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Peacekeeping and foreign policy: Canada, India and the International Commission in Vietnam, 1954–1965*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 October 2009

Ramesh Thakur
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Extract

Vietnam has been the subject of several studies in our times; yet a need remains for an analysis of the Vietnam experience as an exercise in international peacekeeping. Possibly because interest in peacekeeping has tended to be concentrated on UN exercises, the International Commission for Supervision and Control (ICSC) in Vietnam has escaped serious study. I hope in the course of this paper to partially fill the lacuna. I intend to show the achievements and shortcomings of the ICSC by subjecting its workings to as close a scrutiny as is feasible within the constraints of an article. In the process, I shall be breaking down the Commission into its constituent elements, the three delegations. This procedure allows us both to understand the workings of the Commission as a whole, and to comment upon the coincidence of voting patterns of the delegations with the foreign policies of their respective countries. Polish behaviour, it might be noted, will receive less than equal emphasis. The study is thus simultaneously an examination of ICSC behaviour in Vietnam, and of Canadian and Indian behaviour in the ICSC.

Type
Research Article
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 6 , Issue 2 , July 1980 , pp. 125 - 153
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 1980

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References

page 125 note 1 Poland is accorded less attention simply because of my lack of competence in Polish foreign policy, as well as because of the relative non-availability of Polish source-material.

page 126 note 1 For an overview of postwar Canadian foreign policy, see Thakur, Ramesh, ‘Change and Continuity in Canadian Foreign Policy’, India Quarterly xxxiii (1977), pp. 401–418.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 126 note 2 See, for example, the statement in committee by foreign minister Paul Martin in 1965. Canada, House of Commons, Standing Committee on Affairs, External, Minutes of Proceedings and Evidence, 10 June 1965, pp. 8–40.Google Scholar

page 127 note 1 See Thakur, Ramesh, ‘India's Vietnam Policy, 1946–1979’, Asian Survey, xix (1979), PP 957–976.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 127 note 2 Taylor, A. M., Cox, D. and Granatstein, J. L., Peacekeeping: International Challenge and Canadian Response (Toronto, 1968), p. 183Google Scholar. The comment is a general one and not specifically related to Vietnam. See also Praagh, David Van, ‘Canada and Southeast Asia’, in Lyon, Peyton and Ismael, Tareq S. (eds.), Canada and the Third World (Toronto, 1976).Google Scholar

page 127 note 3 Taylor, Charles, Snow Job: Canada, the United States and Vietnam, 1954 to 1973 (Toronto, 1974)Google Scholar. The position is not articulated explicitly as such by Taylor, but forms the undercurren t of his critique.

page 128 note 1 For references to the view that the Indochina experience led to the demise of the Indo-Canadian entente, see Praagh, op. cit. pp. 307–08, 333; Barrie M. Morrison, ‘Canada and South Asia’, in Lyon and Ismael, op. cit. pp. 32–33; and Thomson, D. C. and Swanson, R. F., Canadian Foreign Policy: Options and Perspectives (Toronto, 1971), p. 117.Google Scholar

page 128 note 2 Confidential source.

page 128 note 3 New York Times edition, The Pentagon Papers (New York, 1971), p. 23.Google Scholar

page 129 note 1 India, Rajya Sabha Debates, 24 August 1962, coll. 3051–56.Google Scholar

page 129 note 2 Maneli, Mieczyslaw, War of the Vanquished (New York, 1971), pp. 23–24Google Scholar. Maneli was legal adviser to the Polish delegation (1954–55), and then its chairman (1963–64).

page 132 note 1 ICSG (Vietnam), First Interim Report — Eleventh Interim Report, Special Report to the co-Chairmen of the Geneva Conference (2 June 1962), (New Delhi: Govt. of India, Ministry External Affairs). Special Report to the co-Chairmen of the Geneva Conference on Indo-China (13 February 1965), Vietnam No. 1 (1965), Cmd. 2609, London, 1965; Special Report to the co-Chairmen of the Geneva Conference on Indo-China (27 February 1965), Vietnam No. 2 Cmd. 2634, London, 1965. “Decisions” comprise decisions and/or findings on investigations and complaints, including the question of whether or not to proceed where this question is itself a matter of dispute. Possible major distortions in the set of tables include: behind the scenes Commission discussions which might vary significantly from the published reports; where ‘n’ instances are reported at once, the weight given is ‘n’, but there may have been times when they were reported merely as one, in which case they would be weighted ‘l’; similarly, where investigation of ‘x’ complaints is rejected by a party, there will be only one Commission decision, and correspondingly only ‘l’ weight against the party. The apparent discrepancies between the figures in Tables 1 and 2 are to be explained by the fact that, often, the delegations responded to a category of issues by attaching a minority note for all.

page 134 note 1 External Affairs, xix (1967), pp. 225–28.Google Scholar

page 134 note 2 Cox, David, ‘Peace-keeping in Canadian foreign policy.’, in Clarkson, Stephen (ed.), An Independent Foreign Policy for Canada! (Toronto, 1968), p. 194Google Scholar

page 134 note 3 The logic of periodisation is both internal and external. The 1954–56 bracket is formed by the start of the Commission's work and the date for elections. The 1959–62 period includes, on the one hand, the active direction of the southern insurgency by Hanoi from 1959 and the initiation of large-scale American intervention in December 1961; and, on the other hand, the violent conflict phase in India-China relations (1959–62). The years 1956–59 thus constitute the interregnum. (February) 1965 is a good terminal date for two reasons. It marked the start of the American bombing of North Vietnam, the subject of the first special report, as well as the complete withdrawal of ICSG teams from the northern zone, the subject of the second report.

