| Chapter 1: | Serial Monogamy or Constructive Bigamy |
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not the slightest bit anti-American: He travelled happily in the United States, where he had once lived for a time, and maintained cheery relations with the American consul general in Ottawa. After war broke out in 1914, circumstances made Borden the first prime minister to realize that British military power was precarious and British economic power dwindling—in part because the British during World War I treated Canada more as an ally than as a colony and consequently gave Borden unusual access to a realistic picture of Britain’s strategic circumstances.
Borden responded both by seeking a closer relationship with Great Britain through the recasting of the British Empire and by seeking international standing for Canada. And recognizing where money—not to mention coal and oil and foodstuffs—came from, he sought special arrangements with the United States, which Woodrow Wilson, in the interests of the war effort, was happy to supply. At the Paris Peace Conference, Borden sought American approval, if not support, for the international recognition of Canada; bemusedly, President Wilson and his adviser, Colonel House, gave it. It might eventually prove the first step in Canada’s moving into the political orbit of the United States, House told Wilson.
With respect to Canada, Wilson was ahead of his country. Canadian membership in the League of Nations was a point of grievance for the senators who objected to Wilson’s League; but of course Canadian membership survived that challenge—albeit at the price of being, for a time, the unique North American member of Wilson’s creation (Mexico would join in 1931).
Borden and his successor, Arthur Meighen, tried to square the circle of Canada’s dependent foreign policy, attempting to interpret the Americans to the British and, less often, the British to the Americans. Their efforts were superficially plausible, mainly because the diplomacy of the empire in those days was cloaked in deep secrecy, so no one could know that their efforts were in fact unavailing on such issues as the abrogation of the Anglo-Japanese alliance in 1921 (Brebner, 1935, pp. 45–58).7 Canada’s purported influence on the British and Americans received a name—the linchpin theory—and a certain currency among academics,