An Oral History of the Modern Commonwealth, 1965-2010

The aim of this project is to produce a unique digital research resource on the oral history of the Commonwealth since 1965. It will conduct 60 major interviews with leading figures in the recent history of the organisation, which will be available in digitised form on a dedicated website hosted by the School of Advanced Study's 'SAS Space'. The project seeks to produce a Commonwealth equivalent of the British Diplomatic Oral History Programme based at Churchill College, Cambridge. It will provide an essential research tool for anyone investigating the history of the Commonwealth and will serve to promote interest in and understanding of the organisation. 1965 represented a major turning point in the history of the Commonwealth. The organisation had emerged from the remnants of the British Empire. Originally bringing together Britain and the self-governing 'Dominions', post-war decolonization saw the ranks of its members swelled by newly-independent states from Asia, Africa and the Caribbean, decisively altering its character. With the creation of the Commonwealth Secretariat in 1965, Britain ceased to play the central coordinating role (although the British monarch continued to hold the title of Head of the Commonwealth). The focus of the organisation shifted in the 1960s towards the struggle to achieve black majority rule in Rhodesia and South Africa. From the 1990s, with the end of apartheid, there was a new emphasis on promoting human rights and good governance. Despite these changes, however, some essential characteristics of the Commonwealth remained constant: it operated essentially through informal discussion and persuasion; it lacked a constitution or founding treaty; and the 'official' Commonwealth was part of a broader network including a variety of civil society organisations, many of them considerably older than the Secretariat.

The crucial question for contemporary policy makers, and one that the project seeks to explore, is how effective the Commonwealth has been as an organisation. This shapes debates about the amount of time and effort member states should be prepared to devote to it. In the case of British government, since the 1960s there has been a tendency for new administrations to come to power promising to place greater emphasis on this 'under-utilised resource', only to sideline the Commonwealth in the pursuit of more tangible foreign policy goals. Analysis of the archives of the Commonwealth Secretariat provides one means of seeking to gauge the significance of the organisation. Yet this collection tends to cast more light on the Secretariat's administrative role than on the Commonwealth's contribution to international diplomacy. This project seeks to investigate, through the use of detailed interviews with some of the leading protagonists, those elements of the Commonwealth's activities that are not easily captured in written records. These would include the informal and often highly sensitive diplomacy conducted via the Secretary-General's good offices. They would also include candid assessments of the way in which the Commonwealth was perceived by representatives from the member states.

The timely nature of this project means that it is potentially of great value to a wide range of users. The Coalition government came to power in 2010 promising to put the 'Commonwealth' back into the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and to make greater use of what it regards as an under-utilised resource in British diplomacy. Implicit in the approach of recent British governments is the assumption that the Commonwealth is not merely of value to the UK in terms of 'soft-power' diplomacy, but also in terms of maintaining a network of trading relationships that are of benefit to the UK economy. Indeed, this lay behind the creation in 1997, of the Commonwealth Business Council, with the encouragement of the UK government.

The Institute of Commonwealth Studies has as its principal mission the dissemination of research within and beyond the academic community. Taking advantage of its central London location, it has established excellent relations with the Commonwealth High Commissions, Westminster and Whitehall, the Commonwealth Secretariat and a range of Commonwealth civil society organisations. An integral part of the Institute is the Commonwealth Advisory Bureau (formerly the Commonwealth Policy Studies Unit) which produces commissioned research for policy-making bodies and undertakes its own policy-relevant research projects. As CI on the project, Dr Zeilig, the Assistant Director of the CA/B, is extremely well placed to disseminate its findings to non-academic audiences, and to feed them into other studies.

The project website will be launched with a reception and press conference at the Commonwealth Secretariat at Marlborough House. In order to encourage popular engagement with the project, the launch will be accompanied with the publication of a pamphlet setting out some of the most significant points that emerge from the interviews and offering a guide to the website. The website itself will contain not merely the transcripts of the interviews generated by the current research project but other materials on the history of the Commonwealth including transcripts, audio-visual recordings of witness seminars organised by the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, and digitised documents selected from the Commonwealth Secretariat Archives. We will seek to ensure that the website is the first port of call for anyone seeking materials on the history of the Commonwealth, including teachers of history. As in the case of potential academic beneficiaries, the Institute will utilise its network of contacts in the community of Commonwealth organisations to spread an awareness of the existence of this resource to a global audience.