by Robert Conquest

he term Anglosphere has been much in use lately, particularly in discussions of possible alternatives to the bureaucratized and centralized approach to life exemplified by the European Union (EU). It is a nice word, to be sure, but it has the unfortunate attribute of implying English ethnicity. When I have written about this phenomenon, I haven't used the word Anglo but have instead used the term Anglo-Celtic occasionally and only in the cultural sense. One should think of the Anglo-Celtic tradition more in terms of customs and habits than of institutions and the like. As an aspect of that, it is important to remember that England became a nation-state before the idea of the nation-state arose. It just happened to be one. Every other nation-state was full of intellectuals and professors who were fond of saying that Britain showed how a people became a nation by persuading the peasants that they belong, too. That process worked in England and then in Scotland (and in Switzerland, too), but it is a very rare phenomenon. Moreover, this sort of national feeling is not necessarily bound up with nationalism. Dylan Thomas, the poet who was Welshness incarnate, exemplified this difference in an interview for the London Magazine. In those days, publishers were rather more prudish about what they printed, and when the interviewer said, "Mr. Thomas, what do you think of Welsh nationalism?" the magazine reported that his answer consisted of three words, two of which were 'Welsh nationalism.'" Clearly one's sense of national identity is quite different from "nationalism," which is more of a narrowly political notion.

This ill-defined sentiment, in a broader sense, helps explain why one never hears an American, an Australian, or an Irishman referred to as a "foreigner" in England. The category of foreigner does not include them. An anecdote from when I was young and my family and I were living in France illustrates this well. The American and English boys associated in a sort of natural alliance—this was when we were ten or eleven years old. When we got into fights with French boys, for both English and American combatants the slogan was "Waterloo!" and their battle cry against both of us was "English Peegs!" Thus even French children recognized the strong cultural bond between England and America.

There are certain natural affinities among the English-speaking peoples. They tend to go to other English-speaking nations if they go abroad for their education, for example. They do not go to Paris; they go to London, Cambridge, and the like. And the English-speaking peoples, of course, include a number of independent countries in the Caribbean and the Pacific that not only are not Anglo, they're not European at all, though they're English-speaking. Although they have differing political cultures, countries such as Jamaica, Grenada, and Samoa are important English-speaking nations. Seymour Martin Lipset, Kyoung-Ryung Seong, and John Charles Torres made a study of national political forms and found that the national characteristic with the highest relation to democracy was having been a British colony. (Lipset, of course, is not an Anglo, nor are his two collaborators in the study.) And people of non-European descent are prevalent throughout the rest of the English-speaking world. In California, for example, the Anglos are the flakes and the Latinos do the work. The Anglo-Celtic culture binds them all together.

This bond and the culture behind it have some natural political implications, especially regarding Britain's membership in the European Union. Britain's integration into the European Union not only goes against the grain of history, but it also ignores these natural affinities and impedes valuable relationships. A major source of enmity between these nations is Great Britain's willingness to exasperate the other English-speaking peoples by acceding to EU policies. In the economy, for example, Britain consents to dump New Zealand lamb and let the French dictate the nation's food policies. This understandably creates ill feeling.

Bureaucentrism

Despite these problems, the natural tendency of the Anglo-Celtic peoples to hang together remains strong and is a marked contrast to the disunity of Europe, which could only be countered by the European Union rapidly evolving into a centralized and bureaucratized regime. Europe, as a whole, does not have the linguistic, traditional, or historical qualifications associated with successful nation-states. The European nations are near one another, to be sure, but that is about the best one can say. The Continent's chances for becoming anything resembling a nation-state were shown up in Ireland recently when two leading nationalist Irish politicians denounced Europe for destroying Irishness. Further British integration into the European Union will not help (and there is no indication that Brussels wants to encourage any Anglo-Celtic influence; quite the contrary).

The differences between Britain and the Continent are too great. The French revolutionaries of the late eighteenth century appropriated British philosopher John Locke's ideas and made him an important part of their intellectual foundation. They thought that they were working toward what Locke would have wanted. Unfortunately, the revolutionary intellectuals forgot that Locke was not only writing a book; he was writing a book in England. There were customs, ideas, and attitudes around him that he took for granted. Thus the French intellectuals managed to take an Englishman and turn him into a Frenchman—but not at all successfully. We still live with the result.

