WHEN QUEEN ELIZABETH II inherited the throne in 1952, great swathes of the world map were bedecked in imperial red. Britain still ruled—or had a predominant influence over—some 50 dominions, colonies and protectorates, including at least 15 in Africa, more than a dozen in the Caribbean and a merry maritime gaggle in the Pacific.
Some seven decades later only the tiniest of places, most of them islands, are still under direct British rule, while a clutch of independent states, numbering 14 at last count, choose to keep the queen as their ceremonial monarch. At the grander end of the imperial spectrum, at the time of her death she was still head of state of Canada, New Zealand and, more controversially, Australia.
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Most of Britain’s dependencies broke free in the first few decades of the queen’s reign. But the current Commonwealth, a voluntary club created in 1949, was promoted as a kind of post-imperial alternative under Britain’s cosy patronage. Of all her foreign duties, the queen attached the greatest importance to her role as head of the organisation, though it dropped the prefix “British” before she took the throne. She was widely respected, even revered, in the 56 independent countries that currently make up the club. Some say she was partly responsible for its survival.
Commonwealth boosters make much of its demographic and geopolitical reach. It encompasses a third of the world’s population, more than a quarter of the UN’s membership, a fifth of the world’s land mass and more than a third of its waters that come under national jurisdictions. Most of its members speak English and have systems of law and government inherited from Britain. It is a club that still attracts new members, even if English isn’t their language: Rwanda joined in 1995, Mozambique in 2005, and Gabon and Togo in 2022. Angola is said to be keen. Ireland, Kuwait, Myanmar, Nepal, Palestine and Yemen, which all once had British imperial links, have been dangled as possible candidates.
It is a struggle to explain the point of today’s Commonwealth, all the same. Guided by a modest permanent secretariat in London, it meets every two years at a Commonwealth Heads of Governments Meeting (CHOGM, pronounced “choggum”), where the queen routinely presided, though her eldest son, Charles, took her place in Sri Lanka, a controversial venue, in 2013. It claims to have two chief aims: to strengthen democracy among its members and to nurture economic development.
It has no beefy mechanism for enforcing the first and no big pot of cash for ensuring the second. Countries that have flagrantly disrespected democracy—for instance, Fiji, Nigeria and Pakistan under military dictators, or Zimbabwe when it lapsed into tyranny under Robert Mugabe—have been temporarily suspended from the club, or left it before being expelled. But autocracies such as Eswatini (formerly Swaziland) and the sultanate of Brunei somehow manage to retain membership. Some query the democratic credentials of Rwanda, which hosted the recent CHOGM in June.
The body once enjoyed more diplomatic successes, thanks in part to the queen herself. In the 1970s and 1980s, a wily Guyanese secretary-general, Sir Shridath (“Sonny”) Ramphal cleverly used his position to help nudge Southern Rhodesia towards becoming Zimbabwe and shame South Africa into ending apartheid. The queen was often regarded as keener on both scores than Britain’s then prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. She expertly disguised whatever queasiness she may have felt when required to chat up some of the club’s more bloodstained leaders.
Nowadays the Commonwealth’s chief purpose is to offer opportunities for networking. Some of Britain’s ardent Brexiteers try to puff up the club as an alternative to the European Union. But the bulkiest of its members—Australia, Canada and India—have shown little enthusiasm for such an idea. India’s keen involvement would increase the importance of the Commonwealth, given its size. But recent Indian prime ministers have not always bothered even to attend the CHOGMs.
The Commonwealth may be more useful when it comes to tackling climate change. At a CHOGM in Malta in 2015 the leading governments endorsed an ambitious set of proposals for combating climate change that were said to have helped pave the way towards the UN’s global agreement, signed in Paris in December of the same year. Many of the Commonwealth’s smaller members in the Caribbean and Pacific Ocean are particularly vulnerable to the vagaries of climate change, including cyclones and rising waters, while many African ones are susceptible to drought and desertification. Commonwealth island minnows such as Tuvalu and Nauru cherish their chance to voice their worries on the world platform offered by a CHOGM.
There were nervous moments for Britain before the meeting in Malta, when it seemed uncertain that Prince Charles would succeed his mother as the titular head of the organisation. But a consensus was reached that he would do so as king. He is well equipped for the task, since he must have visited more Commonwealth countries than any other head of state. (The queen is said to have visited every single member, bar Cameroon and Rwanda, some of them many times over.) Charles lived in Australia as a student. His well-aired interest in religion, including Islam, will go down well in a club that embraces all the world’s main faiths. He has supported many environmental and conservation causes, especially in Africa.
Still, he will find it hard to match the popularity or grace of his mother. For many of the Commonwealth’s leaders and people, whether or not she remained their formal monarch, she seemed to epitomise the best qualities, of grandeur and fair play, that the British empire claimed to promote. Justin Trudeau, the 12th Canadian prime minister of her reign, echoed many of his counterparts across the Commonwealth when he said how much he valued his conversations with her. “She was thoughtful, wise, curious, helpful, funny, and so much more…I will miss her so.”■
