Graduation Address

"The Human Intellect on the Throne of Society" (October 1965). (UA Case 69, Box 1)

I cannot begin this address without expressing my profound sense of obligation to this University, for having extended this invitation to me, or to the Beaverbrook Foundation which has made the visit possible.

As I hope to show on a subsequent occasion, there is no more vital task in the maintenance of democracy as a form of Government than the maintenance and encouragement of University life. Nor is there any happier occasion in the life of a politician than when he is asked to drop the day to day preoccupations of current politics and discuss the underlying problems and solutions under the calm if penetrating gaze of a University audience. That the occasion in this instance should be in front of a Canadian audience, and that the sponsoring authority should be the foundation of my friend Lord Beaverbrook to whose memory I am tied by many bonds of gratitude and affection only adds for me to the pleasure of the occasion.

It is right that I should begin by affirming my fundamental political creed in rather stark and unblushing terms. For it is in this context that I ask my question. I do not claim it as original, though I do know that it is not universally held. I am not a political agnostic. I believe there is a general political gospel for mankind. I believe that in the current military and political situation destruction will surely follow in a measurable time if the general doctrine is not generally accepted, and if it is not translated by the human race into operable world wide political institutions. But the nature of the philosophy, and the nature of the political case is such – and here is the poignancy – that this acceptance can only be voluntary, and the political institutions evolved by agreement. This adds poignancy to our situation because we may well prove unable to persuade, and urgency to our advocacy because events may overtake us before we have succeeded.

Moreover the political tradition which I represent is not a closed political system. It is neither an ideal laid up in heaven nor is there any proven pattern to be found on earth. It is only a living tradition, nowhere, and never perfectly realized, nor even fully apprehended but growing slowly over centuries, the marriage of ideas from different sources sometime defeated, but never quite dying, always seen, as it were through a glass darkly, but never quite obscured, or lost sight of.

I would call it democracy but its basic ideas are both wider and older than any democracy on earth. I would call it Christian, but there is nothing inherently theological in its tenets, although but for the Christian Church I doubt if it would have developed or survived. I would call it Western, since until recently its principal home has been Europe. But in a revolving globe, Western is meaningless geographically, and if the idea be to give it universal significance Western is both unduly limited and unattractive politically.

I prefer to call it the doctrine of freedom under law. But it has in fact drawn its seminal ideas from different sources. The political doctrine of freedom no doubt comes from Greece, and of law from ancient Rome, but freedom is definable in principle and undesirable in practice if it does not assume the existence of an objective morality which effectively limits its exercise and gives authority to its actions; and law is only tyranny or the arbitrary imposition of a ruler’s will or a meaningless jumble of regulation and decision – even if the ruler be an anonymous majority of common men or a bench of impartial justices – unless the same majority be called in to give force to its prohibitions and point to its injunctions. Yet both majority rule, and representative government, and Parliamentary discussion are its practical institutions, and technical advance, and universal education on a scale and, it must be said, at a level never yet fully attained, its inseparable conditions. This, I believe, is the doctrine of the West, which if the world does not accept in an age of nuclear weapons, I believe without doubt civilization will perish perhaps everlastingly. This to my mind is the unique cult of the modern age. I believe it firmly and I desire to extend the application of that belief to international institutions on a world-wide scale – in which field it is comparatively without application except on a most rudimentary scale at the present time. You may say that this makes me an impractical idealist and a doctrinaire. In a sense you are right. But I am prepared to defend these beliefs as the only ones which will avoid a universal conflagration or a universal tyranny.

It is in this context that I look at our two countries at the present time, and I see them both uncertain of their future. Has Britain a future? Has Canada? I find these questions are asked more anxiously by our peoples than at any time in their history of more than two hundred years.

In a sense this is paradox. Both countries are more populous, more wealthy an more technically advanced in absolute terms than they have ever been before, and both command a more formidable armoury than they have ever wielded before in time of peace. Nor is it at all true as is sometimes suggested, that modern conditions operate against the survival of small nations. Ghana, Iceland, Norway, and Gabon all survive, and thrive in their way. How then can Canada, or Britain doubt their ability or right to live?

