The Future of the Anglosphere

Roger Scruton Memorial Lecture

Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford, October 18, 2021

(45-50 mins, 6,500 words)

“If you look around the world … it’s only in Britain, America, Australia, possibly India that people would even use that word [conservative]. Because there’s a tradition, which we have inherited from Edmund Burke and the reaction to the French Revolution of recognizing that there is an alternative to revolutionary change and that is not changing. And this extraordinarily original idea only enters the heads of English-speaking people.”

Those were the words of Sir Roger Scruton in an interview with my Hoover Institution colleague Peter Robinson, broadcast on “Uncommon Knowledge” in 2017.

“I don’t know why,” Roger went on, with characteristic modesty. “It’s something to do with the English language, its accommodation of eccentricities, the fact that we live a life based on compromise, the common law, which tells us that the ordinary people are in charge of the law, not the people there who are pretending to impose, all those things that we have inherited from hundreds of years of discussion and debate.”

I found myself pondering these words just over a week ago, as I watched my son’s under-11 football team play. It’s a team that would gladden the heart of the most ardent advocate of diversity, equity and inclusion—if you overlook the fact that they’re all boys. Rylan and Owen are the two white American players. Suraj’s father is Indian, I think. Andy, who scored two dazzling goals last weekend, is Chinese-American. Then there’s Kevin, Nikolai, Tevita, Zayd and the wonderfully named Zidane. I am pretty sure one of the surnames is Thai and another Tongan.

My son Thomas is half Scottish, half Somali. Zayd’s Dad is from Huddersfield, of Pakistani heritage. Of all the parents, we two make the most noise on the touchline.

In short, there is not a lot that’s strictly Anglospheric about the team—not even the ball, as footballs tend to be made in Pakistan. But there we all are, watching our sons play the game of Association Football, the rules of which were standardized at the Freemasons’ Tavern in Great Queen Street, London, on October 26, 1863, and cheering them on in the English language (mostly).

It’s no accident that Ted Lasso has been a hit for Apple TV. Football keeps not “coming home” precisely because it left home long ago, the most successful British export of all.

Roger Scruton was not a football fan, I am fairly sure; foxhunting was his idea of sport. But I think he appreciated that the extraordinary success of English games—not only football, but also cricket (the world’s second most popular game), hockey, and rugby union—illustrates the appeal not just of common law specifically, but of all kinds of English rule systems.

*

In the later years of his life, Roger became a friend to me and my wife Ayaan. Long before that, however, he was a source of inspiration to us both. As an undergraduate at Magdalen in the early 1980s, I came to know him as the editor of the Salisbury Review. He was one of a tiny number of academics who swam against the leftward current of university politics by openly identifying themselves as conservatives and supporting the government of Margaret Thatcher and actively assisting the dissidents of the Soviet Union’s East European empire.

“Only someone raised in the anglosphere could believe, as I believed in the aftermath of 1968, that the political alternative to revolutionary socialism is conservatism,” wrote Roger in How to be a Conservative.[1] But what exactly did Roger mean by that? Was he using “anglosphere,” as is often asserted, as some kind of updated synonym for Winston Churchill’s “English-speaking peoples” or the now scarcely utterable “Anglo-Saxon race”?

As a conservative, Roger grew used to being smeared with accusations of racial prejudice, though they always pained him. In 2019 he had to endure a cynical attack on his reputation by the New Statesman, which took quotations out of context in an unsuccessful attempt to make the charge stick. (The magazine was later forced to apologize.) But Roger’s conception of the Anglosphere was quite explicitly divorced from race and ethnicity, as he had made perfectly clear two years before in an essay for the Wall Street Journal. [2]

As Roger said, the term “Anglosphere” is not to be confused with Huntington’s “Western civilization,” defined as those European peoples who are not Orthodox, plus the places where many such people settled. “Western civilization” was always meant to be more elastic—like its close relative “Judaeo-Christian culture”—in order to maximize the number of Americans and American allies that could identify themselves with it during the Cold War, when the terms were most in vogue.

The term “Anglosphere” is of post-Cold War provenance. It was first coined by the American science-fiction writer Neal Stephenson in his book The Diamond Age, published in 1995. I doubt very much that my former colleague at the Hoover Institution, Robert Conquest, had read it. He appears to have arrived at the same term by a different route.

