The Commonwealth Today
BROGAN, D. W.
By D. W Brogan The Commonwealth Today A far cry from old British Empire None can doubt that the lowering of the Union Jack and the hoisting of the flag of the new (or revived) nation of Ghana...
...But, it will be asked, if the Commonwealth is not British in the old sense, if it is largely inhabited by people of non-British stock, if even the white colonies are likely to be less "British" than in the past (the change in Australia since 1945 is startling), why have a Commonwealth...
...This question, when it is put, usually conceals a further question that is a policy...
...the "freedom" that the Ghana crowds acclaimed may be a kind of freedom very unlike the ordered liberty sung by Alfred Lord Tennyson...
...Does it mark a beginning or only an end...
...We don't know...
...We see it going on every day...
...the old school, thinking of the "five hundred million British subjects," thinking of India in terms of the British Raj, thinking even of white dominions like Canada in Kiplingesque terms ("daughter in her mother's house/ mistress in her own"), it is hard, indeed, not to regret or resent the changes...
...What have Pakistan and India in common with each other or with Britain...
...We have to begin by accepting the unpleasant fact that two disastrously expensive wars, expensive in blood as well as in treasure, have greatly weakened the economic and, consequently, the political power of Great Britain...
...Who can contemplate the future of South Africa without alarm verging on despair...
...If we live in the dream world whose most famous inhabitant is that old romantic, Lord Beaverbrook, we shall, in the not very long run, not do anything because our picture is so remote from reality that nothing we plan to do can be done...
...It is still true, as in Burke's day, that "great empires and little minds go ill together...
...The evolution may be revolution...
...It suggests a leisurely, inevitable, sound progress...
...Would it not be wiser to accept the fact that only the old dominions (probably excluding South Africa) have really enough in common with Britain and each other to make the Commonwealth a going concern...
...But if we ask what Britain has in common with the old dominions, we see that it has some of it in common with new nations like Ghana...
...We do not know...
...To complain that the Japanese maker of bicycles exported to Malaya works longer for lower wages than does the British worker and consequently should be barred from the Malayan market is simply a roundabout way of saying that the Malayan rubber worker or docker should work harder and for less money than ho would otherwise get to keep up the standard of living of the British bicycle worker...
...If you have been an "imperialist" of Denis William Brogan, professor of political science at Cambridge, is the author of The Price of Revolution, The Free State, The American Character and other books...
...But it would be foolish to hope that other stocks will be kept out...
...It is harder, much harder, to be sure what kind of moment it is...
...These links of political education are real and important...
...What we can do about it is limited by what we think about it...
...Only if we face the fact that the old British Empire, even the "British Commonwealth," is dead can we hope to understand and make anything of its successor, "the Commonwealth...
...Because the question is so open, it is natural that there should be British defenders of the ancient ways who see in these changes only a disastrous, premature and ignoble abandonment of an old inheritance and a noble task...
...There is some validity in the question and plausibility in the policy...
...But faith is better than too easy despair or empty lamentation for the good old days of imperial supremacy...
...the most fearful are hopeful...
...Indeed, the comforting word "evolution" begs a good many questions...
...Trade may not have followed the flag, but trade, investment and the flag were inextricably intermixed...
...Britons may rejoice, should rejoice, in the emigration of our own kin to Canada, Australia, New Zealand...
...Who can predict the future of multi-racial communities like the Rhodesias or Kenya...
...By D. W Brogan The Commonwealth Today A far cry from old British Empire None can doubt that the lowering of the Union Jack and the hoisting of the flag of the new (or revived) nation of Ghana marks a great moment in the history of British expansion...
...Consequently, even if there had been no other changes, London could no longer dominate the Empire or its suecessors...
...But not to gamble is to accept defeat...
...The importance of imperial preference (and of the sterling area) is being steadily diminished by the growth of trade outside the Commonwealth, by the maturing of economies like those of Australia and Canada, by the capital needs of the more backward areas of the Commonwealth (most of them much more backward and much poorer than Ghana...
