Why the Jews?

 

The CBC of course uses the death of Queen Elizabeth as an opportunity to slam the British and the monarchy. Just as Easter is always an occasion to question the divinity of Christ.

Both speakers simply assert without argument that empire was a matter of “looting and plundering” the colonies. ”Forty-five trillion dollars of wealth stolen just from the Asian subcontinent.” Even defenders of the monarchy and the British are inclined to argue only that the indecencies of the Empire were long ago.

Yet this is a point that needs to be established. Was government by the British more costly to the colonials than local government? There is no reason to assume so. In fact, historians often suggest that the reason the British, and other European, empires broke up after the Second World War was that the European countries could no longer afford them. They were being subsidized, then.

Were local industries suppressed? India commanded a larger portion of world GDP under the Raj than it did for many decades after independence. That does not sound like a suppression of local industry.

Of course, the issue of slavery is raised. Yet, as Don Lemon learned in a recent interview, if slavery is the premise, it is probably the British who deserve reparations. Slavery was universal. Britain was among the first nations to abolish it, they ended it in all their possessions, and they spent a great deal to end the practice everywhere.

The CBC interviewee actually blames Britain for ending the slave trade, on the grounds that they paid for the slaves’ freedom, instead of paying the slaves.

We have probably all had ancestors who were slaves, and ancestors who were slavers. Who pays whom? The one group who seem more deserving than the rest of us are the British, who ended slavery, fought the slave trade worldwide, and were still paying to end slavery as recently as 2015. That means most Britons still living today.

Surely it is they who deserve reparations. 

The interviewer suggests the Koh-I-Noor diamond should be returned “either to India or to South Africa.” But a half-dozen countries in total claim the diamond. They all say it was stolen from them by one of the others. So whom to “give it back” to? England obtained it by a peace treaty, in return for other concessions. If it is returned to India, other elements of that treaty must properly also be renegotiated. In effect, then, it must be bought back. And what if some other country wants to offer Britain more for it?

The interviewee even blames the British Empire for the Caribbean’s sovereign debts, and for climate change.

I doubt any of that sovereign debt was racked up by the colonial authorities. I doubt the British Empire had much effect on greenhouse gases today.

It all reminds me of an old Yiddish joke. A couple of Nazis stop a Jew in the street, and challenge him.

“Who is responsible for Germany’s problems?”

The Jew knows they want an excuse for a beating.

“The Jews,” he answers. “And the bicycle riders.”

“Why the bicycle riders?”

“Why the Jews?”

The answer is simple: because, like the British, they are envied.

Postcolonial Poverty

 

With the death of Queen Elizabeth, much is inevitably being said of the evils of the British Empire.

It is an interesting fact that Columbus discovered the New World the same year that the Spanish finally expelled the Moors. In other words, Spain began its greatest, most glorious era the very year it slipped the yoke of colonization itself.

The Dutch repeated the trick: they built an overseas empire just as they were casting off the Spanish yoke in turn.

The Jews, we know, are notably successful. Within living memory, they were hunted and killed throughout Europe.

In 1930, under the British Empire, India was responsible for 6.42% of world GDP. Five years after independence, it was down to 3.8%. In 2010, it was at 4.2%; it has risen in the last few years to 7.19%.

In other words, places like Africa and South Asia cannot blame their present poverty on having been oppressed three generations ago. Modern American blacks cannot blame their present poverty on slavery a century and a half ago. It does not work like that.

When Kiples Cease Their Kipling

Rudyard Kipling

There used to be a movement in Canadian poetry called “people’s poetry.” Perhaps it still exists; I can find no trace online.

The idea was to bring poetry back to the common people.

But the group was resolutely left wing. As all official Canadian poetry has become.

This is a fatal problem, because the common people are not left wing.

In fact, the most popular poem among the UK general public is Rudyard Kipling’s “If.” Calling for personal responsibility in the manner of Jordan Peterson. But Kipling was a fellow who wrote poetry from the working class perspective; sometimes in cockney dialect.

In Canada, the only poetry readings that draw crowds are for “cowboy poetry.” Expressing a world view akin to that of country music, in the manner of Robert W. Service—the bestselling poet of all time, not just in Canada, but it the world.

And ignored or rejected by the poetry establishment, including the “people’s poetry” people. Again, the thing about Service is that he wrote from the working class perspective.

It seems that “their people,” as Hamilton is supposed to have said of Jefferson, “is a great beast.” It is an academic construct, quite unlike any people you might meet in the subway or on the 401.

Robert W. Service is perhaps rejected only for speaking for the lower class and being unforgivably accessible to people without an English degree. Despite the fact that he is, in technical terms, an exceptionally good poet. As is Kipling.

