Albion's Seedlings

Cultural Dimensions

Culture is one of those nebulous terms that are hard to define. We know it when we see it, but we don't know how to describe it. Thankfully, Dutch theorist Geert Hofstede has been thinking about cultures for a long time and has formulated five dimensions along which to measure various cultures. They are as follows (quoting from his helpful website):

1. Power Distance Index (PDI) focuses on the degree of equality, or inequality, between people in the country's society. A High Power Distance ranking indicates that inequalities of power and wealth have been allowed to grow within the society. These societies are more likely to follow a caste system that does not allow significant upward mobility of its citizens. A Low Power Distance ranking indicates the society de-emphasizes the differences between citizen's power and wealth. In these societies equality and opportunity for everyone is stressed.

2. Individualism (IDV) focuses on the degree the society reinforces individual or collective achievement and interpersonal relationships. A High Individualism ranking indicates that individuality and individual rights are paramount within the society. Individuals in these societies may tend to form a larger number of looser relationships. A Low Individualism ranking typifies societies of a more collectivist nature with close ties between individuals. These cultures reinforce extended families and collectives where everyone takes responsibility for fellow members of their group.

3. Masculinity (MAS) focuses on the degree the society reinforces, or does not reinforce, the traditional masculine work role model of male achievement, control, and power. A High Masculinity ranking indicates the country experiences a high degree of gender differentiation. In these cultures, males dominate a significant portion of the society and power structure, with females being controlled by male domination. A Low Masculinity ranking indicates the country has a low level of differentiation and discrimination between genders. In these cultures, females are treated equally to males in all aspects of the society.

4. Uncertainty Avoidance Index (UAI) focuses on the level of tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity within the society - i.e. unstructured situations. A High Uncertainty Avoidance ranking indicates the country has a low tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity. This creates a rule-oriented society that institutes laws, rules, regulations, and controls in order to reduce the amount of uncertainty. A Low Uncertainty Avoidance ranking indicates the country has less concern about ambiguity and uncertainty and has more tolerance for a variety of opinions. This is reflected in a society that is less rule-oriented, more readily accepts change, and takes more and greater risks.

5. Long-Term Orientation (LTO) focuses on the degree the society embraces, or does not embrace, long-term devotion to traditional, forward thinking values. High Long-Term Orientation ranking indicates the country prescribes to the values of long-term commitments and respect for tradition. This is thought to support a strong work ethic where long-term rewards are expected as a result of today's hard work. However, business may take longer to develop in this society, particularly for an "outsider". A Low Long-Term Orientation ranking indicates the country does not reinforce the concept of long-term, traditional orientation. In this culture, change can occur more rapidly as long-term traditions and commitments do not become impediments to change.

Not surprisingly, cultures or nations that we think of as similar in fact are so. For example, the core Anglosphere nations of America, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the UK have extremely similar rankings: relatively low power distance, very high individualism, moderately high masculinity, low uncertainty avoidance, and very low long-term orientation. By contrast, France (and presumably other parts of the Francosphere) has high individualism but also high power distance and even higher uncertainty avoidance. China (and presumably other parts of the Sinosphere) has extremely high long-term orientation and power distance, extremely low individualism, middling masculinity, and lowish uncertainty avoidance. Spain, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, and other nations of the Hispanosphere tend to have very high uncertainty avoidance, moderately high power distance, relatively low individualism, and middling masculinity (Portugal and Brazil -- the Lusosphere -- are similar). The other nations of northwestern Europe (Denmark, Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands) share with the Anglosphere high individualism and low power distance but are much lower on masculinity. Places that are sometimes said to have similarities to the core Anglosphere nations may not be as close as some think: India has much higher power distance, much lower individualism, and much higher long-term orientation, the Philippines much higher power distance, much lower individualism, and much lower uncertainty avoidance, whereas Ireland and even South Africa are more similar to the core Anglosphere nations on these dimensions.

(Cross-posted at one small voice.)

A Clarification About Academic Authority for the Anglosphere Model

A few quick points in response to Jim's post.

There is a problem with doing all this on an amateur basis on a blog. Because you must be brief, you must encapsulate large ideas in a brief compass, and use short-hand. This leaves one open to the reasonable response that you are being simplistic. So, from time to time it is necessary to elaborate.

One key example is the frequent invocation of Alan Macfarlane, who is something of a demi-god amongst us. But, taking nothing away from his excellent books, this repeted use of his name is about more than Macfarlane-all-by-himself. Referring to him in this setting is also a marker for an entire body of scholarship which he is helping to revive, about how to look at English legal, political, economic and cultural history. If he were a solo act, I agree this would be flimsy-looking. He is not. He is to a large degree a revivalist, as he says himself, who is restoring to us a body of thinking that is associated with F.W.Maitland, A.V. Dicey, Hallam, Stubbs, Charles McIlwain, Helen Cam, even Hayek (see e.g. Capitalism and the Historians) and many others. Campbell's Anglo-Saxon State is a collection of essays which is taking a similar stance and re-raising ideas about English exceptionalism which went out of style but were never disproved, and which are in fact correct -- so I say.

I'll also add that the arguments of the sort that David Hackett Fischer makes are perhaps controversial in academia. The idea of strongly continuous cultures lasting for centuries and having all kinds of practical implications could never be a P.C. position. However, in the non-academic world where people who fail to show results get fired, his type of analysis is not controversial at all. People who do political consulting know perfectly that the kinds of factors which Fischer talks about are reasonably strong predictors of various behaviors, including voting behavior. People who do product marketing look at similar things. Culture is real, and to some degree, usable and measurable.

Finally, the notion that the Anglo-Saxon world is a sub-civilization within the West should not be that hard to accept. The French, our closest neighbors and oldest enemies, have always believed this. Also, look at Rene David's classic book on comparative law. He is a Frenchman, and he sees the world divided into two models -- Common Law and Roman Law. He nods toward the then-existing Communist bloc, and has a few pages each on Islam and China, but he mainly divides the world up into two European-derived blocs. He correctly sees that the fundamental nature of the regimes established under these two legal systems are very different and, in a feedback loop, shape and are shaped by very different underlying cultures.

It is not really a matter of making an icon out of Prof. Macfarlane or Prof. Fischer and asking people to worship them. It is a matter of assembling and taking a fresh look at a very large body of material which is already out there, some of it very much out of fashion, and seeing how well it explains the world compared to other models which are more current and popular.

Finally, while the history is interesting in itself, the point of it all for this discussion is to better understand the present and to equip ourselves better for the future, not mere antiquarianism.

SATIRE: Secret Weapon of the Anglosphere, D&D Edition

To its detractors, the Anglosphere concept is the white geek version of political Dungeons and Dragons. Something retro, surreal, and darned dangerous if it weren't so totally loopy. In a spirit of contribution to that perspective, let me humbly submit The Secret Weapon of the Anglosphere, applicable wherever twelve-sided dice are sold.

First, some design constraints:

1. The weapon cannot depend on any specific racial or genetic heritage ... because the Anglosphere now contains a greater genetic and racial variety of men and women than anywhere else on earth.

2. The weapon cannot depend on the inherent goodness of Anglosphereans ... because a major school of historical thought believes that Anglosphere success is dependent on the inherent evil of its occupants.

3. The weapon cannot depend on the inherent evil of Anglosphereans ... because a different school of history thinks that Anglosphere success is based on the morality and generosity of its occupants.

4. The weapon cannot depend on geography or local conditions … because the Anglosphere began on the edge of a large island but now spans the globe.

5. The weapon cannot depend on vast populations … because for much of its history, the Anglosphere didn’t have the large populations of its enemies and competitors.

6. The weapon cannot depend on a rigid social hierarchy – either class or caste system … because social mobility has always had some role in the Anglosphere.

7. The weapon cannot depend on a centralized economic-political-religious government … because conflict between these social elements have been a part of Anglosphere history since post-Roman times.

8. The weapon cannot depend on a hard-achieved literacy linked to the apprenticed interpretation of unchanging texts … because the Anglosphere common law didn’t accommodate such scholarship.

9. The weapon cannot depend on good times and/or bad times ... because yet another school of historians feels the Anglosphere was successful only because it was lucky and/or had good timing and/or got there “fustest with the mostest”, while a European branch of history suggests that only the "rat ranch" quality of Anglo-Saxon culture explains its current prosperity.

10. The weapon cannot depend on long years of expertise. Mastery of the weapon must be easily learned through mimicry and executed in ordinary day-to-day life ... because the Anglosphere encourages immigration, and language skills and elite lifestyle can't be guaranteed for every new immigrant. Practice should bring incremental improvement though.

11. The weapon cannot make sense. It must be counter-intuitive ... so that it cannot be given away by people who live in (but hate) the Anglosphere, and it cannot be stolen by other cultural spheres that are jealous of the Anglosphere.

12. The weapon cannot be effective in the hands of smart people working by themselves ... because the Anglosphere is way behind in the creation of dirigiste society and is wary of elites.

So. User- and location- independence, ease-of-use, luck-indifferent, totally secure, decentralized, and communal/non-elite. A rather narrow foundation for a secret weapon but a clear start nonetheless.

Now for some weapon attributes:

A. The weapon must let you bootstrap ... 'cause when the genie offers three wishes, first ask for more wishes. Exponential increases can be handy.

B. The weapon must offer synergy between guns and butter ... the more prosperity you have, the more prosperity you can forcibly keep. Lots of hit points.

C. The weapon must reward vigilance for objective truth ... tell a lie about the nonhuman world, diminish the value of the weapon.

D. The weapon must reward diverse and individual opinion ... because the Anglosphere has the most cantankerous, fervent, independent, opinionated group of cranks on the planet. Might as well put the bastards to work.

E. The weapon must reward open though imperfect communication, and reflect an instinctive human sense of what's fair ... because it must be easy to learn (see #10), not too fragile (see #9) and communally operated (see #12).

F. The weapon must work well when everyone's confused ... because that pretty much describes the 21st century ... or any century, if you're paying close attention. Operation in Singularities will be considered a bonus.

