the anglosphere

The Anglosphere is a set of English-speaking nations with a similar cultural heritage, based upon populations originating from the nations of the British Isles (England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland), and which today maintain close political and military cooperation. While the nations included in different sources vary, the term anglosphere usually does not include all countries where English is an official language, although the nations that are commonly included were all once part of the British Empire. In its most restricted sense, the term covers the United Kingdom, Ireland, the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, which post-British Empire maintain a close affinity of cultural, familial and political links with one another. Additionally, all these countries (except Ireland) are militarily aligned under the following programs: UKUSA Agreement (signals intelligence), Five Eyes (intelligence), Combined Communications Electronics Board (communications electronics), The Technical Cooperation Program (technology and science), Air and Space Interoperability Council (air forces), AUSCANNZUKUS (navies), and ABCA Armies.

i) do you identify with the 'shared cultural values' of the anglosphere, are those values overstated or mostly more generic western values rather than specifically 'anglo'; is the separation of the western world into anglo and non-anglo spheres a useful way of understanding it

ii) how does this work as political entity? how much of it reflects common legal and political ancestry, these being sufficiently distinct from those of continental europe, and creating a stronger, more specific elective affinity beyond the broad alliance of western nations

iii) how does the current political alliance reflect the two centuries or so during which the united states sought to supersede rather than accomodate the uk/commonwealth; does it make sense to view the anglosphere as an elective affinity when the united states is more populous/powerful than the other core anglosphere nations combined

in some ways / different ways

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http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/6a/English_speaking.jpg

we already discussed this but i do buy the anglosphere construct on some level - shared literature, music, etc is nothing to sneeze at, not to mention early English + English immigrant impact on US (not to mention those commonwealth states).

i) do you identify with the 'shared cultural values' of the anglosphere, are those values overstated or mostly more generic western values rather than specifically 'anglo'; is the separation of the western world into anglo and non-anglo spheres a useful way of understanding it

maybe bc of maritime colonization tradition it's like generic western values (enlightenment values) + some kind of hawkish projection of self, maybe?

re your second question obv there's no formal political alliance but there is a sort of de facto one where certain countries (canada, UK, maybe aus?) can be expected to participate in US misadventures. is this more substantial than yr standard coalition of the willing? idk.

i think the other anglo states are smart to let the US take the lead.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Vq7BTLhYbA

45 Acres of a Victorian Era fantasy land will soon be developed just off I-15 in Pleasant Grove Utah. The first phase is planned to be open in 2015. Those involved are seeking to rival Disneyland in the quality of experience. Time will tell, but judging by everything so far it looks like they're on the right track!

nakh reminded me of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9c/Empire_Marketing_Board_poster.jpg

http://www.sterlingtimes.co.uk/follow_th_flag.jpg

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-a5GnCMkr5n4/U7bPP86wYJI/AAAAAAAAKgM/nCjjbGPIYrY/s1600/empire-marketing-board-4.jpg

lol sure looks like an uncomplicated and mutually beneficial relationship

http://www.mapsofindia.com/history/british-empire-map.jpg

Denmark never part of British empire tho

What I'm far more interested in is the places where the Anglophone world and the Anglosphere don't intersect, and why.

Countries that are former parts of the Empire, countries where English is the official language (or at least one of a small group of official languages), and yet are not considered part of this 'Anglosphere'. Why Canada gets included, but South Africa doesn't. Why Australia is part of it, but India isn't. New Zealand, but not Nigeria. Is this a political decision or a racial decision? And on which side (and in whose benefit) this was decided?

It seems almost as if the quality of 'having exterminated all or the majority of the indigenous peoples living there' is one of the major prerequisites for joining this 'anglosphere'. The difference between genocide and colonial domination makes for some considerable discomfort in assigning to one group or the other.

that's a v good point altho we could flip it a little, depending on perspective - for example India has managed to maintain enough non-Anglo cultures to keep itself outside of the Anglosphere proper and i'm sure many Indians are pretty delighted that this is the case

Yeah, I thought that that flip was kind of inherent in the way I phrased the question - that 'avoiding genocide and therefore keeping both their own indigenous people and cultures' is something which benefits the citizens of India. Sorry if that came out clumsily. That 'being part of the anglosphere' is not an automatic and unassailable good. Especially not considering what it's dependent on.

Only about one in five Indians speaks English, it's closer to a third in SA and half in Nigeria, but the countries that stand out the most clearly as excluded are probably those of the Caribbean where English is the primary language of 90+% of people. No 'indigenous' culture, to speak of, but imported cultures that have both merged with the wider Anglophone world and actively resisted that merger.

