Canada and the institute of pacific relations: Lessons from an earlier voyage
Woods suggests that valuable lessons can be learned from Canada's involvement in the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR) which will aid and inform its current Asia‐Pacific relations. Two arguments are made in this paper: that interaction with the IPR has shaped current Canadian attitudes towards regional institutions; and that a form of 1920s track‐two diplomacy is alive today in Canada. Canadian interaction with the IPR is examined through: the impact the Institute had on the leader of the Canadian delegation to the first IPR conference, John Nelson, and his subsequent contributions to Canada's early track two diplomacy; the impact that the Canadian academic/diplomat E. Herbert Norman had on the Institute and Canada's Asia‐Pacific persona; the state‐society relationship within Canada vis‐a‐vis the IPR; and the role of American philanthropy in sustaining Canadian contributions to the Institute. Woods concludes that the belief in track‐two diplomacy is alive and well in Canada; that the utility of a broad...
The Pacific Age in World History
The idea of the world's economic, political, and cultural center moving from Europe to the Pacific region is already more than 100 years old. The term Pacific Age was coined in Japan in 1892, and around the turn of the century the idea was discussed in the United States and Australia. During the 1920s it became a catchword among Pacific liberal intellectuals, but the gloom of the 1930s ended the vision. In 1967 the idea reappeared in connection with the emerging Pacific integration process, and rapid economic development in east Asia has kept the optimistic vision alive since then.
E. H. Norman and the Task for Japanese History
ON THE OCCASION of his death in April I957 E. Herbert Norman, the Canadian ambassador to Egypt and Minister to Lebanon, became another statistic in the Cold War, and gained for a moment the kind of notoriety which he apparently sought to avoid while he lived. Harassed since i95i by professional anti-communist zealots Norman learned, in the midst of the Suez crisis, that his name and reputation had once more been put on the line a few weeks earlier by the U.S. Senate Internal Security subcommittee. Accused of dark dealings in the even darker realm of security, accusations which earlier had been discarded for want of credibility, Norman, already under intense pressure of work, in an apparent mood of severe depression committed suicide. The event dominated both the American and Canadian presses, since the charges against Norman and the suicide itself threatened to endanger relations between the two countries; it was also of considerable concern to Japanese readers owing to Norman's long-time association with things Japanese and the possible implication of one of their more distinguished economists; and it raised the ugly and only half-forgotten memory of Senator Joseph McCarthy's successful exploitation of American fears and phobias. In all this Norman appeared only as another victim, and even when the press and periodical literature invoked the details of the event they did so merely as a further example of the mindless idiocy-indiscriminate anti-communism-which had debased decent instincts and made a mockery of good intention. Yet throughout this literature, much of which today seems like an ancient forgotten past, one will search in vain for an expression of Mr. Norman's achievements in the field of historical scholarship. While the accounts invariably describe him both as a promising diplomat and a renowned scholar, his role as scholar was included only to reveal something about his character and, perhaps, his motivation-not the quality of his intellectual achievements. "A shy, sensitive, aloof man, given to Oriental scholarship," Harold Greer wrote in the Nation in the wake of the