Commonwealth is a historic term in political theory, used by writers of very different political persuasion to refer to their ideal state. It has also been used in the title of the voluntary association of states, the Commonwealth of Nations, which gradually emerged during the first half of the 20th century to replace the British Empire as former colonies achieved self-government and became independent, and in that of the Commonwealth of Independent States set up as an attempt to preserve some unity and co-operation among the former republics of the Soviet Union. It probably derives from the Greek concept of ‘oikumene’ (living together). Poland and Lithuania formed a Commonwealth in 1569 to protect themselves against threats from the Russian state of Muscovy to the east, the Turkish Ottoman Empire to the south and Sweden to the north, but the usual early example is the English Commonwealth under the Cromwells from the execution of Charles I until the restoration of Charles II. The contemporary political theorist Thomas Hobbes used the term to mean that there existed some common ‘weal’ or values which rational people would co-operate to defend. Four of the earliest US states (Kentucky, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Virginia) use the word Commonwealth in their titles; like the English Commonwealth, this was an attempt to find a description of a political system that did not rest on any notion of a monarch legitimately ‘owning’ the country, but allowed for considerable power to be wielded by a central sovereign institution, whether that be vested in an individual or an assembly.
The modern Commonwealth of Nations can be subdivided into two very general types of countries: the ‘Old Commonwealth’refers to those territories which were settled rather than conquered, had all become independent by the First World War, and are predominantly European in origin, such as Canada, Australia and New Zealand; the ‘New Commonwealth’ countries are those, such as India, Jamaica, Kenya, Malaysia and Nigeria, which have gained their independence since the Second World War, often after a political and even armed struggle.
The Commonwealth has never been more than a loose linkage between member states, with no central authority, virtually no civil service, and no general policies or founding treaty (the closest to this is the 1971 Declaration of Commonwealth Principles). It never became an economic unity or an organized military alliance, though British politicians had tried to develop it in both those ways from the end of the 19th century. Even the unity given to it by the fact that the British monarch is its head means little, as several members are republics. With the entry of the United Kingdom into the European Union its political and economic ties to its former colonies became further weakened, although the Commonwealth remains the biggest international association after the United Nations. During the late 1980s quite serious conflicts arose between a majority of members of the Commonwealth and the United Kingdom over the latter’s lack of enthusiasm for political and economic sanctions against South Africa over that country’s apartheid policies, with the consequence that British leadership of the association is much less secure than previously. Ironically this may actually increase the vibrancy of the Commonwealth as a multinational association. Increasingly the Commonwealth uses threatened or actual suspensions from its proceedings to censure members whose internal affairs, it considers, require reforms: since, the late 1980s, Fiji, Nigeria, Pakistan and Zimbabwe have suffered such suspensions.
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