COMMONWEALTH.

The British Commonwealth is the world's oldest political association of states. Composed of independent and self-governing nations formerly belonging to the British Empire, membership in the Commonwealth is voluntary, requiring only adherence to basic standards of good internal governance. From its origins as an association of dominions within the empire, to its rapid expansion during decolonization in the 1960s, the Commonwealth has never lived up to the aspirations of its more ambitious supporters, but it survives because of the modest benefits associated with membership, and as a symbol of connections and ideals associated with the empire and with British parliamentary democracy.

ORIGINS

In its modern usage, the term Commonwealth is best understood as referring to the family of nations originating in the British Empire. It was first used before the American Revolution to refer to Britain's colonies, and British statesmen in the nineteenth century occasionally employed the phrase to refer to colonies within the empire. By the early twentieth century, the word colony was found to be demeaning to the status of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the group of states that would shortly form the Union of South Africa. All four had achieved internal self-government and were approaching practical if not formal independence. In 1907 the Canadian prime minister, Wilfred Laurier (1841–1919), led these nations and Britain in discussions, which concluded that henceforward they would be known as the Dominions.

The Dominions, in turn, became the core of the Commonwealth. The originators of this concept—notably, the British author Lionel Curtis (1872–1955) and the South African statesman Jan Smuts (1870–1950)—hoped their reconfiguration of the empire would offer a solution to the dangerous predicament that Britain faced in the early twentieth century. By this time, Britain had passed the peak of its relative power, and was facing potent European rivals, especially Germany. If Britain was to keep pace with these powers, it was essential that the Dominions share the cost of equipping the Royal Navy. But as the Dominions were self-governing, and in many cases far away from most of Britain's rivals, they could not be forced or easily frightened into contributing. Furthermore, if they chose to do so, they would naturally expect to have a voice in the making of British policy.

The solution, in the view of Curtis, was imperial federation. He argued, ultimately correctly, that the empire faced a choice between union and disintegration. Few were so ambitious. But Curtis's logic was widely shared, and had been the basis of earlier proposals, such as the efforts of Joseph Chamberlain (1836–1914) after 1903 to promote the unity of the empire through tariff reform. Where Curtis and those of similar mind differed from Chamberlain was in their emphasis, exalted and even utopian, on the concept of self-government and how it could be squared with a sharing of imperial burdens through the Commonwealth. Put cynically, the Commonwealth would bring federation on the sly; put idealistically, it would remake the identities of the nations within the empire so they would cooperate willingly with each other.

World War I both proved the loyalty of the Dominions and empire to Britain and put new strains on their ties. Britain declared war on behalf of the Dominions and the Indian Empire, all of which fought and sustained thousands of casualties for the Allied cause. This experience, added to the economic and political stresses of the war, produced restiveness in India and gave the Dominions powerful additional reasons to think of themselves as being the home not merely of Britons living abroad, but of different, albeit friendly, nationalities. At the Versailles Peace Conference, the Dominions were represented both by the British and in their own, separate delegations, a further sign that they were close to practical independence.

FORMAL EMERGENCE OF THE COMMONWEALTH

In recognition of this fact, the 1920s witnessed the formal emergence of the Commonwealth. When Ireland was partitioned in 1922, the Irish Free State was defined as having the same status as the other Dominions, in "the group of nations forming the British Commonwealth of Nations." This was the first formal use of this style. The year 1922 also brought the Chanak Crisis, which threatened war between Britain and Turkey. When the British seemed to presume publicly that the Dominions would naturally offer military support, they were met by private protests from Australia and a public nonresponse from Canada. The implication was that, unlike 1914, Britain could no longer make foreign policy for the Dominions.

By the time the Dominions gathered for an imperial conference in 1926, domestic politics in Canada, South Africa, and the Irish Free State had given these Dominions an even more vigorous desire to assert their status as separate and equal nations. The result was the famous definition of the Commonwealth produced by a committee chaired by Arthur, Lord Balfour (1848–1930) of Britain: "They are autonomous Communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate one to another in any aspect of their domestic or external affairs, though united by a common allegiance to the Crown, and freely associated as members of the British Commonwealth of Nations." When this definition was legalized by Britain in the Statute of Westminster of 1931, it made the Dominions as independent as they wished to be: the right of free association implied the right not to be associated at all.

