The Anglosphere as the Big Somewhere

Two decades ago, I sat down to write an essay conceived as an answer to the following question: “Given that railways, steamships and the telegraph had made large-scale national democratic federations practical, what new political form would satellite communications, jet aircraft and bulk container ships enable?” In the essay, I looked at the fascinating web of connections that had been formed by international special-purpose intergovernmental organisations. Although the United Nations and its related global arms had received most of the attention since its formation, and ambitious regional ventures like the European Union and its imitators took up most of the rest of the limelight, a vast web of technical organisations well out of public attention wielded substantial power, often far more significant to a company’s operations than the actions of national regulators. Interestingly enough, I thought, many of these organisations coincided with membership in NATO, while many others had a different, but frequently recurring pattern of membership: the USA, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand—the old US-Commonwealth alliance of the Second World War, with the Commonwealth side now disaggregated into its separate member-states.

I noticed other organisations organised along cultural-linguistic lines, mostly formed in the footprint of the old European maritime empires—French, Spanish and Portuguese as well as English. One organisation stood out as an obvious exception: the European Union. At this time general intellectual opinion was bullish on the European Union, coming as it was off successes in aiding the transition to democracy in Southern Europe, and now looking to do the same in Eastern Europe. The Single Currency, then in process of formation, was touted as a challenger to the American dollar’s status as a global reserve currency, and in general pundits were viewing the EU as a new world power that might surpass the US for global leadership.

Even then I had my doubts. As a principal of several private space launch ventures, I had watched the European space ventures closely, and as from time to time the private US industry had been aligned with Arianespace, the European space launch consortium, on several issues, I had developed good relations with some of its executives. Their complaints about the faults of the EU’s technology apparatus, combined with the visible gap between European science (which was good) and European technology development (which underperformed its potential consistently) suggested to me that the European model, as it stood, was inherently unsuited to seize or exploit leadership. (I also had some experience with the European technology apparatus from the inside, being on the board of directors of a small Belfast-based software company in the Queen’s University incubator.) The US space launch capability, still primarily a NASA monopoly, had taken a massive wrong turn during the Space Shuttle era.

The Europeans found themselves in the lead almost by accident, having an unexceptional, but perfectly serviceable launch vehicle available after the Shuttle’s failure to meet its economic or operational goals left the US industry scrambling to reintroduce old rockets to fill its place. The Europeans were in the position of the dog that had always chased cars, and finally managed to catch one—and had no idea what to do with it. They had at that moment the opportunity to follow up Ariane’s lead position with a next-generation launch vehicle that would cement their position for the foreseeable future. Instead, they were first undercut by Russian and Chinese dumping of launch services produced in low-wage economies that were still substantially insulated from market forces, and eventually undercut by US entrepreneurial launchers that introduced the next-generation capabilities they could have developed, but didn’t.

I had some experience as a maverick observer calling out an overhyped phenomenon. My own history as a sceptic of NASA’s Shuttle ambitions, and advocate of an unlikely alternative (private launch development)—which positions were ultimately vindicated—left me unafraid to be sceptical of the widespread claims of a radiant future for united Europe, and to look more closely at alternative scenarios. Looking again at the phenomenon of globe-spanning cultural-linguistic networks, and remembering the already dense network of US and Commonwealth states, I considered the possibility that the English-speaking states, as a network, would emerge as the successor to the US alone rather than the EU, or China, or a US-EU duopoly as some posited.

I dubbed these cultural-linguistic networked entities “network civilisations”, a form intermediate between nation-states and a (posited) global civilisation. The institutional form of these civilisations that I saw emerging I dubbed the “Network Commonwealth”. The English-speaking example of such, which I saw as the first to emerge, I called the Anglosphere, a coinage that appeared once, as a throw-away, in The Diamond Age, a futurist novel by Neal Stephenson. (I remain interested in the development of the other network civilisations. I recently had the pleasure of writing a cover blurb for a book titled Brazil and the Emergence of a Digital Lusosphere, edited by Valnora Leister, a Brazilian who had read my book The Anglosphere Challenge.)

I first produced a long essay of around thirty pages, “The Network Commonwealth”, which I circulated to a few friends for comment. I was sufficiently encouraged by the comments, and also made aware of the need to elaborate a number of the points more fully, that I gradually turned the essay into a longer book, and made preliminary inquiries towards getting it published. In the course of circulating the manuscript, I made the acquaintance of John O’Sullivan, who strongly encouraged me to pursue publication.

