The Anglosphere miracle
newcriterion.com
newcriterion.com
I find it very difficult to take this seriously coming from a Conservative MEP (I note the article makes no mention of his party affiliation), mainly because his party is proposing to do the exact same thing with the EU Convention on Human Rights.
To wit, the Conservative Party has upon numerous occasions frequently chosen to ignore their legal obligations, such as trying to deport people who have been charged with no crime on the basis of evidence gained under torture, denying some prisoners the right to vote, and retaining DNA of those arrested but not charged with a crime indefinitely. All of which are, according to the EU courts, illegal.
So when faced with these 'inconvenient' laws, the tories are proposing to ignore them, tear them up, and replace them with a 'British' bill of rights that largely duplicates what's already enshrined in EU law (a pointless exercise).
I also think it's rather disingenuous of the article to gloss over the fact that Daniel Hannan is not without his critics, and that his positions on issues such as immigration are not, in my view, particularly enlightened. I leave it to other commenters here to determine whether it's really 'racist garbage' (as someone else suggested), but whatever he's pining for something that simply doesn't and cannot exist anymore.
I don't think that's true, especially since his own party is doing the exact same thing (ignoring EU treaty obligations), just with human rights instead of fiscal responsibility. If he found it so bizarre why would he do it himself?
He is attempting to project his own Euroscepticism onto the UK as a whole by making blanket statements about what it means to be 'British'. I think these assumptions are false. Whilst there are vocal Eurosceptics in Britain they are not representative of the whole (if they were, his own party would have a majority, but they don't - they're in coalition).
The freedom he praises is the freedom of the very rich and well-connected to impose their success on the less fortunate, be they poor sheep farmers in Scotland who saw their commons taken away by enclosures, indentured servants who were shipped off to the colonies in America or the inhabitants of India who had their livelihood taken away from them when textile manufacturers from Manchester forced the destruction of their local economy. (Notice, by the way, how this essay makes no mention of Indians other than the 2.4 million Indians who were pressed into service in the trenches in World War I and who, for the most part, suffered terribly to defend a country that had pretty much ruined their own.)
For this rich mercantile elite, yes, the anglo system is superior, which is why its ideals have now spread across the entire world (even in China there is now an elite that dresses in suits and engages in trade unencumbered by rules and regulations that protect the millions that are pressed into working in their factories under appalling conditions).
For the vast majority of people, however, the system is a disaster. It has ruined communal forms of organisation that protected the unfortunate and the weak. It has destroyed perfectly viable local economies and it has reduced millions of people to little more than debt bondage.
It takes a special kind of myopia to gloss over all of that and proclaim, like this article does, that the anglo system is superior because it promotes free trade and rule of law for the rich.
(Back when America had a middle class. Now, we have our own despots.)
The adoption of suits is just a fashion thing. China hasn't really developed its own sense of fashion coming out of the Mao era. It's not a sign of wholesale embrace of Western culture and ideals. On the contrary most Chinese are quite proud of their history and culture. What China has embraced since Deng Xiaoping was the pragmatic parts of Western society, i.e. methods of doing business, trade, and manufacturing.
China never really had a system of laws and regulations to protect its workers because it was never in a situation until now where it had millions working in dangerous industrial situations. Until recent decades, China was still largely agrarian.
In short, China didn't cast off its old ways and embraced Angloculture as much as it borrow bits and pieces it found useful. It remains to be seem if it can borrow pieces without taking everything and still have it work.
China is a dangerous counter to the narrative of the superiority of Western or Anglo ideals. If China is indeed successful in the long term with its mix of traditional Chinese authoritarianism and Western style capitalism, then other people and countries would see essays like this one as nonsense.
I couldn't agree more. I have immense regard for the development of the British political system over the last millennium but an account that distills out this fairytale narrative from the immense oppression - of Britain's own, poor and working people, of the colonialism and slavery - that accompanied it is a dishonest and blinkered view of history.
