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rfmcdonaldLet's see if I've got this format right:
Today the 24th of February, the The Globe and Mail published John Ibbotson's article "Canada, be warned: A new alliance is taking shape". Let's take a look at it:
So far, so good.
And this is where things begin to get difficult.
The Anglosphere, for those of you who are unfamiliar with the concept, is a concept invented by the journalist James C. Bennett. In brief, he argues that:
Now, does a community of English-speaking countries exist? Yes, certainly: The past four centuries of migration, from Britain to its various colonies of settlement, and more recently between those colonies of settlement, from those colonies to Britain, and from sundry former British possessions to elsewhere within the English-speaking world, has confirmed this. (Oh, and English is the dominant language in all of these countries.)
The idea of a language-based community, however, is not particularly unique. Look, for example, at la francophonie. Look at the emerging community of Portuguese-speaking countries. Look at la Hispanidad. For that matter, look at the prior concept of Anglo-Saxonism, which as Bennett observes "relied on underlying assumptions of an Anglo-Saxon race, and sought to unite racial "cousins." It saw the British Empire and the United States (and sometimes also the Germans) as the building blocks of the Anglo-Saxon club, which in most proposed versions was some species of framework for mediating conflicts of interest between the building blocks. In short, it was a formula by which London and New York might jointly manage their chunks of the world without conflict." (Christopher Hitchens, incidentally, does a wonderful job dissecting this Anglo-Saxonism and the "special relationship" in his Blood, Class, & Nostalgia.)
This concept is, to put it mildly, problematic. There's no particular reason to assume, however, that language and shared past history should be a decisive factor in political arrangements.
Interestingly, in the last paragraph Bennett introduces a threefold division of the Anglosphere, after Wallerstein: The United States and Britain lie at the core; Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and South Africa (erstwhile British dependencies or colonies of settlement) form a semiperiphery; and, Britain's non-white colonies in the tropical and subtropical worlds form the periphery. Sounds like things aren't arranged very differently from Anglo-Saxonism. I wonder what people in the semiperiphery or the periphery think about this.
More precisely, they're asking themselves just how they'll influence the European Union once they gain membership.
This would be nice if it was true.
As I've observed recently, and as Scott MacMillan has confirmed, central and eastern European populations are no more likely to support the United States than their western European counterparts. In Estonia, for instance,
Estonia is hardly exceptional. The rather undemocratic neglect by central and eastern European public opinion can be explained by the need to gain American support for NATO membership. As reported in the Baltic Times in the case of Latvia,
In short, as Charlie Stross simply says, "Rumsfeld's "New Europe" boils down to a bunch of opportunist politicians hoping to land some foreign aid packages, plus Tony Blair. Go figure."
She would, wouldn't she? Granted that Laar is probably right; the European Union does need reform, and admitting a dozen European states with a combined population of more than 100 million people but GDP per capitas well below the EU average is a good way to force this.
Where to begin?
For starters, by this point Thatcher is cracked. Massively unpopular, if she advocated that the Tories adopt a particular stance they'd be as likely to avoid it as to adopt it.
To continue, there's no particular reason to believe that the costs of withdrawing from the European Union would be equivalent to the gains. Perhaps a prosperous trillion-euro economy like the United Kingdom's would be able to negotiate some kind of favourable arrangement with the European Union, but would much smaller states in central and eastern Europe have the bargaining weight needed to exact similar deals? As Sam Vaknim observed, central and eastern European states don't have any realistic future outside of the European Union:
There is a Central European Free Trade Agreement, but even a Central European Union wouldn't come close to fulfilling central European needs: For the time being, central Europe will be a semiperiphery, and relative autarky from its core will not do anything good for central Europeans.
This is an accurate summation of British politics.
Oy gevalt. As I've pointed out above, there's no particular reason to assume that Italy, or Spain, or Poland, are any more Ameriphile in the long run than France or Germany.
And ambiguity is good in tense situations. Shouldn't we put off choosing which side to choose (if sides there will be, not reconciliation)?
In the 20th century, the English-speaking nations were able to take a leading role in "confronting and defeating illiberal threats" because of their wonderful geographic location, insulating them from all but long-range attacks on their homelands.
