2 - The Anglosphere

Summary

This chapter explores the underpinnings, development and impact of an ‘old Anglosphere coalition’. First, the chapter considers the nature of a coalition of the English-speaking countries at two levels: the Anglosphere, and its core USA–UK–Australia alliance. Second, the chapter explores the Anglosphere’s various underpinnings, linking nuanced but overlapping identities to shared language, cultural commonalities and intertwined histories, including racialised narratives and an enduring proclivity for expeditionary warfare. Here, the drivers of the Anglosphere are considered in full, despite the limitations of mainstream norms in the study of Politics, International Relations, and their subdisciplines. Third, the chapter considers the recent and contemporary implications of this alliance, setting the ground for the subsequent analysis of Anglosphere foreign policy in Syria.

If the population of the English-speaking commonwealth be added to that of the United States… there will be no quivering, precarious balance of power to offer its temptation to ambition or adventure. On the contrary, there will be an overwhelming assurance of security.

Winston Churchill¹

The English-speaking nations have made an enormous contribution… to the defense of liberty in the last two hundred years… a contribution, I would argue, in excess of any other grouping of countries.

John Howard²

Introduction

Talk of an Anglosphere is a case of old wine in new bottles: although the label is relatively new, the contents are of a considerably more mature vintage. In his novel, The Diamond Age, Neal Stephenson first coined the term ‘Anglosphere’ in the mid 1990s, using it exactly once across 450 pages.³ As a literary device and challenge to his readers to re-think Westphalian international order, Stephenson’s noun was new, but the idea drew on other influential writers, thinkers and politicians. Whether in the form of George Orwell’s ‘Oceania’, Samuel Huntington’s ‘Western civilisation’, or Winston Churchill’s ‘English-speaking nations’, the notion of an Anglosphere predates its naming.⁴ A glaring contemporary neologism,⁵ in its simplest formulation, the term Anglosphere is used to denote ‘the countries where English is the main native language, considered collectively’.⁶ If only things were so simple. A term such as the Anglosphere is ‘impossible’: a ‘quintessentially contested’ category.⁷ Yet, the idea that this ‘impossible’ term denotes has been at the heart of prosecutions and understandings of world politics for a century and a quarter. This idea, perhaps more than any other, has shaped international order in the modern world.

Alongside ‘English-speaking peoples’, the term ‘Anglosphere’ refers to older phenomena, such as ‘Anglo-Saxondom’, ‘Anglo-America’ and ‘Greater Britain’.⁸ The academic discipline of International Relations has attributed ‘little or no theoretical status to these terms’, despite the fact ‘they have long defined’ patterns of inclusion and exclusion for ‘millions and, indeed, billions of people’.⁹ The idea of Greater Britain, for example, has had an enduring influence, ‘informing calls for a “union of democracies”’ in the 1930s and helping to inspire the Anglosphere’s resurgence in the 2000s.¹⁰ In between, its ideas have resonated with and informed the language of some of Britain’s greatest and longest reigning leaders. As Margaret Thatcher put it:

The relationship between our nations is founded not just on a shared language, but also on shared history, on shared values and upon shared ideals. Together we have withstood the forces of evil and tyranny in whatever form we found them. In the words of Winston Churchill, we have ‘discharged our common duty to the human race’. And if freedom is to flourish, we must continue with our task.¹¹

It is certainly true that in ‘times of crisis’, the Anglosphere has tended to fall ‘back into the habit of working together’.¹² It is more than this, however: the Anglosphere goes far beyond global crisis management; it is about the proactive creation of modern world order, often in its own image and nearly always towards its own benefit. In these repeated acts of internationalism, interventionism and imperialism, the Anglosphere has been the vehicle through which the mantle of global leadership has been passed and continuity achieved, in a remarkably smooth process of hegemonic transition. This conceptualisation of the Anglosphere enabled Thatcher and Churchill to agree with Harold Macmillan: ‘These Americans represent the new Roman Empire and we Britons, like the Greeks of old, must teach them how to make it go’.¹³

This transition and the ‘outbreak of peace’, as Britain waned and America grew,¹⁴ is one of the most consequential occurrences of the modern world. And the Anglosphere’s perseverance, despite challenges and adversity, is remarkable. Walter Russell Mead has termed it ‘the biggest geopolitical story in modern times: the birth, rise, triumph, defense and continuing growth of Anglo-American power despite continuing and always renewed opposition and conflict’.¹⁵ From the rise of the British Empire to the era of unrivalled and unprecedented American primacy, ‘the Anglo nations – singly or in concert – have taken a special responsibility for the world order’.¹⁶ Today, they account for 7 per cent of the global population but a staggering one third of global gross domestic product, as well as predictably but impressively recording well over half of all global military expenditure. The apparent triumph and coordinated foreign policies ‘of the Anglo-Saxons’ have achieved no less than the creation of a ‘maritime-capitalist order that now encompasses the whole world’.¹⁷

What then binds these nations together, creating the most consequential, powerful and dispersed alliance in history? The extant literature finds ‘defining features’ in the ‘values and institutions associated with the historical experience of England/Britain as well as the English language’.¹⁸ Ethnicity and religion are often downplayed,¹⁹ despite their formative importance. This pattern of selective emphasis, while likely well meant, deliberately follows lines of acceptable enquiry and political correctness. It is, understandably, mirrored in contemporary political statements. For John Howard, the defining feature of Anglosphere bonds and cooperation is:

… a very long and very rich heritage of the defense of freedom: in a world in which the values of openness and freedom are under constant assault, the fidelity of the Anglospheric nations to openness, to a robust parliamentary system of government – and in the case of the United States, certainly of a different brand but no less robust, no less open and no less committed to freedom – the fidelity of those nations to the rule of law, the willingness of those nations to apply the rule of law not only to the behavior of others but also to their own behavior and of course the remarkable facility of the English language.²⁰

This chapter explores several of these entangled bonds of fidelity, investigating downplayed and formative racialised narratives alongside the role played by language, identity, culture, elites and institutions. It also explores the often-overlooked importance of war and war’s consequences for mutual familiarity and revisited alliance politics because, ‘when push comes to shove, the English-speaking peoples tend to flock together’; this flocking is symbiotic, re-creating the notion that Anglosphere members are birds of a feather.²¹ That sense of familial kinship has been central to the prosecution of the War on Terror, despite the legacy of the 2003 war in Iraq. It remains vital in responding to today’s most significant crisis: the civil war in Syria. It is, certainly, a process of transnational storytelling – as national (hi)stories interlock. But it is a story that is sufficiently widespread and deeply resonant to be something that is felt and lived by very many people in the Anglosphere.

