Virtually every visitor to London spends some time in Trafalgar Square, the capital city's most important public space. Laid out in the nineteenth century, it forms an imperial crossroads, where the City of London comes up from The Strand to meet Westminster at the top of Whitehall and where, to the south west, the Mall leads off to Buckingham Palace, passing underneath Admiralty Arch, once the official residence of the First Sea Lord. At its heart stands Nelson's Column surrounded by imperial lions, a monument to Great Britain's iconic admiral whose famous victory during the Napoleonic Wars gives the square its name.
Set into the walls in the north east corner are a group of 1876 Imperial Standards, measures of the inches, feet, yards, perches, poles and chains, that were once used throughout the British Empire. Flanking the square to the east and west are the imposing buildings of what were once two of the most important dominions of the empire: Canada House, where the Canadian High Commission is based, and South Africa House, now the diplomatic home of the Republic of South Africa. A little way out of the square, towards Piccadilly, is New Zealand House, a fine post-war office tower, while down at the Aldwych end of The Strand are Australia House, opened by King George V at the end of the First World War, and India House, designed by the late imperial architect Herbert Baker. Sandwiched between them is Bush House, once the headquarters of the BBC World Service, whose portico bears the inscription ‘To the friendship of English-Speaking peoples’. It holds two male statues symbolising Anglo-American partnership, commissioned by its American developers. Bush House was officially opened on 4 July 1925 – to mark American Independence Day.
If there is a symbolic headquarters for ‘the Anglosphere’, it is here, in Trafalgar Square and its environs. This is a term of relatively recent coinage, first used by the science fiction writer Neal Stephenson in his novel The Diamond Age, published in 1995. But in the last two decades it has achieved much greater prominence in political discourse to denote a group of English-speaking nations that share a number of defining features: liberal market economies, the common law, parliamentary democracy, and a history of Protestantism. It is most routinely applied to the United Kingdom and her former settler dominions Canada, Australia and New Zealand. This grouping has even come to acquire its own acronym – CANZUK. In many accounts of the Anglosphere, the net is cast more broadly to embrace the United States, once also home to settler colonies from Great Britain and a partner to the CANZUK nations in the so-called Five Eyes intelligence and security alliance. Wider still, and often controversially, the Anglosphere has in recent times been used to embrace a new set of potential members, including India, Singapore and Hong Kong, as well as English-speaking countries of Africa and the West Indies, all of which were formerly part of the British Empire. Closer to home, the Republic of Ireland is sometimes included as well.
The Anglosphere has an inherently flexible, ambiguous and often elusive reach in geographical terms, and that is part of its political appeal. But at its core there sit the countries represented in the imperial geography plotted around Trafalgar Square. In this book we explore the emergence and history of this idea in British politics and show how the Anglosphere, and the family of concepts to which it belongs – including ‘Greater Britain’, ‘the English-speaking peoples’, ‘Anglo-America’ and ‘the Old Commonwealth’ – have played an integral role in British politics and political discourse since the late nineteenth century. The complex patterns of thinking that have coalesced around these terms, we argue, enabled leading political actors at different points in the twentieth century to craft influential visions of, and ideas about, Britain's role and place in the world. These exerted significant influence over the ways in which politicians envisaged the main dilemmas facing Britain in the years after 1945 and exercised an important influence upon some of the key decisions made in response to them. The fluid and evolving lineage of thinking associated with the Anglosphere has been directed to different political ends at various junctures, but was especially important, we will suggest, in giving sustenance and shape, in recent years, to the Eurosceptic conviction that the UK's future lies outside the European Union (EU) and involves the resumption of alliances based on deep cultural affinities with other English-speaking countries.
The Anglosphere is a concept with a long historical lineage. Its origins lie in the late Victorian era, when historians and politicians debated what held the British Empire together, particularly those ‘kith and kin’ colonies where ‘Anglo-Saxons’ had settled, and whether stronger forms of political, economic and military unity were needed to secure the empire against the threats posed by the rise of rival powers, the USA among them. The idea lived on in the early twentieth century through debates in high politics about tariff reform versus free trade and came alive again both in arguments over the future of the British Empire between the world wars and in the soul-searching about Britain's place in the world that accompanied decolonisation, the rise of the ‘New Commonwealth’, and Britain's entry to the European Economic Community (EEC). Then, as the ‘short twentieth century’1 came to an end after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the Anglosphere was reinvented once more, becoming a potent way of imagining Britain's future as a global, deregulated and privatised economy outside the EU. In this guise it forms an important part of the story of how Britain came to take the historic decision, in the summer of 2016, to leave the EU.