Yet it is precisely the viability of our nations as cultural communities, as economic units, and, yes, why not say it right out, as objects of loyalty in the present day world that the doubters call in question. Should Britain merge with some unborn federation? Should Quebec secede from Canada? Should Canada form part of the United States? These are questions asked, and if we propound vigorous negatives it is as well we should know why. It is because I believe in each case that our countries have a significant role to play and because I believe in each case that the role may be similar or perhaps the same that I have chosen my theme today. I am, of course, only entitled to speak about Britain, and perhaps here about Europe. But it may be that there is a somewhat closer identity or at least a parallel between the situation of Britain and the situation in Canada that might at first sight appear. If so, you may find my reflexions relevant, as well, I hope, as stimulating.

Both Britons and Canadians are, I think, uneasy about the future basically for the same reason. The things we stand for in the world, the thing which make our countries worth living in, and serving as objects of loyalty and love are in each case things which transcend national boundaries, but in each case can operate on an effective scale only in the presence of world conditions which neither obtain at the moment, and which cannot be said to be attainable solely in terms of our respective national governments.

Neither of our nations therefore can be satisfied with the mere cocky national independence with which some of the younger nations seem content. We must be committed to loyalty to other and larger organizations, perhaps to many – to NATO, to UNO, to the Commonwealth in our case, also to Europe, and, in the case of Britain, to other alliances further East, as well as to intangible things like democracy or the philosophy of the West. Our unease is dependent on our doubts about the relationship between our countries and these, and the relationship of these to one another, and not upon our internal weakness.

Yet, I am sure, that neither desires to see its own national and individual culture swallowed up in that of powerful neighbours or partners, European, American, or international. We are sure that we have a life of our own to live, a voice of our own with which to be heard, an individual role of our own to play. This is the dilemma. For each is profoundly aware that many if not most of the factors determining our respective futures are only partly within, or in some cases wholly outside, control of British and Canadian statesmen.

This, then, is the dilemma. With what to identify? And on what terms? And from what to hold aloof so as to express our own national personalities?

A British politician in opposition who is asked by a University abroad to speak in an occasion like this inevitably casts his mind back to the wonderful speeches in opposition at Fulton, Missouri, at Zurich, and at Strasbourg some twenty years ago by Winston Churchill, the first drawing attention for the first time to the cruel fact of the Iron Curtain, the second and third calling for European unity and in particular for Franco-German reconciliation. How controversial these speeches were at the time they were delivered. Resolutions all over the world greeted their delivery with protest. “Meddling” and “irresponsibility” were the words most generally applied to them. But the protests are forgotten. The speeches remain, and the ideas to which they give rise roll majestically on.

I mention these speeches not because I wish to challenge comparison with the incomparable. But because they provide a theme, and a starting point for our enquiries.

Neither Britain nor Canada can be uncommitted. In this we differ from many nations, great and small. We are of the West, inseparably, indissolubly, till hell freezes. Each of us is irrevocably committed to the doctrine of freedom under law. Neither could hope to exist, and neither could wish to exist in the event of Communist victory, military or political. It is time that each must seek to preserve peace as the sole condition in which our ideas can advance. But for that reason alone neither can pursue a policy of neutralism, or belief that we could survive if others were conquered or destroyed.

But surely our statesmen are right to suppose that our support of the West is not one of silent loyalty. There is, I believe, no voice in the alliance either in America or in Europe which can say quite what we wish to say or do quite what we wish to do in support of our general philosophy. Loyalty to the West does not mean blind acceptance of other people’s ideas. Surely we, and you, have ideas of our own to contribute.