The Old Anglosphere Coalition

The Anglosphere is more than a group of states united by a common tongue. These states repeatedly fight together: they are a coalition. Here, I argue that three states – the USA, UK and Australia – constitute its core: the ‘old Anglosphere coalition’. Vucetic has shown that, statistically, controlling for other variables, ‘English-speaking states/nations tend to be more willing to help the US wage its wars than states selected at random. Particularly willing to fight America’s wars, it seems, are core Anglosphere states – Australia, Britain, Canada and New Zealand.’²² Of course, the Anglosphere could be defined more broadly than the five countries Vucetic names or the three I have identified. Bennett, for example, considers the variable geometry of the Anglosphere, with the US–UK core followed up (in a fading gradation of genuine membership) by Australia, Canada, Ireland and New Zealand, and then (a more peripheral membership of) others, such as the English-speaking Caribbean and India, before finally old Islamic colonies of the United Kingdom in the final class of admission.²³

The crux of the Anglosphere remains the US–UK relationship, so frequently described as ‘special’. While this label is usually referenced to indicate the cultural ties and institutional manifestations of the bilateral relationship, it should also be read as indicating a situation unique to global politics: ‘cooperation between Britain and the US differs in magnitude, frequency and durability from any other major power dyad in the international system’.²⁴ This unique level of connection and synchronicity has endured through various crises, challenging both the international system generally and the bilateral relationship specifically. In fact, throughout ‘the entire post-1945 period no major international security policy divergence between Britain and the US managed to upset the overall cooperation pattern – think of Iran or Suez during the Cold War or, in the European unification era, the Amsterdam Treaty or Saint Malo Initiative’.²⁵ And yet, as we have already seen, there is one country that claims even closer union with the world’s hegemon. John Howard put this ‘remarkable association’ succinctly, when he reminded Americans that Australia, not the UK, is ‘the only country that has participated side by side with the United States in every conflict of any degree in which the United States has been involved since we first fought together at the Battle of Hamel on the Fourth of July in 1918’.²⁶

How was this rendered so? Clearly, the UK has a long imperial history, but how did it manage to transfer a taste for liberal internationalism and then liberal imperialism, despite the rest of the Anglosphere being once-colonised and now post-colonial nations?²⁷ It is in this fading gradation of post-colonial identity, coupled to brute material capability, that we can find clues as to the formation of a hard core – the UK, USA and Australia – at the centre of the Anglosphere. All three countries have gained regional or global hegemonic status in their own right and all have pursued colonial policies. Canada and New Zealand, to a greater extent, have been the victims (as well as the victors) of the liberal imperialism of, first, the UK and, second, the USA and Australia, generating a very different historical trajectory and degree of comfort with imperial wars. While, in identity terms, both are (and particularly were) acutely aware of their perceived natural home allied to their more powerful neighbours and the British motherland, their simultaneous inferiority to those neighbours has led to a heightened criticality, made possible by the (perhaps taken for granted) geopolitical security afforded by virtue of having large, powerful and culturally similar liberal imperialist neighbours.

At the edge of the Anglosphere core, the unusually borne out two-step process of Anglo-Saxon colonial and post-colonial relations experienced by Canada and New Zealand has dampened the militarism and imperialism that remains evident within the old Anglosphere coalition states. This plays out in a greater selectivity of war, despite strong and enduring perceptions of an Anglosphere community. Browning has traced, for example, Canada’s transition from ‘seeing itself in the 1920s as the lynchpin nation, destined to bring the US and UK together in an Anglo-Saxon brotherhood for international peace’ to instead placing ‘themselves as advocates and practical supporters of the UN and its multilateral institutions’.²⁸ Likewise, Vucetic maps out Canada’s decision to avoid entanglement in the 2003 US-led intervention in Iraq.²⁹ He identifies Canada’s liberal discourse, opposed to a North American ‘elephant other’, as vital to Canadian self-understandings of its identity as a unique part of the English-speaking west.³⁰ While the decision to stay out of Iraq was, certainly, very unusual, it was not an anomaly but rather an outcome of an identity formed in part through relations with its imperial, superpower neighbour, as well as internal political developments. As Rod Lyon has noted, ‘The group falls naturally into three geographic pairs and in each pairing, there’s one extroverted strategic player (the USA, Britain and Australia) and another less extroverted one (Canada, Ireland, New Zealand)’.³¹ The USA, UK and Australia, in Lyon’s terms, are the ‘extroverted’, militaristic core of the Anglosphere. And, I argue, this results from the specific mix of mutual and divergent colonial experiences within the Anglosphere.

Added to Canada and New Zealand, Irish and Indian experiences of British colonialism included what the UK understood to be the necessity of despotism.³² Partially as a consequence of this, in conjunction with their own unique cultural contexts, neither Ireland nor India possesses the ‘orientation towards a civilising mission’ that other Anglosphere members ‘tend to’ exhibit.³³ This civilising mission suggests that perhaps we are approaching the issue backwards. Instead of assessing what individual Anglosphere members lack, we should focus on what the USA, UK and Australia share; for example, their mutual colonial experiences, a civilising zeal and what Belich has termed the ‘settlerism’ of the old ‘Anglo-wests’.³⁴ These mutual, violent civilising experiences were crucial to the formation of history’s most consequential coalition. A combination of perceived religious virtue and bloody racialised conflict was at the heart of the Anglosphere from the outset.

‘A Blood of the Body’?³⁵

In summer of 1768, Captain James Cook received orders from the British Admiralty to show ‘civility and regard’ to any Australian ‘natives’ he might encounter on his voyage to the great southern landmass.³⁶ ‘In Botany Bay in 1770, Cook immediately clashed with Gweagal Tribesmen, shooting at least one’, initiating a by now familiar pattern of British-led genocide. In the following years, the raiding parties of the new ‘settlers’ would have instruction to ‘bring back the severed heads of the black trouble-makers’,³⁷ who were seen as ‘subhuman… fly-blown, Stone Age savages’.³⁸ Australia’s foundational ‘War of Extermination’ was followed by a sixty-year policy of the forcible removal of children from the homes of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples: genocide by other means. Australia has long wrestled with the crushing knowledge of these terrible acts. The so-called history wars saw heated debate on the teaching of the story of Australian settlement; on one side, a ‘black armband’ reading of officially sanctioned acts of evil and, on the other, a ‘white blindfold’ colonial amnesia enabling a picture of benign occupation and governance. In 1992, Prime Minister Paul Keating apologised on behalf of the Australian government and nation to the Stolen Generations in his Redfern Speech.³⁹ But subsequent prime ministers have been far more bullish about Australia’s ability to be ‘relaxed and comfortable’ with itself.⁴⁰ Australia Day remains the usual ‘barbecues and slabs and fetishisation of a flag’: ‘a flag that, with the Union Jack, symbolises violence and oppression of indigenous people’.⁴¹ Amidst the patriotic fervour, however, are calls for introspection. Veteran journalist Stan Grant noted in his speech on ‘the Australian Dream’ that an indigenous Australian child was more likely to be incarcerated than finish school.⁴²

