©2001, 2002 by James C. Bennett
Presented to the Foreign Policy
Research Institute
Over the past several years, a new term,
Anglosphere, has crept into political and social discussion in the
English-speaking world. This term, which can be defined briefly as the set of
English-speaking, Common Law nations, implies far more than merely the sum of
all persons who employ English as a first or second language. To be part of the
Anglosphere requires adherence to the fundamental customs and values that form
the core of English-speaking cultures. These include individualism, rule of law,
honoring contracts and covenants, and the elevation of freedom to the first rank
of political and cultural values.
Nations comprising the Anglosphere
share a common historical narrative in which the Magna Carta, the English and
American Bills of Rights, and such Common Law principles as trial by jury,
presumption of innocence, "a man's home is his castle", and "a man's word is his
bond" are taken for granted. Thus persons or communities who happen to
communicate or do business in English are not necessarily part of the
Anglosphere, unless their cultural values have also been shaped by those values
of the historical English-speaking civilization.
The Anglosphere, as a
network civilization without a corresponding political form, has necessarily
imprecise boundaries. Geographically, the densest nodes of the Anglosphere are
found in the United States and the United Kingdom, while Anglophone regions of
Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and South Africa are powerful and
populous outliers. The educated English-speaking populations of the Caribbean,
Oceania, Africa and India constitute the Anglosphere's frontiers.
What
Anglosphere Theory Does And Does Not Hold
The Anglospherist school of
thought asserts that the English-speaking nations have not only formed a
distinct branch of Western civilization for most of history, they are now
becoming a distinct civilization in their own right. Western in origin but no
longer entirely Western in composition and nature, this civilization is marked
by a particularly strong civil society, which is the source of its long record
of successful constitutional government and economic prosperity. The
Anglosphere's continuous leadership of the Scientific-Technological Revolution
from the seventeenth century to the twenty-first century stems from these
characteristics and is thus likely to continue for the foreseeable future.
Finally, beginning in World War I and continuing into the post-Cold War world,
Anglosphere nations have developed mutual cooperative institutions. The
Anglosphere potential is to expand these close collaborations into deeper ties
in trade, defense, free movement of peoples, and scientific cooperation, all
bound together by our common language, culture, and values.
Anglosphere
theorists promote more and stronger cooperative institutions, not to build some
English-speaking superstate on the model of the European Union, or to annex
Britain, Canada, or Australia to the United States, but rather to protect the
English-speaking nations' common values from external threats and internal
fantasies. Thus, Anglospherists call on all English-speaking nations to abandon
Haushoferian fantasies of geographical blocs: on America to downgrade its
hemispherist ambitions, on Britain to rethink its Europeanist illusions, and on
Australia to reject its "Asian identity" fallacy. Far from a centralizing
federation, the best form of association is what I call a "network
commonwealth": a linked series of cooperative institutions, evolved from
existing structures like trade agreements, defense alliances, and cooperative
programs. Rather than despising the variable geometry principle, it would
embrace it, forming coalitions of the willing to respond to emerging situations.
Anglosphere institutions would be open and nonexclusive; Britain, America,
Canada, Australia, and others would be free to maintain other regional ties as
they saw fit.
Anglospherism is assuredly not the racialist Anglo-Saxonism
dating from the era around 1900, nor the sentimental attachment of the
Anglo-American Special Relationship of the decades before and after World War
II. Any consideration of the Anglosphere concept should indeed include
examination of previous attempts to create institutional frameworks for the
English-speaking world. However, any comparison of the ideas and times of such
Anglo-Saxonists as Sir Alfred Milner, George E.G. Catlin, Cecil Rhodes and
Theodore Roosevelt to those of contemporary Anglospherists must also take into
account the considerable increase in understanding of the world that has come to
pass over those years. Contemporary Anglospherist thought bears roughly the same
relation to past Anglo-Saxonism as current evolutionary thought bears to the
simplistic Darwinism of Milner's contemporaries.
Anglo-Saxonism relied on
underlying assumptions of an Anglo-Saxon race, and sought to unite racial
"cousins." It saw the British Empire and the United States (and sometimes also
the Germans) as the building blocks of the Anglo-Saxon club, which in most
proposed versions was some species of framework for mediating conflicts of
interest between the building blocks. In short, it was a formula by which London
and New York might jointly manage their chunks of the world without conflict.
The movement was undermined by the First World War and the Great Depression, as
well as the opposition to the formula that arose many of its would-be
participants. Dublin, Ottawa, and Canberra saw less and less need to defer to
London in matters of defense and foreign policy, much less to allow their
relationship with Washington to be run through Whitehall. However, the
Anglo-Saxonist sentiments and institutions (such as the Rhodes Scholarships and
the English-Speaking Union) did prepare the way for the highly effective
collaboration of U.S., British, and Commonwealth forces in the Second World War
and the Cold War.
Anglospherism is based on the intellectual
understanding of the roots of both successful market economies and
constitutional democracies in strong civil society; in the understanding of the
multigenerational persistence of cultural factors in the success of maintaining
strong civil society; and in the awareness of the depth of cooperation possible
among such societies to a degree not possible among weaker or nonexistent civil
societies. Anglosphere theory examines the reality that on almost any ranking of
the characteristics of successful civil societies -- prosperity, political
freedom, social trust, new company formation and innovation -- the Anglosphere
nations form a significant cluster at the top, accompanied only by the
Scandinavian countries and a few outliers such as
Switzerland.
Anglo-Saxonists of the early twentieth century were
concerned that mass immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe was diluting
America's Anglo-Saxon stock with "unassimilable" newcomers, and that over time
the population would have less and less in common with British and Commonwealth
peoples. In fact, the immigrants assimilated the political values of the
Anglosphere quite readily, and do so today despite the attempts of politically
correct elites and governments to promote multiculturalism. Today's
Anglospherists see immigrants forming a new layer of intra-Anglosphere ties, as
the East and South Asian, Caribbean, and Mediterranean origins of immigrants
throughout the Anglosphere create new cross-relationships.
