95 - Long Live the King: And the Commonwealth?
With Queen Elizabeth II’s death, many more nations will rapidly follow Antigua and Barbuda’s call for a referendum on whether or not to opt for republic status, as Barbados did last year, and to reject King Charles III as their sovereign. Australia may be among those who shift allegiance away from the distant crown.
But the nations that in coming years reject King Charles III as their head of state need not leave the Commonwealth of Nations (no longer styled the “British” Commonwealth). In fact, despite the rightful revived critiques of British colonialism in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean, the Commonwealth continues to serve a purpose.
It does so despite – or in some perverse manner – because of the vast injustices inflicted on the British conquered colonies in the centuries before this one. King Charles III apologized for the slave trade and the inhumanities of slavery when he helped to inaugurate Barbados’ republic. He spoke sharply about the “appalling atrocity of slavery” and labeled those days as “the darkest…of our past.” Prince Williams received a burst of venom when he visited Jamaica last year and uttered homilies less forthright than those of his father. Jamaicans also seek reparations.
The barbaric cruelties that British colonial rulers exacted on Kenya during the Mau Mau insurgency, on several parts of India during the dark years of the Raj, on places like Burma when kings were deposed and indigenous rule displaced, and on innumerable African kingdoms that were conquered or shunted aside, are not so much forgotten by an existing commonwealth. They are absorbed.
Britain refused to let Paramount Chief (Sir) Seretse Khama and his British bride reside in Botswana for fear of offending the Afrikaners of South Africa who had recently created apartheid, and had banned so-called mixed marriages. Britain forcibly bundled Zambia and Malawi into a white-run federation with Zimbabwe despite unrelenting African opposition. It forcibly combined the traditional and Christian sections of Nigeria with the massive Muslim north, creating untold mayhem for decades after, and now.
All of these and many more colonial era attacks on indigenous ways of life were and are reprehensible. Many of the telling problems and weaknesses of today’s independent states reflect the legacies of unfortunate colonial decisions.
But today the Commonwealth remains. Indeed, in recent years, non-former British colonies such as Rwanda, Gabon, and Mozambique -- territories with no connection whatsoever to the Crown, to London, to the common law -- have opted to join an international league with headquarters in London and, today, a British led secretariat.
The Commonwealth obviously still has meaning. It brings together all of those old colonial possessions that were schooled in English and in the English form of jurisprudence. (Mauritius still allows final appeals to the Privy Council of the House of Lords.) A belief in the rule of law, good governance, political participation, and representative democracy unites the nations of the commonwealth even though some of them only pay lip service to its principles, and honor its underlying ethos in the breach.
Tiny Belize and autocratically ruled Francophone Gabon rub shoulders with bastions of the old (liberal) empire like New Zealand and Australia. India and Pakistan, sworn enemies, come together in the Commonwealth. Authoritarian Uganda and carefully democratic Botswana are there, too, along with the varying political outposts of the Caribbean.
The Commonwealth could be viewed as an anachronistic “talking shop,” replete with remorse and nostalgia. But its purpose now is to strengthen – where it can -- governmental integrities, the rights of citizens to enjoy at least the four freedoms, and a semi-religious sense of purpose which remembers the ideals rather than the brutalities of empire. In some respects, the Commonwealth permits the old colonial power to pay homage to its former subjects, and to join them by embracing, and helping to finance, the modernization of their diverse claims to legitimacy.
According to the late Queen Elizabeth, the Commonwealth hardly resembles the empire of the past. “It is an entirely new conception,” she said years ago, “built on the higher qualities of the spirit of man: friendship, loyalty and the desire for freedom and peace.” Those sentiments express the ideal, and lofty aspirations, at least.
As a collective, the Commonwealth has an important role today in combating kleptocracy and rampant corruption everywhere, but particularly in its member states, in enhancing education – especially schooling for girls, and in providing assistance in overcoming poverty, pandemics, and authoritarianism.
The Commonwealth, in other words, can redeem injurious colonial errors by becoming a force for vast good. King Charles III can show the way, as a representative of very post-colonial Britain.