These issues are repeated across the Anglosphere today. In Canada, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has launched an enquiry into the murder of some 1,200 indigenous women in the past three decades. In the United States, the New York State village of Whitesboro faced national outrage over its reluctance to change its emblem, depicting its white founder appearing to choke a Native American.⁴³ In America, of course, the legacy of slavery looms large, with homicide the leading cause of death for black males under the age of thirty-five. In New Zealand, efforts are ongoing to improve the position of the Maori people within society. The model for the physical violence of Anglosphere colonialism, which has subsequently given way to the structural violence of post-colonialism, was the British Empire, particularly its experiences in Ireland and India. Make no mistake: race and war are located at the heart of the Anglosphere, with formative colonial conflicts against the English-speaking nations’ various indigenous Others. This claim requires an alternative ontology of International Relations in a number of respects, but, at the same time, constructivist approaches within IR are well placed to make sense of racialised discourses and identities forged through conflict. This is necessary because the Anglosphere was and remains far more than an alliance: it is a security community, bound by a shared identity forged through racialised conflicts and their subsequent retelling in national mythology. To understand the series of exclusions, hierarchies and affiliations that underpin the Anglosphere, it is necessary to explore the foundations of Anglo-American peace at the turn of the twentieth century, where cooperation was ‘originally established on the basis of race’ thanks to successful elite framings of a single community: an ‘Anglo-Saxon brotherhood, the vanguard of a racially defined humankind’.⁴⁴

Going against the theoretical and historiographical grain, Vucetic has made this argument explicitly and persuasively.⁴⁵ His analysis returns to the 1890s and the near miss over Venezuela, exploring why peace ‘broke out’ between the USA and UK. He finds that this was possible due to a framing of racial brotherhood (rather than shared democratic norms or similar political institutions).⁴⁶ Crucially, it was not Americanism and Englishness that informed a prevalent discourse of racial hierarchy and superiority at the turn of the twentieth century; rather, it was a discourse of Anglo-Saxons. This discourse ‘emphasized the distinctiveness and unity of white, Protestant, English-speaking and “self-governing” gentlemen’. And, ‘in Britain, Anglo-Saxonism was hegemonic at all levels of discourse, including foreign policy’.⁴⁷ ‘The grip of Anglo-Saxonism was so powerful’ in fact that ‘British “race patriotism” … implied not only a “race alliance” with America but also a “federation of race” … and, in the boldest move, a political integration with the “cousins” and “brothers” in the US.’ This ‘reunion’ was variably considered the ‘United States of Empire’, ‘Grand Imperial Federation’, or simply ‘Greater Britain’.⁴⁸

The ‘intellectual roots of the Anglosphere’ can therefore be traced to this ‘emergence of Anglo-Saxonism in the mid-to-late nineteenth century’.⁴⁹ This discourse was ‘a response to the evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin’; ‘Anglo-Saxonism posited the existence of an Anglo-Saxon race distinct from that of other races and in unavoidable competition and conflict with them’.⁵⁰ Of course, those inclined to build theories of IR on the basis of social Darwinism rarely see their own race as inferior. For Chamberlain, like many of his countrymen, it was clear that the ‘Anglo-Saxon race is infallibly destined to be the predominant force in the history and civilisation of the world’.⁵¹ Rudyard Kipling, in ‘The White Man’s Burden’, encapsulated this sense of assumed racial superiority and its associated responsibilities. While the poem certainly attempted to justify ‘imperial rule over inferior races less suited or fit for self-government’,⁵² it is often forgotten that its subject matter was, specifically, support for ‘Theodore Roosevelt’s campaign to extend the American sphere of influence into the Philippines’ and not ‘England’s rule over India’, which is usually assumed.⁵³ The kinship of race was clear, as was its extended tasks of world leadership; far more than a call for alliance politics, this was a call for political union, premised on the perception of common Anglo-Saxon roots. This call was not only well received in the UK; it resonated in the USA and Australia, in part thanks to its logical pronouncements on race relations at the frontier.⁵⁴ These pronouncements were supported and reinforced through the perception of religious doctrine.

Religion has made something of a comeback in International Relations. Whether through Huntington’s ‘Clash of Civilizations’ or George W. Bush’s frequent recourse to the language of good versus evil, religion has re-entered debates that were previously stripped back to the logical consequence of objective material realities.⁵⁵ For the development of the Anglosphere, religion served to bolster Darwinian claims of racial superiority. The Anglosphere’s myriad Others were seen to be and spoken of as mired in both a racial and religious inferiority, such that the latter flowed naturally from the former. Christianity and specifically Protestantism were juxtaposed to the multiplicity of ‘false’ religious orders clung to by lesser races. Whether Muslim hordes or indigenous tribes, the Anglosphere actively wrote barbarism into its Others, in a form whereby belief and the body were intimately – if not inextricably – intertwined. Efforts at religious conversion – the roots of a Wilsonian impulse to promote democracy as well as Christian values – were seen as possible and necessary, but working against the grain that nature had set. Here, we see that the ‘blood of the body’ was seen to flow into the ‘blood of the mind’. However, for Anglosphere elites, the potential for altering the latter contrasted the brute fact of race. That is ironic, given the significance of ideas – including ideas of race – for binding together the English-speaking nations.

‘A Blood of the Mind’

Browning and Tonra note the range of foci evident amongst the various authors who have attempted to explain the Anglosphere, its actions and importance.⁵⁶ Bennett, for example, focuses mainly on culture, escaping the tainted racialism of past understandings,⁵⁷ whereas Vucetic deliberately emphasises that IR has falsely ignored the racial discourse that was central to the Anglosphere’s formation.⁵⁸ To begin with, it is useful to consider the relationship between the privileging of different drivers of mutual affinity and the theoretical bases of IR. At one end of the theoretical spectrum within IR, realist-premised explanations of the Anglosphere centre on the security calculations inherent within decisions to maximise cooperation. For the UK and USA, for example, Tim Dunne notes that at ‘its core, the relationship represents a bargain: Britain pledges its loyalty to the United States in return for influence over the direction of the hegemonic power’s foreign policy’.⁵⁹ Likewise, Tim Lynch has noted that Australia’s repeated decision to fight in America’s wars is actually a policy of sheltering under the eagle’s wing: a rational calculation for a large, under-populated, strategically vulnerable state, located in a turbulent region.⁶⁰ Australian political elites, within this formulation, are seen to be gambling on the USA reciprocating in this arrangement by paying back its accumulated debt as Australia’s security guarantor in a time of need.

