Not foreign to each other: Commonwealth Prime Ministers' Conferences 1944-1969
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Commonwealth Prime Ministers' Conferences were a unique experiment. They were an attempt at an intermediate mode of multilateral relations: members were no longer bound in an imperial hierarchy, nor were they fully foreign. A conscious effort was made to position the Commonwealth as a family, and the Conferences as their periodic reunion. Avoiding a 'diplomatic' culture at the Conferences in favour of a familial veneer allowed participants to claim that binding resolutions were not necessary and that meaningful cooperation could occur by consensus. This appeared to offer potential for forging a 'third way' between superpower blocs in a Cold War environment. This thesis makes an important contribution to the existing Commonwealth literature as the Conferences were the core structure of the Commonwealth until the formation of the Commonwealth Secretariat in 1965, yet have never been the subject of a full-length study. The thesis also engages with the concept of the 'British world', arguing that the Conferences had a major role in projecting British 'soft power' once martial or economic hegemony proved impracticable. By drawing on archival sources in eight Commonwealth countries, this thesis shows that the Conferences were effective in facilitating discussions on flashpoint topics such as white minority rule in South Africa and Rhodesia, even if the Commonwealth failed to fulfil hopes that it would remain an important international grouping. The study also has contemporary relevance, given that the Conferences continue as Commonwealth Heads of Government Meetings, and that questions of transnational identity and 'foreignness' continue to shape debates over Britain's relationship with Europe and its 'world role'.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".