ABSTRACT
The Commonwealths are one of the unintended consequences of
unplanned decolonization, even although the left in the British
Labour Party had long advocated national independence and inter-
national organization. As indicated in the concluding chapter, the inter-and non-state Commonwealths emerged out of inter-war long-
range planning and post-war short-term imperatives around demobili-
zation, decolonization and democratization. In the first decade of the
twentieth century, the Dominions had agreed to ‘‘Imperial Con-
ferences’’ among those colonies with ‘‘responsible government’’: Aus-
tralia, Britain, Canada, Newfoundland, New Zealand and South
Africa, plus India from 1917 and Ireland from 1922. And from 1954,
their concerns and deliberations happened to be largely compatible with other major dimensions of post-war multilateralism, namely the
UN and IFI systems. Although several of the victorious allies were
‘‘old’’ Commonwealth-i.e. Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand,
South Africa and the UK-the primary regional foci of post-war
planning were Western Europe and East Asia rather than, say, Sub-
Saharan Africa or South Asia. And it soon became apparent that the
British empire was in no financial state to resist myriad nationalist
pressures arising in most of its imperial outposts, themselves encouraged by invaluable wartime service by hundreds of thousands of sol-
diers from the colonies with the Allies in Europe and Asia.
