Canada and the Crisis of Middle Powers

Extract

If the superpowers are, as is commonly suggested, passing through a time of crisis, so inevitably are the “middle powers,” for the states that for twenty-five years have been collectively but erratically referred to as middle powers are groping for their place in a system determined by the giants. At San Francisco in 1945 the middle powers seemed to have found a mission in frustrating the great power determination to brook as little interference as possible in their ordering of world politics. When the great powers fell apart, the middle-power front was also broken. Its members found their niches in alliance with the great powers or in a status they called nonalignment. Alignment and nonalignment make sense, however, only in relation to the great powers' division.