The Anglosphere: Criticism and Response
A little while ago, the excellent Canadian blogger Joe Katzman allowed Xavier Basora to post this article on his site criticising certain aspects of the Anglosphere idea. Jim Bennett, author of The Anglosphere Primer, requested space here for his reply, which follows:
Basora on the Anglosphere: A Response
Xavier Basora has written an interesting and thoughtful set of comments on my summary article The Anglosphere Primer. They deserve a response, which logically should be divided into several sections. One concerns those points which, had Basora had access to a more expansive discussion of the Anglosphere phenomenon as I think about it, would have probably not been in disagreement. (Some of these issues have already been clarified in private exchanges between Basora and me, but deserve to be repeated for the public.)
Another concerns those points regarding which we are actually in disagreement, mostly issues of historical interpretation. The third concerns those points where I do not disagree with Basora's analysis, but believe that the points raised are actually consist with my argument and support it.
1. The purpose of understanding the Anglosphere. Basora appears to assume in some of his comments that I am arguing that anything that can be found in the Anglosphere today is inherently good and superior to extra-Anglosphere alternatives. Other comments seem to assume that I am making an argument for Anglosphere essentialism; that things about the Anglosphere that are good, are good because of some inherent quality of English-speaking people. Neither of these points are in fact what I am trying to claim.
I believe when my book is published some of the matters on which Basora commented will be explained in more detail. Without waiting for that, one point that will hopefully become more clear is that I do not write about the Anglosphere to be self-congratulatory. In fact, I consider my work to be in part a critique of previous work on English and/or American exceptionalism, which is for the most part too essentialist. I'm not trying to say there's something about the English-speaking peoples that is inherently superior, more trustworthy, more freedom-loving, or whatever. Quite the contrary.
Rather we are the beneficiaries of a series of cultural-evolutionary circumstances that have led to the emergence of a particular social institutions that, whatever their merits or demerits, have been the specific sources of effective parliamentary and constitutional government, and the Industrial Revolution. Of course these might (or might not) have emerged elsewhere, but it is a fact that they didn't. We can acquire some useful guides for future action by learning from this historical process.
Since the particular characteristics of the Anglosphere are the product of cultural evolution, of course they can be eroded or lost. Preventing such erosion is a concern of people in the Anglosphere. This is why, as an Anglospherist, I am concerned to critique the centralization of local government in the UK and Canada, and the plans of the Blair government to abandon the double-jeopardy protection.
Similarly, effective analogues of these characteristics can be acquired by other societies, and in many cases have been. I tend to believe that imitation of Anglosphere institutions and practices by other cultures is a waste of time, and often counterproductive. Rather, there are probably local institutions and practices that can be evolved to serve parallel functions, and thus would probably be more effective. To use Basora's own cases and examples, Catalunya certainly had its own mediaeval parliamentary traditions, and I am happy to see Catalan decentralists appealing to their precedents. It is far more effective than merely trying to imitate the British Parliament or the American Congress. I don't think that any human population is destined to remain poor or oppressed. However, it must realized that if in some cultures family loyalties continue to determine, for example, government allocation of resources or judicial decisions, they are not going to become fully competitive with venues that enjoy full transparency. How they evolve out of that situation is their business, but I can't see how they can improve things unless they succeed.
It's important to make a distinction between Anglosphere exceptionalism, which I believe is real enough; it shows up statistically all the time. The issue is where it comes from and what does it mean. It's the *essentialism* I try to critique. Some people can't seem to understand that you can demonstrate Anglosphere exceptionalism without proving essentialism. But in fact, looking at the league-table rankings of nations on various things typically will show several non-Anglosphere outliers (usually Switzerland, and often some Scandinavian nations) clustered together with Anglosphere nations. To me this is a good argument against essentialism; whatever features Anglosphere nations share with these outliers (usually, at heart, strength of civil society) are probably important contributors to economic and political success.
Many people don't seem to understand that exceptionalism (showing that certain societies have significant differences from others) and essentialism (claiming that these differences are innate) are two different things.
2. Some historical points. Regarding municipal autonomy, I would have to take exception to the claim that English municipalities have been strongly under the control of the central state since the beginning of the settlement of America (which I assume means 1607.) Although of course their charters stemmed from a grant of Crown-in-Parliament, as did the charters of the American colonies, there were in practice substantially autonomous, elected their own councils and mayors, and remained significant centers of political power until after World War Two. The autonomy of American municipalities has been present from the settlement of America and was not invented out of the blue over here; it was copied directly and rather automatically from English models. As noted above, I regard the degradation of municipal self-government in the several Anglosphere countries to be an error that an understanding of the particular virtues of the Anglosphere advises against.
Regarding German technological leadership between 1871-1945, I would have to say that it is Basora's characterization of Germany that is the exaggeration, not my claim. Certainly Germany was a strong challenger between those years (actually I would say up to 1933; Germany was eating or destroying its own seed corn after that) but although it took leadership in several sectors (industrial chemistry, certainly, and optics) it was rarely more than a peer to the Anglosphere nations over that time in most key lead technologies, and often was behind. In what emerging technology of the first half of the 20th Century was either Britain or America (and usually both) not a peer? Aviation, automobiles, radio, electronics, electrical apparatus, steel production -- Anglosphere nations were leaders or peers in all these fields.
