THE 1923 IMPERIAL CONFERENCE IN THE CONTEXT OF THE CANADIAN NATIONAL SOVEREIGNTY DEVELOPMENT

The Imperial Conference of 1923 summed up a long period of the development of the dominions political and legal status, the paths and prospects of which played an important part in the political thought of Canada at the turn of the 19th - 20th centuries. Issues of participation in foreign policy were an significant aspect of it, since that was the lack of independence that made the key difference between the self-governing parts of the British Empire and sovereign states. Canada was the first of the Dominions to make the way from the desire for active participation in a collective imperial policy on international issues, which was the characteristic of the First World War, to disappointment in the ineffective mechanism for its development, which gave the autonomies only the illusion of control. A number of events in the early 1920s, the key one being the Chanak crisis, demonstrated the general decline of imperial unity. This became a turning point for the change in the vector of Canadian political circles to revise relations with the “mother country” in line with national autonomy. It assumed collective action in the international arena only in exceptional circumstances, while a sphere of direct foreign policy responsibility of the dominion was being formed simultaneously. There was a significant step in this direction when in 1923 the dominion independently entered into a Convention on the protection of halibut fishing in the North Pacific Ocean with the United States, which demonstrated the presence of its own interests in the sphere of international relations and readiness to successfully resolve them independently, without affecting other parts of the Empire. The main task of Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King at the Imperial Conference of 1923 was to provide this precedent with a legal basis for further practice. Not all autonomies supported this increase in autonomy, but the Canadian representative had arguments in its support based on existing practice. The impossible structural modernization, combining both the national interests of the dominions and the leadership of the metropole, forced London to sanction the right of the dominions to conclude international agreements with other countries. As a result of the Imperial Conference of 1923, Great Britain finally lost its monopoly on conducting foreign policy on behalf of the dominions. They could not support its initiatives and acquired the right to act independently in the international arena, including those imposing legal obligations, which became a important step in the development of their sovereignty, to which Canada made a significant contribution.

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