‘Our and the world's advantage’: the constructive Commonwealth

Abstract

The role which any grouping of states can play in world affairs is determined at least in part by the global setting in which it functions. Today, the global setting in which the Commonwealth functions is a particularly challenging one. Heightened suspicion and confrontation between the two superpowers; a decline in the spirit and practice of internationalism, including diminished support for the United Nations; a rise of militarism and increased disregard for established rules and principles of world order; an accelerating arms race acting as both a threat to human survival and a menace to development; a global economic recession from which recovery worldwide is halting: a virtual standstill in the North-South dialogue on international economic cooperation, and faltering responses to the desperate needs of the world's poorest people; failure of the world's financial institutions adequately to adapt to the changed conditions of the 1980s: the environment is unpropitious to multilateral cooperation. Conversely, however, the need for such cooperation was never greater. The apparent drying-up of political will for change in many international quarters means that fresh opportunities, and responsibilities, devolve upon those organizations equipped to make a creative contribution. The modern Commonwealth is, I believe, such an organization. Its unique evolution has given it a character significantly different from other international organizations different in ways which enable it to contribute distinctively to contemporary affairs. The form of this contribution will be shaped, both as to constraints and as to advantages, by the Commonwealth's essential nature, deriving from its history. A beneficiary of the British political tradition of pragmatism, the Commonwealth is most of all a pragmatic, practical association. In many respects it is indeed a 'concert of convenience', in the evocative phrase of Professor Bruce Milter, the Commonwealth's Australian historian. It exists because it has been found by its members to be useful. How it is useful, what it is in the Commonwealth's character which makes it so, and whence that character historically derives, are my subjects in this article. I write with the experience of last November's Commonwealth heads of government meeting in New Delhi still fresh in mind. It was both the spirit and the form of India's decision in 1949 to remain in the association, and the desire of the older Dominions that it should do so, which made the modern Commonwealth possible. India was the first Asian, first non-white member, and later the first republic to be a member. Republican status, in particular, had profound implications for the Commonwealth relationship-a link no longer fashioned from allegiance to the British Crown but from acceptance of Britain's monarch as symbolic head of a Commonwealth pluralistic in forms of political organization as well as in races and religions. In going to New Delhi in 1983, the modern Commonwealth was going