Both of these arguments carry some weight, but fail to do justice to the nature of Anglosphere binds. Such explanations can also explain ad hoc coalitions of the willing, comprised of states sharing nothing more than temporary allegiances in pursuit of momentarily convergent interests. Both of the British Tims – Dunne and Lynch⁶¹ – know this, of course. As Dunne notes, the ‘special relationship is an example of a shared identity (based on shared culture, language and history) that generated converging interests’.⁶² Here, we start to get closer to the ties that bind, but, once again, these perceptions of commonality are filtered through the lens of national interest, complete with its distorting view of an international system comprised of states acting in logical, and even optimal, ways for their own ends. This thinner or conventional constructivism is insufficient in its addition of a new variable – whether culture or identity – into the familiar equations of rationalist foreign policy analysis. It is necessary to move further along the IR theory spectrum and away from the purely rationalist- and interest-premised approaches. In a thicker variant, critical constructivism can help us to understand why it is that states such as the UK and Australia will (eagerly) follow the United States into wars, even when such decisions appear to go against the national interest. In fact, the national interest, I argue, has been a secondary consideration at best for British and Australian political elites when it comes to the question of fighting alongside the Anglosphere’s principal member and Anglo-Saxon brethren. It is a sense of shared identity and shared values⁶³ – not shared interests – that drives the old Anglosphere coalition forward, from war to inevitable war. As Vucetic, again, has shown and argued:

From a [critical] constructivist perspective, then, what causes English-speaking states/nations to cooperate is not simply an outside threat, economic interdependence, shared democratic institutions or some combination of these factors; rather, cooperation is a function of the (historically and cross-nationally variable) collective/shared identity. The Anglosphere, in this view, is not simply an alliance or a zone of peace, but a security community or a ‘family of nations’ … Characterized by two centuries of peaceful change, the Anglosphere ‘core’ can be seen as a mature security community par excellence.⁶⁴

It is precisely because ‘Anglo-America is a transnational political space and an imagined community’⁶⁵ – in the sense that Benedict Anderson spoke of – that the (now) junior partners of the old Anglosphere coalition are compelled to fight as comrades in arms. They are ‘bound to follow’⁶⁶ in two senses: they are tied together in prevalent political, cultural and racial imaginations, to the extent that their impending cooperation in wartime becomes an inevitability. It is any absence of cooperation that is shocking. For very many Britons, Americans and Australians, the Anglosphere alliance is simply ‘the natural order of things’ and is ‘taken for granted’.⁶⁷ The old Anglosphere coalition reflects this perfectly, as the ‘pattern of consultation’ underpinning it rests on the ‘the common language and culture’ of ‘sister peoples’ such that it has become ‘so matter-of-factly intimate’ as to have naturalised a highly unusual degree of cooperation, influence, coordination and synchronicity.⁶⁸ As Henry Kissinger put it:

There evolved a habit of meeting so regular that autonomous American action somehow came to seem to violate club rule… This was an extraordinary relationship because it rested on no legal claim; it was formalized by no document; it was carried forward by succeeding British governments as if no alternative were conceivable. Britain’s influence was great precisely because it never insisted on it; the ‘special relationship’ demonstrated the value of intangibles.⁶⁹

It is these intangibles that are so important and yet have been so readily dismissed in the history of IR theory.⁷⁰ Here, I focus on their role and development by considering language, culture, elite networks and institutions in turn, before affording significant space to the most undervalued component of the Anglosphere’s foundational ties: the co-constitutive nature of mutual participation in war.

The English-Speaking Peoples

The role played by mutual intelligibility, whether linguistic or cultural, is hugely important. The latter, however, rests on the former. And the importance of that fact continues to increase. The ‘key fact, as Bismarck noted, is that the North Americans speak English’.⁷¹ Language is the unifier that Churchill deemed sufficiently important to name his four-part history after, labelling the Anglosphere the ‘English-speaking peoples’.⁷² The British brought the English language to the United States and Australia, replete with idioms and accents that would certainly evolve relative to the idiosyncrasies of their new environment and cultural context but which would enable an ease of dialogue and deep sense of familiarity with the New World and Down Under. Today, the accents and vocabulary of North America and Australasia still bear the hallmarks of British (and Irish) emigration patterns.⁷³ And, moreover, the importance of this linguistic inheritance is increasing due to the ubiquity of technology enabling instantaneous communication and the consumption of cross-cultural news and entertainment.⁷⁴

While, as John Howard has noted, the ubiquity of English in international discourse is certainly an advantage for the Anglosphere, its principal effect is to facilitate the formation and furtherance of the cultural ties that bind. For Lawrence Mead, ‘What makes a country Anglo is that its original settler population came mainly from Britain. So even though a minority of Americans today have British roots, they inherit a political culture initially formed by the British.’⁷⁵ David Hackett Fischer has shown how the political culture(s) of the USA grew from ‘Albion’s seed’, with the germination of four distinct British folkways in the USA.⁷⁶ These folkways were transported to the USA with the migration of distinct groups – the Ulster Scots, East Anglian puritans, southern cavaliers and midlands workers.⁷⁷ Although developing in ways necessary to fulfil their new niches in the cultural ecology of the rich young land, they brought with them and maintained a number of the qualities and beliefs that influenced the development of British political culture.⁷⁸ Although barely explored at all, the same is true of Australia, where numerous population waves, including the Ulster Scots, migrated en masse, helping to build Australian political culture not just in Britain’s image but also through migrants who had British ideas and values.⁷⁹ The presence of these groups during America and Australia’s formative eras ensured that their influence on national political cultures has remained strong, despite the influx of other ‘non-Anglo’ groups; British values have been embodied in national elites and institutionalised in laws and structures of governance. Moreover, they have been promoted overseas in foreign policies that have extended liberal internationalism into liberal imperialist ventures.⁸⁰ In short, we can see the influence of British cultural values in Anglosphere elites, institutions and wars.

