The Anglosphere: A Genealogy of a Racialized Identity in International Relations - Softcover

Vucetic, Srdjan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804772258 ISBN 13: 9780804772259

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 2011

Synopsis

The Anglosphere refers to a community of English-speaking states, nations, and societies centered on Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States, which has profoundly influenced the direction of world history and fascinated countless observers.

This book argues that the origins of the Anglosphere are racial. Drawing on theories of collective identity-formation and framing, the book develops a new framework for analyzing foreign policy, which it then evaluates in case studies related to fin-de-siècle imperialism (1894-1903), the ill-fated Pacific Pact (1950-1), the Suez crisis (1956), the Vietnam escalation (1964-5), and the run-up to the Iraq war (2002-3). Each case study highlights the contestations over state and empire, race and nation, and liberal internationalism and anti-Americanism, taking into consideration how they shaped international conflict and cooperation. In reconstructing the history of the Anglosphere, the book engages directly with the most recent debates in international relations scholarship and American foreign policy

About this title

About the Author

Srdjan Vucetic is Assistant Professor at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Ottawa. He teaches international relations theory and American foreign policy.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Anglosphere

A GENEALOGY OF A RACIALIZED IDENTITY IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONSBy Srdjan Vucetic

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2011 the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-7225-9

Contents

1 What Is the Anglosphere?................................................12 Empire, Venezuela, and the "Great Rapprochement"........................223 ANZUS, Britain, and the "Pacific Pact"..................................544 Suez, Vietnam, and the "Great and Powerful Friends".....................745 Empire, Iraq, and the "Coalition of the Willing"........................1016 The Anglosphere and Its Limits..........................................128Appendix: Note on Primary Sources.........................................159Notes.....................................................................165References................................................................201Bibliography..............................................................211Index.....................................................................245

Chapter One

WHAT IS THE ANGLOSPHERE?

The Anglo-American relies upon personal interest to accomplish his ends, and gives free scope to the unguided strength and common sense of the people; the Russian centers all the authority of society in a single arm; the principal instrument of the former is freedom; of the latter, servitude ... each of them seems marked out by the will of heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe. —Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1835), Vol. 1, p. 434

If the population of the English-speaking Commonwealth be added to that of the United States with all that such co-operation implies in the air, on the sea, all over the globe and in science and in industry, and in moral force, there will be no quivering, precarious balance of power to offer its temptation to ambition or adventure. On the contrary, there will be an overwhelming assurance of security ... If we are together, nothing is impossible. —Winston Churchill, The "Iron Curtain" speech, 1946

Now Mr Churchill is starting his process of unleashing war (like Hitler) with a racial theory, declaring that only those people who speak English are full-bloodied nations, whose vocation it is to control the fate of the whole world ... Mr Churchill and his friends in England and in America are presenting those nations who do not speak English with a kind of ultimatum—recognize our supremacy over you, voluntary, and all will be well—otherwise war is inevitable. —Stalin, a Pravda interview concerning Churchill's "Iron Curtain" speech, 1946

THE ANGLO-AMERICAN "SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP" and the "Airstrip One." ANZUS and the "deputy sheriff." NORAD and the "51st state." These are some of the many representations, official designations, and popular caricatures of the special relationships between the United States on the one hand and Australia, Britain, Canada, and New Zealand on the other. The relationship between the United States and Britain began with a revolutionary war in the eighteenth century, in which the former violently seceded from the latter. This germinal Anglo-American enmity is now all but forgotten, having been replaced with a remarkably durable alliance and a close friendship. Australia, Canada, and New Zealand established their special relationships with the United States more gradually, as they gained more and more sovereignty from Britain. Together, these special relationships are said to constitute a "core" of a distinct international, transnational, civilizational, and imperial entity within the global society, currently known as the "Anglosphere."

Winston Churchill used to describe this entity as the "English-speaking peoples." As far back as the late seventeenth century, as he observed in his hefty History of the English-Speaking Peoples, the proverbial Anglos have been constantly winning wars, expanding trade, and promoting freedom, security, and welfare—all of this thanks to their liberal political culture and institutions. As Churchill explained in his famous "Iron Curtain" speech delivered at a small college in Fulton, Missouri, on March 5, 1946:

We must never cease to proclaim in fearless tones the great principles of freedom and the rights of man which are the joint inheritance of the English-speaking world and which through Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus, trial by jury, and the English common law find their most famous expression in the American Declaration of Independence.

