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the long-term interests of those developing countries and territories dependent on sugar exports, and on special safeguards for New Zealand's dairy produce. The countries concerned are in no doubt of our position on all this. We have kept in constant touch with Commonwealth Governments. Over the past six months there have been 10 to a dozen opportunities for top level discussions, apart from the usual diplomatic exchanges.
There are those who believe that membership of the Communities will spell the end of the Commonwealth: some are worried about this. Others, I'm afraid, seem hardly to conceal their delight at the thought. I may be doing an injustice but I am weary of those critics who seem to set up their own distorted image of the Commonwealth and spend their time knocking it down or nibbling it away. They are, perhaps, not so much critics as what Shakespeare once described as " caterpillars of the Commonwealth". But in fact membership of the Communities and of the Commonwealth is perfectly compatible. Others of the Six at the moment happily continue relationships with countries with which they have traditional associations. If our negotiations are successful, we shall be entirely free to continue our Commonwealth relationship to our own, and I would hope, our new partners' advantage. There will be changes in economic arrangements but, as the Prime Minister pointed out recently in Canada, the lively and dynamic Commonwealth of today is very much more than an economic nexus with its roots in the Ottawa Agreement of 1932. The machinery of Commonwealth negotiation today is based hardly at all on the preferential system.
I have mentioned our belief in everyone's interest that the enlarged Community should be outward looking. If we get in we shall continue to pursue our interests throughout the world. I might refer here to fears aroused by misinterpretation of the Duncan Report on overseas representation that many countries, and among them most Commonwealth countries, were to be relegated to some outer darkness beyond the so-called area of concentration to which Britain was to give her major concern and attention. I do not believe, and Sir Val Duncan has himself publicly confirmed this, that his committee ever had in mind such an over-simplification. What they were saying rests on the obvious truth that Britain, like any other country, has greater interests in some countries than in others. The Government have said that we do not accept a sharp division of the world into two distinct areas. Since I became both Commonwealth and Foreign Secretary, I have been daily reminded how essential it is to see the world as a whole.
It is a pity that the interest aroused by the Duncan formulation of an area of concentration has obscured the important place which the Duncan Committee itself gave to the sustaining of Commonwealth links as one of the major agreed objectives of British policy. We do not intend to neglect the measures necessary to maintain and consolidate the Commonwealth partnership.
The nature of the Commonwealth relationship does over a time change, as it must if it is to remain a living reality, and the nature and scale of British representation in Commonwealth countries should reflect these changes, looking to the future rather than to the past. But in those places where it may in future be smaller, it will not be less important. Nor do I intend that it should be any less well equipped or less effecive in the contribution it makes to mutual understanding and confidence in the Commonwealth.
Now, about the political development of Europe when the Communities are enlarged. The authors of the Treaty of Rome intended that the Community should be more than an economic grouping. The political future of Europe is sometimes, I think, quite mistakenly seen as a battleground between people who are labelled "federalists" and "anti-federalists". I believe that this antithesis
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