Suppose the political climate in the United States became such that a large number of the populace, more than a majority, wanted something more exciting than celebrities to obssess about; say they wanted something like, oh, a Royal Family. Suppose the government of the United States decided it would like to win the instant cooperation and admiration of certain countries, and the best way to do so would be by joining the Commonwealth (you know, the one whose Head is Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second). If this impossible situation came about, what would the US have to do to join the Commonwealth?
To join the Commonwelath as far as I know all they would have to do is ask and sign the Harare (oh the irony!) Declaration.
That wouldn’t make Her Majesty the US head of state - she isn’t HoS of quite a lot of the Commonwealth.
How that would happen is that the US would have to change it’s constitution and invite her to become HoS (perhaps by becoming part of a Greater Canada?).
This is not without precedent - I believe it was Fiji that recently asked to to assume the HoS role - which she did.
It’ll add a bit of class to your currency but the “F.D.” on the coins is going to cause a few problems!
We’re awfully sorry our ancestors persecuted your ancestors for their beliefs, confiscated their property, harried them out of the country, and exiled them to a frozen wasteland where the football rules are weird and bacon is more or less the same thing as ham.
Why stop with joining the commonwealth? I say tear apart the declaration of independance and go back to being a happy, loyal British colony. Things were better when Brits were in charge of the world anyway.
I seriously doubt the US will every join the Commonwealth or re-join the British Empire (whats left of it), so its kind of a moot question. A marginally better question though is, what would it take for the US to join the EU? After all, they are considering letting in other countries not strickly IN Europe, and the economic benifits would be good (I’d think) to both sides. One currency (and I’d think a huge boost to the euro), open trade with no tarrifs, etc. And of course the EU would have a real military then.
Seriously though, what would it take? Is it even remotely possible (forgetting for a moment that the US would probably never go for it) the Europeans would let the US join?
Haven’t you noticed? We’ve already started: we’ve imported American athlete attitudes into the NHL, and it has completely fallen apart. Soon, Canadians will be desperate for sports, and either turn to baseball and (real) football, or commit suicide when faced with watching curling and soccer.
The next step? Replacing those Tom Hogans with Krispy Kremes. Then, nothing can stop us!
(I know this was a joke, but I’m going to answer semi-seriously :))
Naw…not unless they all left the new ‘state’ of England (and it might be broken up into multiple states if it joined the union anyway)…after all, it would simply be another Blue state with one (or maybe 2 or 3) more seats in the congress…not nearly enough to shift the balance. However, depending on how many EC votes they got, it could shift things enough to allow for a Democrat president to finally win.
I wonder what the Brits would think of becoming a state in the union. snort As to the Queen, we’d probably just leave her be…she is a great tourist attraction after all. Maybe the former Brits could bribe us with patents of nobility. I always wanted to be a noble…
2 or 3 more seats in Congress? You’re nuts. The state would have a population twice the size of California. That’s some major representation there. Even more if they broke the UK up into little bits and they each got two senators.
Plus we’d have to give up baseball, football and basketball in favor or cricket, soccer and rugby. Does cricket have a steroids problem at the moment?
The EU idea has some merit, although I can’t see the US ever agreeing to the kind of “equalizations” that would be necessary. I like the Angloshpere idea better, and think it could work out well for the participants.
Based on an estimated US pop of 270 million, and a UK pop of 60 million, the UK states (let’s say there are four of them, England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) would account for 18% of the combined population, or about 79 Congressional seats. Probably 50 of those would be Democrats, if not as many as 60, based on the current UK Parliament.
The combined states would have 87 electoral votes. The addition of eight Senators would raise the number of electoral votes to 546, requiring 274 for election. The 87 electoral votes in the UK states would be almost 33% of the votes needed to be elected president.
In other words, the integrated UK would be very politically powerful, and would be a big boost to the Democrats.
