Crown and countries

Next week, 53 world leaders arrive in London for the Commonwealth summit. It is hard to imagine a better network for the globalised age. Leaders of countries with a combined population of more than two billion will come to discuss issues of common interest. There will be a banquet hosted by the Queen — in her role as the Head of the Commonwealth — at Buckingham Palace, and a day-long leaders’ retreat at Windsor Castle. A nod to history, to be sure, but if the Commonwealth was just about nostalgia the summits would have stopped long ago.

The G53 will have much to discuss. The Commonwealth has a shared language, overlapping administrative and legal systems (largely based on English common law) and a shared heritage. This leads to the ‘Commonwealth Advantage’, with trade between members higher and the cost of doing business much lower. The Commonwealth contains half of the world’s top 20 emerging cities. It is the perfect alliance for the 21st century, and the summit comes at the right time, when Britain is making new alliances and lifting its sights to more distant horizons.

In the months before the European Union referendum, JP Morgan calculated that the nations of the Commonwealth would make a more coherent trading bloc than the members of the European Union. This isn’t saying much. It found that almost any group you could imagine has more in common than the EU: a reconstituted Ottoman Empire, for example, or an alliance of countries beginning with the letter ‘B’. Europe’s defining characteristic is the dazzling diversity of its countries — and attempts to impose conformity end badly.