Overview

Professor Fred Alexander, a distinguished historian and the first Australian to be awarded a Senior Research Fellowship of the Canada Council, makes in this book a frank and friendly attempt to examine the views on various aspects of Canada's external relations expressed to him by an occupational and regional cross-section of Canadians (many of whom are named in the text) during the course of his recent coast-to-coast investigation. Canadian-American relations loom large in the resultant analysis, whether the subject matter is economic or strategic, cultural or political. Other important questions discussed cover the extent to which Canadian nationalism is restricted by surviving provincial regionalism; the significance of spiritual and idealist influences; current internal political trends; and the increasing significance of Asia and the Pacific in the overall attitude of Canadians to the Commonwealth and the world at large. This book, which is being published simultaneously in Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom, has the general quality of highlighting through the eyes of an independent observer the important problems of Canadian attitudes to foreign policy and that special quality which is derived from the author's integrity and good-humoured detachment no less than the shrewdness and rare penetration of some of his judgments.

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9781442651371

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Fred Alexander, a graduate of Trinity College, Melbourne, and of Balliol College, Oxford, was Professor of Modern History and Head of the Department of History in the University of Western Australia. He was also the Director of Adult Education, Dean of the Faculty of Arts, and Chairman of the Professional Board of that university. He was President of the Western Australian Institute of International Affairs. He devoted four years of study leave overseas to evolving a technique of qualitative assessment of contemporary opinion in different countries. In 1932 he worked in Germany and Poland; in 1940 in the United States; in 1950 in the Union of South Africa; and in 1959 in Canada.

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