It was Conquest—a scholar who had ploughed a lone furrow as an historian of Stalin’s crimes, at a time when all too many scholars of the Soviet Union downplayed them—who gave the term “Anglosphere” its contemporary political significance.[3]

Building on the mood of Euroscepticism that had grown more pronounced among many British Conservatives after Margaret Thatcher’s fall from power, Conquest proposed, as an alternative to the European Union, “a much looser association of English-speaking nations, known as the ‘Anglosphere.’” This “grand Association” would comprise “the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada, with Australia and New Zealand and, it is to be hoped, Ireland, the nations of the Caribbean and the Pacific Ocean, perhaps others.”[4]

For Conquest, the Anglosphere was a reliable antidote to despotism. “Within the West,” he argued, “it is above all the English-speaking community which has over the centuries maintained the middle way between anarchy and despotism” and acted as “the main bastion against the various barbarisms and worse which have reared their heads so devastatingly in the past half century.”[5] Such an Association, Conquest argued, would be “something weaker than a federation, but stronger than an alliance.”[6]

Though historically informed, Conquest’s emphasis on decentralization was also forward-looking. A few years later, the American businessman James C. Bennett picked the idea up and gave it a Silicon Valley twist. The Anglosphere, he argued, was a “network civilization” out of which a “network commonwealth” could emerge—a decentralized political entity ideally suited to the age of the Internet. Its “densest nodes” were in the United States and the United Kingdom, but there were other nodes as far afield as Australasia, South Africa and the Caribbean.[7]

The Anglosphere resurfaced in the run-up to the 2016 referendum on British membership of the EU, though it would be a mistake to exaggerate its importance, given the Leave campaign’s carefully calibrated focus on the issues of immigration, national sovereignty, and the National Health Service.

Daniel (now Lord) Hannan’s pamphlet Why Vote Leave proposed “three core aims” for Brexit: “the primacy of UK over EU law on our own territory; the right to sign bilateral trade deals with non-EU states, such as Australia and India; and the right to control who can settle in the UK.”[8] Of these, perhaps the most enticing was the opportunity “to raise her eyes from the exhausted Old World and see the opportunities across the oceans.”[9] Suggestively, one of the tables on the book (the THES World University Rankings for 2015-16) bore the title “Advantage Anglosphere.”

To a striking extent, “Anglo-sceptic” critics have rarely engaged directly with the practicalities of the Anglosphere. Prior to Brexit, Michael Ignatieff and John Lloyd took it as read that the European Union offered superior economic benefits and, in any case, that Celtic nationalism or Britain’s growing ethnic diversity would fatally undermine Conquest’s “grand Association.” After Brexit, Michael Kenny and Nick Pearce argued in a series of essays that the idea was just a British eccentricity. “[T]he other core English-speaking countries to which the Anglosphere refers,” they wrote, “show no serious inclination to join the UK in forging new political and economic alliances.”[10] 

According to Andrew Mycock and Ben Wellings, Brexit was “a victory for an alternative transnational vision with deep roots in the shared political traditions of the core Anglosphere states,” but the Anglosphere was “a symptom, not of the rise but the decline of the English-speaking peoples.”[11]

This was putting it politely. More often, aspersions were cast on the motives of the proponents of the Anglosphere. The term, argued Nick Cohen, was simply “the right’s PC replacement for what we used to call in blunter times ‘the white Commonwealth.’ … the dream that has the Eurosceptics talking in their sleep is that we can forge new bonds with the old empire, or at least the white dominated countries within it, and regain a part of what we once were.”[12]

“In championing this far-flung union,” wrote Duncan Bell in January 2017, “the Brexiteers draw—sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously—on a strand of thought that stretches back to the Victorian age.” [13] Many projects for the Anglosphere, according to Bell, “rearticulate long-standing dreams of settler colonial consolidation. They instantiate a settler imaginary”—whatever that means.[14] Srđan Vučetić sees the Anglosphere as a new expression of “the imperial drive towards the conquest, exploitation and domination of ‘inferior’ peoples.” “Race,” he argues, is “a critical and fundamental aspect of the Anglosphere.”[15] According to Eva Namusoke, the Anglosphere is an idea that appeals to “right-leaning white men … reconnecting with a white ‘kith and kin.’”[16]

In an unhinged screed entitled “The Religion of Whiteness Becomes a Suicide Cult” and published in the New York Times, Pankaj Mishra diagnosed “the rapid mainstreaming of white supremacism in English-speaking liberal democracies” as a reaction to “erupt[ing] revolts against globalization.” It was the mission of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation “to preserve the alliance between capital and mob in the Anglosphere” by “urg[ing] American neoconservatives … to take up the aging white man’s burden and quell mutinous natives.”[17]