Civil
Society, Democracy, Prosperity, and the Anglosphere
Why do some
nations do well, and not others, and what does this say about the alignments and
associations in international politics that we currently have?
In the
past two decades, we have observed such varied phenomena as the fall of
communism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, the collapse of the
East Asian economic bubble, and the revival of entrepreneurship in Britain in
the wake of the Thatcher reforms. These experiences have created a better
appreciation of the link between strong civil society and prosperity. In the
emerging economy of this next phase of the Scientific-Technological Revolution,
these strong civil society values will be even more central to success.
A
civil society is one that is built of a vast network of networks. These networks
start with the individual and the families, community organizations, religious
congregations, social organizations, and businesses created by individuals
coming together voluntarily. Continuing up through the local, regional,
national, and international networks, the tying together of local organizations
creates civil societies, which in turn beget civic states. Such states are based
on the notion that authority begins at the local and community level and is
gradually built upwards to deal with wider-scale issues. Civic states rely on
community assent and a feeling of participation in a local, regional, and
national community. Law is generally accepted in civic states, as are the common
rules of society. The authority of the state is upheld not by constant exercise
of force, but by the willingness of citizens to comply. Civic states are thus
opposed to "economic states" in which loyalty is primarily pragmatic and based
on expectation of benefits through cross-subsidization.
It is important
to make clear that at the root of civil society is the individual. People who
define themselves primarily as members of collective entities, be they families,
religions, racial or ethnic groups, political movements, or corporations, cannot
form the basis of a civil society. Individuals must be free to dissociate
themselves from such collectives without prejudice and reaffiliate with others.
Societies that permanently bind individuals under the discipline of inherited or
assigned collectives remain bogged down in ethnic, racial, or religious
factionalism, nepotism, and economic systems such as the "crony capitalism" so
prevalent in East Asia and Latin America.
It is likewise important to
make clear that a family in a civil society is a voluntary association, even
though it is built on inherited connections. It should not place loyalty to its
members above moral obligations to the rest of society, such as fair dealing,
and should have no power over its members other than the sanction of withdrawal
of help or association. Similarly, its individuals may choose to join
associations marked by inherited ties, such as ethnic or religious
organizations, but are not penalized for declining to join. The state deals with
those individuals independently, rather than as members of that collective.
Thus, would-be advocates of civil society are often fooled into seeing
family-dominated societies as civil societies, when in fact they are the
opposite. Other observers see societies in which the state deals with everyone
as members of ethnic, racial, or religious communities (such as the vilayet
system of the Ottoman Empire) as civil societies, whereas in fact they are
authoritarian societies corrupted by the lack of choice.
The "family
values" of a crony society are not the same as the family values of a civil
society, nor are the ethnic- or religious-based voluntary associations of a
civil society the same as the ethnic or religious compartments of an
authoritarian society. One of the quiet success stories of strong civil
societies, particularly the United States, has been the manner in which the
compulsory family and religious affiliations of immigrants from the Old World
were transformed in the New World into voluntary associations of civil society,
and the immigrants themselves changed from members of traditional societies into
self-actualized individuals. This took place within the same generation in some
families and in no more than two or three generations in others.
Most
societies have some elements of civil society, but their strength differs
greatly from society to society. Some states, generally the most peaceful and
prosperous ones, are civic states, or possess elements of the civic state, but
others have little or no civic nature: totalitarian states, personal
dictatorships, and kleptocracies. The latter exist primarily to permit the
persons in control to steal from those subject to its power. Most of the poorer
and strife-wracked states of the world are in the latter category. The
relationship between civil society and prosperity, and civic statehood and
domestic peace, is not coincidental. However, the causal link has often been
misunderstood.
It is now quite clear that prosperous states are rich
because of the strength of their civil society, and that peaceful states are
peaceful because of the strength of their civic statehood, not the other way
around. States that have inherited vast natural wealth relative to their
populations have been able to spread wealth around, but this has not generally
strengthened civil society or the coherence of the civic state. When the Iraqis
invaded Kuwait, the sons of the rich Kuwaitis fled to Cairo, while their parents
negotiated the price of Western intervention. This is not a strong civic
state.
Also misunderstood are the concepts of democracy and the market
economy. Democracy and free markets are effects of a strong civil society and
strong civic state, not causes. Over the past century, there has been a
misdirection of attention to the surface mechanics of democracy, to
nose-counting, rather than to the underlying roots of the phenomenon. We know
that a society containing strong networks of voluntary association also develops
means of expressing the interests of those networks to the state. It is the need
for effective means of expression that gave rise to the original mechanisms we
now call democratic. Later, intellectuals in states that did not have a strong
existing civil society, especially pre-revolutionary France, looked at states
that did, especially England, and attempted to distill an abstract theoretical
construct that captured the essence of that experience. These intellectuals
called this thing democracy, but they subsequently focused attention on their
model (and its misunderstandings) rather than the essence of the thing they
actually admired.
England's strong civic state had its roots in the local
expressions of civil society in the civic realm, a process that may or may not
be traced back to the era before the Norman Conquest but was certainly
well-rooted by the fourteenth century. These include the grand and petit jury
systems, the election of various aldermen and other local officials, the
quasi-official role of many civil institutions, and the heritage of common law
administered by an independent judiciary. Selecting members of the House of
Commons was one of many different mechanisms by which local communities gave or
withheld their consent to the state.