G. The weapon must work well over time, as opposed perfectly at any predictable time ... because it should never be susceptible to effective but temporary co-option by one person or a small group (see #12) plus it has to stay counter-intuitive (see #11)

H. The weapon should reward habitual practice … (see #10)

I. The weapon should throw Anglosphere enemies into frothing incoherent madness ... not a necessary feature, actually, but a potentially satisfying bug.

Having laid out my constraints and spec list for a Secret Weapon of the Anglosphere, many of you will have already guessed: The Weapon exists. The Weapon has been used relentlessly for centuries. We own the Weapon. And incidentally, “All your base are belong to us.”

In an upcoming post, “The Big Book of the Secret Weapon of the Anglosphere Revealed. Necessary and Sufficient Cause for Total World Domination Identified.”, all will be made clear, and those who didn't help pay for pizza during the last round will be confronted and cast into Outer Darkness.

WW0@1892 Book Review: G. Parkin’s Imperial Federation

Imperial Federation: The Problem of National Unity
George A. Parkin Biography here
MacMillan & Co.
London/New York 1892 314pp no index

725K MS-Word E-book Download file

"Commercial and Strategic Chart of the British Empire"
817K .JPG map 85% of original size Download file
Full-size 1.3meg .JPG of chart available from me upon request.

Note: This substantial book review is meant to give blog readers a solid sense of the book, for those without the time to download and read the entire e-book.

As the 19th century concluded, it became clear that the United Kingdom would not be in a position to both fully capitalize and protect its various colonies in the face of all antagonists. The larger of the colonies, the dominions, were rapidly reaching a level of development and industrialization where self-governance was expedient. Canada confederated in 1867 and continued to expand westward, forming new provinces into the 20th century. Australia federated in 1901 and South Africa in 1910.

In 1884, a movement began in England to federate the empire, much as Canada had recently confederated. The United States and Canada were concrete examples of how vast territories could be effectively managed while maintaining a central representative authority. Branches of the Imperial Federation League spread throughout the Empire, with a large branch forming in 1887 in Toronto in response to an American initiative for Commercial Union between the US and Canada.

George Parkin was a New Brunswick educator sponsored on an Empire-wide speaking tour in 1889 to promote Imperial Federation. On his return he wrote both about his tour (Round the Empire, 1893) and about the core principles of imperial federation in this book, informed by his experiences in England and each of the major colonies. Shortly thereafter he became headmaster of Canada's most prestigious private school for boys - Upper Canada College. Leaving there in 1902, he became the organizing representative for the Rhodes Scholarship. He was knighted (KCMG) in 1920 and died in London in 1922. His round-the-world trip must certainly place him apart from most geopolitical commentators of the day.

As might be hoped from a headmaster, Parkin's book reads very clearly. It's written in the style of the time, occasionally stilted and overly ornate to modern eyes. Unfortunately it also reflects the internal politics of the Imperial Federation League, at least as far as I can determine. The book has a tendency to ramble off on topics that are interesting but not central to the imperial federation argument. The contrast with Dos Passos (the American corporate lawyer writing in 1903) in The AngloSaxon Century is marked. One wonders if Parkin’s tangents were to avoid goring favoured oxen, or perhaps an attempt to present a balanced discussion of topics that were very much in debate within the League. The book was written ten years before Dos Passos' AngloSaxon Century and twenty years before Kennedy's Pan-Angles. It therefore contains no reference to the Boer War, the Spanish-American War, the Panama Canal, or much in the way of the urgent British security concerns of the early 20th century. There is next to nothing about the "radicalism" that was to be the political watchword of the 20th century.

It is, essentially, the economic case for federating the various colonies of the British Empire, answering the most common arguments against such federation without offering too much detail in the specifics of legislative structure or representation. Such specifics were better left to the concerned parties themselves. And it was seen that the federation (on the horizon) of the larger self-governing colonies would be the logical trigger for discussions of an imperial federation.

The table of contents reveals this geographical focus:

Introduction
Federation
Defence
The United Kingdom
Canada
French Canada
Mr. Goldwin Smith (biography: http://www2.marianopolis.edu/quebechistory/encyclopedia/SmithGoldwin.htm)
Australia. Tasmania. New Zealand.
South Africa. The West Indies.
India
An American View
Finance
Trade and Fiscal Policy
Plans. Conclusions.
Commercial and Strategic Chart of the British Empire [see hyperlink above]

The two odd-men-out are the chapters on Goldwin Smith and "An American View". Goldwin Smith was a English commentator, living in Canada, who was convinced that the destiny of Canada was in joining the United States. For the latter decades of the 19th century he was a burr under the saddle of both Canadians and Brits who had contrary views. And the focus of the American View chapter is Andrew Carnegie, who had written a very self-serving article in 1891 about Imperial Federation that denigrated the concept with an argument based on rather shaky assertions. These two diversions from Parkin's argument suggest necessary, but rather ad hoc, arguments. At the time that Parkin was writing, the rapprochement between the US and the British Empire was some years in the future so any suggestion that Canada was better off as part of the United States was a serious affront to imperial federation, especially when Canada was the only colony of the time that had a federated system.

The introductory section of Imperial Federation sets the stage for the state of the British Empire in 1892. It is a story of substantial growth and change during the late 19th century, with the success of Canadian confederation in 1867 generally acknowledged. Apart from the revolutionary changes of 1776, the model for the development of the British Empire was evolution, and friendly relations between the nation of the United Kingdom and its far-flung colonies. In this setting, Parkin asks "The nation-building energy of her people remained unimpaired, and though one group of colonies [US] had been lost, others, extending over areas far more extensive, were soon gained. Under new principles of government these were acquired, not to be lost, but retained as they have been up to the present time. Is that retention to be permanent? Is it desirable? Can the colonies be brought, and ought they to be brought, not merely into friendly relations, but into organic harmony with the national system? Has our capacity for political organization reached its utmost limit?"

He continues: "For British people this is the question of questions. In the whole range of possible political variation in the future there is no issue of such far-reaching significance, not merely for our own people but for the world at large, as the question whether the British Empire shall remain a political unit for all national purposes, or, yielding to disintegrating forces, shall allow the stream of the national life to be parted into many separate channels."

In an earlier era, a focus on Free Trade, and setting colonies free dominated elite political thinking. The exemplar was the United States, a rebellious colony but now a prosperous trading and investment partner. By the late 1800s, that "turn 'em loose" attitude no longer held sway amongst the educated class in the British Empire. International tariffs and the rapidly expanding trade between the United Kingdom and its large colonies had altered the economic realities. The mother country was now profoundly dependent on its largest colonies for food and raw materials, and on colonial customers for its manufactured goods. An earlier British model of the 1860s which saw a methodical transition to complete independence for the colonies now seemed to threaten the security of colonies and the economic viability of Great Britain. The British Empire was now profoundly global, and with the advent of the telegraph and the steam ship, direct rule and intervention were increasingly possible. Great Britain was bumping up against its European competitors in every corner of the globe.

Parkin lists the extraordinary changes of the last half of the 19th century which steered leading public thinkers away from setting colonies on their own: "the extension of commercial and industrial relations, the growth of common interests, the increased facility for communication, above all, the retention in the colonies, under their new systems of free government, of a strong national [i.e., British] sentiment, and the absence of the anticipated desire to break the national connection, have thrown new light upon the whole question." We may take the avowed "sentiment" with a modest grain of salt -- since there were parties throughout the Empire with a fervent desire to see the end of British influence. But the growth of economic interests and the sustained cultural ties supported by improved communication were undeniable.

While Parkin notes that representative government has been the hallmark of British political philosophy, it was also clear at the time that he was writing that Great Britain was taking on far more responsibility for its colonies than pure economics and political interest would demand. "It requires little argument to prove that the anomaly of leaving one part of a nation to bear a disproportionate share of the burdens of the whole is as inconsistent with Anglo-Saxon ideas of government as the exclusion of the colonies from a proportionate voice in the conduct of national affairs."

This, then, was the quandary of the Empire at the end of the 19th century. Huge, increasingly prosperous, and with large colonies on the verge of self-government ... how was the empire to more equitably share the benefits of representative government, and the burdens and responsibilities of global trade and security? It's a question not so foreign to our own time.

Parkin then begins his exposition on the increasing strength of the ties between the "mother-land" and the colonies while at the same time commenting on the relentless colonial trend toward national federation. Imperial federation is held out as simply one more level of federation, entirely feasible and achievable within the traditions of Great Britain, once the various colonies have reached their national federative state.

Moving on from his substantial Introduction, Parkin considers the essence of federation: "[the] central internal fact, then, which must soon bring about a decisive change in our system of national organization is the necessity that British people in all parts of the Empire should have, if they are to remain together and so far as circumstances permit, full and equal privileges of self-government and citizenship."

From the perspective of the colonies, this meant better representation in imperial decision-making, including Privy Council legal decisions, and from the perspective of Great Britain, this meant more equitable participation in common security and the consular structure created around the world for British trade. The most dramatic model on offer was the United States ... vast in scale and able to expand methodically, capable of accommodating substantial differences in the size and circumstances of the States, able to provide for common defence, and with safeguards for its smaller members built into its federal structure.

Parkin was confident that the burgeoning improvement in communication ... the appearance of telegraph and steam ship ... were the practical tools by which an imperial federation could be bound, just as America was bound first by roads, then canals and railways. The trend of economy and science was therefore in favour of a global federation. Parkin was not above drawing on concepts such as sentiment and honour to validate self-interest, however he is particularly strong in pointing out where practical financial interests for ordinary colonial citizens lent themselves to an imperial federation. The tension, of course, is between the efficiency of centralized control (e.g. security) and the natural aspirations of the colonies to have a say in how their contributions were deployed. As would be seen in Canada, it was colonial concern not be drawn into imperial ambitions that led to much divisiveness.

For Parkin: "If we really have faith in our own social and Christian progress as a nation; if we believe that our race, on the whole, and in spite of many failures, can be trusted better than others, to use power with moderation, self-restraint, and a deep sense of moral responsibility; if we believe that the wide area of our possessions may be made a solid factor in the world's politics, which will always throw the weight of its influence on the side of righteous peace, then it cannot be inconsistent with devotion to all the highest interests of humanity to wish and strive for a consolidation of British power."