That's a very good point, and I was going to look up English speaking Caribbean countries (Jamaica? Bermuda? My ignorance is a problem here.) to establish how race is a factor (in addition to extermination of indigenous peoples) in assigning an 'anglosphere'.

Majority whiteness does seem to be key.

The politically dominant group in South Africa, for the majority of its existence as a republic, were Afrikaners, a group not very interested in being part of any Anglosphere.

But, the omission of the Caribbean nations is glaring.

English-speaking nations with a similar cultural heritage, based upon populations originating from the nations of the British Isles (England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland)

suppose i shd've read this properly. so in short, white people.

i get tired and sad just thinking about national affiliation tbh

Yeah India has a lot of languages and no real national language - English isn't even the lingua franca in several states. But 'Anglosphere' basically means 'white people + English + money'.

Ireland feels like the odd one out here for a whole host of reasons.

I have a family which is full of White British People who have a deep investment in repeatedly asserting "The situation in South Africa? It was the Afrikaners. All of it; the Afrikaners. No White British People in South Africa benefited from the situation at all, in any way, shape or form." I kinda mistrust that statement, and always view it for the bullshit it is.

White South Africans are the consensus bogeymen who allow everyone else to shrug off and ignore their own post-imperial hangups though.

apartheid has done a good job at overshadowing shit like the partition riots

They certainly functioned as a way for White Americans to shrug off their own ~issues~ surrounding the economic apartheid applied to Black Americans.

The interesting thing for me is to what extent the Anglosphere as a historical cultural idea has been overtaken by a broader, less racially-specific, idea of an 'English speaking world' dominated by a combination of pop-cultural, educational and capitalist elements. If you are one of the top 5% of Indians who speak English fluently, get your degree or PhD in Aus / UK / US and go on to work for a company where English is the medium of internal and external communication you belong to something that is arguably both part of the Anglosphere but not 'the Anglosphere'.

Sorry, this took forever to write and has now x-posted with ShariVari's very interesting question.

BUT! I kinda want to go back to Ireland, and why its positioning in this group is weird?

I mean, I obviously have my own agenda on this question, but "anglosphere" is interesting in including Ireland, Scotland and Wales - nations which were originally neither Anglo nor Anglophone. There's a long tradition which holds that the "Anglos" (the English) conquered and colonised the other nations of this island before turning to the rest of the world. I can't count the number of times I've heard "whatever the English were going to do to the rest of the world, they practised on The Scots first" (with variants replacing "The Irish" or "The Welsh" or even "The Cornish") depending on who is speaking, and which outrage of history the English committed.

The whole concept of "Britain" as a nation rather than an island was an invented idea - "Britishness" was invented to bring The Celts under the notion of "Whiteness". The original notion of Whiteness - of The Volk or whatever - the 'dolicho-blond' - the ~Nordic Race~ of which Anglo-Saxons supposedly sprang - was not a group that included The Celts, justifying English invasion and domination of the Western corners of the islands. I have seen, in various old (18th and 19th C) books which discussed the Brythonic and Gaelic languages, maps of the British Isles with shaded gradation of "negricity" or "negrotude" (I cannot remember the exact word, I will have to go and look it up, but it had a negr- root - it was a highly racialised word) which grew darker in the Western tips of Cornwall, Wales, the Western Isles of Scotland, and Ireland beyond the Pale. The choice of words and shading was quite deliberate; Celtic-language-speaking barbarians were excluded from the anglophone world, and from Whiteness, in the minds of the writers of these books, these architects of racial identity in the minds of Europeans.

The construction of "Britishness" was a way of conceptually extending Whiteness to Celts, but it also functioned to erase a pattern of racial/language domination that started within Britain, but was extended beyond it.

The irony being, of course, that The Empire was hugely staffed with people displaced from the Celtic Rim by English domination - huge chunks of the British Empire were populated with the newly White, newly 'British' people displaced by The Clearances, the Potato Famine, etc. etc.

But it also had the weird function of... defining "Britishness" as a culture and a language and the Rules of Cricket... and a skin colour, rather than a specific *race* (in the way that Victorian Racialists understood race). That played a massive part in the creation of political Blackness, as opposition to this manufactured concept of Whiteness. Which justified genocide, empire, slavery, colonialism, everything else. The English invented a pattern to create 'The British'; 'The British' extended that pattern to the rest of the world.

