‘So, Professor Murphy,” said the voice at the end of the line. “What does the Commonwealth mean to you?” It was 2014, and I had agreed to do a live interview about the Commonwealth for a radio talk show. Media interest had been sparked by the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, and while I waited, phone in hand, for my turn to speak, the presenter was busily soliciting Commonwealth-related thoughts from anyone he could find on Glasgow’s streets that morning.

Finally, just as the clock was ticking towards the very end of the show, the presenter turned his attentions to me. But I was stumped by the question. What does the Commonwealth mean to me? It was only since I had become director of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies (ICwS) a few years earlier that it had “meant” anything much at all. And what was that meaning? Lots of drinks receptions in the hollowed-out citadels of Britain’s former imperial power? Endless well-meaning conferences exploring how the Commonwealth could achieve its “true potential”?

In the three-and-a-half seconds while all this was racing through my head, the presenter correctly anticipated that a cheery anecdote would not be forthcoming, and moved on to the more concrete question: “What does the Commonwealth actually do?” I blurted out something spectacularly feeble along the lines of: “Well, it doesn’t do very much, but then it doesn’t cost very much.” And that was it – straight into the 10 o’clock news and traffic roundup. Not my finest hour.

With the Commonwealth Games taking place at the moment and the biennial Commonwealth heads of government meeting opening in London next week, my institute will again be fielding a high volume of press enquiries. And this time, I’ll be ready for the “What does it mean to you?” question. Back in 2014, I wasn’t. But it was a variant of another question that I had regularly been asked in the five years since I became director of the ICwS: “How did you become interested in the Commonwealth?” There was always an assumption that some element of my upbringing or family history must have sparked my interest in this unique organisation, one that is very largely made up of former parts of the British empire. It currently has 53 members, including Britain itself, which range in size from India, with a population of more than 1.3 billion people, to the tiny Pacific island states of Tuvalu and Nauru, with populations of about 11,000 and 13,000 respectively. But there was nothing I could really point to. I grew up in Hull. Very occasionally we did go overseas on family holidays – but only to the Isle of Man. I can’t remember anyone even mentioning Commonwealth Day while I was at school in the 1970s and 80s. Had they been fee-paying public schools, where a good smattering of the families would probably have had records of imperial service, the situation might have been different. But they most decidedly were not.

Later, as a postgraduate student studying how the Conservative party reacted to the decolonisation of Africa, I became familiar with the idea of the Commonwealth as a great, soothing comfort blanket for the party’s dwindling band of post-second world war imperial enthusiasts. They could reassure themselves that the sad business of granting independence to British colonies wasn’t really the end of the line. Like the souls of the faithful departed, these countries would simply join the heavenly throng of the Commonwealth and live in eternal peace and harmony.

For the next 20 years or so, insofar as I thought about the Commonwealth, it was largely as a relatively minor aspect of British foreign policy. During the postwar period, the organisation had moved from being seen as an essential prop of Britain’s “great power” status to representing a puzzle, then an irritant, and finally a constant source of disappointment. It has maintained a loyal band of supporters, mostly concentrated in a series of London-based affiliated organisations. Yet even they often seem unable to provide any very convincing reasons for their enthusiasm.

One sign of the Commonwealth’s diminishing significance is just how little people know about it. When, in 2010, the Royal Commonwealth Society published a survey of attitudes across its member states, it found that only half of those questioned knew that the Queen was head of the Commonwealth. A quarter of Jamaicans thought it was the US president, Barack Obama, and 10% of South Africans and Indians thought it was the former UN secretary-general, Kofi Annan.

For Britain’s administrative elite, the Commonwealth is a bit like a grandfather clock that has been in the family for generations. It hasn’t told the right time for decades, but no one has the heart to take such a treasured heirloom to the tip. All the same, in recent years, Britain’s mainstream parties had become increasingly reluctant to place significant weight on the Commonwealth as an instrument of the UK’s diplomatic, economic or even overseas aid policy. Then, in June 2016, a seismic shock was delivered to the UK’s sense of its place in the world when 52% of voters in that month’s referendum opted to leave the EU.

Suddenly, people started to talk about the Commonwealth again. The trouble was that most of what they were saying was nonsense.

In the weeks after Britain voted for Brexit, as I tried to come to terms with what seemed to me an unmitigated disaster, there were always sympathetic friends on hand to make matters worse. “You’re at the centre of things now,” they said. “You must be very busy. Apparently the Commonwealth is the way of the future.” To which, as the director of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, my response was: “If the Commonwealth is the future, then we’re in even more trouble than I thought.”

