Selling the Cold War in *Canada? National identities, cultural transfer, and Canada -United States relations at the dawn of the Cold War

This comparative study of US and Canadian responses to the emergence of the Cold War examines the various forces, including those transmitted across the two nations' shared border, that contributed to the emergence of an anti-Soviet consensus in both countries between 1945 and 1949. Based largely on an analysis of the mass print media, polling data, and aspects of popular culture in both the US and Canada, it seeks to locate distinctly national outlooks on such topics as the development and deployment of atomic weaponry, the disclosure of Soviet espionage operations in North America, decolonization, and the abandonment of "One World" idealism in favor of the regional defense arrangement enshrined by NATO.;The study finds that Canadians, heavily influenced by the presence of the US public and popular culture in their country, shared or adopted views held by many Americans on vital postwar issues. At other points, Canadians sought to advance what they considered national and global interests by producing contrapuntal readings to those imported from the US---for instance, in expressing their desire for international custodianship of atomic weaponry, and for a multilateral, rather than an American-dominated, management of the postwar world. While these oppositional readings represent distinctive and important points of view, and assisted Canadians in delimiting what they considered an independent identity, it is also true that they were based on a patently constricted range of representations of American identity and cultural opinion available beyond US borders. National differences, then, while apparent, were not as profound as many in Canada believed.;Nor did Canadian attempts to demarcate difference always produce progressive outcomes. This is particularly apparent in discourses surrounding imperialism, a practice which many Canadians endorsed as a bulwark against Soviet expansion before such a justification became popular in American public discourse. And in the end, it appears that many Canadians abandoned the principle of universal collective security and endorsed a US-led anti-Soviet military alliance not because of undue American pressures, but because they believed that NATO would best serve national interests. As such, simple models of cultural imperialism are inadequate to the explication of the postwar Canada-US relationship.