In the imperial federative system, the monarch provided a well-established head-of-state, avoiding the thorny debates on the topic in the early United States. The roadmap to federation seemed to have all the building blocks in place. The fact that colonies were in different stages of economic and political development might be seen as a hindrance to federation but Parkin points out that the Canadian and American federations offered substantial historical examples of neighbouring territories gradually developing until they were ready to join the federation. Why not the same for an Imperial Federation?

For Parkin, federation was a step toward greater opportunity and responsibility, not a surrender of rights: "In the minds of some colonists and more Englishmen I have found a belief, or rather a suspicion, that any closer union than at present exists could only be effected by taking away from the colonies some of the self-governing powers which they now possess." This, he felt, was based on a mistaken assumption about how independent they really were ... how much they contributed to their own security, capitalization and development. The question was whether the broader responsibilities were to be dealt with individually by the colonies or in partnership with other parts of the British Empire. "It has been said that all great movements which affect the condition of peoples are originated and carried forward by the combination of two forces: the force of conviction, which comes from reason, and the force of enthusiasm, which is born of sentiment." For Parkin, the sources of colonial sentiment could only come from the literary and cultural heritage which they drew from Great Britain.

Turning to Defence, Parkin extrapolates from the geopolitical realities already established by Sir Charles Dilke (Problems of Greater Britain, 1890) and J.R. Seeley (Expansion of England, 1883). These authors saw the colonies as the sources of great resources but poorly organized. The fall of Great Britain would place them all in jeopardy. In the famous words of Seeley in 1882, "[w]e seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind”. Parkin notes that the defence of common interests is the primary bond for federations and sets about illustrating what those interests were. In contrast to the United States, the British Empire was a maritime establishment, placing 1.2 billion pounds value of commerce on the oceans each year, even in the 1890s. Of that, 740 million originated in the UK and 460 in the colonies. For such a system, the isolation of the colonies was no protection from danger. Security would come from sea power, fortified coaling stations, and strong regional presence. As Parkin notes, for Great Britain's competitors, the challenge was to either seize or duplicate the worldwide staging areas for naval power. That Great Britain already controlled the "chokepoints" (evidenced in the map which Parkin attached to his book) was clear ... Cape Town, Suez, the West Indies, Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia. British and colonial trade was made effective and safe and inexpensive by its global protection. British annual expenditure on ports, armaments and ships was roughly 14 million pounds, a fraction of the value of the trade which it protected. Nonetheless, Parkin noted that the colonies contributed hardly anything to that cost while reaping millions in trade benefits.

This sticking point on "who pays" was a theme in colonial affairs long after Parkin but the general arguments were clear. The federalists wanted a balance between rights and participation. The colonial governments considered that since they shouldered the burdens of development (e.g. the Canadian transcontinental railway), their contribution to the empire was maximized through internal development of marketable resources, and as needed, local defence. Since British capital flowed overwhelmingly to its English-speaking colonies, any halt in internal development to share in defence expenditures would come at the expense of growth and infrastructure of the colony. Colonial trade to mother country trade was in the ratio of four to seven. At a future date, when the balance was more equal, and the basics of civilization were in place, the colonies could share the burden better. From the British side, half the population and trade being required to bear all security costs was not very appealing. For many reasons, some of which may relate to "absence of mind" the British colonies were never required to bear or ultimately compensate Great Britain for their security. British colonies spent minimally on armaments and military development in comparison to colonies or newly independent nations created by other European nations.

Arguments about the colonies being entangled in British imperial adventures were made often and early by authors such as Goldwin Smith but Parkin countered that the 19th century was notable for how little entanglement there was. From the time of the War of 1812 til that of his publication (1892), the only foreign war of note was in Crimea and in that the colonies such as Canada made money but had virtually no other involvement apart from Canadians who had long before joined the British military.

British commentators such as Lord Thring thought that some basis for independence in colonial armies and navies was possible but that they should be formed to allow merging into the imperial army and navy as occasion should demand. And Sir Charles Dilke was adamant that a military under common direction was critical. As history would show during the Boer War, and the two world wars, finding the balance between colonial and British control of colonial troops was fraught with problems. Ultimately, nations that could field large contingents were able to maintain some professional control over their troops. Political interference, especially in the First World War, was to cost the lives of many Canadian troops in particular.

Parkin noted that the "entanglements" that so bothered colonials were likely a matter for the past rather than the future. In fact, the bulk of British engagements and negotiations in the 19th century were in response to the demands of protecting colonial rights. Irritation with European powers was often triggered by British colonies. At one time or another, the British were engaged in negotiations with the United States, France, Germany and Portugal ... with no direct benefit to themselves. Colonial complaints about the national debt which Great Britain assumed in maintaining its forces ignored the great benefits and gain which Britain received in the growth of the imperial economy. Dilke's 1890 book argued passionately that it was imperial carelessness to not balance defence better.

Having set the general terms of federation and defence, Parkin turns to a geographic review of the economic and social realities of Great Britain and each of the colonies.

His section on Great Britain is an extended review of the scale and scope of the British economy. To an unprecedented degree, Britain was being fed and supplied with raw materials from its overseas colonies. Like a modern-day globalist, Parkin notes the manufacturing centres of the United Kingdom that could not last for more than a few months without regular supplies of wool from Australia, jute from India, and timber, wheat or live beef from Canada. Similarly, the growing colonies provided the demand for manufactured goods that kept British factories busy.

Turning to Canada, the experience of twenty plus years of confederation was very positive. With the completion of the Canadian transcontinental railway (1885) Canada was now a geopolitical lynchpin with Atlantic and Pacific interests. Australasia and the Asian ports were immediately affected. Transiting troops by railway reduced the England to Asia travel time from 40 days to 21 days. As to the appetite for union with the United States, Parkin makes much of the Loyalist origins and appetites of many of its citizens. Because of anti-British sentiment in the United States, Canada could be said to be as close to the US as to Britain in most ways. Parkin also contrasts the nature of US immigration which made it less connected to British origins, and to the very different way in which it dealt with the exploration and settlement of the West. The contrast with Canada was notable and Parkin could hardly imagine that Canadians would want to join the US only to have to fight Britain at some future unfortunate date. Parkin concludes that the US is a continental power and self-sufficient while Britain is a maritime power and dependent on trade with its colonies for prosperity. While Canada-US trade was substantial in some products (timber, fish, coal), in wheat (the great driver of western Canadian development) trade with Great Britain was growing dramatically. On balance then, Parkin felt that Canada was both beneficial, and predisposed, to Britain.

In the case of French Canada, which Parkin treats in a separate chapter, he emphasizes a general tranquility in the region, with no love lost for either the United States or France, quoting Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier's typically vague statements in support. Parkin points out that French rights in religion and law are guaranteed by British and Canadian agreements. Without that support, their culture would likely go the way of Louisiana. Quebec nationalism, then in its infancy, makes only a minor appearance in the book, as a cultural oddity. It is worth remembering that the Montreal cultural and business establishment was still very much dominated by the English at this period.

Turning to Australia, the issue of federation was still an open question for the various Australian colonies. The activities of France and Germany in the southwest Pacific were a security concern, as was the Dutch colony of Indonesia. Australian resistance to any Chinese immigration was a future irritant to relations with mainland Asia. An Australia which opted for full independence would be very much at the mercy of other European naval powers, directly or indirectly. Australian security and trade ties were already well-established to India and the Cape Colony, to Hong Kong and Singapore, to Canada, and within the foreseeable future to a Panama Canal. For a trading nation like Australia, Parkin noted that isolation was no protection, and an effective self-defence would not eliminate economic calamity ... the example of the US during the War of 1812 was a case in point. Australia was tied to the ocean and to trade. Severing its overseas ties was not like a previous break between the US and Great Britain. There were no new great lands to claim and settle. Now disruption in trade would lead to slower growth and immigration. With British control of the oceans, Australian federation and then a broader imperial union would better emphasize the practical and emotional ties between the two. Wool, food and horses were already major trade goods. Massive ore mines in Australia provided even more opportunity for investment and economic growth within the imperial system. Parkin, during his visits to the Australian colonies, found his audiences over-confident through their good fortune. They little knew nor understood the degree to which their country depended on foreign trade and British naval supremacy for that fortune. For neighbouring Tasmania, the appetite for imperial federation was stronger because it was both more remote and less well-defended. It could easily be turned into a Gilbraltar of the South Seas if seized by some other European power.

In New Zealand, Parkin met a greater awareness of the need for better security and of the growing importance of direct trade with Great Britain (70% of exports) and the other large colonies. New Zealanders was concerned that the Australian appetite for independence would lead to New Zealand's separation from the empire. In a sense, New Zealand was a Britain in the South Seas and from a military standpoint, the estrangement of Australia from the British empire would not be irredeemable if New Zealand maintained its ties.

For South Africa, the issue of broad concern was the level of non-British descent in the colony. The strategic importance of South Africa was clear to all. If the Suez should be threatened, then British trade to India and the Pacific (roughly 150 to 200 million pounds in value annually) would depend on safe harbours at the Cape. As it was, 90 million pounds of seaborne trade were passing the Cape each year. South Africans were therefore more open to tariff ties to the empire. Bordered as they were by Portuguese and German dependencies, with the French in Madagascar, with native populations and "Dutch republics" that were only barely on friendly terms, South Africans were aware of their need for more capital, more development, and a stable security situation.

Parkin notes that the West Indies were the hardest-won of the colonies but had been left behind as its economic importance as a source of sugar dwindled. The Panama Canal would affect the role of the West Indian colonies, as would a better network of British-only telegraphy lines but this area was less likely to reach self-governance and national consolidation in the near future.

As for India, Goldwin Smith put the question of imperial federation pointedly "But above all, what is to be done with India?" For Parkin, the answer was twofold ... trade between Great Britain and India was larger than any other trade link other than that of Great Britain and the US (some 100 million pounds annually at the time). In geo-strategic terms, Russian control of India would place Great Britain's Pacific colonies in jeopardy. Nonetheless, Parkin granted the great paradox ... how could the United Kingdom rule over hundreds of millions who were without representation? For him, the paradox was no greater under a federation than under the arrangements of the 1890s. The government in India was both effective for Indians and financially independent of the British Parliament. Its fiscal system was separate and whatever changes that would take place in its Crown colony status could occur without affecting any imperial federal system. That might mean "no change" or it might mean something else. Either way, it was no cause to delay a federal system across the dominions of the Empire.