Late in 1999, John called me one afternoon and asked whether I could come to the Eastern Shore of Maryland the next day and speak at an event in front of Margaret Thatcher. I did so, presenting the thesis of the manuscript, and received a warm response from most of the audience, including Lady Thatcher, who spoke with me at length afterwards. The audience included quite a few prominent British and American politicians of the Right, and there was much equivocation, especially among the British politicians, as to what exactly should be done about Britain’s membership in the EU. Having no political career to risk, I made a forthright and unequivocal recommendation that the UK leave the EU, which was greeted with applause by those who had been too cautious to express the thought themselves. Sixteen and a half years later, this came to pass with the victory of the Leave position in the referendum of 2016.

That event introduced the word Anglosphere into public discourse, and ultimately led to the publication of the book, originally titled The Network Commonwealth, but renamed The Anglosphere Challenge at the suggestion of the publisher. As this review evidences, it has now become part of the English language, although it is often used as a mere synonym for the Five Eyes set of nations, or their governments, which was not the original definition as used in my book. As I originally defined it, it included all people, whether in states or not, who habitually thought and spoke in English, were linked by networked media to the rest of the Anglosphere, and who adhered primarily to the anthropological norms of English-speaking cultures. However, it was also useful as a more concise synonym for “the English-speaking peoples”, or “nations”, without the overhanging imperial connotations, and as such it seems to have established itself.

Now comes before us the subject of this review, Shadows of Empire: The Anglosphere in British Politics, by Michael Kenny and Nick Pearce, professors at Cambridge and Bath universities respectively. The book is an examination of the role of various concepts of the English-speaking world (which they term, somewhat anachronistically, the Anglosphere) from around the 1860s to the present day, with an emphasis, at the end, on the role played by the concept of the Anglosphere as an alternative to the European Union as an alliance, market and vector of collaboration during the 2016 EU Referendum. They write from an explicit position as having been advocates of the UK remaining in the EU during the referendum, and of the UK remaining in the Single Market and Customs Union as exit terms are under negotiation. However, the book is a serious attempt at analysis, rather than a polemic, and the explicit discussion of their opinions in regard to these questions is confined to a few pages of regret in the concluding chapter. This tone makes their book much more useful than the hysterical polemics that have predominated in much of the commentary since the referendum.

I should disclose at this point that the authors and I were all speakers at a British Academy meeting in June 2017 titled “The Anglosphere and the Others: The English-Speaking Peoples in a Changing World Order”, a meeting of which Professor Kenny was a convenor. As with the book, the substance of the discussions was cordial and serious, with little polemic, and although most of the participants (two-thirds at least) were pro-Remain and did not believe that the benefits derived from increased Anglosphere ties would be worth the cost in terms of looser European ties, a vocal minority took the opposite point of view. Pearce and Kenny were of course among the former. A number of the authorities cited by the authors were among the participants as well, most notably Professor Duncan Bell. Thus the book can be fairly said to draw on most of the extant academic and commentariat opinion on the topic of the concept of the Anglosphere.

Structurally, the book begins with a summary of the sentiment in favour of an English-speaking union (including the USA), or alternatively an imperial federation (consisting of Britain and the white colonies of settlement), concentrating principally on the theorists Charles Dilke and J.R. Seeley, and the slightly later imperial federationists such as the Canadian George Parkin. In this the authors essentially summarise the study of the topic by Duncan Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain. The economic drivers behind this movement are also discussed using the framework presented by the New Zealander James Belich (who was not present at the London meeting) in his 2011 book Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World 1783–1939. The authors use the term “Anglo-World” in particular to describe the economic system that prevailed from the latter half of the nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth, with a high degree of trade within the Commonwealth and strong links between the financial centres of New York and London. This led to a fusion of the English and north-east American elites, as epitomised in the highly visible American marriages of figures such as Lord Curzon and Randolph Churchill. Belich discusses the concept of an English-speaking union joining the empire and the United States, and particularly the role of Cecil Rhodes and his Round Table movement, which particularly affected South Africa and what was then Rhodesia and is now Zambia and Zimbabwe.

