Why the “Anglosphere” Is No Alternative for the EU - by John Laughand
Pro-Europeans in France (the majority of the political class) argue that European integration is necessary to make Europe independent of the Americans, while anti-Europeans in Britain argue that it is precisely the danger of European integration that it will undermine the Atlantic alliance. This was one of Margaret Thatcher’s principal beefs with Europe and it remains a cornerstone of British Tory Euroscepticism to this day. For such people, the alliance with America is the sine qua non of British foreign policy. They believe that this is threatened by Europe. The most pronounced expression of this idea is support for the so-called “Anglosphere”, for which John O’Sullivan (a British expatriate in the United States) argued again recently in the Daily Telegraph. Far better than the current entanglement with France, Germany and other continental countries, they say, would be an alliance with like-minded English-speaking nations, the US in first place but also Australia, Canada, India and the Commonwealth. These countries are united, the argument runs, by an attachment to “individualism, the rule of law, honouring contracts and the elevation of freedom” and the implication is that these values are not shared by the corporatist, socialist, corrupt and even authoritarian political cultures prevalent on the European continent, and of which the EU is itself an expression.At a deeper level, however, the “Anglosphere” proposal illustrates the fatal intellectual flaws of British Tory Euroscepticism. In spite of all the rhetoric about national sovereignty, what most British Tory Eurosceptics are basically expressing is their dislike of Catholic countries. If Carl Schmitt was right to say that all political concepts are really secularised theological concepts, then the “Anglosphere” is nothing but old fashioned anti-Popery, with all the humbug and dishonesty which that cultural movement contains.
The argument that Britain and other English-speaking countries embody the values of liberalism is also highly tendentious. Samuel Huntingdon attacked “Caesaro-Papism” in his Clash of Civilisations, saying that division between the temporal and spiritual power was the key to Anglo-Saxon liberalism, but of course there is only one country in the world where the king is head of both the temporal and spiritual power – England – while the Pilgrim Fathers who founded America itself were fundamentalist theocrats.
1 comment:
The UK should (and always has) prioritized its foreign relations with the English-speaking countries. Nothing could be more natural than to prioritise links with those countries one has most in common with and anyone who has traveled extensively in the world knows that we have more in common with say far away New Zealand than we do with a near neighbor like Belgium. Shared language, culture, history, legal traditions etc. mean that time and again the Anglosphere countries instinctively react as One to world issues while Continental countries seem motivated by different values. The latest such example is the propaganda coup that many Continental leaders have given to the Zimbabwean dictator Mugabe by lining up recently to shake his blood-soaked hand in Lisbon.
Demographic and economic trends at work in the world add further to this logic as the English-speaking world is likely to increase in importance in the 21st century while the Continent will continue to decline. The population of all the English-speaking countries is rising strongly with the UN projecting the combined population of the "Angloshere 6" will rise another 170 million between 2000 and 2050 while that of Germany, Italy and all of Eastern Europe will decline by ~10% in the same period.
Technological trends are working in the same direction. Advances in communications technology mean that geography is of ever less importance. At the time of the American Revolution it took 6 months round trip to get a response to any message sent across the Atlantic. Now billions of inter-continental transactions occur in real-time over the Internet daily at close to zero cost.
Changes in the economic structure of society have eroded earlier benefits of being in the EU common market. In the 1970s tariffs were high, most Britons worked in manufacturing and trade was dominated by the shipment of physical goods where geographical distance shaped trade patterns. Tariffs today are low and most Britons are employed in the service sector. The EU tarrif on services is 0% and the failure of the Bokenstein directive means that there is no real common market in services. EU withdrawal would have no impact of British workers in the service sector at all and very little difference on those that remain in manufacturing or the <1% employed in farming. Indeed being outside the common market would result in a huge windfall for food consumers (i.e. everyone) who would see their supermarket checkout bills drop significantly as food prices dropped to world levels. And the 80% of the economy not exporting to the EU26 would be liberated from the very significant costs of complying with EU over-regulation.
More and more Britons are waking up the fact that the costs of EU membership have exceeded the dwindling benefits for a decade or more already. The EU project also imposes a severe cost on our democracy as more and more policy areas are transferred to Brussels and beyond the influence of our votes. The time has come to wish our Continental friends adieu.
Post a Comment