A talking shop which offers access to development aid and informal trade talks while conferring prestige and an international platform is hard to dislike. Nations like Sudan, Yemen and to a lesser extent Madagascar may well like the Commonwealth precisely because it doesn't have the power to enforce international norms and has to rely on "constructive engagement" - a staple of regime's from Khartoum to Pyongyang in North Korea. A second look at the list suggests some worrying truths. Britain, eventually, declined but the idea got media coverage and Norway took them up on it this month to the tune of $250m.
Its formal and informal channels benefit the little guy, something that Guyana demonstrated when it floated its offer to protect the entirety of its standing forest in return for development aid on the sidelines of the Uganda meeting in 2007. no more no less." While its membership is almost entirely made up of English-speaking former colonies that share a legal system and often a constitutional framework, Britain is no longer dominant in what is a voluntary association. It enables otherwise isolated and impoverished nations to network with powerful allies and be, in the words of one booster, "a decent club. To its supporters it is a British foreign policy success story that has come to encompass every region, religion and race on the planet, something no other organistation apart from the UN can boast. The old club of the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa has since swollen to 54 countries, until it lost Zimbabwe, and is expected to return to that number during the coming weekend. Formerly the "British Commonwealth", the modern version came into being 50 years ago, shedding the British part of its tag and becoming the Commonwealth of Nations. That depends, both on who is asking and who is answering.
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