As Europe Marches On…
The Anglosphere grows stronger.

By S. T. Karnick, the editor-in-chief of American Outlook
April 17, 2001 8:55 a.m.

ow that America's eight-year delusion that China can be manipulated through increased trade has faded, it is time for the United States to consider another great conflict on the horizon. The European Union recently announced plans to forge further ahead with an EU military force that will certainly draw resources away from NATO, the alliance that has kept relative peace on the continent for a half-century. Europe has also criticized U.S. plans for a ballistic missile defense, a position it now holds in common with Russia, China, and other nations of dubious intent toward America. As Europe continues its process of economic, political, and social consolidation, it perceives that its interests are rapidly diverging from those of the United States.

Britain, itself a member of the European Union, is caught in the middle and increasingly uncomfortable. The European Court of Justice — the top court of the European Union (EU) — recently ruled that the EU government "can lawfully suppress political criticism of its institutions and of leading figures, sweeping aside English Common Law and fifty years of European precedents on civil liberties," as London Daily Telegraph EU correspondent Ambrose Evans-Pritchard aptly stated it in the paper's March 7 edition. This decision was actually the culmination of a long series of disagreements that have pointed out major historical differences between European and British ways. The court's ruling, that the commission had the authority to quash dissent in order to "protect the rights of others," laid bare fundamental philosophical differences between the two political cultures; it will be difficult to reconcile them. In fact, melding the two will probably be impossible; one side or the other will have to give in.

The philosophical disagreement behind this case has worldwide implications. As we contemplate what kind of political structures will arise and thrive after the demise of Communism and the rise of a truly global economy and fully interconnected world, the European Union and the English-speaking nations provide two strongly contrasting models, each displaying highly distinctive strengths and weaknesses.

The European Union has always been, of course, a highly planned phenomenon. Starting with the relatively loose association of the Common Market nations, European leaders methodically ratcheted up the process for decades, steadily adding new countries and additional ties between them, forging the union only as rapidly as seemed feasible to the experts in Brussels. There is now talk in Brussels of having a group of "core nations" integrate even further, leading the way for additional investments of sovereignty in the Brussels government. Building the union has always been a top-down process, with the European governments far more enthusiastic for it than most of the people (especially the British).

Young people in France, for example, have rioted in the streets in recent years to protest their grim economic prospects as EU regulations and then the European single currency tightened Brussels's stranglehold on France's economy, but French president Jacques Chirac remains one of the strongest advocates of further integration. As political theorist Kenneth Weinstein notes in the current issue of American Outlook, European political thinking is based on the idea of an objective popular will that is better and more altruistic than that of the individual citizen. This suggests, as Weinstein notes, that only the state can be trusted to rise above "the selfish preoccupations that afflict the rest of society."

The European Union's governance style reflects these ideas splendidly. It is designed to get things done and is therefore expert-oriented, bureaucratic, unyielding, and centralized. It cannot allow much room for disagreement, because to dissent against the government is to undermine what it embodies: the objective public will. And in any conflict between the individuals and government, the public's interest — so much wiser and more decent than our own private lusts — must prevail. This is why the European Court ruled that the European Commission had the right to fire a British economist for writing a book called The Rotten Heart of Europe. In representing the objective public will, the government and its allied bureaucracy have a clear responsibility to regulate the dissemination of ideas, because opinions can bubble up from individuals' selfish personal interests and create social disturbances. And because the state represents the objective will of the people, ideas must be judged by their likely political outcome, and the EU government must punish those who "damage the institution's image and reputation."

Economic interests provide another powerful source of danger to the public will. Thus the European Union works at reining in corporate power and guards against economic inequality, in order to reduce social tensions and restrain the concentrations of wealth that can threaten the state's power and allow people to exploit one another. To the Continental mind, the concept of rights refers to freedom from exploitation by other people, and freedom means moral autonomy, the opportunity to define one's own conceptions of right and wrong — providing only that these do not result in damage to others, especially the state. Although there is much talk in the European Union of "subsidiarity" — the idea that the central government should allow some discretion to local authorities — for all practical purposes the Brussels bureaucracy is in charge of things.