I thought Hacker News was smarter than this. I thought I was. :( We have better things to do. More intelligent things to disagree with.
>For the vast majority of people, however, the system is a disaster.
The common people living in the Anglosphere are much better off than those where the institutions that protect property rights didn't exist.
I am not originally from an Anglosphere country and yet believe that the econo-political structure that they were first to successfully implement had tremendous advantages over anything before or since.
Yet despite this, the people who are not the very rich and well-connected are far more secure in the Anglophone world. I've lived in various places around the world and, whilst it's always possible for everything you have to be taken from you, this is far less likely in the UK, the US, Singapore etc than in Peru, Argentina, China, Russia and so on.
Whilst it's true that the law works better for the rich everywhere, it's less true in the US, the UK, Singapore etc etc.
It takes a special kind of myopia
Much like your myopia. The Anglophone world isn't perfect. It's a lot better than the vast majority of the rest of the world.
(With apologies to Western Europe, where things are also pretty good :p )
Notice how casually the number of Indian soldiers in WW2 -- 2.4 million, more than the other countries combined -- is slipped in, well after NZ and Australia. And of course they all volunteered out of their love for the Queen -- unrelated to the fact that a coercive foreign power was ruling their country at the time.
Honestly, the world should be too evolved to be accepting thinly veiled racist garbage like this any more.
We have such labels today, of course, quite a lot of them, from the all-purpose "inappropriate" to the dreaded "divisive." In any period, it should be easy to figure out what such labels are, simply by looking at what people call ideas they disagree with besides untrue. When a politician says his opponent is mistaken, that's a straightforward criticism, but when he attacks a statement as "divisive" or "racially insensitive" instead of arguing that it's false, we should start paying attention."
There seems to a be a large rise in popularity of such articles which cherry pick certain facts to paint a rosy picture of the colonial empire. I believe its the classic case of people wanting to read a history they wish was true rather than deal with the uncomfortable truth.
While I have no problems with people writing about the many positives of the raj, I believe that omitting to mention certain genocides and atrocities is akin to misinformation.
Here is Havildar Hirram Singh writing to his family in India from the sodden trenches of northern France in the same year:
We must honor him who gives us our salt. Our dear government’s rule is very good and gracious.
If you know anything about Britain's salt monopoly, Gandhi and the Salt March 15 years after Singh's letter above, you'd see how messed up this article is.
Here's a hint: Salary = salt given as payment for services rendered.
By the time of the Hebrew Book of Ezra (550 to 450 BCE), salt from a person was synonymous with drawing sustenance, taking pay, or being in that person's service. At that time, salt production was strictly controlled by the monarchy or ruling elite. Depending on the translation of Ezra 4:14, the servants of King Artaxerxes I of Persia explain their loyalty variously as "because we are salted with the salt of the palace" or "because we have maintenance from the king" or "because we are responsible to the king".
Somehow my point stands.
I'm not sure how that's supposed to support your point. Pretty sure it supports mine.
Slipping India into that list is just bizarre and tantamount to distorting the truth (not the number, perhaps, but certainly the argument he bases on the number). These 2.4 million "volunteers" were not so much pulled by any affinity of blood and speech as grabbed by the scruff of their neck. Meanwhile countless millions more were struggling at home to overthrow the oppressive rule of the British.[1] The vast majority joined the relatively peaceful struggle for freedom led by Gandhi, but many took up arms against the colonizers and an Indian army even fought against the British and alongside the Japanese in WWII.[2]
So excuse me if I find that rosy picture about the loyal Indian bleeding for the "dear government" a little hard to digest. It would be a lot more believable if the dear government hadn't been massacring and looting the country for two centuries.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_independence_movement
That's the theme of Gandhi's non-violence : it's only non-violence if you're looking from very far away focusing on the person. If you were someone affected by the political decisions Gandhi was involved in ... the political change he affected probably felt more like a holocaust. You could say, if you look at it from afar, that he didn't know this was going to happen, and he didn't order it. But he did order people into situations that he knew perfectly well were going to explode.
