Tuesday, January 15, 2008

The Expansion of our Kingdom?

The continuing debate on the UK’s constitutional debate is certainly throwing up some intriguing ideas...the concept of an "Anglosphere" being only one of them.

This morning, via The Witanagemot Club’s invaluable headline links, I’ve stumbled across "The Monarchist" ("Defending the British Crown Commonwealth and the English-Speaking Peoples - Splendour without Diminishment") and this article from one of the driving forces behind The Institute for an Anglosphere, James C Bennett.

Bringing together (as he admits himself) "the less than likely"* scenario of the separatist movements in both Scotland and Quebec achieving their ultimate goal, he’s floating the possibility of some kind of Commonwealth Union, consisting of "a federal union of the Australian states, Canada minus Quebec, and England proper"

England could then quite happily leave the EU (listed as an advantage here) and become part of the "second-largest economy in the world", a "bigger power than either Germany or Japan".

Highly unlikely scenario, but I’ve got to admit its one that does appeal to the more romantic side of my British patriotism (although it would have been nice to have seen Northern Ireland and Wales also included in this grandiose "Network Commonwealth").

But, more importantly, perhaps, it also indirectly points to the economic and indeed political potential of the present Commonwealth, a potential which isn’t presently being realized.








* Despite that caveat, Bennett still makes the assertion:
“In Scotland’s case, the nationalist party has promised to hold such a referendum, and recent polls show that a majority in both England and Scotland supports dissolution of the union.”

Any reader got any idea about what polls he's referring to here?
Have I missed something?

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

"Eine Kaiserian, eine Volk, Eine Reich!"

O'Neill said...

No, no, you're very wrong. You've got your Deutsch genders all mixed up;

"Eine Kaiserin, ein volk, ein reich".

Anonymous said...

Haven't heard of those polls either. Last I heard it was at 40% in Scotland, 20% something in England, but both of those figures are soft in my opinion. Instinctive support for the status quo will always be strong!

Jon

O'Neill said...

See todays' You Gov poll mentioned in today's post, Jon.

27% for independence in Scotland!

JD said...

Very, very interesting stuff.

Still there's a lingering wiff of neo-imperialism about the project.

I find it fascinating that this thinking is so rigid and absolutist in it's approach to shared cultural space without the full understanding of differences and divergences within and without of the 'anglosphere' template.

An example of this is I am an English speaker and an Irish citizen, I share cultural traits with my neighbors in the UK and the British Commonwealth - these are the result of on a linguistic, legal and economic migration, ties worth celebrating, but my imagined community is not the 'Anglo-sphere' but rather Ireland and Europe (of which the UK is a member). I and many like me find ourselves more comfortable within continental societies such as the Benelux and Scandic countries than 'Anglo' structures.

And while I speak English this does not inform my identity as an Irish person. Rather it's an inherited artifact based on socio-economic history rather natural evolution or personal choice. It's instinctive rather than thought out.

Ultimately, the 'Anglosphere' is a neo-imperialists wet dream - an idea to get around the emerging bloc economics and political structures to somehow place an entity like the UK back on some geopolitical pedestal following the collapse of empire and the emergence of the US as the dominate cultural, political and economic Anglo on the block.

Anonymous said...

As an Australian, I would never surrender the sovereignty and independence of my country to any supranational state. As a loose association of states, the Commonwealth of Nations (formerly the British Commonwealth of Nations) is one thing. But for it to be the basis of some sort of "superstate", and for it to work as such, is highly improbable, to say the least. When the constitutional bonds of the then-British Commonwealth were much stronger than they are now, say in the 1940s and 50s, the Commonwealth as a military alliance and trading bloc was a pretty half-hearted affair. Indeed, the Commonwealth and Australia's membership of it were always seen as a pretty perfunctory business on the part of many Australians, including my parents' and my generations, and I was born in the 1950s. Read Correlli Barnett on the subject of the Commonwealth as wartime military alliance, for example, in his book on the wartime Royal Navy: Barnett was right. No, this one's a neo-imperialist pipe-dream: in the same country as the Poms! Preposterous. Dream on. And I say this as a fifth-generation Australian of English descent. Never! Never! Never! (Where has that been said before?)