Brexit as a constitutive force in the Commonwealth: Constitutional identities and the withering Sovereign

Abstract

Britain’s accession in 1973 to what is now the European Union marked a decisive turn in the British Commonwealth of Nations. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the status and value of the Commonwealth in global affairs was firmly reduced to the fostering of Britain’s soft power: common democratic values, championing civil society, and maintaining historic ties – the carefully preserved ruins of the British Empire. Yet, in 2016 the Commonwealth took on added significance during the European Union referendum campaign. Under the banner of “Global Britain”, the prospect of bringing a formal end to Britain’s membership of the European Union became much more certain after the Brexit wing of the Tory party won a large majority in the general election on December 12, 2019. For some Brexiteers, the Commonwealth is an important plank in Britain’s reassertion of its place in the world through trade and selective migration. To the extent that Brexit instantiates a crisis of constitutional identities in Europe, this is but a more recent episode in the narrative of Europe and her Other, a Europe to which Britain took refuge to reconstitute her relationship with her former colonies, which now make up the bulk of the Commonwealth. This essay centres the intellectual synergies of James Bryce, Jawaharlal Nehru, Kwame Nkrumah, and Shridath Ramphal to assess the constitutive force of Brexit in the Commonwealth. It is argued that, as a matter of constitutional identity, Britain’s anxiety about the constitutional order of the European Union has its current constitutive ground in the British Empire-turned-Commonwealth. Further, as precipitated by radical decolonial republicanism, this persistent constitutive force defines the British Crown’s imaginary exercise of sovereign power in the Commonwealth through a peculiar kind of presence, one that is performed through strategic absence.