Gareth Evans writes: One of the most bizarre arguments made by the people who support Britain’s exit from the European Union is the notion that a self-exiled UK will find a new global relevance, and indeed leadership role, as the center of the “Anglosphere.”
The idea is that there are a group of countries – with the “Five Eyes” intelligence-sharing community of the US, UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand at its core – who share so much of a common heritage that they can be a new, united force for global peace and prosperity.
Geostrategically, the main game is, as it has been for most of recorded time, geography rather than history, and the biggest game of all for the foreseeable future is the emerging contest for global supremacy between the US and China.
The US does value highly its relationship with NATO members Britain and Canada. Yet it is hard to see US leaders devoting time and energy to attending Commonwealth Heads of Government meetings, which is essentially what any formal Anglosphere structure would amount to.
Australia, for its part, sees its security future as wholly bound up in the Indo-Pacific region. Anglosphere connections mattered a lot for Australians and others in the days before the UK joined the European Common Market. The severance of those ties was painful for our dairy and other industries, but for Britain hard-headed self-interest understandably prevailed. Self-interest now prevails for the rest of us.
In Australia’s case, our trade future is bound up either with all-embracing global agreements, or at least substantial regional ones like the Trans-Pacific Partnership, with the US the key player, or the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership now being negotiated between ASEAN and Australia, China, India, Japan, South Korea and New Zealand.
The US manifestly feels the same way.
Probably the hardest truth that Britain’s Anglosphere dreamers must confront is that there is just no mood politically to build some new global association of the linguistically and culturally righteous.
While many of us living in the so-called Anglosphere remain nostalgic about Britain. The truth of the matter is that if Britain steps away from Europe, thinking it can compensate by creating an influential new international grouping of its own, it will find itself very lonely indeed.