Kipling is rejected for his full-bore advocacy of empire. You could hardly be less politically correct than that today. Worst of the lot, no doubt, is “The White Man’s Burden.”

Let’s have a look:

Take up the White Man's burden—
Send forth the best ye breed—
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild—
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.

That sounds pretty offensive. Non-Europeans “half devil and half child”? “Fluttered and wild”; “caught”? These are terms to describe animals.

Yet the criticism seems to be that these non-Europeans do not raise their children properly—“breeding” is mentioned. They are wild in that sense, still children in that sense; they lack morality.

This might be true or false, but it is not racist. The Victorians believed they had reached a pinnacle of morality. This conviction was shaken then by the experience of the world wars, but there was and remains evidence behind it.

Take up the White Man's burden—
In patience to abide,
To evil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times made plain.
To seek another's profit,
And work another's gain.

The conventional idea today is Marxist—that the point of Empire was to exploit the foreign people for profit. Kipling sees empire as, instead, a sacrifice in financial terms, for the benefit of the colonized.

It turns out that Kipling is right. The Empire was a financial burden on Britain, and the same was true of the other European empires, with perhaps the sole exception of Leopold’s Congo, which Conrad so richly condemns in Heart of Darkness. After the Second World War, Britain could no longer afford their empire. If it were actually making money, this would not have happened. Empire is expensive; more recently, we saw the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact collapse for financial reasons.

The European empires were indeed entered into, as Kipling says, as a civilizing mission. They might have been misguided, but they were well-intentioned. They were acts of charity and of civic responsibility.

Take up the White Man's burden—
The savage wars of peace—
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch Sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hopes to nought.

“Heathen” here might make one suppose Kipling was speaking of the spread of Christianity. He cannot have been; the immediate occasion for the poem was the American acquisition of the Philippines. The Philippines had been Christian for centuries—for longer than the USA.

He seems instead to be speaking of what might loosely be called “Enlightenment ideals.” Empire brought peace, ending the endless local wars; it brought greater prosperity, it brought medical advances.

Take up the White Man's burden—
No tawdry rule of kings,
But toil of serf and sweeper—
The tale of common things.
The ports ye shall not enter,
The roads ye shall not tread,
Go make them with your living,
And mark them with your dead!

Again the idea is of service: of building ports and roads for others to use.

And in this, surely, Kipling is right. The British built the rail system, the ports, of India, and then left them for the Indians. They dug the Suez Canal, and then left it to the Egyptians. The Americans built the Panama Canal, and then left. They built Aramco and the Saudi oil industry, and then left. Others generally reaped the benefits. 

Railway bridge,  British India, 1900.

Notably, the UK pulled out of the Persian Gulf, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia right when the oil industry was making the area profitable. That makes no sense if the prime motive of empire was profit. It makes more sense if the prime motive was service; at this point, the area could look after itself.

Take up the White Man's burden—
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard—
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light:—
"Why brought ye us from bondage,
Our loved Egyptian night?"

The stanza seems to disprove the charge of racism, since it describes the colonized as equivalent to the Hebrews, God’s chosen people. And it implies that these “subject races” are as capable of development. The problem, then, is not genetics—race—but the bondage of cultural backwardness. 

Take up the White Man's burden—
Ye dare not stoop to less—
Nor call too loud on Freedom
To cloak your weariness;
By all ye cry or whisper,
By all ye leave or do,
The silent, sullen peoples
Shall weigh your Gods and you.

The use of the plural, “Gods,” here, seems to preclude a Christian interpretation. If he were speaking as a Christian, he would be speaking heresy. The Gods would presumably be the values cherished by Victorian English culture: equality, democracy, discipline, duty, honesty, justice, good manners, and sound accounting principles. 

Take up the White Man's burden—
Have done with childish days—
The lightly profferred laurel,
The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years,
Cold-edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers!

It seems to me that Kipling escapes the charge of racism. He is being read uncharitably here because the modern left hates him for something else: for being an unbending moralist. This, of course, is the reason why they are opposed to the suggestion that any culture might be superior to another—because it implies that any moral stance might be superior to any other. Morality is an unpleasant suggestion to the immoral. 

Indian custom of suttee--widow burning.

I have no problem with Kipling’s moralism. On the other hand, I find him unpalatable because he consistently bases it on the trivial: on “the judgement of your peers,” or being “grown-up,” or “manly.” These are worldly baubles.

One ought to behave morally out of a commitment to morality, to the good, and out of love for God and one’s fellow man; not out of pride, which is to say, so that others will think well of you. Prestige. Kipling’s ethics are pre-Christian pagan ethics.

