Peacekeeping and foreign policy: Canada, India and the International Commission in Vietnam, 1954–1965

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.