Cyril Northcote Parkinson was a British writer, economist, and historian. After the Second World War, he taught history at the University of Liverpool before being appoint Raffles Professor of History at the new University of Malaya, where he remained from 1950-1958. He was later a visiting professor at Harvard, the University of Illinois, and the University of California, Berkeley. Over his career, Parkinson authored over 60 books, including the best-selling Parkinson’s Law: The Pursuit of Progress (1957), which argued that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” He was also a fiction writer, writing naval novels including The Devil to Pay (1973) and The Guernseyman (1982). He died in 1993.
In his lecture, which was the first under the theme “Exploring the Human Aspirations Behind Regional Tensions,” Professor Parkinson discussed the contemporary move towards the unification of Europe as a continent and the countervailing forces of regionalism within European nations. One result of the creation of European nation-states in the 18th and 19th centuries was an increasing movement towards centralization. This level of centralization had served its purpose, allowing for the formation of European empires, but in the age of decolonization and growing concerns about safety at home, he believed that the nation-state was no longer particularly useful. Defense could now only be conceived of on a continental basis, resulting in the creation of the Council of Europe, the EEC, and NATO. The nation-state was largely obsolete, Parkinson suggested, and in the 21st century, while it may retain some useful functions, it would no longer be a significant political formation. He concluded by suggesting that a federal system could only work if provinces had absolute rights, with no national government overseeing their work on education, for example. Amid the perceived growing strength of regionalism in Canada, this lecture brought a point of comparison, and commentators encouraged the audience to learn from the European example.
Listen to his lecture below.