I suspect that this failure of transcendence was, in the end, what caused Europe to lose its appetite for empire. Eventually, once you eventually thought it through, it all seemed so pointless.

Regime-Change Wars

A 19th Century British political cartoon.

I like the sincerity of Tulsi Gabbard. I believe she would be the strongest candidate for the Democrats against Donald Trump. And I think she is being treated dishonestly by a corrupt Democratic Party establishment and media. 

But what about the merits of her central issue, ending American involvement in “regime-change wars”?

She has a point in international law, or what international law said until Kosovo. Until then, intervening in another country’s internal politics, no matter what, was considered unprovoked aggression.

But then there was the Rwandan holocaust, and opinion shifted to holding France morally responsible for not intervening.

I at first resisted this new principle, that there was an obligation upon other nations to intervene in defense of human rights. I was, on reflection, wrong.

This, after all, is the same moral principle as our obligation to intervene if we see someone being raped or stabbed or beaten up. “None so guilty as the innocent bystander.”

So it follows that America, because it has the capability, has the moral obligation to intervene against any regime that is flagrantly violating the human rights of either its own or some other people. It is not okay to gas Jews. It is not okay to stand aside and let it happen. Sorry, Tulsi.

I believe Gabbard sincerely sees it differently, for the simple reason that she is a Hindu.

Hinduism or Buddhism can endlessly tolerate injustice without a moral obligation to intervene because of the doctrine of karma. If someone is being raped or stabbed or otherwise viciously mistreated, if some group is being systematically wiped doubt, it is no doubt just reward for some terrible thing they have done in a past life. No injustice is possible; no cause for us to get involved.

I leave the reader to decide how they feel about this stance; but from it follows the conclusion, for example, that having a criminal justice system is illegitimate.

Gabbard and her supporters would no doubt go on to argue that recent “regime change” wars have not just been costly, but have not worked. They will cite Iraq and Afghanistan.

We have actually had several recent case studies, since this new doctrine has become accepted: Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria.

In the first case, the Western allies stayed on to establish stability, and, after some years, Kosovo has emerged as a functioning multi-party democracy. In Kosovo, it seems that the “regime change” war did work. One might also mention the postwar experience with Germany, Japan, or Italy, although WWII was not just a “regime change” war.

In the second case, Iraq, some stability did seem to have been achieved, after some years of struggle, then lost by what looks like a premature US departure. After some limited re-engagement, Iraq looks more stable. In Afghanistan, relatively low-level conflict continues. In these two cases, long-term results cannot really be determined.

Appalled by the cost of these two interventions, however, when things then turned nasty internally in Libya, the West tried a different tack: go in, take out the regime, and leave. This is, to be honest, what I too thought would be the better policy. You can lead a nation to democracy, but you cannot force them to be democrats. It’s a contradiction in terms.

But this approach seems to have turned out worse: Libya remains in chaos, and human rights abuses remain common.

Disappointed again, when Syria then went south, the West reverted to the old, pre-Rwanda approach: do nothing.

And this has worked out worst of all: an ongoing holocaust of historic proportions, a refugee crisis flooding the borders of Europe, and the intervention of other foreign powers less friendly to human rights: Russia, Iran. As none have the strength to force a resolution, conflict looks to continue indefinitely.

So we’ve tried all the possible approaches, and in terms of defending human rights, the option of intervention, however costly, is visibly the best.

Americans, of course, are historically tempted to ignore the rest of the world’s problems, protected they are by oceans vast and deep. That may or may not be wise—but it is not the moral way.

Those alert to history may realize that Britain, in the nineteenth century, faced the same choice. Protecting the human rights of foreigners was actually the sentiment upon which was built much of the British Empire. Britain spent a lot of "blood and treasure," as the modern clichéd usage goes, ending the slave trade, thuggery, piracy, suttee, the caste system, banditry, endless local conflicts, and the like.

Honesty compels us to admit that, no so uncommonly, colonialism is actually a good idea.

The Case for Colonialism

Former Queen’s prof (now at Portland State) Dr. Bruce Gilley has been summarily removed from Queens’ Centre for International and Defense Policy for publishing a paper titled “The Case for Colonialism.” Apparently arguing that colonialism can be moral in some circumstances is now intolerable.

But of course it can, or at least a reasonable argument can be made. Kosovo, for example, was a colonialist intervention. Bosnia was. Such interventions to prevent human rights abuses are not rare in the annals of European 19th century colonialism. More often than we are told, the intervention of the European power was largely humanitarian in intent. It was a matter of peacekeeping, or of preventing a holocaust.