For Churchill the "great man of history," this speech evoked a moment of victory for the English-speaking peoples against the Nazi-Fascist axis just as they were about to embark upon another war against Soviet communism. For Churchill the historian, however, this juncture was a mere chapter of modern history centered on the expansion of the Anglo experience. The English-speaking peoples were doubly special, to each other and to humankind, because the progress of liberal modernity depended on their unity and cooperation. The newly minted United Nations (UN), Churchill explained at Fulton, could provide collective goods only in one context:

Would a special relationship between the United States and the British Commonwealth be inconsistent with our over-riding loyalties to the World Organization? I reply that, on the contrary, it is probably the only means by which that organisation will achieve its full stature and strength.

Churchill's theory of history continues to claim adherents, many of whom like to point out that Churchill was right. The processes of secession, dedominionization and decolonization destroyed the British empire but left behind a distinct yet loosely bounded community of peoples, who were fiercely committed to, among other items, freedom, democracy, the rule of (common) law, and the English language. This community's lack of formal institutional actorness merely disguises its exceptional longevity and power. Centered first on London and then on Washington, D.C., the Anglosphere has dominated international politics for the world for the past 200 years, perhaps longer. Its agents—companies, empires, states, nations—colonized and industrialized large swathes of the planet and moved millions of its inhabitants, often by force. They also acted as the market and lender of the last resort, the guardian of the reserve currency, and the bulwark against various revisionists and revolutionaries. As a result, the world has now gone Anglobal. Though Australians, Americans, British, Canadians, and New Zealanders make up less than 7 percent of the world's population today, the standard triumphalist argument is that "their" language is the global language, "their" economies produce more than a third of the global gross domestic product (GDP), and "their" version of liberalism in society and economy defines most human aspirations. If he were alive today, Churchill might well be pleased with the state of the Anglosphere. One can imagine him making a swift autocitation: "I told you so long ago: If we are together, nothing is impossible."

This book is one story of how the Anglosphere became possible. It focuses on Australia, Britain, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States—the five states that are said to constitute the "core" of the community—and considers how they came to exempt themselves from the rules that have shaped war, peace, alliances, coalitions, and other manifestations of international conflict and cooperation in world politics. The story begins with a contention that the origins of Anglosphere are racial. The turn-of-the-twentieth-century rapprochement between the expanding United States and declining Britain was caused by a discourse of identity that implied natural unity and moral superiority of the "Anglo-Saxon race." The loosely woven fabric of Anglo-Saxonism began to unravel in the middle decades of the twentieth century. In this period, the Anglosphere emerged as a broad-angled Western community made up of interdependent, institutionalized, and integrated special relationships centered on the United States. As the Cold War dragged on and then fizzled away, the Anglosphere positioned itself as the sovereign icon of liberal internationalism and the corollary human rights revolution. Across the decades, hitherto silent voices grew louder and louder, and antiracism went mainstream around the globe. These changes were sweeping and dramatic, yet they often occurred in such lopsided and contradictory ways that some of the old racialized privileges and hierarchies were left unscathed. At the beginning of the twentieth century, it was thus once again possible for the leaders of the old and new Anglo empires to jointly claim moral superiority in the international society. The main argument of this book is that cooperation among select English-speaking states became possible through a variety of racialized processes, which come together at home, abroad, and in-between. In short, the Anglosphere is a product of its racial past, a past that might not have receded.

A RENEGADE RESEARCH AGENDA

Despite having made an excellent early start on the subject, International Relations (IR) has little or nothing to say about the Anglosphere. E. H. Carr, the putative father of the discipline, long preceded Churchill in theorizing the "English-speaking peoples" as the "dominant group in the world." He was also much more critical. In his Twenty Year's Crisis, Carr provocatively argued that the Anglos were "consummate international hypocrites" bent on spreading their forms of politics under the guise of morality and neutrality. Carr's book is still a classic, but these lines are often skipped over. IR hardly recognizes the dyadic Anglo-American "special relationship" (AASR) as an analytical category, much less the plural Anglosphere. On the surface, the absence has to do with the current hegemony of rationalist theories. These approaches have been extremely insightful about the ways alliances and economic blocs emerge out of strategic coordination among governments, businesses, logrolling coalitions, and other rational actors bent on solving collective action problems and generating joint goods such as security or trade. Yet, with respect to the seemingly more nebulous cultural groupings like the Anglosphere, rationalist accounts of world politics tend to obscure as much as they illuminate. A deeper reason lies in the traditional sway of a narrow materialist ontology focused on a system of sovereign, separate, and nominally equal states. Missing from this picture are racism, nationalism, colonialism, imperialism, and other macro-historical processes, which imply that sovereign states are also historical and cultural nations bound by all kinds of discourses, institutions, and practices.

