Among the various contested understandings of British imperial history, the ‘liberal apologia’ of Biggar, Ferguson et al is perhaps one of the more egregiously ahistorical. A central contention of these accounts — and the ultimate proof offered of the benevolent and unselfish nature of British global governance — is that Britain ‘gracefully’ and voluntarily surrendered its hegemony to the United States following the Second World War, such that the younger, more energetic power could pick up the baton of leading a liberal world system after Empire had been exhausted.
There is, of course, some superficial validity to this interpretation. Yet it ignores the fact that the collapse of British international power was a process more traumatic than is commonly understood for the British ruling class of the time, and, more importantly, the motivations and ideas of the actors who shaped Britain’s responses throughout the period. The much loftier — and mostly unrealised — ambitions contained within British attempts to shape the international system that would ‘inevitably’ replace Pax Britannica are now mostly forgotten.
Indeed, there were many intellectuals and political actors who sincerely believed that the new world order would be a joint Anglo-American endeavour, at least in design and to a certain extent in operation. Most prominent among them was, of course, Winston Churchill, the statesman who presided over the irrecoverable expenditure of British power to wage a war he understood to be existential, and readily accepted the establishment of Britain’s dependency upon the United States in order to do so. That acceptance was based on a complicated and ultimately mistaken comfort which was taken by Churchill and others in fundamental commonalities between the two powers, often truncated in popular history to ‘shared values’ and ‘democratic government’, but in fact rooted in a more complex and deeper sense of supposed bonds including civilisational and, yes, racial kinship.
In particular, the way in which Churchill’s Americanism rhymes with his support for federalism in Britain (often treated as a footnote in his early political career) and his desire for political association between the British Isles and the White Dominions (with ultimate aspirations in the direction of Imperial Federation) is often overlooked as a result of this simplification. Churchill’s self-consciously Whiggish Anglo-Saxonism was central to all of these tendencies.
Since the decline of noughties ‘Churchillmania’, Britain’s wartime leader has retained salience in public debate only as a football in the woke / anti-woke debate, neither side of which succeeds in providing a convincing account of the man. Churchill revisionism, however, which once had a place exclusively in academic discourse, is now finding some political expression among parts of the right (as demonstrated by renewed interest in the work of historian John Charmley, who largely presents British reliance on America as the result of naïve expectations of the role that the we would play in the new world being built, and lays most of the blame for the collapse of British power on the decision to continue the Second World War instead of pursuing a negotiated peace in 1940).
British misconceptions of America and of the intentions of the Roosevelt Administration during the war were undoubtedly one cause of the decisions which ultimately led to that collapse, but if we are to critically assess a period of history or the actors within that period we must at least have a sense of the mentality and understandings which informed them. The reasons for those misconceptions are complex, arising from contemporary interpretations of Britain’s own imperial history and the ideological basis of Empire, yet on closer examination it becomes apparent that many of the dreams of a specifically Anglo-American world order held transatlantic appeal even outside of these mistaken guarantees.
This article also seeks to probe the continued salience of federalist proposals on the British right, as well as contemporary advocacy for political integration between ‘Anglosphere’ countries. These historical tendencies have relevance to many of the debates which have animated the right over the last 20 years.
The devolution of powers to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and the asymmetric constitutional arrangement this has established, encapsulated in the ‘West Lothian question’, have prompted many right-wingers to advocate for latter-day variants of the ‘Home Rule for all’ proposal. Federalism has been seen by a variety of political actors on the right as a ‘patriotic’ solution which preserves the union whilst providing political expression to English identity. This has ranged from UKIP’s advocacy of an English parliament to the BNP’s proposal for an all-British-Isles federation, with its parliament on the Isle of Mann. Indeed, one could go as far as to say that federalism (and English political devolution in particular) was a predominant tendency within the populist right for the first two decades of this century. Though this has declined in recent years, there are still unanswered questions about the country’s constitutional arrangements, with anxieties — hardly alien to the early 20th century — about the possibility of a left-wing government being sustained by regional separatists.
Similarly, Britain’s exit from the EU was seen by many on the centre-right as an opportunity to pursue closer relations with other Crown Commonwealth countries like Australia, New Zealand and Canada (CANZUK). Whilst the institutionalist and Atlanticist argument for this relationship has weakened over recent years, as our faith in the eternal infallibility of our shared institutions and traditions of government has rightly ebbed and our relations with the United States (the inescapable guarantor of such a geographically distributed and militarily weakened union) have become more strained, it remains a temptation that many still find themselves subject to.
