Shortly after the official proclamation of Charles III as new king on Saturday September 10, almost 9,000 kilometers away, Gaston Browne, Prime Minister of Antigua and Barbuda, initialed a document acknowledging the new monarch. But, says the chain ITV on his website, a few minutes later, he reiterated his intention to organise, within three years, a referendum on the question of making his country a republic. He thus confided to the correspondent of the British channel: “This is not an act of hostility or any difference between Antigua and Barbuda and the monarchy, but this is the last step to complete our independence, to ensure that we let us truly be a sovereign nation.”
The Caribbean island is one of fourteen independent kingdoms that continue to have the British monarch as head of state. At the beginning of his reign, recalls The EconomistElizabeth II was the head of state of 32 countries, “for most settlements”. Most “many regard as a colonial anachronism the maintenance of li