...What have Ghana and the Union of South Africa in common with each other or Britain...
...The Commonwealth Relations Office is an unparalleled center of information and exchange of views...
...All that would happen is that we would be tossed out of the manger, not that we could keep it for ourselves...
...The greater part of the Commonwealth, like the greater part of the world, is desperately short of investment, and we would be foolish to play the dog in the manger...
...It is not merely a matter of American capital...
...Britain cannot make this need illusory and cannot prevent the new or old nations from noticing the need and taking steps to meet it...
...Ghana is a gamble and a symbol...
...Thy posterity shall sway...
...What can we British do about it, what should we think about it...
...Will the new nation flourish inside the Commonwealth or outside it...
...There are plenty of problems, ranging from headaches to deep-seated diseases...
...The lessons of the American Revolution are not all obsolete...
...They have economic, social, political results...
...Regions Caesar never knew...
...We can still sway by example, by willingness to learn as well as to teach...
...It is natural enough, if your ideas of West Africa have been formed by Edgar Wallace's stories of Sanders and Bosambo, of India by Kipling or even E. M. Forster, if Malaya means either Conrad or the gin-drinking planters of Somerset Maugham, that the changes that have come so thick and fast since 1945 or 1939 should seem reckless and full of ill omen...
...Who can be sure that the Western institutions that we have imposed on Ghana or Nigeria will stand much wear and tear in inexperienced hands...
...We may regret that there was not more investment in the Empire before 1914, even between the two great wars, but that is water over the dam...
...Will it preserve the political, legal and economic institutions the British have given it or go a different way, cease to be "British," be at most a kind of Liberia...
...One of the first things to notice is that Britain can no longer supply the Commonwealth with all or even most of its investment capital...
...A great part of the Commonwealth needs Swedish, German, Italian capital and know-how...
...It is not only a matter of investment...
...Commonwealth governments, even mutually hostile Commonwealth governments, have habits of mutual understanding and cooperation that are valuable and scarce in this disturbed world...
...If there is an> way that the Malayan can be made to see that this is his duty, it is a secret that should not be kept from the Colonial Office or from the Board of Trade...
...Some zealots of the Australian Labor party may wish to keep down the amount of European immigration since emigrants who have known the blessings of "socialism" in the "people's democracies" don't make good recruits for the Labor party in Australia...
...Sir Winston Churchill said he had not become the King's first minister to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire, but that liquidation has come about...
...A long period of British rule is part of their history, at least as living a part, in modern Africa, as the remote and partly mythical Empire of Ghana...
...it recalls "freedom slowly broadening down/From precedent to precedent...
...But it may not turn out to be like that...
...If India and Pakistan have escaped the endemic disorder and open or covert civil war that curse what were French lndo-China and the Dutch East Indies, again Britons should take pride and hope in the lasting work of the Indian Civil Service, the Indian Army and the kind of education (so much decried) that Macaulay, over a century ago, provided for the dominions of the East India Company...
...The most hopeful are fearful...
...Nor is it wise to harp too much on imperial preference or even on the sterling area...
...Moreover, there is a concealed selfishness in some of the arguments used that can be noticed by the intelligent and critical leaders of the new nations...
...It is a matter entirely for Australia what is done about immigration, but it would be very shortsighted of Britons to welcome a policy that kept down the number of "new Australians" merely to keep up the proportion of British-born in a less populous Australia...
...The launching of Ghana is only the most dramatic of the changes that have marked "Commonwealth" evolution since the end of the Second World War...
...We can be proud of the political education Britain has given to her African colonies that has made them so much more mature than the rule of the Negro oligarchy of the "True Whigs'' has made an "independent" republic like Liberia...
...It is idle to lament that American capital is pouring into Canada (although Canadians may, if they choose, take precautions about its mass and influence) . Britain cannot begin to supply Canada's needs— nor the needs of Australia or India or Ghana...
Vol. 40 • April 1957 • No. 14
