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What is the Commonwealth?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

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Extract

The association of states known as the Commonwealth of Nations has received little attention from students of international politics. Outside the Commonwealth the association has, on the whole, been ignored; alongside other institutions and alliances, its significance is not great; and the foreign policies of the ten states that now belong to it can to a large extent be accounted for, except in the case of Britain, without reference to the fact of their membership. Within the Commonwealth there has been study of it, but the impulse behind this has been provided less by intellectual curiosity than by the desire to see it prosper: British students have been themselves in the grip of the myth of the Commonwealth, which has become in Britain, along with much else, a totem which it is scarcely good form to examine with an innocent eye.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1959

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References

1 The recent publications of Duke University's Commonwealth Studies Center are a notable exception.

2 Report of the Inter-Imperial Relations Committee, Imperial Conference, 1926, in Keith, A. B., Speeches and Documents on the British Dominions, 1918–1931, London, 1936, p. 162.Google Scholar

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4 Britain—NATO, SEATO; Canada—NATO; Australia and New Zealand—SEATO, ANZUS; Pakistan—SEATO.

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