The purpose of this study has been to address an imbalance existing in the historiography relating to American-Canadian relations in the period between 1919-1924. Relying primarily on American sources, this study has attempted to argue that the Canadian government had a unique opportunity to inititiate and execute an independent foreign policy by exploiting her position within the British Empire as well as her close relationship with the United States. In contrast to a number of Canadian studies which have argued that the United States impeded Canada's diplomatic growth in the post World War I period, this work maintains that the United States tried to encourage Canada to assume a more autonomous position because it was in America's interest to do so. Canada's similar attitudes with the United States towards the questions of the renewal of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, Asian immigration and Article Ten in the League of Nations' Covenant convinced the United States that the Canadian government was potentially useful to the American government in helping to protect its international interests in institutions where it was not represented. The evidence presented in this study maintains that it was the Canadian and British governments that were reluctant to carry out the final steps of appointing a separate Canadian representative to Washington in the early 1920s. As a result, Canada lost her opportunity to establish an independent policy because the United States found alternative methods of protecting its international interests. / Arts, Faculty of / History, Department of / Graduate

Texte remanié de: Th. doct.--Lausanne, 1997.

This thesis provides an examination of both the political and legal uses of reference cases to the Supreme Court of Canada by the Mackenzie King government. Attention is devoted to the five-year-period, 1935-1940, in which the King administration submitted several politically motivated references to the Supreme Court. This political use of reference cases to the Supreme Court began immediately after the Liberals returned to power in October 1935 when the government submitted the Bennett government's New Deal legislation for judicial scrutiny. Within the five-year-period the government forwarded two other references to the Supreme Court, again where highly controversial legislation was involved: the Alberta Social Credit statutes passed in 1937 and the private member's bill sponsored by CH. Cahan in 1939 to abolish overseas appeals to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, then the final court of appeal for Canada. The underlying premise of this thesis is that in each of the above instances the King government found it politically expedient to involve the Supreme Court in issues where questions of law were clearly subordinate to the political concerns of the federal government. Furthermore, in each instance, avenues of action, other than a reference case to the Supreme Court, were available to the federal government but were rejected by cabinet. Only in one instance, when Quebec's controversial 1937 Padlock Act was under close scrutiny, did the federal government avoid submitting a patently political issue to the Supreme Court, apprehensive of the consequences of such action. The federal government's reluctance to forward a reference to the Supreme Court in the case of Quebec's Padlock Act thus provides a revealing contrast to both the New Deal and the situation in Alberta where reference cases were initiated almost immediately. The federal government's marked reluctance to deal with Quebec in a comparable manner therefore merits close attention and as such is an important element of this thesis. The background to each reference case, its political origins, the reasons for the federal government's insistence on a reference--or in the case of Quebec, the reasons for avoidance of a reference—are the central issues addressed in this thesis. The cases are examined from another viewpoint as well. Once before the Court, the political issues gave way as the Court focused primarily upon the legal issues involved. The Court's decisions thereby provide another important vantage point from which to view the implications of the federal government's actions. For example, an assessment of the legal argument and judicial reasoning in the New Deal cases helps one answer these questions: First, did King's lawyers really try to win? Second, did the courts (both the Supreme Court of Canada and the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council) simply bow to King's obvious desire that the legislation be declared ultra vires? Third, did the courts, as some have alleged, decide that the depression was not an emergency? Although the King government may have found it preferable for short-term considerations to submit contentious political issues involving questions of law to the Supreme Court for its legal opinion, in the long-term it found itself dealing with unexpected complications arising from the very decisions it sought. Even if the government successfully predicts the legal outcome of a court case, it may find itself dealing with a political outcome it had not anticipated. Certainly if the actions of the King government are any indication in the five-year-period under discussion, this is a complication a government seldom expects, although one as I argue, that it should prepare itself for. This thesis also demonstrates that when reference cases are employed by the federal government, politicians, constitutional scholars, political journalists and other concerned citizens should ask two important questions: First, is the reference being initiated to avoid or delay assuming political responsibility in a given situation? Second, are like situations indeed receiving like treatment? As indicated throughout this thesis, such questions are of great importance. Indeed, this thesis demonstrates that in the period between 1935 and 1940 the King administration initiated not only the New Deal reference, but forwarded C.H. Cahan's private member's bill to the courts as well, in order to avoid dealing with a controversial political issue. So, too, the period provides a telling example of an in-stance where like situations were not treated alike as the striking similarities between the situation in Alberta and Quebec indicates. Clearly, a failure to ask questions such as the ones posed above leads to the possibility that the full meaning of the reference cases themselves, their origins and their implications, will not be realized by the interested onlooker. / Arts, Faculty of / History, Department of / Graduate