In this book we offer an account of some of the main political uses to which the idea of the Anglosphere has been put over the last century or more in British politics. We show how notions of an English-speaking international community were integral to some of the most important political projects pursued in the last century, including arguments for imperial federation; Joseph Chamberlain's pursuit of social imperialism; Winston Churchill's attempt to promote British influence in the face of imperial decline; and the coalescence of a powerful current of Eurosceptic opinion which culminated in the campaign for Brexit. We show too how even hardened Anglosphere sceptics, such as Enoch Powell, offered arguments about the national character and provenance of the English which reflected the continuing influence of this pattern of thinking.
Our own study of this theme follows in the footsteps of many historians, political analysts and commentators, and we draw numerous insights from these works. There is a small specialist literature devoted to understanding the intellectual genesis and constitution of Anglosphere ideas in the Victorian era. Duncan Bell, in particular, has provided a rich and sophisticated account of these ideas and supplies an enlightening map of the various schemes of imperial federation to which it gave rise.2 Other scholars, such as International Relations expert Srdjan Vucetic, have illuminated the racialised character of ideas about an English-speaking civilisation in world politics and observed the intimate relationship between the Anglosphere and nostalgic ideas about empire, a focus that is echoed in the work of various ‘post-colonial’ critics.3
Others have noted the enduring power of the bonds of trust and mutual understanding exhibited in the relationships between some of these countries in a variety of policy spheres, exploring the coordination of intelligence services and military authorities,4 and highlighted the striking readiness of some Anglosphere countries to respond to American calls for military alliance in recent conflicts, most notably the recent Afghanistan and Iraq wars.5 One or two studies have explored the enduring and shifting role played by notions of ‘Anglo-America’ in British politics in the modern period. Andrew Gamble has supplied an immensely suggestive analysis of the power and growing appeal of this form of imagined community to parts of the political establishment in recent decades.6 How this category relates to other similar, but also distinct, terms such as the Anglosphere is a complex question. Andrew Gamble depicts ‘Anglo-America’ as a more encompassing point of reference and uses ‘Anglosphere’ to refer specifically to the countries of the ‘Old Commonwealth’.
There is no agreed definition of these terms to fall back upon in order to determine which should be employed to characterise the patterns of thinking about the Anglophone peoples to which we draw attention. Our own preference is to use the Anglosphere as a label to signify arguments which reference – sometimes very loosely and interchangeably – the values, peoples or histories of the core five countries of the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the USA. But we also analyse the political use of the term for other countries – notably Ireland and India – which represent challenging and important cases of resistance to incorporation into Anglophone topologies. As we shall see, in certain British political discourses, clear and racialised boundaries are drawn between nations and groups considered to be within the Anglosphere and those outside it; in other versions, the boundaries of the concept are kept deliberately ambiguous and fluid, often for particular ideological reasons.
We tend to use ‘Anglo-America’ to refer more concretely to arguments and appeals that reference these two particular countries in ways that may not include others, and we employ terms such as ‘Old Commonwealth’ or the dominions to signal references to Australia, Canada and New Zealand in particular (although South Africa also plays an important role in our account in the first part of the book). These semantic issues illustrate the fluid, and often elusive, nature of the terminologies that have been used to evoke these distinct, but also intersecting and overlapping, forms of imagined community.
Gamble and a number of other academic observers have noted the growing density, in recent decades, of links between British politicians and their American, Australian and Canadian counterparts across the political spectrum.7 The political Anglosphere is an important, but insufficiently explored, dimension of British politics. Its potency is well illustrated by the pivotal role played by the small group of Anglo-American politicians, pundits and media figures who alighted upon the Anglosphere idea in the 1990s, and became influential and passionate advocates of it.8 We explore some of their activities and ideas in chapters 5 and 6 and point to connections between what often looked like esoteric and marginal endeavours and the growing legitimacy and appeal of Eurosceptic arguments within the British Conservative Party.9 This, we suggest, forms an important, if overlooked, pre-history to Brexit.
