The barometer stands for Britain’s seafaring heyday, at which time most vessels would have carried one. Even for a bureaucrat such as my forebear, documenting the fruits of that seaborne trade in the Customs House in Harwich, this object would have been richly symbolic of the peculiar mix of risk-taking and scientific pedantry that characterised our island’s maritime tradition.

The Powell, meanwhile, captures a blizzard of contradictory feelings, from a Britain that had only very recently lost the empire this seafaring tradition founded. It is a confusion due, in part, to the way the loss happened: partly through overstretch and decadence; but with the death-blow dealt by one of Britain’s former colonies: America.

In turn, this close kinship allowed the impression to flourish of this being less a parricide than a passing of the baton. Together, so the hope went, the Anglophone “West” would leave imperialism as such behind, and foster a peaceful, prosperous world for all mankind. But will this comforting fantasy still hold, if 21st-century America abandons this neutrality and turns imperialist herself?

This seems to be where we are, all of a sudden: with the de facto global hegemony that America long exercised obliquely, through a web of purportedly neutral international rules and obligations, giving way to a more naked spirit of expansionism. This isn’t just about the spirit of “endless frontier federalism” extolled in Heritage Foundation director Kevin Roberts’ manifesto for the New Right, or Elon Musk’s ambition to colonise Mars. It appears to have earthly territorial implications too: recently, President-elect Donald Trump has refused to rule out using American economic or even military force to expand US territory into areas of perceived geopolitical interest. Potential targets reportedly include Greenland, Canada, and the Panama Canal.

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Trump’s apparent willingness to comprehensively jettison America’s longstanding role as “world policeman”, in favour of active participation in great-power competition, has caused shockwaves around the world, with the Financial Times recently warning that he “risks turning America into a rogue state”. But leaving aside the question of whether “rogue states” are even conceptually possible, without a “global policeman” enforcing the rules, the prospect of America engaging openly in great-power competition raises deep-seated cultural and political questions for Britain in particular.

Beyond our seafaring history, my dad’s heirloom barometer might more romantically be said to stand for a peculiarly Anglo combination of home-loving and wanderlust, which together provide a common cultural stem for both Brits and Americans. It’s surely true that those historic Englishmen who left to settle the New World possessed these qualities in different proportion to those who roved but — like Bilbo Baggins — always assumed they’d return to the Shire eventually. Even so, whether Australian, Canadian, Brits or Americans, Anglo diaspora peoples tend to recognise this restless, roving streak in our national character.

By contrast, my dad’s Powell anthology captures crucial developments in the specific post-war political history of Britain, as distinct from those of the wider Anglo diaspora. In particular, Powell was excoriating on the self-soothing behaviour characteristic of Britain’s ruling class since the sun set on the empire: a bundle of delusions enabled in practice by the fantasy of diaspora “Anglosphere” continuity.

For when it came, the blow of Britain’s dethroning as Top Nation, by our own former colony, was softened by this sense of kinship. As the historian Nigel Ashton notes, Britain’s Prime Minister Harold Macmillan famously analogised the handover in classical terms, telling his colleague Richard Crossman while the war was still ongoing that the British “are the Greeks in this American empire” and should run the Allied Forces Headquarters “as the Greek slaves ran the operations of the Emperor Claudius”.

This quality of extended-family connection mixed with rivalry is vividly depicted in the literature of the immediate post-war period, such as John le Carré’s classic spy novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Against an early-Seventies backdrop of chilly air, clipped sentences, and penny-pinching, the novel’s British secret service agents refer to their American associates as “the Cousins”. It’s an ambivalent term, often used with mingled resentment and disdain: “Why tell the Cousins everything?”.

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Nor was this wholly unwarranted. For while Macmillan may have been — initially at least — optimistic about Britain enjoying an influential post-imperial position, as favoured flunkeys to the new hegemon, others, including Powell, were more cold-eyed about the dynamic. As noted by James Barr in his history of British and American rivalry in the post-war Middle East, former British Prime Minister Anthony Eden reminisced that, in the late Forties, Powell warned him that “in the Middle East our great enemies are the Americans”. Eden admitted that it was only much later that he understood what Powell had already grasped: that cousins can be competitors as well as kin.

Nor was this Powell’s only moment of foresight. By the time the anthology I found on my dad’s shelves was published in 1969, he was already persona non grata, following a backlash to his notorious 1968 speech on Commonwealth immigration. But what strikes in Freedom and Reality is less Powell’s views on migration than his clear-eyed and prescient assessment of British ruling-class inability to adapt psychologically to the country’s shrunken reach and standing.

For more than a century, Powell points out, the British had been used to “Britain” also meaning India, and had thus, as he puts it, “got into the habit of thinking in what are sometimes called ‘global terms’”. In Powell’s view, having lost that real-world geographic reach, Britain should have refocused on Western Europe. But instead, unable to relinquish their habitual global perspective, the British elite conjured two ideas from the rubble of empire and war: firstly, the “Commonwealth”, and secondly the “special relationship” in which we were to be Greece to America’s Rome, in the joint pursuit of universal peace.

As Powell saw it, this represented a colossal self-delusion, in which “the vanishing last vestiges […] of Britain’s once vast Indian Empire have transformed themselves into a peacekeeping role on which the sun never sets, whereby […] in partnership with the United States we keep the peace of the world”. To him, this was a confection whose lack of basis in logic or reality was only outstripped by fantasies about the Commonwealth, an organisation he saw as riddled with contradiction and whose demands often ran counter to British national interest.

