Conclusion: Anglosphere Twilight?

We have traveled a long way since the gloomy forests of first-century Germany. We have seen that the story of the English-speaking peoples is the story of how they imposed their will upon their rulers. We have noted the way the primitive tribal meetings of the early Teutonic peoples evolved into the local assemblies of the settlers in England, into the Witans of the Anglo-Saxons, and, after many fierce struggles, into the direct ancestor of the parliamentary bodies that meet throughout the Anglosphere today.

We have observed, too, the brave role played by the common law: that beautiful, anomalous system that belongs to the people, not the state, and which allows criminal justice and civil disputes to be domesticated. We saw the common law create the features that kept the English-speaking peoples free, from jury trials to habeas corpus. We looked on as it, and the values it inspired, overthrew the Stuart tyranny and made the American republic. We watched it serve as an antibody against the infections of slavery and dictatorship.

We have seen an idea that had its roots in theology—the notion that every individual must answer for himself, without the intervention of priests or prelates—pass into political theory. We have watched the spores of that idea break away from their religious roots. We have gazed as the wind carried them to far lands. We have seen them take root throughout the Anglosphere in the form of the doctrine of personal responsibility.

And we have seen how a happy accident of nature made possible the triumph of constitutional liberty. Because Great Britain was an island, and the Anglosphere a form of extended archipelago, there was no need for a permanent standing army. Taxes were commensurately low, and the government commensurately weak. If the regime needed resources, it had to collect them by consent through the people’s representatives.

We have seen, finally, how the peculiarities of English property law, based on individual rather than familial rights and on primogeniture, sustained the individualist culture that was in time to develop into capitalism as we now know it: that is, a system where every individual is free under the law to sell his services through private contracts. We have grasped the essence of the Anglosphere miracle: the move, as Sir Henry Maine put it, from status to contract that is the ultimate guarantor of a free economy and a free society.

How, having taken in this much, could we not be disquieted by the readiness with which our generation has squandered its heritage?

That abandonment has gone furthest in the United Kingdom. As it has surrendered its sovereignty to the EU, so it has progressively surrendered the various elements of its national distinctiveness. Laws are passed by European Commissioners, who are appointed, not elected. Trade has been artificially redirected from the English-speaking hinterland to the cramped and dwindling European customs union. Power has shifted from Parliament to the standing apparat, both at national level and in Brussels. The connection between taxation and representation has been broken, as the EU has acquired direct revenue-raising powers. The state has swollen to a previously unimaginable size. Even the common law itself, the first and last bulwark of Anglosphere liberty, is being battered down.

In the 1970s, Lord Denning, the former Master of the Rolls and greatest modern English jurist, likened EU law to an incoming tide, swelling England’s river mouths and estuaries. In 1990, toward the end of his extraordinary life, he revised the metaphor: “Our courts must no longer enforce our national laws. They must enforce Community law. No longer is European law an incoming tide flowing up the estuaries of England. It is now like a tidal wave bringing down our sea walls and flowing inland over our fields and houses—to the dismay of all.”

In the United Kingdom, the process of Continentalization is direct and tangible, driven by force of law. In the rest of the Anglosphere, it is indirect, and its motors are cultural rather than legal. There has been a general loss of confidence in the superiority of the Anglosphere model, which fended off every extremist challenge throughout the twentieth century. Cultural relativism feeds into hard policy. Once you reject the notion of exceptionalism as intrinsically chauvinistic, you quickly reject the institutions on which that exceptionalism rested: absolute property rights, free speech, devolved government, personal autonomy. Bit by bit, your country starts to look like everyone else’s. Its taxes rise; its legislature loses ground to the executive and to an activist judiciary; it accepts foreign law codes and charters as supreme; it drops the notion of free contract; it prescribes whom you may employ and on what terms; it expands its bureaucracy; it forgets its history.

Is it any wonder, as this process unfolds, that power is shifting? The maps of the world that we know, centered on the Atlantic Ocean, no longer reflect the geopolitical reality. The economic center of gravity is moving fast. In 1950, it hovered over the Atlantic Ocean, off Iceland. In 1980, it had moved closer to Norway. Today, it is speeding east across the frozen tundra of Russia. Ten years from now, it will be just beyond the northeastern frontier of Kazakhstan.

This is partly because the Asian states have liberalized. China and Russia, though they remain closed autocracies, are no longer as totalitarian as they were in the 1980s. India has opened its economy impressively.

At the same time, though, the English-speaking states are going in the opposite direction, pursuing the Ming-Mogul-Ottoman road to uniformity, centralization, high taxation, and state control. No wonder they are losing their preeminence.

There is nothing inevitable about this process. It is our choice, not our fate. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.

What, then, is the remedy? After so long a disquisition on the nature of Anglosphere exceptionalism and its enemies, the answer may sound so curt as to be glib, but it is no less heartfelt for that. We should remember who we are.

The basis of the Anglosphere is its common values and institutions, not the formal links between its governments. To the extent that such links matter at all, we should not aim for anything supranational or, indeed, anything that expands the power of the state. We should aim, rather, for an Anglosphere free trade area.

The United States and Canada currently form a single market as, in most regards, do Australia and New Zealand. The United States and Australia signed a free trade agreement in 2005, and New Zealand is negotiating one as I write. Singapore’s eighteen free trade agreements include treaties with the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. India is starting from further behind—a legacy of the postcolonial period—but is liberalizing quickly. The main problem lies with the United Kingdom and Ireland, which, as members of the EU, cannot sign independent commercial agreements, but are instead held back by Brussels protectionism.

If these two states were outside the EU, an Anglosphere free trade area could be based on the unhindered movement of goods, services, and capital; and on an easing, if not a complete lifting, of restrictions on the free movement of labor.

