The Commonwealth : Legacy of Empire--A World ‘Club’

It was a small problem in a small country. A maker of safety matches in Belize, struggling against imports, was fast losing its market to cheaper, higher-quality imports. Belize was about to lose 60 jobs that it desperately needed.

The solution was provided by a Canadian businessman named Al Peterson who had years of experience in the safety match industry. Peterson diagnosed the problem, rejected a high-tech $170,000 option, designed an innovative system for $1,200 and saved both the firm and the jobs.

Peterson learned of the problem only because Canada and Belize are both members of the Commonwealth, a large but little understood organization made up of nearly a third of the world’s countries.

From Britain to Brunei

Its members are enormously diverse--from India, with nearly 750 million citizens sprawled over 1.2 million square miles, to the Pacific islands of Nauru and Tuvalu with populations of about 8,000 each on a total of 18 square miles; from Bangladesh with an annual per capita income of under $200, to Canada, with per capita income of more than $11,400; from Western-style parliamentary democracies such as Britain to Brunei, ruled by His Highness Sultan Muda Hassanal Bolkiah. About all they have in common is that they speak English and once were part of the British Empire.

With a collective population of 1.2 billion, the Commonwealth is arguably the world’s largest and most unusual club.

Like Britain itself, the Commonwealth has no charter and no constitution. Its members are not bound by any treaty, and they receive no trade concessions. Declarations issued in the name of the Commonwealth’s 49 heads of government have no legal foundation and no force under international law. There is no formal document acknowledging Queen Elizabeth II as head of the Commonwealth. She just is.

Unusual World Role

The very absence of such formalities has enabled the Commonwealth to play a highly unusual and influential role in world affairs. The Commonwealth can count among its accomplishments:

--Breaking the diplomatic impasse and making possible negotiations for the rebirth of white-ruled Rhodesia, a British colony turned renegade, as independent black-ruled Zimbabwe.

--Focusing attention on--and offering solutions to--the problems of the growing number of small island states that are open to political subversion or military attack.

--Devising a compromise formula for commodity price stability, which the world’s major producer and consumer countries approved and which the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade adopted.

--Assembling a group of prominent individuals, including two former heads of government, who produced a dramatic report on conditions in South Africa that has rekindled the debate on economic sanctions against the Pretoria government.

--Providing economic and technical help to member countries on small-scale projects, much in the way Peterson helped the Belize match company.

But many people familiar with the Commonwealth’s workings believe that its most significant contribution is more difficult to quantify: providing an unusual forum where leaders of vastly different societies can exchange ideas in a free and casual environment.

Sometimes, as occurred at last week’s seven-nation summit meeting on South Africa, there has been disagreement. Occasionally a member will even threaten to withdraw from the Commonwealth. Zambia’s President Kenneth D. Kaunda talked of pulling out to protest Britain’s refusal to go along with strong sanctions against South Africa. Over the years, Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania have also threatened to withdraw.

But to a considerable extent the Commonwealth has managed to exploit the advantages of a common language, a common colonial heritage and, in many cases, common values to promote a cross-fertilization of ideas that has paved the way for formal high-level diplomacy.

Every other year, 47 of the 49 heads of government get together; the Pacific island countries of Nauru and Tuvalu have few foreign policy aspirations and choose not to attend. This is one of the largest gatherings of national leaders, yet they all speak one language--English.

Interpreters Not Needed

Shridath S. Ramphal, a former foreign secretary of Guyana who is the Commonwealth secretary general, observed: “We’re about the only international conference in the world without interpreters. That’s an enormous asset.”

Informal weekend retreats, where heads of government dress casually and discuss issues by the swimming pool or on the golf course, may be nightmares for anxious bureaucrats left at their hotels to fret over what point of ideology their leaders might concede. But for the world at large, these sessions have been productive.

The compromise that finally ended the 14-year-old Rhodesian crisis was hatched by six prime ministers in the study of President Kaunda’s home near Lusaka during the 1979 Commonwealth summit conference.

Rhodesian whites, fearful that Britain was about to grant independence to the colony under a system of black majority rule, declared unilateral independence in 1965 and set up a minority white government. In the ensuing years, a guerrilla war between blacks and whites raged with ever-increasing savagery.

Applied Persuasion

At the 1979 meeting, Kaunda and Tanzanian leader Julius K. Nyerere promised to deliver Rhodesia’s black nationalist leaders to the negotiations; Britain’s Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was persuaded to prevail upon the white Rhodesian leader, Ian Smith, to attend.

It was at a similar retreat, two years earlier at Gleneagles, Scotland, that the Commonwealth leaders agreed to break sports ties with South Africa as a protest against apartheid. Countries outside the Commonwealth quickly followed suit.

The idea of sending a group of “eminent persons” to South Africa to work out a formula for negotiations was born last year at a meeting of seven Commonwealth leaders at Lyford Key in the Bahamas.

“Where else could you have put together something like the Eminent Persons’ Group, with a former Australian prime minister, a Nigerian general and a Canadian archbishop?” Ramphal asked.

Aside from the summit conferences and the development fund, which provides money for projects such as Peterson’s, the organization sponsors a variety of other meetings and a vast network of unofficial organizations that expand contacts and make for an atmosphere more akin to a club than a political organization.