The half-century since Powell’s heyday doesn’t seem to have cured British elites of such fond dreams. Rather, it has compounded them by adding a third: the pan-European post-imperial project of mutual colonisation usually referred to as the EU. (Powell opposed this as well, also presciently, on the grounds that it would harm Parliamentary sovereignty.) And though Brexit went some way, for better or worse, to reversing Britain’s entanglement in that project, we still possess the same Hyacinth Bucket-like fixation with “Britain’s standing” on “the world stage”.

Nor have we shed the slavish commitment to showing “leadership” by outdoing even America in pursuit of US foreign policy priorities. Meanwhile, not even increasingly strident demands for “reparations” from supposed friends and allies in the “Commonwealth” seem capable of shifting the entrenched British ruling-class conviction that this entity is in some fundamental way a good and necessary thing for our country.

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But one of the crucial pillars on which Britain’s post-war, post-imperial cope rested was always American geopolitical neutrality. The idea was that we needn’t mourn the empire, which was bad anyway, because Anglophone cultural and economic leadership would persist — it would just shift its capital, wealth, and geopolitical interests several thousand miles west. But it would still be “the West”, still the English-speaking world, and still, however tenuously, the same cousinly spirit.

But the idea that Britain is a “leader” alongside America in keeping global peace relies on America both doing the defence legwork, and also making at least a nominal effort to look neutral. Where does that leave Britain, then, if the former is on the chopping-block and the latter risks being jettisoned for a new Arctic “Great Game”? In the genuinely post-liberal geopolitics this would produce, Britain is unlikely to be able to go on sitting in the current three-way intersection between Europe, the “Commonwealth”, and the Cousins.

This juggling act surely only lasted as long as it did because America’s self-appointed “global policeman” role prevented any of this trifecta’s more delusional implications from biting too deeply. But swap out global-policeman America for expansionist America and things quickly get messy. Should Trump actually annex Canada, for example, a Commonwealth state of which King Charles remains (however nominally) head of state, how should Britain respond? Similarly, should he make moves on the currently self-governing Danish territory of Greenland, should Britain come down on the side of our European neighbours, or the “Cousins”?

At least some in Britain clearly feel closer kinship with English-speakers across the pond than our neighbours across the Channel. There have, for example, been recent calls both in Britain and the US for a much more special relationship; even for Britain’s annexation by the Cousins. Especially for those younger, more tech-optimistic “Right-wing Progressive” Brits with portable careers and an eye on the Elon Musk phenomenon, absorption by the USA would likely read more as a formality than a significant change — and in any case as a more advantageous proposition than cosying up to a stagnant and censorship-happy EU.

In terms both of Europe’s resurgent Right-wing ethnopolitics and Britain’s specific history, it would in fact make perfect Right-wing sense. Having sailed our barometers around the world, leaving diaspora communities worldwide, it follows logically that a putative ethnopolitics of Englishness would look beyond as well as within the British Isles, toward that diaspora as well. (Whether such a diaspora would want anything to do with modern Britain is, of course, a separate question.)

For those still committed to European-style social democracy, meanwhile, our immediate neighbours might seem more ideologically congenial than the New World, not to mention more geographically relevant. And Britain’s now-considerable Commonwealth-heritage population, meanwhile, has far fewer direct historic links to the USA. For such groups, “Cousins” is unlikely to conjure a picture of mid-century WASPs.

It is too early to tell which way Britain will jump, though Starmer’s reverse ferret this week on the Chagos handover may be a sign of things to come. But we are leaving the inshore waters of the long 20th century — and, as the seafarers used to say, the glass is falling. For, to extend Macmillan’s classical analogy, the Cousins seem on a trajectory from republic to empire. And if this is so, Britain’s long era of self-delusion will soon be at an end, and with it the deferral of hard choices. What matters more to us: our legacy of empire, our near abroad, or our historic diaspora? I’m not sure I want to find out. But Britain has no prospect of charting a new course until we are willing to face these questions.

In the centuries that have followed, not a single monarch has been assassinated, and only one Prime Minister, Spencer Perceval, has suffered such a grim fate. And he was killed not by political rivals, but by a merchant with a grievance. Before 1688, though, deposed kings and other politically inconvenient royals often faced a darker end than the exiled James II. Royals including two Edwards, Henry VI, and Mary, Queen of Scots, either died mysteriously in captivity or were executed publicly.

This is not especially surprising. In a monarchy proper, as opposed to the constitutional kind, political legitimacy rests not in the system so much as in the person of the monarch: a king only becomes meaningfully a king when enough powerful people perceive him as having that special extra something that elevates him to royalty. And a pretender is someone else competing to be seen in this light — either by the same cadre of the powerful or by a rival cadre. In this situation, the only sure-fire way to eliminate the risk posed by a pretender is to eliminate the pretender.

Whatever name Vladimir Putin gives his system of government, its operations in practice make more sense in monarchical than liberal democratic terms. Take, for example, the death in prison of Alexei Navalny last Friday. While of course reprehensible from a democratic perspective, his death was wholly predictable from a monarchical one. For Navalny was, in effect, a pretender to the Russian throne, with considerable public and international support behind his protests against Putin’s regime. Thus, much as with Henry VI in 1471, the only way to eliminate the threat he posed was to eliminate him.

Writing against the French Revolution, the Savoyard reactionary Joseph de Maistre argued, in 1794, that the government of a people is not something that can be composed in the abstract; rather, it emerges from the distinct history, culture, and disposition of the people as a whole. With this in mind, we might suggest that, notwithstanding superficial changes of regime, from the Romanovs through Stalin to Putin, Russia has never really abandoned rule by tsar and aristocracy.

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This is more difficult to grasp from the vantage-point of the anglophone West, though. For here we’ve grown accustomed to thinking of the Anglo-Saxon model as the only sane and decent way of doing politics. First formalised in the 1701 Act of Settlement — then, across the Atlantic, stripped of its vestigial monarchy 75 years later by the Declaration of Independence — this model views politics as properly a contest of ideas rather than individuals, conducted in a political space that at least aspires to neutrality. Political rivalries, in this order, are to be contained via a matrix of shared norms — one that, importantly, includes a convention of not imprisoning, persecuting, or bumping off one’s rivals.