If the United Kingdom's eastern frontier in 1940 was not the North Sea but the Rhine, German panzers would have seized London just as they did Paris, Brussels, and Amsterdam in the west, Prague, Warsaw, and Vilnius in the east. (And if the United Kingdom's eastern frontier in 1914 was the Rhine, then East Anglia would have been torn up by vicious trench warfare.) As it so happened, the United Kingdom and Ireland were separated in both world wars from continental Europe by the sea, and the Royal Navy was more than sufficient to protect the British Isles from threat of foreign invasion: As has been proved too many times on soc.history.what-if, the Nazis' plan Operation Sealion would never have worked, not without deus ex machinae like asteroid impacts in London and the Midlands or a Nazi-American alliance.
As for the other countries of the Anglosphere, perhaps the Japanese could have threatened Australia and New Zealand without foreign (American, or British) intervention on the Australasians' behalf, but would this be at all likely? Canada and the United States, for their part, share the peculiar benefits of being practically immune from foreign threats: The last fighting that they saw, apart from the Civil War, was the War of 1812, when they invaded each other (Canada as a collection of British colonial territories, granted).
Now, no one's insulated from the threat of terrorism, simply because terrorists act outside of the framework of regular military forces and defenses. The Nazis could never have bombed New York City, but al-Qaeda was able to destroy that city's tallest skyscrapers at immense human cost. The rules of the game have changed since the mid-20th century, I fear, and worse may be yet to come. The question of how to confront terrorism needs to be asked; unfortunately, no one's posed any useful answers.
Could. The transatlantic alliance is in a fragile phase right now, and absent a clear threat both Europeans and Americans can agree on it could well fall apart. (I'm excluding Canadians as a marginal factor.)
Is there any reason to believe that an American invasion will, in fact, fight terror?
Now, granted that almost by definition the destruction of Saddam Hussein's regime will advance democracy since there's nowhere for Iraq to go in terms of civil and political liberties but up, there's no particular reason to think that an invasion of Iraq will advance democracy.
The sad thing about the transatlantic crisis over Iraq is that a passably good case could have been made for invading Iraq, on the grounds that the Ba'athist regime in Iraq treats its citizens intolerably poorly and that the outside world has an obligation to prevent further abuses. Earlier in the 1990s, after all, the West did agree on the validity of humanitarian intervention in the former Yugoslavia, to protect citizens from oppressive governments and senseless war. If Bush and Blair had used those arguments, then perhaps public opinion worldwide would be different. Alas, though, we'll never know, because those arguments weren't used, relying instead on spurious links between al-Qaeda and Iraq. (At least the RAF and East Germany were both Marxists, so that there was some ground for collaboration. But Ba'athism and radical Islam?)
1. Old Europe doesn't exist, save as a pejorative expression for the Franco-German alliance.
2. If the Franco-German alliance (and Europe generally) is irrelevant, why are American government officials and pro-invasion pundits so concerned with winning Franco-German support?
</lj-cu
Today the 24th of February, the The Globe and Mail published John Ibbotson's article "Canada, be warned: A new alliance is taking shape". Let's take a look at it:
In the next week, we will learn whether weapons inspector Hans Blix's increasing impatience with Iraq will convince members of the UN Security Council to support a new resolution authorizing force against Saddam Hussein.
So far, so good.
But regardless of the final outcome, this crisis is reshaping the Western alliance. Long-standing friendships are being shaken, and new ones forged, even as a new word emerges from the diplomatic ferment: the Anglosphere.
And this is where things begin to get difficult.
The Anglosphere, for those of you who are unfamiliar with the concept, is a concept invented by the journalist James C. Bennett. In brief, he argues that:
Over the past several years, a new term, Anglosphere, has crept into political and social discussion in the English-speaking world. This term, which can be defined briefly as the set of English-speaking, Common Law nations, implies far more than merely the sum of all persons who employ English as a first or second language. To be part of the Anglosphere requires adherence to the fundamental customs and values that form the core of English-speaking cultures. These include individualism, rule of law, honoring contracts and covenants, and the elevation of freedom to the first rank of political and cultural values.
Nations comprising the Anglosphere share a common historical narrative in which the Magna Carta, the English and American Bills of Rights, and such Common Law principles as trial by jury, presumption of innocence, "a man's home is his castle", and "a man's word is his bond" are taken for granted. Thus persons or communities who happen to communicate or do business in English are not necessarily part of the Anglosphere, unless their cultural values have also been shaped by those values of the historical English-speaking civilization.
