There is no better known judgement of Britain's post-war international position than Dean Acheson's view that: “Britain has lost an Empire and has not yet found a role”. Acheson's words have echoed and reechoed through the corridors of Whitehall because they seem so true, capturing not only the uncertainty about Britain's role but the decline in her international status. The judgement has attracted the attention of scholars as well as officials and politicians, as was demonstrated in a recent number of this journal when Christopher Hill wrote about “Britain's Elusive Role in World Politics”. Hill warned against the dangers of seeing foreign policy making in terms of “role”, arguing that it suppressed contradictions in the interests of a predominant image, and encouraged the illusion that a state could plough a lone furrow in pursuit of its particular interests. “Unfortunately”, he argued, “the quest for a unique role, like the pursuit of the Holy Grail, is a fatal distraction to politicians with responsibility”, and later he warned of “role” degenerating into “the medium of limp metaphor and rhetoric”.

The theologian Reinhold Neibuhr oftentimes warned that moralists who entered the foreign policy sphere were likely to be more destructive of a nation's ideals than were cynical realists. Evidently he feared that those who lacked a sense of the limits of foreign policy would proceed as if the values and goods which were attainable in the more intimate communities of the family, the locality and the nation were attainable in the international community as well. Whatever Neibuhr's quarrels and debates with classical Greek thought, he was at one with Plato and Aristotle and their present day followers in believing that justice could be more effectively pursued by the smaller communities, such as the city states. He insisted on a recognition of the differences between such communities and the major present day world powers. From World War II until his death, he wrote more about foreign policy than any other aspect of public policy. He wrote scores of articles, some published in less prominent journals, about American foreign policy and its moral basis.

Vietnam has been the subject of several studies in our times; yet a need remains for an analysis of the Vietnam experience as an exercise in international peacekeeping. Possibly because interest in peacekeeping has tended to be concentrated on UN exercises, the International Commission for Supervision and Control (ICSC) in Vietnam has escaped serious study. I hope in the course of this paper to partially fill the lacuna. I intend to show the achievements and shortcomings of the ICSC by subjecting its workings to as close a scrutiny as is feasible within the constraints of an article. In the process, I shall be breaking down the Commission into its constituent elements, the three delegations. This procedure allows us both to understand the workings of the Commission as a whole, and to comment upon the coincidence of voting patterns of the delegations with the foreign policies of their respective countries. Polish behaviour, it might be noted, will receive less than equal emphasis. The study is thus simultaneously an examination of ICSC behaviour in Vietnam, and of Canadian and Indian behaviour in the ICSC.

“William, when I went into the jungle, I was seventeen. When I walked out I was twenty-one. And, by God, I was rich!”

Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman, Act I

Fortunes magically and mysteriously made on vast continents overseas have tempted western entrepreneurs for generations, much as Uncle Ben tempted Willie Loman. But these exploits also involve machinations which appear sinister to a general public increasingly disturbed by the control giant corporations have over our daily lives. As long ago as 1900, John Hobson developed the theory that modern imperial expansion was the product of the manipulation of national foreign policies by the “Rand lords” and similar overseas financial operators. This idea was used by Lenin, Hilferding and others in their elaborations of the Marxist explanation of the nexus between economic forces and the political behaviour of states. Imperialism in tropical Africa was always seen as a key issue in this context. With the onset of decolonization and the struggle for development, questions of the history and the progress of imperialism have remained cogent subjects of intellectual controversy. The historical “scramble for Africa” and the process of colonization which followed created the basis for the modern political map of Africa and modern African political society. To what extent were these developments triggered or determined by the activities of private entrepeneurs? What relevance might the answer have for the contemporary study of international politics? This article seeks to explore these questions in the light of theories of transnational politics. At the same time, the problem of European expansion in Africa provides an important test for the transnational approach, as it relates to the overseas political activity of international business firms.