But this modus operandi has arguably only come to seem so self-evident and eternal by virtue of the outsize role played first by the British Empire, and subsequently by the American one, in shaping the modern West. Both these regimes share a common intellectual and religious legacy and, initially at least, some considerable common demographics. But today the Old and New Worlds are diverging increasingly sharply — including in political outlook. Notably, in today’s England, even supposedly insurgent Right-wing parties colour dutifully inside the conventional political lines. By contrast, the Anglosphere nation now most openly debating direct autocratic rule is the Land of the Free.

There, after Biden’s victory, Trump was mockingly linked to James II. More recently, though, jibes about an impotent king in exile has morphed into mounting anxiety about a Caesar-in-waiting. Those on the Right have made their contribution, not least via mischievous memes comparing the profile of Trump’s son Barron with surviving images of rulers from classical antiquity. And Trump himself has done little to assuage those who fear he aspires to Caesarism, declaring recently that he would not govern as a dictator on election “except on day one”.

In response, Republican Never Trumper, Liz Cheney, has warned of “a sort of sleepwalking into dictatorship in the United States”. Is this really happening, though? In a political attention economy that incentivises hyperbole, it’s hard to say. But if it is, the surest evidence in favour of an American tilt towards autocracy comes not directly from Trump, or even from neoreactionary writers or online shitposters. Rather, it lurks in the political class, in the tiers just below Presidential incumbents or hopefuls — and especially in the weaponisation of American institutions as tools of political persecution.

This is, increasingly, a bipartisan strategy. On the day Navalny died, a court in New York City ordered Donald Trump to pay a $354 million fine in a civil fraud trial, one of a plethora of ongoing efforts to impeach or otherwise hamper Trump via the courts. Trump now claims himself subjected to a Putinesque campaign of persecution, calling the ruling “a form of Navalny” and declaring: “If I weren’t running [for president] none of this stuff would ever happen.”

Two days before the Trump fraud ruling, meanwhile, a parallel Republican mobilisation of the formally neutral institutions of justice produced a special counsel report, which found Biden had “wilfully retained and disclosed classified materials”. When the special counsel nonetheless declined to prosecute on the basis of these findings, this was interpreted as further evidence of partisan abuse of neutral institutions, and denounced by Republican House Conference Chair Elise Stefanik as a sign of the “unAmerican, two-tier justice system that exists in Joe Biden’s America”. The outrage only grew louder the following day, when a key witness in the Trumpist attempt to impeach Joe Biden was charged by the FBI with fabricating allegations about the President and his son taking bribes.

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To be clear: I am not taking a stance here on the truth or justice of any of these allegations or campaigns. Nor, unlike Trump, am I drawing an equivalence between efforts by Republicans and Democrats to wield American state machinery against their political rivals, and the tendency of Vladimir Putin’s enemies to die in plane accidents or (like several English medieval royals) mysteriously in prison. Nonetheless, it should be clear that a new consensus is solidifying among the American political class: one that departs increasingly dramatically from its British constitutional forebear.

In this emerging order no one expects to persuade their opponents. This is perhaps understandable: polarisation is now so acute in the Land of the Free that almost two-thirds of young Americans would reject a prospective partner based on incompatible politics. There is no point contesting ideas, if people’s loyalties are tribal. But if this is so, how do you win? The answer appears to be: by capturing institutions, then going after the other tribe’s leader. There is no such thing as neutral regulatory, governance or administrative infrastructure in this existential struggle against political opponents.

A similar institutional trench warfare is also being fought today in Poland. Since the deposition of the conservative PiS party, a coalition led by former EU President Donald Tusk has taken over and fired key personnel from the state broadcaster, is legislating to pack the judiciary, and is also reportedly preparing to prosecute key PiS officials. Supporters see these actions as an “iron broom” sweeping out anti-democratic distortions. Opponents, though, view Tusk’s efforts themselves as the assault on democracy.

But perhaps again this makes sense from de Maistre’s perspective. Poland’s tradition of liberal democracy is so short as to be practically non-existent. The country enjoyed four years as a fully independent democratic state, from 1922 to 1926, and then another 13 between the end of the Cold War and before EU accession in 2004. Otherwise, the lands and peoples known as Poland have been ruled with vacillating boundaries by an assortment of monarchs, strongman rulers with largely cosmetic parliaments, and Eastern or Western empires.

Thus the face-off between Tusk and PiS represents, if anything, a reversion to the Polish norm, following a brief outlier effort at doing politics on something like the Anglo-Saxon model. And seen across the globe and through time, this is also more generally true: Anglo-Saxon liberal democracy is the outlier, and assorted forms of autocracy and empire are the historic and cross-cultural norm. So perhaps we should greet the competing claims of institutional capture now emanating from America’s rival factions with a measure of fatalism, even if these suggest that American political-class support for the legacy Anglo system is fading.

And again, perhaps, from de Maistre’s perspective this development makes sense. For while its founding political order drew heavily from England both in sensibility and in core assumptions, it is less obvious why modern America should continue in this vein. A “propositional nation” from inception, over time the Land of the Free has become, by design, ineluctably less Anglo in demographic terms. And seen thus, it is perhaps unsurprising to note how many American culture war issues, from statues to “whiteness”, cash out as disputes over how (or whether) to value the nation’s Anglo cultural legacy.

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Following the same de Maistrean logic, it’s to be expected that as the demographic composition of a nation changes, so too will that nation’s emergent — as opposed to written — constitution. It is not unthinkable that one casualty of this change might be the once-unshakeable baseline of public support for a style of procedural politics strongly associated with America’s early Anglo-Saxon Protestant settlers.