While our own study builds upon many of the insights into this subject within this diverse literature, we make two claims for the distinctiveness of our approach. First, we examine the Anglosphere as a shifting and malleable pattern of political thinking and practice that runs through the heart of British politics from the late Victorian era to the present day, demonstrating how the Anglosphere evokes and gives form to one of the most enduring and influential imaginary horizons in British political life, from the zenith of empire, through decolonisation to the present day. Second, we situate this idea in relation to the different political-economic configurations which have given structure to and, in turn, been shaped by its political uses over the course of its history. We argue that the Anglosphere is not best understood as an idea whose meanings and implications were forever fixed at the point when it was first invented, in the late Victorian period, and is not – or not just – a predictable kind of neo-imperial fantasy that crops up periodically at times of national crisis.
Previous analyses of this tradition have not engaged sufficiently with the specific and changing ways in which the English-speaking community of nations has been imagined and characterised in British politics. The various meanings and implications of these ideas are anchored in the ideological character of the traditions of thinking that have deployed and appropriated this dream. While the Anglosphere and its conceptual cousins are today assumed to be the natural mindscape of conservative politicians and pundits, these are ideas that have at different points in their history been framed in progressive political terms. Towards the end of the twentieth century, however, the Anglosphere did become the imaginative landscape of sections of the political right, and this has had important consequences for debates about the UK's relationship with the European Union. The tendency to explain this emergent pattern of discourse as a symptom of colonial nostalgia, or as the recurrence of an ingrained pattern of neo-imperial fantasy, has resulted in the neglect of the particular role which Anglosphere ideas have played in justifying and making more appealing neo-liberal, Eurosceptic visions of Britain's future.
Our inclination is to view discourses of the Anglosphere as the source of recognisable patterns of thinking and practices that enable political actors to construct ideas about Britain and how it should understand and approach its relations with other parts of the world. In focusing on how different political figures have given meaning and coherence to the stories about the UK that they have told, we are necessarily drawn to placing emphasis upon the circumstances they inhabited and the various pressures they faced. We highlight in particular the impact of long-range developments such as the steady decline of the British Empire and the rise to global pre-eminence of the USA during the middle years of the last century.
Our study also draws attention to the predominantly Unionist, and particularly English, political provenance of many Anglosphere ideas. In the late Victorian period, ideas about Greater Britain were strongly intertwined with beliefs about the unity of Anglo-Saxon Protestant peoples, which largely excluded Irish Catholics and other groups of British subjects. The decline of territorial politics in the UK after the Irish War of Independence rendered these cleavages less potent in British politics. But, in the wake of the end of empire and Britain's entry to the EEC, the growth and development of Scottish nationalism and a new series of conflicts and demands generated by devolution within the UK have sharpened their salience. The contemporary Eurosceptic notion of the Anglosphere garners little support in Scotland and the Republic of Ireland. Its strongest supporters are English conservatives, and it is with them that it is now most commonly associated. We explore some of the historical reasons for why this is the case in the chapters that follow.
The Anglosphere concept is inherently transnational in meaning and scope. It can, and should, be studied in relation to the different national cultures of the countries to which it pertains – in which, it should be noted, the history of the British Empire and the idea of a benign ‘Anglo’ heritage are highly contested. Our focus in this volume, however, is primarily upon its employment and implications within the British political realm, as we consider the appeal and character of such thinking in this national context above all. This is partly because of constraints of length, but it also reflects the conviction that, while the Anglosphere concept has been construed and understood in similar ways in its constituent countries, to gain purchase upon its particular constitution and meanings, and to grasp the different audiences to which it is – more or less successfully – directed, it is vital to consider its operation within the discursive contexts associated with distinct political cultures and national histories. Our primary focus is upon Britain. And in this context we argue that the Anglosphere is a vital, overlooked part of the complex story that has led up to Brexit.