![]() In turn, many have toed the Chinese line on issues like Beijing’s crackdown in Hong Kong. In its bid to expand its global influence, China has been systematically targeting poorer Commonwealth states, fully aware that Britain cannot compete. The UK is a much less significant player than, for example, China, which has invested more than £685 billion across 42 Commonwealth member states since 2005. Today the Commonwealth also includes Mozambique and Rwanda, which were never colonised by the British.īritain’s reduced economic clout has a great deal to do with the diminished significance of the Commonwealth. The other member nations, welcoming his logic, issued the London Declaration of 1949, allowing India, Pakistan, and Ceylon to join “as free and equal members.” Since then, the Commonwealth of Nations-the adjective “British” is less and less often used-has admitted other independent nations that, like India, decline to swear allegiance to the crown. When newly independent India chose in 1949 to be a republic but to stay in the Commonwealth, its first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, argued that in an increasingly globalised world the network represented by the British Commonwealth of Nations served a useful purpose. ![]() The Statute of Westminster formalised this relationship in 1931 with the founding of the British Commonwealth of Nations. The evolution of Britain’s imperial domains into a somewhat looser union can be traced back to 1926, when Britain and her dominions (also referred to in those days as the “White Commonwealth”-Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa) agreed that they would be “united by a common allegiance to the Crown,” while proclaiming their equality of status as independent nations.
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