Anglosphere

A favorite here – Lex notes in the ad to the left that Bennett’s The Anglosphere Challenge is “One of (the) most important books I have read in recent years” – inspired two current analyses. First is “Sphere of Influence?” by Keith Windschuttle in National Review. Second is Natalie Solent’s “Evolving political forms and common culture: the Anglosphere” at Samizdata.

Speaking, as Jonathan does, of Dalrymple, this seemed an interesting remark:

“If we live entirely in the moment, as if the world were created exactly as we now find it, we are almost bound to propose solutions that bring even worse problems in their wake.”

Dalrymple’s words reverberate nicely (reminding us of our adolescent, self-centered plans that so often failed despite our energy and good intentions). From his current City Journal article, “The Roads to Serfdom”, his bitterness arises from the uncomfortable fact Britain continues to ignore the good advice Hayek gave in WWII. Perhaps, given the breadth of affection for socialism (which he contends was confused with a sense of community prompted by the common enemy of the war), such insights could not have been appreciated. He acknowledges that in England, the government has moved beyond the role of husband, with his conclusion “Our Father, Which art in Downing Street.”

The United States has now declared that it is going “to help India become a major world power in the 21st century. We understand fully the implications, including military implications, of that statement.” The official spoke on condition of anonymity. (here. Read the whole thing.)

If this is true, it is a major, major step.

The alignment continues to shape up. Anglosphere (Australia, hopefully UK will stay in) + Japan + India + (Israel?) + others on one side. China, Iran, Hezbollah, NK, France, maybe Russia, on the other. I like our cards.

The Bush administration is remolding the world and building an alliance structure to keep the peace and preserve democratic capitalism for decades, maybe centuries. Bush the supposed dolt is a visionary on a breathtaking scale. His recent appointments show that he is absolutely serious about kicking the UN and the World Bank into being useful. Picking Karen Hughes, his most trusted consiglieri, to run the USA’s public diplomacy means that this is a top-rung priority. Everything he is doing is meant to achieve world-transforming results.

Meanwhile, what is Chirac doing? He is draining his bladder in his pants at the prospect of having to compete with Estonia, nickle-and-diming on the deal that would allow some competition in services. Some Union. It isn’t even a free trade zone. What a joke. Europeans have forgotten how to reproduce. They once overran the world and grabbed much of it at swordpoint, and ransacked it and kept the proceeds. You don’t have to like it, but they used to be players. They can’t even face the prospects of a fouled diaper anymore, let alone playing in a league that includes the mammoth world powers of the next Century, India and China. Stick a fork in Old Europe.

What are the Chinese doing? Everything wrong, politically. Scaring their neighbors into an alliance against them. Very much like Kaiserian Germany, another economic powerhouse but political retard. Ludwig Dehio said that a country which feels itself rising to the status of a world power is overcome by a demonic sense of its own energies and potential greatness, which leads it to act provocatively, cause an alliance to arise around it and against it, and then lunge for hegemony in defiance of the odds. But the European countries based on land could not grasp the nature of the offshore power, England, then America, and one after another went down to defeat — Imperial Spain, Bourbon France, Napoleonic France, Kaiserian Germany, Hitlerian Germany — then on a worldwide scale, Soviet Russia. Will China play this role next? What I hope will happen is that China will be confronted by such an array of power that it won’t roll the iron dice. Instead, it will get across the chasm of political and cultural reform needed to become a free and open society with legitimately elected government. All this will of course be “with Chinese Characteristics”, as they might put.

Keep your eye on this India business. It is perhaps the biggest thing going amidst a whole boatload of major initiatives.

OK, this is cool. Jim Bennett now has a website to promote his new book The Anglosphere Challenge: Why the English-Speaking Nations Will Lead the Way in the Twenty-First Century. The website has a synopsis of the book. We’ll let the man speak for himself:

The Anglosphere Challenge is a new and different look at where globalization and information technology are taking the world, and specifically the USA and the other English-speaking nations. Unlike most of these observers, Bennett believes that these forces will not create a borderless world, nor will the process of globalization lead to a homogenized world culture. Instead, Bennett argues that what is emerging is a series of distinct but overlapping globe- spanning linguistic-cultural phenomena, which he terms “network civilizations”. (The Anglosphere, or English-speaking network civilization, is the first but by no means the last of such entities.) Within these network civilizations, cultures with strong civil societies can cross intra- civilizational boundaries with ease, widening the scope of easy interaction, particularly for smaller, entrepreneurial ventures. The task of the emerging era, then, is one of creating political forms of cooperation appropriate to these network civilizations. Bennett argues that such a form, which he terms the “Network Commonwealth”, is already emerging. Unlike national or imperial forms of organization, network commonwealths are characterized by extreme decentralization and lack of compulsory mechanisms. Network commonwealths will serve to replace the trade and defense functions once performed by large economic states. Bennett’s book contains a detailed discussion of the English-speaking world and why its strong civil society, and resultant entrepreneurial market capitalism and constitutional government will likely result in the Anglosphere’s retaining the lead role in the next stages of development, the multiple and simultaneous scientific-technological revolutions sometimes called the Singularity, and the emergence of the Network Commonwealth..