Others have detected the same nostalgia for empire in Brexit Britain, though no other author can rival Mishra when it comes to misrepresenting those he attacks. “The Empire Haunts Britain” was another New York Times contribution, this one by Alex von Tunzelmann.[18] Sathnam Sanghera’s new book Empireland acknowledges that there is at least as much amnesia about empire as nostalgia in Britain today. But the song remains essentially the same.[19]

The reality, seldom remarked, was the near invisibility of the British Empire as a topic of discussion during the debates on Brexit (I know this because I participated in many of them on what proved to be the losing side). If Brexit was based on a love of the former Dominions, it was (to quote Helen Baxendale and Ben Wellings) “a love that rarely dared to speak its name.”[20]  

True, Leave voters were more than twice as likely as Remain voters to think “the British Empire is more something to be proud of than ashamed of,” and to think that “countries colonized by Britain are better off for the experience.” (The margins were 50:20 and 51:22 when YouGov asked those questions in June 2019. The difference is similar when respondents are sorted by party affiliation.) However, overall, only 32% of Britons think their empire is something to be proud of, compared with 50% of Dutch people. Only 6% of Dutch people are ashamed of their former empire, compared with 19% of Britons. The Dutch, it turns out, are the ones most afflicted with imperial nostalgia. One reads little about that in the New York Times.

As becomes clear from the World Attitudes Survey, the peoples of the Anglosphere really do have a great deal in common—and it is not a common enthusiasm for the slave trade, the expropriation of indigenous peoples or white supremacy.  There is a reason that these five countries, along with Ireland, consistently occupy a distinct location on the “World Cultural Map” devised by Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel on the basis of the WSA data collected regularly since 1981.

The map plots countries’ collective values on two axes: “traditional values versus secular-rational values” and “survival values versus self-expression values.” On this basis, the Anglosphere is more committed to self-expression values than all but one of the other seven world cultural regions. Only Protestant Europe is more secular and self-expressive, and it only recently moved clearly ahead of the Anglosphere on the latter measure.

The authors attribute the similar cultural characteristics of the Anglosphere countries to “former colonial ties,” though once again this is very different from saying that they share colonial attitudes today. It is also noteworthy that, with only a minor redrawing of the border, Britain—and Australia and New Zealand—could have been grouped with Protestant Europe, and the United States with Catholic Europe. (The U.S. is closer to Belgium on the graph than to the rest of the Anglosphere; New Zealand is closer in attitudes to Iceland than to Australia.)

What of the thesis that “Anglosphere” is just a euphemism? Google’s ngram tool shows that the term “Anglo-Saxon race” had two peaks of frequent usage in publications, in 1851 and 1899, then went into decline, accompanied almost in lockstep by the briefly fashionable “Greater Britain.” But its place was not usurped by “English speaking peoples,” which never enjoyed such popularity, even at its height in 1919. “Western civilization” was the true heir, rising to a peak of usage in 1949 and then gently declining. The neologism “Anglosphere” is now more frequently seen in English-language publications than all three. Yet to infer from that fact a lineal succession would be erroneous.

*

In reality, as I came to realize when writing The Pity of War and later Empire, these conceptions were to some extent competitors. As Peter Clarke has shown, the term “English Speaking Peoples” was first popularized by British liberals and American abolitionists at the time of the American Civil War and was authentically transatlantic in its adoption. Key contributors included William Edward Forster and Charles Francis Adams—Lincoln’s ambassador in London—as well as John Bright. Another enthusiast for the term was the campaigning journalist W. T. Stead.[21]

By contrast, the notion of the “Anglo-Saxon race” had a different provenance, rather close to where I am standing. It was Oxonian historians—William Stubbs, Edward August Freeman, J. A. Froude, J. R. Green—whose various Whiggish interpretations of history postulated the Teutonic origins of Anglo-Saxon superiority. When Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, the West Point-born author of Sea Power, was honoured with a public banquet in London in 1894, a banner read: “Blood is thicker than water.”[22]

“Greater Britain” was Charles Dilkes’s horse in the race—it was the title of his influential 1868 book—and it gained currency when it was adopted by both the historian J. R. Seeley and the founder of geopolitics, Halford Mackinder.[23] However, their vision of an imperial federation was different from Joseph Chamberlain’s, as he envisioned a “new triple alliance between the Teutonic race and the two great branches of the Anglo-Saxon race,” as well as a tariff wall (“imperial preference”) around the Empire. The Liberal imperialists preferred to maintain free trade. This was different, again, from H. G. Wells’s “greater synthesis” between the Empire and the United States.