Here's one account of the immediate result of Gandhi's "non-violence":
There are numerous eyewitness accounts of the maiming and
mutilation of victims. The catalogue of horrors includes
the disembowelling of pregnant women, the slamming of
babies' heads against brick walls, the cutting off of
victims limbs and genitalia and the display of heads and
corpses. While previous communal riots had been deadly,
the scale and level of brutality was unprecedented.
Although some scholars question the use of the term
'genocide' with respect to the Partition massacres, much
of the violence manifested as having genocidal tendencies.
It was designed to cleanse an existing generation as well
as prevent its future reproduction."[1]
Like most of this kind of "heroes" his non-violence is not the result of a belief that violence is wrong (or he wouldn't have recruited for the army), but the result of the worst aspect of Indian society : the caste system. His non-violence is about him personally refusing to do anything related to violence, except of course, command them from a distance. He would only involve himself in strategy, ordering people around and deciding what is "decent" "good" and "moral", on a grand scale. Personally committing violence is just one of those things he won't do himself, he'll hire/order others to do that for him.
And like any other monster that just happened to do successfully what is popular now, he has a cult following. At least this particular popular monster had the decency and self control to never rape and torture people himself, unlike the ubiquitous Che Guevara.
1. The fact that the (very large) number of Indian soldiers in WW2 was slipped in without comment into a statement about how NZ, Australia and other Anglosphere countries were joined in some kind of glorious kinship. India was not, and is not, a part of this cosy club and should not have been in that list.
2. Attributing the participation of Indian soldiers in WW2 to some kind of personal decision, and not the fact the British ruled India at the time as an imperialist foreign power.
Here are a couple more statements that are false:
1. "What do we mean by Western civilization?...Third, representative government. Laws should not be passed, nor taxes levied, except by elected legislators who are answerable to the rest of us."
This was patently false in the large parts of the world where Britain ruled illegally for two centuries. Taxes were routinely levied on citizens of the colonies without representative government. (I seem to remember this having something to do with the American Revolution, as a matter of fact.)
2. "Yet Peru—indeed, Latin America in general—never achieved the law-based civil society that North America takes for granted. Settled at around the same time, the two great landmasses of the New World serve almost as a controlled experiment. The north was settled by English-speakers, who took with them a belief in property rights, personal liberty, and representative government. The south was settled by Iberians who replicated vast estates and quasi-feudal society of their home provinces."
There were several other differences between North and South America, including the climate, the relative times at which they achieved independence, and (perhaps most importantly) the attitudes of the imperialists towards their subjects. In colonies where the ruled were racially different than the rulers (South America, Africa and Asia), their treatment and eventual outcomes were far worse than in places where the colonial power and the colonies were both racially the same (North America). The author is ignorant at best, and probably deliberately dishonest, in not mentioning this as part of his argument.
==============
The tone of the article is clear enough that point by point rebuttals like this are a waste of time, but since you asked...
That's a bald-faced lie.
The British alone had over 3.5 million. [1]
8.5 million Soviet soldiers died in the war. [2]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Army_during_the_Second_...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties_of_the_...
> Not a single mention of the fact that England with all its stated commitment to freedom ruled India and dozens of countries around the world against their will for two hundred years, systematically stripping them of their wealth for the benefit of the mother country.
Look at what a dishonest shitfest the political system is in India, and the whole culture of corruption.
It seems likely that without the British having brought "Anglo civilization", India today would be like most of Africa today.
Indians should be thankful for the British influence. As an American, I certainly am thankful for their influence on us.
That's a bald-faced lie.
THat comment could have been clearer, but it was clearly in response to the number of "Anglosphere" soldiers quoted in the article. For context the article says:
During the Second World War, 215,000 men served from New Zealand, 410,000 from South Africa, 995,000 from Australia, 1,060,000 from Canada, 2,400,000 from India.