At this point in the book, Parkin spends a chapter to look at "An American View" ... which turns out mostly to be a critical review of an Andrew Carnegie article on imperial federation. To quote: "Working out on separate and yet parallel lines the great problems of liberty and of civil and religious progress, the United States and the British Empire have the strongest reasons for sympathizing with each other's efforts to consolidate and perfect the national machinery by which their aims are to be accomplished. English people now understand and respect the motives which actuated the resolute and successful struggle of the people of the United States against disruption. That Americans should understand the necessity which exists for maintaining the integrity of the Empire and the principles on which it is sought to maintain it, is most desirable. They are not likely to learn them from Mr. Carnegie."

Carnegie's article from 1891 seems almost devilish in its denigration of imperial federation, using arguments which would be just as applicable to the federal aspirations of a young United States were they not so clearly wrong. Parkin responds rather vehemently to Carnegie's cherry-picking, pointing out that as a global and maritime empire, Britain has different priorities and different tools for economic growth than continental United States. American affronts at British tariffs are seen as a tarred pot calling the slightly scuffed kettle black. And Carnegie didn't endear himself by quoting a Monsieur Mercier on the loyalties of Quebec or Goldwin Smith on the sentiments and capabilities of Canadians. Parkin found it useful to quote Alfred Mahan back at Carnegie regarding the role of sea power in national greatness!

Parkin then turns to chapters on Finance, and Trade and Fiscal policy -- material that is both interesting and suddenly tentative. He makes the case again in summary about the economic importance of trade and its growth in the British Empire. Public loans and debt are matched in equal part by the inexpensive private loans which underpin colonial growth. Then he gets sidelined by a discussion of whether free trade (adopted in 1846 by Britain) or protectionism are more effective in reducing prices and increasing economic activity. Since the British colonial system had no unified monetary or fiscal policy, it was entirely possible for different colonies to institute their own responses to economic conditions. The United States was not above playing off its own markets against Britain's if Canadians would establish preferential rates. While Parkin knew finance policies were obviously central to a imperial federal scheme, economic knowledge of the time was uncertain on a course of action. It's entirely possible that Parkin's tour sponsors were similarly conflicted. For his part, he notes that "Dependence on sources of food supply outside the Empire is still so great that any change of policy would be thought to involve great risk and anxiety. Though a few years of strenuous effort would doubtless make the Empire self-sufficing in the matter of food, still those few years of transition would be a critical period. Clear thinkers outside of the United Kingdom recognize this." In other words, when the British colonies could completely supply British food and raw material needs, the question of free trade or protectionism (especially vis-a-vis the United States) could be thoroughly addressed.

In any event, as Parkin notes: "The wealth created by either [economic approach] must be defended, and with the least possible burden on the individual community. A common system of defence therefore seems of itself a sufficient justification for close political union. This is a permanent condition."

The concluding chapter of Imperial Federation -- Plans. Conclusion. -- finds Parkin spending some time discussing the difficulties of making federative changes. Some critics want more specifics, others rebel at any detail that is suggested. And the experience of both the United States and Canada was that endless debate and ultimate compromise was necessary to make anything happen. In both cases, years of general discussion were necessary before the details were worked out by bodies of representatives and wise statesmen. Why should Imperial Federation be any different, Parkin asks. Australia was right in the middle of such a messy proposition. And the European examples of Italy and Germany provided further example of how challenging the process must be. For Parkin, open discussion followed by negotiation of specifics by those with public mandates was the way forward. He saw two ways forward to union: a "great act of constructive statesmanship" or "a great struggle for national safety or national existence." Yet a third was "a policy of gradual but steady adaptation of existing national machinery to the new work which must be done." Dramatic or routine, George Parkin saw the move toward federation a necessary accommodation to the huge range of decisions which had to be made in the Empire, some local, some literally global. Colonial or Imperial Conferences and tinkering with the composition of the Privy Council were both seen as first acceptable steps that could be made by the gradualists.

Other agendas suggested by Parkin included reducing the cost of telegraphic and postal communications, rationalizing the judicial committee of the Privy Council (then the final court of appeal for the Empire), improved education of the public on the subject, and the involvement of chambers of commerce, workingmen's clubs, the press and schools. The "problem of British unity" was the "business of all."

What to make of the Imperial Federation argument after hundreds of pages? The economic and military arguments were compelling from a British perspective. But the whole argument smacks of the kitchen table discussion over when the adolescent kids should stop getting an allowance and start paying rent. In the absence of external threat, or British assertiveness, there was no momentum to shift the burden of foreign affairs and adequate security to the colonies or dominions. They were growing economic giants, supporting the prosperity of the "mother-land," and as long as money was being made in trade and banking, worried diplomats, generals, and admirals were going to hold little sway.

All the antagonisms which George Parkin met during his round-the-world Empire tour of 1889 were to be wheeled out with a vengeance during the political debates of the succeeding half-century. The increasing threat to the British Empire, culminating in the existential threat of World War II, did finally bring the dominions and Great Britain together ... haphazardly at first and then with greater effect. The effort however did take fifty years, and a crisis and left the Empire, and dreams of Imperial Federation badly broken. The United States emerged from the Spanish-American War just a few years later as *a* dominant power and from the Second World War as *the* dominant power. The U.S. made little effort on behalf of, and had little sympathy for, the British Empire. The collaborative efforts of the United Nations during the 1950s and 1960s, and the formation of the Commonwealth, were to gather many of the federative aspirations of the late 1800s into very different structures.

Political union of the English-speaking peoples is still being imagined (cf. Appendix B of Robert Conquest's latest book -- The Dragons of Expectation) but its heyday, in retrospect, seems to been the last decade of the 19th century ... when a middle-aged George Parkin could travel the British Empire in comfort and give speeches to far-flung peoples who still seemed part of one "nation."

Knowing what we do now about the behind-the-scenes discussions in the British government about managing the defence of the Empire and the relationship with the United States, we can read George Parkin's book with benefit but also with an understanding that Britain had no real answer to the growing dynamism of the United States. Within four years of Imperial Federation's publication, the Spanish-American War was to recast America as a global power. And within a decade, the US had become the de facto hegemon of the Americas, with very quiet imperial government acquiescence.

The Origins of the Anglosphere Perspective

David Billington remarks in comments to Lex's earlier post:

But the historical argument for the Anglosphere is a frankly sweeping view of the past that draws on only a handful of sources. These appear to be full of interesting insight. But how they are handled matters. Reviewers of Macfarlane who are experts on the Middle Ages have praised and criticized his work. Yet Macfarlane is cited in Anglosphere arguments as an expert witness to make a case. The case may be strong but other historians might view this use of history with caution.

David has brought up an important point. I am quite aware that Alan Macfarlane is not a representative of a mainstream consensus among historians, although he is not the historian's equivalent of a Velikovsky, either. Personally, I see him as the equivalent of the early proponents of plate tectonics in geology -- making a plausible case, but not yet accepted by all or even most of his colleagues. Oh, well, historiography, like science, advances funeral by funeral.

And as with continental drift, even before the experts are done squabbling, you can look at the problem, see the overall patterns, and make some reasonable judgements. You can look at Africa and South America on the globe and say "Damn it, they fit!" Just so, if you have been dealing with the issues of English-speaking exceptionalism, you can look at Macfarlane's work, and now James Campbell's even before it, and say "damn it, it fits!"

If I had derived the Anglosphere perspective from Macfarlane's work, a reliance on a small number of opinions not generally accepted by their colleagues would indeed make me nervous. But the Anglosphere perspective is not a foundationalist approach to understanding the questions it deals with, and it does not rest on the validity of Macfarlane's work. In fact, the first publication manuscript of The Anglosphere Challenge was finished before I had heard of Macfarlane's work. In rereading Claudio Véliz's The Gothic Fox in the New World, I came across a footnote reference to Macfarlane's The Origins of English Individualism, and promptly realized that the roots of Anglosphere exceptionalism might be far deeper than I had been assuming. I also realized, with mixed excitement and dismay, that I would have to rewrite the whole damned manuscript.

The Anglosphere perspective did not come out of a study of history, but rather a gradually growing perception of the current fact of Anglosphere exceptionalism in politics, economics, and culture.

Far from being a triumphalist explanation of Anglosphere success, it began as a search for an explanation for an Anglosphere failure, specifically the remarkably persistent inability of Anglosphere nations to conduct industrial policy successfully. I became interested in this during my heavy involvement in the policy issues at the takeoff of the US private space launch industry, where various industrial-policy approaches were being advocated and debated, and through my involvement on the Board of what is today the Foresight Nanotech Institute. I became interested first in the question of why British industrial policy in the aerospace industry had in general been so disastrous from the postwar period onward, despite the fact that British aerospace design was in many cases brilliant.

I came to the conclusion (to make a long story short, the long story being published here) that socio-cultural considerations had much to do with the relative success of industrial-policy approaches in Continental European and other cultures, and with their failure in Britian and Canada, and that these factors were probably predictors of the failure of industrial-policy approaches if attempted in the United States.

These tentative conclusions came as a surprise to me. I had been a kind of reflexive Turnerian and Correllian, and had expected to see a degenerate, aristocratic Britain somewhere closer to its European neighbors and further from its vigorous, frontier-selected American offspring. However, the similarities seemed to be more significantt than the differences.

Then I ran across David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed (from which the name of this blog is derived, of course) and it was an immediate revelation. Fischer, in my opinion, gutted Turner like a fresh-caught trout, and re-opened the apreciation of the deep underlying connections between British Isles and American cuture that Founding Fathers like Franklin, Jefferson, and Adams had taken for granted. In this regard, Fischer allows us to return to the roots of the American founding, as does Macfarlane's revindication of Montesquieu (and therefore Jefferson) in Riddle of the Modern World.