The Anglo-Celtic culture tends to reflect the opinion expressed by Geraldus Cambrensis, the great Welsh medieval writer, when he said that he was descended from the Prince of Wales and the Lords of the Marches and hated injustice whenever he saw it in either race. On the Continent, by contrast, two prevailing attitudes are more tolerant of injustice. One attitude is, "He's such a great leader, he's entitled to commit injustices." The other one is, "He got away with injustices; let me have a crack." These attitudes are far less common in the Anglo-Celtic lands. You may say that the Englishman is rather hypocritical about injustice, or that he simply assumes that everything he does is always right and provides a justification for it afterward. But on parts of the Continent, they don't even bother to do that. There is something to be said for hypocrisy and the English hypocrite.

The European Union's tendency to run roughshod over traditional national sentiments has, of course, caused a good deal of anger and resentment, not only in Great Britain but all over Europe. Brussels is denationalizing Europe without providing a new national identity to replace the ones being cast aside. An equally dismaying characteristic of Europe's central government, however, is the highly corrupt nature of its bureaucracy. The EU bureaucracy is enormous, self-satisfied, incredibly intrusive, and totally incompetent. Money disappears with shocking regularity. My impression is that the EU bureaucracy is worse than the national bureaucracies that gave it birth. Indeed, the European Union provides a new justification for the bureaucracy. Bureaucrats need to feel that they are not intrusive manipulators but rather that they are doing something wonderful through a Big Idea. Socialism is gone, and practically nobody believes in communism these days, but we have "Europe." The bureaucratic trend indeed remains, not only in Europe but the world over. This trend is based in part on human beings' ageless conviction that all problems can be solved by the appropriate experts and then enforced by the state. Hence it is intrinsically hostile to Anglo-American ways, though our countries are by no means exempt.

This leads to an interesting fact about political correctness on American and English campuses. I think that what is happening in both the American and English academies is that a large section of people can no longer be called English-speaking. They use a dialect invented in Germany, France, or both, which has been filtered through (and has further augmented) a body of incredibly pretentious, obscure, and tendentious European "scholarship." That, you may say, is the revenge of Europe. At a conference in Prague a few years ago, my friend Alan Besançon and I served on the cultural committee, and the French were making the most terrific fuss about Hollywood soft-core porn films. Alan said in response, "A hundred Hollywood soft-porn films have done less damage in Paris than one French philosopher has done in America."

There is a constituency in the West—including America and Great Britain—that is hostile to serious political and cultural thought. The problem intrudes on, but is by no means simply a matter of, foreign policy. To be successful, a nation's foreign policy must be supported by the populace, and however sound their instincts and political habits, in America and Britain they are deafened by a large caste that is significantly to the left of the media and even farther politically from the rest of the public. The media, Left-wing or not, will publish perfectly sensible stuff, which is simply not true of today's academic journals. But the ideas prevalent in the academy do seep into the world. As someone told me recently, "America is a place where a man works hard, grows rich, and sends his daughter to Wellesley."

New Balance

So, what does all this mean for international politics?

The main thing is that we are in a totally different situation from one where there are numerous national powers and complex balances among them. We hear the word globalization (which everybody rightly hates so much) all too often these days, but it does describe something real and important. We are in a century that holds forth the possibility of a world in which really bad wars, or possibly all wars, are stopped. In that context, the idea of having a Europe balancing an America doesn't sound quite right. The two powers must work in tandem, and I think that a union of the English-speaking peoples would be a central element of any attempt to bring the two continents together. The other countries would move toward it and with it. I think that the French might try to remain somewhat aloof for a while, but ultimately they would have no choice but to work with a union at the center of which stand the English-speaking peoples.

A full-fledged union of English-speaking nations is still rather sketchy and only in the idea stage, of course, but it provides a distinct, plausible direction for the world's future political evolution. For Great Britain, in particular, it is a viable alternative to greater integration into the European Union, and it provides a forum for those who think it wise to get out of Europe or at least break free of the present constraints the European Union imposes. In fact, other nations might eventually find that leaving Europe in favor of an English-speaking union would be better than staying in.

The Anglosphere would have greater gravitational attraction.

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