Colonialism and The Commonwealth of Nations

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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now a little social studies, political science, history lesson. In light of recent events, there are many who point out that Queen Elizabeth's multimillion-dollar funeral happening at the same time as millions of people in Puerto Rico and other Caribbean nations lost their power and water because of hurricane Fiona, that that's emblematic of how colonialism still affects people's lives and the global economy to this day. The legacy of colonialism is one reason some countries in a subset of British Commonwealth member nations known as Commonwealth realms are reconsidering their relationship with the Monarchy now.

With me to discuss the history of colonization and the Commonwealth of Nations and what the Commonwealth's future might hold and perhaps what it should hold is Ishaan Tharoor, the foreign affairs columnist at The Washington Post. Hi, Ishaan. Always great to have you. Welcome back to WNYC.

Ishaan Tharoor: Always great to be with you, Brian. Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, are you from a Commonwealth Nation or realm, a former colony, a current territory? Give us a call if you'd like and help with this Brian Lehrer Show social studies lesson. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or tweet a@BrianLehrer. Ishaan, the Commonwealth of Nations, for our very American listeners who don't know, is a voluntary association of 56 independent and equal countries, so they say. Can you define or explain basically a little bit more about what it is.

Ishaan Tharoor: I think there are a couple of things to put on the table. First is that there seems to be, at least in some conversations I've had with folks since the passing of Elizabeth, this misunderstanding in the US that if you are a Commonwealth country, then somehow the British Monarch is at the top of at least the symbolic structures of power in your nation. That is not true. The vast majority of Commonwealth nations are not countries where the Queen and now King Charles is the head of state. There are only 14 countries within the Commonwealth, and you said they're 56, where the British Monarch remains the symbolic head of state.

Brian Lehrer: I think I have the list. Should I do it?

Ishaan Tharoor: If you want. [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, The Bahamas, Jamaica, Belize, Grenada, Papua New Guinea, Antigua and Barbuda, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. That's a combo. Saint Kitts and Nevis, Solomon Islands, and Tuvalu. Did I get the list?

Ishaan Tharoor: I think so. I think that's about it. What's important is that not on that list, but would've been there last year is Barbados, which was one of these Caribbean nations that said, "Okay, it's been sometime now since we've been independent, we don't need the Queen as our head of state," and so they became a republic last year. We can get into that later. What's also interesting about the Commonwealth is that, yes, you absolutely have a huge stretch of the world that it still encompasses. It is, in many ways, the legacy of the British Empire.

It represents some 2.5 billion people, although the majority of that is in South Asia, specifically in India. It is a grouping that doesn't really have that much going on for it. There are these games that happen once in a while at sporting events. I'm really curious what listeners have to say, do you go about your days as someone from a "Commonwealth country" really feeling any profound bonds of solidarity or identification with the Commonwealth?

Brian Lehrer: Listeners from any of the places we just mentioned, do you feel any bonds of solidarity or identification, or maybe just economic benefit, if there is economic benefit, or for that matter, maybe economic downside with respect to the Monarchy? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. I guess not just the Monarchy, but the British government generally. As a few people are starting to call in, what are the benefits versus downsides, as they're generally considered, Ishaan, of being part of the Commonwealth?

Ishaan Tharoor: Well, when it was first organized, it was seen as this new replacement vehicle for the British Empire. It was called the British Commonwealth. Yes, this was at a time when the British Empire was politically contracting, it was losing. It had already lost it's colonies in South Asia. It was losing or at the start of a wave of decolonization in Africa. Here was an instrument that kept the British Monarchy at the top and existed in a somewhat paternalistic way as folding in all these new nations into the newfangled embrace of the 20th century British Empire.

As far as the actual benefits goes, this is a matter of debate. There are degrees of corporation and trade discussed through the Commonwealth, but I would suggest that Britain's total trading volume with the Commonwealth countries is right now around 8% of its total trade. Britain basically trades as much with Germany as it does with the entirety of the Commonwealth. I wouldn't really consider it a major economic vehicle. You also have to recognize that the countries within the Commonwealth have a diverse and varied set of interests.

What matters to, say, India or South Africa is very different than what matters to perhaps a country in the Caribbean or Australia or New Zealand or so forth, so on. There isn't really a very strong political anchoring force around what the Commonwealth is. I would suggest that the people who benefited the most from the existence of the Commonwealth, at least in the last half century, have been the British Monarchy itself because the Commonwealth, with Queen Elizabeth at the top of it, gave her this whole canvas upon which to-- She spent years touring various countries, being feted as the ceremonial figurehead of this institution. It gave her a global legitimacy that she would not have otherwise had, and to very minimal benefit to most of the nations involved.

Absolutely there are countries in the Commonwealth that still considers the British Monarch the head of state and where many people in those countries have emotional attachments. I would suggest that that may change in the years to come. You already see opinion polls in countries like Australia and Canada showing just a minority of people still concerned or committed to having the British Monarch as their head of state. It does seem that the Commonwealth as an institution, of course, as well as the British Monarchy itself is ripe for evolution.

Brian Lehrer: Well, why are some Commonwealth realms reassessing their ties to the British Monarchy now? How much is it colonial history and it just takes this long for politics to happen? How much is disliking Charles and now that he's king fueling this? I know it's only been a few days. Which countries are doing this and what are they saying?

