The editors and contributors to this impressive volume based on a conference at the British Academy are to be congratulated on producing an engaging, stimulating, informative, empirically rich, and even theoretically informed dissection of a world-historical phenomenon. The essays are uniformly of high quality in a collection that I feel sure will pass the test of time and should be required reading for anyone who makes any claim to being well informed about the dynamics of world politics. Edited books are all too frequently uneven in quality, lack a unifying thread, or both. This one stands out as a model of what a truly outstanding edited volume should be. It comes as close to what one might describe as a research monograph as a multiauthored set of essays could probably be.
Ben Wellings’s and Andrew Mycock’s edited collection of research articles opens a window to a phenomenon that is not widely addressed within political science, including in the international relations (IR) subfield. The core theories of IR hardly acknowledge the significance of race and colonialism in world political development (therefore, Srdjan Vucetic’s, Duncan Bell’s, and Eva Namusoke’s contributions to this volume are notable exceptions), and knowledge of how these phenomena have affected global politics is virtually unknown in the broader public sphere. The book therefore is a very welcome avenue for understanding a highly significant international phenomenon, one that should form the basis for further theorizing the synthesized influence of transnationalized ideas, experiences, and practices of class, race, culture, language, economy, and military power in world politics. One hopes that future research on this topic will be widely disseminated, thus contributing to a growth in knowledge and understanding of the power, influence, ideational and material foundations and institutions, history, and probable futures of the “Anglosphere.” This concept may be hard to define; there may be disagreements over its membership—who’s in and who’s not—over its aims and meanings, and whether it can survive in our new world disorder (see Ravenhill and Huebner’s chapter), but the book’s essays leave in my mind the strong impression and indeed conviction that the Anglosphere is alive as an idea, as a material reality, and in formal and informal transnational Anglospherist networks (Tony Legrand’s and Andrew Gamble’s chapters are particularly strong on this point).
This book shows that there are both a significant body of extant and recent research and a future research agenda to be pursued in regard to the Anglosphere—a somewhat nebulous imagined community with historical pedigree and world-historical influence. Contrary to the modest viewpoints expressed by the editors that the Anglosphere is hard to define and delineate and that it is a concept whose influence is impossible to measure, the essays show a powerful world-shaping force undergirded by an enduring and influential set of ideas, institutionalized on a global level (see Tim Legrand’s empirically rich, theoretically informed chapter) that is likely to continue to be powerful in what can only be described as “interesting times.”
The Anglosphere—a “community” united by its attachment to the English language and an entire mythology of shared cultural traditions, liberal ideology and, importantly for many adherents, “blood ties”—is shown to be rooted in the British Empire (the chapters by Bell, and Vucetic show this, but see also chapters by Carl Bridge and Bart Zielinski, Michael Gardiner, and Michael Kenny and Nick Pearce). The empire, in turn, morphed its way into what is now known, almost nostalgically, as the (Anglo-)American rules-based liberal international order (see Gamble, and Bridge and Zielinski), and into the rather choppier waters of President Trump’s “America First” (Gamble, and Helen Baxendale and Wellings), PM Johnson’s post-Brexit Britain (Kenny and Pearce, and Namusoke’s standout contribution), and an Indo-Pacific region offering security, ethnoracial and cultural challenges, and economic opportunities in equal measure (Ravenhill and Huebner).
It is recognized by adherents and critics alike that what the core powers of Anglospherism “do” best is wage and win wars and build the governing structures that “order” the world. This echoes the work of Walter Russell Mead’s authoritative God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World (2007). The editors argue that Anglospherism has many supporters among intellectuals, a variety of organizations, and even politicians—but few hard-core adherents once those leaders attain positions of political power. I would suggest that actual historical development shows that Anglospherism, and its prior mothership—Anglo-Saxonism of the racial and cultural varieties—is the ghost in the machine, the invisible hand, the idea that dare not speak its name among the powers-that-be, and that perhaps cannot be and is not intended to be up front and center because of its controversial racial, elitist, and hierarchical political character and implications. Why scream from the rooftops when actual power and practice indicate that pragmatic, softly spoken Anglospherism is powerful and consequential, has been so, and will continue to be in the foreseeable future? It is Joseph Nye’s (Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics, 2004) soft, hard, and smart power rolled up into one many-sided and multidimensional force. Even more perhaps, the Anglosphere is an almost perfect embodiment of the intangible, institutional, and coercive combination that Antonio Gramsci would call “hegemony” (see Q. Hoare and G. Nowell-Smith, eds., Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, 1971).
One of the “secrets” of the power and longevity of Anglospherism is surely its very nebulousness, its fuzzily uncertain boundaries, the very vagueness of the formulation that contains enough latitude and evolution and promise of opening its membership to acculturated Anglo-Saxons. This promise was aptly expressed by Clement Attlee at a Thanksgiving Day speech in London in November 1944, a few months before he was swept to power in the 1945 British general election to join President Truman in constructing the architecture of a liberal international order. He noted in that speech the difference between the racial exclusivity of the Nazis’ herrenvolk concept and that of the Anglo-Americans’ universalism as expressed in the “melting pot” theory of US society and the emerging multiracial character of the British commonwealth of nations. Anyone, at some point, could look forward to becoming an Anglo-Saxon (Inderjeet Parmar, 2016, “Racial and Imperial Thinking in International Theory and Politics: Truman, Attlee, and the Korean War,” British Journal of Politics and International Relations 18 [2], 2016).
Future research on this rich topic could include interviews with political leaders who espouse Anglospherism while out of office but rarely mention it once in power. It would be fascinating to hear their explanations of how the idea enters policy making and implementation and of the nature of relationships (formal and informal) among core and peripheral Anglosphere states. Given the universalist-assimilationist claims of Anglospherists, studies of racial, ethnic, and linguistic minorities’ attitudes in core states would be very interesting and informative.
The concept, history, and current practices, networks, and politics of the Anglosphere are admirably documented in this collection. The Anglosphere also has a future. And given the recent and current crises of world order, I cannot imagine that the Anglosphere and its allied and associated states will not play a leading role in reimagining and remaking a multipolar world.
