“Five hundred soldiers from the elite French Surrender Battalion of the Foreign Legion are in the process of shipping out to Iraq where they will assist the Iraqi Republican Guard in their inevitable surrender to the overwhelming might of the American armed forces.

“Chirac also announced that his government will send 3,000 advisers from the French Collaboration Force to assist the Iraqis in collaborating with the Americans while pretending to be part of a non-existent resistance movement.”

Brutal, non? But certainly not rare. I’ve lived in the United States for almost 20 years and have rarely heard anything but condescension towards successive French governments. But now that condescension has turned to contempt.

A cover piece in the liberal online magazine Slate last week had the headline “Why they hate us”. It referred to France. In a recent online poll people were asked which other countries they would place next to Iran, Iraq and North Korea in the “axis of evil”. France won by a mile.

And then Donald Rumsfeld blurted out what many privately think: France and Germany are the old Europe, with sclerotic economies, anachronistic aspirations for world power, and terribly weak leaders, shored up by appeals to crude anti-Americanism (Schröder) or to the fact that they’re not actually neo-fascist (Chirac).

That’s why when The Wall Street Journal and The Times published a letter from eight European leaders calling for unity in facing down Saddam, it was big in the United States. The chattering classes began to talk about another kind of international coalition: not one based on power-politics, or geographic proximity, but on a shared commitment to civil society and free economies, and a determination not to appease but to confront international terrorism.

The word for this nascent international alliance is the Anglosphere. The Anglospherists have been stirring discussion among Washington’s conservative think tanks. Their vision of the future of the West is starkly different to that envisioned by the Euopean Union or even, in some respects, the United Nations.

The Anglosphere is not a revived version of the “special relationship” between the US and the UK. Nor is it some racist contraption uniting “Anglo-Saxons” or even “English-speaking peoples”. It is, rather, a notion of an expanding group of nations and countries that share basic principles: individualism, rule of law, honouring contracts and covenants, and the elevation of freedom to the first rank of political and cultural values.

One of the critical elements of an Anglospherist nation is a healthy and vibrant civil society; by which I mean voluntary associations, private schools and colleges, charities, sports clubs, churches and so on — the “little platoons” of liberty that Tocqueville so admired in England and America.

Why Anglosphere? Simply because these political values — by accident of history — originated in England and subsequently Britain. But these values need not be restricted to English-speaking countries. High on the list of countries eager to join are those in formerly communist eastern Europe who value freedom more dearly for having been denied it for so long.

Others include centre-right governments in Italy and Spain. But countries where civil society is weak — Latin America, Asia or (as yet) Russia — don’t make the grade. Nor do those societies where personal freedom is close to non-existent — the Arab world. France and Germany are standouts against such a concept as well. Why? Because the state in each country is too powerful, scepticism about individual freedom and civil society deep, and economic rigidity is maintained at the expense of employment and growth.

That’s why the coalition to disarm Saddam is a sign of a changing world. Terrorism threatens societies that value freedom more than those that don’t. Citizens of free societies have more to lose from terror — more civil liberties, more personal freedom of movement and thought.

Religious terrorism is also anathema to free societies, because it threatens freedom of religion by equating it with violence and intolerance. So I don’t think it is surprising that, say, China and Russia are more ambivalent about disarming Saddam than, say, America or Australia. And it is equally unsurprising that the European Eight are those countries most sympathetic to an Anglospheric worldview.

Should this mean a formal alliance? Not necessarily. After all, one of the other ingredients of an Anglospheric view of the world is that voluntary associations are often better than forced ones. Anglosphere nations should co-operate when necessary. But just as they value freedom at home, they also value it abroad.

National sovereignty is a freedom as well — one that free countries are reluctant to give up without some tangible gain. So this concept will never yield something like the EU, an institution that can only make sense to a Gallic or German mind that sees the chaotic liberty of a diverse Europe in need of false coherence and discipline.

But for these reasons the Anglosphere is also durable. It springs from the values people hold, not the concepts their leaders impose upon them. As we move slowly out of a post-cold war era, the coalition emerging against Saddam today may well mark the future of international relations. Here’s hoping.