On the first of these, Inderjeet Parmar has traced the role played by elite networks in the establishment of the Anglosphere.⁸¹ In particular, he emphasises the formative role of the ‘Cliveden Set’ (sometimes called ‘Milner’s Kindergarten’), as well as the (British) Royal Institute for International Affairs (Chatham House) and the (American) Council on Foreign Relations.⁸² The impact of these groups was quite remarkable. ‘As forces for consensus-building in their respective countries and between them, Chatham House and the Council on Foreign Relations provided critical forums for the more respectable “liberal” elements within the US and the UK to map out a new world order.’⁸³ Parmar shows how a powerful mix of scientism, elitism and religiosity, as well as the plain racism of Anglo-Saxonism influenced by social Darwinism, drove these influential think-tanks forward in their agenda.⁸⁴ As ardent and influential liberal internationalists, they helped to promote and foster the distinctive foreign policy disposition of the Anglosphere.⁸⁵

The impact of influential elite networks extends well beyond the Anglosphere’s formative period, driving it forward and fostering the conditions for its further and continued institutionalisation.⁸⁶ Tim Legrand has explored ‘the emergence and evolution of inter-government policy networks across Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States’, finding that ‘over the past twenty years, mandarins of some of the most significant government institutions in these countries have jointly established distinctive, and highly exclusive, policy learning networks with their counterparts’.⁸⁷ Legrand argues that these ‘international institutional relationships’ and ‘international policy ideas’ have significant impact ‘on domestic institutions’, as part of a continuous process of Anglosphere policy learning.⁸⁸ During ‘the past 25 years’ these ‘transgovernmental networks’ – comprising ‘a cadre of top-level public servants from the Anglosphere’, ‘particularly the “core” countries of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States’ – ‘have increasingly engaged in systematic and reciprocal policy learning’.⁸⁹ This is an insight that has thus far been notable by its absence from the IR literature. And it is an insight that helps us to understand the frequent institutionalisation and ‘brass hatting’ of the crucial ‘intangibles’ identified by Kissinger; previously tacit agreements are solidified in more formalised, visible and concrete arrangements. In particular, we can see evidence of this institutionalisation in the realm of security and intelligence.

The Anglosphere possesses the most extensive cross-national security cooperation in the world.⁹⁰ Growing up in rural East Anglia in the United Kingdom afforded the chance to witness this first hand, as US fighter jets would practice dive-bombing the local church and basketball or ten-pin bowling would take place at RAF bases hosting USAF units and personnel.⁹¹ During the Cold War, popular rumour suggests that, in the case of an impending nuclear strike, the unofficial advice for those in the region was to head outside and ensure a quick demise, given that these airbases would certainly be targeted early on.⁹² The UK’s current ten US air bases have Australian equivalents, near Alice Springs,⁹³ and, most recently, near Darwin, where 2,500 US marines rotate, following an agreement between former Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Barack Obama. As well as the physical presence of military personnel in each other’s countries, the Anglosphere also cooperates to an unprecedented degree on the battlefield, with embedded forces (including in Syria)⁹⁴ and troops taking command from military leaders from other Anglosphere states.⁹⁵ Military procurement and contracts are coordinated between Anglosphere states, with similarly high degrees of collaboration in the private sector. And, at the most fundamental level, Anglosphere states are committed to the defence of each other in times of crisis, as the invocation of NATO’s Article V and the Australia–New Zealand–United States Pact (ANZUS) demonstrated after the events of 11 September 2001. Although written to ensure America’s interests were tied to the Pacific, the invocation of the ANZUS treaty – framing 9/11 as an attack on Australia and New Zealand, as well as the United States – while John Howard was in Washington DC served to further cement the notion that the Anglosphere fights as one in the defence and promotion of shared values.⁹⁶

During the War on Terror, Anglosphere intelligence sharing has reached new (and at times troubling) heights. The USA, UK and Australia, as well as Canada and New Zealand, are party to the UKUSA Security Agreement, popularly known as Five Eyes or (by its former code name) Echelon. This arrangement sees an unusual degree of cooperation and information sharing in the area of signals intelligence, which amounts to a combined capacity to intercept global communications. Set up during the Cold War, with the Soviet Union in mind, the War on Terror has transformed intelligence arrangements across the Anglosphere, with members now being asked to spy on each other’s citizens so as to avoid breaking domestic laws or falling foul of the US Constitution. Recent revelations about Dragnet and Prism have revealed that the NSA and GCHQ now participate in incredibly large-scale bulk data collection on foreigners and citizens alike. Despite the revelations, spearheaded by Edward Snowden, the alliance remains strong as one of the most comprehensive espionage arrangements of all time.⁹⁷ The impact on those such as France, who lie outside of the Five Eyes arrangement,⁹⁸ is one of exclusion. As one report put it, new members are simply not welcome, however senior you are, or close to Washington; if outside of the Anglosphere, ‘your communications could easily be being shared among the handful of white, English-speaking nations with membership privileges’.⁹⁹ This was proven, most recently, by reports that UK and US intelligence had hacked into and watched live footage of attacks by Israeli fighter jets and unmanned aerial vehicles.¹⁰⁰ The fact such revelations have been possible – with the release of official, if secret, documentation – reflects the ‘brass-hatting’ of previously more informal arrangements; these arrangements build on and further the cooperation that has been uniquely ‘characteristic of English-speaking, common law countries such as, well, Britain, Australia and America’.¹⁰¹

Clearly, the Anglosphere coalition regularly exempts itself ‘from the rules that have shaped war, peace, alliances, coalitions and other manifestations of international cooperation and conflict in world politics’.¹⁰² And this exemption, as it applies to intelligence, security and conflict, is of global consequence. Here, we both move on from and find answers to Vucetic’s evocative question, ‘Why do (some) English-speaking states/nations continue to go to war together?’¹⁰³ As Coleman puts it, Anglos run the world because of their taste for war.¹⁰⁴ And, in addition, their Anglo identity is reinforced through the pursuit of this global mission in repeated coalition wars – armed conflicts of global significance, which shape international order, including its norms, institutions and economics. As Lawrence Mead argues, the Anglosphere is ‘available to deal with chaos and aggression abroad, as other countries usually are not. One or another of the Anglos has led all the major military operations of the last fifteen years’.¹⁰⁵ A combination of the impulse to lead and the resources to do so, Mead argues, enable the repeated projection of force overseas through a combination of habit and a desire for good global governance. He notes that ‘Anglo governments combine strong executive leadership with legislative consent. Both features make for effective warfighting overseas.’¹⁰⁶ The ‘Anglo countries… approach war more confidently than their potential rivals’ in part because armed conflict has been a continuation of domestic political projects – liberal projects applied internationally and imperially, to protect themselves and world order. For ‘the Anglos’, war confirms rather than threatens ‘their deepest values’.¹⁰⁷ Just as the British derived confidence and pride from military victories and conquests (over Spain, France and Germany), so too are the USA and Australia able ‘to look back on World War II and the Cold War as glorious crusades’.¹⁰⁸