In the 1930s, the British sought to manage this implication. In the Indian Empire, the Government of India Act of 1935 brought provincial self-government; the measure was scorned by leaders of the Indian nationalist movement, but it brought the Congress Party to power in many areas. The British hoped the act would moderate, and so frustrate, the nationalists; it had the potential to do so, but only by giving them power and a platform to press for more changes. In Ireland, the 1936 External Relations Act, followed by a referendum in 1937, all but made it a republic by eliminating any substantial role for the Crown. The British found it better to accept these developments than risk the disintegration of the Commonwealth by opposing them. Most seriously of all, throughout the decade, Dominion reluctance to become involved in a second great European war gave the British government another reason to appease Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.

It would be too simple to describe this as merely an era of imperial disintegration: the 1932 Ottawa Conference, for example, brought a partial fulfillment of Chamberlain's dream of imperial unity by instituting imperial tariff preferences. More broadly, many in Britain, and in the Commonwealth, viewed the institution with pride, finding in it a broadly applicable model for the development of peaceful cooperation between democratic states. But no matter how artfully described, the reality was that the Commonwealth had become a way to slow and accommodate the drift of the Dominions away from Britain, not a means by which self-government in the Dominions could be reconciled with wholehearted support for Britain's role as a great power.

Britain's cautious handling of the Commonwealth restricted its European diplomacy, but it did help to ensure that when Britain declared war in September 1939 all the Dominions except Ireland did likewise. But this was not 1914: only Australia merely assumed that Britain's declaration applied to it, and South Africa entered the war by the narrowest of margins. And, when Japan entered the war against Britain in 1941, Australia and New Zealand realized what Canada had long known: only the United States could protect them. This meant that the Commonwealth could not be a self-sufficient economic unit, nor unite politically, nor even defend itself. It was the end of any possibility that the Commonwealth would ever attain the unity to which a generation of Britons had aspired.

But though the entry of Australia, New Zealand, and Canada into the war initially widened the war almost beyond Britain's strength, their willingness to fight proved that these members of the Commonwealth, at least, retained their loyalty to Britain, both as the ancestral homeland of many of their citizens and as a great parliamentary democracy. These nations, with Britain itself, were the core on which the Commonwealth built in the twenty years following World War II, when the age of decolonization began with the independence of India and Pakistan in 1947, followed by Ceylon and Burma in 1948.

Burma never entered the Commonwealth, and in 1949 the Commonwealth for the first time lost a member when Ireland departed as a republic at midnight on 17–18 April. But this was more than balanced by the decision of the prime minister Motilal Nehru (1861–1931) of India, five days after Ireland's exit, that India, though a republic, would remain in the Commonwealth. In recognition of the end of the Indian Empire, the term Dominion had been abandoned in favor of Commonwealth Members in 1948. Nehru's declaration implied that the Commonwealth would continue to add new members, but on the basis of their right to conduct their internal affairs as they wished.

Over the following decades, the Commonwealth indeed grew rapidly. At the Commonwealth heads of government meetings, known by the inelegant neologism CHOGM, there were eight leaders in 1948, eleven in 1960, twenty-one in 1965, thirty-one in Singapore—at the first official CHOGM—in 1971, forty-two in 1981, and fifty-two in 1999. In the middle decades of the century, the British repeatedly rejected the possibility that many of the smaller territories within the empire could ever be viable, independent states, or that they could ever be full Commonwealth Members. But just as repeatedly, the British found no easy way to draw the line. Thus, as the empire contracted, the Commonwealth expanded apace.

DECOLONIZATION

The watershed year was 1960. Since 1945 the British Empire had clearly been moving toward its end, but even in the late 1950s the British believed their African Empire might last into the 1970s. In 1960 the context of imperialism was irrevocably changed by France's grant of independence to thirteen territories and by the passage of United Nations Resolution 1514 on ending colonialism. Like the French, Britain picked up the pace of decolonization. Ghana had become the first African member in 1957. In 1960 Nigeria, Africa's most populous state, became an independent Commonwealth Member, and in the same year, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan spoke in the South African parliament of the "winds of change" that were blowing through the continent.