To begin with there are divergent theories available as to what committal to the West may mean. According to one view opposition to the systems of ideas we know as Communism is a holy war, to be waged a l’outrance wherever Communists are to be found, at home, abroad, in the satellites, in Russia, in China, in Cuba. According to this theory, anything bad for them is good for us. According to this theory anything which increases their wealth, their happiness, or even their health, if it be but to prolong the life of their starving millions, is to be avoided, and, if military adventure is to be eschewed it is solely for reasons of prudence and not of principle. According to this view any approach of a friendly nature to Socialist societies is at best a dangerous measure of appeasement, at worst, an unprincipled concession to expediency even if not the beginning of treason.

I do not think that either Canada or Britain has adopted, or is likely to adopt, this position or anything like it. Its plausibility, if any, is derived from an appraisal of the Stalinist position just after the war, rather than an actual analysis of the existing situation, and in fact it involves the acceptance, rather then the rejection of the original Stalinist thesis that the West was on the verge of collapse, and the war was inevitable. Once this was accepted it was almost an irresistible corollary that, short of fighting, the economic and political attitudes appropriate to war should be adopted all the time.

This would be a dismal conclusion, and even during the Stalinist regime, I doubt whether many British or Canadians ever adopted it. For even during the Stalinist regime, and a fortiori today, and alternative view was possible. Though it be admitted – and certainly I believe – that to some extent and in some sense all Communists consider that the only future for the world, inevitable in the long run, desirable in the short, is the world socialist revolution, and that it is the duty of all good Marxists to further this inevitable historical process in every way they can, it is by no means necessary for Western statesmen to embrace the antithesis of this doctrine. It is of the essence of our belief, - it is why we are Western, - that there is an objective truth apart from the class struggle, that progress by revolution, that words like law, justice, morality, have an objective content independent of the class struggle or political expediency. To deny all this is legitimate expression in social contacts, argumentation, discussion, cultural exchange, economic intercourse, is to admit defeat, if only for a moment, and to surrender at least intellectually the thing for which we fought.

Moreover, without in the least underestimating the reality of the battle for dominance in the world between Western and Communist philosophies, whether these are clad in their Chinese or their Russian dress, we have to accept that their chosen battleground is not Europe, where the armies stand ready, - more or less – where the missiles are armed and accumulated, but elsewhere in the world, in the undeveloped countries, in places where it is still possible as well as easy to accentuate the antagonism, and emphasise the contrast between haves and have-nots. This, after all, is in line with the classical Soviet doctrine of revolution, where the revolution is brought about by an alliance between the peasants (that is ex-colonial and undeveloped countries) and the proletariat led by the Bolshevists (That is the Communist regimes led according to your fancy by Russia or China). The ideological struggle between the Russians and the Chinese does not touch this basic Marxist analysis, and, on either view, the battlefield of their choice is not the closed frontier of the Iron Curtain, but the open frontiers of the uncommitted, and the inner aspirations of depressed classes everywhere. The real choice before the West is whether it is not sound strategy to accept the battle on ground of the enemy’s choosing; and, if, as seems probable, there is no other front upon which any alternative form of encounter is possible, to wage it with the weapons of argument, of economic aid, of political manoeuvre, of social contact. One may surely be forgiven for concluding that these arms are more constant with our philosophy, and it may be more appropriate to the circumstances of the case.

If this argument be accepted, British and Canadians are driven, and I believe that this is reflected in their respective policies, to the conclusion that the only way of ensuring victory for our ideas as distinct from defending our territories, our friends and our lives from aggression, is to prove that they are more successful, and this involves, not merely pursuing them intelligently, generously, and consistently, but pursuing them on a scale sufficiently large to enable them to obtain their optimum results. Others may be sufficiently large to think that they can do without an expansion of their economic or political base – or sufficiently parochial, and sufficiently insensitive to the great tides of emotion and change sweeping across humanity at the moment no to want to do so. Britain and Canada are neither committed to the West, we are committed to a peaceful solution. Committed to the peaceful solution, we are committed to a growing integration of Western efforts without dominations by great powers on the one hand, or parochialism and selfishness of the small on the other.

Since Churchill spoke at Fulton the situation has developed into a point in which a new appraisal is necessary.