The Anglosphere, as a network civilization without a corresponding political form, has necessarily imprecise boundaries. Geographically, the densest nodes of the Anglosphere are found in the United States and the United Kingdom, while Anglophone regions of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and South Africa are powerful and populous outliers. The educated English-speaking populations of the Caribbean, Oceania, Africa and India constitute the Anglosphere's frontiers.
Now, does a community of English-speaking countries exist? Yes, certainly: The past four centuries of migration, from Britain to its various colonies of settlement, and more recently between those colonies of settlement, from those colonies to Britain, and from sundry former British possessions to elsewhere within the English-speaking world, has confirmed this. (Oh, and English is the dominant language in all of these countries.)
The idea of a language-based community, however, is not particularly unique. Look, for example, at la francophonie. Look at the emerging community of Portuguese-speaking countries. Look at la Hispanidad. For that matter, look at the prior concept of Anglo-Saxonism, which as Bennett observes "relied on underlying assumptions of an Anglo-Saxon race, and sought to unite racial "cousins." It saw the British Empire and the United States (and sometimes also the Germans) as the building blocks of the Anglo-Saxon club, which in most proposed versions was some species of framework for mediating conflicts of interest between the building blocks. In short, it was a formula by which London and New York might jointly manage their chunks of the world without conflict." (Christopher Hitchens, incidentally, does a wonderful job dissecting this Anglo-Saxonism and the "special relationship" in his Blood, Class, & Nostalgia.)
This concept is, to put it mildly, problematic. There's no particular reason to assume, however, that language and shared past history should be a decisive factor in political arrangements.
- Language is hardly the only factor involved in culture: Geography and the natural environment are at least as important, never mind other factors like religion, political ideologies, or recent history. Do Scots have more in common with Norwegians (despite the language barrier) or with English (despite the growth of a distinct Scottish identity?) Can New Zealand really be understood without reference to its Polynesian context?
- History, too, isn't a single narrative. It is quite possible for interpretations of history to change. For instance, it wasn't at all impossible that American support for British decolonization after the Second World War and opposition to the Suez intervention in 1956 could have created a British Gaullism.
Interestingly, in the last paragraph Bennett introduces a threefold division of the Anglosphere, after Wallerstein: The United States and Britain lie at the core; Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and South Africa (erstwhile British dependencies or colonies of settlement) form a semiperiphery; and, Britain's non-white colonies in the tropical and subtropical worlds form the periphery. Sounds like things aren't arranged very differently from Anglo-Saxonism. I wonder what people in the semiperiphery or the periphery think about this.
French President Jacques Chirac's furious assault last week on the Eastern European governments who are supporting the United States revealed the depth of the rift. French bitterness is so intense that commentators in the former Warsaw Pact countries are starting to ask themselves just what kind of club they'll be joining when they enter the European Union next year.
More precisely, they're asking themselves just how they'll influence the European Union once they gain membership.
As Estonia's former prime minister Mart Laar wrote in the European edition of The Wall Street Journal on Thursday, Eastern Europeans have only recently won back their freedom, and appreciate it all the more keenly. "They are more receptive to 'moral arguments' on Iraq and a host of other issues and less understanding of 'European Realpolitik.' "
This would be nice if it was true.
As I've observed recently, and as Scott MacMillan has confirmed, central and eastern European populations are no more likely to support the United States than their western European counterparts. In Estonia, for instance,
[c]ritics say leaders from the Baltic governments are kowtowing to the superpower United States. "The public reaction was so negative, it amazed me," said Peep Mardiste, who heads Estonia's Green Movement. "People were angered about the secrecy around the letter. No one was consulted beforehand and no one explained it."
That unease extended into mainstream media. Monday's Aripaev, Estonia's normally pro-government business newspaper, rebuked leaders for becoming entangled in "a dangerous and irresponsible game," arguing that Estonia's pro-U.S. stance could make it a terrorist target.
The official backing for Washington's Iraq policy appeared to confirm divisions between what U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called the "old Europe"-meaning France and Germany-and ex-communist states. But recent polls in the allegedly "new Europe" Baltic states suggest far more public affinity for the French and German anti-war views, with over two-thirds of Baltic residents saying they opposed military action in Iraq. Prominent Estonian writer Jaan Kaplinksi has also launched a nationwide petition expressing "astonishment" that the government signed the ten-nation letter, saying the statement would reflect the majority Estonian opinion.