Even when this is not the case, much colonialism can be compared to the sound corporate policy, when a business is not doing well, of bringing in new management from outside. It works in business; it works as well in government.

Of course, at the time that Europe was colonizing the rest of the world, European culture was also significantly more technologically advanced than any of its colonies. The colonial authority introduced this new technology, improving living standards: railroads were laid, canals dug, new industries developed, schools and hospitals founded. Sure, European firms profited in building and managing these things; but so did the local inhabitants.

The case against colonialism is that it infantilizes people; makes the colonized dependent and strips them of initiative. And this is an important issue.

But really—the idea that different ethnicities should be sovereign and govern themselves is a new idea, dating from about 1917 or so and Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points. Before that, everywhere, colonization was the universal norm. It is, moreover, arguably racist to insist that there is something wrong with it—that government ought always to be on the basis of race or ethnicity. And this position that governments must be ethnically-based is disastrous for minorities everywhere.

A Third Empire

Big Pink.

With Brexit, a union of the Anglosphere becomes more plausible. And you hear more mention of it. Most British commentators, true, do not include the US in the proposed entity, as I would. This is perhaps understandable, as the US would completely dominate any such union. The UK does not like being number two.

But then let's play the ball where it lies: without the US for now. It seems to me that the concept of such a union still makes mighty good sense for the potential players: most obviously, Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand.

First and for all, of course, there is the benefit of free trade, and the free movement of people. Canadians could choose to move to and work in Australia, and Britons in Canada. Canadians who look with envy at the greater career opportunities in the huge American market, especially, should appreciate this.

For Britain, there is secure access to the natural resources of Canada and Australia. It makes more sense for the UK to establish free trade in this direction than with Europe, because European nations are much of a muchness; they all more or less offer the same competitive advantage, a large skilled labour force, and so are natural competitors. By contrast, Britain's strengths and Australia's are more complimentary: Britain has a large skilled labour force, and strong, established service industries, but lacks Australia's natural resources.

It also makes more sense in cultural terms, of course, for Britain to reach hands across the sea than to stick with Europe. Its culture, and especially its political culture, is far closer to that of Canada than to that of Italy. Moreover, Britain is by tradition and geography a maritime trading nation; its natural ties are not the land ties and the ties of proximity that drive the rest of the EU.

For Canada, the great allure is, as has always been the core of the Canadian experience, a counterbalance to the strong centrifugal force of the USA next door. As part of a Commonwealth Union, Canada would be, unlike with the US, and indeed from then on in dealing with the US, much more of an equal partner. Canada has a vast territory that, if ever challenged, it does not have the manpower to protect. Now, it relies entirely on tacit US protection. That is beneath the dignity of a great nation. That is the state of being a colony. Better a formal military alliance with Britain, which does have the manpower.

Moreover, Canada’s security needs fit Britain’s capabilities like a glove fits a hand. Britain is by tradition a naval power. Canada has the longest coastline in the world.

If Canada remains in NAFTA, the addition of Commonwealth Union membership would also be a great trading advantage. By setting up in Canada, American firms could gain access to the significant British market, as well as those of Australasia. British firms could in the same way gain access to the gigantic American and Mexican markets.

What sets may also rise again.

Australia has almost the same defense concerns as Canada. It lives in a possibly dangerous neighbourhood, and like Canada lacks the population to defend a vast territory. As an island nation, it needs naval power above all else.

As goes Australia so goes New Zealand--present ties make the two inseparable. At the same time, becoming part of a larger union protects New Zealand from being too dominated by its much bigger neighbour.

There are other potential partners. Ireland, for example. Ireland does not, for historical reasons, want too close an embrace from Britain. But it was vastly to Ireland's economic advantage to be in the EU alongside the UK. Now that the UK is out, Ireland's position is awkward: most of its truck, trade and transit is with Britain, rather than the more distant remainder of Europe. A Commonwealth Union gives Ireland a new and viable option: join the larger group, and the presence of largely catholic Canada and largely Irish Australia prevent English influence from becoming suffocating, as in the EU. Joining the Anglophone union might also make Irish reunification easier: the counterbalancing presence of Britain, Canada, and Australia in the larger union might well make Ulster Protestants feel more secure with Dublin as their capital. Instead of losing their British ties in joining the Republic, they would be broadening them.

The former British colonies of the Caribbean might also make worthy partners. From their point of view, union would boost tourism, often their main income. From the perspective of Canada, and to a lesser extent Britain, they would offer ideal winter tourism and retirement destinations. No doubt there would be some migration of locals to the greener economic pastures of the more developed dominions, but this is not a major consideration pro or con: we are speaking of small populations. Nor are all Caribbean nations poor: the Bahamas, for example, if a member of the union, could pull its own economic weight.