What will emerge in its place? Will a rapidly-diversifying 21st-century America find itself, by virtue of its changing composition, more inclined towards more autocratic governance? Certainly, albeit in a less violent fashion than Russia, an order seems to be emerging in which victory requires more than just defeating opposition parties: it necessitates the annihilation of rival pretenders. And in turn implies the replacement of a politics of ideas, by one of divinely marked persons. Should this order consolidate itself, it will, whatever the window-dressing, be a monarchical regime.

At present, the keenest supporters of American diversity are generally also those loudest in expressing anxieties about a putative Trumpian Caesar. It will be ironic in the extreme if it does turn out that the real bulwark against autocracy was America’s now rapidly dissolving Anglo heritage.

The subsequent attempt to remould Britain as a European power acting in concert with its continental neighbours through the European Union was an unhappy marriage, and has ended in a rancorous divorce whose final settlement is still to be determined. Adrift on the world stage, we are in need of good ideas.

Instead, we are offered CANZUK, a reheated Edwardian fantasy of a globe-spanning Anglosphere acting as a world power which excites the enthusiasm of a small coterie of neoliberal and neoconservative ideologues, if no one else.

In a recent piece for the Wall Street Journal, the historian and Churchill biographer Andrew Roberts argued that the CANZUK nations — Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK — ought to establish “some form of federation among them” as a “second Anglospheric superpower” combining “free trade, free movement of people, a mutual defense organization and combined military capabilities” , which would “create a new global superpower and ally of the U.S., the great anchor of the Anglosphere”.

One cannot fault Roberts for the grandeur of his vision, even if the details of how this would actually work are left to others to fill in. Instead, we are reassured, this would not be a centralising project like the hated EU; rather,“its program for a loose confederal state linking the Westminster democracies would be clearly enunciated right from the start.” Already, we see the harsh hand of reality ready to crush this initially appealing vision. On the one hand, CANZUK is a globe-spanning superpower ready to be born; on the other, it is merely a loose grouping of separate national governments, which would, like all national governments, act according to their own interests above all. 

By totting up the different GDP figures of the various CANZUK nations, Roberts claims that his proposed Empire 2.0 “would have a combined GDP of more than $6 trillion, placing it behind only the U.S., China and the EU,” while “with a combined defense expenditure of over $100 billion, it would also be able to punch above its weight”.

Yet the flaws of this argument are obvious. As other critics have noted, only a minuscule proportion of the CANZUK nations’ trade is with each other, save New Zealand, an economic satellite of Australia. Australia is a great East Asian trading power, and will remain so. Canada is enmeshed in the greater North American trading sphere, as are we with Europe, whatever Brexiteers may wish. As always, the simple matter of geography trumps the affective bonds between far-flung kith and kin, whatever their emotional appeal. 

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As the political scientists Duncan Bell and Srdjan Vucetic note in a 2019 paper on the CANZUK project, sober analysis of the geographic facts underwriting trade patterns reveals “why Australian exports to Britain have for decades hovered below two percent of its total outgoing trade and why only for New Zealand would a CANZUK pact count as ‘the most important’” This, they note, partly “explains why during the Brexit campaign, the leaders of all of the CANZUK countries supported Britain remaining in the EU. They do not see the huge benefits professed by CANZUKers.”

In any case, what good would it do us if Australia sells huge quantities of raw materials to China, or Canada agricultural produce to America, if the UK exchequer doesn’t benefit from it? Would we share the same currency? Would there be a shared tax mechanism to convert this notional $6 trillion GDP into something meaningful? The issue is not even raised, let alone answered.

Yet the example of the EU already shows us the failure of economic union without political union; and of advancing a common foreign policy among nations with different interests. Without an overarching political and economic framework, the goal of uniting separate nations into one coherent geopolitical bloc cannot succeed; and even with one, as long as the interests of the component nations diverge, the long-term chances of success are slim. The only meaningful economic effect of a CANZUK free trade zone, surely, would be to wipe out what remains of British farming under tides of Canadian wheat, Australian beef and New Zealand lamb. 

On the strategic level, the MP Bob Seeley, in a report for the neoconservative Henry Jackson Society thinktank, proposes “a mutual defence clause, akin to NATO’s Article 5”. But on the matter of defence, again the stumbling block is not the individual fellow-feeling and affection shared between the Anglo-Saxon nations but the differing foreign policy goals of CANZUK’s constituent countries. Would Australia send jets to defend the North Sea from Russian incursions? Would avowedly anti-nuclear New Zealand, an essentially pacifist state with barely any armed forces to speak of, demand a place under the UK’s nuclear umbrella, or raise an army to defend Canada’s oil exploration rights in the high Arctic?

As Bell and Vucetic note, “it is illusory to think that an alliance with Britain would ever again become Australia’s main strategic priority, just as it is illusory to expect that Canada and the UK would re-orient their defence postures away from the Atlantic and towards the Asia-Pacific region.

Roberts claims that “Churchill would have approved” the CANZUK scheme, but his previous attempts at viewing foreign policy through a Churchillian lens have not been successful. On the wisdom of invading Iraq, I suspect not even the objects of his adulation would agree with his previous assertions that “history will prove George Bush right”, nor that Tony Blair’s “apotheosis” will come “when Iraq is successfully invaded and hundreds of weapons of mass destruction are unearthed from where they have been hidden by Saddam’s henchmen”.