From there the story concentrates on Joseph Chamberlain and his support of imperial federation, and its (hoped-for) predecessor imperial preference, and the role of the Sterling Area. Through these mechanisms, the Commonwealth (partly excluding Canada, which remained outside the Sterling Area) remained a semi-protected economic world that did afford some insulation for its members from global shocks throughout the Great Depression and Second World War. A subsequent chapter explores the critical role of Winston Churchill and the somewhat clouded question of precisely how he saw Britain’s three circles of affiliation—Empire/Commonwealth, the Anglo-American relationship, and United Europe. It is clouded because he said different, somewhat contradictory things at various times, as circumstances, developments and probably moods impelled him to.

However, whether under Churchill or Attlee, American pressure eroded the Sterling Area and imperial preference, and gradually moved Britain and the remnants of the Anglo-World system into the more generalised world economy of the Bretton Woods system and full convertibility of sterling. (It is somewhat ironic that the attitudes of Chamberlain are most closely echoed today by the advocates of a United States of Europe—wanting high protective walls around a secure area in which they can maintain social protections, with the Eurozone playing the part of the Sterling Area. Like Chamberlain, they see themselves as surrounded by rising powers against whom they cannot compete. Since they must comply at least in theory with the WTO free-trade system, they rely on non-tariff barriers and pseudo-scientific theories to exclude competitors.)

The entry into the European Economic Community, of course, both reflected the demise of the old Anglo-World of the Sterling Area imperial preference, and ensured it would not be resurrected. One shortfall in Kenny and Pearce’s account is the absence of a serious Anglospheric initiative that for a time was Harold Wilson’s preferred choice over the EEC. This was the proposed North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement—not to be confused with the later NAFTA—that was discussed among Lyndon Johnson, Canadian PM Lester Pearson (its originator and keenest proponent) and Wilson in the mid-1960s. Planning had gone quite far and a draft agreement had been produced, but Lyndon Johnson’s increasing preoccupation with Vietnam, and loss of political capital, caused the idea to linger and die. It was not until Johnson’s departure from the Presidency that the British government decided that Europe was its only option to replace the lost Anglo-World system.

At this point the book’s narrative takes a dubious turn by devoting a chapter to Enoch Powell and his views on England, immigration and Europe. This would make sense if the book were titled “The European Question in British Politics”, since Powell’s departure from the Tory consensus on joining the EEC was a significant event in that process. However, he had little to do with the Anglosphere, except in a negative sense—he disliked the Commonwealth and thought it useless, hated America and wished Britain to distance itself from it, and barely tolerated the non-English parts of Britain, even though he ended up representing a Northern Ireland constituency in a party he didn’t really agree with.

One wonders at such attention to Powell while entirely omitting any discussion of people like James Burnham, who was highly influential in the immediate post-war period and who advocated (and predicted) a merged US–British Empire entity as the new hegemonic power. Of course such a union appeared in a dystopian form as “Oceania” in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, while its semi-mythical (and possibly fabricated) rebel theorist Emmanuel Goldstein’s tract (which also served as Orwell’s platform) was basically a paraphrase of Burnham.

Coming back to its subject, the book then describes Thatcher’s gradual evolution away from Europe, towards America, and ultimately towards advocacy of Brexit. Like Powell, though, she had little use for the Commonwealth in its modern form, but towards the end of her life she became supportive of the newer concepts of Anglosphere organisation, such as those I had described at the conference she attended.

The book then segues into a discussion of the modern concepts of the Anglosphere, and their dissemination into, and adoption by, first, a circle of thinkers in the think-tank worlds of the Anglosphere, and subsequently, by circles within the Conservative Party and parts of the right-wing public media in the United Kingdom. These ideas had a definite impact in several ways. For one, the Anglosphere idea was effectively detached from imperial nostalgia and previous racialised theories that posited an “Anglo-Saxon race” with a hierarchical position above the “dusky races” and for that matter non-Anglo-Saxon Europeans. For another, the idea that an Anglosphere alliance or axis should be Britain’s main international affiliation created a counter-narrative to the Europeanist story, that United Europe was the Radiant Future, and that without being part of it Britain would be isolated and ineffective.

Finally, the logical consequence of the Anglospherist position was that Britain must be entirely separate from the European Union, rather than hoping to reform it. This brought clarity and coherence to the demands of the Eurosceptic Right, which previously had been divided among various different groups critical of the EU, but pursuing a myriad of proposed solutions. If one strand of the Brexit campaign was the narrow, cramped and crabby Powellite vision of England alone, the Anglospherist vision was the open, liberal and future-looking Global Britain strand, as expressed by Boris Johnson, Douglas Carswell and Daniel Hannan, without which it is doubtful that the Leave position would have gained its majority.