Interestingly enough, Fischer is as important in bringing to proper attention the differences between different regions of America as he is in reaffirming the continuity between the British Isles and America. This, when followed out to its logical conclusions, returns the proper focus from individual Anglosphere nations to the Anglosphere as a coherent and distinct culture area, and sees both the broader subdivisions within the whole, and the smaller coherent units, the regions and subregions through which the various currents of Anglosphere culture flow. The Anglosphere state-nations are, wthin this, webs of shared narrative binding together various chunks of regions and subregions with the "mystic cords of memory", distinct from and at times tangential to the natural lines of culture and geography. The Anglosphere is a sufficiently large and diverse subset of humankind that only such a schema is sufficient to serve to understand it.

It is not my intent to provide in this post a detailed or complete intellectual history of the Anglosphere perspective. It would require substantial discussion to describe the importance of Fukuyama's Trust, or Downing in discussing the divergences between England and the Continent in the sixteenth century as the bureaucratic military state emerged in the latter but not the former (or the work of N.A.M. Rodger in qualifying the latter statement with the important differences between England's naval bureaucracy and the Continent's military version), or to discuss the importance of the comparative studies -- Véliz's of the "Gothic foxes" of the Anglosphere against the Hispanosphere in the New World, or Macfarlane's of Japan versus the West in Making of the Modern World. A sketcchy outline of this intellectual history is provided in the book's bibliography. The principal point of this post is to clarify the specific role of Macfarlane's assumptions in supporting the Anglosphere perspective.

To summarize the above, then, the core perception of the Anglosphere perspective is not about the past, but about the present -- about the existing fact of Anglosphere exceptionalism. In the earlier drafts of my book, I had not read Macfarlane, and I had assumed, like most people who have thought about such things, that England had undergone the transition from medieval familialism to modern individualism somewhere around tthe sixteenth or sevententh century -- early, but still part of a general European transition to modernity.

Ironically, given that Macfarlane seems to believe that following continental Europe's transition to modernity, English exceptionalism is no longer significant, my initial draft had drawn the exact opposite conclusion from Macfarlane -- I believed that English exceptionalism was recent but significant today, whereas he believed that it was deep-rooted but no longer all that significant. At any rate, I immediately accepted his arguments fo the antiquity of English individualism, partly because they explained the contemporary phenomena I was seeking to understand far better than the more shallow-rooted explanations I had been working with. As a pattern, it fit, and I tend to think primarily through the construction and testing of broad-scale apttterns.

Macfarlane's work was exciting when I discovered it, and seemed to support and deepen my conclusions greatly, but it was not the original source of the perspective. In other words, I liked Macfarlane's conclusions because they were very consistent with a pattern I had already seen, not because I derived the perception of the pattern from his work. If his work were conclusively refuted (unlikely in my opinion, but possible) the Anglosphere perpective would still stand, although its roots would be shallower.

Thoughts and Questions about Ireland and Ireland’s Economy -- And the Anglosphere

This post says:

The Irish model combines the so-called “active welfare state” of continental Europe with the Anglo-Saxon liberal economy in a balanced fashion. The model is efficient. Ireland surpasses all other EU members in prosperity, job creation, social expenditure and productivity per working hour.

Our colleague Verity has said Ireland’s performance is due to EU subsidies. But others said, yeah, well, why isn’t Greece booming? How much do EU subsidies impact this seemingly rosy performance? Will the current Irish boom continue if Ireland were more oriented toward, say, a North Atlantic NAFTA? Aren’t they about to lose their EU subsidies anyway?

My question for anyone who has done business in Ireland and knows first-hand: How Anglospheric is Ireland? Is it a very well run European country? Or is it an idiosyncratic Anglosphere country in terms of business culture, legal culture, government efficiency, tax policy?

Getting Ireland interested in the Anglosphere is more important than the relatively small size of Ireland itself indicates. America’s Irish population will not be inclined to be supportive of something that seems to benefit Britain, or be some British-inspired initiative. But I think they will be supportive if it is seen to be good for Ireland, too – particularly if it will be seen to bring Ireland and America closer together. Generating political momentum for Anglospheric initiatives inside the USA will be hard enough as it is, so getting this politically active interest group – composed of Democrats, too – interested in some of its elements, like a sojourner treaty, could be very helpful.

Please pardon a post with no facts and a lot of questions. If you can’t think out loud on a blog, where can you do it?

Quote of the Day

Now there was a time when we believed that what a human mind could accomplish was determined by genetic factors. Piffle, of course, but it looked convincing for many years, because distinctions between tribes were so evident. Now we understand that it’s all cultural. That, after all, is what a culture is – a group of people who share in common certain acquired traits.

Information technology has freed cultures from the necessity of owning particular bits of land in order to propagate; now we can live anywhere. …

Some cultures are prosperous; some are not. Some value rational discourse and the scientific method; some do not. Some encourage freedom of expression, and some discourage it. The only thing they have in common is that if they do not propagate, they will be swallowed up by others. All they have built will be torn down; all they have accomplished will be forgotten; all they have learned and written will be scattered to the wind. In the old days it was easy to remember this because of the constant necessity of border defense. Nowadays, it is all too easily forgotten.

Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age, or A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer

A Few Thoughts on World War Zero

James McCormick has blessed us with a remarkable post about World War Zero, the long and quiet struggle by which the USA managed to get its older rival, Britain, out of the way without any direct conflict.

I quoted Max Beloff in an earlier post, who noted that after World War I, some people were predicting a war between Britain and the USA as the next round of conflict, but that Britain had already “lost” a war with the USA without a shot being fired. Beloff cited the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 as the key moment, since it was at that point that Britain formally and forever gave up the idea of maintaining naval supremacy over the next most powerful country -- in this case the USA. But we might better describe that treaty as a "peace treaty" for a World War Zero that stretched back well into the 19th century. Even more apt, it was just one milestone on a downward course for Britain, as it gradually conceded bit by bit its world role to the USA.

World War Zero runs almost as a Cold War from the Revolution until some end point like the Suez Crisis, like a dark subtheme to the brighter and cheerier melodies of Anglo-American amity and cooperation. The USA throughout this entire era, to the despair of American Anglophiles of all ages, was very active in promoting the dissolution of the British Empire. The hinge period seems to have been roughly sometime around 1900-1910, with the British in a weakening position relative to the USA permanently thereafter. For example, the US Navy kept building battleships during World War I, even though there was a need for destroyers. The clear aim was to take advantage of the war to outgun the British at sea, so the USA could twist their arms hard after the war. And the USA did just that, compelling Britain to accept the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922.

Britain’s “defeat” in World War Zero was not perfectly clear in 1918, or even 1922 or even up to 1945. The reason is that Britain did not really suffer any absolute decline. It was a relative decline. Real income, life-expectancy, etc. were increasing throughout the 20th C. Britain weathered the depression better than most countries did, though of course there were pockets of desperation. Britain’s huge overseas empire allowed it to obtain benefits almost equivalent to free trade. The size of the Empire helped to cushion Britain from the protectionist wave of the early 30s. Britain had a stable currency. The British were innovative in technology during this period as well. It didn't look too bad because it wasn't too bad, at home, and in absolute terms. It would have been impossible to perceive Britain’s relative decline by only looking at Britain. A person would have had to know in some detail what was going on elsewhere, and have appreciated the scale of the USA, USSR, etc. This was beyond most people, as was Britain’s absolute reliance on the USA to survive any major war.

But Britain’s actual position was brutally clear by 1945. The Americans made sure Britain was broke, made them pay cash until they had nothing left, and made them give up their hard-won, centuries-old Empire at fire-sale prices. Keynes was involved in the postwar discussions 1945-46 and was shocked at how tough the Americans were being. Keynes somewhere said after World War II that the Americans were treating them like a defeated enemy. Britain was paying the bills for losing World War Zero -- without a shot, and without bloodshed, it is true. But Britain’s world role was being pushed to the margins, consciously, by the USA at every opportunity. Americans were and are hardball players who tell themselves they are #########. No one but the Americans themselves believes that.

If this struggle was real and such hard consequences for Britain, why didn’t it break out into open conflict while Britain was still relatively strong? Orthodox international relations theory would posit armed conflict when an aspiring hegemon tries to supplant the existing hegemon. (“[T]he central proposition of nearly all balance of power theories is that states tend to balance against concentrations of power or hegemonic threats. Indeed, this is one of the most widely held propositions in the international relations field.” (From this.)) The political science models for balancing against hegemonic challenges as the cause of major wars fails to describe the US-UK transition. There are only a very small number of examples in the whole data set -- and here is this huge outlier.

Looked at less schematically, Britain had ruthlessly opposed all challengers for several centuries. (See, e.g. Ludwig Dehio’s The Precarious Balance: Four Centuries of the European Power Struggle, and my earlier post). Yet, the British v. USA rivalry played out differently, and British hegemony shaded over into American hegemony without a shot being fired.

There were both carrots-and-sticks in play. A dense network of Anglo-American contacts related to investment, trade, family ties, the scientific and academic community, etc. raised very high the potential cost of open conflict. On the other hand there was a pervasive American desire to push the British aside and run the world their own way. The US Navy definitely had war plans against Britain before World War I, and up to World War II. But we know that Britain had given up on preparing war plans against the USA around the turn of the century. War with the USA was too awful to contemplate. Ultimately, the other security threats to Britain – Germany, then Japan and Germany, then Soviet Russia – were so severe that alliance with the USA, even at a very steep price, was preferable every time.

I hope I won’t be damned as unsentimental when I suggest that Britain’s security concern was the predominating factor. Ties of history and culture and even economic advantage played roles – but supporting roles only. For example, James notes in his post that the notion of “Anglo-Saxon” unity was not widely popular in the earlier period when it was being proposed. Anglo-American cooperation and friendship had to be constructed, or put on as a mask, in the face of various areas of conflict.

Britain's elite very adeptly orchestrated this complicated and hazardous relationship with the USA. They managed Britain’s relative decline, and loss of its Empire, in such a way that its underlying prosperity and freedom at home emerged in comparatively good shape compared to other declining or defeated powers. “Genteel decline” would have looked like a wonderful option to most citizens of most countries who got to experience direct invasion and tyranny imposed by conquerors or grown domestically. Britain did manage, just barely, to avoid outright defeat, let alone invasion and occupation, by a non-Anglosphere power throughout the very dangerous years of the 20th Century. Rather than decry too loudly Britain's decline, or its submission to the USA when there were no good options, we should express amazement at this feat of statecraft.