In that context, Indian soliders did outnumber the other listed countries.
It seems likely that without the British having brought "Anglo civilization", India today would be like most of Africa today.
I'm old enough to remember the 1970's and 80's where India was like Africa[1]. I'm not drawing any conclusions from that except to say that colonial influence isn't as simple as you may believe.
[1] http://www.gapminder.org/world/#$majorMode=chart$is;shi=t;ly...
> It seems likely that without the British having brought "Anglo civilization", India today would be like most of Africa today.
India was keeping pace with the rest of world, and leading in many ways, quite nicely for thousands of years before the 1600s. It happened to be under continuous foreign occupation at just the time the Industrial Revolution happened in Europe, and British policies were explicitly designed to stifle the same changes happening in India. Most things that you see today are a consequence of that missed opportunity.
Without the British, it's more likely that India would have been like Japan today rather than Africa.
It's easy to be thankful for British influence when the US got rid of it so early in the industrialization game.
How so? I'm genuinely curious.
I know the British brought a system of law and education and a massive train system to India, and I don't know much else about what they may have done. None of that seems like it would serve to stifle the Industrial Revolution.
It seems to me like promoting the Industrial Revolution to the maximal extent possible in India would have been the rational thing for the British to do. You don't produce wealth by holding other people down. And the three examples I gave above would support the idea that that's what they were aiming for---development. But maybe there's something I don't know.
You will find even disrespect to what they call "Hispanic people" that in fact are more native American that they are, from California to New Mexico or Florida.Those were not exterminated because they were lately incorporated from other countries.
In all the south you find lots of blacks living in misery, the descendants of slaves. Is that freedom? In Spain slavery was forbidden by law in XVI century. In practice there were abuses but by law any native Indian was a citizen like any other.
When you go to any Latin American country you find a significant population of native Indians, all of them somewhat different from another. It is not the same the people from Colombia to the people in Ecuador, Brazil, or Argentina. This difference makes hard for them to unite and became a US competitor. Also US has done anything he could to divide and conquer, including destroying by force those governments that did not align with US interest.
In the past it was Europe who controlled South America, now it is the US. Brazil is slowly getting independent, as it is big enough.
Don't get me wrong, I like the US and have lots of north American friends, but there is propaganda in any country of this world and people inside them believe it blind folded without thinking for themselves.
If I had any criticism, it would be this: It praises western government too much. While I'm certainly glad I live in the US, it seems clear to me that better forms of government exist. The problem is that nobody has invented them, or no country has tried them. This is understandable. Switching systems is not only incredibly hard, it's stupendously risky. Things have to get really bad before people are willing to switch.
Also, anything better would probably sound ridiculous to us today. To quote Vernor Vinge:
If you go back to the year 1200 and you tried to explain to some noble lord why a democracy and intellectual freedom works better, he might be the rare sort of person who would listen to you. That's possible, that he would listen to you. But he would be quite right to laugh in your face and say, "You know what would happen? If I tried to open myself up to that? Tomorrow, I would be dead. There would be another clown up here on the hill, and he would be doing the same thing that I'm doing. What you're talking about is anarchy and it is impossible."
(from around http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzRuPGnJxCs#t=52m25s)
Finally, even if I believe the author, he offers no solutions. If the anglosphere's special sauce is being diluted, what can we do about it? I've sat around for five minutes thinking, but nothing particularly good comes to mind.
Overall though, I enjoyed reading this article. Then again, I'm from the anglosphere.
It's quite obvious that the author is proposing you vote 'Whig' in order to stem the dilution. Unfortunately I, personally, don't think that any of the conservative parties in the Anglosphere are of much use (if they were, at least a potential solution would be much easier!).
It's very appropriate that this article was posted in HN. After all, these are the five guys of the Five Eyes- the intelligence network that's spying on the world they 'civilized.'
http://thinkprogress.org/security/2013/07/10/2276191/snowden...