Today we tend to focus on the many
ways in which pre-modern England differed from contemporary norms. The
restricted franchise, the "rotten boroughs" which elected members of Parliament
with a handful of voters, the lack of a party system, and the open purchase of
votes for money or favor all seem very undemocratic. But it is a mistake to
ignore the many ways in which England's system created a far more effective
means of assent and dissent compared to other state systems of the times. The
lesson from English history is repeated many times over, up to and including
contemporary events in Taiwan and South Korea. When civil society reaches a
certain degree of complexity, democracy emerges. Absent that civil society, the
importation of mere mechanisms of democracy only creates one more set of spoils
for families and groups to fight over at the expense of the rest of
society.
Similarly, the market economy requires more than merely the
absence of socialism or an overweaning government. It is the economic expression
of a strong civil society, just as substantive (rather than formulaic) democracy
is the political expression of a civil society and civic state. Democratic
mechanisms no more create civil society than wet streets cause rain. There is
theoretically no reason why democracy needs a market economy, or vice versa --
but in practice they are almost always found together. Entrepreneurship in
business uses and requires the same talents, and often the same motives, that go
into starting a religious, nonprofit, or political organization. The society
that can create entrepreneurial businesses tends to be the same society that
creates the other forms of organizations as well -- often the same individuals
start several of each form at different stages in their lives.
The market
economy also requires a civil society with general acceptance of a common
framework of laws, practices, and manners. Without a general acceptance of fair
dealing, an agreement on what fair dealing means, and a system that can
adjudicate disputes, a true market economy cannot exist. Just as post-Soviet
Russia's politics demonstrated that the mechanics of democracy alone cannot
create a civic state, its economy demonstrated that market formulas cannot by
themselves create a market economy or a civil society. They are necessary but
insufficient conditions in each case.
The Link to Science and
Technology
These realizations have immense implications for the next
stages of the Scientific-Technological Revolution. It is highly likely that the
current information revolution will continue to be a source of innovation for
the next stages of growth. They will emerge in an entrepreneurial environment
marked by the rapid creation of teams and capitalization through venture money
and public markets possible only in a strong civil society. The crucial role of
non-company organizations (such as professional and industry associations and
informal networks of acquaintance) in creating the Silicon Valley phenomenon
also indicates that this form of entrepreneurism is a strong civil-society
phenomenon.
Looking at the geography of the next stages of this
scientific-technological revolution, it is no accident that it is emerging first
in the United States. Strong civil society has its roots in medieval Europe, as
a result of the society being built of a mix of tribal, feudal, local, church,
family, and state institutions, characterized by the lack of a single,
overwhelming power that could impose its will. Gradually the different interests
established negotiated relationships of power and influence, none of which
involved full submission of one element to another. At first these institutions
were for the most part neither free nor voluntary in nature. However, the
multiplicity of institutions eventually permitted some liberty, and eventually
many individuals to establish a substantial freedom and independence through
astute negotiation.
England, by virtue of its being the strongest part of
an island at the periphery of Europe, was insulated from many of the more
centralizing influences that eventually eradicated the complexity of emerging
medieval civil society. In particular, its security from invasion after 1066 and
consequent lack of need to maintain a large land army shielded it from the royal
absolutism that continental monarchies fashioned in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. Thus, England was free to continue combining medieval
institutions such as Parliament, juries, and corporations into effective forms
of complex civil societies. These forms were present throughout Western Europe,
but faded or changed into instruments of state power over civil society on the
continent, while still flourishing in England.
The colonization of North
America happened in such a way that the most useful characteristics of civil
society were brought to its soil from England, while many of the less useful
remnants of feudalism were left behind. In fact, Anglo-America was a
particularly strong civil society from the start, especially in New England and
Pennsylvania, where Puritans and Quakers, both of whom were strongly dedicated
to the fundamentals of civil society, brought particularly robust institutions.
Above all, they elevated the sanctity of contract and covenant to central places
in their moral universe, an critical advantage in fostering civil society, and
particularly, dynamic entrepreneurship.
The entrepreneurial cultures of
the Quakers of Pennsylvania and northern England, the Methodists of northern and
midland England and America, and the Calvinists of New England and Scotland seem
to have fundamentally contributed to the emergence, development, and continuing
dominance of the industrial and information revolutions.
It is important
to reject a narrow, triumphalist view of the Anglo-American role in this matter
and to stress again that it was the confluence of a number of factors that
created this link. This implies that the characteristics that have given the
Anglosphere its leadership can be lost as well as acquired, that other cultures
can acquire (and to some extent have acquired) characteristics with similar
effects. It also implies that these cultural and institutional characteristics
are fairly deep-seated, and changes, negative and positive alike, usually
require several generations to take full effect.
As the saying goes,
"There is a lot of ruin in a nation." Thus England took more than a few
generations to lose the characteristics that sparked entrepreneurial vigor, and
when relatively shallow political and institutional changes reversed the climate
of decline, entrepreneurial vigor quickly resurfaced there. Conversely, it will
take more than "anti-corruption" campaigns in low-trust cultures in the former
Soviet states, Latin America, or East Asia to change their deep-rooted cultural
biases feeding nepotism in business and government.
If the above
historical observations are at all valid, the obvious conclusion is that the new
scientific-technological revolution is likely to emerge in a high-trust culture
-- specifically, the Anglosphere. Hence, the most important political challenge
of the near future is to create close cooperative ties among groups of strong
civic states, starting with the Anglosphere nations. These conclusions also
suggest that one critical preparation for this process is for Anglosphere
nations to gain an awareness of the distinctiveness of their own civilization,
not in order to feel superior to others, but to create a realistic basis for
addressing the serious problems arising within this
civilization.
Finally, we must realize that every advance brought by the
next stages of the scientific-technological revolution will bring a serious
potential for danger and disruption. The potential solutions to such dangers
must come from the strengths of the civilization from which they emerged: the
strengths of advanced civil societies.