Organization for All

Ministers of trade, justice, finance, health and education meet every two or three years, and more frequently in regional sessions.

There are Commonwealth organizations for lawyers, members of Parliament, doctors, architects, tax collectors and 28 other specialties. There are also about 250 Commonwealth societies, institutes and federations, including organizations for food researchers, weightlifters, trade unionists, for people who deal with the blind and the deaf.

“Until you understand what all these things are, you can’t understand why the whole thing stays together,” Ramphal said. “It is a bit of a community.”

The Commonwealth is a direct outgrowth of the British Empire. Its first members were Britain’s white-run dominions, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa. At the time of the first official recognition of a British Commonwealth, in 1931, these five were largely independent, except that they recognized the British monarch as sovereign and they retained strong trade and defense ties to Britain.

After World War II, the Commonwealth changed to accommodate newly independent India and Pakistan, which wanted to retain links with Britain but as republics rather than as constitutional monarchies.

End of British

Under a compromise agreement, member countries were bound to acknowledge the monarch as the symbolic head of the Commonwealth, regardless of whether they continued to recognize the monarch as head of state. Also, the word British was dropped and the organization became simply the Commonwealth.

Unlike France, which looks after its ties to former colonies through a government department, Britain chose to forfeit its “mother country” role and in 1965 transferred responsibility for Commonwealth affairs to an independent, jointly funded secretariat based in London.

“We could have run it on a tight rein as the mother country, but it would have broken up very quickly,” a British official involved in Commonwealth affairs said. “Instead, we decided to become an equal member.”

It was a formula with appeal. With decolonization, Commonwealth membership has grown from eight countries in 1950 to 30 in 1970 to today’s 49. All are independent in every other respect, but 18 of these countries still recognize the queen as head of state.

Only a small number of formerly British-ruled entities, including Burma, the Irish Republic, Aden and Israel, decided against Commonwealth membership upon independence.

Couple of Dropouts

Only two countries have left the organization. South Africa, which was declared unwanted because of its apartheid policies, pulled out in 1961. Pakistan withdrew 11 years later when some members of the Commonwealth recognized breakaway East Pakistan as independent Bangladesh. Bangladesh, however, did join.

For small countries, the attraction is technical help, and a chance to trade experiences with countries that have a similar past. And the Commonwealth gives these countries access to an important international forum. The present Commonwealth chairman is Lynden O. Pindling, prime minister of the Bahamas, which has a population of just over 200,000, roughly the same as that of Des Moines, Iowa.

The Bahamas’ high commissioner in London, Richard DeMerrite, said: “It makes sense for a country like ours to bind ourselves with other former British colonies. To share experience and expertise is very important to us.”

(Commonwealth countries exchange not ambassadors but high commissioners, a title that implies a special relationship.)

Chance for Links

For larger nations, like Australia and New Zealand, membership offers a chance to forge links in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean that they could not develop with their own resources alone.

Within the Commonwealth the lines between north and south, rich and poor, tend to blur. For example, Bangladesh, which has a high-quality diplomatic service thanks in part to traditions that go back to the old British Indian Civil Service, has helped to train Fijian envoys, and Malaysians have traveled to India for training in tropical science.

Economically, meetings of Commonwealth heads of government or finance ministers provide a rare chance for nations of the North and South--that is, industrialized and developing--to sit down without wearing those labels.

For some Britons, the Commonwealth’s image has been tarnished by what they they see as excessive “Britain-bashing” through much of the 1970s--at the time of the Rhodesia crisis and, more recently, in connection with London’s policy toward South Africa.

“It’s just a platform for others to insult Britain,” said John Carlisle, a Conservative member of Parliament. “It’s an entirely negative organization and a drain on the taxpayer’s money.”

Unhidden Displeasure

Prime Minister Thatcher makes little secret of her displeasure with the actions of many members, a view that reportedly put her at odds recently with the queen, who has devoted much of her 34 years on the throne to promoting Commonwealth unity.

But there is little doubt that Britain gains from the organization it created. The Commonwealth gives London unusual influence, for an industrialized Western country, among newly emerged Third World countries.

For example, in the United Nations, where numbers count for more than the the size of a country, Britain’s ability to marshal Commonwealth backing against Guatemala’s territorial claim to Belize helped clear Belize’s path to independence in 1981. And that same ability helped to rally world opinion to Britain during war with Argentina over the Falklands Islands.

“It’s a contribution at the margin,” a senior British official said. “It’s not central, or in the same league as the European Community or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, but then the cost isn’t the same, either.”

The Commonwealth secretariat has about 400 employees and an annual budget of barely $8 million. The total budget for all Commonwealth projects is $48 million. Ministerial meetings are financed by individual governments. The unofficial associations are mostly self-financing.

Cost Is ‘Peanuts’

“It’s peanuts by the standards of most international organizations,” the British official said. “We regard it as well run. It’s closely supervised by leading contributors.”

James Eberle, director of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, sees the Commonwealth becoming increasingly relevant to a Britain struggling to come to grips with the problems of its multiracial society.

“It’s like a good club,” Eberle said. “It’s a place where you can discuss issues with those who don’t hold the same views but who are not so incompatible that they can’t be members of the club.”

With Britain still controlling 15 dependencies, the club could continue to grow.