Sorry, my thoughts are jumbled, and I am certain that I am expressing myself terribly here. I apologise in advance for the ways in which I am wrong, This could do with a great deal of defining and debate and dissection. Which it has not had as it's been percolating inside my head.

Now I have to go and do the shopping and not get caught up in any more arguments on ILX this afternoon!

ShariVari, your question brings up the other half of the issues raised by this weird creation of "Britishness".

This was kind of a loophole, created almost by accident. In this act of creating 'Britishness' by uniting the varying nations of The English and 'The Celts', and defining this new identity not by race (as 18th Century people understood it), but by this idea of this 'shared culture' and 'shared heritage' and centred around being Anglophone - they did not just create Whiteness (though that was certainly the major thing they created).

They also created this loophole whereby people who acquired those cultural markers - who learned the English language and learned Shakespeare and the Rules of Cricket - people who became not just Anglophone, but *culturally* Anglosphere - but are not White by any racial or skin-colour definition. How does one race these people?

I mean, it does make for hilarious transatlantic miscommunications, on ILX and elsewhere - e.g. Matt DC (sorry, Matt, I'm not picking on you, honest, this example is just fresh in my mind) is one of the most ~Britishes~ men I have had the pleasure of meeting. But when an American calls him "Culturally White", well, no he's not. He is Culturally *British*. 'Britishness' was *invented* with Whiteness and the very creation of Whiteness at its core. But Britishness and Whiteness are not synonymous, not in individuals, and not even in countries and cultures. And that creates these gaps and these non-intersections that we're talking about. And the place where American conceptions of race really fall down when trying to describe current European racial realities.

*cough* Protestantism *cough*

Yes! Protestantism (as opposed to Catholocism) is a big part of it!

But only specific kinds of state-sanctioned Protestantism. e.g. Methodism versus C of E breaks down along similar faultlines.

If you are one of the top 5% of Indians who speak English fluently, get your degree or PhD in Aus / UK / US and go on to work for a company where English is the medium of internal and external communication you belong to something that is arguably both part of the Anglosphere but not 'the Anglosphere'.

FYI I suspect that as India grows in economic power as will surely happen over the next 50 years or so it, or at least its big cities, will find themselves semi-included in the Anglosphere in the way that, say, Hong Kong and Singapore are now. Big commercial centres in which English is the main business language are another determinant.

Having travelled (not all that extensively) in India I can say that English does appear to be the de facto lingua franca - Indians holidaying in regions with a different first language to theirs seem to invariably converse with the locals in English, for example.

that's a v good point altho we could flip it a little, depending on perspective - for example India has managed to maintain enough non-Anglo cultures to keep itself outside of the Anglosphere proper and i'm sure many Indians are pretty delighted that this is the case

― The Falun Gong Show (Noodle Vague), Friday, 31 October 2014 11:38 (2 hours ago)

this is all separate to the initial questions here which centre around the uk and its successor/project nations and how 'shared values' and history relates to the particular formal political/strategic alliances and resource sharing agreements ratified by the five signatories to UKUSA

then the questions of how that relates to the numinous 'shared values' expounded by......

The American businessman James C. Bennett, a proponent of the idea that there is something special about the cultural and legal traditions of English-speaking nations

British historian Andrew Roberts claims that the Anglosphere has been central in the First World War, Second World War and Cold War. He goes on to contend that anglophone unity is necessary for the defeat of Islamism.[7]

According to a 2003 profile in The Guardian, historian Robert Conquest favoured a British withdrawal from the European Union in favour of creating "a much looser association of English-speaking nations, known as the 'Anglosphere'".[8]

the original wikipedia quote here is incoherent because 'in its most restricted sense' ireland cannot be a full part of the core anglosphere when it is not privy to those formal alliances

nor is it culturally a successor state / project nation

I don't know what these 'shared values' are because the US and the UK can't even agree on tipping, let alone anything else.

But when I look at this list of "Anglophone countries who are in the Anglosphere" vs "Anglophone countries who are not" it's really hard to see any corresponding thread except Whiteness.

xps

But only specific kinds of state-sanctioned Protestantism. e.g. Methodism versus C of E breaks down along similar faultlines.

Which fault-lines do you mean here Branwell? The celtic-language ones? I think I get you if so – but i'd push it further and map those splits inside Methodism – imo it sits comfortably with 'Britishness' in the Northern/Midland towns, but is a worse fit in its Welsh (and – I am really ignorant on this – Cornish?) versions.

