W. David McIntyre

The significance of the Commonwealth, 1965-90

List of Tables - List of Abbreviations - Introduction: Commonwealth in Controversy - PART 1: STRUCTURE - Origins - Changing CHOGMs - The Secretariat - Global Concerns and Commonwealth Principles - PART 2: ISSUES - Race - Africa - Inequality - Security and Small Estates - PART 3: FUNCTIONING - Regional Emphases - Function Organisations - Professional Linkages - Peoples - Sport - Head of the Commonwealth - Conclusion: Agenda for the 1990s - Notes - Index

Background to the Anzus pact : policy-making, strategy, and diplomacy, 1945-55

PART 1: PROLOGUE - Introduction: Great Powers, Small Pacific Allies and the Cold War - US Post-war Bases in the Pacific - PART 2: STRATEGY - American Post-war Global Strategic Planning - British Post-war Global Strategic Planning - World War III in the Middle East - Australian Post-war Strategic Planning - New Zealand Post-war Strategic Planning - The ANZAM Arrangements - PART 3: DIPLOMACY - Collective Security and the Peace Treaties - A Pacific Pact? - Impact of the Korean Outbreak - Dulles and an American Guarantee - The Canberra Talks, February 1951 - Signing the Treaties - PART 4: AFTERMATH - The ANZUS Council and the British - Collective Security in Southeast Asia - Conclusion: Transfer of Power in the Pacific - Appendix: The Anzus Text - Abbreviations used in Endnotes, Location of Sources, and Endnotes - Index

The Global Dimension

While there is disagreement about the nature and significance of the metropolitan dimension of decolonization, there is less cause for doubt about the general outlines of the changing international environment. Germany had been eliminated as a colonial rival in the 1914–18 war, and schemes for its colonial ‘restitution’ in the 1930s made no headway. However, Italy’s incursion into Ethiopia excited anti-imperialist feelings in many parts of Africa, and Japan’s expansion into Asia and the Pacific gave new opportunities for some nationalists in Burma, Malaya and India. In helping to defeat the German, Italian and Japanese bids for regional hegemony, the British protected or recovered their colonies, but the Empire was severely tested and weakened by the 1939–45 war.

Head of the Commonwealth

The Games may be the greatest popular event in the Commonwealth, and they are not without their symbolism. But they share the key element of this symbolism with the wider official and unofficial Commonwealth. This suggests that the symbol rather than the Games is the association’s single most popular feature. If this is true, it means that the Queen, as Head of the Commonwealth, has an importance which far transcends that of the role of constitutional monarch of Britain and sixteen other states.

The Expansion of the Commonwealth and the Criteria for Membership

Abstract Have they opened the floodgates? This question was being asked after the Kampala CHOGM agreed to receive applications for membership of the Commonwealth from countries that had never been British colonies. After more than a decade of uncertainty about this issue — ever since Mozambique joined in 1995 as an exceptional case — Heads of Government at Kampala approved the Report of the Committee on Commonwealth Membership finally agreeing to entertain further such applications and providing a procedure for handling them. Comment on this decision has been muted and ambiguous and usually focuses on one or other of the known new aspirants, such as Rwanda, Yemen and Algeria, rather than the general principles that should govern criteria for membership or the long term shape of the Commonwealth. The purpose of this article is to review the whole history of the expansion of the Commonwealth and consider how the issue of criteria has been resolved.

Whose Commonwealth? Responses to Krishnan Srinivasan's The Rise, Decline and Future of the British Commonwealth

Abstract Krishnan Srinivasans provocative book The Rise, Decline and Future of the British Commonwealth is the first full-length study of the Commonwealth for some years. The Round Table invited five leading Commonwealth scholars and activisits to respond from varying perspectives. They find the book stimulating and irritating in equal measure. The debate is set to continue.

Contradictory Aims in West Africa: the Cardwell Policy, 1864–5

ON 17 June 1864 Vice-Admiral Sir John Hay rose in the House of Commons to make a furious onslaught upon Lord Palmerston’s Government. Clutching in his hand some letters from a brother who had just died on military service in the Gold Coast, Hay spoke with intense emotion as he moved a motion of censure on the Cabinet: ‘The men who have betrayed Denmark and truckled to Germany … who have alienated France and irritated Russia… who have convulsed China and devastated Japan; the same men who ten years ago sent a British army to perish of cold, of hunger, of want of shelter in a Crimean winter … have now sent British troops to perish of fever, of thirst, and of want of shelter on the burning plains and fetid swamps of Western Africa.’1 Only a year before Palmerston’s death, the great statesman, who had once challenged the crowned heads of Europe and had dominated the British political scene for the past decade, was thus angrily denounced and forced to defend his ‘benevolent crotchet’. He replied, with a hint of the old aggressive fire, that if England became responsible for protecting ‘tribes of men’ the honour of the country sometimes demanded steps to ‘make that protection not an empty word but a reality’.2 But many of his hearers were not impressed. Admiral Hay’s motion of censure was rejected by the slender margin of seven votes.

The Unofficial Commonwealth Relations Conferences, 1933–59: Precursors of the Tri-sector Commonwealth

One of the unique features of the Commonwealth as an international association is the width and depth of its non-political manifestations. At recent Commonwealth conferences political and official consultations have been held in parallel with large civil society, business and youth forums and, in some cases, inter-faith dialogues. Growing collaboration between the political, civil society and business elements gives rise to the notion of the ‘tri-sector Commonwealth’. The concept of an ‘association of peoples’ as well as one of nations, does, however, have a long pedigree. Between 1933 and 1959 a series of Unofficial Commonwealth Relations Conferences, organised by Chatham House and its overseas affiliates, were held at roughly five-yearly intervals to analyse the implications of the most recent Imperial Conferences. Politicians and civil servants joined with lawyers, academics, editors, military men, agriculturalists and trade unionists. In contrast to the political Commonwealth, women had a part in the unofficial conferences. And among more than 400 participants at Toronto 1933, Lapstone 1938, London 1945, Bigwin 1949, Lahore 1954 and Palmerston North 1959 were fifty-five academic historians and other writers of history, who included most of the leading authorities on the Commonwealth of the 1930s and 1940s.

American Post-war Bases in the Pacific

The first post-war proposal to link Australia and New Zealand with the United States in a mutual security arrangement was made on Australian initiative in 1946. It was made in connection with American plans for a system of bases in the Pacific and around the globe. These plans may be traced to somewhat unlikely origins at the end of the first year of the Pacific War.

Introduction: The Imperial Frontier in the Tropics

‘WE have been of late much perplexed by a new word, “Imperialism”, which has crept in amongst us.’ With these words the fourth Earl of Carnarvon, speaking to a large Edinburgh audience in 1878, entered upon a discussion as to the ‘meaning and value of the word Imperialism’, which has continued from his day to this. In the course of his lecture he found it easier to say what imperialism was ‘not’ than to define what it was. In particular was he at pains to refute analogies which were then being drawn between the Roman Empire and the mid-Victorian British Empire. In one respect, however, Carnarvon admitted that they could be compared. Every great empire, he declared, was confronted by ‘similar difficulties of frontier — the same arguments for and against — the same provocations real or supposed — the same questions as to the key of the position — the same temptation of those on the spot to acquire territory’.1 These remarks highlighted an important, though comparatively neglected, aspect of imperial affairs.