To those, such as Alfred Milner and John Buchan, who sought to turn such visions into a political reality in the years between the Boer War and the end of the First World War, the practical challenges quickly became apparent. The Afrikaners of the Transvaal had no interest; the Irish nationalists were prepared to teach themselves Gaelic precisely to get out of the nascent Anglosphere; meanwhile the rapid integration of an originally German-Jewish elite into the British aristocracy made the language of race increasingly awkward. (Buchan’s novels are shot through with these tensions.)

And then there were the ambivalent Americans, whose United States had, after all, originated in a repudiation of imperial ties and had later absorbed large numbers of Germans, Scandinavians, Irish, Italians and East Europeans, to whom the Anglophilia of the WASP elite was either meaningless or irksome. As Sir Edward Grey told Theodore Roosevelt in 1906: “Your continent is making a new race and a new type, drawn from many sources, just as in old times the race of these Islands was evolved from many sources. So I do not dwell upon race feeling. But common language helps to draw us together, and religion also.”[24]

Before the term was even dreamt of, the Anglosphere was riddled not merely with the narcissism of small differences but often with the resentment of big ones. Read the historical novels of Walter Scott—particularly Waverley, Guy Mannering and Rob Roy—to see how those fissures of the 16th and 17th centuries endured into the 18th century, extending even beyond the Jacobite Risings. In Scott’s Chronicles of the Canongate, there is a haunting short story, “The Two Drovers,” in which the Highlander Robin Oig ends up stabbing his English friend and fellow drover Wakefield after a pub brawl, a tragedy due (Scott tells us) to their two incompatible notions of honour.

In short, a defining characteristic of the Anglosphere since the inhabitants of the British Isles became mutually intelligible has been their quarrelsomeness. As J. C. D. Clark argued in The Language of Liberty, the American War of Independence was merely a renewal on different terrain of the partly religious partly constitutional battles of the 17th century.[25] As Linda Colley demonstrated in Britons, even in the British Isles a common identity took time and effort to be forged after the Act of Union, and it required the cement of Anti-Catholicism and Francophobia to take a firm hold.[26] Even after 1837, when Colley’s narrative ends, deep divisions persisted, above all in Scotland and in Ireland, as scholars such as Tom Devine and Oxford’s own Roy Foster have shown us.

The First World War might be thought to have transcended all the divisions of the Anglosphere, as the Empire, joined by the United States in 1917, fought a common foe. Memories of that war are remarkably persistent, over a century after its end, thanks to rituals of commemoration across the Anglosphere.[27] Yet the realities on the ground—in the trenches—were different. In war, one sees more of one’s allies than of one’s enemies. The Sydney-born Irish-Australian Frederic Manning, who enlisted as a private in the 7th Battalion of the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry in 1915 and fought at the Somme, captured memorably some of the frictions he witnessed on the Western Front in The Middle Parts of Fortune (1929). He and his comrades did not relish their encounters with the Scots soldiers in the Highland Regiments, whose distinctive language and garb are rather disdainfully mentioned. “That Scotch bastard” is shorthand for a man in a kilt.

HALF-WAY

By the end of the war, it had become obvious to Churchill that the only way out of the chronic fissiparity of the Anglosphere was to drop all talk of race and to emphasize instead language and, perhaps more importantly, law. “The Declaration of Independence,” he argued at the founding of the English Speaking Union, not coincidentally on July 4, 1918, “is not only an American document. It follows on the Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights as the third great title deed on which the liberties of the English-speaking people are founded. By it we lost an Empire, but by it we also preserved an Empire.”[28] After his retirement from politics, this conceit became the basis for the four volumes that he published between April 1956 and March 1958 as A History of the English-Speaking Peoples.

When Margaret Thatcher spoke at the English Speaking Union in New York in December 1999, she used the same kind of formulation: “We take seriously the sanctity of the individual; we share a common tradition of religious toleration; we are committed to democracy and representative government; and we are resolved to uphold and spread the rule of law.”

As he made clear time and time again, this was also Roger Scruton’s understanding of the term Anglosphere. “Nowhere outside the anglosphere,” he wrote in How to be a Conservative, “is there the equivalent of Habeas corpus, and all attempts to curtail its extent or effect are greeted by English-speaking people with defiance. It expresses, in the simplest possible terms, the unique relation between the government and the governed that has grown from the English common law.”[29]

And: “We should always remember that legislation does not create a legal order but presupposes it, and that in our case—the case of the anglosphere—the legal order arose by an invisible hand from the attempt to do justice in individual conflicts.”[30]

And: “In the Anglosphere … common-law justice reminds citizens that they are accountable to others for the freedom that they enjoy.”[31]

In short, it is a myth that the Anglosphere is some kind of code for the Anglo-Saxon race—Mishra’s ubiquitous “white supremacy,” detectable even in books that explicitly repudiate theories of racial difference. In reality, those arguing for the common values of the English-speaking peoples, including Roger Scruton, have spent a century explicitly disavowing the racial and emphasizing the legal, taking a leaf out of Churchill’s book.

