The Anglosphere

[Dashing_Chap]

I've been using this term for a few months now regarding the Brexit shenanigans and I was quietly hoping it would come to the forefront of our national policy. I finally heard it mentioned on Radio 4 today ergo I thought it deserves a thread of its own.

The idea of the Anglosphere is for Britain to forge closer ties with her English speaking allies and Commonwealth nations. Anglosphere - Wikipedia this may even result in Canadian/Australian/NZ passports waivers and ease of movement between countries. This makes far more sense to me as I'm far more likely to visit those countries than somewhere like Romania.

The government are also taking a greater interest in southeast Asia, which directly affects UK investment in that area, as well as supporting Aus NZ. We're even using and building the same ships as CANZAC.*

What do you guys think? Is it a goer? Unfortunately the Corbyn screamers will probably label it as racist as it only includes English speakers.

*
Canadian Type 26 Frigate contract awarded after legal challenge dismissed

Australia officially announces $26B frigate contract. Here are the build details

https://www.smh.com.au/world/europe/uk-navy-to-push-into-asia-pacific-with-increased-lethality-minister-says-20190212-p50x47.html

 

[HappyNomad]

This makes far more sense to me as I'm far more likely to visit those countries than somewhere like Romania

Klaus Iohannis called. He said, "Thank fcuk for that."

 

[kelvin_273]

I've been using this term for a few months now regarding the Brexit shenanigans and I was quietly hoping it would come to the forefront of our national policy. I finally heard it mentioned on Radio 4 today ergo I thought it deserves a thread of its own.

The idea of the Anglosphere is for Britain to forge closer ties with her English speaking allies and Commonwealth nations. Anglosphere - Wikipedia this may even result in Canadian/Australian/NZ passports waivers and ease of movement between countries. This makes far more sense to me as I'm far more likely to visit those countries than somewhere like Romania.

The government are also taking a greater interest in southeast Asia, which directly affects UK investment in that area, as well as supporting Aus NZ. We're even using and building the same ships as CANZAC.*

What do you guys think? Is it a goer? Unfortunately the Corbyn screamers will probably label it as racist as it only includes English speakers.

*
Canadian Type 26 Frigate contract awarded after legal challenge dismissed

Australia officially announces $26B frigate contract. Here are the build details

https://www.smh.com.au/world/europe/uk-navy-to-push-into-asia-pacific-with-increased-lethality-minister-says-20190212-p50x47.html

 

[Charlie4]

Strangely enough, my dear old mum maintained this back in the 70's, what with New Zealand lamb and those nice Canucks.

Having said that, she was slightly to the right of Adolf Hitler in her politics, god bless her, the crazy old racist!

 

[supermatelot]

Strangely enough, my dear old mum maintained this back in the 70's, what with New Zealand lamb and those nice Canucks.

Having said that, she was slightly to the right of Adolf Hitler in her politics, god bless her, the crazy old racist!

She was left wing then? / centrist left?

 

[vvaannmmaann]

What this Commonwealth?

• Antigua and Barbuda
• Australia
• Bangladesh
• Barbados
• Belize
• Botswana
• Brunei
• Cameroon
• Canada
• Dominica
• Fiji
• The Gambia
• Ghana
• Grenada
• Grenadines
• Guyana
• India
• Jamaica
• Kenya
• Kiribati
• Lesotho
• Malawi
• Malaysia
• Malta
• Mauritius
• Mozambique
• Namibia
• Nauru
• New Zealand
• Nigeria
• Pakistan
• Papua New Guinea
• Republic of Cyprus
• Rwanda
• Samoa
• Seychelles
• Sierra Leone
• Singapore
• Solomon Islands
• South Africa
• Sri Lanka
• St Christopher and Nevis
• St Lucia
• St Vincent and the
• Swaziland
• The Bahamas
• Tonga
• Trinidad and Tobago
• Tuvalu
• Uganda
• United Kingdom
• United Republic of Tanzania
• Vanuatu
• Zambia
• Zimbabwe

Good luck with that.

 

[Goatman]

What do you guys think? Is it a goer? Unfortunately the Corbyn screamers will probably label it as racist as it only includes English speakers.

The Frogs call their version La Francophonie - and its 160M strong according to my old OU course lit.

