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The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs and Policy Studies is published six times a year.
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Contributions on these themes, to the Editor are particularly welcome.Malaysia: The 15th general election and its implications
From the Archive
The European Union has had to wrestle with a notion of national sovereignty – state authority over its territory, and independence from external authority – harking back to the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia. This editorial from 50 years ago by Robert Jackson (subsequently a Conservative MEP and MP) finds inadequacies in the perceived, descriptive, and normative elements in the concept. In the new Europe political entities are interdependent, power distributed across multiple layers, political legitimacy to come from collectively agreed-upon ends. ['From the Archives' curated by Alex May and Paul Flather]
Debates over educational philosophy and the curriculum remain highly salient across the Commonwealth today. This article, by A.G. Frazer, is a case study of the Prince of Wales College at Achimota, Gold Coast (now Ghana), founded the previous year, illuminating contemporary colonial educational practices. Here we read of the problems of transplanting British educational models without due adaptation. The article advocates for ‘pupils [to] learn in their own vernacular’ so that they learn about the local as well as the global.
The Commonwealth Secretariat came into existence on 1 July 1965, with Canadian diplomat Arnold Smith as the Commonwealth’s first secretary-general. In this article from the previous December Dermot Morrah, editor of the journal, anticipated the Secretariat as forming ‘the first confederal institution’ of the Commonwealth. While enumerating an ambitious programme, Morrah noted that, although based for convenience in London, ‘it is important to maintain in its working the same impulse from oversea to which its foundation responded’.