-depth historical queries and an ongoing partiality to utilise Brebner’s triangle where it applies, while also retracting it from episodes of history where it clearly does not.

The articles presented herein from historians Gordon Stewart, Terry Crowley, Neville Wylie and Hector Mackenzie and political scientist David G. Haglund emerged primarily from the discussions that took place in Canterbury and London on the 60th anniversary of North Atlantic Triangle. Their contributions and conclusions are varied. Stewart opens up the debate with his boldly entitled article, ‘What North Atlantic Triangle?’ and adds an illustration to conjure, that of ‘two men and a dog’, with Canada waiting for treats from under the table. A decade earlier, historian John English presented a similar critique that the triangle ‘was not an equilateral one’,⁹ but Stewart takes this further, suggesting that the concept itself was only kept on ‘life support by a relatively small network of scholars’. Crowley reinforces this critical view, finding little evidence of a ‘triangle’ in Canada’s decision to go to war in 1939, which was based on the legacy of colonialism instead.

Criticisms are important in any debate and Brebner would most likely have found it amusing that his descendants in the scholarly community continue to ponder over the concept’s historical authenticity. Historians have taken up defensive postures and provided substantial evidence that the triangle did exist during wartime and not just in the form of the famous photograph of the wartime leaders in Quebec City in 1943. There was an important period in the Mackenzie King era when, according to historian Tony McCulloch, ‘the Canadian prime minister was in a very powerful position to affect Anglo-American relations because of the rapidly deteriorating international situation in the mid-1930s’.¹⁰ McCulloch maintains that King was instrumental in bringing about the Royal Visit of 1939 with its all-important American extension,¹¹ and Neville Thompson has emphasised King’s role in his book, The Third Man: Churchill, Roosevelt, Mackenzie King, and the untold friendships that won WWII.

In the collection of articles herein, historians Neville Wylie and Hector Mackenzie and political scientist David G. Haglund are all in the camp ‘for’ the triangle concept. Wylie brings to light the part played by Canada in aiding British and American prisoners of war as the Canadian Red Cross intensified its efforts in 1942 and sent millions of cubic feet of parcels across the Atlantic to grateful camp inmates. This form of assistance, King argued, was ‘tangible proof of Canadian aid’ that the individual soldier in Europe would not likely forget. Wylie maintains that the ‘explanatory or descriptive utility’ of the triangle concept ‘is at its most appropriate in the decade from the mid-1930s to the mid-1940s’. Mackenzie focuses his historical lens on the time period of the late 1940s during the secret ‘security conversations’ among American, British and Canadian counterparts in the spring of 1948 that resulted in the origins of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) as a response to Soviet Communism. These ‘ABC’ talks, Mackenzie argues, ‘may be interpreted as an articulation of the North Atlantic Triangle’, yet ‘the initiative began as an expression of the Anglo-American “special relationship”’. Canada was still a ‘constructive and valuable contributor’, and he concludes that ‘the ABC talks certainly provide an example of the trilateral (or triangular) relationship at work’.

There is a tendency to view the 1950s as marking the disintegration of the triangle. Writing in Canada and the World since 1867, historian Asa McKercher contends that, ‘Clearly, by the 1950s, all was not well within the North Atlantic Triangle. The term itself fell into disuse . . . there was less and less of a triangular relationship.’¹² An explanation presented itself during my own search for a contribution towards the historiography – in the form of a previously classified policy paper penned from within Canada’s Department of External Affairs in 1951 with explicit instructions for its readers to do ‘everything possible’ not to refer to the ‘Anglo-Saxon triangle’ even though it was regarded as a ‘cornerstone of Canadian foreign policy’.¹³ The deliberate hushing of the triangle’s existence points to its validity and begins to explain its ethereal tendency by the beginning of the decade.

While historians continue to debate over the suitability of the triangle concept, political scientists can more easily leap to embrace Brebner’s foresight. Haglund considers that the ‘triangle’ encapsulates the key to understanding how and why Canada acted in world affairs throughout much of its history. Taking up interest in the topic at the end of the twentieth century, at a time when ‘the Brebnerian tale was becoming time-worn, some even held it was a cliché’, he set out to determine ‘whether the time has finally arrived for the funeral arrangements to be made’.¹⁴ He took on a ‘cognitive approach’, employed strategic culture and claimed the triangle has had ‘imaginative-generative’ significance, as it contributed to the ‘framing of Canadian foreign policy choices by sentient decisionmakers’. Haglund is confident that the triangle will continue to be a feature in Canadian policy making and strategy into the twenty-first century.

Twenty years ago, McCulloch reminded readers that Canada’s contribution in Afghanistan, in terms of its military and intelligence cooperation with the United States and Britain, was reminiscent of the North Atlantic Triangle: ‘the three powers still share common values and have common security concerns that they are prepared to pursue above and beyond the other western democracies.’¹⁵ What is to be the final verdict on the North Atlantic Triangle? As the articles in this collection make clear, debate is at the centre of good scholarship and the triangle is not disappearing on its 80th anniversary.

Notes

1. Brebner, North Atlantic Triangle. ⮭
2. For biographical accounts of Harold Innis, Arthur Lower and Frank Underhill, see relevant chapters in Berger, The Writing of Canadian History; for further discussion on Lower and Underhill, see Francis, ‘Historical perspectives on Britain’, 309–21. ⮭
3. Shotwell to Brebner, 8 September 1942; and Shotwell to Brebner, no date. John Bartlet Brebner Papers, Box 10 and Box 12, Rare Book & Manuscript Library (RBML), Columbia University in the City of New York. ⮭
4. B. K. Sandwell, ‘Canada, the nation that must be ever sitting between two stools’, Saturday Night, 27 October 1945, Brebner Papers, Box 6, folder ‘Triangle Reviews’, RBML, Columbia University in the City of New York. ⮭
5. F. Cyril James, Survey Graphic, 2 January 1946, Brebner Papers, Box 6, folder ‘Triangle Reviews’, RBML, Columbia University in the City of New York. ⮭
6. Aronsen and McKercher, eds, The North Atlantic Triangle in a Changing World, 8. ⮭
7. Eldridge, ‘Introduction’, in Eldridge, ed., Kith and Kin, xvi. ⮭
8. Mackenzie, ‘Delineating the North Atlantic Triangle’, 109. ⮭
9. English, ‘Not an equilateral triangle’, 147–83; and Underhill, ‘Canada and the North Atlantic Triangle’, 255–62. ⮭
10. McCulloch, ‘The North Atlantic Triangle’, 204. ⮭
11. McCulloch, ‘Mackenzie King and the North Atlantic Triangle in the era of Munich’, 16; McCulloch, ‘A royal visit revisited’, 79. ⮭
12. McKercher, Canada and the World since 1867, 160. ⮭
13. Department Policy Papers, 29 June 1951, secret, Library Archives Canada, Escott Meredith Reid fonds. Silver, ‘The “Anglo-Saxon Triangle” downplayed’, 133–58. ⮭
14. Haglund, The North Atlantic Triangle Revisited; Haglund, ‘North Atlantic Triangle revisited’, 14. ⮭
15. McCulloch, ‘The North Atlantic Triangle’, 207. ⮭