The site also has excerpts from the book, and the annotated bibliography. Check these out. They will make you want to get the book if you haven’t already.

I finished reading the book a while ago. I just need a chunk of time to write up a detailed review. Bear with me.

Instapundit had this post, and Nito posted these maps in response. The basic idea is that the Blue Staters are so horrified about living under the rule of George Bush that they want to break the USA into pieces and form their own country. Of course, they are just venting.

The core strength of “liberal” America resides in the descendants of Yankee puritans, a memetic “Greater New England” that sprang from the Yankee diaspora which settled the Northern tier of the country. These folks have been living uneasily with their fellow Americans for over 350 years. They have been trying to reform the rest of us for our own good the whole time: Revolution, abolition, prohibition, civil rights, environmentalism … . Sometimes they are even right, as much as I hate to admit it. Look at a picture of Cotton Mather, or Susan B. Anthony, or any eat-your-peas liberal do-gooder. The eyes: sad at the foolishness and injustice of the world — the mouth, a mirthless line — and the jaw, set in determination to rectify the world’s wrongs and smite its wrongdoers. Those Yankees, genetic or memetic, are the core of the “progressive” element in American life, and they have been for centuries, and they’ll never change.

Still, even though secession is not seriously on the table, it is interesting that the immediate impulse of the embittered defeated party in 2004 was to think about rearranging territory, not tearing up the Constitution and forming a Second Republic.

This all has an Anglospheric dimension to it. Jim Bennett in his new book reiterates a theme he has written about repeatedly. Anglospheric political struggles tend not to aim at regime change, ala the French, who are now on their Fifth Republic since 1789. Rather, Anglospheric Constitutional struggles end up being “compositional struggles” leading to attempted or successful secessions with territorial division being the outcome. A big issue in the 18th century was about the composition of Britain, and the Act of Union of 1707 (uniting England and Scotland) led to two wars in 1715 and 1745 before Scotland was firmly embedded in a “United Kingdom”. Our own Revolution of 1776, of revered memory, was similarly a matter of territorial composition and secession, much less about Constitutional values. The Americans claimed to be fighting for their rights as free-born Englishmen, after all. In 19th Century America the big question was: Will the slave states have their own country or not? They rolled the dice and lost. A tumultuous issue in 19th Century Britain was Irish Home Rule. This vexatious problem was resolved, incompletely, by civil war and secession. The peaceful devolution of rule to Canada, Australia and New Zealand was due in part to the painful lessons of 1776 et seq.

A large part of the success story of the Anglosphere has been the ability of its communities to maintain their cultural, economic and military ties while reconfiguring the territorial elements. These reconfigurations have, to an unusual degree, been peaceful and lawful. Where violence did occur it has usually come at the end of protracted efforts to compromise and work out differences peacefully. And once a conflict has ended there have always been strong constituencies pushing to restore the many ties of civil society relatively rapidly in the aftermath. The strands of civil society, across the Atlantic, and even across the Irish Sea, have been relatively swiftly rewoven repeatedly for many centuries. (An example that comes to mind is the Treaty of Washington, negotiated by President Grant’s administration, which resolved outstanding claims against Britain as a result of its assistance to the Confederacy. There was much bitterness against Britain, but there was also a strong desire to reopen the spigots of British investment capital. There are many other examples.)

So seeing maps with “Jesusland” and “United States of Canada” should not surprise us. It is the traditional Anglospheric way of thinking out loud about how to resolve seemingly irreconcilable differences. One way is to leave, physically, for some new place — “light out for the territories”, or “go West”, or as Davey Crocket put it “you people can go to Hell; I’m going to Texas”. And if there are too many dissatisfied people for this method to work, there is pressure to re-deal the cards on who runs which pieces of real estate.

Thankfully, for now, any proposed division of territory is merely political satire. But secession thinking is often the first straw in the wind of a storm of deeper conflict coming up.

The patterns repeat themselves like family resemblances, the living seeing echoes of their own faces in old photographs.