The union might be especially attractive to several Caribbean islands with mixed English and French histories; the strengthening of cultural and tourism ties with Quebec could be alluring. For Quebec, they could be a source of Francophone immigration. More generally, few Caribbean islands are really viable, economically or militarily, as nations by themselves. Joining a larger jurisdiction would be entirely to their advantage.

Singapore would also be on my list. It, too, is too small to protect its own interests, and it is a strategic plum too attractive to any aggressor. Better to form a voluntary union with some larger entity where its concerns are heard, than to sit and quack. This is why, despite ultimately insurmountable demographic difficulties, Singaporeans tried hard to form a union with Malaysia. Association with the Commonwealth Dominions should be more comfortable. Singapore, in return, would be invaluable to the other partners as a regional naval base, and as a regional headquarters to do business with Asia. If Singapore retained its membership in ASEAN at the same time, it would have huge trade advantages, and could offer British, Canadian or Australian firms easy access to the vast and fast-growing Southeast Asian market.

The projected union still, to my mind, with these members, seems relatively lacking in one essential resource—indeed, the most vital. Manpower. Even with these several strong nations linked together, the total population would not be that far north of 100 million—less than a third the population of the US, less than one twelfth the population of China, about the population of Japan. Worse, the demographic trends are toward population decline, barring large immigration from elsewhere. This makes the future, and future prosperity, insecure.

Yet there are obvious risks to large-scale immigration. It can change the culture. This matters: cultures are not equal. The greatest advantage the Anglosphere has, and has always had, is its culture, a culture of public order, respect for law and authority, for individual and property rights, and relative honesty in government. Where and how, then, can the proposed union safely secure its demographic future, without handing away the keys? The more so since the rate of population growth even in the less developed world is beginning to slacken?

Nobody here but us Filipinos.

India is the obvious solution, but it would be a culturally indigestible chunk. It is many times larger than the rest of the union put together. And Indian culture is, in the end, significantly alien: different languages, very different religion. Moreover, a land power, with other great land powers on its borders—a valuable complementary ally, no doubt, but not a good blend as a full strategic partner.

A better alternative, I propose, is union with the Philippines. Its population, soon to be 100 million, would ensure sufficient manpower for the foreseeble future while being just small enough not to overwhelm. Any Filipino who has graduated high school can speak English, and English is the lingua franca of the country. It is, like the rest of the union, predominantly Christian. It is an archipelago, defensible by a naval power. It is a functioning democracy. While its governmental and legal system are not quite the same as the Commonwealth Realms, they are close relatives: Manila follows the American model, with much current talk of moving towards the Westminster parliamentary system. The Philippines has a strong tradition of seafaring--one in five of the world's sailors today is Filipino. This meshes well with British traditions, and is especially valuable to what would be primarily a sea power and a trading nation. This trading tradition also, not incidentally, makes Filipinos particularly apt at navigating cultural differences and at migration. Wherever they settle, you find no Filipino ghettos. There are not Filipino neighbourhoods the way there are Little Italys or Chinatowns. Give them a generation, and a Filipino family has assimilated.

I expect the Philippines, for their part, would welcome the association. Not just for the obvious economic opportunities for Filipinos, either. When the American Navy pulled out of Subic Bay, there was graffiti reading "Yankee, go home-- and take me with you." Whatever mild thirst there might have been then for going it alone, moreover, has faded a fair bit in the face of new Chinese expansionism in the South China Sea. The Philippines needs to join up with a legitimate naval power.

Britain, Canada, Singapore, and Australia can finance the ships; the Philippines can supply able sailors. The former can offer the capital, the factories, the resources; the Philippines can supply the many willing hands.

Will the pour Filipinos take jobs away from less-skilled Britons or Canadians? Sure. No doubt. But the choice is this: let local and loyal Filipinos take the jobs, or let then be taken by distant Chinese and others. If allied Filipinos take them, the money paid stays and circulates in the union, making the overall opportunities for all of us greater. If we send it to China, the capital and the opportunities are there. And then serve to strengthen an alien system that may be antithetical to our interests.

One more reason that we all might want to do this: one hopes it is temporary, but the US is beginning to look punched out. It seems weary of shouldering alone the burden of being "the world's policeman." Time, perhaps, to call in Scotland Yard. Nations like Britain, Canada, Australia, and the Philippines, who have relied since WWII upon the assured aid of the American military mammoth whenever needed, might be wise to start making alternative arrangements. Indeed, such a strong new partner might persuade the Americans too to stay in the fight. Either way, surely better for our interests than passively ceding the field to some unpredictable other. China? A new caliphate? The BRICS?