Some visionaries advocate a world
government in hopes that it would control such hazards. Such a government
(unless it is a disguised empire of the major powers imposed on the rest) would
have to be constructed on a lowest-common-denominator basis to include a
substantial collection of hapless dictatorships, rotten oligarchies, and shabby
kleptocracies. It may be more useful to construct a framework for cooperation
starting with a small number of significant strong civil societies and to work
on improving constitutional structures which can restrain harmful use of power,
whether political or technological, while preserving safeguards against
political abuse.
Any such institution would have to draw on the civil
society's strengths of openness, voluntary consent and compliance, inclusion,
constitutional restraint of authority, and flow of participation from the
fundamental levels of society to the top. Any other approach to solution is
unlikely to be effective in its goals or tolerable to its citizens.
An
understanding of the success of market economies and democratic government will
lead inevitably to skepticism about ambitious, broadly inclusive international
or transnational institutions. International cooperation will be essential to
meet the challenges of the next stages of the scientific-technological
revolution. But the first challenge of organizations is to attempt to link those
civic states that already have much in common. If we cannot make such forms
work, there is no hope whatsoever for institutions hoping to link across
different cultures, except in the most superficial ways.
Thus, the first
challenge is creating the institutional ties to parallel the economic realities
of the convergence within the English-speaking economies. Since the changes
sparked by the Thatcher reforms, some signs of entrepreneurial takeoff can be
discerned in the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia. But other areas of the
world displaying creativity and entrepreneurship are, not surprisingly, strong
and relatively open civil societies themselves, such as Scandinavia and the
Netherlands. It is no accident that Linus Torvalds -- who created the
phenomenally successful Linux computer operating system -- is a Finnish citizen.
It is also noteworthy that he eventually moved to the English-speaking world --
in this case Palo Alto, California -- in order to further his dreams.
By
contrast, such high-tech entrepreneurship as does emerge in the core European or
Japanese economies tends to be content-related and based on local knowledge
inherent in language or location. These are classic strategies of follower
economies, and, although they are intelligent strategies, English-speaking
countries do not adopt them. Rather, they tend to compete in the mainstream,
taking advantage of regulatory arbitrage, such as Ireland's low taxation or
Canada's more rational technology export laws, and pursuing global, not regional
niches.
The problem is not any lack of creativity, energy, or
entrepreneurial drive among non-English-speaking people. The problem is that
when creativity does arise and ventures start, the prevailing set of social,
economic and political institutions retards their growth. In corrupt and
undemocratic countries with weak civil societies, family networks permit
entrepreneurs to get around these obstacles, up to a point. But they cannot
expand easily beyond that point.
In stronger civil societies such as
Germany, which have high-trust characteristics but lack openness and flexibility
in their political and social systems, ventures are frustrated by bureaucratic
barriers. Thus, while in America computer industry start-ups draw heavily on
South Asian programmers and entrepreneurs, a German proposal to give visas to
Indian programmers prompted the slogan "Kinder statt Inder" -- "(our) Children,
not Indians."
This resistance may change, but not overnight. The European
Union will likely go through one or more rather severe crises before it broadens
its purview, and the Japanese system is even more rigid. The decades it will
require for these changes to take place will also be the critical decades of the
next stages of the scientific-technological revolution. In the short term,
therefore, it is likely that the Anglosphere nations will continue to pull away
from Continental Europe and Japan.
Many young continental Europeans use
their EU rights to relocate to Britain, whose entrepreneurial culture and
freedom they seek. Free movement has been reported as a triumph of EU
principles, but it is very much a one-way street. Young continentals move to
Britain and Ireland, suggesting the continual attraction of the English-speaking
world for the smart, talented, and ambitious. The real "French Silicon Valley"
does not lie in any of the planned technology centers created by the French
state, but stretches instead from Dover to London, where thousands of young
French men and women have relocated to pursue their dreams without the high
taxes and social burdens prevailing on the continent.
Becoming A
Self-Aware Civilization: The Anglosphere Perspective
An Anglosphere
perspective differs from any of the lenses through which our societies have been
viewed in the past. It could not have arisen at an earlier point in time.
Although aspects of the perspective may seem familiar, they are applied in new
ways and combined into new synergies. The principal characteristics emphasized
by the Anglosphere perspective include the following:
• Historical
continuity. The Anglosphere is a relatively old social construct among human
societies, with a tangible continuity reaching back at least twelve centuries.
Although substantially transformed by each human wave added to the whole, and by
each invasion of ideas which have affected development for good and for bad, the
Anglosphere is recognizably evolved from Alfred's kingdom. Americans or
Australians who long for depth of historical perspective ought properly to find
it in the Anglosphere identity. The better we understand history, the more we
understand that the voyage to those countries was more continuity than
re-creation. This perspective has substantial consequences on our understanding
of political, social, economic, military, and technological history.
•
Memetic, rather than genetic, identity. Richard Dawkins popularized the concept
of the meme, the equivalent of a gene in the process of evolution of
information. This has proven to be a useful concept. Memes reproduce, spread,
and evolve far faster than genes, and thus human societies are far more affected
by memetic than by genetic evolution. (The classic example: it is far quicker to
evolve the concept, or meme, of the corrective lens and spread the use of
eyeglasses worldwide, than it is to wait for genetic evolution to weed out the
near-sighted.) A century ago, proponents of English-speaking political unions
had a primarily genetic view of the English-speaking world and sought to reunite
the British with their cousins in America. This vision failed, partly because so
many Americans were already of non-British descent by that time. In contrast,
the Anglosphere is a memetic concept. Those who come to use the language and
concepts of the Anglosphere (and further their evolution) are the memetic heirs
of Magna Carta, the Bills of Rights, and the Emancipation Proclamation, whatever
their genetic heritage. "Innocent until proven guilty" now belongs to Chang,
Gonzales, and Singh, as well as Smith and Jones.