It is important to make three points about these military victories: they are sufficiently naturalised so as to be taken entirely for granted; they are of global significance in shaping international order and global governance; and they are co-constitutive of the Anglosphere and thus mutually reinforcing of this remarkable coalition’s thirst for battle. On the first, ‘it was largely unremarkable for [Australian] Prime Minister Cook to announce in August 1914 that “when the Empire is at war, Australia is at war”’.¹⁰⁹ This blunt matter of fact-ness continued throughout the twentieth century. In 1939, Prime Minister Robert Menzies announced Australia’s entry into World War II as his ‘melancholy duty to inform… that in consequence of persistence by Germany in her invasion of Poland, Great Britain has declared war upon her and that, as a result, Australia is also at war’.¹¹⁰ On the second point, Vucetic argues that the Anglosphere is ‘comparable perhaps only to the Nordic security community’, despite being ‘conceptually comparable to half a dozen post-colonial networks such as the Francophonie, the Hispanidad or even the Danish and Dutch mini- commonwealths. What makes the Anglosphere unique, at least in the eyes of its proponents, is its centrality to the course of world history’.¹¹¹ Walter Russell Mead, more than any other, elaborates on this point across his range of books on this subject and related ones.¹¹² As Vucetic summarises, the ‘core Anglosphere states/nations have been constantly winning battles and wars, thus profoundly shaping a succession of international orders’ to the extent that we might talk of ‘Anglobal governance or Anglobalization’.¹¹³ On the third point, we must return to critical constructivism in order to understand how and why the Anglosphere repeatedly goes to war as one, with military ventures reinforcing a collective desire to fight together.

A range of constructivist scholars in International Relations and beyond have shown that foreign policy is not just something that states do; foreign policy is something that states are.¹¹⁴ The identity of the state is written through its foreign policy – and that foreign policy, in turn, is contingent upon its identity. Very often, foreign policy and identity are mutually reinforcing; they operate in a co-constitutive relationship. Few foreign policies are more consequential and defining than those pertaining to military intervention overseas. That is certainly true of the Anglosphere, where American, British and Australian foreign policy has both been enabled by and formed through repeated coalition warfare. We can trace this process in each of the old Anglosphere coalition states with respect to their distinct domestic contexts and particular narratives of national identity, which facilitate and even necessitate ideas and patterns of belonging to a larger Anglo community (see Chapter 3). Most explicitly and easily for our purposes, it is possible to see how Australian national identity underpins and encourages repeated patterns of Anglosphere coalition warfare.

In Australia, the foundational moment of the national identity is very often considered to be a seminal battle of World War I, some fourteen years after federation. The ANZAC legend ‘portrays the birth of the Australian nation through [mutual] sacrifice in war’,¹¹⁵ suggesting ‘that the Australian national identity was forged through the remarkable courage shown by Australian soldiers in the face of overwhelming odds in a military campaign at Gallipoli in 1915’.¹¹⁶ Courage, humour and larrikinism are all central to the imagined qualities that the Australian soldiers (‘diggers’, perceived to have gone from the mines to the trenches) were believed to have demonstrated in the face of repeatedly flawed leadership.¹¹⁷ Above all else though, it is mateship that is held up as the defining quality of the ANZAC spirit and the Australian identity it underpins. For many Australians, including former Prime Minister John Howard, ‘Australian mateship and national identity [saw] its fiery birth in the ANZAC legend’.¹¹⁸ According to Australia’s most influential national narrative, then, an ideal Australian character is prepared to fight alongside culturally similar, powerful mates – as comrades in arms.¹¹⁹

In the United States, the prevalent national identity has formed at the intersection of three trends. First, the USA has defined itself in opposition to the corruptions of the Old World, from which its early settlers fled. This has allowed America to see itself as the defender of, and world’s last great hope for, freedom. Second and related, as freedom’s global bastion, the USA has embraced a teleological narrative in which it stands at the zenith of a worldwide project to improve the cause of humanity.¹²⁰ Third, pioneers and settlers understood the ‘discovery’, foundation and development of the USA as providentially blessed, thanks to the considerable security of its geography and abundance of its resources, adding a significant religious fervour to the perception of standing on the front lines of a global mission to defend and promote freedom.¹²¹ Within this narrative, divine providence suggests that God approves such a mission.¹²² Together, these trends combine to create an intoxicating discourse of American exceptionalism, in which the USA is held up as unique and, yet, world-leading: the nation to which the torch of freedom has been passed, charged with ensuring it continues to burn brightly.¹²³ In its more vindicationalist variant, this discourse is a powerful, legitimating and inspirational component of American internationalism, interventionism and imperialism.¹²⁴

In the United Kingdom, the Empire may have been disbanded, but several of the narratives upon which it was built remain influential. As with the wider Anglosphere, British victory in globally consequential wars has been seen to vindicate a militaristic and interventionist British national identity, reinforcing the narratives such policies produce and promote in a virtuous circle of proclaimed global leadership and its apparent enactment. While explicit appeals to racial superiority have thankfully waned, narratives of British leadership on the world stage have remained influential. These narratives comprise multiple perceived qualities and beliefs, focusing on rationality and common sense, as well as the defence and promotion of democracy.¹²⁵ As Inderjeet Parmar has shown, at its core there is an intimate relationship between contemporary interventionism and historical pride in the policies of the British Empire.¹²⁶ Today’s imperial present is built on selective amnesia and nostalgia for a colonial past,¹²⁷ in which British action is often re-written as ethical and altruistic, advancing the development and democratic cause of others.¹²⁸ Like the ANZAC myth and a belief in American exceptionalism, narratives of British global leadership remain pervasive across the political spectrum.¹²⁹ These are hegemonic stories that enable, shape and constrain the range of possible foreign policies that old Anglosphere coalition members can employ. It would be too strong to suggest that they are ‘locked in’ indefinitely: change is certainly possible, even where agency has limits. But repeated coalition warfare is the expected and default state of affairs, likely to continue into the future; abstention not inclusion is the exception to the rule. Anglosphere war is the normal and consequential condition.