The US, in a new wave of its traditional isolationism, also seems to be pulling back from trade deals. The Germans and the French are muttering that the US is not negotiating in good faith on the proposed free trade deal with the EU. But Washington is perhaps only reacting to popular opinion. Americans are sick of the world outside. Both major presidential candidates have announced against the TPP, to which both Canada and Australia were wedded.

This presents for others both a danger and an opportunity. With the US pulling back, the rest of us need new trading partners elsewhere. And it also leaves an opening for someone else to seize the trading opportunities the US is waiving. Another argument for a Commonwealth customs union.

I believe that the union, as proposed, as a free trade area and a unified military entity, would begin life as the third-largest economy in the world, and the third-largest military power. It would only grow in influence and importance from there.

Traditional British naval ensign. You know, I see three blank quadrants that might be filled.

Parliament of the Imperial Federation

"Freedom, Fraternity, Federation": The British Empire in 1886.

Assuming each seat represented 500,000 constituents, here is the representation by population for a "Parliament of the Imperial Federation," as envisaged once before World War I. The idea is now underfgoing a revival, thanks to the near-collapse of the EU.

Most of those currently pushing the idea speak of limiting it to the “developed” members of the British Commonwealth. The following are usually given as the most likely members:

England: 102 members

Canada: 68 members

Australia: 44 members

Scotland: 10 members

New Zealand: 8 members

Wales: 6 members

Northern Ireland: 4 members

Total: 242 members; population circa 121 million.

But Malta, Cyprus, Singapore, the Bahamas, Barbados, and Trinidad and Tobago now also seem to qualify as developed:

Malta: 1 member

Bahamas and other islands of the West Indies: 1 member

Barbados and other islands of the West Indies: 1 member

Trinidad and Tobago: 2 members

Singapore: 10 members

Cyprus: 2 members

Total: 257 members; population circa 128 million.

This is still, of course, far from the entirety of the “Anglosphere.” A number of big players are missing:

Ireland: 9 members

Jamaica: 6 members

USA: 628 members

India: 2410 members

Philippines: 207 members

South Africa: 98 members

There are obvious problems with incorporating some of these. The USA would dwarf the rest put together. India would dwarf the rest including even the USA, and flood the union with cheap labour. The Philippines would also be a huge injection of cheap labour; Jamaica a smaller one. Which might be either good or bad.

Leaving aside labour and wages, I cannot see a union working well with any one member too dominant. The danger of democracy is of any large majority bullying and oppressing any distinct minority.

Personally, I'd like to see a union including Ireland, the USA, Jamaica, and the Philippines. I would hope that including the Philippines would give enough counterweight to prevent complete domination by the US.

And since it's my fantasy, I guess I get my way.

The New British/Anglophone Empire

The biggest "Red State" ever.

Here's another writer talking about a revived British/Anglosphere Empire. He sees the recent deal between Canada and Britain to share Embassies as a step in that direction.

The Moral Case for the British Empire

Being of Irish extraction and Catholic, I have more reason to be hostile to the British Empire than anyone. Still, certain things are simply true, and deserve to be acknowledged. The British Empire was a good idea, and mostly a force for good. There is precious little bad feeling toward it in most of its former colonies.

http://www.prageruniversity.com/History/The-Moral-Case-for-the-British-Empire.html

Angus Reid Poll Suggests Plurality of Britons for Leaving EU

http://www.angus-reid.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/2012.08.14_EU_BRI.pdf

Sounds as though, if Cameron is serious about holding a referendum, it might really result in the UK leaving Europe.

Not that I think it would be a good idea in the modern world for Britain to try to go it alone. Just that I think they're in the wrong trading block. I'd rather see a combined NAFTA-Commonwealth Bloc, with a few other members (Ireland, The Philippines...)--roughly, the "Anglosphere." The combination is far more natural, in terms of shared political, legal, and economic traditions. It would be much bigger and more powerful. And I think it makes more economic sense--a more diverse bloc has more to trade profitably.

On Britain Leaving the EU

A new report.

Telegraph Writer Says What I've Been Saying for Years

Might the sun yet rise, and never set again, on the Anglophone Empire?

...Britain would have a great future economically and politically  allied with the Anglosphere instead of the EU.