(I'd say dissenting and nonconformist sects in general were much more easily accommodated to the c18th idea of Britishness than any kind of Catholicism (outside *possibly* the aristo/gentry recusants). Multiple reasons for this accommodation – the hard edge of radical dissent leaving for America, the financial success of eg Quakers, the flexibility of the CoE allowing fuzzy lines between inside and outside (& Methodism was one of those fuzzy lines till the death of Wesley at least), massive cultural input from Dissenters, eg Defoe).

to provide some answers to the initial terms

i) those anglosphere proponents are all singularly dreadul, sentimentally retrogade people who misunderstand realpolitik and how the usa uses the 'special relationship' and its bargaining power with the other ukusa signatories

ii) the obama administration's reorientation of american power to the pacific rim, the renewed emphasis on relations with germany and to a lesser extent france, the lessened need for ukusa to support war coalitions, australia's reorientation towards china etc....these and various other factors render the traditional ukusa alliances less important

iii) india, nigeria and other increasingly powerul former anglo-colonial nations see themselves more in terms of local/economic kinship (such as brics) rather than in terms of belonging to the engish speaking world; they might share certain institutional legacies with the anglo project nations but their alliances with them are realpolitik rather than sentimental

iv) the 'anglosphere' exists mostly as a delusory identification of the right in the uk who believe it represents an alternative value system to that of continental europe (even though broadly liberal or neoliberal ideas retain prominence in much of the eu) and who believe the 'special relationship' describes anything other than fealty

i was a Midlands Methodist for a part of my early teens, it didn't feel counter-establishment in the ways i understand it to have expressed itself in the Celtic fringe

tribal influxes into these islands over the 2000 years or so before the Norman Conquest are pretty muddly and don't code on racial lines as far as i understand it, maybe better to think of linguistic/cultural communities?

point iv sums the reality of this thing up quite neatly

the broader acceptance of neoliberal ideas across the entire west show the 'shared values' claims to be essentially rosy eyed and superficial

weber was quite dismissive of claims that the particular development of the westminister system and the common law rendered the english speaking nations conceptually distinct from continental europe in any essential way once capitalism had developed

I think a lot of Brits would like to see themselves as part of a nation conceptually closer to the Nordic countries than the modern US, despite the broadly separate path to developing systems of government and law.

i only ever see this term used by rightists and as shorthand for unbridled capital and imperial nostalgia, yeah.

Sorry, should have been more specific about "Methodism" but I was typing on an iPhone while avoiding the shops.

Methodism specifically as an expression of Cornish and Welsh identity. Linked to notions of national/cultural/linguistic identity. Methodism as seen as a specifically Welsh/Cornish rejection of the Church of England. (The Church of England had been hated in Cornwall since the 16th Century Prayer Book Rebellion - seen as the imposition of a foreign *language* (English as opposed to Cornish) through a foreign religion. It was seen - quite rightly - as an attack on the Cornish language, Cornish culture and the Cornish people by an assertion of English control and English dominance. Though that specific rebellion - and the crushing of the Cornish language that followed - was the culmination of at least a century of Cornish rebellions.)

Interested in ways of thinking about Methodism (not just in Brythonic areas) but as Dissenters, in terms of rejecting English centralisation and the dominance of London and a ruling class. (This doesn't only have to happen on a right-wing basis. Or is there an analogue between the right wing rejecting "Europe" and the parts of Britain that reject "London"?)

The muddy 2000 years of pre-history don't code on 'racial' lines because obviously Race as we're talking about is something that was invented later (it was invented during the Colonial period) - so even the people fighting in the Prayerbook Rebellion wouldn't have thought of themselves as "The Celtic Race" but they would have thought of themselves as a nation distinct from The English. But it's kind of a chequered history of who, exactly the "English" that they were fighting *were*. They're called English (or rather, Saxons/Sassenachs/Sowsneks) but the Anglo-Saxons drew a border and stayed on the other side of it. It took the Anglo-Normans, in the course of installing Feudalism, to expand the borders of their kingdoms over the rest of the island and invent Englishness as we know it. That really, there is no such thing as "Englishness" except in opposition to the other peoples of the isle, with their strong identifications of "Not That Lot". Or maybe the other way around, the "Celtic" identities were formed in opposition to 'English' invasions and 'English' imperialism on land that formerly belonged to Picts and Cumbrians and Cymru and Kernewek and whoever...)

I had a point, but I've lost it. Sorry.