The War on Terror and the Legacy of Iraq

During the War on Terror, these interventionist narratives and the policies they promote reached something of an apogee. The post 9/11 era saw an intensification of Howard’s efforts to frame Australian foreign and security policy in terms of values shared with ‘great and powerful friends’; a project begun in 1996.¹³⁰ Camilleri, amongst others, notes the links between an increasingly narrowed national identity and Australia’s past polices – such as White Australia – which were explicitly defined in racial terms. For Camilleri, ‘Howard’s international conception’ in part reflected ‘a deeper sense of White Australia’s cultural and racial identity’: his ‘conception of the world mirrors his image of Australia’; when he spoke ‘of Australia’s “national character”, of its “distinct and enduring values” and of “an Australian way”’,¹³¹ he was employing a form of dog whistle politics ‘to refer to key aspects of the white Anglo-Australian heritage’.¹³² ‘The narrowing and exclusion at the heart of John Howard’s conception of Australian identity was therefore significantly tied to an interpretation of identity that emphasised Australia’s white, Anglo-heritage.’¹³³ And, as McKenna has warned, this narrowing of Australian identity ‘gives rise to a military tradition within which those values and ideals are given their most profound expression’.¹³⁴

By framing the policies of the War on Terror as simply the most recent examples of the ANZAC spirit, Howard justified and naturalised Australian participation in the old Anglosphere coalition’s post 9/11 wars. For example, on ANZAC Day one year into the 2003 Iraq War, Howard gave a speech to Australian troops at Baghdad Airport, insisting that their actions and values ‘belong to that great and long tradition that was forged on the beaches of Gallipoli in 1915’.¹³⁵ This, then, was part of an ongoing project across an influential decade of political office. Two years previously, referring to the war in Afghanistan, Howard had insisted that Australians ‘are fighting now for the same values the ANZACs fought for in 1915: courage, valour, mateship, decency [and] a willingness as a nation to do the right thing, whatever the cost’.¹³⁶ For Australia, like its allies, the principal conflicts of the War on Terror provided the immediate context for the forthcoming Anglosphere wars in response to the Arab Uprisings across the Middle East and North Africa. Howard, for example, had already promised that Australians ‘resolve to work ever closer together to root out evil, we resolve ever more firmly to extend the hand of Australian friendship and mateship… We are Australians and Americans and others together in the campaign against evil’.¹³⁷ As the war in Iraq drew to a close, the last Australian troops left ‘Operation Riverbank’ at the end of November 2013, five weeks before the commencement of ISIL’s dramatic Anbar Campaign.¹³⁸ Eighteen months later, Tony Abbott would send 330 Australian troops back to Iraq.¹³⁹

In Britain, Tony Blair concurred wholeheartedly with Howard’s assertion that the events of 11 September 2001, were ‘not just an assault on the United States’, but also ‘an assault on the way of life that we [the Anglosphere] hold dear in common’.¹⁴⁰ Tim Dunne describes this as the ‘resurgent Atlanticist identity’ that has shaped ‘British security strategy after 9/11’.¹⁴¹ For Heer, this was more than a pro-Atlantic leaning in UK foreign and security policy: he argues that the most ardent American imperialists at the time of the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 were in fact not American at all, but British.¹⁴² Notwithstanding important debate and contestation,¹⁴³ it is certainly true that the likes of Wolfowitz, Perle and even Max Boot had equivalents in the UK, such as Robert Cooper, eager to re-establish (what they perceived to be) the benefits of imperialism, and even empire, for the Anglosphere and the world. Such seemingly alarming sentiments had been given greater policy relevance and mainstream acceptance by Tony Blair’s infamous doctrine of international community – articulated in his 1999 Chicago speech. This speech and the doctrine it gave voice to redefined the notion of the international community; membership was now contingent upon the willingness to take military action in defence of shared western values. Lip service alone was insufficient. Moral multilateralism would no longer cut it in a new era of global terrorism; the international community was reimagined through a lens that crudely redefined the old Anglosphere coalition as comprising only central interventionist members, at the expense of those who erred and failed to act.¹⁴⁴

The outcome of British and Australian eagerness to rush to war alongside the United States was profound but predictable. In Iraq, ‘Only Australia and Britain helped the US with significant combat troops, leading some pundits to describe the coalition as “Anglosphere-heavy’’.’¹⁴⁵ The scale of the US operation and British contribution dwarfed Polish, Danish and Spanish deployments. And Howard was so keen to be seen to play his part that Australian troops were on the ground in Afghanistan before Australians even knew they were going to be fighting a new war.¹⁴⁶ If a desire to be America’s ‘Deputy Sheriff’ helped inspire the decision to contribute early and in a meaningful way, it would soon become a term of derision rather than a badge of honour. In much the same way, one impact of the quagmire in Iraq¹⁴⁷ has been a push to question Britain’s apparently uncritical assistance of the USA in times of war and crisis. Labels such as ‘airstrip one’ returned along with new probing insults for British political elites. A far cry from Winston Churchill being pictured as a British bulldog, Tony Blair was frequently portrayed in the popular press as George W. Bush’s ‘poodle’, at the beck and call of his master, the leader of the free world. In 2004, as Blair faced increasing consternation regarding the failure to locate Iraqi WMD amidst ongoing allegations of ‘sexing up’ the intelligence case supporting the war, Dunne warned that, of ‘all “Blair’s wars”, the decision to join the US mission to disarm Iraq by force will have the most lasting impact. It is not too far-fetched to suggest that it may become a defining moment in UK foreign policy, alongside Munich in 1938 and Suez in 1956’.¹⁴⁸

Iraq has generated a threefold legacy, inclusive of overriding patterns and currents of Anglosphere behaviour: (i) a heightened sensitivity to the limitations of hard power; and (ii) protracted entanglement in post-Saddam Iraq; amidst (iii) the continued propensity for the Anglosphere to pursue military solutions to developments in the region. It is the latter that this chapter has explored. While it is possible – and necessary – to detail the considerable problems of Blair’s war in Iraq,¹⁴⁹ a counterfactual reading of British foreign policy would suggest that, far from being a ‘mistake per se’, Blair’s decision to once again rally to America’s side makes perfect sense when considering that ‘the idea of Anglo-America has enjoyed such a hold over the British political imagination during the era of imperial decline’.¹⁵⁰ Iraq, for both the UK and Australia, was business as usual – a mutual war, pursued by a common community, occupying a single transnational political space. For the Anglosphere’s most ardent theorists and advocates, asking whether it was the wrong decision is to, perhaps mistakenly, suppose that within this set up there was much of a choice to make in the first place.¹⁵¹

