It is not too late to rebuild the Commonwealth.
The idea that the Commonwealth is antiquated is absurd. It is a free association of 53 sovereign states, making up slightly more than 30 per cent of the world’s population, from every major continent and world religion.
Rarely has any sporting event got under way under the shadow of such relentlessly negative coverage as today’s Commonwealth Games in New Delhi. It’s almost as if a deliberate attempt were being made to jeopardise the competition. These systematic attacks are part of a pattern. For the last 13 years there has been a tendency to view the Commonwealth as little better than a historical artefact – useless, corrupt and worthy only of contempt.
The Commonwealth never fitted in with Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s modernising vision. Under New Labour, British foreign policy focused on two objectives. Blair was determined to place Britain in what he called “the heart of Europe”, while simultaneously ensuring that we did nothing to offend the United States. During this period there was little sense of a distinctively British foreign policy, let alone a distinctively British set of interests. In the age of Cool Britannia, traditional British allegiances and identities were seen as xenophobic, if not racist. There was no sense of the virtue, let alone the magnificence, of British history.
Yet it is not too late to rebuild the Commonwealth, as a strikingly counter-intuitive pamphlet, launched at today’s Tory conference by the former shadow foreign secretary Michael Ancram brilliantly argues. Ancram’s central thesis is that, far from being out of date, as Left-wing ideologists naturally assumed, the Commonwealth is actually a remarkably modern organisation.
Indeed there is no international organisation that is more relevant to the complex and networked world in which we now live. It is the slavish relationship with the United States, and the dogmatic assumption that British national interest means signing up to a federal Europe, which now look hopelessly outmoded.
The idea that the Commonwealth is antiquated is absurd. It is a free association of 53 sovereign states, making up slightly more than 30 per cent of the world’s population, from every major continent and world religion. It costs us just 20p per head a year, a fraction of the £52 per person absorbed by the European Union. More than half of its 1.7 billion citizens are under 25 and its guiding principles are open, humane and democratic. Its membership includes some of the most fast-growing and significant countries in the world – India, Canada, Singapore, Malaysia and (though Tony Blair and co did their best to forget this) Britain.
The glory of the Commonwealth is its lack of structure. It is not tied down, like the European Union, by hubristic ambition and a stifling bureaucracy. It is not based, like Nato, on a set of defunct aims and objectives and an enemy that no longer exists. It is not corrupt and unwieldy like the United Nations. With the discrediting of the neo-Conservative dream of imposing democracy by force, it is the ideal vehicle for the quiet promotion of democracy.
In the Commonwealth, the means used are never invasion, but subtlety and quiet pressure. The exclusion of Fiji and Pakistan from the Commonwealth provided powerful incentives for both countries to return to democracy.
It is of course the case that the Commonwealth retains in some quarters a post-colonial stigma, and it is here that the Ancram pamphlet is especially creative. “Without losing influence, Britain should accept that centring the Commonwealth in London leaves it open to accusations of carrying the shades of empire. It should be re-based in India, which itself has the potential to become a powerful inner core of a living network of relations that cross continents and have unparalleled global reach.” Ancram also urges that there should be a dedicated minister for the Commonwealth at the foreign office, just as there already is for the European Union.
Since the end of World War Two there has been a tragic parochialism at the heart of British foreign policy. We have turned our backs on the wider world and focused instead on a our doorstep in Western Europe and our allies across the Atlantic. This may have made some sense during the Cold War, but makes none today, at a time when the new global powerhouses are arising in the East.
New Labour’s solution to this conundrum was to suck up to China, studiously neglectful of its atrocious record on human rights. A Commonwealth based in Delhi could become an important counterbalance to the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. David Cameron’s Coalition government is already showing a stronger sense of decency and is much less embarrassed by our history. The Prime Minister signalled this during the summer when, in his first major foreign excursion, he chose to lead a trade mission to India. Our military experience over the past few years has shown the limits to hard power. It is time to work on the up-to-date alternatives – and the most natural to hand is the Commonwealth.
Michael Ancram’s pamphlet ‘Farewell to Drift: A New Foreign Policy for a Networked World’ is published today by Global Strategy Forum
This article appears in The Daily Telegraph