I recount the narrative, rather, to stress a point that has often been missed by historians and politicians on both sides of the Atlantic. A common political culture encompassed Britain and America before and after the formal rupture. The two states drew on a common political heritage. Politicians on both sides of the Atlantic saw themselves as heirs to an inherited folkright of Saxon freedom, expressed in the common law. Both traced a direct political lineage back through the Glorious Revolution to the signing of Magna Carta in 1215. If anything, Americans placed (and place) greater store by that document than Britons. The site where Magna Carta was signed, at Runnymede in my constituency, went unmarked until 1957 when a memorial was erected there—by the American Bar Association.
It is no surprise, then, that amity was soon restored between the adversaries. When Britain formally recognized U.S. independence, John Adams became the first American minister to London. The speech he made, as he presented his credentials to George III, is so handsome and affecting that it is worth quoting in full:
Sir, the United States of America have appointed me their minister plenipotentiary to your Majesty, and have directed me to deliver to your Majesty this letter, which contains the evidence of it. It is in obedience to their express commands, that I have the honor to assure your Majesty of their unanimous disposition and desire to cultivate the most friendly and liberal intercourse between your Majesty’s subjects and their citizens, and of their best wishes for your Majesty’s health and happiness, and for that of your royal family. The appointment of a minister from the United States to your Majesty’s Court will form an epoch in the history of England and of America. I think myself more fortunate than all my fellow citizens, in having the distinguished honor to be the first to stand in your Majesty’s royal presence in a diplomatic character; and I shall esteem myself the happiest of men, if I can be instrumental in recommending my country more and more to your Majesty’s royal benevolence, and of restoring an entire esteem, confidence, and affection, or, in better words, the old good nature and the old good humor between people, who, though separated by an ocean, and under different governments, have the same language, a similar religion, and kindred blood. I beg your Majesty’s permission to add, that, although I have some time before been entrusted by my country, it was never in my whole life in a manner so agreeable to myself.
The king was visibly moved, and replied with a generosity that had eluded him during the recent conflict:
I wish you, sir, to believe, and that it may be understood in America, that I have done nothing in the late contest but what I thought myself indispensably bound to do, by the duty which I owed to my people. I will be very frank with you. I was the last to consent to the separation; but the separation having been made, and having become inevitable, I have always said, as I say now, that I would be the first to meet the friendship of the United States as an independent power. The moment I see such sentiments and language as yours prevail, and a disposition to give to this country the preference, that moment I shall say, let the circumstances of language, religion, and blood have their natural and full effect.
And so, in time, it came to pass. The rapprochement was not immediate. It took British Tories another generation to accept emotionally what they had accepted legally: that America was truly an independent state. A war—albeit an inconclusive and absurd war—was fought before the British state was fully reconciled to its lost jurisdiction. Once this had happened, though, the way was open to the Anglo-American imperium that has lasted to our own day. Throughout the nineteenth century, the Monroe Doctrine was made possible—enforced, we might almost say—by the Royal Navy. And in the twentieth century, Britain and America fought side by side, first against Prussian autocracy, then against Nazism, and finally against Soviet Communism.
Those battles, and those victories, were not based solely on “the circumstances of language, religion and blood.” They were based, even more, on a shared political heritage, an identity of culture and outlook.
__________
Like other British MEPs, I am occasionally teased by Continental colleagues about the willingness of what they call “the Anglo-Saxons” to line up with the United States in foreign policy. Britain, they scoff, has turned itself into an American aircraft carrier. Do we have no foreign policy of our own?
Gently, I try to explain that, coming as we do from a common culture, we tend to react in similar ways when we face the same problems. We have a number of things in common, I tell them, we Anglo-Saxons. We try to see the other chap’s point of view. We revere our laws and our parliaments. We bridle at injustice. We dislike bullies. We are slow—often too slow—to anger, but terrifying when roused.
As Kipling put it:
The Saxon is not like us Normans. His manners are not so polite.
But he never means anything serious till he talks about justice and right.
When he stands like an ox in the furrow, with his sullen set eyes on your own,
And grumbles, “This isn’t fair dealing,” my son, leave the Saxon alone.
To return to Kagan’s metaphor, if Americans are from Mars, then the free English-speaking nations share the Martian orbit, rather than that of Venusian Europe. Look at the countries that are first to deploy force alongside the United States and you see the same names coming up again and again: United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand.