There's an old joke that France never gave up it's African colonies, merely held them at arms length for a while.

This amusing visualisation of the World as a flat object* may help :

It may come as news to the Vietnamese that they are still French speakers.....




* It is of course a disc , supported on the back of four elephants who stand in turn on the shell of the Great A'Tuin....as any fule kno.

 

[Charlie4]

What this Commonwealth?

• Antigua and Barbuda
• Australia
• Bangladesh
• Barbados
• Belize
• Botswana
• Brunei
• Cameroon
• Canada
• Dominica
• Fiji
• The Gambia
• Ghana
• Grenada
• Grenadines
• Guyana
• India
• Jamaica
• Kenya
• Kiribati
• Lesotho
• Malawi
• Malaysia
• Malta
• Mauritius
• Mozambique
• Namibia
• Nauru
• New Zealand
• Nigeria
• Pakistan
• Papua New Guinea
• Republic of Cyprus
• Rwanda
• Samoa
• Seychelles
• Sierra Leone
• Singapore
• Solomon Islands
• South Africa
• Sri Lanka
• St Christopher and Nevis
• St Lucia
• St Vincent and the
• Swaziland
• The Bahamas
• Tonga
• Trinidad and Tobago
• Tuvalu
• Uganda
• United Kingdom
• United Republic of Tanzania
• Vanuatu
• Zambia
• Zimbabwe

Good luck with that.

Rwanda was never commonwealth, francophone.

 

[vvaannmmaann]

Rwanda was never commonwealth, francophone.

The Commonwealth has admitted Rwanda as its 54th member.
The African country was admitted at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Trinidad and Tobago, a statement from the group said.
A Rwandan minister said the move showed his country's "tremendous progress" over the last 15 years.
The former colony of Germany and Belgium is the second country to be admitted without a British colonial past or constitutional link to Britain.
BBC News - Rwanda becomes a member of the Commonwealth

 

[exbleep]

Rwanda was never commonwealth, francophone.

Neither was Mozambique, it was a Portuguese colony but was admitted to the British Commonwealth as was Rwanda.

Oh, and the British Commonwealth is out of date. It's now called the Commonwealth of Nations. Still good old Betty in charge, though.

 

[Charlie4]

The Commonwealth has admitted Rwanda as its 54th member.
The African country was admitted at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Trinidad and Tobago, a statement from the group said.
A Rwandan minister said the move showed his country's "tremendous progress" over the last 15 years.
The former colony of Germany and Belgium is the second country to be admitted without a British colonial past or constitutional link to Britain.
BBC News - Rwanda becomes a member of the Commonwealth

I stand corrected gentlemen. My experience dates from the unpleasantness of '94/95, and I wasn't aware we could now tack on any old nation we fancied.

Everyday's a school day.

 

[Deleted 158059]

5 eyes apart, seems like an imaginary construct in reality

Opinion | Britain, Time to Let Go of the ‘Anglosphere’

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 this 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. We have family ties. We even share similar legal systems. The usual barriers to trade are largely absent.”
In 2013, Boris Johnson, a prominent Brexit supporter and foreign secretary until he also resigned this 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 Prime Minister Theresa May’s most recent plan for Brexit, which includes concessions to European Union rules to make trading with the bloc easier post-Brexit and which, in Mr. Johnson’s view, has “suffocated” the dream of a global Britain, trading with the wider world.
President Trump arrived in Britain on Thursday 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 decolonization and Britain’s entry to the European Community.
Then, in the early 1990s, after the Maastricht Treaty created the European Union, those who were skeptical of Britain’s participation in the whole European project reinvented the Anglosphere, somewhat, as a way to imagine Britain’s future as a global, deregulated and privatized economy outside the European Union. It’s this idealized version of the Anglosphere that was an important part of why Britain, in June 2016, decided to leave the European Union.
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 United States, Australia and New Zealand, as well as rising Asian powers like India.

But has the idea of the Anglosphere ever actually existed outside of the imaginations of British politicians?
The late-Victorian statesman Joseph Chamberlain tried to unite the settler dominions of the British Empire, like Canada, Australia and New Zealand, in a tariff union, but he was defeated by fierce resistance from free-traders, the City of London and working-class voters who responded to concerns that the price of food would rise as a result.

