Britain and the transformation from empire to Commonwealth

Abstract

In the middle years of the century, many Britons hoped that the Commonwealth would be a kind of halfway house between empire and normal international relations. Although constituted of independent states, it was expected that dealings between Commonwealth members would have a special character—one which would be especially advantageous to Britain. And for quite a while—probably until the 1970s—and on a number of issues, successive British governments at least purported to believe that this was indeed its nature. However, as a working diplomatic arrangement it is hard to imagine that such a halfway situation could exist for long: the relations of states tend to have their own self‐interested imperatives. In practice there is very little evidence to suggest that a special Commonwealth actually existed after the Second World War. In particular, a series of important events in the years immediately following 1945 undermined the credibility of the idea. Britain, however, did not draw the obvious conclusions from these developments, notwithstanding their salience and the fact that it was intimately involved in a number of them. Short of revolutionary contexts it is often hard to grasp the depth of contemporary change, not least when that change is adverse to one's own position. British responses were also testimony to the hold which the imperial idea had, and perhaps also to the depth of the psychological need to believe that their country was still a power of substantial consequence. More prosaically, some Britons doubtless hoped that the changing nature of the Commonwealth would somehow compensate for increasing indications of her relative international decline. And their hopes were, to some degree, to receive emotional and sentimental validation. But by the end of the reign of George VI in 1952 it should have been abundantly clear that as a more or less coherent international unit the Commonwealth had disintegrated. It had never been more than a brief and increasingly insubstantial phenomenon—a reflection of transition rather than of settled behaviour. The legacy of the British empire was a species of international organisation, not a uniquely well‐integrated and cosy association of a familial kind.