<p>The present study is an attempt to describe and explain the institutional history and intellectual discussions of the Fellowship of Reconciliation in Britain during the period 1914-1945. Since its inception on December 31, 1914, the FOR has commonly been described by historians and other authors as an interdenominational Christian pacifist organization. Yet, the establishment and maintenance of peace was not the ultimate aim of the founding members. What they envisioned was the establishment of the Kingdom of God. Peace, they argued, would be an indubitable consequence of the Kingdom. However, FOR members often did not agree with one another about the method by which the Kingdom could be inaugurated. During the period discussed in this thesis, the FOR gradually narrowed its focus. From striving to achieve the Kingdom of God, which encompassed all aspects of life, the Fellowship shifted its attention to what are generally regarded as matters pertaining primarily to pacifism. By the advent of World War II, however, the wider perception of the FOR's mission had been reasserted by many members.</p> <p>This pendular movement is described in the four parts of the thesis. Part I looks at the matrix out of which the FOR grew, the gestation period, the nature of the envisaged Kingdom, the growth and the activities of the Fellowship until the end of World War I. Part II, covering the period 1919-1929, surveys the FOR's internal struggles, the changing theological climate and the Fellowship's attempts, however unsuccessful, at creating a new society. During the 1930s, described in Part III, the FOR was largely a single issue interdenominational Christian pacifist organization, providing the churches and other pacifist organizations with a vast amount of literature on pacifism. During the second world war, discussed in Part IV, the FOR entered a new phase which yet invites comparison to 1914. The publications and activities, especially those of the second half of the war, readily recall the original FOR vision.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Note:

When I came to Canada five years ago, leaving a turbulent and politically unlucky land behind me, I knew nothing about the Canadian Senate. My interest in it does not extend farther back than three years. This comparatively short acquaintance may explain the weaknesses and the strength -- if any-- of this study. It will probably lack the insight which can only come with one's being reared and educated in the atmosphere of a particular social and political milieu with its traditions, Views and institutions. Such inside knowledge cannot possibly be acquired in the short span of a few years. Of the inevitable consequences of the absence of such native familiarity I am painfully aware. On the other hand, want of any preconceived notions may produce freedom from prejudice and encourage objectivity -- a trait particularly useful in the discussion of such a phenomenon as the Canadian Senate, which I have found fogged in an almost impenetrable cloud of partisan attitudes and biases. [...]

The French Popular Front was a coalition of left-wing political parties (Communists, Socialists, and Radicals) united through a common desire to combat fascism and improve the living conditions of France's workers. Between 1935 and 1938, the ideology of the Popular Front, largely informed by that of the Parti Communiste Francais (PCF), exerted tremendous influence on the cultural life of the French nation. Many cultural and musical organizations heeded the Popular Front's call for broad-based anti-fascist solidarity among intellectuals, artists, and the working class. In the realm of culture, this translated into multiple initiatives designed to bring art to the masses and to encourage the proletariat to become more active in the cultural life of the nation. / Sympathetic to the Popular Front's larger political aims, a number of French musicians and composers became affiliated with the Communist-sponsored Maison de 1a Culture and its affiliated musical organizations, the most prominent of which was the Federation Musicale Populaire (FMP). They participated in the administrative, cultural and intellectual life of the FMP; they took part in conferences, wrote articles on the theme of "music for the people," and were advocates for the organization within French musical life at large. Furthermore, these composers wrote works for government-commissioned events, for amateur groups, and for spectacles designed for mass audiences. / Some of the FMP's most prominent proponents (Darius Milhaud, Georges Auric, and Arthur Honegger) were former members of Les Six, a group that had been particularly interested in borrowing music derived from "popular" sources like the music hall and the circus following World War I. This study argues that the aesthetic approach of Les Six, which found support in FMP presidents Albert Roussel and Charles Koechlin, was reinvigorated during the Popular Front for a much more clearly defined political purpose. While the general interest in "popular" sources was still maintained, composers at the FMP now sought to integrate folklore and revolutionary music into their works "for the people" in an attempt to create and underline cultural links between workers and intellectuals---a compositional approach for which this dissertation coins the expression "populist modernism." / This study, the first book-length examination of French musical culture in light of Popular Front politics, concentrates on some of the period's most significant populist modernist works and draws upon contemporaneous journalistic coverage and archival documents that in many cases have hitherto never been the object of musicological study. The research shows that in 1936, following an initial infatuation with the genres and styles of socialist realist Soviet works, French left-wing composers developed a more inclusive view of what constituted music "for the people." Composers continued to write music indebted to politically resonant popular sources like folklore and revolutionary songs, but they also drew upon these genres in works (like the collaborative incidental music for Romain Rolland's Le 14 Juillet) that employed modernist compositional techniques. Though this approach was most obviously felt in the numerous works composed for organizations like the FMP, populist modernism also emerged in works performed at the Theatre de l'Opera-Comique and the 1937 Paris Exposition. By cutting across musical genres as well as institutional and social contexts, populist modernism emerges as the dominant aesthetic trend in French music during the years of the Popular Front.

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