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http://blogs.ottawacitizen.com/2011/01/30/three-cheers-for-the-anglosphere/

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Robert Sibley's Ideas & Consequences

Some years ago I wrote a column on the need for an “empire” based on the cultural and political values shared among the English-speaking peoples of the world. I argued that idea of empire should not be all that controversial since empires have been the historical norm. Sumeria and Assyria, Persia and Rome, the Carolingian and the Holy Roman empires, the Spanish, Portuguese, British, French, Dutch and Soviet empires: World history is imperial history. Compared with empire, the nation-state is an historical anomaly.

I went on to argue that we are seeing the emergence of new empires in our post-Cold War world. Soon, I suggested, we’d see a Chinese imperium, and, perhaps, even an Islam empire of sorts. In this regard, I suggested, it was necessary for the English-speaking nations, those that shared a tradition of liberal democratic institutional order, to form their own empire. Essentially, it would be a “voluntary empire,” an “association” of countries that share practices of common law and democratic institutions. This “political civilization,” as historian Robert Conquest calls it, includes primarily, although not exclusively, English-speaking countries — the U.S., Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and Canada, along with the Caribbean and India, both of which largely adhere to western institutions. Call it the Anglosphere.

The term Anglosphere has been popularized by American journalist James Bennett, historian Andrew Roberts and commentator Nick Adams. Each of them argue that the Anglosphere has been a bulwark against the forces of disorder and a beacon for enlightened political and social evolution, and to claim this is not to denigrate others but to recognize a reality. As Adams puts it in the YouTube video below, “Anglospherist exceptionalism is not racism.” He and other Anglospherists argue that closer integration of English-speaking countries would create a power bloc that could withstand the disintegrative forces elsewhere in the world.

The idea has been floating around for a long time, of course. Indeed, in the late 19th century, many Canadians thought Canada’s role in the world was to help foster a union between the United States and the British Empire. “That is the work that Canada is appointed by its position and history to do,” wrote George Monro Grant, the one-time principal of Queen’s University. “We are to build up a North American Dominion … to be the living link, the permanent bond of union, between Britain and the United States.”

John Watson, the pre-eminent philosophical mind in early 20th-century Canada, offered moral justifications for empire. In his 1919 book, The State in Peace and War, Watson argued that imperialism is justified if it is a force for civilization and the development of moral consciousness. “Political rule over others is only justified if the rulers exercise their authority for a good that transcends their own desires.”

More recently, this idealist notion of empire was refurbished by British historian Niall Ferguson in his book, Empire. He argued that the British Empire was, by and large, a force for good. But Watson’s ideal also fits the prescriptions of Anglosphere proponents. “What is needed is a new kind of imperialism,” says political theorist Robert Cooper, “one compatible with human rights and cosmopolitan values: an imperialism which aims to bring order and organization but which rests on the voluntary principle.”In other words, an Anglosphere “empire” would be an imperium of freedom.

The idea of the Anglosphere is also the focus of the latest edition of The New Criterion, arguably the best intellectual magazine in North America. The editors devote most of the January issue to the concept of the Anglosphere, drawing on writers such as Mark Steyn, Roger Kimball and Keith Windshuttle to draw out the need for and implications of such an “empire.”

Here, for example, is Steyn lamenting the decline of the Anglosphere that has given the world so much in the last two centuries:

One of my favorite lines from the Declaration of Independence never made it into the final text. They were Thomas Jefferson’s parting words to his fellow British subjects across the ocean: “We might have been a free and great people together.” But in the end, when it mattered, they were a free and great people together. Britain was eclipsed by its transatlantic offspring, by a nation with the same language, the same legal inheritance, and the same commitment to liberty.

It’s not likely to go that way next time round. And “next time round” is already under way. We are coming to the end of a two-century Anglosphere dominance, and of a world whose order and prosperity many people think of as part of a broad, general trend but which, in fact, derive from a very particular cultural inheritance and may well not survive it. To point out how English the world is is, of course, a frightfully un-English thing to do. No true Englishman would ever do such a ghastly and vulgar thing. You need some sinister rootless colonial oik like me to do it. But there’s a difference between genial self-effacement and contempt for one’s own inheritance.

Not so long ago, Geert Wilders, the Dutch parliamentarian and soi-disant Islamophobe, flew into London and promptly got shipped back to the Netherlands as a threat to public order. After the British Government had reconsidered its stupidity, he was permitted to return and give his speech at the House of Lords—and, as foreigners often do, he quoted Winston Churchill, under the touchingly naive assumption that this would endear him to the natives. Whereas, of course, to almost all members of Britain’s governing elite, quoting Churchill approvingly only confirms that you’re an extremist lunatic.

Then there is Kimball, arguing that the world should be grateful for the English-speakers:

Consider Britain’s record as a colonial power. “Thanks to English law,” Keith Windschuttle notes in his essay below, “most British colonial officials delivered good government.” And the positive effects are not merely historical artifacts. They are patent everywhere in the world today. “The key regional powers in almost every corner of the globe,” Mark Steyn reminds us below, “are British-derived—from Australia to South Africa to India—and, even among the lesser players, as a general rule you’re better off for having been exposed to British rule than not: Why is Haiti Haiti and Barbados Barbados?”

“English institutions” you might say, “the rule of law, and all that.” Well, yes, but why were the English peculiarly prominent among the bearers of that beneficence? Again, I do not have an explanation. It has something to do, I feel sure, with the habit of liberty, the contagious temperament of freedom. It’s a trait that has been widely noticed. The Czech writer Karel Capek visited England in the 1920s. Writing about the country a few years later, he observed that the Englishman “stays in England all the time even when he happens to be somewhere else, say, Naples or Tibet. . . . England is not just a certain territory; England is a particular environment habitually surrounding Englishmen.” Santayana registered something similar in his essay on “The British Character” in Soliloquies in England (1922). “What governs the Englishman is his inner atmosphere, the weather in his soul.”

Instinctively the Englishman is no missionary, no conquero
r. He prefers the country to the town, and home to foreign parts. He is rather glad and relieved if only natives will remain natives and strangers strangers, and at a comfortable distance from himself. Yet outwardly he is most hospitable and accepts almost anybody for the time being; he travels and conquers without a settled design, because he has the instinct of exploration. His adventures are all external; they change him so little that he is not afraid of them. He carries his English weather in his heart wherever he goes, and it becomes a cool spot in the desert, and a steady and sane oracle amongst all the deliriums of mankind. Never since the heroic days of Greece has the world had such a sweet, just, boyish master. It will be a black day for the human race when scientific blackguards, conspirators, churls, and fanatics manage to supplant him.

Of course, such sentiments will not please those who swim in the tepid waters of political correctness. But then such creatures are an evolutionary throwback to more primitive tribes. In any case, those who are curious about the concept of the Anglosphere should read the New Criterion essays by Steyn, Kimball and others in full here and here and here and here.

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 367