Anglospheres old and new.

A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900, by Andrew Roberts (HarperCollins, 752 pp., $35)

ON the very eve of the period with which Andrew Roberts deals in his splendid new history of the English-speaking peoples, the American Republic and the British Empire almost went to war with each other. The 1895 Venezuela crisis was deliberately provoked by the U.S. in order to assert its primacy in the Western Hemisphere. This strategic forcefulness was strongly supported by Congress, which appropriated funds for a 900,000-strong U.S. army, and by American public opinion. Forty-two governors offered to raise troops for the war. In the course of the dispute Canada was openly threatened with invasion by senior American diplomats and military men. (The Canadians promptly declared themselves to be loyal British subjects and embraced an anti-Americanism to which many of them still cling.) The two great powers might well have been driven to hostilities by jingoism on both sides if the British prime minister, Lord Salisbury, the Cool Hand Luke of Victorian diplomacy, had not been determined to appease the Americans, however fiercely they resisted his surrender.

Salisbury's shrewd retreat paid immediate dividends in much warmer relations between the two governments. Britain supported the U.S. in the Spanish-American War, and the U.S. beneath a facade of neutrality took Britain's side in the Boer War, especially when early British defeats tempted the continental Europeans to intervene. It took longer for the two peoples to forget their quarrel. While Britain's colonies sent large numbers of volunteers to help the Mother Country in South Africa--war memorials in small towns across Canada and Australia list the lads who "answered the Empire's call"--U.S. public opinion supported the effort of 300 volunteers to help the Boers. All the same, the future was embodied by one such volunteer, a Rough Rider veteran, who wrote to Teddy Roosevelt: "I came over here meaning to join the Boers ... but when I got here I found the Boers talked Dutch while the British talked English, so I joined the latter." Roosevelt himself wanted a united South Africa that spoke English--still a possibility, indeed closer today than in 1901. And in the war's aftermath, between 1901 and 1907, Britain and the U.S. signed a series of treaties essentially satisfying American grievances, establishing naval cooperation, and laying down the foundations of what became a full-fledged Anglo-American "special relationship" four decades later.

None of this would have happened had the British pursued their interests to the limit in the Venezuelan crisis. By quite deliberately appeasing the rising U.S., the British allied themselves and their colonies with the U.S. in world politics over the next century. Together these allies won two world wars, one cold war, two lesser wars in Korea and the Gulf, and innumerable smaller skirmishes. Two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan remain undecided. Vietnam--where Australia and New Zealand were America's only Anglophone allies--was the only war that was definitely lost.

Halfway through the last century, America became the senior partner in this informal alliance. Historians cite different dates as the moment when the baton was unmistakably transferred. But December 27, 1941, when John Curtin, the Australian prime minister, declared that "Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom," is as good a date as any. The brutality of Curtin's statement infuriated Churchill (not wholly unreasonably, since British forces were then fighting in Asia to defend Australia) but its realism was undeniable. America emerged from World War II as the leading power in the English-speaking world and thus as the main global superpower, challenged but not equaled by a Potemkin USSR.

"Les Anglo-Saxons" were united not just by the English language but by the Common Law. Still more links were listed by Churchill in 1943: "Common conceptions of what is right and decent, a marked regard for fair play, especially to the weak and poor, a stern sentiment of impartial justice and above all a love of personal freedom . . . these are the common conceptions on both sides of the ocean among the English-speaking peoples."

Translated into foreign policy, these common conceptions produced distinctive but similar attitudes. Both superpowers were supporters of free trade and parliamentary democracy. Both were liberal powers whose global influence helped to remove barriers to commerce, to create international rules, and to shape global institutions of a plainly liberal kind. Because the joint economic strength of both powers amounted to 40 percent or more of world GDP for most of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, they had the wealth to promote their values. Most interestingly of all, both took their liberal-democratic professions seriously and were prepared to advance them by arms even when their interests were not at stake--an unusual characteristic illustrated notably by the Royal Navy's suppression of the international slave trade and by America's Marshall Plan assistance to stricken postwar Europe.

This Anglo-dominance was a cause of resentment and aggression on the part of other great powers. Naturally, they dressed these emotions in arguments of principle. Roberts builds his book around four great ideological challenges to the dominance of the English-speaking world and its liberal values: Prussian militarism in 1914, Nazi-Fascist aggression in 1939, Soviet Communist aggression in the Cold War, and the Islamist jihad against the West today. His major chapters tell the story of how these conflicts were begun and (with the exception of the last) resolved. Other chapters deal with the intervening periods of drift and interregnum. The result is a clear and gripping historical narrative.

Since one or more of the English-speaking countries was involved directly or importantly in almost all of the great events of the 20th century, this book is in effect a world history of the last 100 years seen from an Anglo-centric viewpoint. Its almost encyclopedic character means that each chapter covers a multitude of topics, grave and gay, from the time it took to build the Empire State Building (one year) to the cost of the flowers placed outside Buckingham Palace in tribute to Princess Diana ($50 million). Some passages last a dozen pages, such as a revisionist account of Suez (Roberts argues persuasively that Eden was right and Eisenhower wrong); others a single paragraph, such as the first nonstop air crossing of the Atlantic in 1919 (not "Lucky" Lindbergh but the even luckier Brits, Captain John Alcock and Arthur Whitten-Brown, the latter of whom had to climb out onto the wings during the flight to clear them of ice). So, as well as offering a serious historical argument, Roberts gives his readers any number of what Thomas Beecham used to call in a musical context "lollipops." This is a highly enjoyable book, to be dipped into at bedtime, as well as an important one to be studied and pondered.