The Special Relationship with Washington would only be strengthened, not weakened, as America looks beyond the emperor with no clothes in Brussels to a resurgent Britain freed of the shackles of the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy and Common Security and Defence Policy. And it would only be a matter of time before a free trade agreement was negotiated and signed between the US and UK, reinforcing the biggest bilateral investment relationship in the world. It would also be a major opportunity for Britain to reinvigorate ties with the Anglosphere nations of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and India, as well as important English-speaking trading partners in Asia such as Singapore and Hong Kong. 

Link. 

The Renaissance of the British Empire

Bigger than a breadbox.

The recent exclusion of the UK from the latest deal to rescue the Euro moves us a big step closer to seeing the Anglosphere reunite--Britain is visibly and definitively pulling back from the EU now.

But then, a guest on the BBC was just quoted as saying the Euro itself is now doomed; it is only a matter of time. And the EU itself is likely to break up when this happens.

England may then not be the only European country interested in chipping in instead with NAFTA. Among those shopping for some new association might well be Ireland, Spain, and Portugal--all turfed out of the Euro as bad financial risks. All three have powerful New World connections.

I can see a possible reunion, not just of the old British Empire plus the US, but this also combined with the old Spanish Empire plus the old Portuguese Empire, for a that much more formidable free trade area. This free trade area would be far stronger than the EU, because it would combine areas with a great diversity of resources and economic strengths, along with greater unity of language and culture. It could include two important emerging powerhouses, India and Brazil.

It would permanently dwarf China.

Some Say He's Hardy...

Having just watched the movie “The Wind that Shakes the Barley” (I watch movies while I exercise), I was pondering the British Empire—on balance, was it a force for good or evil.

So I thought, once again, I'd throw the question to Ask500People, and see what the world thought.

The overall result: 69% good, 31% evil. That's a pretty positive result, and belies the usual politically correct line. So much for “post-colonialism” and all that guff.

Here's an even more interesting result: a quick scan of the world map shows the opinion of the British Empire is especially positive not in Europe, but in the “Third World”--just the folks who are supposed to have suffered from it. South America and Africa love it. The Middle East loves it. So does India. The negative votes seem clustered in Europe—that is, the one spot that did not actually experience it.

To be perfectly fair, there were two former British colonies in which the negative vote surpassed the positive, though only by 1 to 0: Jamaica and Australia. Ireland posted no votes. In Britain itself, the feeling was perfectly ambiguous: a tie. In the US, the Empire swept two thirds of the vote. The two countries in which the British Empire seemed most popular were Brazil and Argentina. Argentina—Britain's opponent in the Falklands War.

The British Empire: An Idea Whose Time Has Come

A little while ago on this blog, I was admitting nostalgia for the British Empire.

You know, I might have been premature. The British Empire has been counted out before—when those troublesome American colonists insisted on going it alone. Is it possible we could have a third empire?

Here's why we might: because it is in India's best interests. Given demographics and economic trends, in a few decades, ot looks as though there will be two great powers in the world: India and China. But India's great advantage over China might be this: while China has tended to go it alone, India has an international network of friends. China is scrambling now to make friends in order to secure markets, on the one hand, and raw materials, on the other. But India already has all that, in the Commonwealth. India may want to play up this advantage.

The difference between the present Commonwealth and a new Empire, I posit, would be two things at a minimum: a free trade agreement, and a mutual defence pact.

For many of the former bits of the British Empire, it still makes sense to work together on this basis. India gets it markets and raw materials, just as British manufacturing did a century ago. Canada gets an advantage over its partners in NAFTA: it becomes the portal for Empire businesses seeking access to North America, and for North American businesses seeking access to the Empire. Britain gains the same advantage vis a vis Europe. Myanmar, Malaysia, and Singapore, if they joined, would gain the same advantage within ASEAN. India would automatically gain a free trade area covering all of South Asia: Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Myanmar. Australia gets a counterbalance to the inevitable pull of China, and a security guarantee.

The Gulf States—Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE, and Oman—can supply the union with valuable oil and valuable investment capital. It return, they get the right to invest freely, and, crucially, defense guarantees. Being rich, tiny, and in a rough neighbourhood, they can use the same protections that brought them into the British Empire to begin with.

A reconstituted Empire would also, not incidentally, control many of the major sea trade routes—this was most of the point of the Empire for the British in the first place. This would be valuable to India and to the oil nations in securing the flow of trade. And it is a real consideration—we again see piracy in the Malacca Straits and at the mouth of the Red Sea, since the British left.

African nations would probably want in, for the sake of foreign aid—as it is, Mozambique has chosen to join the Commonwealth despite a lack or historic ties to Britain. The small English-speaking nations of the Caribbean would certainly want in. The only question is whether the rest of the federation would be interested.

