The British Imperial Establishment, Post Imperial Era, and the ‘Churchillian’ World View, 1945-2016. (Adjustments & Challenges in Contemporary British Diplomatic Strategy)

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great
Asian as well as great Western nations, is the world’s best hope that
Asia and the West will develop in
friendship and co-operation instead of
hostility and suspicion. This, as I see it, is a task that history bas
confined
to the British Commonwealth. There is no other force in the world so well
fitted to discharge
it, no other association of nations in which the best of
Asia and the West is equally represented and
intimately united.”5

P.O. Gordon-Walker, 1950.

Professor H.V. Hodson of
Oxford University, however, after World War
Two described the Modern Commonwealth as the “Fourth British
Empire”.6 This
was following Alfred Zimmern’s phrase, the
“third British Empire”7 which he
coined in 1920. Professor
Zimmern had divided the History of the British Empire
into three periods. The first was the early expansion
overseas and lasted until
1776-1783. The second, from the American War of Independence until the
First
World War, we marked by the construction of a new Empire based on sea-power
and trade whose
components gradually achieved internal autonomy as Chapter
Two showed, yet remained politically dependent on
the mother country. During
and after the first World War the third period began as a result of the evolution
of
the British Commonwealth up to the time when Britain came to accept a non-
British-stock India as an
equal partner to white Dominions which worked the start
of the Modern Commonwealth’s evolution, or
Hodson’s “Fourth British Empire”

– in other words, the
fourth and final manifestation of an historical and political
entity created by Britain on the world
stage.

Britain
managed to hold on to the imperial ties by creating the Modern
Commonwealth in the decolonisation process.
Subsequently, she also managed
to become a member of the European Economic Community. Britain’s entry
into
the EEC has, however, resulted in substantial trading commitments, which, in
order to be an active
member, need fulfilling. Therefore, the UK has become less
and less involved in her old imperial ties and its
commercial activities and the

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