Anglospheremonger

Churchill’s career was concerned with defending civilization against totalitarians and empire against its nonwhite subjects’ demands for self-rule. Hannan is the product of a United Kingdom that is diminished militarily and economically, even as the Anglosphere (whose core identity was once ethnically Anglo/Scots) has transmuted into a multinational, multi-ethnic culture at peak influence. English is the world’s lingua franca, while groups in developing countries around the world value the Anglosphere’s ideals of liberty, law, and democracy. 

Despite this, Hannan is gloomy. Wrapping himself in Herbert Butterfield’s Whig interpretation of history (though he purports to disclaim Butterfield’s more extreme formulations), Hannan argues that the Norman Conquest marked the fall of a medieval Germanic Eden and launched a millennium-long struggle between Whig forces of liberty and Tory forces of statism and aristocracy. This eternal bright line never existed, and it is odd that Hannan, himself a member of the British Conservative party, thinks it does. The Normans, rather than importing continental villainy, were themselves Germanic (from the Scandinavian branch), and the later, unimpeachably Germanic Habsburgs and Hohenzollerns were no lovers of freedom. Hannan even claims that people think more clearly in the good old Germanic tongue of English, using himself as prime example. While English grammar, thanks to multiple medieval invasions, actually is simpler than its Germanic kin and the Romance languages, most English vocabulary is French-derived. In this, as in many aspects of Anglosphere culture, the hybridity is what is most distinctive.

The Manichean model downplays the increasing trade, transportation improvements, and arms technology that led large states commanding centralized military power to coalesce, starting in the later Middle Ages. Louis XIV exemplified the absolutist trend, but it is absurd to call him a “totalitarian”—his scorched-earth wars and personality cult notwithstanding. Hannan also downplays the incentives for oligarchic elites throughout history to feather their own nests. Even medieval Italian and German city-states—which shared with England cheap water transport, strong commercial classes, relatively broad franchises, and admixtures of Germanic culture—either fell under the control of larger states or became absolutist or oligarchic. In grabbing for power, England’s aggressive monarchs may have produced enough centralization to fend off other expanding absolutist states, as well as the triumph of a closed English oligarchy.

The question is why the United Kingdom was able to resist the absolutist trend and ultimately become the template for modern democracy. Hannan correctly observes that Great Britain’s island status limited monarchs’ ability to justify standing armies. This made it easier for elites to organize politically and grow their commercial power beyond central control. Similar processes were at work in Britain’s close cultural kin, the Dutch Republic, with its landscape of river deltas, islands, and inland sea at the edge of the Holy Roman Empire. Ironically, the United Kingdom was launched to world power when the Dutch stadholder and aspiring English-Scottish King William III turned its water barrier into a water highway with the amphibious invasion that triggered 1688’s Glorious Revolution and a 25-year war with Louis XIV. The Glorious Revolution imported Dutch concepts of a limited monarchial executive with military powers, as well as religious freedom.

Hannan traces the growth of freedom through three Anglosphere civil wars that, he argues, were conservative in their efforts to restore lost liberties. The English Civil War of the 1640s damaged absolutist monarchy, while the Glorious Revolution secured a constitutional monarchy. The third and culminating revolution was the American, which set the model for the descendants of the British settler colonies. Hannan poses these decentralized, self-governing independent nations with universal franchises, open economies, and tight informal ties against the overweening European Union.

Yet this only partially describes the Anglosphere’s colonial expansion. Forced labor and land seized from indigenous peoples fueled the economic booms and commercial wealth that led to open societies. While Hannan correctly notes that British liberty ideology led to the abolition of slavery, equality before the law, and universal suffrage, this was not the predestined path. The expansion of the franchise and popular rights could also lead to herrenvolk democracy (in which an ethnically defined people rules over subordinated groups). Herrenvolk democracy triggered three more civil wars in the Anglosphere, which Hannan barely addresses: the American Civil War, South Africa’s Boer War, and Ireland’s 20th-century conflicts. All were partial victories for liberty and freedom ideology but left racial or religious subordination in place for the better part of a century.

Hannan’s blindness to the temptations of oligarchy, and of herrenvolk democracy, leads to sweeping claims about the triumph of Anglosphere values in nonsettler, ethnically non-Anglo, former British colonies. Among the former colonies he cites, India, the country longest ruled by Britain, has had robust democratic institutions (parliamentary elections, free press, independent judiciary) for over a century. Ethnically and religiously fractured Nigeria has only recently emerged from a series of military dictatorships, while South Africa is functionally a one-party state ruled by the African National Congress, with the potential to degrade its democratic institutions. Hannan includes authoritarian Singapore in the group, although its commitment to Anglosphere values is limited to commercial courts and racial equality.

Hannan’s loathing of the federal EU blinds him to a crucial Dutch Republic innovation, transmitted to the Anglosphere via the United States: federalism. Our Constitution blended aspects of the Dutch Republic’s Union of Utrecht with the unwritten English constitution. As the United Kingdom relaxed its hold on its dominions and colonies, Canada, Australia, South Africa, India, and Nigeria became federal states. Within the Anglosphere, Britain itself was an outlier that grew to be nearly as centralized as France by the mid-20th century, although recent decades have seen the start of devolution. Today, the United Kingdom is pondering its federalist futures: whether to pursue further internal devolution in the wake of the Scottish independence vote and whether the EU’s statism and overreach outweigh its value in submerging the conflicts of its nation-state members.

While the Anglosphere’s model of liberty and democracy has not been Hannan’s struggle of virtuous Whigs against autocracy, many groups did push for greater freedom over the millennium. Their achievements are not diminished, even if they sometimes acted as grasping monarchs, oligarchs, or herrenvolk democrats. The Anglosphere’s legacy of channeling conflict into free institutions, where winners cannot take all, remains a light unto the world.

Jay Weiser is associate professor of law at Baruch College.