• Networked, rather than
hierarchical, structure. The first expression of a vision of unity was the
coining of the term "Great Britain" by James I, king of Scotland and England
alike. The unity of the United Kingdom, formalized finally in 1707, was
contested many times by Scots and Irish, and rejected altogether in Philadelphia
in 1776. The second vision, that of Rhodes and Milner, was of a co-dominion
jointly run from London and Washington. The high-water mark of this vision was
the Anglo-American high command of World War II, which merged the two militaries
far more than a mere alliance. But this relationship was diluted into NATO and
the United Nations, and as a vision, dissolved. The third vision, the plan of
Harold Wilson and Lyndon Johnson for a North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement, was
waylaid by the politics of the day and the suspicion that it would have ended in
an American hegemony made obnoxious by the Vietnam War and the shadow of the
Suez crisis. The network commonwealth vision is thus the fourth iteration of
Anglosphere cohesion. It is polycentric and collaborative, befitting an era in
which the network, not some plan, is the ruling paradigm. Coalitions of the
willing, variable geometry, and multiple, overlapping political ties, rather
than One Union, One Parliament, and One Capital, are the characteristics of the
Network Commonwealth approach.
• Emphasis on similarities and recognition
of differences. Narrow racial and nationalist narratives have emphasized the
differences among Anglosphere nations and deemphasized similarities. At the same
time, a superficial universalism has suppressed appreciation of genuine
differences between the Anglosphere and other civilizations. This has led to the
facile and futile attempt to impose the surface mechanisms of the Anglosphere on
cultures with none of the background of slow evolution of strong civil society.
Kosovo cannot be turned into Kansas or Kent in two years. An Anglospheric
perspective concentrates on tending and perfecting our own garden first, on
creating deep and strong ties between highly similar nations and cultures, and
seeking to help other nations by serving as an example (and sometimes, as a
caution). It does not impose solutions on nations that cannot benefit
thereby.
The English-speaking peoples are now at the threshold of the
perception stage. To move forward, new mental categories must be given name and
definition and brought to general attention. As noted above, there is no concise
term for the category of "English-speaking nations." Even that clumsy phrase is
imprecise, as it focuses excessively on the linguistic aspects and ignores the
much wider set of shared legal, constitutional, and social values which these
nations hold in common. Hence the term "Anglosphere," which is concise, goes
beyond mere linguistic commonality, and has no racial overtones. However, it is
not clear that it will become the term of the future since it still has
overtones of "Anglophile," which is a value not universally considered positive
in the Anglosphere. In California "Anglo" is a term identified with
"Non-Hispanic Whites"; in Canada "Anglophone" has come to mean "non-French
whites." In Ireland, it carries overtones of ancient British oppression, rather
than English-speaking civilization as a whole. An Anglospheric Perspective
reclaims the term from narrow usage and connotation.
Time will tell
whether this neologism will endure. Although "Anglosphere network commonwealth"
is a convenient shorthand to discuss such things, the formal title of such an
entity may be more prosaic -- a "Community of English-Speaking States," for
example -- or it may reach for a more poetic form; a "League of the Common Law,"
perhaps. It will depend on the temper of the times that bring it
forth.
More generally, what is needed is an explicit recognition of a
status that is "not a countryman, yet not a foreigner," but rather a fellow
member of a network civilization.
The Sinews of the Network
Commonwealth: Evolving New Forms from Existing Elements
Network
Commonwealths will emerge evolutionarily, like most viable political mechanisms,
growing from, altering, and redefining institutions and developing in the era of
economic states until these institutions become a new thing. When the history of
Network Commonwealths is written, the current time will be seen not as the start
of the process, but as perhaps a halfway mark in the building of the Network
Commonwealth.
1. Common Economic Spaces: Trade and
Transmigration
As I discussed previously, common market areas for
trade in goods have blossomed over the past half-century, the successes sparking
numerous imitations. A Network Commonwealth will have a set of free trade
agreements as one of its fundamental ligatures. It would differ from existing
common markets in focusing on facilitation of informational trade, services, and
the free flow of people and interpersonal cooperation.
The mental model
of the European Union as a "harmonized" trade area (to use the European Union's
jargon for area-wide uniform standards) could be illustrated by the example of a
group of corporations throughout Europe being able to manufacture an airplane
jointly, coordinating tens of thousands of workers producing fuselages in
France, wings in Germany, and tail assembly in Spain. The mental model of a
Network Commonwealth is illustrated by a set of arrangements permitting a
software company incorporated in Bermuda to use programmers, marketers, and
financiers in California, Australia, India, and Ireland to put together a
Web-based product in cyberspace and sell it worldwide. At the same time, they
would enjoy adequate intellectual property protection and have the ability to
resolve disputes in the process fairly and expeditiously.
It is relevant
that the harmonizations needed to enable the European example took decades to
create, and imposed substantial transition costs on the citizens of the
member-states. Most of the harmonizations needed for the latter example already
exist: common language, common software standards, and a common law and
understanding of business practices. The Network Commonwealth places a greater
emphasis on creation of a common business space for information businesses than
on the elimination of traditional barriers like tariffs or quotas. International
processes such as the World Trade Organization are already effecting many of the
needed changes in such areas. A NAFTA-EU free trade agreement, such as has been
proposed, which would reduce trade barriers between those areas, could carry the
process further and deeper.
In the Network Commonwealth, future trade
will be more dominated by informational goods and services than by physical
goods. In these areas, it is more important to avoid the creation of new
barriers than to eliminate existing ones. Instead, such a trade regime would
focus on resolving issues such as the different treatment of state-generated
intellectual property by the US and the Commonwealth countries. In an era in
which the US software industry is economically more important and generates more
jobs than the US auto industry, these are the types of issues whose resolution
ought to have priority. Similarly, a Network Commonwealth emphasis would ally
Anglosphere nations, with their more open, competitive industries, in
international decision-making forums such as those on radio spectrum allocation,
where Britain today undercuts its own interests in the name of European
solidarity.