Despite the leave campaign’s best efforts to turn the Commonwealth into a symbol of Britain’s ability to stand on the international stage independently of the EU, its power and influence has long been on the wane. Just a year before the Brexit referendum, the party manifestos for the UK general election reflected the Commonwealth’s diminished importance. In place of Labour’s 1997 vow to give renewed priority to this “unique network of contacts linked by history, language and legal systems”, the party now barely mentioned it. The Conservatives were a little more forthcoming, although they largely cut and pasted the words from their 2010 document. Ukip, predictably, scattered in references far more frequently than anyone else. Yet even they had dropped a startlingly ambitious proposal that had featured in its 2010 manifesto, to establish “a Commonwealth Free Trade Area” with the other Commonwealth countries.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The opening ceremony of the 2018 Commonwealth Games in Australia last week. Photograph: EPA

So, how exactly did it manage to shuffle its way back into the political conversation? For the leave campaign, depicting the Commonwealth as a huge potential trading opportunity for the UK was a useful fiction. This was reassuring mood music for a campaign keen to demonstrate that Britain would not be left helpless and isolated after Brexit. Yet beyond a few hand-me-down figures about its supposed economic potential, there were few clues about how or why the volume of trade with Commonwealth member states would be increased.

Although the Commonwealth featured as an element in the snake oil sold to voters by the leave campaign, it was by no means the most potent ingredient. Indeed, many Brexiters struggled with the whole concept of the Commonwealth. On the one hand, it fed into their arguments that Britain had the opportunity to engage more actively with growing economies outside the EU. But it also sat uneasily within a campaign that had focused sharply on the issue of immigration.

Once the result was announced, some of Britain’s most prominent Commonwealth enthusiasts began celebrating. Less than a week after the vote, the Daily Telegraph carried an article by David Howell, then chairman of the Royal Commonwealth Society, under the headline “A bright future awaits Britain post-Brexit in the Commonwealth markets”. It rehearsed a series of arguments that had been regularly trotted out for two decades, including the idea of a “Commonwealth advantage” in terms of the ease and cost of trade, and the notion that the world’s future growth areas would be outside the EU: “It is to Asia, Africa and Latin America we need to look for the big prizes, and the Commonwealth network is the gateway to many of these fast-growing new economies,” Lord Howell wrote.

Given the ever more certain prospect that we will, indeed, leave the EU, it is worth looking closely at whether there is anything to this view. The origins of Howell’s argument go back to a brief and not very well-substantiated 1994 article by the Australian scholar Katherine West, titled “Britain, the Commonwealth and the Global Economy”, which was published in the the Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs. The piece began with the proposition that, for the UK, Europe had “become an economic black spot, with double-digit unemployment and the lowest rates of growth in the developed world”. It suggested that the British government’s “Eurocentric political rhetoric” tended to disguise the importance to Britain of markets outside the EU. West then moved to note “the spectacular economic growth” of Asian markets, suggesting again that “myopic concentration” on Europe on the part of British policymakers was an impediment to the exploitation of these markets.

Tony Blair’s New Labour government, which took office in May 1997, initially seemed keen to run with this idea. The UK was about to host a Commonwealth heads of government meeting for the first time in 20 years, and the idea of the Commonwealth as an instrument to promote British trade seemed a useful way of fitting this rather creaking institution into New Labour’s modernising agenda.

This new commercially minded love affair between the Blair government and the Commonwealth was, however, fairly shortlived. In the short term, Blair himself seemed disillusioned from virtually his first sight of the Commonwealth in action, irritated by the drawn-out and inconclusive nature of the Edinburgh Commonwealth heads of government meeting. In the longer term, and particularly after 9/11, Blair’s attentions focused on Anglo-American relations and the Middle East.

Nevertheless, it was clear that promoting the notion of the Commonwealth as an under-utilised business asset was a way of persuading the British government to take it seriously. During the next two decades, bodies such as the Royal Commonwealth Society, the Commonwealth Business Council and the Commonwealth Secretariat pushed the idea vigorously. In particular, they suggested that there was a “Commonwealth effect” that rendered intra-Commonwealth trade cheaper and easier – an idea that can be traced directly to West’s 1994 article.

