Word: commonwealth
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...Commonwealth of Massachusetts received a $500 million budget windfall when a mid-level bureaucrat discovered a loophole in the federal health insurance codes...
Gorbachev proved his skills as a go-between when he negotiated the last, never signed union treaty. Whether the nation that emerges out of the rubble now takes the form of a federation, confederation or commonwealth, there will still be a need for some kind of governmental body to judge the conflicting claims of the member states. The President of the Soviet Union is the logical candidate to assume such an executive role, and that means Gorbachev...
Analysts have proposed various paradigms. Some think the republics that were the Soviet Union may rearrange themselves into a kind of British Commonwealth, or into something like the European Community. Some think of the Organization of African Unity, a roster of African states each of which has declared adherence to principles of sovereign equality and noninterference in the internal affairs of member states. Might they become a federation, in which the republics yield some coordinating economic authority to a central government, or a confederation, an alliance, some sort of cooperative? Will they adopt a cooler, well-machined nationalism...
Other models for a union of sorts include an economic common market like the 12-nation European Community; or a military alliance patterned after NATO, which for most of its 42 years has been an explicitly anti-Soviet grouping; or even the Commonwealth, whose member nations rarely do anything together anymore except talk...
...about it the deep sonority of history. Unfortunately, it is history -- or virtually so. Last week members of the Soviet parliament batted around suggested titles for the disintegrating union. Among the candidate monikers are the Union of Sovereign Soviet States (a Gorbachev favorite), the Euroasian Economic Community and the Commonwealth of Sovereign States of Europe and Asia. One cynic even suggested the Club of Crippled Nations...