The Anglo-American Worldview and the Question of World Order

One of the distinctive features of the idea of an Anglosphere has been a particular view of world order, based on liberal principles of free movement of goods, capital and people, representative government, and the rule of law, which requires a powerful state or coalition of states to uphold and enforce them. This chapter charts the roots as well as the limits of this conception in the period of British ascendancy in the nineteenth century, and how significant elements of the political class in both Britain and the United States in the twentieth century came to see the desirability of cooperation between the English-speaking nations to preserve that order against challengers. This cooperation was most clearly realised in the Second World War. The post-war construction of a new liberal world order was achieved under the leadership of the United States, with Britain playing a largely supportive but secondary role. Cooperation between Britain and the US flourished during the Cold War, particularly in the military and intelligence fields, and this became the institutional core of the ‘special relationship’. The period since the end of the Cold War has seen new challenges emerge both externally and internally to the Anglo-American worldview.

The Anglosphere and the American Embrace: The End of the British Empire and After

In 1919 and 1945, an English-speaking alliance had a seeming solidity born of victory. In the inter-war period, a British-led Anglosphere continued and even increased trading connections in times of crisis and remained a defence unit, while the Americans went into isolation, which was broken up by another war. After 1945, American hegemony of the Anglosphere, and the rest of the Western world, was a given and trumped the British Empire. This led to NATO, as the British imperial element of this ‘Anglo’ order was undergoing change. Australia and New Zealand could not join NATO, while Canada did, and formed ANZUS with the United States and without Britain. Trade divergence ensued, as Britain joined the EEC and the former Dominions went separate ways embedded in their regions. In the post-Cold War era, the Anglosphere remains one of the cornerstones of a global security structure, whereas, ominous for Brexit, in the important area of world trade, the Anglosphere has no relevance.

The Political Economy of the Anglosphere: Geography Trumps History

Economic integration among Anglosphere economies peaked during the period from 1870 to 1960. Maintenance of Imperial Preferences and the Sterling Area ensured that Britain remained the dominant market for most colonies and Dominions in the early post-Second World War period. Britain’s entry into the EEC, the ending of Commonwealth preferences, and the rapid growth of Asian economies caused the UK’s share in Anglosphere economies’ exports to decline rapidly. Growth in the US market share offset some of this decline until the financial crisis of 2007–8 reversed this trend. The significance of intra-Anglosphere trade has declined substantially – from approximately two-thirds of countries’ total trade in 1913 and in 1947 to just over one-third in 2016. Contemporary trade patterns are shaped more by geography than history. The world economy remains substantially regionalised, especially for manufacturing. Many preferential trade agreements (PTAs) are regional in scope: Anglosphere economies have been prominent participants in these arrangements but their partners are typically neighbouring countries rather than other Anglosphere economies. The EU has been the most active negotiator of PTAs: the challenge for a post-Brexit UK will be to negotiate access to markets equivalent to that currently enjoyed through membership of EU PTAs.

Anglospheres: Empire Redivivus?

This chapter will explore the similarities and differences between late nineteenth-century debates on the British settler Empire and more recent visions of the Anglosphere. It suggests that the idea of the Anglosphere has deep roots in British political thought. In particular, it traces the debates over both imperial federation and Anglo-American union from the late nineteenth century onwards into the post-Brexit world. I examine three recurrent issues that have shaped arguments about the unity and potential of the ‘English-speaking peoples’: the ideal constitutional structure of the community; the economic model that it should adopt; and the role of the United States within it. I conclude by arguing that the legacy of settler colonialism, and an idealised vision of the ‘English-speaking peoples’, played a pivotal role in shaping Tory Euroscepticism from the late 1990s onwards, furnishing an influential group of politicians and public intellectuals, from Thatcher and Robert Conquest to Boris Johnson and Andrew Roberts, with an alternative non-European vision of Britain’s place in the world.

The Anglosphere as a Principle of Progress

The Anglosphere is not only a linguistic entity, it is more fundamentally based in a binding of linguistic improvement, commerce, and historical advance, and it can be read in linguistic aspirations specifically set against the improving background of the Scottish Enlightenment. Enlightenment rhetoric guides answered the imperative of adjustment to British union and a desire to level the ground for individual public advance, and they define the language area in terms of a teleology, pointing inevitably towards commercial society. For literati like Adam Smith, linguistic improvement was the raw material of exchange, exchange was a clear historiographical good, and this good can moreover be demonstrated more or less empirically. The Anglosphere should be understood as a space that is simultaneously linguistic, economic, and historiographic, remaining readable in Victorian statecraft, and in Greater Britain’s ‘linguistic ethnicity’, and in the lost colonies of Britain’s ‘first empire’. It is doubtful, however, whether the Anglosphere in this understanding has retained its direction after the attenuations of the late twentieth century, the new pressures on property creation, and the undoing of the original ethical knot of language, economy, and historiography.