The Iron Curtain remains. But Stalin has been dead for twelve years. Stalinism, one hopes, lies buried. That fascinating and popular but mercurial Sputnik Nikita Khruschev has crashed across the sky and burned himself up in the Soviet atmosphere. A more conventional, though still recognizably Marxist, regime has developed in Russia with whom a peaceful dialogue may well prove possible if it be sufficiently stable and amenable to rational discussion. Since Churchill’s speeches China has increased that area behind the Iron Curtain by more than a factor of two. But from behind this increased area of the Curtain come terrifying (if to unbelievers like myself almost unintelligible) cries of “heresy” and “schism”, and the horizon is lit by sudden flashes of bitter controversy. The black and white pattern of the Communist world is now no longer so complete a picture, nor the so called Socialist camp immune from internal conflict and contradiction.

Moreover, the scene has moved away, at least temporarily, from Europe. Something like a defacto stability has descended on the Western frontier since the erection of the Berlin Wall, and even the alarms and excursions in Cuba served only to preserve for the time being the status quo. By contrast, the East has been a welter of confusion, and the scene of nearly all the fighting in the world. Since the war, even the smallest political areas have been shown themselves capable of subdivision. There are now two Koreas, two Vietnams, two parts to the subcontinent of India (at war with one another), two Chinas (if you count Formosa), two Palestines (Arab and Israeli), potentially two Cypruses, two Germanies, as well as the perennial two Irelands, all mutually hostile, each refusing to recognize the other, and unwilling to arrive at a permanent arrangement. Is this a situation in which Britain and Canada can rest happy? Or is there something we can do?

One effect, of course, of all this confusion has been to reduce the effectiveness of the United Nations, already in 1948 hampered by the use of the Veto in the Security Council, and now also by establishment of the principle – unique, I believe, in human organizations – that you do no even need to pay your subscription to retain your vote.

But fundamentally, in each case, from Berlin to the far East, none of the outstanding problems of peace and war can be solved without reference to existing powers which are not members of the United Nations.

There has always been an inherent ambivalence in membership of UNO. Is membership a certificate of good character or a recognition of an existing fact? Is the United Nations a club of like minded nations banded together to impose a minimum standard of conduct on all or is it, like other political institutions, a Parliament of mankind, in which sinners and saints alike have votes?

The first view was no doubt originally in the minds of the founders, and explains, for instance, the absence of Germany, or rather both Germanies, from the organizations. This view is undoubtedly reflected in the form of the Covenant, and the requirement of subscription as a condition of joining. It is this which adds force to the arguments of the U.S.A. for the exclusion of China, which after all both preaches and practices the inevitability of war as an instrument of which the Covenant exists to proscribe. But the effort of applying it has been formidable. Both primary parties to the Berlin dispute are excluded, both Koreas, both Vietnams. Indonesia has been permitted to leave over her dispute with Malaysia, and the present Government of China has never been permitted to occupy the Chinese seat. What sort of an organization for peace or what sort of world Parliament can it be where none of the disputes in fact threatening the peace can be solved without reference to powers excluded or not admitted to represent their country? Surely a realistic appraisal would now come forward with the view, that though the Covenant remains and should be a required standard of conduct and subscription therefore a condition of entry, in fact membership should be, so far as possible, universal and compulsory and extended to the powers that be in this world whether their conduct is likely to conform or not? The assembly of mankind cannot be like the kingdom of heaven, exclusive of the wolves and the goats, and, if full membership for all is impossible surely, the United Nations should at least use its facilities to assemble from time to time, a peace conference determined to solve, in advance of war, the principal issues which afflict mankind at which all various contestants shall have the right to appear and state their case.