In 2015, the Commonwealth Secretariat published a report that claimed to prove the existence of this “Commonwealth effect”, with data that purported to show that trade in goods and services between Commonwealth nations had been growing at almost 10% a year for two decades, and would “exceed $1tn by 2020”. The report also claimed that “when bilateral partners are both Commonwealth members, they trade on average 20% more”, and that, compared with other country pairs, “the bilateral trade costs for Commonwealth partners are, on average, 19% lower”.

These figures are now regularly rehearsed at Commonwealth gatherings, but there has been little objective analysis of this report, and we might well be cautious in reading too much into them. First, as the study notes, there are wide variations in the extent to which individual Commonwealth countries trade with others. For some, the proportion is relatively low. The UK and Canada are mentioned in this context as countries “positioned close to large non-Commonwealth markets”. By contrast, there are other member states, including Singapore and Malaysia, that enjoy greater geographical proximity to major Commonwealth trading partners, and so conduct a much higher proportion of intra-Commonwealth trade. Given this, and the fact that there are huge variations in the levels of trade conducted by individual member states, it is difficult to see what we can actually learn from an average figure for “Commonwealth advantage” between two notional Commonwealth states.

The fact is that in 2015, about 44% of UK goods and services went to the EU. By contrast, the entire rest of the Commonwealth received around 9% of UK exports. This is because intra-Commonwealth trade figures have been shaped more by a mixture of hard economic reality and historical accident than by any so-called Commonwealth effect. From the mid-1950s to around the late 80s, there was a fairly steady reduction in the proportion of total British exports and imports flowing to and from the Commonwealth. This was due to the revival of the economies of western Europe, which had been devastated by the second world war on the one hand, and the 1948 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (the predecessor of the World Trade Organisation) on the other, which began to unwind the UK’s preferential trading agreements with its remaining colonies and with the Commonwealth.

It is worth noting, too, that in the run-up to the referendum, Commonwealth member states were virtually as one in wishing Britain to remain part of the EU. Behind this uncharacteristic outbreak of unanimity is the simple fact that Brexit throws the UK’s future trading relationships into confusion. The working assumption is that the current EU agreements, which allow many developing Commonwealth countries access to the UK market on advantageous terms, will lapse in Britain at the moment that Brexit takes effect. It will only be after that point that the UK has the legal capacity to negotiate trade agreements independently of the EU.

This means many less-developed Commonwealth countries that currently conduct a significant proportion of their trade with the UK risk being hit by an immediate tariff hike. Given the finite resources available to the UK government for complex trade negotiations, and that attention is likely to be focused on the more lucrative markets of Europe, Asia and North America, Commonwealth countries quite reasonably fear that they will be a relatively low priority for Brexit Britain. The UK is also a major contributor to the EU aid budget, from which many Commonwealth countries benefit, and British overseas dependencies face the prospect of losing access to this important source of development funding altogether.

In October 2010, Michael Ancram – then the former Conservative shadow foreign secretary – published a pamphlet setting out a new agenda for British foreign policy. The document, titled Farewell to Drift: A New Foreign Policy for a Network World, showed the influence of David Howell’s worldview: the forces of globalisation were steadily undermining the significance of old-fashioned power blocs such as the EU. Conversely, the Commonwealth, with its lack of treaty or constitution and its emphasis on collaboration and mutual support, was “a readymade vehicle for positive action”.

“For too long the Commonwealth has been under-funded and underappreciated by many of its members, including the UK,” Ancram wrote. “For us it costs only 20p per person per year, while the EU costs £52 per person per year. It urgently needs, with British help, encouragement and involvement to become a bolder organisation that recognises its own strengths. It could have associate members as well as new members; indeed some of the giants of the world like Japan could become interested, especially if it is based in the emerging powerhouse of India. It is in our interest to encourage such countries to become involved in the Commonwealth in one way or another.”

During the 2016 referendum campaign, Ancram duly pinned his colours firmly to the leave mast. His encomium nicely encapsulated many elements of the British myth of the Commonwealth. This includes the tension between wishing to use the organisation more effectively, and disavowing any wish to lead it. Ancram was not the first Commonwealth enthusiast to recommend moving its headquarters to India, the most populous member state – but, more than seven years since the publication of his pamphlet, that prospect is no less remote. With many members of India’s policymaking elite seeing the Commonwealth as little more than a quaint relic of British imperialism, there is little chance of them offering it this sort of flag of convenience. There was also something familiar in Ancram’s ambiguous contrast between the supposed 20p cost of the Commonwealth, against the EU’s £52. Were we supposed to conclude that the Commonwealth is better value for money, or simply that it is under-resourced?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Theresa May visiting Bangalore in India in November 2016. Photograph: Getty Images

Commonwealth enthusiasts generally want to have it both ways: the Commonwealth has supposedly vast potential (thus the idea of Japan joining as an associate member), which could be augmented further with a little additional funding, yet membership will always remain cheaper than the EU, and not only in terms of the UK’s direct financial contribution. Somehow, this mythical Commonwealth of the future will cost less than the EU in terms of the vast number of hours required to negotiate its treaties and other formal agreements; it will not require members to make significant concessions in return for some collective good; and it will have only the most rudimentary of mechanisms to enforce its will.

