WASHINGTON, May 10 (UPI) -- An Open Letter to John Howard:
Dear Prime Minister:
Please accept my sincere congratulations. Last week, you made one of the best and most succinct statements of the underlying logic of the Anglosphere concept that I have seen. In your comments at the United Nations, you stated that "You should never get yourself forced into choosing between your history and your geography." Following on, you said "I am not into putting Australia into particular spheres, Anglo or otherwise, nor am I into making a choice."
My first reaction on seeing those words was "I wish Tony Blair would say that!" The fledgling Anglosphere movement is dedicated to, among other things, restoring the balance between history and geography that has been lost during the Cold War and not yet regained. Throughout the Cold War era, the particular ties of history -- language, institutions, and values in common -- were subordinated to the need to apply a lowest-common-denominator definition of the Free World, some parts of which were freer than others. The logic of geographically-based exclusive blocs, such as the European Union, reigned supreme.
Australia was a conspicuous victim of this mentality. Most of the complex and useful ties among Commonwealth nations, and particularly those between Australia and Britain, were ruthlessly severed at the demand of the Continental Europeans as the price of Britain's admission to what is now the European Union. Australians well remember veterans of El Alamein being forced to wait in the foreigner's queues at Heathrow while the German veterans who had fought against them went through alongside British citizens. Had Britain demanded what you advocate -- not being forced to choose -- this would not have happened.
The Anglosphere movement does not demand that Australia, or any other Anglosphere nation, choose between its historical ties and its geographical ties. What we demand is that choice be restored to the Anglosphere nations -- the choice to form useful links for trade, security, science and technology cooperation, and free movement of people among Anglosphere nations, not in place of, but in addition to the useful links with our geographical neighbors and other friends around the world.
It is the advocates of geographical blocs, such as the advocates of an inward-looking European superstate defined in opposition to "the Anglo-Saxons" -- that threaten to force us to choose one or the other. The Anglosphere movement in the United States and Canada particularly favors free trade with Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Britain, Ireland, the Caribbean Anglosphere, and eventually India and the African Anglosphere as well.
However, we also welcome free trade with Latin America, so long as it is not exclusive, and would very much like to see a Trans-Atlantic Free Trade Area including both European Union and non-EU states. Similarly, Australian Anglospherists do not want to cut off Australia's ties to Asia, Continental Europe or anywhere else. Like British and Irish ties to Continental Europe, or U.S. ties to Latin America, these are mandated by geographic reality, and to ignore them would be to miss an enormous opportunity.
Having said that, it would be equally foolish to ignore the particular opportunities presented by the Anglosphere. The revolution of the Internet and other modern telecommunications has already created a virtual Anglosphere. During the debate prior to the onset of the Afghan and Iraqi wars, a furious debate raged across the Internet. But the two sides to the debate did not divide on national lines, but on political ones across the English-speaking world, with Australian, American, British, Canadian, and other opponents of Taliban and Baathist thuggery debating those who felt intervention was unjustified.
This virtual Anglosphere (in which Australia is already fully immersed) is just one more phenomenon of a wider growing together of Anglosphere nations, due to the millions of commercial and human links forged one by one, mostly by private and individual actions. Many of these links are forged by the great mass of recent immigrants from India and East Asia, Anglosphere Africa, the Caribbean, and Southern and Eastern Europe. It is more usual than not for such families to have members in London, Sydney, Vancouver and New York as well as in their homelands. This is a reality that, given fairly modest institutional actions to assist it, can enrich and benefit all of our nations.
The Anglosphere movement does not want an English-speaking equivalent of the European Union, or an inward-looking "Anglo-Saxon bloc." You are right to reject such a possibility. What we advocate is what I have called in my writing a "network commonwealth" -- a loose set of cooperative links and institutions, not all of which need be joined by all Anglosphere nations, and which complement, rather than replace, existing institutions like NATO or the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Some nations would emphasize trade and cooperation; others security -- fine. Unlike geographical blocs, we do not need to enforce uniformity or exclusion.
This network commonwealth is already partly in place. The three pairs of the core Anglosphere nations -- the U.S. and Canada; Britain and Ireland; Australia and New Zealand, all have very substantial mechanisms for joint economic cooperation and free movement of people. The proposed U.S.-Australia free trade agreement would begin to link two of these pairs. In security affairs, virtually all of Australia's key security arrangements are intra-Anglosphere, especially the ANZUS and USUKA agreements, and technology-sharing arrangements between the US and Australia with which only Britain is equally trusted.
When action was required to save the Timorese in their separatist struggle against Indonesia, it was overwhelmingly the distant and disinterested Anglosphere nations that sent tangible assistance. This is likely to be the case in future crises as well, in a region that cannot count on stability for the foreseeable future. Australia would be prudent to look at strengthening the institutional ties that run along these natural lines of common outlook. Such ties become another strand of the network commonwealth.
The Anglosphere movement is in its infancy, but the message has attracted support from a wide variety of people and places throughout the English-speaking world. You will find as the political battle to ratify the U.S.-Australia free trade agreement heats up that we will be vocal in supporting it. We look forward to the day when a new set of institutions and ties complements both the global organizations like the United Nations, and existing regional ones. Then Australians may be free to travel and trade more easily with the United States, and once again with Britain. If the Anglosphere vision is realized, Australia will have more options, not fewer. I look forward to your support of a movement to increase those options.
Your course of refusing to choose between Australia's geographical and historical realities is right on target. The Anglosphere perspective aids in restoring a proper balance between the two spheres of association, neither of which should have to be exclusive. All we ask is that you give it a fair go.
With best regards,
James C. Bennett