Everyone recognizes that America prevailed over Germany partly because of industrial productivity (another way of saying we had better production engineering; Germany never matched Willow Run) but we are only now really understanding how important raw scientific-technological superiority had been as well. Radar and computation, mostly British, (particularly the cryptanalytical computers developed at Bletchley Park) were key to the Allied victory, and if course, if Germany hadn't collapsed before August 1945, they would have been finished off with nuclear weapons.
It's instructive to note a few side points in the Anglosphere-German technology leadership issue. One of the principal reasons for the rapid German progress in the late 1800s was their invention of the research university as an institution. But it's worth noting that between, say, 1880 and 1930, America has effectively copied the German institution, and Britain had altered their university system to incorporate many of those research features. Thus the Anglosphere responded to the German challenge fairly quickly and effectively.
The other issue is sensitive, but worth looking at. Germany's period of greatest growth and progress was also the period in which its Jewish population was most integrated into German life. From Mendelssohn to Rathenau, many of the people who contributed greatly to making Germany smart, rich, and strong were Jews only a generation or two from their emancipation, or recent immigrants from Eastern Europe. In comparing the two cultures, we need to look at what made Germany fall, as well as what made it rise. The Anglosphere nations have always prospered most and best when they were most opened to strangers and minorities, and when it most enthusiastically integrated them into their national lives.
This is true for others as well, but it's worth looking at how wide those windows have been in the Anglosphere and how narrow they were in other cultures. In fact, it's worth looking at the two main Continental challengers to the Anglosphere, France and Germany, and asking how much of a handicap they gave themselves by the persecution of the French Protestants (just at the time France was losing its high-trust characteristics, perhaps not coincidentally) and by the German rejection of Jewish integration.
It does not buttress the argument for German leadership to point out that the Anglosphere benefited from immigrant and refugee German technological expertise. In fact much of the real benefit came specifically from Jewish refugees, without whom it's doubtful we would have been able to develop nuclear weapons. The several hundred rocket engineers we brought over after World War II were a mere drop in the bucket compared to the tens of thousands of talented refugees that flooded into the Anglosphere before and during the war. I would hold that in comparing cultural traits, a culture that expels (or murders) talent is down points against a culture that shelters it.
Finally, Basora is at his least convincing when he tries to argue that Germany would have become and remained the world technological-economic leader had it not chosen to challenge Britain before 1914 and seek an overseas empire. This is, at a minimum, impossible to prove, and furthermore, puts us into a game of picking and choosing aspects of a culture and saying "if only" certain parts hadn't have existed, the other parts still would have, and that they would have had a substantially different historical outcome. For better or worse, the Kaiser's ability to project his cranky personal strategic ideas on Germany's course of action was part and parcel of German culture and constitution.
In fact, overseas empire and naval expansion *was* the liberal option for Germany between 1871 and 1914; the conservative option was conquest of and expansion into Eastern Europe and Russia, a program that was finally indulged in 1941-44. The liberal and mercantile middle class (who were also the source of technological entrepreneurism) supported the Navy League and the Colonial League as political counterweights to the landed aristocracy and Army interests. A Germany that concentrated more on eastern expansion and gave up its naval and colonial ambitions would have been less likely to have come into direct conflict with Britain, but British foreign policy of the time would still have seen the need to support France and Russia to counterbalance what would have
been a very strong Germany.
It's impossible to say anything for sure in alternative history, but the probability of a non-expansionistic but technologically and commercially dynamic Germany before 1914 strikes me as being very low. The self-limitation of the German challenge seems to be one of its characteristics, and one of the reasons why the Anglosphere retained leadership in spite of that challenge.
Regarding the issue of Anglosphere tolerance and the treatment of the Catholic minority in the British Empire between the Reformation and Catholic Emancipation, that must be discussed in the context of European practice of the day. The Anglosphere certainly wasted many of the talents of two of its significant population groups, Irish Catholics and people of African descent, for substantial periods in its history. However, the Catholic issue was primarily a military-national security issue, not a minority tolerance issue.
Remember that elements of the Catholic community in Britain engaged in armed rebellion and subversion in concert with foreign hostile powers periodically from the time of the Act of Supremacy through the 1745 Rebellion. At the same time, Britain experienced a constant inflow of refugees from Catholic portions of the Continent relating validated stories of horrific persecution. This was a situation that fluctuated between cold and hot war for more than a century. In other words, enough British Catholics presented a genuine national-security threat to the Protestant regime that they felt justified in taking steps to preclude Catholics from full participation in national political life.