After World War II, the Conservative leader Winston Churchill famously sought to place Britain at the critical intersection of the “three majestic circles” of the British Empire and Commonwealth, the English-speaking countries of North America and a “United Europe.” But at that point, British power was already on the wane. Instead, the Cold War world was dominated by the superpowers of the United States and the Soviet Union. Churchill’s vision did not survive the changing economic and political realities of the 1950s and ’60s.
In the 1960s, the iconoclastic Conservative Enoch Powell railed against allowing subjects of the former British Empire to immigrate to Britain — a legacy of imperial overreach that he believed was endangering the culture and heritage of England. Powell thought that the only kind of national community that could prosper was one where its members share the same racial background, culture and customs. But — though he had his supporters — his attempts to prevent Commonwealth immigrants from making Britain their home was defeated by the growing diversity of multicultural Britain and the unwillingness of the Conservative Party to adopt his agenda.

Whenever anyone has tried to actually apply the idea of an Anglosphere, in its various guises, it has always collided with reality. Economic interest or politics or national security has never been enough to persuade the peoples of these different countries to enter into an Anglosphere alliance. And the current Brexit-loving advocates of a global Britain, leading the world in free trade, will meet the same fate.

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. Such a deal raises the specter of British voters eating chlorinated chicken and hormone-injected beef while watching the revered National Health Service being opened up to American multinationals.

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 massive 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 Anglosphere 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 formalized Anglosphere alliance.

Some pomp and ceremony on this visit might improve relations between Mrs. May and Mr. Trump, which reportedly are not very warm. But it’s sensible to be skeptical that Mr. Trump will think that the Anglosphere is any kind of answer for the United States, just as it has never really been the answer in the past.

Despite this, and despite its practical shortcomings, the idea of the Anglosphere will probably endure.

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.

Michael Kenny and Nick Pearce are authors of “Shadows of Empire: The Anglosphere in British Politics.”

 

[greyfergie]

You and cut and paste

 

[Dashing_Chap]

Copying from the NY times, that's what the Americans have to say, some Anzacs and Canadians seem quite keen on it.

 

[S11Blade]

Personally if you want to do business on a fair basis then welcome. Want to act the cnut then do one. Hopefully the anglosphere would tend to the former but if they don't then no special pleading.

 

[CaptainRidiculous]

Yep. Go to Mozambique and try too find and English speaker...
WTF?

 

[terminal]

I've been using this term for a few months now regarding the Brexit shenanigans and I was quietly hoping it would come to the forefront of our national policy. I finally heard it mentioned on Radio 4 today ergo I thought it deserves a thread of its own.

The idea of the Anglosphere is for Britain to forge closer ties with her English speaking allies and Commonwealth nations. Anglosphere - Wikipedia this may even result in Canadian/Australian/NZ passports waivers and ease of movement between countries. This makes far more sense to me as I'm far more likely to visit those countries than somewhere like Romania.

The government are also taking a greater interest in southeast Asia, which directly affects UK investment in that area, as well as supporting Aus NZ. We're even using and building the same ships as CANZAC.*

What do you guys think? Is it a goer? Unfortunately the Corbyn screamers will probably label it as racist as it only includes English speakers.

*
Canadian Type 26 Frigate contract awarded after legal challenge dismissed

Australia officially announces $26B frigate contract. Here are the build details

https://www.smh.com.au/world/europe/uk-navy-to-push-into-asia-pacific-with-increased-lethality-minister-says-20190212-p50x47.html

You're probably looking for this.
Main web page: Home
News: CANZUK International
Who is involved: The CANZUK International Team

With the last link above, be sure to read the list of people on the Political Advisory Board. There's a load of sitting MPs. opposition critics / shadow cabinet members, former cabinet ministers, and at least three serious recent major candidates for major party leadership. Some of the names on the Executive Board and Advisory Board seem well connected in the political and financial world as well. They're not a bunch of cranks, but I don't know to what degree they see this as a serious thing versus being a harmless hobby. I don't see any current government MPs there, but I wouldn't expect them to put their names on something like this that wasn't approved government policy.

I wouldn't care to even guess how seriously to take this, but it's probably what you should be following if this is what interests you.