In creating common trade and economic spaces, agricultural
and manufactured goods issues would have the lowest priority, both because they
will be of declining economic importance and because they tend to have
substantial entrenched protectionist lobbies. There is no need to hold back the
creation of fully free markets in some areas because they cannot be had in all
areas. More important are agreements providing for free entry throughout the
community's economic space in the communications and transportation sectors.
Universal flat- or low-rate communications and fully competitive air
transportation should be the end-goals of these agreements.
2.
Sojourner Provisions: The Human Element of Trade and Cooperation
I
place substantial emphasis on immigration ties and "sojourner" status: a right
to travel to, reside in, and do business within all the member-states of the
Network Commonwealth on an equal and reciprocal basis. The European Union has
effectively implemented such a status as of 1993; US-Canadian agreements have
moved in a similar direction. Sojourner status is important because the critical
ties within a Network Commonwealth are not, as with the European Union,
hierarchy-to-hierarchy relationships between large corporations, but rather
person-to-person relationships between the enterprising individuals who will
create the businesses, civic organizations, and personal networks of the
future.
Sojourner status is also important because the Network
Commonwealth model incorporates a new model of transnational personal movement
appropriate to the era of Internet, cheap jet travel, and worldwide media. The
Machine Age model was fundamentally one of immigration. In that model,
individuals were citizens of one nation-state and resided, worked, and paid
taxes within that state. The only way to change that status was to give up
citizenship in one nation, move to a new nation and adopt residence, employment,
and citizenship there. The immigrant who adopted the identity and customs of the
new nation and fit himself into that structure, rarely if ever returned, lost
contact with home country media, and communicated with his previous home and
family slowly through mails, or not at all.
The Network Era model of
transnational personal movement is sojournership. A sojourner is one who moves
from one country to another to reside and engage in economic activity, but does
not give up his previous identity, returns to previous countries of residence
frequently, and remains in constant communication with his home network. This
sojourner is an essential element of transnational cooperation, making possible
entrepreneurial activity on a wide scale with an extremely low cost of entry.
The sojourner often serves to cross-pollinate activity from place to place,
accelerating ties begun or continued via Net and Web. As humans cease to be
inhabitants and economic actors solely of physical space, we begin to have an
"amphibious" existence split between physical space and information space. Each
space has its own rules and realities, and the sojourner is the person who helps
tie the two together by combining cyberspace and physical-space
contact.
Existing immigration law is poorly adapted to such activity. The
levels of state benefits attached to citizenship have risen to such levels
during the Machine Age that an immigrant's slot becomes a valuable prize,
particularly for persons from poorer countries. Yet the sojourner does not seek
to fill a citizen's slot. The immigration machinery and provisions of most of
the world's industrialized states are designed to ration these entitlements by
rationing citizenship. Sojourners face the choice of trying to fit the
immigrant's slots or to abuse tourist, student, or temporary worker provisions,
none of which are appropriate to their needs.
Similarly, national borders
create other obstacles to effective sojourning. Consider the situation among
English-speaking nations. Despite the similarity in the legal, financial, and
business systems of the English-speaking nations, and the transparency of credit
records due to common language, it is difficult for an ordinary sojourner to
obtain credit or secure loans across the borders of the English-speaking
nations. At a minimum, credit checks in the US require a Social Security number.
But to gain a Social Security number is to stake a claim on numerous benefits,
none of which were things the sojourner sought to begin with. Yet the would-be
sojourner cannot renounce those benefits to get a Social Security number merely
for the purposes of gaining credit status. Network Commonwealth agreements could
reduce such burdens with a substantial net gain to financial institutions as a
result of an expansion of the common economic space.
A sojourner
agreement among English-speaking nations would create a reciprocal right of
sojourning for citizens of the adhering nations, permitting those citizens to
travel to, reside in, and to perform economic transactions in all member
nations. Sojourners would not be eligible for state benefits and would pay core
taxes, but not taxes earmarked for state benefits. Thus, a Briton sojourning in
America would pay tax supporting basic governmental functions, but would not
make a Social Security contribution nor be eligible for Social Security
benefits, unless the U.S. chose to include sojourners in the system on a
voluntary basis. Similarly, an American sojourner in the UK would pay basic tax,
but not support the National Health Service or be eligible for those
benefits.
Although it would be generally beneficial to permit sojourners
to hold employment, concerns about competition for formal employment slots may
create a barrier to agreement. More important, and less controversial, would be
a provision permitting sojourners to conduct business, including acting as
contractors and consultants. As such, they would be in line with the emerging
economic trends. They would not have political rights in the host nations,
though there is a reasonable argument for giving long-resident sojourners who
pay local sales and property taxes a vote in local elections, as the European
Union does.
Most importantly, sojourner status would not be rationed; it
would be freely available to any applicants, subject to a basic check for
criminal record. Misbehavior of a sojourner in a host nation would be dealt with
primarily by expulsion; similarly, need for welfare services would be dealt with
by repatriation. Countries could remove sojourners from the competition for
state benefits and insulate host citizens from potential problems caused by
their presence. They could make grant of status dependent on strict reciprocity
and ensure that sojourners come primarily from countries within the network
civilization of the host nation (thereby minimizing interpersonal transaction
costs). This would deliver many of the benefits of immigration. It would also
minimize the commonly ascribed costs to the host nation and its
people.
Despite the theoretical availability of a sojourner-like status
throughout the European Union, young Britons and Irish have made relatively
little use of it. Large numbers of both nations' young (and those of the other
principal Anglosphere nations) come to the United States to live and work, often
by abusing immigration statuses designed for other purposes. Sojourner status
would turn current violators into constructive economic participants.
