Canada, Apartheid, and the Defence of the Liberal Order

An account of Canada's role in challenging apartheid and shaping international norms in the postwar era.

From the late 1950s to the mid-1990s, Canadian policymakers shared a remarkably similar worldview that shaped their approach toward South African apartheid and the risks it posed to global race relations. Why did Ottawa take a leading role internationally in addressing an issue seemingly peripheral to its national interests?

Canada, Apartheid, and the Defence of the Liberal Order draws on newly declassified files and an extensive program of interviews with policymakers, officials, and activists in a definitive investigation of Canada's response to apartheid. Over nearly four decades, Canadian policymakers and officials held consistently to the view that the West's association with Pretoria's organized racial oppression threatened to undermine the appeal of the liberal world order. In opposing apartheid, Canada was defending a global system predicated on norms, rules, and institutions in which Ottawa was ideologically invested.

By unravelling the thread of racial perceptions woven through the liberal order, this thought-provoking study reveals Canada's liminal position in the apartheid story and global politics to be as much a social matter as a question of power dynamics.