World War Zero is a deep topic that needs to be dug up and assembled from disparate sources. I don’t know of any historian who has told the tale as a continuous story, though many have told important parts of it – e.g. William Rogers Louis.

Suggestions for a World War Zero bibliography are hereby solicited from our erudite readers. The idea is to cull out the best books and reconfigure the discussion into the framework of World War Zero. Max Beloff's quote, is an unusual example of someone seeing things this way. Most writers who address the Anglo-American rivalry talk about a war that did not happen. Few talk about a transfer of power that had consequences much like a military defeat, but without actual combat breaking out, which is different way of looking at it.

(Many aspects of the Anglosphere understanding of history have this problem. There is a mountain of material, but none of it is organized into the framework that we want to use to look at it. The boxes are configured wrong -- national histories, mostly. The facts are at hand, lying in a heap, needing to be picked through and rearranged.)

World War Zero and its outcome -- the transfer of hegemony from Britain to the USA without armed conflict -- is one of the fundamental underpinnings of the contemporary world and all of modernity. I look forward eagerly to James’ further posts on this topic.

Update:
Some good comments provoke this update/clarification.

I do not mean to say that the proponents of an English-speaking union circa 1900 were sentimentalists. They were astute in seeing how the global winds were blowing. And, indeed, an orderly process of cooperation and even union would have worked better than the expedient, extemporized and haphazard process that ensued. Both sides would have gotten a better deal. These thinkers had very little actual real-world impact because most people were not aware that a "transfer" was going to happen, or the consequences of such a change happening. The perception was that the USA would get stronger, yes, but the structural consequences of this were not widely appreciated. This was especially so in the USA, which tried hard to avoid the global responsibilities that its size and wealth and power indicated it should take on. Few people then or now appreciated the centrality of Britain and London to the world economy, for example, or the turmoil that would ensue when this position dissolved. Americans thought they could keep the world at arms length, and not allow it to corrupt their free institutions. America was a highly protectionist country during this era as well. And Americans had been so used to a powerful Britain as a major actor in world affairs that they had a hard time imagining that major player going away. I recall reading that Franklin Roosevelt himself -- who knew the hard facts better than most people, and who had worked hard to shove the British Empire into the ash heap of history -- was genuinely shocked to realize that the British Empire was bankrupt. On the other side, British people thought of their country and its empire as a major power in the world. Until very late in the day the majority of British people had no idea how badly things had slipped. John Keegan writes of being a child in Britain in World War II, and looking at a map of the world and having no doubt that the British Empire was one of the mightiest powers there was. 1945-1956 was the era of the great disillusionment.

If Britain were not facing the security threats it was, essentially all at once, I think that it would likely have tried to organize a coalition to contain and if necessary defeat the USA. That had been its strategy for centuries against all powers. Working from a position of strength would have allowed it to get a better deal from the Americans, at the minimum. But Britain had such serious threats from all quarters that the American challenge had to be back-burnered until it was too late. Had Russia industrialized earlier and neutralized the German threat, or had Germany had a more reasonable leadership in the post-Bismarck era after 1890, or had Britain made a better and earlier transition to the second industrial revolution (electricity, internal combustion, chemicals) in the late 19th C so it was more wealthy, dynamic and powerful in its own right -- things may have gone differently.

The ties of solidarity were real and strong. But they would not have been strong enough to prevent conflict absent overwhelming security concerns. The British felt strongly toward their fellow Protestants, the Dutch, for example – but they fought them as needed. I also agree that the prospect of living as a subordinate under an American rule-set was more tolerable to contemplate than rule by others would have been. I also think that these factors allowed Britain to make the most of a bad situation, and put a good face on it -- but they were not the cause of its acquiescence to American hegemony and the dismantling of its own position by the Americans.

I close with this Big Think question for you: Can look at the entire disastrous era of 1914-1945 as the spillover effects of the botched hand-off of global economic and political hegemony from Britain and the USA?

Rediscovering World War Zero

While reading Jim Bennett's Anglosphere Challenge last fall, I was intrigued by his description of an earlier era of enthusiasm for a union of English-speaking countries (roughly a century ago) lumped uncomfortably under the term "Anglo-Saxonism". What did that period share with our own? Are we re-inventing the wheel? Reading the literature, I found that the arguments were far from simple proclamations of cultural or racial superiority. Geopolitics, law, and economics were front and centre. In the spring of 2005, I converted three specific titles from the period into e-books (MS-Word format). Each book offered a different perspective (1892, 1903, 1914), a cross-section or transect, of the "ties that bind" between the nations of what we currently call the Anglosphere.

The recent bicentennial celebrations of the Battle of Trafalgar sparked an e-mail exchange with Lexington Green. What was the actual moment Great Britain gained its international dominance? Two hundred years after the defeat of Napoleon's navy, the English way of trade and technology still dominates the planet. Through the 19th century, Great Britain largely existed in Splendid Isolation but three great challenges were seen off in the 20th century. Things weren't placid between 1805 and 1914, however. The rapid transition from antagonism to co-operation with America from 1895-1910, without the upheaval of either Trafalgar or the Somme, obscured a sombre reality. A great confrontation (a world war of sorts) did take place and we live in a world powerfully altered by the fact that America became an assertive then dominant world power 100 years ago, without fighting a war with Great Britain.

As I reviewed my notes on pre-Anglosphere concepts, it dawned on me that 100 years ago, a world war actually was fought ... undeclared and informally, perhaps ... but global in scope and deadly serious in intent. World War Zero, as I call it, took place without the massing of armies or noteworthy battles. It signaled a great global change. Yet it was a "nullity" by the standard of schoolboy history. It shaped all the subsequent world wars in the 20th century (First, Second, and Cold) and there's little doubt who won the war. The British Empire was doomed to a relentless, sometimes subdued, often painful dismantlement at the hands of America when the smoke cleared from the virtual battlefields of World War Zero. World War Zero began on the Great Lakes and in the Caribbean. It closed on the banks of the Suez Canal in 1956. Traces linger to this day.

Adding World War Zero to our lexicon and our conceptual framework gives us better perspective on the last two hundred years. Suddenly, British hegemony of the oceans after 1805 is placed in more dynamic context. As Great Britain coped in the late 19th century with French-Russian, German, and then Japanese pressure on the high seas, it had hard decisions to make about developing and protecting its far-flung empire, with newly assertive dominions slowly but steadily industrializing and capitalizing. The nation's tremendous industrial and economic lead during the first half of the 19th century was disappearing as other European nations caught up. The American Civil War triggered a tremendous expansion of economic capacity in the United States though little of its military transformation was carried into the rest of the century. The world took note however of how that war was fought and the scale of mobilization that America could sustain in a few short years.

For the worldwide British Empire, as the final quarter of the century appeared, the numbers simply couldn't add up. Great Britain's European entanglements were demanding military expenditure just when Canada, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, India, and a multitude of other colonies were in need of economic investment. How could that money be found if the Royal Navy and British Army were forced to compete militarily with nations newly industrialized (owning few colonies), and able to field armies beyond Britain's capacity? The British colonies on the other hand showed no interest nor appetite in providing troops for the protection of mother-country interests. Indeed, colonial or dominion governments were insistent that Great Britain provide adequate security during their development -- only fair, they claimed, in light of the vast profits British investors captured through trade and colonial investment opportunities. Far from being a military advantage then, the British Empire, circa 1890, was a military vulnerability for Great Britain.

As the final decade of the 19th century opened, Great Britain's defense policy was increasingly under pressure. Too much geography, too few men, too little money. A series of confrontations between the United States and Great Britain (over Venezuela, the Alaska border, Grand Banks fisheries) and two wars (the Spanish-American War, the Boer War) were to provide the context in which British diplomats, generals and admirals first had to envisage confrontation with the US, and then see their way out of such confrontation.

If as JR Seeley suggested in 1892 the British "seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind," America awoke suddenly in 1896 and took the reins "in a fit of absence of fear." Or as one wag put it ... the British stride the earth as if they own it, the Americans as if they don't care who owns it.

Lex has generously steered me toward some excellent books on the diplomatic and secret details of World War Zero (Bourne's The Balance of Power in North America [1960] has been a great start) but let me offer up the three e-books as useful way to recapture and rediscover the atmosphere of World War Zero ... its opening salvoes and mise-en-scene, its tentative suggestions at truce, and the final round of mythmaking that allowed America to exert itself on the world stage in World War One with a confidence fully explained by its victory in World War Zero.

World War Zero: The Gathering Storm

Let’s return to a time when Great Britain was struggling to cope with the far-flung nature of its empire, of the huge sums required for industrialization over such expanses, and of the rationale for an empire that was just beginning to recognize aspirations for effective self-government, as the Dominion of Canada reached its twenty-fifth birthday (since Confederation in 1867). George Parkin's Imperial Federation (1892) is a well-written, and self-contained argument for both change and development in the British Empire. Parkin was a Canadian academic, a prestigious private school headmaster in Toronto, at a time when Canada was undergoing rapid industrial expansion and had recently completed a transcontinental railway to link Ontario with British Columbia. He was fully aware of the relentless colonial focus on economic development, and how that development was subject to hindrance from both London and Washington. His audience was both Britons and colonials who needed to be convinced that business-as-usual in the running of the Empire could not continue. In that, he had to make the case that the senior colonies were rapidly reaching the age of independence, but that they were also subject to the economic and military vulnerabilities of the age.

For every advantage of steamships and telegraphs, there was a corresponding vulnerability to the awakening giants of Europe, Asia, and America. For every example of rational self-government and the success of federal systems over huge areas (Canada, the US, Australia), a counter-argument could be made that the British Empire was simply too big to run as a single effective unit. Closer association or divestment? Which direction should the Empire take? Unresolved questions of finance, currency, legal structure and appeals processes, economic development and military safety were building up. Co-ordination between political entities, or between the various departments of the Colonial, Foreign, and War Office was insufficient. The pace of development was increasing. The United States was knocking at Canada's door and seeking commercial union. What could Britain offer by way of alternative? Some form of effective decentralization within a broader economic and security framework seemed like the only way out. The actual model for the solution was therefore a higher level of the kind of federation seen to work at a national level -- an imperial federation. Something inspiring but set to resolve very practical economic, legislative and security problems.