page 138 note 1 Fourth Interin Report, Appendix IV.

page 139 note 1 Nehru in India's Parliament on 24 April 1954; Nehru, Jawaharlal, India's Foreign Policy; Selected Speeches, September 1946–April 1961 (New Delhi, 1961), pp. 396–400Google Scholar; Pearson the Canadian Parliament; Canada, House of Commons Debates, 22 February 1950, pp. 132–33.Google Scholar

page 139 note 2 By tripolar I mean three members of roughly comparable status and influence; by troika a representation of the three chief ideological streams.

page 140 note 1 Bridle, Paul, Canada and the International Commissions in Indochina, 1954–1972 (Toronto, 1973), P. 22.Google Scholar

page 140 note 2 Praagh, op. cit. pp. 311–12.

page 140 note 3 Weiner, Myron, ‘India: Two Political Cultures’, in Pye, Lucian and Verba, Sidney (eds)., Political Culture and Political Development (Princeton, 1965), p. 214.Google Scholar

page 141 note 1 Lyon, Peyton, Canada in World Affairs, 1961–63 (Toronto, 1968), p. 316.Google Scholar

page 141 note 2 Pentagon Papers, op. cit. p. 66; emphasis added.

page 142 note 1 This account of the Commission handling of the cases is based upon confidential sources.

page 142 note 2 Ibid.

page 144 note 1 Ibid.

page 144 note 2 For details, see Tenth Interim Report, Eleventh Interim Report, and Special Report (1962).

page 144 note 3 Sardesai, D. R., Indian Foreign Policy in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, 1947–1964 (Berkeley, 1968), p. 202.Google Scholar

page 144 note 4 To author, 1975.

page 145 note 1 Similarly, when Maneli met Chou En-lai in Peking in 1963, the latter, not normally emotional, “spoke about the Indians with anger, contempt, and disdain”. Maneli, op. cit pp. 77–78.

page 146 note 1 Taylor, op. cit. p. 185.

page 146 note 2 See Pentagon Papers, op. cit.; Document 15, pp. 53–66.Google Scholar

page 147 note 1 Denis Stairs has persuasively argued the thesis that “Canadian policy-makers sought to maximize the role of the United Nations in the politics of the Korean War as a means of imposing multilateral constraints on the exercise of American power”. The Diplomacy of Constraint: Canada, the Korean War, and the United States (Toronto, 1974), p. 303.Google Scholar

page 147 note 2 See Nehru, op. cit. p. 404 for a statement to this effect by him in the Lok Sabha on 25 March 1957.

page 147 note 3 See Brecher, Michael, ‘The Subordinate State System of Southern Asia’, World Politics, xv (1963), pp. 213–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Robert F. Randle, Geneva 1954; The Settlement of the Indochinese War (Princeton, 1969), pp. 552–53; Sardesai, op. cit. p. 252; and Ton That Thien, India and South East Asia, 1947–1960 (Geneva, 1963), p. 338.Google Scholar

page 147 note 4 See, in particular, First Interim Report, pp. 33–34; Fourth Interim Report, para. 41; Eleventh Interim Report, paras 84–85; Special Report, (1962), paras, 21, 22; Special Report (13 February 1965), and Special Report (27 February 1965).

page 148 note 1 Seventh Interim Report, para. 66.

page 148 note 2 Eighth Interim Report, para. 43.

page 148 note 3 Ninth Interim Report, para. 45.

page 148 note 4 Bridle, op, cit. p. 23.

page 148 note 5 In a speech to the Geneva Conference on Laos in 1961, Krishna Menon referred to “the Commission consisting of the representatives of Canada, Poland, and ourselves, representing, if I may say so, the different points of view, and ideologies, or alignments that exist in the world”. Govt. of India, Ministry of External Affairs, Foreign Affairs Records, vii (1961), p. 143.Google Scholar

page 149 note 1 Holmes, John, “Geneva: 1954”, International Journal xxii (1967), p. 459.Google Scholar

page 149 note 2 Randle, op. cit. pp. 56–68.

page 149 note 3 Holmes, op. cit. p. 461. “Theirs not to reason why; theirs but to do and die”, might, in the circumstances, have proven a better epitaph.

page 150 note 1 External Affairs, xix (1967), pp. 227–28.Google Scholar

page 150 note 2 The most comprehensive treatment of the UN role in Indonesia is Taylor, A. M., Indonesian Independence and the United Nations (London, 1960).Google Scholar

page 151 note 1 Rikhye, I. J., Harbottle, M., and Egge, B., The Thin Blue Line: International Peacekeeping and its Future (New Haven, 1974), p. 142.Google Scholar

page 151 note 2 See Stegenga, James, ‘Peacekeeping: Post-Mortems or Previews?’, International Organization, xxvii (1973), pp. 382–83.Google Scholar

page 152 note 1 See Nehru, op. cit. p. 403, and Bridle, op. cit. p. 10, for the Nehru and Pearson expressions of this sentiment.

page 152 note 2 For the Indo-Polish statement, see Foreign Affairs Records, xviii (1972), pp. 273–74Google Scholar; for Canadian position, see Canada, Dept, of External Affairs, Communique No. 17, 3 October 1972Google Scholar. Saigon's anger against New Delhi stemmed from the latter's establishment of full ambassadorial relations with Hanoi while retaining consular representation in Saigon.

page 153 note 1 Canada, , House of Commoms Debates, 14 April 1972, p. 1328.Google Scholar