But as a useful thought experiment in this mooted superpower’s foreign policy, what would the CANZUK position on invading Iraq have been anyway? Neither Canada nor New Zealand took part in the war, which they strongly opposed, judging that the invasion was not in their national interests. Perhaps a more useful Churchillian lesson would have been the Chanak Crisis of 1921, when Canada refused to follow Britain into war against Turkey to Churchill’s great disappointment, and which established the principle that the dominions would from then on follow their own independent foreign policies — a principle even more apparent now than it was a century ago. 

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More bold claims for a united CANZUK foreign policy have been offered recently by Matt Kilcoyne of the neoliberal Adam Smith Institute, who argues that “common language, common political systems, common history, common sense of purpose, translate into a sheer force of fact re-emergence of a global role that has eluded the mandarins in the Foreign Office for far too long.” Explicitly echoing the civilisation-state rhetoric of China, Russia and Turkey, Kilcoyne claims that the CANZUK nations are themselves a civilisation-state, with that civilisation being globalised capitalism. “Our civilisation needs champions to save it from opponents and challengers abroad, but also nationalists at home,” he asserts (presumably referring to the voters who brought Johnson’s government to power), vowing that “we must defend the gains of globalisation for the whole of the world”. 

This is a vision of Anglo-Saxon civilisation purely reducible to swashbuckling free trade on the high seas previously made only by Napoleon or Oswald Spengler at their most cynical and dismissive, though here represented as a positive trait. Wrapping neoliberal economic goals within a narrative of derring-do and imperial nostalgia derived from Ladybird’s Adventures From History series may make a subset of middle-aged Brexiteers go weak at the knees, but a zealous adherence to free trade dogma does not make a civilisation, even if, as we are rapidly finding out, it may well break one.

If the argument is that doubling down on the economic theories which have done so much to destroy British manufacturing and boost Chinese power at the expense of the West will somehow restrain China’s growth, then it is self-evidently absurd. Having handed the world on a platter to China in pursuit of globalisation, we are now told to deepen globalisation to fight China. Far from an Anglospheric superpower, a CANZUK along these lines would be simply a transcontinental suicide pact.

As for what a united CANZUK foreign policy of confronting China would mean in practice, Kilcoyne cites the fact that “Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom joined the USA in condemning moves to shut down free and fair elections in Hong Kong this autumn”, as indeed they did; and if foreign policy were simply a question of co-signing petulant letters, no doubt CANZUK would indeed be a superpower.

However, foreign policy and grand strategy entails far more than this in the real world, and in the real world, the primary defence relationship of each CANZUK Nation is with the United States, and not with each other, and the primary focus of each nation is its own continental sphere. In defence as with trade, Britain remains a European power, Australia and New Zealand retain their focus on Asia, and Canada on North America and the Arctic: and these basic orientations will not change, whatever the dreams of a certain subset of Westminster thinktankers. 

A more limited argument in favour of enhanced cooperation among the CANZUK nations could reasonably be made — indeed, it is a common approach of the cheerleaders to elide support for their more realistic goals with that for their grander geostrategic fantasies.

Liberalisation of visa regulations among the CANZUK nations would no doubt be broadly popular; similarly, a more realistic proposal for diplomatic cooperation on the world stage between Britain, Canada and Australia has been put forward by the journalist Ben Judah. He correctly notes that New Zealand’s foreign policy does not chime with the others, as “Wellington is simply not in the same place as Ottawa, Canberra, or London when it comes to China”, and “New Zealand sees itself as neutral in U.S.-China competition”. Cooperation could well be considered on shared defence procurement issues, though again, Australia, the UK and Canada expect to fight wars in very different environments for very different goals, so even here a degree of scepticism must enter the conversation. 

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Given the vast disparity between the economic and foreign policy realities and the grand claims of the CANZUK enthusiasts, what are we to make of this sudden reflorescence of ideas first proposed, and then swiftly abandoned as unrealistic, at the height of Britain’s Edwardian golden age? The historians  Michael Kenny and Nick Pearce note in Shadows of Empire, their recent book on the Anglosphere, that “it is advocates of a free market, neo-liberal future for the UK who remain its most enthusiastic champions”, and that as the UK’s attachment to Europe soured, “the gravitational pull of the Anglosphere on the political imagination of neo-liberal Eurosceptics intensified”. 

“Politicians, commentators and think-tanks such as the Institute of Economic Affairs and the Adam Smith Institute, which had long-established transatlantic ties with Washington counterparts such as the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute, began to publish pamphlets, speeches and blogs making the case for Brexit,” they note, which “reimagined Britain as a freewheeling, globally networked economy, striking trade deals with the USA, Canada and an expanded Asian and Australasian Anglosphere.”

Despite the overlap of personnel between these neoliberal ideologues and the Leave campaign, the campaign to exit the European Union consciously chose not to stand on a platform of Anglospheric neoliberalism. It correctly perceived that few in the Leave vote’s core areas share Kilcoyne’s perception of globalisation in which “the empirics of a world made richer, with more choice, happier, freer, more tolerant people, engaged in commerce with others right across the world would be obvious to all”. Who in the Red Wall clamours to keep the South China Sea safe for globalisation? Where is the popular demand to rework Britain’s constitutional order around neoliberal economics? This is, after all, precisely the worldview most Brexit voters were casting a defiant vote against. 

As Pearce and Kenny note, “a neo-Thatcherite idea of Brexit, which involves stripping away tariff barriers, reducing labour market and product regulations, and trading at ‘world prices’ remains a potentially toxic position to present to a public weary of austerity, facing years of declining living standards, and increasingly jaded in the face of the economic liberalism associated with the last few decades of government.” Aware of the absolute unpopularity of their ideology with British voters, neoliberals have tweaked their offering by dressing it up in dashing Edwardian garb.