The book then moves to a retelling of the Brexit referendum story and the significant role that the vision of the Anglosphere alternative played. Kenny and Pearce mention repeatedly the fact that, even without direct appeals to empire nostalgia, the past of Britain’s shared experience with the Commonwealth and the USA, especially in the two great world wars of the past century, presents a rich set of themes, tropes, imagery and associations that have surprising salience with all classes. This is true and was liberally used by Brexiteers. It was all the more effective because Remainers could not disparage these appeals without stirring up further memories. The best they could do was maintain the line that the EU was needed to prevent the recurrence of a European war. This was generally ineffective, partly because it was obviously untrue—it was clearly NATO that had kept the peace with its effective threat of overwhelming (that is, American) armed force that would be used should any European state think of turning aggressor again. The experiences of the Balkans in the 1990s only served to hammer home that point.

They then note the post-Brexit developments of the Anglosphere concept, particularly the growth of interest in the CANZUK (Canada-Australia-New Zealand-UK) concepts for free trade, free movement and further co-operation, including strategic, among those nations, being both Anglosphere and Westminster democracies.

The book concludes with a rather gloomy vision. The authors believe that the departure of the UK from the European Union, and specifically the Single Market and Customs Union, will degrade Britain’s ability to sell into the EU’s markets without corresponding gains from freer trade with Anglosphere, CANZUK or other non-EU states. They fear that Britain has been placed in a position of internal paralysis due to conflicting visions and sentiments, dividing on class, educational and regional lines—David Goodhart’s “Somewheres” versus the “Anywheres”—with the result that it will never be able to make a wholehearted, and therefore effective, commitment to any path, be it Europeanist, Anglospherist or Powellite solipsism.

What to make of all this?

First of all, it marks a re-evaluation of the Anglosphere concept and analysis on the part of the small corner of the academic world interested in such matters. The first serious look had been taken by Srdjan Vucetic, a Canadian academic of Balkan origins, in his 2011 book The Anglosphere: A Genealogy of a Racialized Identity in International Relations. (Vucetic was also present at the British Academy event.) In it he primarily analysed the Anglo-Saxonist and imperial federationist movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which, of course included theorists who utilised the racial thinking prevalent at that time. He viewed the contemporary Anglospherist movement as a sort of reflection of earlier movements, and saw the distinctions made regarding sociological characteristics (primarily radius-of-trust rankings) as a form of racialised analysis. Vucetic wrote at that time that he saw the Anglospherist movement of the early 2000s as a short-term reaction to specific events, including the Iraq War, and predicted that it would gradually fade away.

The fact that the Anglospherist movement and the recent related CANZUK movement instead increased in visibility and salience, and became a substantial component in the intellectual, rhetorical and symbolic appeal of the Brexit campaign, and of course the victory of the Brexit movement in 2016, all suggested that the concept was in fact not fading away. The British Academy meeting of June 2017 was an attempt to take another, more serious look at the concept.

Perhaps the most important admission made by the meeting’s participants was that the Anglosphere was not (as not infrequently charged in the past) merely a fiction, an imaginary category made up for political convenience by a few opportunists. It was a valid category of analysis, a useful predictor of many things in social science and history, and represented something that many people found to be—under one name or another—part of their identity and sentiments. As brought out by a number of presenters at the 2017 meeting, there were actually a large number of institutional ties among the CANZUK-plus-US nations, but for the most part they bore no explicit “Anglosphere” identity. The European Union loves to slap the blue flag on any effort involving all or some of its members, while the Anglosphere seemed to go out of its way to avoid any explicit categorisation of its institutions. Furthermore, it seemed quite likely to continue well into the future. Therefore, it deserved to be studied as such.

Kenny and Pearce’s book was a product of the same revisitation. As one of the objects of the book’s attention, how do I rate the accuracy, adequacy and applicability of the book’s argument?

To begin with, I found few if any direct, overt errors or misrepresentations. Those I did spot appeared to be inadvertent oversights; the Indian Anglospherist advocate is Nalapat, not Alapat; Owen Harries was not a supporter of the concept, but rather a critic. More common was the repetition of tropes that had currency in articles about the concept in outlets such as the Guardian or New Statesman, but no substance. Chief among them was the idea that “right-wing press lords” put wind in the sails of the idea through financial support and by ordering their outlets to support it editorially. Given that I was involved personally in most of the attempts to raise funding from or sell articles to such press lords and their outlets, I can safely assure them that such support was effectively non-existent.