A
sojourner agreement would create a powerful incentive for active,
entrepreneurial persons in all parts of a network civilization, particularly the
young, to support the creation of the Network Commonwealth. It creates a direct
and visible benefit to individuals from the creation of the Network
Commonwealth.
3. Collaborative Organizations in Science and
Technology
The European Union was seen as the outgrowth of the
European Coal and Steel Community, which evolved gradually into the European
Economic Community, then the European Community. However, the EEC was only one
of several elements from which the European Union was forged. Also important
were a group of organizations for joint scientific and technological
cooperation, including the European Atomic Energy Agency, and the European Space
Agency. These programs had two important functions. The first was a pragmatic
one, of permitting European nations to participate in scientific and
technological projects beyond their individual means. Second was the symbolic
function of demonstrating that a united Europe could remain competitive in
science and technology, at a time when the USA and the USSR seemed destined to
dominate those fields.
The cooperation model for European
scientific-technical organizations was, as in nearly all pan-European programs,
one of top-down negotiated relationships between national hierarchical
structures. Programs are composed under the rule of "juste retour" -- money is
spent in each member-nation in proportion to the percentage of funding
contributed by that nation.
Nations benefit from these programs to the
degree their national economic and technical structures are organized in a
top-down, state-directed hierarchical structure; and their political systems can
generate the bureaucratic and funding stability needed to properly support such
programs. France and Germany are good examples of such nations; the United
Kingdom has historically been a poor example; not surprisingly. The United
Kingdom has tended to get the worst of the deal in most European cooperative
science and technology programs in which it has participated.
A Network
Commonwealth would find cooperative science and technology programs similarly
useful in creating added leverage for national expenditures in those fields.
Highly visible programs, like space exploration, would yield similar benefits in
producing a visible source of pride in cooperation for accomplishment. However,
such cooperative programs would be conceived and structured quite differently
from the Machine Age structures of the European Union.
As with all
Network Commonwealth efforts, its science and technology programs would seek to
exploit the deeper cooperation possible among persons with similar cultural
backgrounds. The universality of English as the world language of science would
seem to reduce the value of Network Commonwealth commonalties. However, it is
not the difficulties of interpersonal communications among scientists that is
the barrier to international cooperation; scientists are often capable of
forming effective transnational teams. The problem lies in the way that the
conflicts of their sponsoring states often intrude into the possibilities of
further cooperation once initial work has produced promising
results.
Consider the invention of the World Wide Web: although developed
by two researchers (one of them English) at CERN in Switzerland, a pan-European
scientific research institution, its benefits were first and most widely reaped
by Americans, who neither participated in the CERN consortium nor were present
at the creation of the Web. The incompatibilities of the CERN member-states and
the slowness of state-to-state cooperation made it unlikely that any of the
member-states would be able to exploit this breakthrough, as indeed they did
not. By aligning nations with similar and more compatible political systems; and
by encouraging person-to-person and institution-to-institution rather than
state-to-state cooperation, a Network Commonwealth is likelier to promote
effective science and technology cooperation than international structures
created on other bases.
4. Security Organizations: Sailing With the
Fast Convoy
Permanent security alliances rank high among the
institutions that can evolve into building blocks for the Network Commonwealth.
Since its founding, NATO has become more than a military alliance: it is now an
elaborate set of permanent structures and institutions which have had a profound
effect on the military, political, and economic life of the nations which have
joined them. One need only look at the importance of NATO membership to Spain,
Greece, Turkey and now, the states of Eastern Europe in stabilizing and
democratizing them to see that permanent alliance structures have become one of
the central building blocks of transnational institutions.
It is also
instructive to note the failures in building or maintaining security alliance
structures. The U.S.'s unsuccessful attempts to replicate NATO's success in
CENTO and SEATO and the immediate collapse of the Warsaw Pact with the fall of
communism, demonstrate that permanent structures require substantial alignment
of interests and values. Perception of immediate threats can create an incentive
to join an alliance, but when the perception of threat changes, (or the
perception that resistance, rather than accommodation, is the effective way to
meet it) that incentive disappears, and the alliance collapses.
Just as
the transition to the Machine Age made mastery of manufacturing the key to
success in warfare, so will mastery of information be the key to success in
Information Revolution warfare. Already, the predominance of the US military is
due more and more to its superior information technology.
Information war
is war directed not against persons or things directly, but against the
information that controls and affects both. That information war will become a
major new form of warfare, on three levels: state vs. state; state vs.
individual; and individual vs. individual. This will lead to a transformation of
the nature of privacy, with new winners and losers. Individuals and small groups
careful to master the new information technology can gain a level of privacy
vis-à-vis governments and other individuals unthinkable during the Machine Age;
those who ignore these developments will have far less privacy, both from the
state, and from private eavesdroppers. The great powers of the new age, to the
extent there are great powers, will be those nations that possess a high degree
of information-age literacy, a vigorous software industry, and the ability to
develop the political-military doctrines to exploit its advantages.
The
US prevailed in the Machine Age because of its general mastery of machinery, its
enormous industrial base, and its ability to find and give command to generals
such as Dwight Eisenhower. Eisenhower and his peers understood how to use these
assets to win in the face of clear German superiority in weapons, morale, and
training throughout most of the war. Germans had, for most of the war's length,
better tanks, planes, and guns -- the U.S. had better trucks. It also had the
only army where almost every draftee knew how to drive, and most how to fix
motor vehicles, from civilian life.
The dominant powers of the future
will be those who have a strong domestic software capability, potential soldiers
who are comfortable with use of computers, and the ability to generate
political-military strategies to exploit the new technologies properly. The
Network Commonwealth provides a means for today's economic states to minimize
the loss of defensive potential as they undergo devolutionary pressures and
fiscal constraints as their previous ability to divert large percentages of
their GDPs diminishes. Those who can effectively implement it will retain
substantially more power than those who don't .