However, it's worth noting that for most of this time British Catholics did not have full equality, but still were able to live, work, and
worship with relatively few restrictions other than political. (Ireland, which was a war zone for substantial parts of that time, was a different story.) They could not attend Oxford or Cambridge, but could go across the Channel for Catholic education and return without hindrance. They could not serve as commissioned officers in the armed forces but could be warrant officers. None of these things were true for French or Spanish Protestants. In comparison to contemporary Catholic Continental nations, British religious minorities experienced substantially more tolerance. Indeed, it's worth considering that in Muslim Andalucia, where academics assure us that Christians and Jews enjoyed a multicultural paradise alongside the Muslim majority, non-Muslim minorities had rather fewer rights that British Catholics before Emancipation.
It's odd that Basora brings up Quebec as an example of the religious tolerance issue: minority religious rights under the Quebec Act were a grant from the British government after the conquest. When it was under French rule, Quebec forbade Protestants entirely. In fact, the Quebec Act was the first experiment with Catholic emancipation in the Anglosphere, and quickly led to its expansion elsewhere. And of course Catholics were given full political rights in the United States as a result of the revolution. The fact that Irish Catholics came quickly (by historical standards) to full political and social integration in the United States demonstrates that anti-Catholicism was a transient phenomenon of the Anglosphere, caused by specific geopolitical circumstances, rather than an inherent feature. It's also an interesting phenomenon that today, so many prominent British Euroskeptics, stridently proclaiming English exceptionalism, are Catholics. (One such Catholic did tell me that the British Catholic Euroskeptics tend to be Jesuit-educated, while the Europhiles are Dominican-educated. I don't have a theory about that just yet, although it does speak well for the quality of Jesuit education.)
3. On Cultural Crosscurrents within the Anglosphere. Basora's point about Canada, Australia and elsewhere serving as influences to
democratize England is perceptive and accurate. This does not seem to me to invalidate any of the Anglosphere analysis. In fact, although the Anglosphere is a unitary culture area, it has within a common framework of language and political structures a very wide diversity of regional and national cultures. These are constantly interacting and influencing each other. These is an overall split between a relatively rural, traditional, Anglican, hierarchical and aristocratic tradition (what I call the "Tory temperament") and an urban, innovative, dissenting-religion, egalitarian, and bourgeois tradition (which I call the "Whig temperament") that have been contending politically and socially for centuries. The American Revolution split an empire that was by turns mildly Whiggish or mildly Tory into a rather more Whiggish American republic, and a more Tory Second British Empire. Canada served as the refuge-point for many American Tories and thus shows what a North American Tory culture is like.
America and the colonies of settlement have continued to influence Britain from the start. Britain continues to influence America and the colonies. (This is also true of metropolitan-colonial relations in the Francosphere, Hispanosphere, and Lusosphere as well, of course.) Now the emerging English-speaking cultures of India and other Third World parts of the Anglosphere are beginning to have a real impact on the demographics, culture, religion and arts of the Old Anglosphere. It's all part of the ongoing evolution of the Anglosphere, and it's all fascinating.
Summary: I think Basora and I would agree that the Anglosphere is a real, statistically evident phenomenon that merits ongoing study and research. I think we would both agree that a simplistic triumphalism or essentialism obscures, rather than adds to the understanding of the Anglosphere. We may have to disagree on certain specific historical points, but I am always open to more discussion and evidence. In short, this is a welcome addition to a common discussion whose initiation was one of the objectives of my publishing The Anglosphere Primer.
James C. Bennett
ISM: I have little to add other than what are essentially nit-picking points with the Basora critique. First, either I am suffering from a lon-standing delusion, but I think he gets his facts wrong in his very first assertion. As far as I am aware, the Lord Mayor of London has
been elected annually by the liverymen of London since 1215.
As for the decentralized democracy that Basora claims was usurped long ago, I'd put that as beginning with the growth of the welfare state and the nationalization of hospitals, prisons and public assistance in the 1940s (although a case can be made for Salisbury's education reforms as being a nationalization of schooling in the 1890s). But the biggest change was the rate-capping in the early 80s that destroyed accountability for local taxes (something the poll tax was designed to reverse, until the Treasury stupidly insisted on a cap for that too). As for the Scottish parliament, that's not a local government issue at all. Tam Dalyell would box his ears for his confusion over this issue. The reality of the supposed "centralization" of control in the UK is best summed up by AJP Taylor:
Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman. He could live where he liked and as he liked. He had no official number or identity card.... [B]roadly speaking, the state acted only to help those who could not help themselves. It left the adult citizen alone. (English History: 1914-1945)
As for Basora's citation of the "ne bis in idem" principle, well, jolly good. I'm glad that Protocol 7 of the European Convention on Human Rights recognizes this. But, as with virtually everything in the ECHR, there are exceptions allowed, including the new evidence loophole that Blair & Blunkett are exploiting. The Common Law autrefois rule does not provide for exceptions. Advantage common law over codified law here. Would NuLabour be trying to subvert common law by statute is the ECHR wasn't around to give them cover? I don't know, but if he's saying that Common Law should not be supplantable by Statute Law that's a whole different argument, it seems to me.