Ishaan Tharoor: We're seeing a critical mass now, but there have been long-running conversations in various parts of the world for quite some time about legacy of the British Empire, about some of the unreconciled questions and harms of the Imperial and colonial experience. Absolutely the political awakening triggered by George Floyd protests here in the US has had a very curious impact in the conversation you saw in the wake of that as statues of slavers and various controversial figures of British Empire got attacked in Britain and in some other parts of the world.

You saw a parallel conversation emerging at the political level in the Caribbean amongst the grouping of Caribbean countries about unresolved issues and legacies of colonialism. There has been a longstanding conversation from heads of state in various Caribbean countries, and not just Caribbean countries that were colonized by the British, but also those countries with ties to France and the Netherlands and Spain, about the need for perhaps reparations. There's a huge conversation about reparations for Haiti, which France has a very complicated legacy with. There's a conversation about what the Dutch should be doing with their own possessions in, say, Aruba and so forth.

Then absolutely, in places like Barbados, Jamaica, a number of other countries, you had political leaders come to the fore and say now is the time not only for us to reevaluate our relationship with the Monarchy itself," in the cases of countries where the king is now their head of state, but also even in countries where the Monarchy is no longer the head of state, to really reevaluate how they identify with that Imperial legacy, and that involves discussions about slavery and, of course, at least in the Caribbean context, a real conversation about reparations.

Brian Lehrer: Let me get a couple of calls in here. Namina in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Namina.

Namina: Oh, Brian, good morning, my favorite star in the whole wide world. Thank you for taking my call.

Brian Lehrer: Oh, you're so kind.

Namina: But you are. Anyway, I'm from Sierra Leone. Freetown, Sierra Leone, West Africa. It's a British colony. The British did it so well that we in Sierra Leone are more British than the British. Our mentality, our education, the way of thinking, the way we do things up till today. We gained independence April '61 and we are still British. They've done that. For me, the person that was supposed to make all the countries that don't have their independent, the Queen was supposed to let that happen.

All the artifacts that are out there, the person that was supposed to make them go back to where they belong is the Queen. I don't believe Charles is going to do, pardon my language, a damn thing ever. I don't think he's going to, and it's sad because this woman is gone. People are saying that, "Oh, he's not a politician." What is more political than slavery? What is more political [unintelligible 00:11:35]? She is a silent killer.

I'm sorry I'm using that word, because she sits down and she makes things happen very quietly, and she's gone. She [inaudible 00:11:46] Africa, take land, name them, rename them. She has that much power given to her. Why? I don't know. She is gone. Charles is not going to do anything. Those artifacts, those countries, they need their independent and they need those things to be returned.

Brian Lehrer: Namina, thank you so much for your call. Ishaan, is this the first plea and complaint that you have heard of that sort, and in the case of Sierra Leone or anywhere else?

Ishaan Tharoor: I think it's incredibly important to stress how divergent the conversation is. In Britain, especially amongst those who are very moved by the Queen, there's this incredible bafflement when you talk to some Britains about how you could equate Queen Elizabeth, our cuddly dear Queen Elizabeth with a legacy of Empire partially because she was not around and certainly not the queen at the time when Britain was doing its most heinous things, although there are exceptions for the ways in which Britain carried out counterinsurgencies in the 1950s and '60s.

What is fascinating to me, as I said, there's this desire to separate the Monarch from the Monarchy, but at the same time, what is the Monarch without the Monarchy? What are we talking about here? When we talk about this political figurehead who was surrounded by the trappings of centuries of British nomination and exploitation around the world, whose mother in her crown possesses diamonds leadership in India, whose entire ecosystem is created by centuries of British plunder around the world? What are we talking about when we talk about Monarchy and what it represents?

Brian Lehrer: One more call. Patrick in Inwood, you're on WNYC. Hi, Patrick.

Patrick: Hi, Brian. Thanks for taking my call. I think it is ludicrous to try and separate the Monarch who ascended to the throne in the midst of the Mau Mau rebellion and who created this sham of a Commonwealth [unintelligible 00:13:58] for me at this point in time is to give my native Trinidad and Tobago a chance to win a few medals every four years in the Commonwealth games.

Otherwise, the opportunity exists now for us to address the issue of reparations at a time when the Caribbean region as whole, and in fact, all of the so-called realms of the Commonwealth contributed less than probably 2% to global warming and are now the subject or the objects of extreme global catastrophic warming. What we need is to have the jewels and the diamonds and the rubies and the [unintelligible 00:14:43] and the crowns returned to their rightful owners, and the issue reparations be put clearly on the table.

Brian Lehrer: Patrick, thank you so much. In our last 30 seconds, Ishaan, since both callers brought it up, are reparations in the realm of possibility?

Ishaan Tharoor: I would say probably not. There are political demands for it, but there's also going to be concerted opposition to that in Britain. It's something that the British government, not the Monarchy, has to do, and that triggers a whole difference out of political conversations about what a future British government would be willing to [unintelligible 00:15:17].

I think what's very important, as the callers have said, is that throughout all these complicated political histories, Queen Elizabeth remained quite silent, and she did not apologize. She did not specifically speak out about Kenya and the brutality visited upon the Mau Mau rebels, and that is a legacy. As much as we can celebrate her grace, poise, and dignity through so many challenges, the legacy of her silence is also deeply important.

Brian Lehrer: We leave it there with Ishaan Tharoor, foreign affairs columnist at The Washington Post, and a take felt very deeply around British Commonwealth nations that didn't make it into the press very much during all the ceremonies after the passing of Queen Elizabeth. Ishaan, thanks a lot.

Ishaan Tharoor: Thanks for having me.

 

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