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There is a danger that Johnson, with his fatal weakness for bombastic and absurd ideas, will hear the siren song of Westminster’s new Empire League; but this will be counterbalanced by his just as powerful ambition to remain in power, shoring up his fragile electoral coalition by giving his new working-class voters what they want, and not what neoliberal thinktankers demand they must suffer. This scheme is literally the work of an elite, and not a popular one. Everything about the EU that Red Wall voters hated, this would multiply.  

In any case, is there any meaningful support for CANZUK in its other mooted constituent nations? The CANZUK blogosphere asserts so, but — as is a recurring pattern here — this very much depends on which shifting definition is used. Certainly, a number of right-wing current and former politicians in Canada, New Zealand and Australia support a free trade agreement among the CANZUK nations, along with some form of free movement between them. Support for free movement, free trade and an undefined “security coordination” among the CANZUK nations is now a policy platform of Canada’s opposition Conservative party, but this is far from the federal superpower of Roberts’ imagining. 

CANZUK evangelists cite the Australian senator Eric Abetz as a supporter, but his explicit insistence that “this would absolutely not be a political union”, and that “I wouldn’t want a CANZUK Human Rights court which would determine what Australia or New Zealand parliaments can legislate”, again shows the limitations of the idea’s appeal even to its own supporters.

New Zealand’s leader, Jacinda Ardern, has expressed no interest in the idea whatsoever, though her coalition partner in the rightwing populist New Zealand First party supports free trade and movement, as does the leader of New Zealand’s opposition New Zealand National party, though again both are silent on the wider strategic aspirations of CANZUK’s true believers.

Similarly, Australia’s former leader Tony Abbott has expressed support for free trade and free movement among the CANZUK nations, and again, is silent on the wider geopolitical aspects. Support for the idea even in its most nebulous form is hardly unanimous among the ranks of Australia’s former prime ministers. Kevin Rudd, writing for The Guardian, has described CANZUK as “utter bollocks” and “the nuttiest of the many nutty arguments that have emerged from the Land of Hope and Glory set now masquerading as the authentic standard-bearers of British patriotism”. 

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Covid has exposed America as a failed state

By Aris Roussinos

The issue here is, as the political scientists Ben Wellings and Helen Baxendale note, that “in eschewing the type of institutional set-up that characterizes the EU, the success of the Anglosphere appears to rest on the existence of a constellation of like-minded politicians in English-speaking countries”. As long as the Antipodean and Canadian equivalents of Daniel Hannan or the other neoconservative and neoliberal occupants of the wilder fringes of British conservatism are in power, then the idea may seem viable, “but such alignments are ephemeral”.

A loose alliance dependent on the vagaries of four different electoral cycles for its very existence is clearly not a stable prospect. In any case, as Pearce and Kenny observe, generally speaking “the other core countries of the Anglosphere … remain indifferent to — or simply perplexed by — calls for some kind of formalised Anglosphere alliance.”  

Much of what is achievable is harmless, and may even bring a modest good; that which is actively dangerous is fortunately unlikely to be achievable. As a proposal to amplify Britain’s diplomatic reach, it is worth considering, though in any case it is Australia and Canada who have more to gain from sharing our UN seat than we do.

Easier movement between the CANZUK nations may well be popular, though the significantly differing immigration policies of Canada, New Zealand and Australia would present a barrier, whatever the strength of fellow feeling between the mother country and the dwindling proportion of the former colonies’ citizens who claim descent from these islands. How long the residual emotional pull of Britain’s political and cultural inheritance will survive the changing demographics of the former dominions is an open question. 

Eager to shy away from accusations of racial discrimination in choosing Britian’s former white colonies for political union over the rest of the Commonwealth, CANZUK’s adherents seem to advance the notion that the people of Australia, Canada and New Zealand are, whatever their origin, somehow metaphysically British, like those of Hong Kong, due to their adherence to Westminster-style governance and free trade dogma. But this is a shaky foundation on which to build a political union. Indeed, the very survival of the United Kingdom itself as a single political unit is looking shakier than it has at any time since its founding, and CANZUK’s evangelists would do better to worry about the continued existence of their own country before planning unions with other nations on the furthest corners of the globe. 

But it is as a Trojan horse to smuggle in failed and wildly unpopular economic belief-systems under the banner of imperial nostalgia that CANZUK’s neoliberal fantasies will have to be rejected. That these wild dreams are even entertained by MPs of the governing party only highlights the irreconcilable tensions within the Brexit vote, and the fragility of the Conservative Party’s hold on power.

They are useful only to show how far Whiggish fantasies have penetrated into British conservatism; and how bereft the ideologues are, perhaps fortunately for the national good, of meaningful or achievable ideas. Perhaps it is for the best that they are distracted by such a fanciful project, as long as it prevents them from doing more damage to this country than their harmful economic dogma has already achieved.

From their island home — an ancient nation of poets and heroes — the Goodies venture out into the world, spreading their values of tolerance and liberty wherever they go. With derring-do they found a mighty, but benign, empire. Eventually, it evolves into a family of free nations who, in times of trouble, still stand together to defend democracy and defeat tyranny. Huzzah!

The Baddies meanwhile are a desperate and devious lot — basically a bunch of pirates. Not even they can stand their wet, miserable homeland, so they sail off to grab territory in sunnier climes. They’re good at lying, cheating and murdering and so achieve global dominance. But apart from that, they’re rubbish — making a mess wherever they go. To this day, everything that goes wrong is their fault. Boo!

Further reading

Tolkien's guide to contemporary politics

By Peter Franklin

Okay, you don’t need to imagine such a world — because it’s this one, not some Tolkeinesque fantasy. Furthermore, we (by which I mean the “English-speaking peoples”) are the Goodies. However, we’re also the Baddies — because these two civilisations are in fact one and the same. Then again, neither exist, because the rival narratives — ‘Rule Britannia’ versus ‘Perfidious Albion’ — are equally absurd in their simplification of history.