I guess it's not that "but this conception of race isn't real, it's a fantasy" is not an adequate dismissal. These fantasies were invented by someone, and to serve a specific purpose. Dismissing them as fantasies or pure conceptions is a way of obscuring the purposes that they serve.

sorry i wasn't intending to dismiss, i did start to have some thoughts about Celticness that you've articulated there, the idea of it as a response to English nationalism, in part. because obviously "Englishness" as a coherent "us and them" identity comes along pretty late, and most of the mixing of peoples across the islands has happened long before then, including but not limited to groups variously identified as Celtic, Belgic, various Anglo-Saxons, Danes and assorted "Vikings"...

i don't know exactly where this leads me either except that most of the island's identities feel like deliberate political choices made at some point a good way after general patterns of settlement - inasmuch as people stayed relatively still - were laid down?

I think a lot of Brits would like to see themselves as part of a nation conceptually closer to the Nordic countries

― Wristy Hurlington (ShariVari), Friday, 31 October 2014 15:57 (6 minutes ago)

this is evident in the amount that those people seem to know about the nordic countries beyond similarly rosy-eyed fictions that don't acknowledge eugenics, oppression of local minorities, marginalization of immigrant minorities and so forth

the nordic countries and the netherlands are significant here as countries where the english language is understood by virtually all educated people and whose commercial classes, cultural practitioners, academia etc are significanty oriented to the uk, even if this is less often acknowledgef in the uk

in thinking about it the purpose of this particular bit of right-wing imagined community is to differentiate it from other conservatisms: not catholic, not royalist, not 'national,' not fascist, not sentimental (but kind of being all those things thru the back door).

"we're just calm rational efficient managers, you know, not like those other people who want to stride the earth for crazy reasons! you could only object to our rule out of superstition, resentment or laziness"

the broad left seems like the 'far enemy' to this idea

there is something to be said for the united states pursuing 'the anglosphere' as one of many supranational communities through which to pursue its interests largely at the expense of the other countries within them

the uk right is incapable of seeing beyond ancient blood kinship and common language as the foundation for supranational affiliation

'the anglosphere' represents the affixing of the vestigial imperial project to the settler project and manifest destiny, the means by which the uk pursues the delusion of empire long past the historical juncture which rendered it a secondary power

the uk's interests are conflated with that of the united states, the historical trauma of having been superseded by the next superpower is elided; the crushing war debts, the final clipping of its wings at suez

the azores summit immediately preceding the second iraq war is illustrative -- three former colonial powers offered symbolic fealty to the united states, even as rumsfeld made clear that it could win the war by itself and that the uk was merely lending its second rate military hardware for decorative purposes

what did scooter libby say at one point, "the brits are a high maintenance ally" or some such?

there was some anxious murmuring on the british right when obama was elected, since his published views on the uk extended to describing his grandfather's experiences as a menial for a british officer during the second world war and then a detainee during the mau mau rebellion during which thousands of people were tortured, castrated, executed and so forth

that period of late colonial pretention encompassing the particularly unpleasant malayan emergency and various minor skirmishes is very seldom mentioned by the empire queens but it provided an initial template for the vietnam counterinsurgency

harold wilson's terribly apologetic unwillingness for not joining in that folly being one of the few unalloyed british foreign policy successes of the postwar era, again seldom mentioned by the liberal internationalists who reflexively support american follies of this century

Those Kenyans that fought against Hitler without any wage other than sustenance and then got put into British gulags that were easily as murderous as Stalin's Kolyma camp, for having the temerity to expect a life in their own land. They can stick this fucking "freedom" up their arseholes.

As I've said in other contexts, one should never mistake being an anglophone for being an anglophile.

surprisingly good new statesman article about this

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/02/rise-anglosphere-how-right-dreamed-new-conservative-world-order

is there a good precis of what harper has been doing in canada

for some reason new zealand feels like a bit of a stretch compared to the other 4

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nations_of_Nineteen_Eighty-Four#Oceania

Though not well known in the Anglosphere, Ms Konstantopoulou is being touted among some Syriza members and MPs as a potential figurehead for opposition to the coming deal.

this is a v good thread and i’m bringing nothing to it other than

The Anglosphere does indeed exist... 🧻 https://t.co/8TKLN6YXdU

— Faisal Islam (@faisalislam) March 8, 2020

love to see irish broken down (insert eu troika joke)

ive a feeling we've been lumped in there

Sorry guys, but…

It appears history is to blame

History is a nightmare from which I am trying to buy cake