Both of these debates touch on the relationship that the nations of the British Isles should seek with each other and with our cousins overseas, and both are equally informed by and exert influence over our perceptions of our own identity. Reflecting upon similar attempts to grapple with these questions in history may provide some clarity for the present.
The historical context of Anglo-Saxonism and Imperial Federation
Reading the extensive work of Duncan Bell on Anglo-Saxonist unionism, it is hard not to feel a deep sense of lost possibilities. The belief in the possibility of a transoceanic Anglo-Saxon state was borne of latent concerns surrounding Britain’s increasingly precarious position in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and forged amongst the various racial anxieties of the time, but it was also motivated by a profound optimism that traditional territorial and geographic constraints could be superseded by the revolution in media of communication which was ongoing throughout the period. The hope that the material advancement of the British and their diaspora could provide the basis for a genuinely progressive (in the sense of human development) world order was commonplace within large parts of both the old British ruling class and newly rising parts of the social order.
Feared obstacles to this possibility, such as the diverging strategic interests of the constituent parts of the Empire and the continuing demographic transformation of Anglo-America by European immigration, did in fact materialise and ensured that no such outcome could be realised. Further worst-case scenarios — including the prospect that non-white immigration would imperil the homelands themselves (presciently anticipated by New World writers) — are in many cases being contested within our politics now, if they have not already come to pass.
The relationship between Anglo-Saxonism and Imperial Federalism is complicated; though there was a significant degree of overlap, they cannot be treated as ideologically interchangeable. At core, Anglo-Saxonism represented the increased emphasis on race as an explanation of geopolitical and developmental dynamics between civilisations. Specifically, Anglo-Saxonists claimed that the unique virtues of the English-speaking people writ large were a consequence of their distinctive racial characteristics, rooted either in their descent from the particular group of tribes which settled Romano-Britain, more broadly in Scandinavian influence, or wider still in their membership of the greater Germanic family.
Their emphasis on British ethnogenesis was varied. Some argued that the experience of island settlement bequeathed the Germanic inhabitants of Britain a unique, thassalocratically oriented polity which predisposed the people and their constitutional preferences towards liberty- in contrast to their more authoritarian continental cousins. Others maintained a belief in a type of ethnically and regionally particular variant of ‘hybrid vigour’, in which the British had strained from a mix of varying northern peoples an independent and territorially acquisitive nature.
Neither are the origins of this ‘racial’ thinking exclusively modern, emerging solely out of enlightenment scientism and the discoveries in biology which preceded the period in question, as is often insisted by historians. Rather, race or heritage was largely understood synonymously with norms, culture and even political institutions over a long period dating far before Churchill’s time. It would therefore be wrong to understand this historic ‘racialism’ as coterminous with 21st-century ‘ethnonationalism’, which — operating under very different conditions in which the boundaries between ethnic origin and acculturation are far more blurred — seeks to draw far more solid lines between and within these phenomena.
As early as the fifteenth century, authors William Lambarde and William Camden shifted narratives of identity away from mythological and Roman accounts to ones which stressed a specifically Teutonic heritage. While we traditionally associate racialised defences of Anglo(-American) constitutionalism with the era of Imperialism, the idea that the English, and perhaps the British more generally, had been endowed with a love of liberty can be found as early as the seventeenth century, when parliamentarian John Hare declared England as a ‘member of the Teutonik nation, and descended out of Germany’ in opposition to the purportedly Norman-derived absolutism of the Stuarts. The 18th century would see further iterations of proto-Nordicism in the obsession of Whiggish England with the ‘Gothic’ origins of the nation, and the increased romanticisation of a primordial and Boreally oriented Germanic tribal past. The concept of the ‘Norman yoke’ was a useful rhetorical tool to depict disliked domestic institutions as derived from an alleged origin in a traumatic past, but it did reflect a genuine belief amongst such historically varied figures as the Diggers, Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine that a freer form of political association had been destroyed by Gallic feudalism.
Obviously, identification with Germanic heritage should not be viewed as synonymous with support for liberal, democratic or federal political arrangements. There were Germanists, such as Thomas Carlyle, who were happy to credit the Norman contribution to England’s political order, naturally reflecting his own sympathies for absolutism.
