Balfour Declaration of 1926
The Balfour Declaration of 1926, issued by the 1926 Imperial Conference of British Empire leaders in London, was named after Arthur Balfour, who was Lord President of the Council.[1] It declared the United Kingdom and the Dominions to be:
... 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
British Commonwealth of Nations.[2]
The Inter-Imperial Relations Committee, chaired by Balfour, drew up the document preparatory to its unanimous approval by the imperial prime ministers on 15 November 1926.[3] It was first proposed by South African Prime Minister J. B. M. Hertzog and Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King.
The declaration accepted the growing political and diplomatic independence of the Dominions in the years after World War I. It also recommended that the
The conclusions of the Imperial Conference of 1926 were re-stated by the 1930 conference and incorporated in the
References
- ^ "Balfour Report | United Kingdom [1926]". Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 1 September 2021.
- ^ Clause II
- S2CID 143421201.
- ^ Statute of Westminster, 1931, 22 Geo. V, c. 4, s. 4.
Further reading
- Hall, H. Duncan (1962). "The genesis of the Balfour declaration of 1926". Journal of Commonwealth Political Studies. 1 (3): 169–193. .
- Holland, Robert F. (1981). Britain and the Commonwealth Alliance, 1918–39. Springer.
- McIntyre, W. David (1999). "The strange death of dominion status". The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History. 27 (2): 193–212. .