2015-08-21
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The present Commonwealth comprises Britain and most of her old empire: 54 states, scattered over all the inhabited continents, with a population estimated (in 1994) at 1.4 billion. Mozambique, not a former British colony, was admitted as a special case in 1995.
The term ‘commonwealth’, in this context, dates from the early 20th cent., and grew out of the realization that several of Britain's older-established colonies were already self-governing in all essential respects. To call them ‘colonies’, or an ‘empire’, appeared to undervalue their real independence, and the new word was felt by some to express better the form the empire would take: a federation of equal nation states. This development was not to everyone's liking, however. Enthusiasts for the ‘commonwealth ideal’ had generally envisaged the dominions taking an equal share in the formulation of policies that would then be common to them all: instead it came to mean that they would have equal rights to separate policies of their own.
This privilege was established in the early 1920s, after disputes within the Commonwealth over the Washington naval conference of 1921-2 and the Chanak affair in 1922. In 1923 Canada became the first dominion to conclude a treaty with a foreign power (the Halibut Fish treaty) without reference to Britain; and the pattern for the future was set. It was formalized by an important pronouncement of the 1926 imperial conference, defining dominion status; and by the 1931 statute of Westminster, which confirmed the dominions' legislative autonomy. For the moment this only applied to colonies of European settlement, and not to the ‘non-white’ colonies. That changed in 1947, when the newly independent nation of India was admitted to the Commonwealth. That established the multiracial character of the Commonwealth as it exists today.
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As decolonization progressed, other ex-colonies followed. Many old imperialists regarded this process with pride. Some of them saw the new Commonwealth as the culmination of the empire. In a way it was, for there had always been a strong tradition of what was called ‘trusteeship’ in British imperial thought. The idea that the Commonwealth could be a kind of empire-substitute, however, was soon shattered. The newest members regarded their hard-won national independence jealously, and there were sharp clashes between members, especially over the issue of apartheid, which forced South Africa to leave in 1961. So the Commonwealth became much less than the united ‘third force’ in the world that the imperial optimists had envisaged.
As it stands now, it is totally unlike any other international organization of states. It has a secretariat, and a secretary-general (set up in 1965), but little else in common. It has no power, no united policy, no common principles, and no shared institutions. Most member states are parliamentary democracies, but not all. Most have retained English legal forms, but not all. Most play cricket, but not all. The single constitutional feature common to all member states is that they acknowledge the British monarch as symbolic head of the Commonwealth, but fewer than half recognize her or him as the head of their own states. It was once thought of as an economic unit, a potential free (or preferential) trade area, but that was never convincing, and collapsed when Britain joined the European Economic Community in 1973.
Nevertheless the Commonwealth still serves a purpose, as a forum for informal discussion and co-operation between nations of widely disparate cultures. That function is served by a host of specialist Commonwealth institutions (the Commonwealth Institute in London, the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association, the Association of Commonwealth Universities, the Commonwealth of Learning); and by biennial conferences of Commonwealth heads of government. The ideal it represents still flickers, albeit fitfully.