These concepts and the measures designed to implement them foster a strong, relatively stable social order, but one in which social mobility and economic opportunities are somewhat limited in comparison with the other major bloc of developed countries — the English-speaking nations, or Anglosphere. Unlike the members of the European Union, the Anglosphere nations are widely dispersed across the globe, and there is no formal political union among them. Nonetheless, the similarities between the English-speaking countries, attributable to their common cultural background, are greater than those among the European Union nations, despite the best efforts of the Brussels bureaucracy to generate uniformity. Europe still lacks the common linguistic and cultural traditions that make up a true nation.

The Anglosphere has never been the result of any plan. Like the European Union, British hegemony was initially imposed by force rather than established by consent; as the British Empire grew and solidified, its growth was spurred by commercial and political interests, not any government-ordained plan of action. Administration of the empire was relatively loose in most cases, and perhaps as a result of this, it slowly spun out of London's grasp, piece by piece. The national relationships have been purely by consent for the past half-century, and decidedly unplanned and informal. These associations have been close and effective, but based on common interests and cultural similarities rather than imposed by institutions.

Having grown out of the individualistic habits of an island nation, the governance style of the Anglosphere countries reflects a more organic, unruly, trial-and-error approach to political organization. It involves relatively decentralized governments based on the consent of the governed; competing points of view contending in a marketplace of ideas largely free of government censorship; tolerance of corporate power and economic inequality; a good deal of economic freedom; respect (at times grudging) for religious liberty; and a perpetual struggle among interest groups to affect national policies. Of course, the Anglosphere nations embody this approach imperfectly and to varying degrees, but they certainly have tended more toward a limited-government philosophy than have other nations. In the Anglo-Celtic tradition, the concept of rights refers to freedom from government interference, and freedom means independence. This political philosophy leads to a rough, dirty, energetic, productive society with a relatively ragged social order, high social mobility, and a strong need for a wide moral consensus that is seldom achieved. It also makes it much easier to assimilate immigrants from different cultures, because there is no felt need to create an objective public will.

The weaker sense of public purpose in the English-speaking nations, however, invites the perpetual tug-of-war among interest groups so familiar in American politics. This battle of factions is supposed to impede concentrations of power, but it continuously undermines these nations' ability to defend individual rights against government interference, because those who can achieve political power will naturally try to use it. Moreover, as interest groups succeed in influencing government actions, they grow larger than their contributions to the social good would otherwise allow. And as the world economy becomes increasingly interconnected and corporations become correspondingly bigger and transnational, it becomes more difficult for the average individual to feel any great benefits from power being concentrated in private organizations rather than being explicitly vested in government, especially as huge corporations become necessarily distant from consumers and communities. The English-speaking nations will struggle with this as surely as any other country will, and it is not clear just how we will be able to resolve the matter. Perhaps we will do what we always do — simply let things run their course — and perhaps that will turn out to be the best thing.

It is possible that the English and European models will evolve toward each other, with the EU incorporating increasing respect for subsidiarity and individual rights and the Anglosphere allowing an ever-greater role for government. That scenario seems unlikely, however, given the fundamental philosophical differences behind the two approaches. In fact, it is quite plausible to think that the two systems will diverge further in coming years, and the United Nations and the World Trade Organization (WTO) will probably shepherd these competing visions further into global affairs, with the UN representing the European idea of harmony through support of the public will and the WTO representing the Anglosphere's concern for maximizing local sovereignty and individual liberty.

Perhaps, then, as UPI columnist James Bennett argues in American Outlook, "we have gone beyond the old civilizational alignments and are actually defining a successor civilization. It may take another century or so for the new civilization's cultural identity to jell, but the roots of it are there… [A] civilizational alliance has to have a general, all-encompassing culture that people are free to join. The English-speaking nations have that, and I strongly believe that the English-speaking world of today is best thought of as a new civilization." Rather than becoming a political phenomenon on the order of the European Union, this Anglosphere civilization would probably be as informal and inclusive as the culture from which it grew. And that, too, might turn out to be for the best.