America doesn’t have to choose between Europeanization and isolation. There is another option: the Anglosphere. Instead of pursuing harmonization as Europeans do—through rules and bureaucracies—we should prefer an organic and wholly voluntary association of free peoples. Instead of integration among states, let us have collaboration between individuals, businesses, and other bodies. Instead of a union of governments, let us pursue a union of values.
Until very recently, states were defined by their geographical location. In the post-war era, regional blocs seemed to make sense. The United States concerned itself with its hemisphere, as it had since the 1820s. Britain joined a European customs union. Australia and New Zealand took on responsibilities in the South Pacific.
Technological change, however, has rendered geographical proximity irrelevant. The Internet has made nonsense of distance. Capital now surges around the world at the touch of a button. It is as easy to sell to another continent as to the next county. Indeed, often easier. Businesses in my constituency generally are more comfortable dealing with Anglosphere firms—firms that share their language, common law system, commercial practices, and accountancy rules—than with businesses that happen to be in the EU.
The United States doesn’t need to sign up to supranational structures in order to prove its internationalist credentials. It doesn’t need to sacrifice sovereignty or democracy in order to participate in the comity of nations. It can, instead, seek to inspire by example, holding true to the precepts of its constitution, offering its hand to any nation that accepts those values.
Let me return, one more time, to Thomas Jefferson, a bust of whom stands on my desk as I write these words. Jefferson predicted that there would be a thick flow of settlers from the Old World to the New, and that few would choose to make the return journey. His prediction, of course, came true in a spectacular way. But it is important to be clear about the basis of Jefferson’s confidence. He didn’t think that there was a magical quality in American soil, or American water, or the American gene pool. (He did, slightly eccentrically, tell a French friend, “Our sky is always clear, that of Europe always cloudy,” which statement one can attribute either to patriotic exuberance or to a radically different eighteenth-century climate.) Rather, he believed that the genius of America lay in its system of government, and that any country that ordered its affairs along republican principles could be as happy and prosperous as the United States.
Encouragingly, Barack Obama made precisely the same argument on the night of his election victory in Chicago: “Tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from the might of our arms or
the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope.”
Quite so. Which is why the rest of us want you to cleave fast to those ideals. They have served to make you rich and free, to the benefit of other nations as well as your own. And you will perhaps allow me a certain additional pride, as a British politician, when I say that your ideals came from ours, that the highest conception of British liberty was committed to paper in the old courthouse at Philadelphia.
__________
Which brings me to my country’s present discontents. The fears that the American patriot leaders had about a Hanoverian tyranny were, in retrospect, exaggerated. The United Kingdom did not develop into an absolutist state. Power continued to pass from the Crown to the House of Commons. Indeed, many of the political developments that occurred in the United States happened in parallel in the United Kingdom, for the obvious reason that the two states were starting from a similar place.
The real divergence has come much more recently. It has come about as a result of a general shift in power in the United Kingdom from Parliament to quangos, from local councils to central bureaucracies, and, most damagingly, from Westminster to the EU. It is the process of European integration, above all, that has concentrated power in the hands of functionaries, in Whitehall as well as in Brussels. With every new European Directive, every Regulation, Britain is tugged away from its Martian orbit by the gravitational pull of Venus.
In consequence, the grievances which the Americans laid against George III are now, more than two centuries later, coming to pass in earnest. Colossal sums are being commandeered by the government in order to fund bail-outs and nationalizations, without any proper parliamentary authorization. Legislation happens increasingly through what are called Standing Orders: a device that allows ministers to make laws without parliamentary consent—often for the purpose of implementing EU standards. Elections have been drained of purpose, and turnout is falling. Local councils have surrendered their prerogatives to the central apparat. Foreign treaties are signed by the Prime Minister under what is known as Crown prerogative, meaning that there is no need for parliamentary approval. Appointments to the growing corpus of state functionaries—the quangocracy—are made in the same way.
How aptly the British people might today apply the ringing phrases of the Declaration of Independence against their own rulers who have “combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws.”
