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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.