Matthew Yglesias writes:
British policies in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, however, demonstrate that there were approaches that the United Kingdom could have taken to the thirteen colonies that would have led to a workable form of political association. Indeed, even without any formal structure, after World War II the British settler states share a set of fairly close ties.
The key point in response to this is that British policies in C/A/NZ were informed by the failures of colonial policy in the 13 colonies that became the United States. New Zealand gained effective self-government in the 1850s, and Canada of course became independent relatively rapidly in the 1860s. The Australian colonies with penal settlements had somewhat more oversight from London. It took the American Revolution to work out a workable form of settler colonialism, and as Brad De Long points out the democratic example in the U.S. forced democratic reforms in Britain too.
One might also point out that New Zealand and Australia were democratic innovators themselves; the secret ballot was an Australian innovation, women's suffrage and guaranteed representation in parliament for indigenous populations New Zealand ones.
C/A/NZ had enough effective sovereignty that the granting of actual formal independence from Britain (Statute of Westminster) was seen as a matter of no great urgency in the 1930s and 1940s, as the prerogative of the British parliament to pass legislation affecting life in the Dominions had never been exercised in a long time.
There was a formal structure for maintaining associations after WWII -- it's still going, and it's called the Commonwealth.
Posted by robe0419 at July 7, 2004 1:51 PM