The Commonwealth: Crash Course

THERE was a time when summit meetings of the British Commonwealth meant tea at Buckingham Palace and gracefully informal get-togethers in mahogany-paneled London offices. No longer. Last week, when the 31 regular members of that unique order gathered for their 18th formal conference, Singapore's Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, the host, had to plead with his colleagues to be polite to each other, "if only coldly so."

It was the Commonwealth's first regular meeting outside London (a special meeting was held in Lagos in 1966), and even in Singapore's muggy 85DEG weather, the chill was noticeable. Angry Black African members have vowed that they will pull out of the Commonwealth if Britain's Conservative government goes through with its announced plan to resume arms sales to South Africa's white-supremacist regime. In reply, Britain's Prime Minister Edward Heath rose in Singapore's harbor-front Convention Hall and declared bluntly that no member had the right "to sit in final judgment of the policies and the actions" of another. Alarmed by the collision course between the mother country and her former African colonies, Singapore's Lee warned: "If we cannot contain our present differences over the proposed arms sales, then it is unlikely that the Commonwealth, as at present constituted, can long endure."

Bible Lesson. To be sure, there is still a chance that the arms issue can somehow be solved by what Queen Elizabeth II has called "these personal contacts which mean so much." Even so, the issue is certain to leave a bitter aftertaste and could accentuate the centrifugal forces at work within the Commonwealth. The Africans are deeply embittered at what Zambia's bush-jacketed Kenneth Kaunda labeled a moral decision to "support apartheid with arms."

Heath argues that the arms sales, cut off by the Labor government in 1964, are needed to protect British shipping and counterbalance the Soviets' growing influence in the Indian Ocean. His case was bolstered somewhat when two Soviet warships sailed within sight of the conference hall on their way to the Indian Ocean. Heath points out that South Africa (which resigned, under attack, from the Commonwealth in 1961) will be getting mostly frigates that could not be used to enforce internal repression; helicopters, however, would also be included.

Tories as well as Laborites have questioned Heath's perspective on the controversy. Lord Alport, a Conservative peer who handled Commonwealth relations under Harold Macmillan, recently called Heath's apparent determination to go ahead with the arms sale not only "politically unwise" but also "militarily irrelevant." Worse, it could prove counterproductive. By antagonizing black African governments, Heath might actually hasten the expansion of Soviet influence--not only in the Indian Ocean but on the African land mass as well. But Heath seemed determined to have his way and lost few chances to argue his side of the controversy. The Bible lesson he read in St. Andrew's Cathedral from John 15 included a pointed message: "Ye are my friends if ye do whatsoever I command you."

However the dispute is finally resolved, the most remarkable thing about it is that the Commonwealth's members could allow it to threaten their very special union. The Commonwealth includes 900 million people, a quarter of the world's population, and embraces a fourth of the earth's land area. Although its racially and culturally diverse members have frequently been at odds, and two of them (India and Pakistan) have even been at war, they have voluntarily kept up the association since it was formally established by the Statute of Westminster in 1931. In those four decades, the Commonwealth has created what India's Jawaharlal Nehru once called "a silken bond" of cultural, political and economic ties. Says Britain's Prince Philip:

"Nothing quite like it has ever happened before."

Many have called it an anachronism, but it would be more accurate to term it an anomaly. As TIME Correspondent Lansing Lamont cabled from Singapore: "It is neither a political union nor a federation, neither a military alliance nor an economic bloc, but it has elements of all four."

White Man's Club. Originally, it was an extension of empire--or, as Commonwealth Secretary-General Arnold Smith, a Canadian, puts it--a "privileged white man's club with little relevance to the developing world." As Britain's former colonies gained independence after World War II, most elected to remain part of the system. Since 1955 alone, the Commonwealth has admitted 25 members, the vast majority of them nonwhite; last year Fiji, Tonga and Western Samoa became members. Even so, the white man's culture is still the cement of the Commonwealth.

In all but a few of the member nations, sterling reserves back the local currency, schools teach English, judges decide cases by British common law and stores sell British products. Britain's schools and universities have educated a whole generation of Third World leaders, from Nigeria's Yakubu Gowon (Sandhurst Military Academy) to Singapore's Lee (Cambridge), and 50,000 Commonwealth students are now studying in Britain. In 1969, nearly 90% of Britain's $430 million bilateral aid program went to Commonwealth countries.

Economics also provides a powerful tie. Britain is the principal exporter to 17 of the Commonwealth countries and the principal importer from 15. Still, trade among the members is declining. While Commonwealth nations bought 37% of Britain's exports in 1958, today they account for only 20%. They are looking to new and usually closer markets--Australia to Japan and the rest of Asia, for example, and Ghana to Francophone Africa.

In the Dock. The gradual loosening of economic bonds is paralleled in other areas. Far from taking pride in the Commonwealth as a vestige of empire, an increasing number of Britons wholeheartedly agree with Heath's skeptical attitude. The Prime Minister is determined, above all, to join the European Economic Community in the near future. He made his political reputation as Britain's first negotiator with the Common Market, and he has found the Commonwealth's special economic arrangement more of a hindrance than a help. "The fact is, we've got far more in common with European nations than with most members of the Commonwealth," says Conservative M.P. Peter Hordern. "If the Commonwealth disappeared tomorrow they'd hardly notice."

Many Britons are simply weary of being lectured by fellow Commonwealth members. As Heath put it before leaving for Singapore: "Consultation does not mean there is a right to tell Britain what Britain's policies should be." A Heath aide noted that other members expect a special standard of Britain and then "put .us in the dock" when they are not satisfied. Says Oxford Historian A.J.P. Taylor: "The colored members always seem to be asking something from us, but contributing little. We've been too keen in appeasing and placating them instead of our old friends."

Nonwhite members have their own complaints. There still exists a distinct racial pecking order, they say. The whites patronize all coloreds; Asians are often contemptuous of Africans as unsophisticated; and Africans view the West Indians as a lowly species whose tribal culture has been polluted by whites.

Hub and Spokes. The problem is that Britain and the other white nations of Australia, New Zealand and Canada remain the Commonwealth's center of gravity. With rare exceptions --Canada's Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau has emerged as one--their leaders have been slow to take into account the sensibilities of the new members. "We are the hub, the others are spokes," declares a British official in a telling remark. Too late, he adds: "We'd like to see it more a Commonwealth of equals, though." British and Australian officials speak of how far the Commonwealth has come since its days as a whites-only fraternity; Kaunda and Tanzania's Julius Nyerere, to name only two African leaders, point out how far it has to go before ridding itself of paternalism and even racism.

The disparity between those two attitudes could, of course, tear the Commonwealth apart. There are those who believe, however, that if only the members can be civil about it, Britain's matchless club will emerge as strong as ever from the effort to reconcile its internal quarrels.

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