How Britain should find its way in the modern world

Is there a family of English-speaking nations, united by cultural values, liberal market economies, the common law and democracy, that is waiting to welcome Britain with open arms after it frees itself from the constraints of the European Union? Some optimists think so.

David Davis, the British government’s Brexit secretary until he left his post last week, said in a 2016 speech on the referendum: “This is an opportunity to renew our strong relationships with Commonwealth and Anglosphere countries. These parts of the world are growing faster than Europe. We share history, culture and language.”

In 2013, Boris Johnson, a prominent Brexit supporter and foreign secretary until he also resigned last week, described Britain’s joining the precursor to the European Union in 1973 as when “we betrayed our relationships with Commonwealth countries such as Australia and New Zealand.”

Both departed in protest of UK Prime Minister Theresa May’s recent plan for Brexit, which includes concessions to EU rules to make trading with the bloc easier postBrexit and which, in Johnson’s view, has “suffocated” the dream of a global Britain, trading with the wider world.

US President Donald Trump arrived in Britain on July 12 for a visit meant to “celebrate the strong business links between our two countries,” according to Downing Street. And maybe to renew kinship and ties between Britain and the United States?

Unlikely. The problem is that in British politics, the Anglosphere has always been a paradox: a politically useful idea that has never lived up to the ambitions of its advocates. The idea of a family of English-speaking nations was useful in arguments about the rise of rival powers, like the United States, in the 19th century. It was useful when politicians were imagining, and telegraphing, the future of the British Empire between the world wars. And it was useful during the soul-searching about Britain’s place in the world that accompanied decolonisation and Britain’s entry to the European Community.

Then, in the early

1990s, after the Maastricht Treaty created the EU, those who were skeptical of Britain’s participation in the European project reinvented the Anglosphere, somewhat, as a way to imagine Britain’s future as a global, deregulated and privatised economy outside the EU. It’s this idealised version of the Anglosphere that was an important part of why Britain, in June 2016, decided to leave the EU.

Now, as the British government grapples with the fraught policy questions that leaving the union raises, the Anglosphere is a balm for those same euroskeptics, who argue that Britain should just strike out on its own and make its own trade deals with some of the world’s leading economies, including the US, Australia and New Zealand, as well as rising Asian powers like India.

President Trump may agree to a new trade deal with Britain, but it’s unlikely that Britain would decide the terms, a prospect that is fraught with political risks for the British government. For Australia and New Zealand, trade links with China and Asia are much more important than those with Britain. And Canada, as a member of Nafta, has long been oriented toward the American market. Security and intelligence cooperation among these states and Britain in the so-called Five Eyes group is critical, as is Nato membership, but this kind of cooperation does not require a new bloc.

In reality, the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand show no inclination to join Britain in new political and economic alliances. More likely, they would rather continue to work within the existing institutions — like the European Union and the World Trade Organization — and remain indifferent to, or just perplexed by, Britain’s calls for some kind of formalised Anglosphere alliance.

The tragedy of the different national orientations that have emerged in British politics after empire — whether pro-European, Anglo-American, Anglospheric or some combination of these — is that none of them has yet been the compelling, coherent and popular answer to the country’s most important question: How should Britain find its way in the wider, modern world?

As long as that is still being asked, the Anglosphere will continue to be an answer for some of Britain’s political dreamers.

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In reality, the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand show no inclination to join Britain in new political and economic alliances