A diminished Commonwealth

As the 2026 Commonwealth summit concluded in Antigua and Barbuda, King Charles III’s expressions of horror and sorrow over slavery offered an appropriate moment to mourn another loss: the Commonwealth’s diminishing capacity to shape the world around it. The King’s sentiments deserve acknowledgement, but an organisation once associated with confronting injustice increasingly seems content to describe it eloquently.
For those who remember the Commonwealth of the 1970s, the contrast is painful. Newly independent countries of the centuries-old European empires in every continent were asserting that political independence must mean more than replacing the flag above Government House. They wanted an international order in which racial equality, sovereignty, and economic development – all deformed under the hubris of imperial rule – carried practical weight.
The Commonwealth became one arena in which they pursued that ambition. The 1971 Singapore Declaration articulated principles of equality and opposition to racial discrimination. The 1977 Gleneagles Agreement translated opposition to apartheid into commitments to discourage sporting contacts with South Africa. At Lusaka in 1979, Commonwealth diplomacy helped prepare the ground for the negotiations leading to Zimbabwe’s independence. These were imperfect achievements, but they addressed living structures of domination.
For Guyanese, that history has a particular resonance. Shridath Ramphal, Secretary General from 1975 to 1990, demonstrated how an international institution could amplify the influence of small countries. His contribution to southern Africa’s liberation struggles gave substance to the proposition that diplomatic imagination could compensate for limited national power. As a Guyanese occupying that office, Ramphal, who had served as Burnham’s Foreign Minister, helped deflect criticism and censure of the creeping dictatorship established by “the Kabaka”.
As such, he demonstrated that there was no golden age of consistent virtue and that Governments could champion freedom abroad while restricting it at home. Burnham, after all, was one of the staunchest opponents of apartheid in South Africa, and even risked the wrath of the US when he permitted Cuban aircraft ferrying troops to Angola to refuel here. For sure, Commonwealth pressure did not single-handedly defeat apartheid, but the organisation possessed a recognisable political purpose, sustained into the struggles of the 1980s.
Its subsequent decline is therefore best understood as a loss of collective ambition: the Commonwealth still convenes and still declares, but what is harder to discern is the common political project for which its members will accept inconvenience, expend influence, or confront powerful interests. This year’s summit reported half a billion US dollars in new commitments covering renewable energy, skills, and economic opportunities. Those commitments deserve scrutiny and, where delivered, credit; but investment announcements alone cannot restore the authority of an organisation that once helped make racial domination an international liability.
The slavery reparations debate exposes the gap ironically just by looking at Charles III’s namesake ancestors’ role. In 1632, King Charles I granted a royal monopoly licence to the reconstituted Guinea Company to transport enslaved people, and Charles II transformed Britain’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade from a marginal commercial activity into a fully-fledged, state-backed enterprise. Through his implementation of royal monopolies, military backing, and legal structures, Charles II and the Royal African Company (RAC) aggressively expanded the slave trade.
Charles III, as head of the Commonwealth, expressed profound personal sorrow and advocated practical partnerships to address historical wrongs, but his speech offered no formal apology or commitment to reparations. The descendants of the enslaved are entitled to ask when acknowledgement becomes an obligation and when an obligation produces a remedy. The responsibility extends beyond the monarch, and Commonwealth Governments must decide whether their association can organise sustained pressure for reparatory justice, fairer climate finance, debt reform and the protection of small states against coercion.
The old Commonwealth’s achievement was to turn the shared experience of empire into a platform from which its inequalities could be challenged. Its successors risk turning that experience into an annual exchange of sorrow and reassurance. We should agitate for more, and a Commonwealth that remembers its purpose could still provide a platform through which collective action enlarges the freedom of small nations to act.

Source: Guyana Times