p. 227-237

The gods send thread for the web begun. —Greek saying engraved on the lintel of Andrew Carnegie’s home.

The concept of a network commonwealth linking the Anglosphere nations is distinct from previously proposed models of English-speaking cooperation. It would not seek to create a united English-speaking state. It would not be based on the concept of an “Anglo-Saxon Race,” popular during earlier areas promoting English-speaking union: on the contrary, it sees many of the diaspora networks common to the Anglosphere as threads that can serve to network these nations together. It recognizes that the English language and cultures derived from our common Anglosphere values are today borne by people of all races and origins.

It would not be based on Cecil Rhodes’s vision of a common British and American elite, or on the twentieth-century vision of the Anglo-American “special relationship.”

This was a vision of a northeastern American, white, British-descended elite within the United States and a British elite within the empire cooperating in the ruling of their respective political communities. Such dominance has faded as the leadership of the elite has faded. Previous visions were often ones of London and New York jointly ruling an Anglo-American empire. Today, New York no longer rules west of the Alleghenies nor does London rule beyond the core United Kingdom. A network commonwealth, as a network rather than a hierarchy, experiences power and influence as dispersed to many nodes throughout its fabric. New York and London remain nodes—and very influential ones. Neither city nor its historical elite can expect to rule, individually or jointly, a network commonwealth—they can only influence it.

A common political structure for the Anglosphere, however loose, could not have emerged at any earlier historical moment. Although there is a long history of conceptual frameworks for uniting all English speakers in a common political home (a reality for only sixty-nine years, from 1707 to 1776), they have all failed.

Most important, they failed not by historical happenstance, but because they were unable to resolve the principal underlying contradictions of unity. These have always been issues of dominance, representation, control, and benefit. These issues have been uppermost because previous concepts of unity were always cast in state forms, whether unitary or federal, and always carried the threat of domination by one nation and its ruling elite over others. At all times, some communities continued to see (often accurately) their best interest served by independence rather than unification.

1776: DIVERGENCE AND THE END OF THE FIRST EMPIRE

It is useful to examine previous projects for Anglosphere collaboration, their partial successes and failures, and consider why a network commonwealth approach in the current environment might be more likely to succeed today.

The British Isles were unified in a series of steps starting with the English Acts of Union with Wales, the Act of Union with Scotland, and the Act of Union with Ireland. In each case the expansion of the core English state was made by integrating the local elite and giving them representation in Parliament and the national bureaucracy, while promoting the primacy of court English over local languages and dialects. These measures were largely successful in Wales and Scotland. (The latter nation retained autonomy in important national institutions such as law, education, and the Church.) The measures were relatively unsuccessful in Ireland, due in part to the reluctance to include the majority Catholic population in the civil life of the United Kingdom and to reform the archaic land system until late in its political history. Wales and Ireland also experienced substantial inflows of English-speaking colonists. These became part of the national fabric in Wales, and the earlier, pre-Reformation waves in eastern Ireland formed a hybrid Anglo-Irish culture that eventually became the core of the current Irish republic. In fact, the small towns of eastern Ireland may be the best approximation of what England might have been like had the Reformation failed there—an English-speaking Catholic-majority culture.

The American colonies provided the first movement counter to the progressive incorporation of all English-speaking and bordering peoples into the United Kingdom. Colonists, left largely autonomous until the restored Stuarts began imposing their Continental ideologies of centralized autocracy, had created a series of self-governing representative states. In the colonial view, they owed allegiance to King-in-Parliament, being good Whigs. However, to them, “parliament” in America was split between the colonial assembly, for all but imperial matters, and the Westminster Parliament, which was seen as having authority only over the latter, issues such as imperial defense and trade. (And most colonists weren’t too happy about the trade restrictions.) All nonimperial matters were seen as having devolved to the colonial assemblies, permanently. It was in the question of the permanence of devolution that the problem lay.

Strains in questions of sovereignty and authority led to competing models of pan-Anglosphere political unity. The King’s Party in Parliament, led by Lord North, was influenced by Continental ideals of enlightened despotism and promoted a model of permanent supremacy of the central power, with autonomy only as permitted by London. English Whigs such as William Pitt the Elder and most Americans, preferred the old model, which saw colonial legislatures as permanently devolved entities. To the centralists, power had been only leased to the colonies, and could be rescinded. To the colonists, autonomy had been a permanent part of the deal, part of their incentive for undertaking the perils and hardships of colonization.