What, after all, do we mean by Western civilization? What was Churchill driving at in his definition, quoted above? There are three irreducible elements. First, the rule of law. The government of the day doesn’t get to set the rules. Those rules exist on a higher plane, and are interpreted by independent magistrates. The law, in other words, is not an instrument of state control, but a mechanism open to any individual seeking redress.
Not only are the governments setting the rules, they are denying individuals seeking redress. Worse, with gag orders, we can't even know if redress is owed.
It just comes out sounding really self-congratulatory. I'm no fan of Howard Zinn or Marxist historical revisionism. But this article makes it sound like the game is done and the West has won. Perhaps if it had been more prescriptive, urging the Anglosphere to strive to be better, to refine the rule of law, increase personal liberty, and reform representative government, then it would be more convincing.
So then someone points out something wrong with the Anglosphere, something which needs to be fixed, and that comment gets voted to the top. I don't get it.
Further, it's not as if the author is trying to paint the Anglosphere as perfect. The best, healthiest culture in existence? Yes. Perfect? Obviously not.
Anglosphere. What a load of crap. If the center of gravity of this article's definition of "civilization" is currently in America and previously in Britain, it's an artifact of history, not of "Anglo". The center was once in Italy, and before that in Greece. If you've read Russian literature you'd see the democratic spirit was there too.
And then there's India, a piece of this so-called "Anglosphere". What did India do? It threw out the tyranny that was the British Empire. You'll probably argue that this somehow proves the beauty of the "Anglosphere".
Which of Stephenson's novels is your favorite?
The demise of freedom in the former Anglosphere is due to the abandoning of the original patriotic principles and the adoption of the way things are done everywhere else.
And curiously enough, 800 years later, my old country still hasn't reached the mental state that "the power of the king may be limited by the people". When i read about Latin/South America a lot of things sound familiar. The article compares AngloSaxon world against Spanish when it is basically AngloSaxon world against any other - i mean pick any place in Africa or Eurasia ...
This is no doubt aimed at Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, (Geography) & Steel"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Hannan
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/meps/en/4555/DANIEL_HANNAN_hom...
http://www.votewatch.eu/en/daniel-hannan.html
P.S. Wouldn't comments be more interesting if they scrupulously avoided attacking the messenger?
Where I feel the article fails is in somehow presuming that the former led to the latter. Despite the author's protests of being triumphalist, the article comes off as praising the Anglosphere as an almost unqualified success, and it makes it sound like there is something inherently greater about Anglosphere culture. He mentions many good things that were formative to its rule of law and regard for liberty- and ignores those accomplished by contemporaneous civilizations- the Althing, the Golden Liberty of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Declaration of the Rights of Man. (Oh, sure, he pays lip service to the Swiss, the Dutch, and the Scandinavians- why not the rest of the Low Countries as well?- but should they be discounted simply because their nations and empires were smaller? What makes the Anglosphere greater, its culture better, than those other countries with a long tradition for respect for the rule of law and personal liberty?)
Maybe my disagreement comes from viewing history as a complex system, easily altered with a few tweaks here and there- call it the Sid Meier Model of History. What the Anglophones achieved was great. But they weren't the only ones to achieve it. And they needn't be the only ones to achieve it.
The way I see it, if we were living a couple of millennia ago, we'd be saying the same about Rome. And with good cause. The Roman Empire was glorious. It was a pinnacle of human civilization. But there is always a pinnacle at some point. They come and go, and are not intrinsic to any one culture, nor one people. Success is created as much by luck as it is by culture or people. Perhaps if some battles had happened differently, we'd be remembering Carthage as the great classical empire. Or, had things not fallen apart as terribly as it did in the Revolution, we'd be praising the achievements of the modern Francosphere. Roll the dice, and some other civilization succeeds, not because of their intrinsic greatness, but because there has to be someone at the top. Someone with the most rule of law, the most democratic institutions. The Anglosphere (and the Swiss, and the Swedes, and the Dutch...) won because of their unique set of circumstances, their roll.