The first point – recognition of the limits of hard power – influenced the foreign policy of Barack Obama above all others. For Obama, a range of factors combined to inspire a foreign policy that prioritised soft power and engagement in order to achieve rebalancing and retrenchment.¹⁵² Strategic reassessment in the wake of economic crisis, aligned with a habitual Jeffersonian prioritisation of domestic issues, encouraged a more cautious foreign policy approach.¹⁵³ And, yet, for a president defined by caution and patience in international affairs, Obama repeatedly ended up pursuing foreign policies that appeared decidedly squeamish.¹⁵⁴ Whether acting as ‘Assassin in Chief’ through US drone strikes,¹⁵⁵ leading from behind with airstrikes in Libya, or authorising the extrajudicial assassination of Osama bin Laden, Obama repeatedly demonstrated that he was prepared to use American force for lethal purposes, notwithstanding his reluctance to go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. Despite these actions, Obama’s foreign policy was characterised by an attempt to end (what he infamously termed) his predecessor’s ‘dumb war’ in Iraq, while at the same time refocusing American efforts in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Reluctance, where possible, to put boots on the ground, in the wake of the quagmire in Iraq, elevated American airpower to the default solution when lofty rhetoric fell short of achieving desired outcomes. And the UK and Australia largely fell into line behind these policy, strategy and tactical decisions.

On the second point – the protracted entanglement in post-Saddam Iraq – Ralph and Souter have noted that this has brought a series of military and ethical engagements for the old Anglosphere coalition. Having destabilised the country, these states have inherited a presumed ethical commitment towards its rebuilding.¹⁵⁶ This responsibility stems from a ‘reparative obligation’.¹⁵⁷ Having created the context in which extremism and, specifically, ISIL have flourished, the old Anglosphere coalition is ethically committed to Iraq in a way that others (such as France) are not.¹⁵⁸ This is an obligation understood and articulated by leaders of all three states.¹⁵⁹ It is a significant legacy that has gone much of the way to overriding the reluctance to engage hard power options following the explicit highlighting of their limitations in and after 2003. It has not, however, come at the expense of a second important outcome of the War on Terror: that, once again, has been the reaffirming of an Anglosphere commitment to united warfare in conflicts of significant global consequence. The War on Terror, like old Anglosphere coalition wars of the past, helped to make intervention in Syria a question of when not if; it served to make war’s avoidance or delay the exception and its prosecution the expectation. Anglosphere war is a seemingly inevitable constant in international relations: a consequential global norm.

Conclusion

Unlike the significant consensus acknowledging the Anglosphere’s empirical existence, its role as a positive global force is fiercely disputed. Like all analysts of international relations, Anglospherists are engaged in political storytelling. At various points, however, their strategic narratives have been troubling, as with notable attempts ‘to present a somewhat rosy [historical] picture’, ‘marked by progress and humanitarianism in which bad behaviour tends to be forgiven, played down or explained away’.¹⁶⁰ Browning and Tonra note that, while escaping the Anglosphere’s ‘racialist origins in Anglo-Saxonism’, it is necessary to interrogate ‘the logic of memes over genes’, not least as cultural essentialism can result ‘in the underestimation of cultural differences within the Anglosphere’, whilst overestimating the extent to which Anglosphere values ‘are part of a distinct Anglosphere, rather than European/Western tradition’.¹⁶¹ These are important points that I have addressed in my previous research, which has shown how the USA, UK and Australia sold the War on Terror in different ways to articulate, appeal and acquiesce effectively in distinct domestic contexts.¹⁶² Yet, despite these divergences, there is more that unites than divides.

On Browning and Tonra’s second point, it is these three countries together – and not a broader West – that repeatedly and inevitably line up to fight. Blair’s redefinition of the international community may have been troubling politically and normatively, but it pointed to a clear global reality: only a handful of states – with the USA, UK and Australia at the forefront – are prepared to take military action in the defence of values often shared more broadly by western states. This is not a one off or even an isolated era of cooperation: the old Anglosphere coalition has fought together in very nearly every single US-led war of the past century. And many of these wars have shaped world order. Browning and Tonra are correct that Anglosphere narratives play down the role of Greco-Roman ideas and European or western influence. But those ideas and influences play into a warrior culture formed in the United Kingdom and exported to the United States and Australia, the latter connected, umbilically, to the motherland and the former now offering assistance and protection to its weaker parent. If Anglosphere wars inspire UN Security Council resolutions, it is possible that they will be joined by others – recently, for example, France – but that is a secondary question. Old Anglosphere coalition warfare has been constructed as the natural order of things to the extent that it is a near constant of the post-1918, post-1945, post-Cold War and post 9/11 eras – the modern era. It remains so today, following the regional turbulence of the Arab Uprisings. Those who would repudiate the ‘link between being an English-speaking state and acting in concert with other English-speaking states’¹⁶³ in favour of old-fashioned national interest miss the point that this is, very frequently, not the principal concern of Anglosphere leaders when considering whether to participate in Anglosphere wars; not to do so is, very often, unpalatable or even, quite simply, unthinkable.

Lastly, before we move on to consider the linguistic choices and dynamics of these English-speaking states, it is important to reflect on the normative resurgence the Anglosphere has of late inspired, including its conservative bias. Lloyd notes that ‘the Anglosphere idea pushes so many of the right’s emotional buttons’.¹⁶⁴ Following Churchill’s Herculean undertaking,¹⁶⁵ the Anglosphere has gone on to inspire contemporary conservative historians, some of whom have made quite worrying and problematic arguments. For example, the ‘enthusiasm for the old Pax Britannia has been bolstered by the revisionist scholarship of Scottish historian Niall Ferguson’.¹⁶⁶ He ‘argues that the British Empire was a progressive force in world history that lay the foundations of our current global economy’.¹⁶⁷ Ferguson is certainly not alone,¹⁶⁸ but conservative affinities for Anglosphere imperialism are not sufficient reason to abandon a term that well encapsulates one of the most striking patterns of behaviour in modern and contemporary world politics. At this moment, the term has greater analytical value than at any time previously, off the back of: (i) several large recent Anglosphere wars, which – whether successes or failures – have served only to reinforce the cultural bonds of war; and (ii) a technological revolution that has accelerated and intensified global communications, heightening the importance of linguistic and cultural fluency.¹⁶⁹ Today, as Syria burns, the Anglosphere continues to grow stronger and more unified.¹⁷⁰ As it does so, we do well to remember the important critique of Anglosphere foreign policy as helping to sustain the conditions necessary in the Middle East for persistent civil war, as well as asymmetric economic exploitation.¹⁷¹