This intellectual tendency came to a crescendo during the 1880-1914 period. A generation of historians began to explain the spread of both British racial stock and political institutions around the world as a natural outgrowth of liberty-loving, expansive energies. Britain had, in essence, found herself with a global empire as a kind of lucky accident. Its composite parts were poorly integrated, and it fell on London to work out what to do with them as old and new rivals abroad were rapidly catching up and closing new colonial markets, corresponding to the ‘New Imperialism’. This thinking shaped an entire generation of leadership in Rhodes, the Earl of Rosebery, Joseph Chamberlain and Churchill himself in his formative years.
John Robert Seeley’s The Expansion of England posited that a ‘Greater Britain’ already existed despite the British state’s failure to see it. Seeley brought the idea of imperial federation into political conversation, and presented the United States as a model for emulation. Charles Dilke, the Liberal Radical politician, extended these ideas towards a vision in which America provided a model of governance through which not only ‘Greater Britain’, but ultimately the wider world, might be integrated. John Fiske, an American historian, similarly saw Anglo-Saxon racial expansion as a world-historical evolution, within which America was one branch of a larger tree. The natural outcome of this evolution, so it seemed to those at the time, would be the eventual world leadership of Anglo-American civilisation, however the particulars might work themselves out.
J.A. Froude was more pessimistic about the fate of Greater Britain and America but saw the preservation of Empire — and more abstractly of a position of dominant influence within the world — as a necessary precondition for the continued vitality of the English as a people. Indeed, Froude would have conceded that any people would require such a canvas on which to express themselves in order to cultivate commercial and martial vigour, but he also suggested a particular need of the English for global scope of freedom to maintain their special expression of Anglo-Saxon virtues of freedom and adventure. The way in which colonial lives were lived and then valorised during this period and later paints this sentiment quite clearly: the unusual understanding of the good life consisting in travels to far-flung places seeking glory and opportunity — a life which could only be lived in the context of Empire.
Quasi-vitalist ideas such as Froude’s were especially influential on a young Churchill and on his understanding of the purpose of Empire, although — given that he was a man never particularly interested in detail — his reception of these ideas was always superficial at best. Nonetheless, a distillation of the vague sentiments underlying the ideas floating around in fin-de-siecle historiography and subsequent political thought underwrote much of his orientation towards the question of Empire and of Britain’s place in the world.
On a more mundane level, the question of ‘what to do’ with the Empire in the face of new, mostly illiberal, continental rivals, the steady closure of markets to British trade, and the exhaustion of virgin colonial territory around the world impertinently presented itself as the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth. An equally important question in these conversations was the recognition, to varying extents, of the rising economic, military, political and demographic weight of the self-governing Dominions, and how these newfound stakeholders would be accommodated within any future structure of political organisation. Grappling with these questions required an understanding of the nature and telos of Empire (and the English by extension), and drove an impulse in the fin-de-siècle generation towards politically liberal and racially Nordicist beliefs which went on to fuel numerous attempts to achieve the political union of English-speaking peoples.
Some, like Joseph Chamberlain, limited their ambitions to the unification of Britain and the White Dominions. Yet Imperial Federation was a nebulous concept which sometimes included the Empire’s other possessions and often overlapped with transatlantic unionism. Some Anglophilic American elites, such as Andrew Carnegie — a philanthropist, steel magnate, and one of the richest men in the world — believed that full reunification with the motherland would guarantee a pacifistic, progressive world order led by Anglo-Saxon civilisation, and dedicated much of his energies towards advocating the idea. His view was that ‘Reunion’ would have to take place in tandem with the dismantlement of the Empire, leaving only America, Britain, and the White Dominions within the official borders of the united state — yet the ‘dismantlement’ of empire in this context should be understood not as the sacrifice of Anglo-Saxon influence over those territories, but as the regularisation of their status as countries subordinate to the influence of this new hegemon.
In sum, Anglo-Saxonism manifested in competing accounts of the role that Empire would play in shaping the institutional forms through which ‘Greater Britain’ (and subsequently the rest of the world) would be governed in the next stage of its world historic evolution. Throughout all of these differing suggestions, the implicit linking thread was the notion of a particular destiny for the Anglo-Saxons; the management of the world in service of advancing the historical process which bends towards civilisation and progress.
