The Anglosphere Primer: part 1
24 July 2003
The first part of James C Bennett's essential introduction to the Anglosphere concept.

Over the past several years, a new term, Anglosphere, has emerged (1) into political and social discussion in the English-speaking world. This term, which can be defined briefly as the set of English-speaking, Common Law nations, implies far more than merely the sum of all persons who employ English as a first or second language. To be part of the Anglosphere is to adhere, by birth or choice, to the fundamental customs and values that form the core of English-speaking cultures. These include individualism, rule of law, honoring contracts and covenants beyond family and crony circles, and the maintenance of freedom in the first rank of political and cultural values.

Nations comprising the Anglosphere share a common historical narrative in which the Magna Carta, the values of the English and American Bills of Rights, and such Common Law principles as trial by jury, presumption of innocence, "a man's home is his castle", and "a man's word is his bond" are taken for granted. Thus persons or communities who happen to communicate or do business in English are not necessarily part of the Anglosphere, unless their cultural values have also come to share such values of the historical English-speaking civilization.

The Anglosphere, as a network civilization (2) without a corresponding political form, has necessarily imprecise boundaries. Geographically, the densest nodes of the Anglosphere are found in the United States and the United Kingdom, while Anglophone regions of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and South Africa are powerful and populous outliers. The educated English-speaking populations of the Caribbean, Oceania, Africa and India pertain to the Anglosphere to various degrees.

What the Anglosphere Perspective Does and Does Not Hold

The Anglosphere perspective suggests that the English-speaking nations have not only formed a distinct branch of Western civilization for most of history, they are now becoming a distinct civilization in their own right. Western in origin but no longer entirely Western in composition and nature, this civilization is marked by a particularly strong civil society, which is the source of its long record of successful constitutional government and economic prosperity. The Anglosphere's continuous leadership of the Scientific-Technological Revolution from the seventeenth century through the twenty-first century stems from these characteristics and is thus likely to continue for the foreseeable future.

Beginning in World War I and continuing into the post-Cold War world, Anglosphere nations have developed increasingly important mutual cooperative institutions. The Anglosphere's potential is to expand these close collaborations into deeper ties in trade, defense, free movement of peoples, and scientific cooperation, all bound together by our common language, culture, and values. Such institutions are not meant to replace other ties between English-speaking and non-English-speaking nations, but to expand the range of options for cooperation between nations. Network Commonwealth theory sees international collaboration as most effectively emerging through the construction of network commonwealth structures among groups of nations whose like characteristics permit close cooperation, and at the same time linking the various groups of nations together through inter-commonwealth ties.

Anglospherists promote more and stronger cooperative institutions, not to build some English-speaking superstate on the model of the European Union, or to annex (3) Britain, Canada, or Australia to the United States, but rather to protect the English-speaking nations' common values from external threats and internal fantasies. Thus, Anglospherists call on all English-speaking nations to abandon Haushoferian fantasies of geographical blocs: on America to downgrade its hemispherist ambitions, on Britain to rethink its Europeanist illusions, and on Australia to reject its "Asian identity" fallacy.

Far from a centralizing federation, the best form of association is what I call a "network commonwealth": a linked series of cooperative institutions, evolved from existing structures like trade agreements, defense alliances, and cooperative programs. Rather than despising the variable geometry principle, it would embrace it, forming coalitions of the willing to respond to emerging situations. Anglosphere institutions would be open and nonexclusive; Britain, America, Canada, Australia, and others would be free to maintain other regional ties as they saw fit.

Anglospherism is assuredly not the racialist Anglo-Saxonism (4) dating from the era around 1900, nor the sentimental attachment of the Anglo-American Special Relationship of the decades before and after World War II. Any consideration of the Anglosphere concept should indeed include examination of previous attempts to create institutional frameworks for the English-speaking world. However, any comparison of the ideas and times of such Anglo-Saxonists as Sir Alfred Milner, George E.G. Catlin, Cecil Rhodes and Theodore Roosevelt to those of contemporary Anglospherists must also take into account the considerable increase in understanding of the world that has come to pass over those years. Contemporary Anglospherist thought bears roughly the same relation to past Anglo-Saxonism as current evolutionary thought bears to the simplistic Darwinism of Milner's contemporaries.

Anglo-Saxonism relied on underlying assumptions of an Anglo-Saxon race, and sought to unite racial "cousins." It saw the British Empire and the United States as the building blocks of the Anglo-Saxon club, which in most proposed versions was some species of framework for mediating conflicts of interest between the building blocks. In short, it was a formula by which London and New York might jointly manage their chunks of the world without conflict.

The movement was undermined by the First World War and the Great Depression, as well as the opposition to the formula that arose many of its would-be participants. Dublin, Ottawa, and Canberra saw less and less need to defer to London in matters of defense and foreign policy, much less to allow their relationship with Washington to be run through Whitehall. However, the Anglo-Saxonist sentiments and institutions (such as the Rhodes Scholarships and the English-Speaking Union) did prepare the way for the highly effective collaboration of U.S., British, and Commonwealth forces in the Second World War and the Cold War.

Anglospherism is based on the intellectual understanding of the roots of both successful market economies and constitutional democracies in strong civil society; in the understanding of the multigenerational persistence of cultural factors in the success of maintaining strong civil society; and in the awareness of the depth of cooperation possible among such societies to a degree not possible among weaker or nonexistent civil societies. Anglosphere theory examines the reality that on almost any ranking of the characteristics of successful civil societies -- prosperity, political freedom, social trust, new company formation and innovation -- the Anglosphere nations form a significant cluster at the top, accompanied only by the Scandinavian countries and a few outliers such as Switzerland. (5)

Anglo-Saxonists of the early twentieth century were concerned that mass immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe was diluting America's Anglo-Saxon stock with "unassimilable" newcomers, and that over time the population would have less and less in common with British and Commonwealth peoples. In fact, the immigrants assimilated the political values of the Anglosphere quite readily, and do so today despite the attempts of politically correct elites and governments to promote multiculturalism. Today's Anglospherists see immigrants forming a new layer of intra-Anglosphere ties, as the East and South Asian, Caribbean, and Mediterranean origins of immigrants throughout the Anglosphere create new cross-relationships.

(Continued in part two)

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