Parkin's book was written after he had made a round-the-world tour of the British Empire, giving public speeches and listening to both public and private figures. At the time, Britain still was the dominant power on the oceans and America was seen more as an economic threat – a hypocritical protectionist giant. Parkin minces few words in describing the abhorence of the educated classes in the empire to American appetites. Free trade being impossible with the US, it fell to the Empire to establish its own zone of economic prosperity. In reading his words, we can be struck (maybe even shocked) by how radically the world would change in a single generation, let alone a single century. In Parkin's book, we see literally a last gasp of the "go-it-alone" vision that had carried the British Empire through the 19th century. Perhaps if America were avoided, if a new and vibrant method of government could be established for the Empire, the calculations of economy and military strategy could be resolved.

Avoid continental entanglements then, build trade through an imperial free trade zone, and sort out the bureaucratic inefficiencies propagated from London. And tell the Americans to bugger off. Not a bad plan if you can make it work. Regretably, the Americans weren’t going away. Within a few years of Imperial Federation’s publication, the US Army was casting a shadow across the Pacific, battleships were being built with regularity, the army grew from 25 to 65 thousand regulars, switched from gunpowder to cordite, and the US Navy converted from an "alphabet of floating wash-tubs" to the second largest modern navy in the world (third largest in tonnage). There is something tragic also, when one reads Parkin. He, and his fellow academics, were extrapolating from a Victorian past into a 20th century that was to carry very little across the watershed of the new century. Parkin gives us a window into an Anglosphere without America ... a vision that fervently imagined that there would be no World War Zero. For Parkin, the world was still a place where the British Empire still could set its own economic and security requirements if only it could find the right structures of unity and government. Ten years later, things were very, very different.

World War Zero: Blitzkreig and Phony Peace – The Americans at “Pas De Calais”

The Anglo-Saxon Century and the Unification of the English-Speaking Peoples written in 1903 by American John Randoph Dos Passos (father of the more famous John Roderigo Dos Passos), reflects a private citizen’s assessment of an extraordinary decade. Dos Passos was a corporate lawyer and his book, though reflecting the writing styles of the period, is a lucid and quick read which doesn't get bogged down in historical minutiae. The contrast between American lawyer (Dos Passos) and Canadian schoolmaster (Parkin) is noteworthy.

Expecting some sort of triumphal diatribe on the superiority of the white race, I was both pleased and surprised to instead find a careful summary of why the United States and the British Empire should form a loose union to optimize commercial and cultural ties between the two bodies. This was the "Anglosphere" - 19th century-style. Great Britain had turned a blind eye to American activities in the Spanish-American War. America returned the favour during the Boer War. Noblesse oblige. Here were two great confederations which suddenly faced similar challenges and, potentially, similar challengers. The Hay-Pauncefote Treaty of 1901 had confirmed the American right to dominate and fortify the Panama Canal … instantly turning the Caribbean from UK trade terminus to US critical waterway. Suddenly the US Pacific Fleet could be rapidly deployed to the Atlantic (and vice versa) while all other nations faced an additional 10,000 mile trip round the Cape Horn. Dos Passos can write his book with the calm generosity of a citizen whose country is growing more powerful on the world stage literally by the minute.

Martin Wolf's "Why Globalization Works" (2004) notes that economic liberalism actually peaked at the end of the 19th century. So Dos Passos, writing in the aftermath of the wars which confirmed the new shapes of international commerce in the English-speaking world, focused more on the potential for free trade than "ominous rumblings" from Moscow, Tokyo and Berlin. America felt no threat. There is a parallel, of a kind, with the unifying aspirations of our own time, and with Jim Bennett's focus in the Anglosphere Challenge on civil ties (“network commonwealths”) rather than formal governmental or defence ties. For Dos Passos, World War Zero was all but over. A logical, rational, and wise Great Britain would simply join its newborn partner and profit greatly from it.

Regretably, scandal in Dos Passos' personal life (resulting in his famous son!) seems to have removed his book from the bibliographies of authors writing later in the 20th century. For the purposes of an intellectual history of the Anglosphere idea, however, the Anglo-Saxon Century stands as an early and explicit rationale for real union – union that fully acknowledges America, union that accommodates American values.

Ten years later, the memory of WW0 had faded. Now the situation in Europe is serious enough for Great Britain that American co-operation is an important wild card in geopolitics. The German have known since the Spanish-American War that Britain will use America as a foil at every opportunity but will its neutrality in the First World War hold?

World War Zero: Denouement and Reverse Colonization

The Pan-Angles: A Consideration of the Federation of the Seven English-Speaking Nations, written in early 1914 by American Sinclair Kennedy (for whom I can offer no biographical detail at the moment), is both a more detailed look at history, and a grimmer book geopolitically. The assassination of Duke Ferdinand was still some months in the future but Kennedy is writing at a time when Germany's naval buildup in the Baltic and North Seas was triggering a redeployment of Royal Navy assets, and providing a rude awakening for the self-governing former colonies of Britain across the globe. Some sort of federation of former Imperial holdings was seen as a potential response to impending threat. In this book then, Kennedy is not only reviewing the history of Anglosphere culture -- the deep ties between the English-speaking nations -- but pointing out the various competitors, dangers and threats facing the "seven Pan-Angle nations": UK, US, Canada, Newfoundland, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Kennedy's ideas for unification are much more focused on the barriers to and mechanics of a real federation of these countries. And, indeed, a unification of sorts was shortly to be achieved through threat of war. But the tone of discussion, and the recollection of shared history and value in the Pan-Angles, is all the more a rough wooing for its reasonable tone. The gun is now at the head of the British Empire yet America’s experience with the colonies of the Spanish-American War has taken the edge off its naivety. America is a vast economy of its own, manufacturer and resource base mixed as one, industrializing at break-neck pace and heir to the self-confident era of Teddy Roosevelt and the idealism of Woodrow Wilson. Union of English-speaking nations is now a matter of greater urgency for both parties but the earlier mood of Canadian Parkin (“ignore the Americans”), and American Dos Passos (“join us in reason, brother”) is being replaced by an attitude of “it’s Us vs. Them, for goodness' sake let’s get organized” – a theme perhaps for rest of the 20th century.

A few years after Kennedy wrote his book, American doughboys were in France and the shattering effects of World War One were changing British demographics, its politics, and the role of the British dominions forever.

Remembrances of World War Zero: Anachronism and Insight

I found these books remarkable. Not only because I was initially ignorant of the complexities of the period; but also because the themes, arguments and solutions offered by the three authors have substance and vibrancy for today. Much has changed ... and I'll write further about that in a final post after introducing each of the three e-books separately. But much has stayed the same, and as Jim seeks out the roots of Anglosphere exceptionalism back into the era of Anglo-Saxon rule in England, the passage of the century since “World War Zero” is an eye-blink in historical terms. Parkin was struggling with imagining the British Empire in a way that would encourage readers to come up with a dynamic, new and effective means of government. Dos Passos and Kennedy both recognized the unique elements of Anglosphere culture but, post-World War Zero, they cast their recommendations in the new republican terms of alliances and union.

All three authors were constrained by a different vocabulary but if "Anglo-Saxonism" is to be used as a 'term of art' by our modern commentators on the Anglosphere, careful distinction must be made between authors such as these and less interesting and more virulent essayists of the day. The Anglosphere of 1900 was overwhelmingly Caucasian and Protestant but, especially in the case of the US, it was including people from a very wide geographical swathe of Europe and western Asia. In between the occasional anachronistic appeal to shared culture and genetic heritage, Parkin, Dos Passos, and Kennedy provide sophisticated economic, legal, and geopolitical models for co-operation and union. They were smart men, struggling with complicated problems, and have something to offer us in the 21st century.

In three posts to come, I'll introduce and summarize the electronic (i.e., OCR'd) copies of the three books on World War Zero discussed above (in Microsoft Word .doc format, for the moment). In a final fifth post, I'll put forward my view on (1) what the events of the intervening century mean for the arguments of Parkin, Dos Passos and Kennedy, and (2) how these three books should alter how we assess Jim Bennett's formulation of a "network commonwealth."

Technical Note:

The e-book files make full use of "styles": the font formatting for the text can therefore be changed quickly and easily, according to individual reader preference.

Chief Crazy Camel

It comes as an exciting surprise to hear that when Columbus landed in North America 200 years ago (sic) the Native American intelligentsia were speaking not their tribal languages but … Arabic! No! Seriously! The two Arabic translators Columbus had brought along on the off-chance that the natives would be Arabic speakers had some very productive intellectual exchanges with the New World chattering classes.

From MEMRI comes this interview with guest moonbat Lebanese cleric Abd Al-Karim Fadhlallah, aired on Al-Manar TV on November 20, 2005:

“The Arabic language, 200 years ago, was a universal language. It's interesting to note that when Christopher Columbus went to America, in what language did he speak with the Indians? It is said that the language they spoke with the Indians – and I have indisputable documentation of this at home... The intellectuals among the Indians spoke Arabic. He took two Arabs with him, to serve as interpreters between the Spaniards and the Indians. He took two of them as translators. So you can imagine the historic and cultural value of Arabic. It's undoubtedly very important.”

Well, I can certainly understand how one would leave “indisputable documentation” on a trivial matter such as this lying on the coffee table in the rush to get to the studio for the interview. Doubtless by the time he got home, the dog had run out and buried it in the garden. Oh, hang on a mo’ (if you’ll excuse the term), not the dog. Dogs are bad. It was the cat! The cat had sicked up on it. Yes! That was it!

This news comes to us courtesy of Dhimmiwatch.org

From the Other Archipelago

Fil-Anglosphere blogger Rizalist follows up his Orphans of the Anglosphere post with a thoughtful post on the Philippines, the war with radical Islamism, and the "metaphor of the single jetliner".