They might. A generation or two ago, the rich nations feared the integration of the Empire because of a possible mass influx of poor from the less-developed nations. Now, with the developed world facing demographic crisis, this might actually be an advantage. Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Britain, and the Gulf nations could probably soon use the immigration flow.

What's in it not to love? It makes more sense than the European Union, or NAFTA--the members complement each other better.

Of course, the British would not be able to dominate this empire as they did the last two. This time, it would be the Indians—though those troublesome American colonists, if we let them back in, might act as something of a counterbalance.

The Captains and the Kings Depart

It is okay to admit to some nostalgia for the British Empire?

One of my students, a Pakistani, asked me recently how I felt about it. It was a difficult question. On the one hand, I was raised in Canada on my grandfather's old boys' books, published in the early years of the 20th century. They made the British Empire seem a glorious thing. On the other hand, I am ethnically Irish, and my grandmother never let me forget that the Irish were treated very badly by the English.

All that being so, however, perhaps it leaves me as fair a judge as we can find. And I do feel some nostalgia.

Is empire wrong? Not necessarily. It is wrong if you believe in the primacy, the essential rightness, of the nation state. But the nation state is, at its core, to be perfectly frank, racist. Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy were the ultimate nation states. Isn't a multi-national state morally better? Does it not better conform with the universal brotherhood of man?

By the same token, if the person heading your state is of a different ethniciy or race than you, is that a problem? Only if you are racist. Only if you have a problem with, say, President Barack Obama. Or Queen Elizabeth II, ethnically German. Or the Scottish Gordon Brown.

Certainly, empire was good for human prosperity and human progress. Expanded, open trade makes everyone richer. Open trade in ideas makes us all the wiser. As The Economist once pointed out, only in very recent years has China recovered the same portion of world trade it held in 1900. The notion of the white people “looting” the dark races was, for the most part, a myth, though there were some exceptions. The foreigners made their profits, but the local workmen got their pay, and the local merchants and entrepreneurs their prices and their contracted fees. The British kept the peace, dealt fairly ont he whole, and they left some very fine infrastructure, infrastructure that is often still relied upon, a half-century or more after the last foreigners left.

What of the shame of the local people, being treated as if they were wards? Fair enough; but the same argument ought to hold equally against foreign aid. Let them pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, then?

Of course, an empire is not a democracy. There is that criticism, surely?

Agreed; but I think it is also objectively fair to say that not all societies can handle a democracy. I recall the Saudi Ambassador to the US explaining this to Bill O'Reilly, on the latter's show, and being hooted down by the host. I knew he was right, but knew I would once have agreed with O'Reilly. I heard the same argument from a Vietnamese neutralist back during the US-Vietnam War, and doubted him.

But, having lived in various places around the world since, I now believe it—just, I might add, as Thomas Jefferson did. A democracy needs, first and foremost, a responsible ruling elite who are prepared to enter into a gentleman's agreement not to abuse power once they attain it, and to peacefully pass it on to someone else when the system requires it. That needs a huge amount of trust—trust, for example, that they are not themselves immediately going to be imprisoned or executed by their successors.

Without that, no democracy will last past the first fair elections; as history has repeatedly demonstrated. And, failing democracy, a disinterested, but essentially honest, foreign ruling authority may be the best remaining alternative.

In fact, an empire, acting as a court and police force of last resort, can be the ideal guarantor of democracy. It would have been best, perhaps, if the British Empire had worked harder in this direction. Nevertheless, it may have sown some seeds. And I suspect the fundamental insight was right, that the societies over which Britain held control were not ready for democracy for the most part.

India, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the USA, Ireland, Malta, and others emerged from the Empire as functioning democracies. Had the Empire lasted longer, perhaps more would have as well. It may not be coincidence that there seems to be a correlation between successful democracy post-Empire, and how long Britain held control over the territory. The oldest colonies have experienced the most successful transition.

That being so, the British Empire might, I think, in the end, have taken another course. A course that was actually proposed by many at the beginning of the 20th century. It might have slowly evolved into an international federation, like the EU, with nations becoming full partners in an Imperial Parliament once they had established their democratic traditions.

Perhaps it is for that lost opportunity that I feel most nostalgic. Had it come to pass, we surely would have avoided much human suffering: in the partition of India, in Idi Amin's Uganda, in apartheid South Africa, in Mugabe's Zimbabwe, in the Sri Lankan civil war, in the Yemeni civil war, in Saddam's Iraq, in the partition of Cyprus—even, perhaps, in the ongoing tragedy of Palestine.

It would be a very different world.

And wouldn't it, frankly, be a better world?