Benjamin Franklin, among other more prescient Americans, realized that neither the old model nor North’s new model would resolve the conflicting needs of imperial unity and colonial autonomy. Franklin experimented with constitutional formulas providing for an imperial parliament in London with American representation (drawing on the recent, successful model of the Scottish Act of Union), combined with substantial local autonomy. Adam Smith and many others on both sides of the Atlantic supported the concept (Smith viewing with equanimity the prospect of voting control gradually passing to the American side), but it fell upon deaf ears at the ruling levels of power. Equally unsuccessful were Crown Union models that would have preserved the King as head of state in the colonies, but removed any role for the Westminster Parliament.

With the failure of Franklin’s model, and of the subsequent attempt by George III and North to impose their model by military force, the last serious attempt to create a unified state encompassing all English-speaking people failed. The American Revolution was, in essence, a constitutional crisis leading to civil war, ultimately resolved by successful secession leading to territorial partition. The Anglosphere, which consisted at that time of the British Isles, Atlantic North America minus Quebec, and the Anglophone Caribbean, was sundered by the loss of the middle of the American side. This left Canada and the Anglo-Caribbean as isolated fragments, dependent on Britain and flooded with highly polarized Tory political refugees, the losing party of the civil war.

Both parts of the Anglosphere subsequently diverged in political, social, and economic development, each half evolving in a different direction by its respective experiences and challenges. Britain and its colonies developed in response to the Napoleonic challenge, the Industrial Revolution, and the creation of the Second Empire. The United States grew through Continental expansion and settlement, the resolution of the slavery issue (again by a constitutional crisis leading to civil war and a secession attempt, this time unsuccessful), and a more delayed entry into the Industrial Revolution. A nationalist ideology in the United States, influenced by the growing secular religion Continental European nationalism, lead to the promotion of a separate national identity (with measures such as Noah Webster’s promotion of a distinct American spelling standard) and the self-conscious creation of a distinctly American literary voice, such as Longfellow’s attempt to create an American mythic poetry in Hiawatha and Evangeline and the Acadians. Ironically, the idea that English literary models were somehow a foreign importation that needed replacing, was itself a foreign importation from alien models. These trends led to a historical narrative that interpreted the American experience as one of inevitable progression to a distinct emergent nationhood; incorporating the Turnerian myth of a unique culture forged in the crucible of the American frontier, and the political creation science myth that saw the Philadelphia Constitution as a unique creation without antecedents, rather than the Whiggish exercise in adapting British constitutionalism that it actually was.

CONVERGENCE IN POLITICS: THE DILEMMA OF THE SECOND EMPIRE

Divergence of American and British culture seemed natural and inevitable.

Indeed, had the steamship, telegraph, powered presses, and subsequent means of rapid mass communications not emerged, American and British culture could well have continued divergence to the point where American and British English would be languages as separate as are Dutch and Afrikaans today.

However, the rise of cheaper, easier, and more effective communications starting in the later nineteenth century ended the process of divergence and began a new process of convergence. By the 1880s, the transatlantic voyage was sufficiently safe and convenient enough that the wealthy elite of Britain and the United States could readily visit with each other and interact, intermarry, and find profitable business to transact with each other. After a century of hostility and divergence, Americans and Britons began rediscovering the advantages of common language, institutions, and culture. Additionally, Americans began interacting with the broader world, and Britons became aware of the rise of powerful new industrializing rivals, particularly Germany. The industrialization of the Great Lakes region, and the dependence of both America and Canada on unhindered use of the lake route for iron-ore transport rendered the idea of an Anglo- American war, and the cost of preparations to adequately defend the Lakes region, unattractive and eventually unthinkable. The Rush-Bagheot agreement on Great Lakes disarmament become the cornerstone of a de facto Anglosphere entente in which naval estimates began to be made on the implicit assumption that American and Britain would never fight.