Unfortunately, simplistic civilisational narratives are all the rage right now. It’s not enough to be a mere country or group of countries, these days you have to present yourself as a ‘civilisation-state’. Everyone’s at it — the Chinese, the Russians, the Indians, even the EU. As for us Brits, the Empire may be long gone, but we have the ‘Anglosphere’ instead — Britain, America and the other English-speaking nations.

The pro-Anglosphere narrative is a familiar one — built on a foundation of British Imperial propaganda plus notions of American exceptionalism. It’s been updated by historians such as Niall Ferguson and promoted by politicians such as Dan Hannan. It is of course contested — indeed detested — by many on the Left. The resulting counter-narrative — a feature of academic discourse and protest movements alike — is winning the culture wars right now.

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One of the foremost scourges of Anglo self-satisfaction is the Indian writer Pankaj Mishra. In a rapturously-received 6,000 word essay for the London Review of Books he gives both John Bull and Uncle Sam a proper shoeing.

His jumping-off point is the Covid crisis, which he says has “blown the roof off the world, most brutally exposing Britain and the United States, these prime movers of modern civilisation”. As a result, we can now see the wider, deeper truth that’s been supposedly staring us in the face all along, which is that “the early winners of modern history now seem to be its biggest losers, with their delegitimised political systems, grotesquely distorted economies and shattered social contracts”.

The ungainly forms of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson feature heavily in Mishra’s account of current government ineptitude. However, to him, these men also personify a civilisational sickness that stretches back decades, if not centuries. Whereas happier lands have understood that “genuine public interest is different from the mere aggregation of private interests”, we’re a bunch of selfish individualists. We loudly proclaim the virtues of liberty, but “democracy does not always guarantee good government, even in its original heartlands”. Thus, in both Britain and America, the pandemic has shown up each country for what it really is — “a broken society, with a carefully dismantled state”.

There’s no denying that the comparative statistics look bad for us. Set against Germany, Japan and many other nations, “Anglo-America” (as Mishra calls it) has not had a good pandemic. And yet it’s a bit early to be drawing conclusions. We don’t know to what extent national variations in the spread of the virus — or the harm it’s done — are explained by public policy alone. All sorts of other factors are in the mix — like initial exposure to chains of global transmission, genetically-determined variations in susceptibility, differences in pre-existing immunities and plain old measurement issues. At this stage, we’re still guessing as to their relative contributions. Nor is this wretched plague over yet — some countries that had been doing relatively well have suffered recent setbacks. Given these multiple uncertainties, Covid is a fragile hook on which to hang a tale of civilisational decline.

Another key weakness is the very idea of “Anglo-America”. Obviously, the world contains a number of English-speaking nations that were once part of the British Empire. But these also include Australia and New Zealand, countries that that have been notably successful in their fight against the virus — despite the terrible handicap of their Anglo heritage.

Further reading

Coronavirus has driven America mad

By Justin Webb

An even bigger problem with the Anglo-America concept is that the differences between the UK and US are profound. Never mind “two nations divided by a common language”, what really divides them is what they don’t have in common. Their respective political systems, for instance, are about as unlike as any two democracies can be. The same goes for their healthcare systems, policing methods and gun laws.

In fact, among all the nations of the West, there are two fundamental categories — the USA and the rest. That’s for many reasons, but the most important is that America is alone among western countries in being a continental nation. Yes, Canada and Australia also occupy continent-spanning territories, but most of their space is uninhabited (and pretty much uninhabitable). Only in America does a population of hundreds of millions range across temperate lands from ocean to ocean. Such boundlessness is bound to effect the development of a nation, shaping a radically different set of habits, attitudes and ambitions. In good ways and bad, the US was always going to be the outlier.

By the way, this is also a major plot hole in the pro-Anglosphere narrative. America is sui generis.

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Mishra sets Anglo-America against an even sketchier civilisational concept — a disparate group of nations which he bundles up into a kind of anti-Anglosphere. 

He’s not the first to do so. For instance, Russia has a long history of ‘Eurasianism’ — an intellectual movement, often associated with the political extremes, that sets the liberal, mercantile values of Atlantic nations such as Britain and America against what they see as the virtuous authoritarian traditionalism of the Slavic world and neighbouring lands. Contemporary Eurasianists include Aleksandr Dugin — a significant influence on Vladimir Putin. 

Further reading

Test article

By Aris Roussinos

Then there are those who focus on the philosophical divide between the Platonic and Aristotelian traditions — the former being used to justify the top-down technocratic state, the latter a more laissez faire approach. By linking that up to the various differences between the British and Continental Enlightenments, and contrasts in religious, legal and political schools of thought, one can spin-up a tale of rival Anglo and non-Anglo cultures – but only, of course, if one ignores all the exceptions, inconsistencies and complications. 

Pankaj Mishra’s own scheme of the world (which, I should say, is not Eurasianist) starts with Otto von Bismarck and the unification of Germany. As Chancellor, Bismarck pursued a policy of building up a highly capable “social state”, which, Mishra says, became a “model for all of the world.” In the late 19th and early 20th century, the rapidly modernising Japanese learned from Germany’s example. Japan, in turn, became a model for the post-war Asian tiger economies such as South Korea and Singapore — and, eventually, China. Having rejected the “Anglo-American ideologies of unfettered markets and minimal government”, the countries thus had the strong state capacity to prevail against the pandemic, while America and Britain did not.

The leap from Bismarck to Covid is a rather ambitious one, and it misses out some rather important things in between. For instance, the American influence on Japan, South Korea and Taiwan after the Second World War and the even longer British influence on Singapore and Hong Kong. Whether for good or ill, it strikes me that these connections might be more important to the way these places turned out than the rather distant link to Imperial Germany.