For the next thirty years the Commonwealth struggled with the dilemmas of decolonization. One problem, as the number of potential republics within the Commonwealth grew, was to describe the relationship between the British Crown and the Commonwealth. This was handled with surprising ease in 1949 at a meeting of Commonwealth prime ministers, who agreed that the Crown would be "the symbol of the free association" of Commonwealth Members and, "as such, Head of the Commonwealth." Thus, if and when a Commonwealth Member decided to become a republic, it would not necessarily have to reconsider its status within the Commonwealth.

Other difficulties posed by decolonization were resolved less neatly. The most intractable of these centered around questions of citizenship and race. In 1961, foreshadowing later disputes, the apartheid state of South Africa left the Commonwealth because it refused to treat the newly independent African members, and their diplomatic representatives, as equal members of the Commonwealth. For many believers in the Commonwealth, the departure of South Africa was a shattering blow, confirming that the old Commonwealth was no more.

That Commonwealth had held it as a principle that the internal policies of a particular member were not a legitimate subject of concern for the rest of the Commonwealth. The new Commonwealth seemed to promise only angry, public disputes over domestic policies. Yet the departure of South Africa, and, more broadly, the rapid expansion of the Commonwealth into a multiracial grouping, also prompted the last outburst of enthusiasm for it. In previous decades, the Commonwealth supposedly exemplified peaceful cooperation between sovereign Anglophone democracies; now, in the era of decolonization, it promised to be a model of cooperation between races around the world.

In its fullest bloom, this idealism did not survive the 1960s. Among British conservatives, the Commonwealth was already losing its appeal. Some criticized the effective abolition of the Crown connection, believing that it had produced a Commonwealth that stood for nothing more than its own existence. Others realized that maintenance of the Commonwealth, or indeed the empire, as a genuine political unit implied that Africans and Asians would have the unrestricted right to emigrate to Britain. In a series of acts, starting with the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, consecutive British governments sought to assert control of their borders while giving offense to neither Commonwealth Members nor liberal opinion and Commonwealth supporters at home.

INTERNAL POLICIES

The multiracial appeal of the Commonwealth meant that the Left was the home of much of the remaining Commonwealth idealism. But the British and the Commonwealth faced an unavoidable dilemma. If the Commonwealth were to stand for democratic values, for racial cooperation, and for friendly association and mutual aid between rich and poor nations, it had to concern itself with the internal policies of its members. Furthermore, at least for a time, most of the policies in question would inevitably be those of Britain, because it was the most visible and important nation in the Commonwealth, and of South Africa and Rhodesia (since 1980 Zimbabwe), which were led by minority white governments.

For a time, the struggle was bitter. In 1966 Kenneth Kaunda (b. 1924), of Zambia, spoke of "throwing Britain out of the Commonwealth" because of its handling of Rhodesia. Harold Wilson (1916–1995), the British Labour prime minister, complained that "We are being treated as if we were a bloody colony." In 1971 at the Singapore CHOGM, rhetorical unanimity was achieved with the adoption of a new definition of the Commonwealth, which stated that the Commonwealth supported peace, liberty, and international cooperation, and opposed racial discrimination, colonial domination, and wide disparities of wealth.

These platitudes about the role of the Commonwealth in international affairs disguised the fact the Commonwealth was now primarily concerned with its own internal affairs. In 1965 the Commonwealth Secretariat was established to administer economic and international affairs. Such a secretariat had long been a goal of British imperialists, but not until it became clear that the Commonwealth had little real power did its members allow it to develop central institutions of this sort. More such institutions were soon created: the Commonwealth Foundation, also in 1965; in 1971, the Commonwealth Fund for Technical Co-operation. These organizations were well intentioned but they were a sign of the Commonwealth's impotence, not its importance.