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Read the next post, too, even though the first part of it seems to be primarily about Philippine politics. The most interesting bit to me starts with the parenthetical comment:

"(Note to Bloggers: Most of those big time warbloggers in America have insufficient knowledge of what their grandfathers and great grandfathers were trying to do here, or what exactly happened here. Did it fail or succeed, or something in between and what lessons ought be learned for next step in the ascent of man? You do not know that history either, I would suspect, but you are closer to some of the sources. That history and shared experience contains far more wisdom-- American and Filipino wisdom-- about liberty, democracy and honor -- than even Instapundit. or even the Mr. Spock of the American Blogosphere, Steven den Beste. Because the First Iraq is a real, historical data point. So study your history, and don't just read Blount or Constantino and Sison, or Mark Twain and the US Anti-Imperialist League for crying out loud. Try a little "Gleeck" and spend some time at the American Historical Collection at the Ateneo -- you might find a whole new perspective on our past, and more importantly, our future. You shall meet the Democrats and Republicans again in that history! Our history!)"

Would you like to read the thoughts of an Iraqi about America a hundred years from now? You can't, but there just may be a clue in the thoughts of a Filipino a hundred years after our nasty, prolonged, botched intervention there (following a brilliant, lightning-quick, painless high-tech military victory). A hundred years ago the great-grandparents of some readers of this blog were probably on the ground in the Philippines, sweating in a blue uniform and carrying a heavy Krag-Jorgensen rifle, and singing Underneath the starry flag/civilize them with a Krag/and return us to our home sweet home. They were probably staring at the faces of an utterly incomprehensible people, living a radically different life than that imaginable back in Wisconsin, with, ah, different ideas about what is good and proper to eat. It would have been hard for them to imagine the next century, or that at the end of that century somebody like Rizalist would be writing, in eloquent English, an objective judgement of what the American effort, for all its mistakes, had wrought in his homeland, not to mention that another descendant of these people who seemed so alien would be commanding American troops in yet another alien, far-away land.

We first understood the experiences of empire and colonialism through the propaganda of its adherents, the triumphalist stuff. Then we heard it through the propaganda of its opponents, the victimology stuff. Now it's time to listen to the voices of all those who experience the actual complexities of the situation.

Anglosphere's Business: And Business is Good!

Time for a mini-gloat! The Economist has just released its 2006 Best Business Travel Destinations, article here.

The Anglosphere rules ... and Canada (as hard as it is to admit, living here in Calgary) rules "just a wee bit better", eh.

Anglosphere Historical Narrative, Continued

I liked Carl Hollywood's comment to Lex's Anglosphere Historical Narrative post so much that I am arbitrarily using my editorial privileges to move it up here. So here it is:

There are lots of great reasons to buy the Anglosphere narrative, and Lex stated many of them. Here’s my own partial list. Some of the items overlap his… but we lawyers love our restatements.

1. Expanded possibilities of collaboration. The Anglosphere narrative provides an understanding of how important it is to have shared cultural references. The lack of them isn’t insurmountable, but a shared culture (transmitted along with the English language) makes communication and understanding easier. This, plus the rise of ever-better communication technologies, raises the possibility of collaborating with a much wider group of people, who have more in common than one might have previously suspected.

2. A model for less developed countries to follow, and for us to cherish and maintain. Macfarlane and others explain how the model works. We can analyze the factors and figure out how to make the model work in Iraq and other locations. (In most places, this will probably be the work of generations… but Japan developed rapidly on the Western model thanks to Yukichi Fukuzawa.) (I can’t avoid thinking of the process in Baghdad as “putting the IRAC in Iraq.” Sorry.)

3. An increased appreciation of the subtle revolutionary power of consumer goods and services. Claudio Veliz’s The New World of the Gothic Fox provides a brilliant metaphor for thinking about Western capitalism and the constant production of new items designed to appeal to consumers. In particular, I’m thinking about Ruskin’s Gothic cathedral, to which “workers” (i.e., producers of goods and services) are always adding “rooms”. Consumers can decide to enter these rooms or not, and they provide value to some regardless of how many others dislike them. In the Anglosphere, there is a celebration and use of imperfection. Even the mediocre has value and is appreciated by someone, somewhere.

And so we have 300 kinds of breakfast cereal, and Britney Spears singing “Baby One More Time” while wrapped in a boa constrictor. William Carlos Williams fans may kill me now, but

so much depends
upon

a writhing boa
constrictor

wrapped around Britney’s
shoulders

before an admiring
audience

Is Anglospherist pop culture mediocre… or is it beautiful? Regardless of your position on this (me? I love it, but Travis’s version of “Baby One More Time” wipes the floor with Britney’s), any Salafi jihadist will tell you it’s utterly revolutionary.

4. An improved concept of the network (or network commonwealth) as a tool for information processing. The Anglosphere is decentralized as a rule and believes in local knowledge, incremental (not radical) improvement, and flexible adherence to shared values. It gave us the common law, and it can make better use of ideas like the wisdom of crowds and smart mobs than other organizational models can.

5. A new way for lawyers to see themselves. I’ve always liked my day job, but many of my colleagues either started out cynical or got there fast. If they knew how important their work is to the English-speaking peoples, and by extension to everyone else, they might cheer up a little. They might view themselves as trustees of the common law system that’s preserved essential institutions like trial by jury and free transferability of property, for centuries. Like item #2 above, this reverses the widespread “we’re so awful” meme and replaces it with justifiable pride and reality-based optimism.

6. A great set of tools for analysis. Mr. Bennett’s reading list is awesome. Alan Macfarlane’s books pack the heavy intellectual firepower of the justly renowned Cambridge school of anthropology. Fischer and Fukuyama provide a completely new and revelatory way of looking at the Anglopshere and the rest of the world. For example, now I think of Chinese culture as a mixture of Puritan traits (like emphasis on literacy and education in general) and backcountry traits (like sticking to your extended clan and trusting no one else for various historical reasons). As Fukuyama and others have noted, long-term progress for the Chinese may depend on the ability to dissolve tight family bonds and associate more freely with people outside the family circle.

7. A solid background for scenarios, like the ones reviewed here and described here. Mr. Bennett recently posted about alternative histories, which are not only fun to read, but also allow the reader to better visualize how events come about and which actions are likelier to lead to the desired results. Visualizing the future is a wonderful tool for strategic planning. What if the UK pulls out of the EU? What’s the significance to other core Anglosphere countries if the Conservatives take over in Canada next January? What are the possible ways for Anglospherists to meet the challenges presented by the Singularity? (Some are suggested in the books on Arnold Kling’s essential reading list.)

8. The pleasure of knowing where we came from. I mean “we” in the cultural, not the genetic sense. When I first saw the connection between East Anglia and New England, in the way David Hackett Fischer describes it, I felt the same pleasure a schoolboy feels when he first learns about Pangaea and continental drift, after years of staring at a world map and wondering why the coastlines of South America and Africa are so similar.

My two-year-old loves to chant ”Willie, Willie, Harry, Stee”, and I like to think he’ll experience the same joy later on, when we fill in the details of what happened between the first Willie and the second Elizabeth.

Gallimaufry

On Jim's Orphans of The Anglosphere, Lex added a very interesting post, noting a few of the tangible things that make up a small part of the vast mosaic which is the Anglosphere. I added a few myself.

What I noticed in adding my own, and also in an earlier post which glancingly addressed the unnoticed incorporation of Indian words into our everyday vocabularies, is how much we have absorbed of one another's cultures. And, as I’ve mentioned before, we have the biggest choice of slang in the world. Although Ozzie slang ‘ocker’ (meaning oik) never caught on in Britain or the US, Brits do know what it means. We have so much slang, we can’t use it all.

Obviously, British TV, American TV and Kylie Minogue are unavoidable. But many city and town names in Oz are Aboriginal - as are those in the United States. So, in Britain, besides Tallahassee, we also know Roratunga. (The French changed the names of native towns in the US to French.) We thoughtlessly use Indian words every day - pyjamas, bungalow, dinghy, chinz, juggernaut (or jagganath) and - most important - curry, tikka and masala! We have incorporated our colonies and one another - including some of our customs (Auld Lang Syne is Scottish – and syne is pronounced “sine”, by the way, not ‘zyne’’; it means ‘since’) in a way that other former colonial powers have not. Do the Dutch feel a fondness for any Indonesian customs? Well, riystafel, OK - but anything else? What about the French? Do they feel a well of affection for the customs of say, Cote d'Ivoire? The New Zealanders do indeed do a Hakka ceremony before their rugby games, because they have incorporated this into themselves in a way I do not believe non-Anglo settlers do. And now we just accept the Hakka done by mainly white New Zealanders as part of NZ.

Everyone in the Anglosphere, except the ornery Yanks, plays cricket. What did France introduce to W Africa or N Africa that had the side effect of bonding everyone together? Or Holland? Do the people of the Netherlands Antilles feel Dutch? Do the Dutch feel an affinity with them?

I do have French friends who lived in French W Africa and hold it in great affection, but its culture - and its words - have not entered mainstream France the way our Anglosphere cultures have all swished around into one another's consciousness.

We have the biggest, strongest, most flexible, constantly changing free-for-all language, and a system of criminal and civil law that has never been bettered or even equalled.

The Anglosphere and the Economic Historians

The success of Europe, and especially the Anglosphere, in the last few centuries has kept historians busy, pondering just why and when the Europeans made such an impact on the world.

Not surprisingly, the theories of causality often mirror their times. Way back when, European success was seen as religious and cultural vindication. Later, it was seen as a genetic or perhaps geographic predisposition. At the dawn of the 20th century, as non-Europeans and radical philosophers got an opportunity to make suggestions, earlier "gifts" were turned on their heads and proclaimed as intrinsic "evils." Thus Europeans, and by extension, the Anglosphere, were successful specifically because they were monstrous in comparison to other human beings -- more cruel, more greedy, more lacking in humanity (specializing in anarchy, greed, heresy ... to quote one witty Amazon.com reviewer). European destruction was therefore a solemn obligation and no doubt ordained by higher powers, real soon now.

As the wheels of history ground on during the 20th century, and people (both European and non-European) had a chance to ride the hobbyhorses of fascism and communism (and perhaps socialism) into political and economic oblivion, a more intellectually useful historial theory was needed. Europe and the Anglosphere was showing a distressing tendency toward further prosperity. The intellectual solution, particularly with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and orthodox communism in China, was to claim that the entire question of European success was based on a false premise. The truth was ... Europe was never the centre of anything much. And if it was, it was only a relatively recent event that is passing quickly now from the historical stage. Eur