 

[retread2]

5 eyes apart, seems like an imaginary construct in reality

Opinion | Britain, Time to Let Go of the ‘Anglosphere’

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 this 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. We have family ties. We even share similar legal systems. The usual barriers to trade are largely absent.”
In 2013, Boris Johnson, a prominent Brexit supporter and foreign secretary until he also resigned this 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 Prime Minister Theresa May’s most recent plan for Brexit, which includes concessions to European Union rules to make trading with the bloc easier post-Brexit and which, in Mr. Johnson’s view, has “suffocated” the dream of a global Britain, trading with the wider world.
President Trump arrived in Britain on Thursday 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 decolonization and Britain’s entry to the European Community.
Then, in the early 1990s, after the Maastricht Treaty created the European Union, those who were skeptical of Britain’s participation in the whole European project reinvented the Anglosphere, somewhat, as a way to imagine Britain’s future as a global, deregulated and privatized economy outside the European Union. It’s this idealized version of the Anglosphere that was an important part of why Britain, in June 2016, decided to leave the European Union.
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 United States, Australia and New Zealand, as well as rising Asian powers like India.

But has the idea of the Anglosphere ever actually existed outside of the imaginations of British politicians?
The late-Victorian statesman Joseph Chamberlain tried to unite the settler dominions of the British Empire, like Canada, Australia and New Zealand, in a tariff union, but he was defeated by fierce resistance from free-traders, the City of London and working-class voters who responded to concerns that the price of food would rise as a result.

View attachment 377369

After World War II, the Conservative leader Winston Churchill famously sought to place Britain at the critical intersection of the “three majestic circles” of the British Empire and Commonwealth, the English-speaking countries of North America and a “United Europe.” But at that point, British power was already on the wane. Instead, the Cold War world was dominated by the superpowers of the United States and the Soviet Union. Churchill’s vision did not survive the changing economic and political realities of the 1950s and ’60s.
In the 1960s, the iconoclastic Conservative Enoch Powell railed against allowing subjects of the former British Empire to immigrate to Britain — a legacy of imperial overreach that he believed was endangering the culture and heritage of England. Powell thought that the only kind of national community that could prosper was one where its members share the same racial background, culture and customs. But — though he had his supporters — his attempts to prevent Commonwealth immigrants from making Britain their home was defeated by the growing diversity of multicultural Britain and the unwillingness of the Conservative Party to adopt his agenda.

Whenever anyone has tried to actually apply the idea of an Anglosphere, in its various guises, it has always collided with reality. Economic interest or politics or national security has never been enough to persuade the peoples of these different countries to enter into an Anglosphere alliance. And the current Brexit-loving advocates of a global Britain, leading the world in free trade, will meet the same fate.

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. Such a deal raises the specter of British voters eating chlorinated chicken and hormone-injected beef while watching the revered National Health Service being opened up to American multinationals.

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 massive 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 Anglosphere 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 formalized Anglosphere alliance.

Some pomp and ceremony on this visit might improve relations between Mrs. May and Mr. Trump, which reportedly are not very warm. But it’s sensible to be skeptical that Mr. Trump will think that the Anglosphere is any kind of answer for the United States, just as it has never really been the answer in the past.

Despite this, and despite its practical shortcomings, the idea of the Anglosphere will probably endure.

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.

Michael Kenny and Nick Pearce are authors of “Shadows of Empire: The Anglosphere in British Politics.”

I'm interested that the map shows what is now know as Namibia described as being 'formerly in the British Empire". My understanding is that prior to WW1 it was a German colony (Deutsch Sud-West Afrika) and after WW1 it was entrusted to South Africa in whose care it remained until independence in 1990. Is that not a tenuous connection to the Empire? Happy to be corrected.

 

[S11Blade]

I'm interested that the map shows what is now know as Namibia described as being 'formerly in the British Empire". My understanding is that prior to WW1 it was a German colony (Deutsch Sud-West Afrika) and after WW1 it was entrusted to South Africa in whose care it remained until independence in 1990. Is that not a tenuous connection to the Empire? Happy to be corrected.

Afair as SA was a dominion it classed as a British colony post ww1

 

[retread2]

Afair as SA was a dominion it classed as a British colony post ww1

Fairy Nuff.