Look around the Western world. Which country’s politics seem the most shambolic? In the past, your eyes might have headed instinctively toward southern Europe. The politicians in Athens, Madrid and Rome are certainly trying hard, but if you want dysfunctionality, there are only two places to go: Washington and London.
The US’ government was shut for a long stretch of this year — and now US President Donald Trump is stuck in a row with the US Congress over whether there is a national emergency on the southern border with Mexico.
Britain’s government is meandering toward Brexit with all the discipline of a drunk on an icy road. If nothing changes, the UK will topple out of the EU in five weeks.
Is this the end of “the Anglosphere”? For nearly four decades, the US and the UK have touted the benefits of open markets, globalization and personal freedom. Now that voice has either shrunk to a murmur, or is singing a very different tune.
It is not silent yet, but the faltering partnership that has set the mood music for much of the world is something that matters far beyond the English-speaking world.
You might not like pontificating Anglos, but everybody who cares about liberty and the rule of law should pray for them to be heard.
By “Anglosphere,” this pontificating Anglo means something narrower than the fifth of the world that speaks English; this is about the US and Britain. Yet it is a definition that is also meant to encompass something much more powerful and evangelical than the tweedy “special relationship.”
A half-century ago, Britain was certainly the US’ closest ally, with strong historical, military and personal ties, and a shared aversion to communism and the Soviet Union. Still, it was hardly evangelical.
In the 1970s, Britain was farther left and far less successful than the US; not that Washington, limping through Vietnam and Watergate, looked especially inspirational either.
All this changed in the 1980s with then-US president Ronald Reagan and then-British prime minister Margaret Thatcher.
The Anglosphere broadcast a message that handbagged the world: Words like “privatization” and “deregulation” became commonplace, first in the West and then in the emerging and former communist realms.
As Victor Hugo once said: “Nothing can stop an idea whose time has come,” and globalization jumped forward, driven by technology, as well as ideology.
Tony Blair and Bill Clinton; Blair and George W. Bush; David Cameron and Barack Obama — a succession of youngish British prime ministers and US presidents walked the world, telling people what to do, with various degrees of smugness.
Again the US was the bigger and more influential partner; Britain’s economy is smaller than California’s and its total defense budget is less than half the size of the US Navy’s. However, the fact that Washington had a partner that spoke the same language, on many different levels, made the alliance greater than the sum of its parts.
Britain gave the Anglosphere a voice in the EU — indeed, French moans about Disneyfication and le defi americain were gradually replaced by ones about Anglo-Saxon capitalism and mondialisation.
Britain also brought a lot of soft power. It came to the table with an unusually global media, Oxbridge, and, of course, London, a commercial entrepot rivaling New York in finance and cosmopolitanism.
Gradually, the Anglosphere became a presumption. Some countries hated its message; many more wanted to adapt it to their needs or delay it. Nevertheless, the presumption, even in places as hostile to it as Brussels and Beijing, was a grudging acceptance that most countries, if they wanted to do well, would have to become more Anglo.
The recognition that Silicon Valley had such a hold on technology only added to this sense of inevitability.
Looking back, this presumption was more vulnerable than anyone realized. Although the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks initially united the world behind the Anglosphere, the idea that Britain and the US were on the right side of history was brutally questioned by the bloody quagmire in Iraq, the illiberal horrors of Guantanamo, and then the credit crunch.
What is more, as China continued to rise, a rival trumpet began to sound that was attractive to governments across the emerging world: The “Beijing consensus” promoted the idea that authoritarianism was a better spur for prosperity than “chaotic” laissez faire.
However, it was not until 2016 that the Anglosphere fell to pieces. First came Brexit, which has silenced Britain almost completely.
It is not just the unseemly, all-consuming chaos that it has unleashed. The sense of Britain as a liberal, outward-looking country has been reversed.
Even if a few Brexiteers want to create a free-trading Singapore on the Thames, the movement is dominated by Little Englanders scared of Johnny Foreigner.
Britain has gone from the emerging world’s lecturer to its beggar: When British Prime Minister Theresa May shows up in Africa, it is to plead for trade deals.
The strutting home of the Rolling Stones has become like the fallen heroine of Like a Rolling Stone: “Now you don’t talk so loud/Now you don’t seem so proud...”
The election of Trump has proved a bigger blow. Nobody could accuse the US president of singing quietly or walking unproudly; the problem comes with the song he is bellowing.
The Anglosphere is now led by a man who dislikes globalization, wants to quit pretty much every global institution, and yearns to protect his border with a wall. Soft power has no value to him. He shuns the language of Liberty.
In the past, the US was accused of either being hypocritical — hiding national interest behind words such as “freedom” — or naive. Now Washington has a president who seldom mentions freedom or human rights, and whose slogan is simply “America First.”
Worst of all, the Anglosphere is no longer very popular with Anglos. Far from viewing globalization as “their” movement, many Britons and Americans associate it with a rootless elite trampling on John Bull and Uncle Sam.
Witness May’s attack on these “citizens of nowhere,” or US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s joyous tweet that Amazon’s withdrawal from New York was a sign its citizens had triumphed over “corporate greed, worker exploitation and the power of the richest man in the world.”
Like Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of Britain’s opposition Labour Party, Ocasio-Cortez wants to take her country back to the 1970s, before Reagan and Thatcher ruined everything.
Good riddance, some will say. A world with fewer pontificating Anglophones is one that many people will find reassuring, but look at the collateral damage. The place on the stage that the US and Britain used to occupy has not been filled by worthy European social democrats like French President Emmanuel Macron; instead autocrats spouting fake news have come to the fore.
In a world of “America First,” tyrants of all persuasions do not have to go through the motions of mentioning freedom. Economically, free trade is in retreat.
The beliefs that the Anglosphere promoted were, on the whole, useful ones that helped pull a billion people out of poverty. The global institutions and laws that the Anglosphere supported generally helped keep the peace.
The hope is that the Anglosphere will recover.
Note that eight of the world’s 10 biggest companies are American. The Anglosphere still dominates higher education, technology and finance. China is slowly being forced to open its markets. The schadenfreude that continental Europeans felt about the woes of Wall Street and the City of London after the Great Recession has been replaced with misery about the fragility of their own banks and the euro zone.
The appeal of freedom should also not be written off: Look around the developing world, and the enthusiasm that autocrats feel for the Beijing consensus does not seem to have reached their people. Who knows? Chinese middle classes might yet discover a need for democracy and representation.
Of course, the Anglosphere’s politics can change, too: Trump could be a one-term president, and even if Brexit looks unlikely to be reversed, there is a decent chance of avoiding a chaotic no-deal exit and a Corbyn premiership.
Still, if a recovery is to happen, it has to happen soon. History does not wait for dysfunctional countries to sort themselves out.
The Anglosphere changed the world for lots of reasons, but one was because it had sustained momentum. Let us hope it recovers it soon.
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