Uneasy sits the crown

The conclusion of another Commonwealth summit earlier this month provides an opportunity to examine the relevance of the organisation in the changing international situation. Government leaders from 51 member countries converged in Coolum, Australia to participate in the deliberations; Queen Elizabeth of England was there in confirmation of her role as the head of the multilateral forum. India was represented by Minister for External Affairs Jaswant Singh. Pakistan’s participation remained in abeyance in view of the strictures imposed on it after Pervez Musharraf’s overthrow of the democratically elected Nawaz Sharif Government in October 1999. International terrorism, the management of the downturn in the world economy, and the deteriorating political situation in Zimbabwe were the main items on the agenda.

The former British Commonwealth transformed its identity in the late 40s and early 50s when Britain relinquished her imperial status. Initially, the UK government remained keen on sustaining the organisation as ‘a British Commonwealth’ with the king or the queen retaining the status of the head of state of each of the member states of the Commonwealth. As far as the Commonwealth was constituted by the Anglo-Saxon dominions of Australia, Canada and New Zealand, there were no inhibitions on this score. But once a large number of non-White colonies of Britain became independent, the peoples and governments of these countries baulked at acknowledging the British crown as the head of state. India forged a compromise. Jawaharlal Nehru insisted that India will remain part of the Commonwealth only as a republic without acknowledging the British king as the head of state. His advice that the British head of state should have a separate identity as the head of the collectivity, was accepted.

There was logic in India and other countries wishing to retain the British connection in the 50s and 60s. The political organisation and state structures of all the non-White countries were rooted in institutions, procedures and laws inherited from British imperial rule. There was considerable dependence on England in technological, economic and defence supplies arrangements. Preferential trade arrangements and the special treatment accorded in higher education in England to young people from the Commonwealth countries was another factor that impelled the newly indep- endent Asian and African countries to retain the British connection.

All this changed with the advent of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government in England. Even before that, UK’s gradual integration with European regional arrangements had commenced, eroding the special relationship between England and other members of the Commonwealth. From the late 70s, the preferential trade arrangements between England and the Commonwealth countries diminished. During Thatcher’s long tenure in office, the special and concessional relationship between UK and the Commonwealth countries disappeared. Commonwealth countries were treated at par with other countries having good relations with the UK. In a parallel development, the policies of other Commonwealth countries had also changed their terms of reference. While Britain’s agenda became Euro-centric and related to the energy and economic interests in the Gulf and West Asia, the other Commonwealth countries shifted their attention to their own regions and to other emerging political and economic power centres of the world. Symbolic and emotional attachment to the institution of the British crown has also diminished over the years, even among the White Commonwealth countries.

Today all members of the Commonwealth, including Britain, are involved with other regional groupings that serve their interests in a more substantive way. By the early 1990s, the Commonwealth attempted to re-define its role in these changed circumstances. Under Prime Minister John Major and the then Secretary General of the Commonwealth Chief Anyake, attempts were initiated to make the Commonwealth a collective entity responding to the emerging global concerns regarding human rights, democracy, good governance, management of the environment, emerging travails of globalisation, UN reforms and peace-keeping and peace-making initiatives. The Commonwealth’s agenda was recast on these lines at the Harare summit in 1991 and the Cyprus summit in 1993. The effort, however, has not succeeded.

What, then, is the relevance of the organisation today? Britain remains interested in sustaining it because it is an important instrumentality underpinning Britain’s status as an important power in the context of its diminished status after World War II. The institutional, intellectual and linguistic connections between Commonwealth countries and Britain remain relevant in terms of the attitudes and inter-relationships of the power structures of the Commonwealth countries. But there is nothing more substantive than this. In fact in more recent years, the internal contradictions in the Commonwealth have made its functioning ambiguous at best and difficult at worst.

Commonwealth countries have been involved in military conflicts with each other in Africa and Asia. The Indo-Pakistan relationship is the most glaring example. There are also profound reservations about the Commonwealth’s role in furthering good governance, democracy and respect for human rights, amongst the Asian and African member states.

The Commonwealth summit in Australia in the first week of March brought these contradictions to the fore again. The only major item on which the Coolum summit had a consensus was on combating terrorism. On all other issues, the consensus was cosmetic. On the most important question discussed at the Coolum summit — the internal situation in Zimbabwe — the conflict of views was insurmountable. While Britain, Australia and New Zealand wanted a collective decision to suspend Zimbabwe from the membership because of Robert Mugabe’s refusal to accept external stipulations about how he should manage his country, African heads of state were more or less unanimous in questioning not just the role but also the motivations of the proposed policy. Though Zimbabwe has since been suspended from the Councils of the Commonwealth for one year after its violence marred elections, the Coolum summit showed up the organisation’s deep divisions on this issue.

India tried to play a tempering and mediatory role in these controversial discussions. This might have reduced the tension in the summit, but did not lead to anything more. The New Zealand prime minister aptly summed up the Coolum summit: ‘‘I hope we do not have another CHOGM like this one ... I think the Commonwealth has to get its act together for the future.’’

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