Nevertheless, the historian now has to inject another of his many insufferable notes of caution. It is true that a significant proportion of the Anglosphere runs on common law. As F. W. Maitland put it in his inaugural lecture at Cambridge in 1888: “Our law is their law.”[32] Yet there are non-trivial differences between English and American law. A dominant feature of U.S. law is the Constitution and the power of the Supreme Court, in interpreting it, to strike down even acts of Congress.  No one would deny that this power—created by the judicial decision in Marbury v. Madison (1803)—has fundamentally affected the course of American history. 

By contrast, the United Kingdom famously lacked, and still lacks, any written constitution, and the English courts lacked any ability to strike down acts of Parliament until in limited respects they acquired it in the closing years of the 20th century.

The U.S. concept “eminent domain” contrasts with English rules requiring specific legislative authority and then due compensation. To this day, the rule of English (though not American) common law is that the statements of the parties during the negotiation of a contract are legally irrelevant to ascertaining its meaning and cannot be given in evidence. (My old friend Charles Bear, QC, and I are very slowly co-authoring a paper that will explore these and other differences.)

Finally, let us not forget that Scotland, as much a cradle of the industrial revolution as England, had and still has a quite different Roman-law legal system.

Perhaps it is true, as Conquest said, that shared legal traditions were the basis of the alliances of the Anglosphere in the world wars and then the Cold War, not forgetting the War on Terror. Yet we must not lose sight of the 20th-century fractures of the Anglosphere—the partition of Ireland, the messy business of decolonization, the rise of Scottish and Welsh nationalism, and finally the decision to join the European Economic Community—nor of the intensity of the rivalries between London and Washington. As I write the second volume of Henry Kissinger’s life, I am struck by the co-existence of platitudes about Anglo-American amity, a standard feature of speeches on both sides of the Atlantic, and privately expressed distrust.

Nor can we lose sight of the fact that, even at its moments of triumph, the Anglosphere was never alone. It fought the First World War in alliance with France and, until 1918, Russia. It fought the Second World War in alliance with the Soviet Union. And it fought both the Cold War and the War on Terror with other European allies.

*

So much for the past (or rather the prehistory) of the Anglosphere. Though the term was unknown until recently, the Anglosphere had a long, shapeshifting prequel of a life. The fact that, in political terms, it has never cohered into anything more substantial than the Commonwealth—that in practice it has merely been a subset of a succession of wartime coalitions—does not mean it can never evolve further. Still, I would argue that the odds are against its doing so.

If, for example, the overarching strategic goal is to contain the People’s Republic China, whether economically or militarily, the Anglosphere is a necessary but not sufficient entity. If the goal is to prevent catastrophic climate change, it is again necessary but not sufficient. Moreover, if the integrity of the Anglosphere is a function of a common language, that is a depreciating asset, as English has ceased to be the property of the English-speaking peoples. Finally, there is good reason to be fearful that the common legal and political principles that used to distinguish the Anglosphere are being corroded from within. The paradox of having relatively interoperable cultures is that bad ideas can spread as rapidly as a novel coronavirus.

In economic terms, the Anglosphere is doubtless large, though around three quarters of its size is due to the United States. But almost every economic study seems to suggest that “gravity” (in effect, geography) still matters a lot with respect to trade, as does complementarity.[33] Two identical economies have little incentive to trade, whereas it was precisely the differences between England and Portugal in the time of David Ricardo that made trade rational, on the basis of comparative advantage.

There is a reason that when, under President Obama, U.S. trade negotiators sought to negotiate a trade agreement designed in some measure to contain China, it was called the Trans Pacific Partnership, not the Anglosphere, and its initial signatories were not only Australia, Canada and the United States but also Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam. By comparison, an Anglosphere free trade agreement would at once be harder to negotiate and less meaningful than the U.S. belatedly joining the TPP.

