QUEEN ELIZABETH II AND THE COMMONWEALTH – HER ROLE AND LEGACY
QUEEN ELIZABETH II AND THE COMMONWEALTH – HER ROLE AND LEGACY

Summary/Abstract: This paper aims to present the role played by queen Elizabeth II in the transformation of the old British Commonwealth into the Commonwealth as we know it today, and the legacy that she leaves behind. We briefly introduce the founding documents that paved the way for the modern Commonwealth: The Balfour Declaration of 1926, The Statute of Westminster of 1931 and the London Declaration of 1949, documents which reshaped the constitutional links between the British Crown and the members of the Commonwealth. We review the queen’s contribution to solving various crises in the Commonwealth like the Rhodesian civil war, her support for the establishment of the Commonwealth Secretariat and other Commonwealth bodies by means of which Commonwealth nations could express their own identity and aspirations. We also analyse the symbolism of the Commonwealth Games and of the Commonwealth Service and the queen’s participation in their development. Furthermore, we also illustrate how the queen used her three constitutional rights (the right to be consulted, the right to encourage and the right to warn) in order to perform her duties as Head of the Commonwealth. We also aim to investigate the sources of the queen’s power and we circumscribe our analysis to Dorothy Emmet’s taxonomy: power as “creative energy” and power as “personal influence”

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