It is in this context that men of Churchill’s generation came to consider the historical moment of 1945, and within which they would later imagine the terms of a ‘peaceful transfer’ of the reins of the global order from London to Washington.
Federalism and Empire
The emergence of ideologically systematic accounts of the British constitutional order and its relationship to the nation’s racial origins coincided with the growth of politically mature settler colonies in Oceania, Canada and (more ambiguously) Southern Africa. The question of how these new settler colonies would relate to the homeland was an open one in imperialist discourse. From the 1850s (starting with Nova Scotia) to the 1890s (concluding with Natal and the Cape Colony), colonies with significant white populations were granted ‘responsible government’, with each territory establishing a legislature to which governors-general were answerable. The readiness with which the Colonial Office acceded to (or indeed, actively prepared colonies for) self-government was influenced by a variety of factors. The last major set of white and politically self-conscious possessions to aspire to self-government had traumatically broken off from the British Empire in the American War of Independence. The Canadian revolts of 1837-40 and the resultant Durham Report also engendered a shift towards viewing self-government as a ‘safety-valve’ for settler discontent.
The prevalent liberal political tendencies of the 19th century and their intersection with racial ideology made the imperial centre more willing to grant self-government. It was felt that it was both perverse and unjust to directly administer predominantly white colonies populated by recent British immigrants and govern them in the manner in which coloured possessions would have been. The speed with which self-government could be extended was hampered in those ambiguous cases of colonies which possessed a large population of British settlers but which had non-white majorities (or significant non-white minorities) or indeed substantial non-British white populations whose loyalty was uncertain. This complicated the process in both New Zealand and Canada (where conscious efforts were made to dilute Francophone demographic influence), and most clearly in South Africa — where a demographic ‘settlement’ could only be partially reached even following the conclusion of the Boer War.
Though the journey towards colonial self-governance contained longer-term uncertainties, it was largely unimpeded by settler violence and imbued by a spirit of racial fraternalism and imperial loyalism. The logical next step for both peripheral and London-based actors was to strive for the consolidation of territorially contiguous and self-governing territories into sovereign Dominions within the framework of Empire. As John Darwin clearly documented in The Empire Project, the historiographical tendency to view the assumed course to dominionhood as a refutation of British identity is erroneous; Australian, New Zealander and Canadian nationalism were by and large new but rejuvenated affirmations of shared identity with the homeland. The architects of New World statehood saw their prospective countries as new expressions of a deterritorialised British racial identity. The understanding, therefore, that dominionhood and Imperial Federation were parallel, alternative solutions to how white settler colonies could be accommodated within the Empire is limited. Instead, they should be seen to have existed on an overlapping spectrum, with intra-continental integration of crown colonies often understood to prefigure some form of transoceanic federation. Figures such as John Buchan (himself heavily involved with the Round Table Movement) and Alfred Deakin saw Canadian and Australian federation respectively as naturally leading to the substantive political integration of these nations and Great Britain.
There were further complications in that some crown colonies, reflective of their own anxieties around the prospect of subordination to regional centres of power, sought to maintain direct relations with the crown in lieu of domestic federation. Queensland’s infamous stand off with the Australian Commonwealth over its enforcement of the White Australia policy, which mandated the end of the former’s planation culture (reliant as it was on indentured Polynesian works, aka ‘kanackas’), the growth of the ‘Westralia’ movement, Nova Scotia’s resistance to rule from Ottawa and Newfoundland’s surrender of self-governance to a London appointed governor: all reflect intercolonial tensions which belie simplistic narratives of post-colonial nationalism.
The framework within which the British proper thought of their role within Empire thus developed: London as the manager of a world-system, with the boring administrative work of government left to the British majority Dominions, which (ostensibly) would be prone to develop a political will identical to the mother country anyway. By surrendering direct control where possible, London would therefore be freed to focus on broader external concerns, as well as the management and development of the coloured colonies. The fact that these domestically self-governing but imperially subordinate Dominions would inevitably demand full participation in imperial governance — perhaps through the establishment of an imperial parliament — was, at least in certain quarters, understood and readily accepted.
