what countries are part of the british commonwealth

Welcoming the announcement, Commonwealth Secretary-General The Rt Hon Patricia Scotland, QC, said: ‘The Commonwealth, which began as eight nations in 1949, is growing to 56. The Commonwealth admitted Gabon and Togo as its 55th and 56th members respectively earlier this year. Zimbabwe also left voluntarily in 2003, President Emmerson Mnangagwa applied for the country to rejoin the Commonwealth in 2018. Please contact us for subscription options.Membership is voluntary and former members of the Commonwealth include Ireland which left in 1949 and Maldives which withdrew in 2016.

Johnson first floated the idea to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky when he traveled to the Ukrainian capital on April 9, and his government has since then lobbied Kyiv hard over the proposal, it noted.īritain would be the leader of the new eurosceptic and anti-Russian alliance, which would extend to Ukraine, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, as well as Turkiye 'potentially, at a later stage,” it also said.Ĭorriere’s report was written by one of its correspondents at the World Economic Forum in Davos, based on anonymous sources who are “aware of the talks” and are taking part in the high-level meeting in Switzerland.Īnadolu Agency website contains only a portion of the news stories offered to subscribers in the AA News Broadcasting System (HAS), and in summarized form. The countries in the new bloc would be united by their “diffidence towards Brussels” and criticism of Germany’s excessively timid response to the Russian aggression in Ukraine, the report suggested. The daily Corriere della Sera called the idea a “European Commonwealth” and described it as “a new system of political, economic and military alliances - alternative to the European Union.” No government in the Commonwealth exercises power over the others, as is the case in a political union. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is trying to create a new bloc of European nations that would bring together Ukraine, much of Eastern Europe, and Turkiye at a later stage, according to Italian media on Friday. The Commonwealth of Nations is a voluntary association of 56 sovereign states.Most of them were British colonies or dependencies of those colonies.

What countries are part of the british commonwealth