Since Churchill’s European speeches at Strasbourg and Fulton, Europe which he had then described as in ruins, has regained her confidence, her prosperity, and her poise. Reconciliation between France and Germany is complete. This is a development at least as important as the Communisation of China, the liquidation of the British Empire, or the rise of the undeveloped peoples. But, by a paradox which Churchill would certainly never have approved, France, one of the principal instruments in the orchestra, has suddenly decided to play a tune of her own, while Britain, to change the metaphor, whose sacrifices and exertions have done so much to liberate and inspire, finds herself excluded from the central keep at any rate for the present. Having committed the unpardonable heresy of living on an island, we are on the fringe, in a kind of Football Association of our own devising – apparently as a punishment for not being more insular towards the United States. But consistency is not always a virtue of the new dispensation. Having relegated Britain to an other twilight on account of our insular refusal to sign the treaty of Rome without qualification, the awe-inspiring in Cyrano-like figure who at present presides on the new French Sinai has now decided to leave his own chair at the Community Board precisely on the ground that the treaty which he thought we should have signed is not acceptable to France now that it is being applied. In the meantime we lesser breeds without the law in Canada and Britain are left to ruminate upon the situation which this betokens. Not since Louis XIV abandoned Madame de Montespan for Madame de Maintenon has France been ruled by a monarch so unpredictable and inconsistent.

The temporary, and now temporarily academic, issue of our membership of the Community has thus been allowed unnecessarily to confuse Anglo Canadian relations. In reality our interests on these matters are identical. Neither you, nor we, any more than the French wish to merge our identity wholly in that of the United States. When we hear General de Gaulle demanding for the European partners equality of status with the United States we can surely agree wholeheartedly each from his own separate point of view.

But status depends upon industrial, technical, and economic power, and if we wish to create an equality of status in Europe to the United States we must wish the means, as well as assert the desirability of the end. The means involve the development of an industrial market, a manufacturing complex, and a technological civilization on our side of the Atlantic equivalent in power, scale, range and sophistication to that of the United States, and the creation of such a complex must, I submit, be in the interest of Canada, French speaking and English, as well as of Europe and of Britain.

It is in fact also in the interest of the U.S. One of the greatest illusions is to believe that the United States can retain all the most advanced technologies and leave to her allies only the obsolescent, the small scale, the accessory, the derived, and the subordinate. Whatever ingenious arguments based on the size of the American lead, the magnitude of their operations, the advantages of coordination, Europeans are simply not going to hate it that way, cost what it might, and if the super salesmanship of the American aerospace industry tries to get it that way it will simply break up the alliance. But if Britain wants European equality she must will the means, and if France wants European equality she must win the means no less, and the means are the admission of Britain to the complex and the acceptance of such limitations of sovereignty as are required to achieve the economic objective. If Europe is to develop technologically and scientifically in lines equal in status and sophistication to the United States, national boundaries will have to be transcended, and European nations will have to compromise their national sovoreignty. Britain cannot with advantage stay outside nor can she be excluded against her will from this European industrial complex, for even if she has – as I think she has – the manufacturing and technical capacity to go it alone she would not in those circumstances have equal access to the markets. But if France or Germany wish to have the political sympathy from Britain or military alliance with Britain in the indefinite future – and they need both – they must cease – and cease soon, to continue the attempt to exclude Britain and other associated powers from the equal access which they need in order to sustain their obligations. If European countries thing that we are going to contribute indefinitely to European security with our industries permanently excluded or placed at a disadvantage in their markets, they have, I can assure them, another thing coming.

But, if Britain cannot stay outside, neither can she afford only to see the European continent as a third or neutral force or, as is now becoming a popular alternative, to see the West developing into a sort of dumb bell, of which the United States form one, and the European Continent the other half. This would leave no room for Canada, Australia, or New Zealand in the West at all. The neck of the dumb bell would be non-existent and neither of the component heads would be able to play its predestined part.

For reasons, therefore, which are different, but entirely compatible, and parallel, Britain and Canada cannot afford to see the free world growing apart, cannot afford to see it becoming excessively belligerent, cannot afford to countenance either parochialism, or domination, must work for the integration of the West into a single complex, and the gradual absorption of the uncommitted by peaceful means into its general economic, ethical and political life.