If we turn to the institutions of military and intelligence cooperation, we see again that the Anglosphere is necessary but not sufficient. In this domain, the Anglosphere is not a pipedream. It exists. Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States have long cooperated in around 36 “Anglosphere policy networks,” the majority of which all five countries belong to, covering “internal affairs, policing, social welfare, overseas consulates, critical infrastructure, cyber security, and more.” Among the most important are the Technical Cooperation Programme for intelligence sharing (better known as “Five Eyes”), the Quintet of Attorneys-General, and the Five Country Conference (immigration and customs).[34]

The announcement of the new agreement between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States to co-operate on nuclear-powered submarines (AUKUS) aroused understandable excitement amongst proponents of the Anglosphere. Ambassador John Bolton called “a sit-up-and-take-notice moment, perhaps a genuine pivot. … AUKUS looks like a mini-Anglosphere club [he wrote] but its potential is far broader.” John O’Sullivan declared that it seemed “likely to change the global strategic picture as much as the Entente Cordiale, the Nazi–Soviet pact, and the foundation of NATO did in earlier days.”

But the launching of those nuclear submarines lies a long way in the future. AUKUS only makes sense as part of a broader strategy of containment in which the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (the U.S. plus Australia, India and Japan) may ultimately be of more importance, to say nothing of the other countries in the region that the U.S. needs keep on its side (e.g., the Philippines, South Korea, and Vietnam).

And if one turns from national security to a different kind of security—public health, the Anglosphere looks a good deal less coherent. Australia and New Zealand adopted quite different strategies from the rest of the Anglosphere when it came to dealing with COVID-19; Canada and the United States also diverged. To date, the death rates per million range from 2,232 for the U.S. to 2,027 for the UK to 746 for Canada, 59 for Australia and 6 for New Zealand. Even allowing for the five countries’ different locations, one is bound to ask: Anglosphere? What Anglosphere?

What of the Anglosphere as a source of soft power, based on the global dominance of the English language? This is an idea that has become such a commonplace that we scarcely think twice about it. But the world learns English without necessarily absorbing the values implicit in the language, in much the way the world learns JavaScript. Of the 1.5 billion English speakers around the world, the vast majority speak it as a second (or third or fourth) language. According to a report by EF Education First, differing levels of proficiency around the world do not correlate closely to historic membership of the Anglosphere. The Netherlands tops the rankings, followed by Sweden, Norway and Denmark. Of the top ten, ironically, all but two are EU member states. People from the Middle East are the least proficient (Egypt ranks 83rd), despite the sustained presence of British soldiers and civil servants in the region from the 1870s. Singapore makes the top ten, followed by South Africa in 12th place and Kenya (22nd), but the Philippines ranks ahead of Malaysia, Hong Kong, and India, despite only a brief period as an American colony.[35]

The combination of English’s universal role and the advent of Google translate means that the Anglosphere matters less and less as a linguistic bloc. If the Anglosphere is everywhere, then it is nowhere.

And yet we know that something still remains of Anglospheric soft power, do we not? We look at the games people play—including the computer games—the books they read, the movies they watch, the clothes they wear, and (if you ignore Squid Game and the K-pop band BTS) we cannot miss the continued predominance of the Anglosphere—not forgetting Hannan’s global ranking of universities. And there is the rub. For one of the most alarming trends of our time is the rapid spread throughout the Anglosphere of ideas—anti-racism, critical race theory, gender fluidity—and, worse, practices—safe spaces, trigger warnings, deplatformings, cancelations—that seem fundamentally inimical to precisely those characteristics that were supposed to define the Anglosphere, notably reverence for individual liberty, religious tolerance, and common law.

Though less lethal than the Islamism that last week claimed yet another victim in the MP David Amess, wokeism’s claim that everything—from “Western civilization” and meritocracy to correct arithmetic and punctuality—is a manifestation of white supremacism represents a direct threat to academic and other freedoms.

In Heterodox Academy’s latest Campus Expression Survey, 62% of U.S. college students agreed that the climate on their campus prevents students from saying things they believe, up from 55% in 2019.

Earlier this year, the Challey Institute for Global Innovation published even more disturbing findings. 85% of liberal or liberal-leaning American undergraduates said they would report it to their university if a professor said something that they found offensive. 76% said they would report another student. It is not too much to say that a kind of “soft totalitarianism” pervades many American university campuses today, complete with informers, denunciations, apparatchiks, show trials, struggle sessions, public confessions, and censorship.   

Ironically, the close ties between the universities of the Anglosphere mean that such profoundly illiberal attitudes and behaviours are spreading rapidly.

