London Conference (1926)
The 1926 London Conference (also known as the 1926 Imperial Conference ) on the British Empire helped define the foundations of the Commonwealth ; the final document of the conference, the second Balfour Declaration , stated that the Dominions were equal to the United Kingdom :
“They are autonomous communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate one to another in any aspect of their domestic or external affairs, though united by a common allegiance to the Crown, and freely associated as members of the British Commonwealth of Nations. "
This was preceded by the Imperial Conferences of 1921 and 1923 after the end of the First World War . The conference took place from October 19 to November 23, 1926, immediately after the General Assembly of the League of Nations in 1926. Present were representatives from Great Britain and the Dominions of Canada , Australia , New Zealand , the Union of South Africa , the Irish Free State and Newfoundland and India .
Issues concerning relations within the Empire were dealt with in the Inter-Imperial Relations Committee , which met fifteen times from October 27 to November 19, 1926, chaired by the former Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary of the United Kingdom and acting Lord President of the Council Arthur Balfour . Other members of the Balfour Committee were the British Foreign Secretary Austen Chamberlain , the British Colonial Secretary Leopold Stennett Amery , the Prime Minister of Canada William Lyon Mackenzie King , Australia's Stanley Bruce , New Zealand's Gordon Coates , the South African Union James Barry Munnick Hertzog and Newfoundland's Walter Stanley Monroe , the Vice-President of the Government Council of the Irish Free State Kevin O'Higgins and the Secretary of State for India Lord Birkenhead , as well as other Ministers and MPs.
The final report of the preliminary negotiations, the Balfour Report , which rejected the idea of a codified constitution for the Empire following British tradition, was adopted by the conference on November 19th and published on November 20th.
After the conferences of the 1920s, there were no real constitutional agreements, but the individual Dominions acquired their own alliance rights and began to build diplomatic relations with other states. In addition, there was no review of the compatibility of the laws with those of Great Britain.
The judicial move from the Dominions to the highest courts in London has also been abandoned. In this context, the term “Commonwealth” prevailed instead of the term “Empire”. The Westminster Statute (1931) codified this development.
literature
- Michael Maurer: Brief history of England , Federal Agency for Civic Education, Bonn 2005, p. 431.
- Hessel Duncan Hall: Commonwealth. A history of the British Commonwealth of Nations , Van Nostrand Reinhold, London 1971 ISBN 0442022018 .