The Commonwealth in the 1980s: Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract

Relations between states, like other social relationships, may be judged in terms of their approximation to one or other of two models of society. In the community model actors identify strongly with each other and expect that their interests will converge in the long run. Indeed they may postpone the settlement of short-term disagreements in the expectation that this will happen, and stress shared values and experiences as the main justification of the relationship. On the other hand, in the pluralist model relationships are justified primarily in terms of their utilitarian rewards to the actors, and the satisfaction of interest is less frequently postponed as there is no agreement upon priorities among them. The central principle of the first model is emotional, psychological, or identitive; that of the second is utilitarian, calculative, and concerned with the balancing of accounts in the short term.¹