The American and British elites became increasingly more susceptible to the attraction of a like-minded ally with whom cooperation came more easily and naturally than with more alien powers. Furthermore, social and political convergence was driven by modernization in parallel. George III was in fact the last British monarch who attempted direct governance. The reaffirmation of Parliamentary dominance, and the franchise expanding Reform Bills, combined with the expansion of the franchise in America in the Jacksonian era, meant that by the late nineteenth century, both nations had become industrial constitutional democracies. As such, they no longer represented substantially opposed philosophies of governance, particularly in contrast to other national systems. This awareness led to both the sentiment of the “special relationship,” which bore fruit in the winning alliance of World War II, and the less fruitful concepts for reunification of the Anglosphere in some form of federal empire or state.

The memory of the American secession hung as a constant shadow over the rise of the Second British Empire, particularly in regard to the colonies of settlement such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. This led to a search for federalist solutions at three levels. The creation of the Canadian and Australian federations showed its application in resolving questions of regional governance.

The search for a federal solution to the governance of the British Isles led to the Irish Home Rule proposals which dominated British domestic politics for a half century, the subsequent autonomy of Northern Ireland, and the now-unfolding autonomy of Scotland and Wales. Finally, a federalist answer was sought to the problem of governance of the empire itself.

History has shown that the British infatuation with federal states was an overgeneralization from American success. Several federations failed quickly, such as the West Indian Federation and the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. The Malaysian Federation suffered the secession of Singapore, immediately, due to ethnic politics, but has succeeded in a less multicultural version.

India and Canada seemed like successes but have been showing their strains lately; South Africa was problematic from the start, and in the end the empire chose a unitary solution there, also ultimately unsuccessful. The post-apartheid government has now chosen to experiment with a federal form, but with only weak provincial powers. Only Australia has been to date an unqualified success as a federal state.

Examining the record, it is clear that federal states are not a panacea and cannot substitute for social coherence if such a state does not emerge by reasonably organic means. Generally speaking, federations which arose primarily through internal demand in the constituent states have done better than those imposed from above.

Successful federalism is that which is voluntarily adopted by strong civic states, where it is merely the highest level of uniting a rich structure of association starting with free individuals at its base. What is less well understood is that a civic state itself is in reality a network of federations, starting with the federation of individuals into families, associations, partnerships, companies, communities, and states. The stronger the underlying consensus, the more successful will be the federation at the top level. What is disastrous is papering over genuine deep differences with federalist formulas in a manufactured state solution.

A long series of schemes for imperial confederation, whose by-product was the concept of British Commonwealth, ultimately foundered. No formula was able to offer a binding form of government for the entire empire. The formula needed to be, at the same time, representative in nature, effective in creating a governing consensus for needed economic and military actions, and yet autonomous enough to satisfy the desires of strongly developed distinct cultures for national self-determination. In particular, neither the “encapsulated” alien colonies of settlement such as Quebec and the Boer states, nor the politically subjugated but intact civilizations like the Indian states, the Malayan states, and the Arab nations bought into the narratives and justifications of empire except among relatively small classes of people with direct interest in its success. Finally, no federalist formula was able to resolve the issues of local economic interest with imperial preference—the concept of the empire as a protected common economic area.

In the long run, the inability to create a state form to resolve the quandary of a democratic empire was resolved by turning its successor, the (once-British) Commonwealth of Nations, into a nonstate form that survived due to its amorphousness. It survives as a collective description of a group of common institutions, created by the empire, which were sufficiently useful to all participants so as to be voluntarily perpetuated. It is those parts of the empire that remained when the compulsory element was entirely removed.

It is much less than some of its founders hoped it would be. Reading works like Nevil Shute’s In the Wet (1953), it is possible to glimpse the hope that the assemblage of so many disparate civilizations into a cooperative entity could survive the end of the imperial, compulsory element and evolve into something new and creative, and a significant actor on the world stage. Still, it has survived, and continues to thrive in its diminished form, so much so that nations with only the most tenuous ties to the empire are now considering joining. More interesting is the fact that the president of the Republic of Ireland has even begun to speculate publicly about rejoining in the wake of the Good Friday peace agreement, though whether that will become reality remains to be seen.