In a study published in March entitled “Academic Freedom in Crisis: Punishment, Political Discrimination, and Self-Censorship,” the Centre for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology showed that academic freedom is under attack not only in the U.S., but also in the UK and Canada. 75% of conservative American and British academics in the social sciences and humanities say there is a hostile climate for their beliefs in their department. This compares to just 5% among left-wing faculty in the United States. Younger academics are twice as likely to support dismissal for “wrongthink” as older academics in the U.S. and Britain, with 40% of American social sciences and humanities professors under the age of 40 supporting at least one of four hypothetical dismissal campaigns. PhD students are even more intolerant than other young academics. 55% of American PhD students under 40 support at least one dismissal campaign. “High-profile deplatformings and dismissals” get the attention, the authors of the report conclude, but “far more pervasive threats to academic freedom stem … from fears of a) cancellation—threats to one’s job or reputation—and b) political discrimination.”

And these are not groundless fears. The number of scholars targeted for their speech has risen dramatically since 2015, and undergraduates increasingly are to blame, according to research by the American Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). FIRE has logged 426 incidents since 2015. Just under three quarters of them resulted in some kind of sanction—including an investigation alone or voluntary resignation—against the scholar.

I could provide multiple examples from both sides of the Atlantic to illustrate the point, but one may suffice today: the case of Kathleen Stock, a professor in the University of Sussex philosophy department, who since this academic year began has been subject to a campaign of harassment because she argues in her book Material Girls, that biological sex is real and (to quote the Economist) “should in some circumstances take precedence over self-declared gender identity, and that therefore some female-only spaces (women’s changing rooms, sports, prisons) should be off-limits to trans women, that is, males who identify as women.” 

The sole consolation I can offer is that ordinary people in the Anglosphere are not woke. Most Americans dislike political correctness and oppose affirmative action in academia. As the Economist reported in August, a survey by Ipsos Mori on behalf of King’s College, London, asked 23,000 adults in 28 countries to rate, on a scale from zero to seven, how they felt about using potentially hurtful words when speaking with people from different backgrounds to their own. A zero would mean that they felt that “people are too easily offended”; a seven would mean they thought it was necessary to “change the way people talk.”

More than half of respondents in America, Australia, Britain and Sweden rated themselves between zero and three (excluding those who answered “don’t know”), meaning they were the most likely to feel that the general public are too sensitive when it comes to speech. At the other end of the scale, Chinese, Indians and Turks were the least likely to say people were being too sensitive.[36]

Moreover, and contrary to the claims of the likes of Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, people in the Anglosphere countries are among the least racist people in the world. In 2013, the Washington Post published data, drawn from the World Values Survey on racism. People were asked to pick from groups of people they would not want as neighbours, including “people of another race.” In the Anglosphere countries, the percentages of people reluctant to live next door to people of another race were between 0 and 4.9%—the lowest in the world. In Russia and China, the percentages were between 15 and 19.9%. In France it was 22.7%. And fully 43.5% of Indians and 51.4% of Jordanians said they would not want people of another race next door.[37] The labour markets in the OECD that most rapidly provide jobs to foreign-born workers are the American and British.

*

Thinking back to the playing fields of northern California, I find the word Anglosphere always makes me think of a football—or what Americans (following the Oxford undergraduates of the 1870s) would call a soccer ball. That’s appropriate, in view of football’s position as the world’s most popular sport (with 4 billion fans).

Sir Richard Turnbull, the penultimate Governor of Aden, once told Denis Healey that “when the British Empire finally sank beneath the waves of history, it would leave behind it only two monuments: one was the game of Association Football, the other was the expression ‘Fuck off.’”[38] That was my favourite quotation in the book Empire, precisely because it deflated the book’s grandiose subtitle: “How Britain Made the Modern World.” Not everything about the modern world is nice.

It is fair, though unfashionable, to say that the British Empire was responsible for both good and ill. But the Anglosphere—which is mistakenly seen as its sinister reincarnation but is in fact merely its enduring if fading imprint on the world—seems a more innocent phenomenon, precisely (as Roger Scruton and Robert Conquest understood) because it has no headquarters, no colonial office, no navy. It is just history, in the same way that the buildings of Oxford or the inns of court are history.

You can, if you like, object that the oldest were built at a time when feudal bonds of servitude still existed; and that others were erected by patrons who also favoured the burning of heretics. But—as those who, for some unfathomable reason, regard the sins of imperialism as worse than those of feudalism or Protestantism may one day understand—tearing down the edifices of the past will do nothing to make amends for its misdeeds, least of all for the deeds that contemporaries did not consider to be wrong, but which simply do not accord with current progressive norms.

The corollary is that, precisely because the Anglosphere is history, it can play only a circumscribed role in the future. It cannot become a trade bloc.

It can do no more than complement existing and new alliance structures, which must needs extend beyond it, whatever our strategic goals.

As for its cultural reach, this seems mostly a force for ill these days, not for good, at least as far as the Anglosphere universities are concerned.

