Looking at the Anglosphere Part One

Editor's note: James Bennett has proposed a daring idea of an Anglosphere alliance that extends across the world and presently led by the United States in his most recent book, The Anglosphere Challenge: Why the English-Speaking Nations Will Lead the Way in the Twenty-First Century. This essay is my review and reflection upon his ideas.

The Anglosphere

National Review editor Ramesh Ponnuru calls this alliance of English speaking nations, “The Empire of Freedom” which he says where the United States belongs. James Bennett has termed this Alliance as the Anglosphere. Anglosphere is the branch of Western Civilization that is moving beyond the West and on to its own. Ponnuru writes, "Anglosphere is no longer purely Western civilization" and Bennett writes that the Anglosphere is “Western in origin but no longer entirely Western in composition and nature, this civilization is marked by a particularly strong civil society, which is the source of its long record of successful constitutional government and economic prosperity.” While European are attempting to build a European Union that is bureaucratic in nature, the Anglosphere nations are for most part suspicious of such Super state institutions build from top down and instead as Bennett states, “promote more and stronger cooperative institutions, not to build some English-speaking super state on the European Union, or to annex Britain, Canada or Australia to the United States but rather to protect the English speaking nations’ common values from external and internal fantasies.”

Who is part of the Anglosphere? Good Question and author James Bennett answers,” Geographically, the densest nodes of the Anglosphere are found in the United States and Great Britain, while Anglosphere 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.”

What we may be witnessing is a cooperative alliances based on defense alliances and trade. Ponnuru notes, “Important point here is that all these countries remain broadly in harmony on the subject of global free trade and more supportive harmony on the subject of global free trade, and more supportive of free trade than most countries outside Anglosphere.”

Of course, Anglosphere may be just another word for American led Empire of Liberty. While some feel that Europe is going in one direction and United States and other Anglosphere nations another direction, Ponnuru notes, “Is it conceivable that the political cultures of France and Germany could change into a free-market and pro-American direction in 20 years- or even ten?” As Ponnuru observed, Ireland is becoming an economic dynamo based on free market ideals, so Europe is not yet lost. While the European experience is different from North America, there is still enough similarity between the two separate cultures.

Article Author: Tom Donelson

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