{"id":7567,"date":"2013-07-15T06:00:15","date_gmt":"2013-07-14T20:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=7567"},"modified":"2013-07-17T16:07:33","modified_gmt":"2013-07-17T06:07:33","slug":"sunset-for-the-anglosphere","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/sunset-for-the-anglosphere\/","title":{"rendered":"Sunset for the Anglosphere?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Sunset<\/a><\/p>\n

Peter Jennings has sprung to defend the Anglosphere<\/a> from my disparagement<\/a>. But before battle begins, let\u2019s clarify what exactly he’s defending, because Peter uses the term \u2018Anglosphere\u2019 in several rather different ways. Some of them I wouldn\u2019t dream of disparaging, and others I suspect he wouldn\u2019t really want to defend.<\/p>\n

The sense of \u2018Anglosphere\u2019 that I would least want to disparage is what we might call the Tennysonian one. This sense clearly looms large for Tony Abbott. In the Heritage Foundation speech<\/a> mentioned in my column, Abbott quoted lines from Tennyson that I\u2019ve always loved, which describe Britain [or perhaps England] as ‘a land of just and old renown\/ where freedom broadens slowly down\/ from precedent to precedent’. If the Anglosphere means nothing more than reverence for Britain\u2019s deep-rooted legal and constitutional traditions then I wouldn\u2019t disparage it for a moment.<\/p>\n

Nor do I disparage the second sense which Peter attributes to the Anglosphere when he identifies it with the \u2018five-eyes\u2019 Anglo-Saxon intelligence sharing arrangements from which Australia benefits so handsomely. I\u2019m all for that.<\/p>\n

But Peter slides from those meanings to some very different ones. He says the Anglosphere is \u2018the engine of global order and the essential enforcer of international stability\u2019. Really there are two claims here. One is that the Anglosphere has created the global order as it is today. Tony Abbott believes this: in his Heritage speech Abbott said \u2018Given America\u2019s role, it can\u2019t quite be said that the modern world has been made in England but it\u2019s certainly been shaped in English\u2019. But really, if we’re talking about the last century, and certainly the last seventy-five years, it isn’t the Anglosphere that’s created and upheld the modern order, but America. Talk of the Anglosphere is just a way for we smaller Anglos to bask in America\u2019s glory.<\/p>\n

The other claim is that it’s the Anglosphere that upholds international order today. Peter acknowledges that the Anglos alone do not do this. He expands the Anglosphere to take in NATO and Japan. This group\u2014\u2018the Anglosphere and its allies\u2019\u2014includes \u2018the capitalist democracies which support open trading systems and the international rule of law\u2019. So now we are not really talking about the Anglosphere at all. This wider group carries a big burden, Peter says:<\/p>\n

If there\u2019s a need for a coalition of countries to impose order or reduce risk in Kosovo, or Iraq, or Timor, or Afghanistan or Libya, or Mali, then the world looks to the Anglosphere or its allies to lead the task.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That\u2019s an interesting list, but it doesn\u2019t do much to support the importance, cohesion or effectiveness of the Anglosphere itself. Kosovo was NATO, with America and Britain taking very different views; Libya was a subset of West Europeans with grudging US support; East Timor wouldn’t have happened without the Southeast Asians; Mali was, well, French, and they\u2019d probably smile if we chalk that one up for the Anglosphere. That leaves Afghanistan and Iraq, both significant failures. Responsibility for Afghanistan can be shared with others. Only Iraq, the biggest and saddest failure of them all, can really be attributed to the Anglosphere. Nothing to crow about there. I see no evidence that the Anglosphere as a group has done much useful or significant to uphold the global order recently.<\/p>\n

And then there’s the future. The real question for those, like Abbott, who would place the Anglosphere at the centre of Australia\u2019s strategic policy, is whether this grouping will do much for us in the future when wealth and power will no longer be so strongly concentrated in Anglo-Saxon hands. I think in the end Peter acknowledges this. \u2018The Anglosphere\u2014or more accurately the international system it bequeathed\u2014will remain the dominant paradigm, perhaps taking on some Chinese characteristics<\/i>\u2019.<\/p>\n

Those are my italics. I have no idea what an Anglosphere with Chinese characteristics would look like, but it would not be anything Sir Robert Menzies would recognise. The italicised words thus seem to concede the point I was making in the passage that Peter quoted from my column\u2014that we can no longer take for granted, as I think Abbott does, \u2018the agreeable idea that the world should continue to be run from Washington and London, by people just like us\u2019.<\/p>\n

Hugh White is professor of strategic studies at ANU and a visiting fellow at the Lowy Institute. Image courtesy of Flickr user Mike Mahaffie<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Peter Jennings has sprung to defend the Anglosphere from my disparagement. But before battle begins, let\u2019s clarify what exactly he’s defending, because Peter uses the term \u2018Anglosphere\u2019 in several rather different ways. 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