Failed attempts at unification
The practical and institutional push towards unification was, at least during its most energetic phase, driven by the exigencies of global conflict. The Boer War gave birth to the first circle of dedicated Imperialists, Milner’s Kindergarten, which was brought together under the influence of colonial secretary Joseph Chamberlain and Lord Milner. Together, they sought to solve the tricky colonial case of South Africa. With its divided populations of Anglo-South-Africans, Afrikaners, and various black tribes, the territory came with deep governance challenges, but also provided an opportunity of wider significance for the Empire in establishing unification, initially on a smaller scale, as a blueprint for resolving tensions, integrating the British Anglophone world, and handling heterogeneous populations within it. Milner’s groups would mature into the Round Table organisation, which would keep alive the idea of Imperial association, albeit on a more multilateral basis throughout the 1930s and 40s.
The Boer War also gave rise to the first serious military coordination between Britain and her fledgling diaspora states, with units from all parts of the white British world assembling under joint military command in South Africa. This pan-imperial upsurge in British racial patriotism was accompanied by real intergovernmental cooperation, which provided hope for federalists like Joseph Chamberlain that the beginnings of closer integration (namely a joint defence union and imperial free trade, effectively an imperial common market) could be established. However, whilst there was some sympathy for closer defence alignment, imperial free trade was ultimately rejected in favour of the watered-down concept of imperial preference. Similarly, the idea of a Pan-Imperial navy also fell through, as Dominions strove towards greater defence independence to address their particular security anxieties, whilst simultaneously displaying reluctance to bear the brunt of increased spending.
The narrative of a linear trajectory towards alienation from the British imperial centre is a simplistic one. WW1 would see a return, on an even greater scale, of intensified military cooperation and pan-imperial fervour, only to conclude in the unsatisfactory dénouement of the 1921 Imperial Conference (which was riven by differences over diplomatic posture towards the United States and Japan). However, the war itself revealed the Britishness of the fledgling nation-bearing states, which fielded disproportionately large volunteer forces on the Western Front whilst often fighting regional campaigns as well. Canada, it should be noted, opted to fly the Union Flag as opposed to the red ensign over Parliament Hill, and Commonwealth soldiers happily served under British coordinating command for the duration of the conflict.
Ultimately, the Dominions elected to become formally independent national states, a desire which was recognised in the Balfour Declaration of 1926 and the Statute of Westminster in 1931. While these states would remain part of the ‘Empire’ and maintained close economic and military ties with Britain into and after WW2, they would do so as a set of associated states, which, as we have seen, would be forcibly divorced from each other by the actions of hostile domestic actors in all ‘Crowned’ members of the Commonwealth.
The significance of Churchill’s Atlanticism and federalism
Winston Churchill, close in his time to politicians like Joseph Chamberlain — but also to intellectuals proposing more radical re-imaginings of the Anglo-Saxon world such as H.G. Wells — provides an insight into the federalist milieus of his time. In particular, as an Anglo-American who supported both federalism within Britain as a solution to the Home Rule crisis and the close political association of Britain, her Dominions, and the United States, he embodied the elision of domestic and external politics inherent to liberal imperialism, and the influence of America’s constitutional order as a model for the broader Anglo-Saxon world.
During the Home Rule Crisis of 1912, Churchill advocated for the establishment of regional assemblies which would have extensive devolved powers. Seen as a means of accommodating Irish separatism within the framework of British unionism, Churchill envisioned a project which will be familiar to 21st Century contemporaries, in which Ireland, Wales and Scotland would receive unitary ‘national’ legislatures, whilst England would be divided into regions such as Lancashire, Yorkshire, the Midlands and so on (Churchill’s proposals were never systematically outlined, but he gave greatest detail in his speech to the Liberal Women’s Federation in Dundee in the same year). An ‘imperial’ parliament would retain power over all other major external and defence-related affairs. Churchill linked this explicitly to discourses surrounding ‘national efficiency’, which were closely intertwined with debates on the future of the empire, arguing that such legislatures would be more sympathetic to local needs. But even more saliently, he explicitly referenced the success of federation in both the Dominions and the United States as a model for Britain’s internal reordering, stating that:
‘We are not venturing into unknown territory. The United States possesses many legislatures united under a federal authority. Germany has combined kingdoms and principalities into a strong federation. Canada, Australia and South Africa have all found federal institutions the means by which local development can be reconciled with national unity.’