Until 1980 the most important issue facing the Commonwealth was how to deal with Rhodesia, which had unilaterally declared its independence in 1965 under the leadership of Prime Minister Ian Smith (b. 1919). The initial British response was to impose sanctions, which were not successful. At a Commonwealth conference in 1966 Wilson managed to win a "last chance" for Smith, but most of the other heads of government did not support the British approach, which Smith then rejected. In the end, it took a civil war to bring down the white minority regime. At the 1979 Lancaster House Conference, the Commonwealth secretary-general Sonny Ramphal (b. 1928) and African leaders persuaded rival African politicians in Rhodesia to accept a British plan for elections. After an overwhelming victory, Robert Mugabe (b. 1924) took office, and the new nation of Zimbabwe gained its independence in 1980.

The road to majority rule in South Africa was even more painful. After South Africa withdrew from the Commonwealth in 1961, the Commonwealth had to decide what connections its members would keep up with the apartheid regime, and what measures it would take to bring about majority rule. Sporting boycotts were the most visible means of expressing disapproval of South Africa. In 1977 the Gleneagles Agreement isolated the regime from Commonwealth sports, the Commonwealth Games having by this time become the organization's most important symbol and event.

In the 1980s, CHOGMs regularly endorsed sanctions against South Africa, and just as regularly recorded the dissent of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (b. 1925), who believed that sanctions would be counterproductive. For this, she was vilified: more nations boycotted the 1986 Commonwealth Games, held in Edinburgh, than competed in them. But Commonwealth sanctions, combined with the more important pressure exerted by the African National Congress and other foreign powers and international organizations, finally led to a 1994 all-races election, the election of Nelson Mandela (b. 1918) as president, and the return of South Africa to the Commonwealth.

By the mid-1990s, it was obvious that the most persistent violators of the 1971 principles, now reinforced by the 1991 Harare Commonwealth Declaration, were in Africa and Asia. In 1995 military-ruled Nigeria was suspended from the Commonwealth. This suspension was lifted in 1999 but was followed by the suspension of Pakistan, where the democratically elected government had been overthrown by the military. In 2000 Fiji was suspended; its membership was restored the following year. In 2002 Zimbabwe was suspended, and in 2003 this suspension was extended, whereupon the dictatorial regime of Robert Mugabe left the Commonwealth. In 2004 Pakistan's suspension was lifted, though the commitment of its leaders to democracy was uncertain. As of mid-2005, the Commonwealth had fifty-three members.

The political record of the Commonwealth Members is uneven, and except in the cases of Rhodesia and South Africa, there is little reason to think that the Commonwealth itself has played a central role in advancing human rights. Its most successful institutions are not those charged with promoting economic development, or popular knowledge of the Commonwealth, but the Commonwealth Games and the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. And there is no likelihood that the Commonwealth will assume the leading role in international affairs that was projected for it in the 1920s and 1960s. Yet it retains its attractiveness as a modestly effective international organization, and a symbol—and occasionally more than a symbol—of the connections made by the British Empire, and of the values associated with parliamentary democracy.

See alsoBritish Empire; British Empire, End of; Decolonization; India; Pakistan; United Kingdom.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brown, Judith, and William Roger Louis, eds. The Twentieth Century. Vol. 4 of The Oxford History of the British Empire, editor-in-chief William Roger Louis. Oxford, U.K., 1999.

Darwin, John. The End of the British Empire: The Historical Debate. Oxford, U.K., 1991.

Hall, Hessel Duncan. Commonwealth: A History of the British Commonwealth of Nations. London, 1971.

Hancock, William Keith. Survey of British Commonwealth Affairs. Vol. 1: Problems of Nationality, 1918–1936. London, 1937. Vol. 2: Problems of Economic Policy, 1918–1939. Part 1, London, 1940; and part 2, London, 1942.

Mansergh, Nicholas. Survey of British Commonwealth Affairs: Problems of External Policy, 1931–1932. vols. 1–2. London, 1952, 1958.

——. The Commonwealth Experience. 2nd ed. 2 vols. London, 1982.

McIntyre, William David. The Commonwealth of Nations: Origins and Impact, 1869–1971. Minneapolis, Minn., 1977.

——. A Guide to the Contemporary Commonwealth. Houndmills, U.K., 2001.

Miller, J. D. B. Survey of Commonwealth Affairs: Problems of Expansion and Attrition, 1953–1969. London, 1974.

Moore, Robin James. Making the New Commonwealth. Oxford, U.K., 1987.

Ted R. Bromund