It is an irony that Roger would himself have appreciated that, so far as I know, the only student café in the world to bear his name is in—of all places—Budapest. We shall know the concept has been stretched to breaking point when Hungary is added to the Anglosphere.

Notes

[1] Roger Scruton, How to be a Conservative (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), p. 5.

[2] Roger Scruton, “The Case for Nations,” Wall Street Journal, June 2, 2017.

[3] Robert Conquest, Reflections on a Ravaged Century (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), pp. 267-288.

[4] Ibid., p. 270.

[5] Ibid., p. 271.

[6] Ibid., p. 280.

[7] James C. Bennett, The Anglosphere Challenge: Why the English-speaking Nations Will Lead the Way in the Twenty-first Century (Lanham: Rowan & Littlefield, 2004), pp. 80.

[8] Daniel Hannan, Why Vote Leave (London: Head of Zeus), Kindle edn., KL 1349.

[9] Ibid., KL 2030.

[10] Michael Kenny and Nick Pearce, Shadows of Empire: The Anglosphere in British Politics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018).

[11] Ben Wellings and Andrew Mycock (eds.) The Anglosphere: Continuity, Dissonance and Location, Proceedings of the British Academy, 226 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. 2, 18.

[12] Nick Cohen, “It’s a Eurosceptic fantasy that the ‘Anglosphere’ wants Brexit,” Spectator, April 12, 2016.

[13] Duncan Bell, “The Anglosphere: New Enthusiasm for an Old Dream,” Prospect, Jan. 19, 2017.

[14] Duncan Bell, “Anglospheres: Empire Redivivus?” in Wellings and Mycock (eds.) Anglosphere, p. 53.

[15] Srđan Vučetić, “The Anglosphere beyond Security,” in Wellings and Mycock (eds.) Anglosphere, pp. 77, 90.

[16] Eva Namusoke, “The Anglosphere, Race and Brexit,” in Wellings and Mycock (eds.) Anglosphere, p. 240.

[17] Pankaj Mishra, “The Religion of Whiteness Becomes a Suicide Cult,” New York Times, Aug. 30, 2018.

[18] Alex von Tunzelmann, “The Empire Haunts Britain,” New York Times, April 24, 2018.

[19] Sathnam Sanghera, Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain (Viking, 2021), pp. 208-216.

[20] Helen Baxendale and Ben Wellings, “Underwriting Brexit: The European Union in the Anglosphere Imagination,” in Wellings and Mycock (eds.) Anglosphere, pp. 222f.

[21] Peter Clarke, “The English-Speaking Peoples before Churchill,” Britain and the World, 4, 2 (2011), pp. 199-231.

[22] Ibid., p. 219.

[23] Daniel Deudney, “Greater Britain or Greater Synthesis? Seeley, Mackinder, and Wells on Britain in the Global Industrial Era,” Review of International Studies, 27, 2 (April 2001), pp. 187-208.

[24] Clarke, “English-Speaking Peoples,” p. 224.

[25] J. C. D. Clark, The Language of Liberty Political Discourse and Social Dynamics in the Anglo-American World, 1660–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

[26] Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).

[27] Andrew Mycock, “CANZUK, the Anglosphere(s) and Transnational War Commemoration: The Centenary of First World War,” in Wellings and Mycock (eds.) Anglosphere, pp. 133-155.

[28] Clarke, “English-Speaking Peoples,” p. 229.

[29] Scruton, How to be a Conservative, preface.

[30] Ibid., pp. 56f.

[31] Roger Scruton, Confessions of a Heretic (New York: New York Review Books, 2016), p. 48.

[32] Clarke, “English-Speaking Peoples,” p. 224.

[33] John Ravenhill and Geoff Heubner, “The Political Economy of the Anglosphere: Geography Trumps History,” in Wellings and Mycock (eds.) Anglosphere, p. 119. See also Carl Bridge and Bart Zielinski “The Anglosphere and the American Embrace: The End of the British Empire and After,” in Wellings and Mycock (eds.) Anglosphere, pp 120-132.

[34] Tim Legrand, “The Past, Present and Future of Anglosphere Security Networks: Constitutive Reduction of a Shared Identity,” in Wellings and Mycock (eds.) Anglosphere, esp. p. 66.

[35] “Where Are the World’s Best English-speakers?” Economist, Dec. 4, 2019.

[36] Economist, Aug. 2, 2021.

[37] Max Fisher, “A Fascinating Map of the World’s Most and Least Racially Tolerant Countries,” Washington Post, May 15, 2013.

[38] Denis Healey, The Time of My Life (London: Michael Joseph, 1989), p. 283.