And also that:
‘It was only another bold step onward to that of closer union with the overseas Dominions which must be achieved if Britain’s greatness is to endure’
Churchill’s advocacy of federalisation not only envisioned the constitutional reordering of the British Isles to address political exigencies. It also, in a type of ideological ‘boomerang effect’, presented the political order of settler possessions, past and present, as the normative model of Anglo-Saxon governance, one which if adopted, would facilitate closer union within the majority white parts of the Empire. It should be noted that Churchill did not explicitly advocate for the Dominions to send representatives to the envisioned imperial parliament, and that this stands at odds with his later advocacy of his tri-spheric model of Britain’s geopolitical future.
Churchill’s explicit references to the United States should be seen within the wider context of his pro-American sentiments and his envisioned closer relationship between the two Anglophone superpowers. Winston Churchill corresponded extensively with H.G. Wells, reading and commenting upon both ‘Anticipations’ and his subsequent (and slightly moderated) work, ‘A Modern Utopia’. Wells, whilst known primarily for his science fiction writing, was an extensive political commentator, who was primarily interested in the latent power of technological developments, and their intersection with the economic and political predominance of Anglophone peoples.
His preoccupation with political and industrial modernity, efficiency, and his ambiguous ontology of race make him a figure aligned with Churchill. Whilst chastising ‘race chauvinism’, Wells envisioned the unification of English-speaking people as presaging ultimate global unification, under a meritocratic world order which would dispense with less adaptive individuals through tumultuous processes of material change. Whilst it’s easy to see Wells’ ‘racially millenarian’ vision of a eugenically oriented and Fabian political order as a unique political program, its cultural meliorism (Wells’ recognition that coloured individuals could be absorbed into the future global Anglophone body politic) aligned with Churchill’s own attitudes towards race. The English-Speaking Peoples for Churchill were not an ethnographic unit exclusively defined by an essential biological unity, but also by their shared institutional and cultural norms, and Churchill hoped that those post-colonial states influenced by parliamentary governance could maintain a future relationship with Britain within the framework of the Commonwealth.
In a view he would expound to the ‘Co-Efficients’ dining club, Wells also saw the natural focal point of the English-speaking peoples in the nexus of Anglo-America, and saw the unification of the two sides of the Atlantic as a highly probably eventuality. Wells believed that the historically accidental formation of the Empire would eventually disintegrate in favour of rationalised and technocratic structures which were present (albeit haphazardly) in the industrial organisation of the United States already and would eventually proliferate throughout the English-speaking world. Wells’ ‘New Republic’ (much like his would-be patron Andrew Carnegie’s ‘United States of the English-Speaking World’) would be one whose political reorganisation would take its cues from the development of the New World.
Churchill was similarly enamoured with the United States and, like Wells, recognised that its political arrangements had an immensely compelling character at the time. He was in fact less equivocal in his recognition of the country’s emergent potential at the turn of the century and saw its democratic institutions (perhaps idealistically) as successfully navigating continental-scale union. Wells, conversely, saw America’s political optimism as unjustified in the face of the reality of demographic change and ethno-political corruption, which cast doubts on its future potential.
Churchill was not an imperial federalist in the mould of Cecil Rhodes or Joseph Chamberlain. However, particularly in his post-war writings, he gave more concrete political form to the romantic visions of Anglo-American unity expounded in his History of the English-Speaking Peoples. His vision of ‘majestic three circles’ described a world in which Britain would function as liaison point between the Commonwealth, the United States and a united (Western) Europe. Like the more associative visions of imperial unity which prevailed within the Round Table circles, Churchill saw shared liberal democratic norms, as well as racial and linguistic kinship, organically directing the Anglophone and more broadly the Western world towards unity within a fraternal concert of nations. In this sense, there is continuity in Churchill’s political thought, in that he was consistently willing to think and advocate beyond the paradigms of unitary nation-states and believed in a proto-globalist vision of world unity guided by the ‘Anglo-Saxons’.
Churchill’s relevance today
Churchill’s federalism, his Atlanticism and Anglo-Saxonism were mutually reinforcing belief systems, which influenced his domestic and international prescriptions throughout the first half of the 20th Century. They existed within a wider context in which advocates of a semi-racialised liberalism sought to use political reform to strengthen imperial bonds, address domestic divisions and accommodate the emergent cousinly power of the United States.