The same argument must, I think, take us two stages further. We are surely right to attempt a gradual moving towards one another of Communist and Western society. Granted, of course, that Communist political ideas, and Communist military and political practice, are at least now, quite incompatible with our own modes of thinking, as I think they are, is this a purely impracticable or visionary ideal or can it in fact lead to practicable policy?

I do not think myself that it is possible to believe that Russian Communism would lend itself to this kind of soft sell at all easily. The ingrained suspicion – even antagonism – of all the Slavonic peoples to Western Germany which has struck every observer of whatever party, would have first to be overcome and the really enormous practical difficulties in the way of a solution to the problems of Berlin and the two Germanies circumvented.

Moreover the dispute with the Chinese, so far from being of assistance to is, in some ways presents an additional obstacle. The danger to the Russian Communists presented by the Chinese schism is precisely that it is represented as a challenge to their orthodoxy and therefore to their consciences as good Marxists. Any advance towards evolutionary thinking is apt to be treated as yet further evidence of their revisionism, and the cruder and more naïve attempts by Western politicians to exploit the Chinese Russian dispute is apt to antagonize rather than to allure the Soviet leadership. I saw this when I was in Moscow negotiating the Test Ban Treaty. Caution, understanding, pragmatism must therefore be of the whole essence of our approach.

But in some respects history is on our side. Practical differences between free enterprise and socialist economics, although enormous, are slightly diminishing. As Russian industry produces a wider range of consumer goods, the importance of consumer choice, and of economic cost accountancy is slowly coming to be recognized, whilst the limitations of the price mechanism as well as its advantages are admitted in almost all current Western practices. Moreover the importance and increasing range of public investment is a growing feature of capitalist economics. Finally the extent of East West trade is slowly increasing across the frontiers of military opposition, and political suspicion.

De Gaulle is said to recognize in Russia a future ally against an inevitable Chinese preponderance in world affairs. I have no doubt that there is much thought in the West which also looks in this direction.

I may be forgiven if I express a contrary view. I have already said that I consider the cruder and more naïve attempts to exploit the differences between the Chinese and Soviet leadership an error even as an essay in political tactics. But basically I am against the very concept of the cordon sanitaire. If we are to persuade the Chinese that war is not inevitable, we cannot do so by continuously hostile noises and attitudes, and this position is made more and not less urgently necessary by the repeated necessity felt by the Western allies to confront with force Chinese adventurism. The object must be to bring China back within the comity of civilised nations, and, if she continues to be excluded, to ensure that her exclusion must be seen to be self imposed. A policy of cautious approach to the Russians must be accompanied by a conciliatory and not a menacing attitude towards the Chinese.

My views on this are as coloured by my ultimate conception of international peace. We are in a world in which atomic and nuclear weapons exist. I happen to think that a four environment test ban treaty is feasible. I happen to believe that a non-aggression pact between the Soviet and Western alliances – asked for by the Soviet, - would be no bad thing, and I should certainly be pleased rather than the contrary if U.S. and Soviet authorities could find a way of limiting or abolishing nuclear weapons. But all this is irrelevant to my present point. There is a sense in which nuclear weapons cannot be abolished, and even if they could there is a sense in which their abolition would serve little purpose. The basic scientific knowledge is there, and will be with us till the end of time. Even if it were not, other ranges of weapons, equally, or almost as, terrible, will surely become available. I do not believe that in the modern age mankind can live without a world authority. I do not say ‘a world state’ because this begs a number of important questions. But at least the question of public order in the world constituted as ours is must be reduced to some sort of coherence and this means a single authority to which all belong – saints and sinners. Such an authority can be based on law – and therefore compatible with freedom, or on tyranny and therefore incompatible with decency. But if we continue with our present chaos I foresee nothing but unhappiness and disaster for man in the twenty-first century. From such a world authority no sizeable body of men and women organized politically can be permanently excluded.

I believe Canadians and British have an honourable, perhaps a decisive part to play in the debates, encounters and confrontations which must precede the outcome. And I believe they will walk together.