It is fitfully suggested that the Commonwealth, which is growing at an impressive speed, could be a suitable vehicle for such economic integration. The trouble with the Commonwealth, though, is that it contains some dictatorial regimes that have drifted away completely from Anglosphere values; and, conversely, it doesn’t include two key component states: the United States and Ireland.

Better to begin with the key relationship of our present age, namely that between the core Anglosphere states and India. The days when India pursued an essentially anti-Western foreign policy through its leading role in the Non-Aligned Movement are over for good. The country is now a major military ally of both the United Kingdom and the United States, though the present U.S. administration has not pursued the relationship with the same warmth as its predecessor.

It was the military aspect of the Anglosphere that actuated its greatest champion of all. In 1946, in the tiny town of Fulton, Missouri, Winston Churchill gave a speech remembered to this day for a sentence where he spoke of an iron curtain having descended across Europe, from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic. Yet that line was almost incidental. Churchill was quite clear about what his chief purpose was:

I come now to the crux of what I have travelled here to say. Neither the sure prevention of war, nor the continuous rise of world organization will be gained without what I have called the fraternal association of the English-speaking peoples. This means a special relationship between the British Commonwealth and Empire and the United States of America.

This was no mere rhetorical flourish. Churchill knew that the survival of liberty had been secured by an Anglosphere military victory. He had played a brave role in all three of the great twentieth-century conflicts that pitted the English-speaking peoples against their autocratic foes, fighting in the first, inspiring the tribe in the second, defining the third. And he knew exactly what he wanted, namely a permanent, formalized military alliance. One, indeed, that would go beyond any alliance then known between sovereign states:

Ladies and gentlemen, this is no time for generality, and I will venture to the precise. Fraternal association requires not only the growing friendship and mutual understanding between our two vast but kindred systems of society, but the continuance of the intimate relations between our military advisers, leading to common study of potential dangers, the similarity of weapons and manuals of instructions, and to the interchange of officers and cadets at technical colleges. It should carry with it the continuance of the present facilities for mutual security by the joint use of all Naval and Air Force bases in the possession of either country all over the world. This would perhaps double the mobility of the American Navy and Air Force. It would greatly expand that of the British Empire forces and it might well lead, if and as the world calms down, to important financial savings. Already we use together a large number of islands; more may well be entrusted to our joint care in the near future.

It was not simply an Anglo-American alliance that Churchill wanted. He understood that the Anglosphere went further than those two core states:

The United States has already a Permanent Defense Agreement with the Dominion of Canada, which is so devotedly attached to the British Commonwealth and the Empire. This Agreement is more effective than many of those which have been made under formal alliances. This principle should be extended to all the British Commonwealths with full reciprocity. Thus, whatever happens, and thus only, shall we be secure ourselves and able to work together for the high and simple causes that are dear to us and bode no ill to any.

He ended with an aspiration that has been almost forgotten today: “Eventually there may come—I feel eventually there will come—the principle of common citizenship, but that we may be content to leave to destiny, whose outstretched arm many of us can already clearly see.”

What would the great man think if he could be transported to our present age? Much of the common defense infrastructure he called for, and indeed helped put into place during his two terms in office, remains. The five core Anglosphere states retain a closeness on issues of military technology, including nuclear technology, that has no equivalent among separate states anywhere on earth. They operate a joint electronic eavesdropping system known as Echelon, sharing secrets under a treaty known as UKUSA, which dates back to 1947. This much, we may be sure, would merit a grunt of unsurprised approval from that deep chest.

What would astonish the old war leader, however, would be to find that India was now the second-largest investor in the United Kingdom after the United States, that its economy was poised to overtake Britain’s, that it was a nuclear power, and that it had achieved all these things while remaining a law-based democracy.

Once he had overcome his astonishment, he would surely press for the immediate inclusion of India into the military and intelligence structures of the Anglosphere. He would recognize India as a state that met the criteria he saw as essential to civilization, namely a mechanism to change the government peacefully, a legal system that is independent of the rulers, and a conception of property rights that protects the freedom of the individual.

Nor would India be his only surprise. He would doubtless shake his round and stubborn head in wonder at the way Singapore had been transformed from a mosquito swamp into a gleaming city-state. He would nod approvingly at the way the more democratic Caribbean states had retained their maces and their horsehair wigs and their stiff blue passports. And he would surely take particular delight in the way that South Africa, despite the very different future envisaged by his former jailers the Afrikaners, had rejoined the Commonwealth as a democracy.

One thing, we may be certain, would leave him bewildered and depressed. He would struggle to explain the loss of confidence in that portion of the English-speaking peoples whose history he had written, namely the core Anglosphere states. He would wonder why, having seen off the authoritarian challenges of both fascism and Marxism, they were now so ready to discard the things that had raised them to greatness. Still, he was fundamentally an optimist, and would doubtless deliver some well-turned quip about doing the right thing after exhausting all other possibilities.

For we are not finished. We remain an inventive, quizzical, enterprising people. All we need to do is hold fast to the model that made us that way. Edmund Burke’s words about America in 1775 apply, mutatis mutandis, to the Anglosphere as a whole today. English privileges have made it all that it is; English privileges alone will make it all it can be.

At almost exactly the moment that Edmund Burke was making that speech, at the other end of the Anglosphere, a young doctor in Boston named Joseph Warren—the man who sent Paul Revere on his ride—was seeking to rally his countrymen in defense of the same principles. His words ring down the ages: “You are to decide the question on which rest the happiness and liberty of millions yet unborn. Act worthy of yourselves.”

You, reading these words in his language, are the heirs to a sublime tradition. A tradition that gave us liberty, property, and democracy, and that raised our species to a pinnacle of wealth and happiness hitherto unimaginable. Act worthy of yourselves.