Estonia is hardly exceptional. The rather undemocratic neglect by central and eastern European public opinion can be explained by the need to gain American support for NATO membership. As reported in the Baltic Times in the case of Latvia,
Latvian President Vaira Vike-Freiberga won rave reviews for forthrightly supporting the United States stance on Iraq while she was in Washington this week, at least according to a report today in the conservative Washington Times.After meeting with President George Bush on Monday, the Latvian president later appeared on CNN and Fox television to discuss her backing for the American position. According to the Washington Times, the Latvian embassy was inundated with e-mails heralding Vike-Freiberga and contrasting her to French President Jacques Chirac, who strongly opposes military action in Iraq. The newspaper quoted Joe Armstrong of Scituate, Massachusetts, as saying he had been planning a trip to France, but will go to Latvia instead to "experience the spirit of your brave, strong people in a land recently freed from despotism."
In short, as Charlie Stross simply says, "Rumsfeld's "New Europe" boils down to a bunch of opportunist politicians hoping to land some foreign aid packages, plus Tony Blair. Go figure."
Mr. Laar thinks the entry of the new Europeans into the EU will invigorate the union, making it "more dynamic, decisive, competitive, open and future-oriented." Margaret Thatcher disagrees.
She would, wouldn't she? Granted that Laar is probably right; the European Union does need reform, and admitting a dozen European states with a combined population of more than 100 million people but GDP per capitas well below the EU average is a good way to force this.
The former British prime minister argued in her 2002 book Statecraft that the Eastern European nations risk having their new democracies hijacked by the turgid bureaucracy of Brussels. She urged Britain to withdraw from the EU and join with Eastern Europe in negotiating a free-trade agreement with the union that would leave them otherwise outside Brussels' enervating grip.
Where to begin?
For starters, by this point Thatcher is cracked. Massively unpopular, if she advocated that the Tories adopt a particular stance they'd be as likely to avoid it as to adopt it.
To continue, there's no particular reason to believe that the costs of withdrawing from the European Union would be equivalent to the gains. Perhaps a prosperous trillion-euro economy like the United Kingdom's would be able to negotiate some kind of favourable arrangement with the European Union, but would much smaller states in central and eastern Europe have the bargaining weight needed to exact similar deals? As Sam Vaknim observed, central and eastern European states don't have any realistic future outside of the European Union:
The countries of central and eastern Europe might admire the United States and its superpower clout -- but, far more vitally, they depend on Europe, economically as well as politically.
Even put together, these polities are inconsequential. They are presuming to assume the role of intermediaries between a disenchanted Franco-German entente cordiale and a glowering America. Nor can they serve as "U.S. Ambassadors" in the European corridors of power.
The EU absorbs two-thirds of their exports and three-quarters of their immigrants. Europe accounts for nine-tenths of foreign direct investment in the region and four-fifths of aid. For the likes of the Czech Republic and Croatia to support the United States against Germany is nothing short of economic suicide.
There is a Central European Free Trade Agreement, but even a Central European Union wouldn't come close to fulfilling central European needs: For the time being, central Europe will be a semiperiphery, and relative autarky from its core will not do anything good for central Europeans.
Tony Blair can empathize. A dedicated Eurocentrist, Mr. Blair has spent much of his prime ministership attempting to more closely integrate Great Britain into Europe. But, since Sept. 11, he has also strongly supported the United States. His reward has been to earn the enmity of the French and Germans and many within his own party.
Indeed, Labour might be en route to a Conservative-style split between Euroskeptics and continentalists, a development that could trigger a realignment in British politics.
This is an accurate summation of British politics.
The United States is unlikely to stand aloof as the Europeans squabble among themselves over Iraq. Their struggle is damaging NATO, and has contributed to Germany's and, to a lesser extent, France's estrangement from the U.S. In response, the Americans are likely to support and encourage their new Eastern European allies (and strengthen their ties with Italy and Spain), while distancing themselves from France, Germany and the Benelux countries.
Oy gevalt. As I've pointed out above, there's no particular reason to assume that Italy, or Spain, or Poland, are any more Ameriphile in the long run than France or Germany.
Which leaves Canada in a pickle. On the one hand, our excruciatingly ambiguous stand on Iraq could come in handy, allowing us to mediate a lessening of tensions among our fellow NATO allies.