Then there’s the matter of Germany and its closest continental neighbours. If there is anywhere German influence might have made a difference — when it comes to how countries coped with Covid — it is surely in the European Union, in which the institutional connections are indisputable. And yet countries such as Italy, France, Belgium and Spain have suffered about as badly as the British. If anything, these nations are even less Anglo-Saxon in their attitudes than the Germans are, but that evidently hasn’t helped them much.

Back home in Blighty, there’s no doubt that mistakes have been made. We didn’t lockdown early enough and we’ve been incredibly slow in using face coverings. But why was that? An excess of Anglo-Saxon individualism? Er, no. The timing of the lockdown followed the independent advice of a highly eminent panel of scientists. Meanwhile the policy on masks followed the guidance of the World Health Organisation.

Further reading

Why heroes should wear masks

By Peter Franklin

There have been other cock-ups. Countries such as Germany, South Korea and Taiwan have shown that tracing app technology can be used to good effect. Our attempt to replicate their success was not our finest hour. On the other hand, Britain is playing a leading role in the quest for a vaccine. Furthermore, after some false starts, the UK Government has made great strides in expanding the availability of tests. The speed with which the Nightingale hospitals were created was also impressive. Of course, this extra capacity hasn’t been needed so far — testament to the fact that despite the number of cases, National Health Service capacity has not been overwhelmed. 

It’s worth reflecting on the incredible public support shown for the NHS, which isn’t just symbolic, but expressed in our willingness to comply with the strictures of lockdown. For a supposedly selfish society we’re remarkably inclined to acts of national and international solidarity. Just as mysteriously, our supposedly hollowed-out public sphere seems remarkably capable of creating and sustaining effective institutions.

Undoubtedly, there are things that, say, the Germans and Japanese do better than us. Germany’s superb technical education system, for instance; or the jaw-dropping punctuality of Japan’s trains. But narratives of non-Anglo hyper-efficiency leave out all the counter-examples. For instance, German mismanagement of infrastructure projects or the fact that the Japanese economy has been stagnant for a generation.

The idea that one can draw a line in the English Channel between the social states of Europe and East Asia on the one hand and turbo-capitalist bandit country on the other is ridiculous. The Brits maybe more market-orientated than the EU average and the tax burden a little lighter, but these are differences of degree not kind. Even America, which does have a significantly less statist society than the rest of the West, still has a vast public sector — including the armed forces that Europe is happy to rely on for its security. 

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If there’s one thing on which the Anglo and non-Anglo worlds do diverge, it’s their 20th century history. Say what you like about the Limeys and Yanks, at least we never went the full fash. Indeed, both countries became full democracies and stayed that way. Tragically, the same cannot be said for Germany and the other social states that Mishra is so impressed by. Most of them either embraced, or were conquered by, some form of totalitarian madness.

Further reading

Test article

By Peter Franklin

It’s all a bit awkward for the anti-Anglo narrative. But Mishra has an answer to that: “what made the first half of the 20th century so uniquely violent”, he says, was the “scramble for territory and resources, started by British slave-owners and colonialists”.

Without wanting to deny our involvement in the crimes of the era, I would point out that we we weren’t the pioneers of European empire-building or the slave trade. The Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch were in there before us, and the French were our great rivals. But let’s not mention all those Continentals, it’ll spoil the narrative! 

Meanwhile Germany took even longer to acquire overseas colonies. However, various German states (not least Prussia) had a long record of ruthless military conquest within Europe — going all the way back to The Middle Ages and the Teutonic Knights. It seems likely this did rather more to inspire Hitler’s dreams of conquest. In fact, I’d venture that Nazis didn’t do Nazi things because of the British, but because they were Nazis.

None of this means that Britain and America don’t have a lot to be ashamed of. There’s our part in the Transatlantic slave trade; the slave economies of the southern states and the Caribbean; and what our colonists did to the Native Americans, and to lesser-known victims of imperialism like the Aboriginal Tasmanians. Furthermore, the bloodstained record of famines, massacres and racial segregation extends well into the 20th century. 

All of that has to be reckoned with and none of it is erased by the British and American contribution to the defeat of fascism. But the idea that Anglo-America somehow stands at the root of 20th century violence is a distortion, one that ignores a history of inhumanity in which every nation and civilisation is mired.

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It also ignores the history of those who have stood up to defend human dignity — a history in which the English-speaking peoples have also played a prominent role. It is a story of progress that goes hand-in-hand with political freedom. In the World Wars and the Cold War, Britain and America didn’t just stand against the tyrants, they stood for democracy, endeavouring to introduce or restore it to liberated nations around the world.

In his essay, Pankaj Mishra downplays the importance of democracy, claiming that “social and economic well-being depends less on how political representatives are chosen and more on how adroitly the state formulates and implements policy”. And yet in acknowledging the terrible things that the Chinese government is doing right now in Xinjiang and Hong Kong, he admits that “the modern state’s biopower can enable monstrous crimes”.

Further reading

The Left's shameful silence on China

By Paul Embery

Democracy, however, disables it. As a country becomes more democratic, its government may or may not become more competent, but it will almost always become more humane. Injustices, whether of the present or the past, can be openly debated and contended with. Meanwhile, free speech, transparency, the rule of law and the verdict of the ballot box serve as impediments to tyranny. Yes, there have been times when tyrants have been freely voted into office, but, tellingly, they then dismantle the democratic system so that they can’t be voted out again. They know where their interests lie and it’s not with a powerful electorate.

Even if you think Boris Johnson and Donald Trump epitomise the decline of Anglo-America, the fact remains that both men can be voted out of office. Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, not so much.

So for all our failings, flailings and hypocrisy, there are things in our history we can be proud of. We may not be the goodies, but we’re not all bad either.