The balance of power has
already begun to change as a result of the increase in the rate of transition
from the Machine to the Information Age. Powers like Russia, which dominated the
Machine Age because of their ability to cover square miles with medium-tech tank
battalions, have lost capability. Ironically, powers such as Britain and France,
which had fallen to the middle rank of military capability, today have returned
to the rank of top powers precisely because of their greater ability to master
the cutting edge of today's information-based technologies.
The
centrality of information technology, combined with organizational and
weapons-technology innovations, constitutes what has become known as the
"Revolution in Military Affairs" (RMA, in defense-wonk shorthand). The U.S. has
already begun to consider the issue of how to cooperate with its NATO and other
principal allies in using the "Grid" -- the dense network of information, using
Internet-like techniques, that links information-gathering sensors, command and
control centers, and weapons and men in the field. The defense sinew of Network
Commonwealth ties will center around cooperation in the use of the Grid by the
core alliance. NATO has built a series of standards, such as a common rifle
caliber, making it easy for units of NATO member nations to cooperate in the
field. A Network Commonwealth defense alliance would be built primarily around
common standards in information.
A Call For Civilizational
Construction
The next stages of the Scientific-Technological
Revolution will require a great deal of flexibility if nations are to respond
creatively to new technologies and the unprecedented individual and social
options they will provide. The history of the developed world since the onset of
the scientific-technological revolution has been a search for a new equilibrium
following the creative destruction of the Medieval order. The search has been
long and bloody, and has led down many fake paths. But we may now be able to
avoid, after such bitter experience, all utopian temptations and construct an
adapted civilization firmly on the roots of the strong civil society we have
inherited. The twentieth century saw many failed attempts at ideological social
construction; we live yet among their ruins. It also saw many attempts to
reinstitute the values of previous eras, or (in many cases) imagined versions of
previous eras. None of these returns to the past was successful, although new
generations often look back to previous generations' revivals as nostalgic
models.
The call for an Anglosphere network commonwealth is neither
utopian nor nostalgic, but simply a response to the challenges likely to be
posed in the next stages of the scientific-technological revolution. It is a
call to repair the weakened roots of civil society and to construct civic states
to replace the failing institutions of the economic state. Doing so will require
civilizational self-awareness, to be won not by creating a new civilization, but
by appreciating the value of those that have already emerged.
These tasks
will no doubt seem tame to those who long for exotic and wholly novel forms of
human society. However, the construction of a society that can lead humankind
through the challenges of the next stages of the scientific-technological
revolution without repeating the disasters of the twentieth century is not a
trivial piece of work. Rather, it is a task that will dominate even the long
lives of today's young people and future generations. For those whose lives have
been occupied with preventing or repairing the disasters of failed utopian
visions, the turn to construction, rather than opposition or remediation, will
require a major change of mentality. Above all, it requires in young and old
alike the recovery of self-assurance. It requires the knowledge that we are the
standard-bearers of a civilization that has defeated much evil (including that
generated by our own wrong paths) and now stands poised to lead the Anglosphere,
and someday the world, to the stars.
A Note on Sources
The
following books are among the principal works of scholarship and thought on
which I have drawn in proposing the idea of the Anglosphere perspective; their
influence underlies the entire book. My describing them as "Foundational
Anglosphere Works" should not be taken to imply that their authors endorse or
agree with the arguments of my work in part or in full, credit or blame for
which is entirely mine.
Fischer, David Hackett Albion's Seed: Four
British Folkways in North America
Fischer's work challenges effectively one
of the central myths of American exceptionalism: the Turner's frontier thesis.
He argues convincingly that American culture exhibits great continuity from the
British Isles to the New World, and that differences between American regional
cultures are overwhelmingly the product of the differences between regional
cultures of the British Isles. Turner's theories of a transformation through the
frontier experience is effectively disproved, particularly in light of a
continual evolution of the Anglosphere cultures through ongoing frontier
experiences within the British ideas and subsequently. Fischer's picture of
Anglosphere continuity is consistent with the Anglosphere exceptionalism whose
English roots are shown by Macfarlane to be deep, and whose overall
characteristics are shown by Véliz to be wide and distinct when viewed through a
comparative lens. Together, they add up to an Anglosphere culture that is
persistent and pervasive over many generations, distinct throughout its history
from other European-origin civilizations around it, and bearing for its time a
particularly strong variety of civil society.
Fukuyama, Francis Trust:
The Social Virtues & The Creation of Prosperity 1995 The Free Press, New
York One of the most important books for thinking about, and comparing and
contrasting cultures and subcultures, and particularly about the role of high
trust in successful civil societies.
Macfarlane, Alan. The Origins of
English Individualism. Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1978. One of the critical
foundation books of modern Anglosphere thought. It refutes in detail the
prevailing Marxist assumption that England had been just another European
peasant society before the modern era and the Industrial Revolution. Macfarlane
makes a strong case for the distinctness of English-speaking civilization and
its unique social mode reaching back to at least the fifteenth century, and
possibly well before. Rather than a product of the Industrial Revolution,
Anglosphere individualism may have been one of the leading causes of
it.
Phillips, Kevin, The Cousins’ Wars: Religion, Politics, and the
Triumph of Anglo-America, Basic Books, New York. An excellent and comprehensive
treatment of the three principal internal conflicts of the Anglosphere -- the
English Civil War, the American Revolution, and the American Civil War. Phillips
mentions the prospect for closer Anglo-American collaboration at the end of the
book, but fails to elaborate.
Véliz, Caludio The New World of the Gothic
Fox: Culture and Economy in English and Spanish America University of California
Press, Berkeley, 1994 An extremely erudite and impressive survey of the
contrasting natures of the “Gothic Foxes” of the Anglosphere and the “Baroque
Hedgehogs” of the Hispanosphere. Professor Véliz, a Chilean who has lived much
of his life in Australia, England, and America, knows both spheres
intimately.
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