Is the Commonwealth a Non-Hobbesian Institution?

Abstract

Abstract According to Christopher Dawson, “the British Commonwealth has disproved the Hobbesian doctrine that if political power is not concentrated, society returns to the jungle.” Wight observed, however, that Commonwealth theory “has failed adequately to explain what has been, essentially, the progressive disintegration of the British Empire, and the steady assimilation of its internal relationships to the condition of international politics.” The Indo-Pakistani frontier is so mutually “suspicious” that “no international frontier could give a more vivid illustration of that ‘posture of gladiators’ which Hobbes described as the natural condition of sovereigns. … There are intra-Commonwealth disputes which threaten the peace of the world. … The United States … has been the unacknowledged major premise of all Commonwealth theory, since but for the United States the Commonwealth might not have survived the First World War and certainly would not have survived the Second. … At the … Unofficial British Commonwealth Relations Conference at Lahore [in 1954] … three hypothetical situations were adumbrated which it was suggested would be incompatible with Commonwealth membership (and what was implied was some kind of expulsion since secession is always open to the individual member). (i) If one member went to war with another member. (ii) If a member joined a hostile bloc—if India had joined China and Russia in the Korean War, for example. (iii) If a member abandoned democratic government, which in the case of Communism would approximate to (ii).”