The sum total of press lords who might actually have given some support was limited to two: Rupert Murdoch and Conrad Black. Murdoch is basically an unideological person who so far as I know has never explicitly mentioned, much less supported, the Anglosphere. Black, on the other hand, is an intellectually curious person who has written on a great number of topics, and who has suggested Anglosphere and CANZUK confederations (not under those names) in several think-piece articles over the years. However, he has never connected with or supported any organisation or person associated with these causes, to my knowledge. Of course, for a good deal of the time in question, his wealth had been attached by the US government and he would have had a hard time buying an extra Snickers bar from the prison commissary.

In so far as their papers were concerned, most of the right-wing and Tory press in the UK has run occasional articles on Anglospherist themes, and of course began using the word Anglosphere some time ago. These, however, were editorial decisions made by working editors and were made purely on the basis of general sympathy and their estimate of readers’ interests. They also printed quite a few articles and columns critical of the Anglosphere concept, again because they liked the idea of a back-and-forth argument to stimulate reader interest. The question of press lord support for the idea is not so much “opaque”, as Kenny and Pearce at one point describe it, but “invisible”, primarily since it was non-existent.

The same answer, writ large, holds for the question of think-tank support. Over the entire past twenty years, no think-tank has had a dedicated program for study or promotion of the Anglosphere concept. A number of meetings on the concept have been held at various institutions, supported primarily out of the institutions’ general endowment, but those were held primarily because some officer was searching for an interesting or timely topic. A number of commentators have mentioned that Anglospherists have few detailed proposals for how their institutions might function. This is because there has been no funding for the detailed research such proposals should have to be taken seriously.

In short, the Anglosphere idea has got as far as it has almost entirely on the dedication of a few individuals. If it does attract the support of substantial parties, one could expect to see a much higher profile.

In general, Kenny and Pearce’s study would have benefited from attention in three specific areas that were absent or under-served.

The first is the lack of any mention of the substantial work in the social sciences over the past fifty years vindicating the assumptions of the continuity of English-speaking society, and of the substantial exceptionalism of English-speaking society going back long before the Protestant Reformation, and of the individualism of English-speaking cultures. This research, coming from many disciplines, rejects much of the prior historiography still accepted in many circles. A proper discussion of this work would require an essay at least the length of this entire review, but I would at a minimum mention the work of Alan Macfarlane on English individualism, James Campbell on the continuity of English culture even before the Norman Conquest, David Hackett Fischer on the continuity of culture and institutions between England and America, Emmanuel Todd on family systems and the uniqueness of the English nuclear family, Claudio Véliz on the comparison of the English-speaking and Spanish-speaking worlds, and Kevin Phillips on continuities in civil conflicts of the English-speaking world.

The Anglosphere as a unique thing among the cultures of the world is a real phenomenon and only now is it being fully described. This is important among other things because it shows that distinctions that in the nineteenth century were attributed to “race” or genetics were real, but had perfectly non-racial explanations based on cultural evolution. In other words, the nineteenth-century Anglo-Saxonists were seeing real distinctions, but wrongly attributing them to race. (Much of this scholarship was not represented in The Anglosphere Challenge. A much fuller discussion along with an annotated bibliography can be found in my 2013 book America 3.0: Rebooting American Prosperity in the 21st Century, co-authored with Michael J. Lotus.)

Both Vucetic and Belich have at times suggested that the analysis of my books and those of other Anglospherists has created racialised hierarchies or categories. Due to the extreme stovepiping of current academia, I suspect much of the research I mentioned above, coming from sociology and anthropology, and providing sound cultural-evolutionary (and thus non-racial) explanations for such categorisations, was not familiar to these authors, coming from international relations and historiographical research communities. I find it ironic to be characterised as racial on one hand, while actual advocates of biological and genetic explanations such as John Derbyshire accuse me of “intellectual cowardice”, as he did in his review of America 3.0 in the Claremont Review, for adhering to cultural-evolutionary explanations.

Similarly, the gloomy forecast in the concluding chapter of Shadows of Empire states that geography will always rule trade. Yet that is a static forecast that fails to take into account the current rapid transformation of production, one fully as disruptive as the first industrial revolution. (Again, this is treated in some detail in America 3.0.) When my co-author and I set out to draft that book in 2011, we drew up a list of several dozen things we were sure that additive manufacturing (“3-D printing”) could never make. One by one, we found contrary examples, almost daily. By the time the book went to print, the entire list had been falsified. It is very possible that we are seeing the last decade in which most goods are mass-produced and distributed globally by container ship. All of the production processes that the UK negotiators are so anxious to continue co-producing with Europe may be shut down before the last transitional arrangements expire.