POTENTIAL ROADBLOCKS TO AN ANGLOSPHERE NETWORK COMMONWEALTH

It required the transformation of the British Empire, the denouement of the Cold War, and the end of the “American Century,” combined with the advent of a network civilization, before a project for the linking of the Anglosphere could be contemplated. Yet all these things have come to pass. The convergence of the Anglosphere is already becoming a reality in its component cultures. The nature of that convergence, and the political opportunities that it presents, are what matter now.

For the past two centuries, the United States, the United Kingdom, and the other primarily English-speaking nations could not develop stronger, more distinctive common means of cooperation than the loose ties of the Special Relationship or the Commonwealth of Nations. Despite the shared values and interests, there have been a number of fundamental obstacles to any stronger relationship. These roadblocks slowed and limited the development of the Special Relationship, and made any thought of a British-American confederation a nonstarter in the court of public opinion on both sides. Chief among these roadblocks were the following:

Ireland

Simply put, there was the refusal of a varying but never insignificant segment of the Catholic Irish population whether in Ireland itself, or in America and the Commonwealth, to accept the incorporation of Ireland integrally into the United Kingdom. There was a constant struggle to reverse that act, the consequence of which was that a large and influential sector of the American electorate was automatically hostile to any close cooperation with Britain. This opposition contributed substantially to the delayed U.S. entry into World War I, and prior to Pearl Harbor, into World War II. Additionally, the Irish grievance against the empire created an ongoing resistance both in Ireland and throughout the Commonwealth against the attempt to use the monarchy and its emotional symbols as a binding element for the Commonwealth. Australian republicanism always found support in that country’s Irish population.

The independence of Southern Ireland in 1921 alleviated this grievance to some extent, but the ongoing trauma of the unresolved conflict in Northern Ireland still represents a rallying point against any proposal for closer Anglo-American ties. For this reason, the full realization of an Anglosphere Network Commonwealth will require a permanent settlement of the Northern Ireland situation in a form acceptable to the large majority on both sides. At the same time (although this is a subject requiring substantial discussion elsewhere), the institutions of an Anglosphere Network Commonwealth may offer the external stabilizing institutions to permit a mutually acceptable solution to the Northern Ireland situation.

Racial Attitudes

Both the United States and the British Empire, even in the late nineteenth century, were substantially multiracial entities. They had also both evolved to a political philosophy of broad manhood (and eventually universal) suffrage. Yet in the American South until 1965, and throughout much of the empire, effective suffrage was not extended to nonwhite segments of the population. Any formula for political unification of the English-speaking world in those years would have had either to exclude many or all nonwhites from voting, or be effectively imperial (permitting some nations to make decisions for others). It might permit nonwhites to vote, which would have resulted in a nonwhite electoral majority if India participated. The issue of free movement of people, with the right to exercise political rights throughout the resulting political entity, was perhaps even more incompatible with then-current racial attitudes in the long run. Each of these solutions, therefore, was problematic.

Today, changing racial attitudes, along with a looser concept of cooperative ties, have removed this objection. A network commonwealth, although it assumes an inclusive representative government at the civic state level, operates on the principle of a Hanseatic-style coalition of the willing at the commonwealth level.

Thus majority rule is not an issue. In feudal times, people identified, and society divided, along lines of title and status. After the Reformation, identity and social division focused on sectarian religious identity. During the Machine Age, economic class was seen as the principal division. Toward the end of the twentieth century, an identity politics of race and ethnicity arose. Now as the Singularity approaches and the economic state is in eclipse, the rapid transformation of demographics (partly enabled by the decline of racial barriers) will bring civilizational identity to the fore. A concept of an Anglosphere network civilization has the opportunity to eclipse past racial divisions, making the racial diversity of the Anglosphere an incentive to rather than a barrier against pan-Anglosphere institutions. The diaspora networks of Indian, Hong Kong Chinese, and other immigrants throughout the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia may be unifying threads for the Anglosphere.

The Empire

The conflict between British imperial and American national interests was the underlying source of almost all high-level conflict between American and British governing elites in working out the basis for Anglo-American cooperation throughout the heyday of the Special Relationship.

