Problems of security and defense of the British Commonwealth at the 1937 Imperial Conference: Canada's position

The article presents an analysis of the views of the canadian delegation on security and defense issues within the framework of the British Commonwealth of Nations at the 1937 imperial conference. The contradictions between canada's position and Britain's attempts to establish closer cooperation within the Commonwealth to ensure imperial defense in the event of war are revealed. The approaches of other "white" dominions, Australia, New Zealand and the Union of South Africa, to current international political and military-strategic issues are considered, which allows them to be compared with the canadian point of view. Special attention is paid to the factor of public opinion in Canada, since a significant part of canadian society, especially the french canadian minority, was opposed to the involvement of the dominion in military conflicts abroad, which was taken into account by the canadian establishment when developing a foreign policy line. It is also shown that one of the factors influencing Canada's position was the isolationist policy of the United States, with which the dominion actively developed extensive economic and political ties. During the writing of the article, the author turned to both special historical methods and used the tools of the theory of international relations. The problem of Canada's position at the 1937 imperial conference on the security and defense of the British Commonwealth was practically ignored in Russian historiography, which prompted the author to fill in this gap in the history of, on the one hand, the transformation of the British Empire, on the other – in the prehistory of the Second World War. In this study, we rely on a wide range of diverse sources, represented by canadian, english and american documents of an official and personal nature. We conclude that the evasive position of the canadian establishment was the result of a breakdown in the coordination of the Commonwealth's defense policy and one of the factors contributing to Britain's policy of appeasing aggressors during the crisis of the Versailles-Washington system of international relations during the interwar period.