And ambiguity is good in tense situations. Shouldn't we put off choosing which side to choose (if sides there will be, not reconciliation)?
But we may be missing the boat. The American stand on Iraq, and its campaign against terrorism, reflect the Bush administration's determination to pursue the sort of values-based diplomacy to which Mr. Laar referred.
Recalling that the English-speaking nations led the world in the last century in confronting and defeating illiberal threats, some commentators have started to refer to the Anglosphere: an alliance of nations centred on the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, dedicated to confronting the 21st-century threat of terrorism. The former Warsaw Pact nations could become integral parts of that coalition.
In the 20th century, the English-speaking nations were able to take a leading role in "confronting and defeating illiberal threats" because of their wonderful geographic location, insulating them from all but long-range attacks on their homelands.
If the United Kingdom's eastern frontier in 1940 was not the North Sea but the Rhine, German panzers would have seized London just as they did Paris, Brussels, and Amsterdam in the west, Prague, Warsaw, and Vilnius in the east. (And if the United Kingdom's eastern frontier in 1914 was the Rhine, then East Anglia would have been torn up by vicious trench warfare.) As it so happened, the United Kingdom and Ireland were separated in both world wars from continental Europe by the sea, and the Royal Navy was more than sufficient to protect the British Isles from threat of foreign invasion: As has been proved too many times on soc.history.what-if, the Nazis' plan Operation Sealion would never have worked, not without deus ex machinae like asteroid impacts in London and the Midlands or a Nazi-American alliance.
As for the other countries of the Anglosphere, perhaps the Japanese could have threatened Australia and New Zealand without foreign (American, or British) intervention on the Australasians' behalf, but would this be at all likely? Canada and the United States, for their part, share the peculiar benefits of being practically immune from foreign threats: The last fighting that they saw, apart from the Civil War, was the War of 1812, when they invaded each other (Canada as a collection of British colonial territories, granted).
Now, no one's insulated from the threat of terrorism, simply because terrorists act outside of the framework of regular military forces and defenses. The Nazis could never have bombed New York City, but al-Qaeda was able to destroy that city's tallest skyscrapers at immense human cost. The rules of the game have changed since the mid-20th century, I fear, and worse may be yet to come. The question of how to confront terrorism needs to be asked; unfortunately, no one's posed any useful answers.
Would this mean an end to old alliances? Not necessarily. NATO Secretary-General Lord Robertson was in Washington last week urging that the protection of the Karzai government in Kabul should become a NATO responsibility. After all, reconstruction in Afghanistan to date has been led by the British, the Turks and mostly recently by the Germans and the Dutch. These are all NATO states and a NATO role in Afghanistan could revitalize the Alliance.
Could. The transatlantic alliance is in a fragile phase right now, and absent a clear threat both Europeans and Americans can agree on it could well fall apart. (I'm excluding Canadians as a marginal factor.)
But the Chrétien government must sooner or later understand that our interests, our values, our future, lie in fighting terror and advancing democracy, in concert with the other English-speaking nations and their allies.
Is there any reason to believe that an American invasion will, in fact, fight terror?
Now, granted that almost by definition the destruction of Saddam Hussein's regime will advance democracy since there's nowhere for Iraq to go in terms of civil and political liberties but up, there's no particular reason to think that an invasion of Iraq will advance democracy.
The sad thing about the transatlantic crisis over Iraq is that a passably good case could have been made for invading Iraq, on the grounds that the Ba'athist regime in Iraq treats its citizens intolerably poorly and that the outside world has an obligation to prevent further abuses. Earlier in the 1990s, after all, the West did agree on the validity of humanitarian intervention in the former Yugoslavia, to protect citizens from oppressive governments and senseless war. If Bush and Blair had used those arguments, then perhaps public opinion worldwide would be different. Alas, though, we'll never know, because those arguments weren't used, relying instead on spurious links between al-Qaeda and Iraq. (At least the RAF and East Germany were both Marxists, so that there was some ground for collaboration. But Ba'athism and radical Islam?)
The alternative is to join old Europe in standing aside, and receding with them into irrelevance.
1. Old Europe doesn't exist, save as a pejorative expression for the Franco-German alliance.
2. If the Franco-German alliance (and Europe generally) is irrelevant, why are American government officials and pro-invasion pundits so concerned with winning Franco-German support?
</lj-cu