Fundamentally, Britain was bound to rank protection of the empire and its interests second only to the safety of the Home Islands themselves. For America, imperial interests were suspect at best, and many times directly opposed to American interests. Full cooperation between the United States and the British Empire would have resulted in America defending British imperial interests without sharing proportionately in the benefits thereof.

Subsequently, during the era of decolonization and the Cold War, America, desiring to expand and consolidate its sphere of interest (as part of a larger strategy of consolidating an anti-Communist superpower bloc under its leadership), frequently found itself opposed to Britain’s perceived need to act in protection of residual imperial interests. The Suez fiasco was perhaps the most egregious and painful example, but the trend has persisted. (Although the Suez episode was also much aggravated by specific circumstances: had Churchill remained in government just a year longer, or had Macmillan rather than Eden been prime minister, or had someone other than Dulles been American secretary of state, the entire situation would likely have been handled much better.) The Grenada episode rankled even so pro-American a leader as Margaret Thatcher. The Falklands War caused a severe internal dispute in the American government between Cold War hegemonists and the adherents of the Special Relationship. (Although it is instructive to note which party won out in the end.) More recently, America’s lukewarm support of the Commonwealth strategy of sanctions toward apartheid South Africa caused continued strains in its relationship with members of that organization.

In discussions of the Anglosphere concept, there has been some criticism from the British right which seems to arise from lingering resentment of the Suez incident, or rather the inherent issues of a declining British ability to act independently at that time that caused Suez to arise. This experience is brought up to support the argument that the Anglosphere nations are like the Greek city-states of antiquity; although allied in culture, they often experienced divergent and even opposed national political interests. Yet what the Suez example demonstrates is the inadequacy of the Special Relationship model for Anglosphere affiliation. Nation-states often experience conflicts between short-term national needs and long-term civilizational interests. A completely informal relationship tends to result in the latter being sacrificed to the former; a federal state model tends to sacrifice the former to the latter. A network commonwealth solution is an attempt at a more balanced relationship between these two valid needs. And it is instructive to remember that the inability of the Greek city-states to create a successful political form uniting them against alien civilizations ended in their conquest by outsiders and the enslavement of their intellectual class.

Europe

Both the United States and the United Kingdom have sacrificed ties with each other, and in Britain’s case, with the Commonwealth as well, for the sake of particular interests in Europe. The past thirty years of British history have encompassed a period of political and cultural schizophrenia that has created ongoing unresolved tensions in its national life and identity.

Opposing the trend toward British participation in Europe has been the increasing convergence of Anglosphere culture, combined with Britain’s ongoing indecision over the nature of its relationship to Europe.

Since World War II, Britain has seen the emergence of common European institutions as a challenge, dilemma, and opportunity, in various admixtures.

Challenge, because the Continental states at first attained faster growth and greater prosperity through the creation of the common economic area, and also because France and Germany were seizing the leadership of Europe through their economic and political contributions to European unity.

Dilemma, because the constant temptation to join the common effort came at a high price of abandonment of overseas ties and domestic distinctness and autonomy.

Opportunity, because many of Britain’s lasting military, financial, and industrial strengths created a dream in the mind of certain Britons of their seizing leadership of a common Europe.

Europe offered a different mix of challenge and opportunity to the United States. NATO, rather than the EU, was the arena of decision, and there the United States was preoccupied from 1948 through 1992 with a single, overwhelming issue: the prospect of a massive Soviet invasion on the Central European Front. To counter this, U.S. plans had to center around the maintenance of a large armored force with appropriate air cover in Germany.

The Bundesrepublik, with its large conscript army, had to be the centerpiece of American diplomacy and strategy. As the joke put it, NATO was a device for keeping “the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down.”

Britain, in this situation, could only be a secondary interest, a partner in patrolling the North Atlantic to ensure that American convoys could cross in wartime and an unsinkable carrier for American aircraft offshore from the continent. Thus, both Britain and the United States had strong interests in Europe, and for each, the geopolitical realities demanded that Germany and, to a lesser extent France, remain the primary partners in the central instrument of cooperation.