The Anglosphere beyond Security

Contemporary Anglospherism – a convenient shorthand for recent calls for more cooperation and unity between select English-speaking polities – draws considerable potency from the existence of the Five Eyes network, ABCANZ and many institutions and practices that constitute the Anglosphere in security. For some, the connection is self-evident and should be made explicit: ‘we’ are already glued together in security, so why not build a zone of free movement in goods, services and labour, too? The mutual constitution of these two Anglospheres – political Anglospherism on the one hand and the Anglosphere in security on the other – is more than a century old but remains poorly understood. In this chapter I perform three tasks set out to interrogate this relationship. First, I provide a genealogy of the Anglosphere and of the nearby ‘CANZUK Union’. Next, I map out the Anglosphere in security, probing the depth and frequency of coordination and cooperation among Five Eyes states since the Second World War. I then argue that the deep origins of the Anglosphere in security lie in late nineteenth-century inter-racial politics.

Underwriting Brexit: The European Union in the Anglosphere Imagination

In the eyes of senior Brexiteers, the Anglosphere constituted a familiar and appropriate international grouping for post-Brexit Britain. Strikingly similar views about the European Union also emanated from Anglosphere enthusiasts outside Europe, highlighting the role of the European Union (EU) as an ‘other’ against which the Anglosphere was cast. These detractors’ views of the European project fed into the Brexit referendum campaign. They helped create a distinctively Anglo-British Anglosphere resting on three pillars: parliamentary sovereignty, the memory of empire, and twentieth-century conflict, underpinned by a meta-narrative concerning the emergence and export of a particular form of liberty. By establishing the salience of the Anglosphere idea in right- and left-leaning newspapers since 1999 and by examining the discursive co-constitution of the Anglosphere and the EU during the 2016 referendum, this chapter illustrates how senior Brexiteers offered the Anglosphere as a vision of an alternative political community to the European Union.

Churchill, Powell and the Conservative ‘Brexiteers’: The Political Legacies of the Anglosphere

This chapter advances the case for a more ‘political’ reading of the Anglosphere discourse than is typically offered by its advocates, or by its academic commentators and critics. The authors stress the plentiful rhetorical resources and motifs associated with this shifting current of thinking, and the political opportunities and dilemmas associated with its recurrent deployment in high politics throughout the twentieth century. They give particular emphasis to the ways in which the Anglosphere ideal was re-worked and re-invented in different eras. And they explore its particular importance in the last three decades in British politics, highlighting its growing importance as a vehicle for an antithetical characterisation of the UK’s past and future to conventional ideas about the integral importance of the European Union to British prospects. They highlight the stirrings of this manner of thinking during the Thatcher years, its coalescence within a wider Anglo-American community in the 1990s, and its subsequent influence over leading campaigners for Brexit. They draw lessons from this account for wider debates about how the Anglosphere might be conceptualised and interpreted.

The Past, Present and Future of Anglosphere Security Networks: Constitutive Reduction of a Shared Identity

This chapter maps a new terrain of public policy collaboration in the Anglosphere. Over the past decade, ministers, mandarins and their deputies from across core Anglosphere states – Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and United States – have begun to establish and entrench a new class of transgovernmental networks with their counterparts. Though such networks rarely come into public view, they are significant sources of the ideas and information used to forge domestic public policy. Increasingly, moreover, these networks are turning informal cooperation into distinctive quasi-institutional arrangements. This chapter contributes to new literatures in International Relations and Public Policy exploring the underlying normative ideas that contribute to transnational governance. Drawing from public statements from network participants, it considers the dynamics and political implications of three specific network cases: the Quintet of Attorneys-General, the Five Country Ministerial and the Five Country Conference. Here it is found that Anglosphere institutions are pursuing ever-deeper collaborative ‘transgovernmental’ strategies to overcome nascent global threats to national interests. These are cohered by a series of appeals to a shared construction of the Anglosphere’s identity, its globality and the threats it faces.

Continuity, Dissonance and Location: An Anglosphere Research Agenda

This chapter maps out an agenda for those wishing to research the Anglosphere. It does so by examining the elements of political and ideational continuity between the present-day Anglosphere and its antecedents such as Greater Britain and the English-speaking peoples. It also analyses the dissonance within and amongst members of the Anglosphere and thus assesses the potential for the realisation of the diverse political goals that its proponents claim. In searching for the locations where this idea has been realised, it suggests that Brexit increased the salience of the Anglosphere in the United Kingdom and beyond. The chapter notes the changing scope of definitions of the Anglosphere from proponents and analysts alike. It focuses on the five ‘core’ states of the Anglosphere – the USA, the UK, Canada, Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand – but is sensitive to overlapping and intersecting relationships, such as the Commonwealth and the Anglo-American ‘special relationship’. By examining the narratives that the idea of the Anglosphere generates this chapter argues that the hierarchies and tensions intersecting it both sustain and constrain this durable yet thin political ideology.