FREEDOM AND WESTERN DEMOCRACY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 887, 3 August 1956, Page 26

FREEDOM AND WESTERN DEMOCRACY

O most people in the world really want a say in government, or do they prefer to be told what to do? Is our Western form of democracy a suitable article for export to people who may have had little or no experience of it? Do the relatively slow processes of the party system and the evolution of public opinion seriously inhibit our adjustment to a rapidly changing world? These are some of the questions Vernon Bartlett asks in "The Democratic Dilemma," the first of 10 BBC talks called What Price Freedom? which will start from 4YC on August 7, and later will be heard from other YC stations. Vernon Bartlett, whose talk is really an introduction to the series, is a noted journalist and expert on foreign affairs who for many years was an Independent member of the House of Commons, He now lives in Singapore. Following Mr. Bartlett in the series will be Raymond Aron, diplomatic correspondent and author of several works on current events, who has been described as one of the leading French. political writers of his generation. In his talk on Disunity in Europe" (4YC, August 12), M. Aron begins with what he considers to be the dominating factor in the European situation-the partition of Germany. Other speakers in the first half of the series, which inquires ‘into the state of Western democracy today, are Denis Brogan (Professor of Political Science at Cambridge University), Rajkumari Amrit Kaur (Minister of Health in the Indian Government, and formerly secretary to Mahatma Gandhi), and Don Salvador de Madariaga (whose career has included service as an ambassador and as a League of Nations official), / The second group of speakers, considering the impact of our civilisation on the rest of the world, try to discover if there are any grounds for Believing in a decline of the West. The speakers are Philip Mason (Director of Studies of Race Relations at the Royal Institute of International Affairs), Sir Douglas Copland (New Zealand-born Australian High Commissioner in Canada), Denis Healey (Labour M.P.), Angus Maude (Conservative M.P.), and Sir Harold Nicolson (author, critic and former diplomat), who will sum up,