RESTLESS NATIONS

This book is a selection of papers and speeches from a conference held in England (at Oxford) in the summer of 1961 under the auspices of the Council on World Tensions, a private organization located in New York. The subject of the conference was international tensions arising from the problems of the new and economically underdeveloped nations and their relations with the ex-colonial powers and other rich countries from whom they must seek aid. Invited to Oxford was a curiously disparate group of distinguished and not-quite-so-distinguished people --professors, politicians, diplomats and ex-diplomats, civil servants, and others -- ranging from Paul Hofmann, Sir William Hayter, Lester Pearson, Tom Mboya, and Barbara Ward to various ambassadors, UN officials, William Benton, and Roscoe Drummond. To judge from the papers, the conference had a few high spots and a good many low periods devoted to mouthing the liberal platitudes of foreign aid -- that there must be no strings attached, so that foreign aid is used not as a tool in the Cold War, but only as an attack on world poverty. Among the high points of the conference was a paper by Margery Perham, specialist in African affairs, on problems including the abandonment of democratic procedures and constitutional rights in some new nations, and the need for expatriate staff (often from the ex-colonial power) to compensate for lack of trained personnel. Tom Mboya talked with brutal frankness about the expectations of Africans for a place in the world and control of their continent's natural wealth; Kenneth Kuanda of Northern Rhodesia gave an impassioned speech about the hypocrisy of racial ""partnership"" as practised in Welensky's Federation.