The obvious ontological and theoretical home for the Anglosphere appears to lie in constructivism, particularly in its research agendas revolving around the concept of identity. Much of social life, constructivist argue, can be explained in terms of the relations between the Self and Other. What social actors want and how they act is indeed determined by who they are, but the point is that the Self does not exist as a disconnected, unadulterated unit; instead, it always emerges in interaction with certain significant Others. To go back to Churchill's "Iron Curtain" speech, the "fraternal association of the English-speaking peoples" would have been meaningless without this interaction. In the speech, one first finds the temporal or historical Others, defined by a recent global war against the Nazi-Fascist enemies: "The awful ruin of Europe, with all its vanished glories, and of large parts of Asia glares us in the eyes." Then there are the territorially bounded Others: Soviet Russia, "Turkey and Persia," the "South American Republics," and, as a particularly menacing force within, "the Communist parties or fifth columns." Here, the Self-Other relations are in a transition, with Soviet Russia and Communist partisans changing their status from wartime allies to future foes. "Christian civilization" and the UN also appear in Churchill's speech, but mostly as the second-order extensions of the Anglo Self, rather than as significant Others.

Similar "us" versus "them" dynamics are present in countless international discourses, institutions, and practices across different social realms of world politics—from pop culture (for example, James Bond, Jason Bourne) to university scholarships and literary awards (such as Rhodes, Knox, Man Booker) to political economy (as in "Anglo-Saxon capitalism") to transgovernmental and intermestic relations (such as the Strategic Alliance Cyber Crime Working Group). The continuity and change in these ideas and actions has been subject to contingent and variable interactions among the "peoples" involved, but the main point is that the Anglosphere is meaningless without some other social group in time and space, whether one refers to a state/nation, international association or organization, transnational network, civilization, or some combination of these. Herein lies the usefulness of what constructivists call constitutive analysis—an analysis of intersubjective meanings that condition the social and political possibilities within a given community, site, or field. This type of analysis resembles "theories of reference" in philosophy or "theoretical identifications" in the natural sciences. On the latter, by showing how atoms constitute molecules or how average molecular kinetic energy constitutes temperature, constitutive analysis contributes to causal explanations of various chemical, biological, and physical processes. By analogy, an analysis of constitutive dimensions of the social kinds like the Anglosphere can therefore contribute to causal explanations of international conflict/ cooperation.

It is precisely these types of explanations that motivate the constructivist research program on "security communities" or groups of states in which a collective identity is said to lead to dependable expectations of nonviolent change. The same can be said about the constructivist work on transnational diasporas and "families of nations," which tends to treat preferential treatments in diplomacy, foreign aid, trade, or tourism as a function of ethno(racial), (anti) national, (neo)colonial, and (post)imperial identities. That the Anglosphere is absent in these literatures is surprising considering that it is both conceptually and substantively related to the "Atlantic community," "Black Atlantic," the Commonwealth, the Francophonie, and similar entities, which are more or less acknowledged in constructivist IR. The absence of the Anglosphere agenda in IR is neither ontological nor theoretical in nature, but sociological. The Anglosphere is unattractive as an analytical category because it carries the burden of political and normative reappropriation. Most IR theorists would point out that the concept—in fact, the conceit—of the Anglosphere must first be separated from the racist associations it carries from the era of Churchill and Stalin before it can be used in the analysis of international relations. That this reappropriation is inherently risky is evident in the fate of the conservative and neoconservative discourse on the Anglosphere in the 2000s. Much like Churchill, who used Anglosphere-talk to prop up anticommunism and empire, James C. Bennett, Robert Conquest, and Keith Windschuttle, among others, have used it to legitimize or mobilize certain political projects—anything from Euroskepticism to the U.S.-Indian nuclear alliance to assorted liberal orderings at a global scale. Unlike Churchill, this generation of thinkers never failed to underscore the pluralist, postcolonial, anti-imperial and, indeed, antiracist nature of the imagined community spanning sixty or so sovereign and "diverse" nations from Antigua and Barbuda to Zimbabwe. What made these claims unpersuasive to those on the political and cultural left was a certain consistency in conceptualizing the Anglosphere as a hierarchy made up of the core and mostly white Self on the one hand and on the other the peripheral and overwhelmingly nonwhite Other. Core/periphery—like the corollary metaphors of concentric circles, nodal points, families of nations, clubs, or waiting rooms—is a colonial-era concept that refers to the presence of historically or culturally backward Others. The new discourse on the English-speaking peoples thus arrived with the old discourse in tow, in the sense that the talk of the linguistically bounded and hierarchically ordered "spheres" invoked the old images of empires and civilizations. Little surprise that liberals and Marxists rejected the idea of the Anglosphere, sometimes echoing Stalin's response to Churchill's Fulton speech, as not only insufferably outmoded and parochial, but also fundamentally racist.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Anglosphereby Srdjan Vucetic Copyright © 2011 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of Stanford University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0804772258
• ISBN 13: 9780804772259
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272