Word: commonwealth
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...since Britain was driven from her last French possession, the island nation approaches the climax of a historic effort to vault the Channel and bind her fortunes indissolubly to those of the new, united, booming Western Europe. This decision will deeply affect Britain's relations with 724 million Commonwealth citizens. Britons who want to remember the sails of Drake and Raleigh, and the balance sheets that once followed the flag around the world, are being asked to turn their backs on what little remains of the Empire and to abandon (or so many believe) yesterday's wide horizons...
...turning an empire into a commonwealth, the British showed unparalleled genius for adapting old forms to new needs and alien peoples. Every other empire in history has either crumbled from within, exploded or been razed by invaders. By temperament and experience, Britain should be uniquely capable of making the successful passage from Commonwealth to Common Market-and in so doing, bring about that mingling of the Anglo-Saxon and the Latin spirit that Historian André Siegfried saw as the genius of Europe. As Edward Heath said to the House of Commons last month, "What we are dealing with...
With her ties to the U.S. and the multiracial Commonwealth, Britain's adherence to the Continent is the free world's best hope that Europe will evolve instead into a liberal, outward-looking community committed for the foreseeable future to the Western Alliance...
...heat of the Commonwealth controversy, few Britons recall that its sacrosanct trade ties started as a marriage of convenience-and have lately proved increasingly inconvenient. Since the 1880s, British politicians have dreamed of the Empire as a competition-proof common market that would forever absorb British manufactured goods and supply cheap raw materials in exchange. But it never worked that way. In 1962, as Richard Cobden protested in the early 19th century, the Commonwealth is, in purely economic terms, "but a gorgeous and ponderous appendage to swell our ostensible grandeur without improving our balance of trade...
While clinging possessively to the right of free entry into British markets, the Commonwealth nations have tended increasingly to discriminate against British goods that threatened their own budding industries. In recent years, Britain's Commonwealth trade has consistently ended in the red. Britain's exports to the Commonwealth since 1954 have dwindled from 49% to 36% of her total foreign trade; they were actually exceeded this year, for the first time, by her exports to Western Europe. Trade with the six Common Market countries alone has soared 30% since 1960 and now accounts for more than one-third...