Dreams of imperial federation had dissipated by the late 1940s. The former Dominions in subsequent decades drifted from the British orbit into closer association with an increasingly ethnically and (eventually) racially diverse America. Churchill, unlike Wells, did not anticipate this, and was blind to the changes that the United States was undergoing even as the very administration he dealt with throughout the war exemplified those same changes in its personnel.
Today, the beliefs of Anglo-Saxonism have a renewed salience amidst the demographic onslaught against white, English-speaking nations. The emergence of an international Western right-wing populism has pointed not only to the tentative possibility of European nativist unity, but also the reunification of the Anglophone populist right. The shared racial anxieties of white voters from Canberra to Calgary have lent some credence to the possibility of a transoceanic populism, uniting principally British and American, but also to an extent Australian immigration restrictionists. However, this tendency has hazily intersected with the more ‘liberal’ concerns of previous ‘Anglosphere’ advocates (Daniel Hannan, Nigel Biggar and Niall Ferguson) who have interpreted it through an institutionalist paradigm, in which a strategic Anglophone alliance would be a complimentary ‘circle’ alongside NATO, perhaps a reformed EU and (although less so now) a strategic alliance with the ‘parliamentary democracy’ of India.
The tensions between a latter-day, implicitly racial and populist vision of Anglospherism and a neoconservative one, focused on buttressing the post-war order, are not necessarily evident from episodes such as Brexit (which functioned as something of a floating signifier, feeding into both visions). We also see these ambiguities in Trump’s own referencing of the special relationship during the celebrations of the 250th anniversary of America’s independence, in which he spoke of American revolutionaries’ veins running with ‘Anglo-Saxon courage’. Trump’s unique capacity to contain all the contradictions of his time within himself is at work here as elsewhere.
A sceptic might note that, despite the increasing prevalence of biological allusions within the utterances of various political and media figures, the ultimate commitment to a dogmatically culturalist understanding of their respective nations’ identities (and ultimately of Anglo-Saxonism itself) remains. Like Thomas Carlyle, we should note that the ‘neo’-Anglo-Saxonists tend to ascribe the success of their national character to their institutions, rather than the success of their institutions to their national character.
Yet despite this, the reality of demographic change forces reflection upon the basis of identity in much the same way as questions around the future of empire once did. In order to decide what we must do, we must first understand who we are. Whilst much of the youth wing of the GOP is dominated by the lowest common denominator populism of Andrew Tate and Sneako, unifying a multiracial coalition around misogyny, antisemitism, and occasional jabs at Indians, there remains a large faction outside of this which continues to view demographic questions as centrally important. A New York Young Republican delegation visited Orania in March of this year, and the Trump administration is the first Western government to be sympathetic to the plight of white South Africans since the end of Apartheid. At the same time, many of the newly emergent ‘nationalist’ tendencies in Canada and Australia have begun to lean away from particularism and towards a common British (or Anglo-Saxon) identity. It is not uncommon to see the Union Flag waved at their demonstrations — a marked shift from the 2000s and even the 2010s. As the former colonies transition towards majority-minority status and their historic majority populations lose their grip on a particular claim to nationhood within them, we can expect to see these trends continue as they seek an external anchor of identity.
There is a happy coincidence in which Britain, Australia and America all have institutionalised and relatively successful right-wing populist movements. No doubt all of these, particularly the chronically boomer-oriented One Nation party, have significant flaws. But it is up to younger generations to find the path along which these movements can align towards the preservation of a transoceanic Anglo-Saxon majority. To that end, further unification of the Anglo-Saxon right is desirable. It is hard to imagine a world in which one European or Anglosphere country alone tackles the problem of demographic change whilst all others fail. Even were that to be possible, that lone country would be left without kin in a world full of rising, alien powers.
This problem we face together, and in all likelihood, if it is to be overcome, it will be overcome together — first as the Anglo-Saxon right, with its shared political culture and heritage, develops a common path, and then as it leads its European allies along it. The future of the Anglo-Saxon might be once again, as Wells envisioned, to lead a broader unification of the world. An association, and eventual union of, free, sovereign and demographically secure British nations will lay the grounds for the unity of all European peoples, necessary to assert our sovereignty within the world. It is this force we must actualise, because without it, not only will we lose a bond essential to ourselves, but we also risk imperilling the future of our civilisation.
This article was written by George Ruska, a Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.
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The definitive text on this question, Blood, Class, and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies by Christopher Hitchens, shows how the alleged special relationship is deeply one-sided. Now more than ever.