These realities have altered substantially over the past decade without a corresponding alteration in the political strategies of either nation. Despite a widespread feeling that new solutions and arrangements are called for, neither Americans, with regard to NATO, nor Britons with regard to both the EU and NATO, have generated a positive alternative vision.

In particular, the widespread uneasiness about further European integration, especially regarding monetary union, which continues to emerge from diverse regions of the British political spectrum, suggests that an Anglosphere Network Commonwealth could be an attractive alternative direction.

I shall discuss further on the emerging debate over the Anglosphere alternative to full British immersion into the increasingly integrated European superstate. For now, it is enough to note that the search for alternatives may prove to be one of the strongest drivers for the emergence of an Anglosphere Network Commonwealth.

p. 287-289

THE ANGLOSPHERE AND THE CHALLENGE OF THE SINGULARITY

This book started out as a look at what the Internet and subsequent technologies would do to the world economy. It began as an exercise in imagining a “borderless world” and an investigation into “the end of nation-state” and similar themes. However, my research on the issue convinced me that this was not what was happening at all. Yes, there is going to be a borderless economy in the sense that obstacles to flow of capital and technology and goods will continue to diminish. But even though this process will lead to the end of the economic state, it is not going to be the end of the nation-state, because nations—in the sense of cultures and institutions—will count more than ever in this environment.

It is significant that so many of the divisive disputes in the world today are no longer battles over economic substance, but about culture and nationhood and the symbols by which those qualities are embodied. Neither Scots nor Quebecois are motivated primarily by economic considerations to advocate secession; their arguments instead hark back to what Lincoln called the “mystic cords of memory” which define nationhood. African Americans and Dixie neo-Confederates battle over display of the Confederate battle flag. Even arguments over Britain’s membership in the EMU talk more about sovereignty than theories of optimal currency areas.

The Anglo-American concept has always been what historian John Laughland calls the “civic state”—that in which statehood is based on cultural affinity, essentially voluntarily assumed ties, and a shared narrative and culture. We have that within the nations of the English-speaking world, and we have it to a large extent among the nations of the English-speaking world. The challenge now is to create the appropriate institutions to take advantage of this reality.

It is time to lay out the program for accomplishing this institutionally. The Anglosphere is where the action is going to be. We have the ability to create common institutions based on common values—common-law concepts, the rule of law, our concepts of constitutional government—which are vitally important to our happiness and success as a society. Other approaches and institutions have become increasingly inappropriate to the challenges of the twenty-first century. It is our core values and characteristics that have made us dynamic, and it is to those values that we must return.

These and other developments, along with others suggest that international institutional arrangements based on physical proximity, such as the EU, NAFTA, and ASEAN, may not be the most useful arrangements for Anglosphere nations during the coming scientific-technical revolution. Rather, a new set of arrangements, those described as the network commonwealth, would be more effective. These arrangements would concentrate on creating links between the unique strong civil-society mechanisms of the Anglosphere nations to create a common economic space, taking advantage of natural, preexisting harmonies to maximize the opportunities for reaping the fruits of the new scientific-technical revolutions.

Parliamentary democracy, rights-respecting constitutionalism, and a common-law judicial system have allowed the Anglosphere nations to weather the stresses and challenges of the Industrial Revolution better and with more freedom than the various totalitarian and authoritarian alternatives once promoted as solutions. It is most likely that these values will permit us to face and surmount the challenges of the Singularity as well. Those who succumbed to the totalitarian temptation at the beginning of the twentieth century could at least plead their ignorance in the face of uncertainty; those who succumb now can only plead stupidity.

The nineteenth century was the British Century, without a doubt. The twentieth century was the American Century. The Anglosphere nations, and their allies in all strong civil societies existing and emerging, can offer the world the benefit of their experiences and examples in the face of the challenges ahead. If the English-speaking nations grasp the opportunity, the twenty-first century will be the Anglosphere Century. This is not a prediction of conquest or domination. Rather, it is an admission that the most important phenomena of the twenty-first century will likely emerge in the Anglosphere, and their resolution will be a result of, and characterized by the nature of the Anglosphere. As the British Century brought the eradication of slavery and serfdom worldwide, and as the American Century brought the defeat of totalitarianism in all its forms, the Anglosphere Century can see the mastery of the challenges of the Singularity.