Nobody in the CANZUK or Anglospherist movements expects the trade patterns of 1970, much less 1890, to be resurrected by Brexit. Britain will not import chilled beef from Australia and send locomotives in return. Rather, the future lies in ventures like Rocket Labs, the small US-New Zealand company that recently launched a satellite into orbit from New Zealand, using a rocket designed collaboratively on line by small teams in both countries, with a mixture of small but high-value components sent from the US, to parts designed collaboratively on line and 3-D printed in New Zealand, to metal-bashing done in New Zealand. There would have been no big advantage if the two teams had been closer together geographically, and no big penalty had they been further apart. However, it did help enormously that the two teams both spoke English and had essentially the same ideas of how teams work together. It also helps that an American landing in New Zealand can walk through the fast customs channel with the US, UK, Australian and Canadian flags marking it.

Additionally, while geography does not change, transportation technology does, as has been noted as far back as Dilke’s and Seeley’s work in the mid-nineteenth century. A new wave of supersonic transport, quieter and more energy-efficient, is in research now—an effort in which I am involved. Elon Musk’s SpaceX have announced their intent to pursue ballistic point-to-point rocket transport between cities, using already-existing technologies. A mere halving of flight time would reduce intra-European flights only slightly, as most of the time in a London–Paris flight is taken up with taxiing, taking off and approach for landing, none of which can be speeded up. However, it would reduce London–Sydney times to those of a London–Vancouver trip, and a London–Toronto trip to a mere three hours. The annihilation of distance, which Seeley and Dilke may have been a bit premature in announcing, is in the process of being delivered.

Finally, the book would have benefited from a bit more awareness of the environment of the whole Anglosphere. The book treats the Anglosphere and CANZUK movements as essentially a UK political phenomenon, while a key assumption in its conclusions is that none of the other Anglosphere or CANZUK partners will particularly want to negotiate these sorts of structures with them. There are only a few mentions of the state of interest in the Anglosphere or CANZUK movements in the other countries involved.

The CANZUK movement, to consider one example, currently draws its memberships roughly proportionately to the populations of the nations involved, with New Zealand probably a bit over-represented. Age distribution tends to be somewhat bimodal, with clusters in the early-to-mid twenties and the late forties-through-sixties cohorts, but some representation in all age groups. Minority memberships are roughly proportional to their presence in the national populations, 10 to 15 per cent or so, predominantly of East and South Asian background. If one characteristic stands out it is that a high proportion have partners or parents from other Anglosphere nations, which suggests that they are finding the concept to be a superset of identities that may resolve personal identity dilemmas or ambiguities, yet a superset with real characteristics, symbols, traditions and narratives. Since there are quite a few such individuals, there is a substantial potential recruitment pool for a core membership.

In fact, it may be the case that globe-spanning ethno-linguistic communities—what I called “network civilisations” in The Anglosphere Challenge—may represent an intermediate category in David Goodhart’s opposition of “Somewheres” and “Anywheres”. To be an “anywhere” you must shed a number of characteristics, in terms of loyalties, customs, preferences and identities, that many people are loath to give up. Yet Anglosphere people can travel to many parts of the globe and still find quite a few anchors that help them feel at home, and not among aliens. This helps bring many of the advantages of being an “anywhere”—mobility, job choice, better conditions, chances to make new friends or partners, a fresh start—while still enjoying many of the psychological comforts of “somewhere”. Americans to some extent have achieved this “Big Somewhere” effect—the over-the-top patriotism that others sometimes find a bit forced may actually be a mechanism to help any American feel that any place in America is still their Somewhere. The EU would like people to feel that Europe as a whole is their Big Somewhere, but their cultures are so genuinely diverse that this is difficult to achieve.

Mark Carney in his summation just prior to the EU referendum mentioned that the sort of continental labour market that the US has achieved will never be achieved in Europe. But CANZUK once had this, in effect, and it could achieve it again, more fully, relatively easily. This may end up being the real benefit of CANZUK. If so, it could prove to be the popular achievement that will finally reunite British society as well. This is a possibility that the next scholarly treatment of the Anglosphere and CANZUK movements should devote come time to considering.