In this light, the Commonwealth is the international relations equivalent of a homeopathic remedy – a cadre of staff so small as to be almost invisible when dissolved across a body comprising 2.4 billion people, which nevertheless does or could achieve miraculous results. But the promise of the Commonwealth can be seen in another, arguably far more realistic way. It is based on the prospect offered by charlatans and quacks throughout the ages – that of something for nothing.

In the decades since the second world war, the process of devising and agreeing mechanisms for European cooperation has indeed been time-consuming and expensive. But it has resulted in a series of concrete achievements, above all the creation of the world’s largest free-trading bloc. Decisions made at an EU level affect the texture of daily life in its member states in the way that the Commonwealth’s empty pronouncements do not. As a result, any contemporary survey of international relations since 1945 is likely to devote considerable space to the EU and little or none to the Commonwealth. Frankly, the EU matters, in a way that the Commonwealth does not.

This has long been apparent to those within the UK government who engage directly with the Commonwealth. It is far less obvious, however, to the vast majority of people in the UK, who know the organisation largely through occasional high-profile events such as the Commonwealth Games, and through the annual round-robin delivered in the Queen’s speech. It is at this level, and in this specifically British context, that the myth of the Commonwealth is arguably most dangerous. It encourages perceptions of the organisation as some sort of genuine global network with the UK at its centre, the other members ready to fall into line and embrace the prodigal mother whenever Britain finally decides that it is time to resume a guiding role.

It was this combination of a widespread unfamiliarity with how the modern Commonwealth actually functions, and a lingering sense that it is in some way a special asset to the UK, that allowed some in the leave camp to present it during the 2016 referendum campaign as a direct alternative to the EU. This was despite the fact that the vast majority of Commonwealth members, and indeed the secretary general, Patricia Scotland, emphasised that membership of both organisations was not only wholly compatible but also mutually beneficial. The referendum result marked the point when the Commonwealth ceased to be simply a puzzle in Whitehall – an itch the civil service didn’t quite know how or where to scratch – and became a contributory factor in, arguably, Britain’s greatest foreign policy disaster since the end of the second world war.

What, then, should be the basis of the UK’s future relationship with the Commonwealth? It could be argued that the referendum result has already ordained that this relationship will be an ever-closer one. But I doubt that. Brexit is unlikely to enhance British trade with Commonwealth countries. Indeed, in the short term, it might actually reduce it, as the UK struggles to replicate deals already in place under its EU membership. There may be closer trading and diplomatic relations with Australia and New Zealand, which represent the acceptable face of the organisation to those leave supporters who continue to regard the citizens of the notional white Commonwealth as “kith and kin”.

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But when it comes to the genuinely vast potential of the Indian market, a UK government driven by the anti-immigration agenda of leave voters is unlikely to make great strides in that direction. For example, India seems likely to want a relaxation of visa restrictions on its nationals in return for trade liberalisation. Certainly, the issue of immigration overshadowed Theresa May’s visit there in November 2016, leading to accusations that the UK wanted India’s business, but not its people. And whatever the future holds, invoking the name of the Commonwealth is unlikely to oil the wheels of any trade deal.

As the Commonwealth summit in London approaches, get ready to hear about the long list of good causes – from ending war and poverty to tackling climate change, and from spreading democracy to promoting gender equality – that the organisation champions. All of this is, indeed, laudable. But given the Commonwealth’s record in recent years, one would need a great deal of faith and a remarkably short memory to believe that the organisation really can make a significant contribution in any of these areas. What is surely beyond doubt is that the Commonwealth cannot rescue the UK from the grievous, self-inflicted wound of Brexit. And any suggestion that it can will only serve to rob the organisation of whatever last vestiges of credibility it still possesses.

Adapted from The Empire’s New Clothes: The Myth of the Commonwealth by Philip Murphy, published by Hurst on 19 April

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