Roberts's message is essentially optimistic. The first three challenges to the English-speaking peoples, he points out, were formidable; all seemed, at times, to be within reach of their goals; all benefited initially from a reluctance of their intended victims to take them seriously; but all eventually lost because "les Anglo-Saxons," once aroused, were powerful and determined enough to crush them. Roberts argues that the fourth challenge of Islamist jihadism is still in that early stage when its intended victims in the Anglosphere (and the entire West) do not yet take it seriously and even attribute it to their own past crimes such as the Crusades. But he believes that the English-speaking peoples have the resources to defeat jihadism several times over and will rally to the standard when future atrocities reveal the cruelty and ambition of its sects. When that happens, victory will be assured, however long and hard the struggle--since, as Churchill once declared, "If we are together, nothing is impossible."

Unfortunately, as Roberts demonstrates, major obstacles persistently obstruct our getting or at least staying together. For the first three-quarters of the last century the largest such obstacle was America's anti-imperialism. This began as the result of a national myth that exaggerated the oppressive character of George III's rule and exalted America as a revolutionary power hostile to all imperialism but especially the British sort. It is an early instance of the foolishness of ideological theorizing. Imperialism and anti-imperialism are two sides of the same ideological concept--one that blinds its adherents to all the important distinctions between actual empires. It is rather as if there were a theoretical concept called "matrimonialism" which maintained that all marriages are identical. In fact the British Empire was a liberal one, very different from, say, that of the genocidal Belgian Congo. And though the U.S. was self-consciously anti-imperialist, its "grand strategy" (as outlined in Robert Kagan's recent book Dangerous Nation) bore a strong resemblance to Palmerston's definition of British imperial policy: "Trade without the flag where possible; trade with the flag where necessary." Japan? The Philippines? In other words, the U.S. and Britain were pursuing similar policies in practice, but their rhetoric and self-understanding were different and even opposed.

These theoretical disagreements were not strong enough to prevent the rapprochement that began in 1895 and was cemented by World War II. But they continued to poison otherwise good relations and to obscure common interests in the postwar world. For instance, Churchill's "Iron Curtain" speech was initially denounced by politicians and newspapers as a trick to get the U.S. to save the tottering British Empire. This anti-imperialism had its last gasp in the Suez crisis, when the U.S. backed a Third World dictator against its two closest European allies, and effectively ended their careers as world powers.

Still, the effects of U.S. anti-imperialism linger. Because the demise of the last European empires coincided with the Vietnam War, the charge of imperialism was quickly turned against the U.S. itself. The flourishing of European anti-Americanism on the right as well as on the left has been fed by this resentful politics of turnabout. It is, so to speak, revenge for Suez. More significantly, since Americans still like to think they are anti-imperialists, the charge of imperialism has the effect of hobbling U.S. foreign policy: Either Washington shrinks from necessary interventions or it shrinks from staying long enough to ensure that difficult interventions succeed.

A second obstacle to Anglo unity is fully and worrisomely acknowledged by Roberts: the emergence in the English-speaking countries of a cultural self-hatred. This tendency to self-blame has deep roots. Roberts quotes Salisbury as saying in 1901: "England is, I believe, the only country in which, during a great war, eminent men write and speak as if they belonged to the enemy." This tendency has since spread to all the nations of the English-speaking world and, within those nations, far beyond the small elite of intellectuals previously in its grip. There is now a substantial lumpenintelligentsia of teachers, clergymen, and "knowledge workers" whose first reaction to almost any international controversy is to "blame America (or England, or Australia, etc.) first." It is a short step from this to holding culturally similar allies in less esteem than more exotic and utopian regimes from Moscow to Havana. Alliances based in part on cultural similarity of outlook cannot permanently coexist with cultural self-hatred.

It might be easier to recover from this malady were it not for a third problem: the appeal of competing identities. A few years ago all the English-speaking countries seemed to be spinning outwards into new identities based in part on geography: Britain was said to be becoming "European"; Australia embracing an "Asian" identity; the U.S. choosing a Hispanic-flavored multiculturalism; the Canadians constructing a "new Canadian nationalism" rooted in anti-Americanism, etc., etc. This boded ill for any prospect that the English-speaking world would continue to operate with its old cohesion. But with the sad exception of Britain--which is being absorbed against the popular will into a regulatory European state based on Roman Law--these fashions have gone into sharp reverse owing to 9/11, the challenge of jihadism, the worldwide communications revolution (which has raised culture above geography), and a humble election result in Australia that rejected an Asian identity in favor of an Australian one. These competing identities have not evaporated, however, and, given the cultural self-hatred mentioned above, they must be considered "down but not out."

Can the English-speaking peoples overcome these obstacles to continue playing their hegemonic role of the 20th century into the future? The prospects are not good, if we are thinking of the traditional definition of the English-speaking peoples--i.e., the U.S., Britain, and the "white Dominions." That suffers from the taints of nostalgia and racism. But another definition is to hand, namely the Anglosphere.

This is an evolution of the English-speaking world rather than a synonym for it. As much as from history it emerges from the communications revolution that has brought all peoples speaking the same tongue closer together. In such works as James C. Bennett's The Anglosphere Challenge (recently embraced as an Urtext by Roberts), the Anglosphere includes nations such as India where the English language and culture may be emerging as the single most important element in a multiethnic society. It is perhaps the first monolingual multicultural identity in history and as such able to encompass diverse groups within itself. This civilizational identity is matched in practical politics by strategic developments such as an emerging Indo-U.S. military alliance. And, thanks to some geopolitical Fairy Godmother (who looks oddly like Osama bin Laden), almost all the candidates for Anglosphere membership have had war declared on them by the jihadists. So the fourth great challenge--jihadism--may deepen, extend, and prolong the life of the English-speaking world.

Wider still and wider / Shall thy bounds be set. But will it be an English-speaking world without England?