(As much as this author tries to bring up parts of the British Empire to show that he's not praising the West as a people or a culture but instead a concept, it's unconvincing. The five core nations of the Anglosphere are made up of Britain, America, and the White Dominions. India's democratic success is not quite at the same level. Singapore is very rich and has a strong rule of law, but is very undemocratic.)
My conclusion is not to bury the Anglosphere's legacy, but neither is it to praise it without reservations. We should certainly take what is good from its history. But we shouldn't pretend that it is exceptional; if we do that, we pretend only one culture is capable of its success. We discount the victories of other civilizations. (We also ignore that perhaps liberal democracy isn't the true end of history- perhaps some alternate government model may in fact arise and be even better for standard of living.) We forget that the Anglosphere is just as human as any other ball. Like Rome, thousands of years from now Anglo-American culture will show its influence from one end of the Solar System to another. But some other pinnacle will exist just the same.
And at the same time, as the Romans said, we should also never forget: Memento mori.
I see the main virtue of the article thus: it identifies a successful (by some measures) political system; attempts a deconstruction into its components; and then draws some conclusions from them.
The political system of England and its sister nations (the article argues) is successful in providing a robust government that maintains important personal freedoms. While the main support the article lends is pointing out the failure of most other countries' political schemes, we can also find strong evidence elsewhere. For example, the United States has ended slavery and granted suffrage to the poor, to former slaves, and to women, all while maintaining a nonviolent transfer of power between administrations and fundamentally similar Constitutions. Of course, the American Civil War was anything but nonviolent, American Presidents have been assassinated, and some Constitutional Amendments fundamentally change the structure of that nation (for example, the 14th). Nonetheless, it is hard to argue that other political systems can claim even such results.
The article then attempts to deconstruct what this "Anglo-Saxon civilization" entails. The author provides three broad components: the rule of law; personal liberty; and representational governance. For example, the author groups the protection of property under personal liberty (it might justifiably be grouped under the rule of the law, but I believe the author means, by "rule of the law", the simple belief that no entity is above the law).
Of course, one is a fool if one says the United States', or England's, political system is perfect. The shared history of the "anglosphere" (let's assume for a moment this is well-defined) is a history of a political system, but also of its use for racism, xenophobia, class schisms, for the destruction of civil liberties. But I think we can perhaps attempt to understand a few points: whether or not the political schemes used in England and her sister countries are in fact more successful than other schemes; if so, how we can characterize the successes, and perhaps distinguish them from its failures; and if so, how we can characterize the necessary components of this political system as leading to successes or failures.
Now, I do not claim the linked article was good; in fact it had so many flaws. But it is easy to criticize these flaws, much harder to write an article like the linked. Yes, we do not do a writer justice by blindly nodding along to his words. But it is so easy to find a flaw to complain about---maybe trying to understand what the article is saying, and trying to correct its flaws, is a more noble exercise than criticism?
This must be why the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association's slogan in 1967 was "one man, one vote". The native population of northern Ireland saw American blacks in Mississippi on the telly and wanted to get the kind of enfranchisement they were getting.
Workers in Manchester in 1819 who had a rally for the vote were massacred by a cavalry charge.
Of course all of this was paradise compared to what Rhodesians, Indians, South Africans etc. were going through.
What a load of bollocks
I think you can make the observation that countries that were colonised by the British (i.e. the Anglosphere) ended up stronger legal, administrative and educational infrasrtucture and traditions than countries that were colonised by other European powers (i.e. Portugese, Belgian, French, German, Spanish and Dutch).
I am not implying that they ended up better off than if they had never been colonised at all. I am not implying that colonisation did not take a terrible toll on the colonised. Nevertheless, the era of colonisation has left a legacy. Some of it is good and some of it is bad. We do not get to live in the counterfactual world where there was no colonisation. We do get to see the results of various approaches to colonisation.
Does this legacy tell us anything of the colonisers?