Fire and the Full Moon

The history of Canada's postwar foreign policy is dominated by Cold War narratives – the Gouzenko Affair, UN peacekeeping missions, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. By contrast, the story of Canada’s response to decolonization in the Global South is less well known.

Fire and the Full Moon focuses on Canadian-Indonesian relations to explore a larger question: Was Canada’s postwar foreign policy guided by an overarching set of altruistic principles, or did its policy objectives in the South follow a different path? It frames Canada’s response to the Indonesian struggle for independence in the context of other regional decolonization movements and US and Commonwealth relations with Asia and shows that Canada operated as a loyal member of the Western alliance, hoping that Indonesia would follow Canada’s own, non-revolutionary, model of decolonization and development. Canadian economic development policies caused Canada to overlook Indonesian human rights violations in East Timor.

Fire and the Full Moon is a work of trans-Pacific international history that reassesses Canada’s foreign-policy objectives in Indonesia, and its own national image, which will appeal to students of diplomatic history interested in Asia and the developing world.