Throughout my career in politics, I have campaigned to apply Jeffersonian democracy to British political conditions, to recover those British freedoms that have flourished more happily in America than in their native soil. Ever since my election, I have worked to repatriate our revolution. So you can imagine how I feel when I see the United States making the same mistakes that Britain has made: expanding its government, regulating private commerce, centralizing its jurisdiction, breaking the link between taxation and representation, abandoning its sovereignty.
The United States is an ideal as well as a country. As John Winthrop told his shipmates on the way to the first settlements in 1630:
We shall find that the God of Israel is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies; when He shall make us a praise and glory that men shall say of succeeding plantations, “may the Lord make it like that of New England. ” For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.
The eyes of all people are upon you. And if they see you repudiate your past, abandon that which has brought you to greatness, become just another country, they, too, will have lost something.
So let me close with a heartfelt imprecation, from a Briton who loves his country to Americans who still believe in theirs. Honor the genius of your founders. Respect the most sublime constitution devised by human intelligence. Keep faith with the design that has made you independent. Preserve the freedom of the nation to which, by good fortune and God’s grace, you are privileged to belong.
INDEX
The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created. To locate a specific passage, please use the search feature of your e-book reader.
Page numbers of illustrations appear in italics.
Aaronovitch, David, 13
Abu Ghraib prison, 14
Adams, John, 116, 154, 178–80
Afghanistan
British Muslims fighting in, 106
Obama policy, 13, 14, 15
U.S. war in, 129, 139
Africa, 41
anti-Americanism in, 8
emigration, 83
EU membership and, 57, 124
foreign policy and, 7, 133
GDP, 77
South African auto use, xviii
African, Caribbean, and Pacific Group of States, 57, 124
Albania, 102
American authors, xix
American character, xiii-xiv, xxi, xxii
civic vs. ethnic citizenship, 6
faith in the system, 19–21, 40, 167
myths about, xvii-xx
naïveté or absence of cynicism, 39–40
optimism, xiv, xv, 40
patriotism, 4–5, 172
self-reliance, 2
threatened loss of, xv, xxiii
as virtuous, independent, and freestanding citizenry, xxiii, 6
American Civil War, 63
American culture, 40, 137
Europe vs., 119, 123
shared with Britain, 180–81
American dream, 8
American Enterprise Institute, 160
American ideals, xv, 1–3, 6, 162
British liberties and, 171–81
danger of loss, xv-xvi, xxiii
defending, 123
essence of America as doctrinal, 7–8
exporting of ideology and, 139
failures of, 8
in foreign policy, 133–34, 136–37
as inspirational, 186–87
Magna Carta and, 178
Obama and, 183–84
racial issues and, 10–12
American Revolution, 172–76
Boston Tea Party, 177
Americans for Tax Reform, 161
American superpower and world
leadership status, xxii, 40, 74, 114
Andean Community, 56
Anglosphere, 182–83
anti-Americanism, 8, 10–11, 13, 15
diversity of America and, 19
foreign press headlines, 14–15
Iraq war and, 122
Obama and, 12–13, 14, 74–76
anti-Semitism, 122, 137–38
Arafat, Yasser, 143
Arbour, Louise, 145
Aristotle, 73
Armey, Dick, 166–67, 168
arrogance of power, 37–38
ASEAN, 56
Ash, Tim Garton, 121–22
Ashton, Baroness, 135–36
Asia
anti-Americanism in, 8
in antiquity, 50, 52
as autocratic, 8
economic prosperity, 77, 78
Australia, xviii, 55, 182
Austria, 55, 128
Baldwin, Stanley, 25
Barroso, José Manuel Durrão, 44
Bashir, Omas al-, 149, 150
Becker, Gary, 52–53
Blackstone, William, 143
Blair, Sir Ian, 36–38
Blair, Tony, 30, 135
Bork, Robert, 140, 141
Bosnia-Herzegovina, 139
Bouyeri, Mohammed, 106
Brecht, Bertolt, 44
Britain. See United Kingdom
British Tea Party, 176–77
Brown, Gordon, 31, 86, 136
Burke, Edmund, 16, 155–56, 175
Burnham, Andy, 86
Buruma, Ian, 113
Bush, George H. W., 144, 164
Bush, George W., xvi, 70, 122, 127–28, 164
<
br /> big government policies, 157, 168–69
Bush, Prescott, 163–64
Cameron, David, 165, 168
Canada, 55, 62, 91, 182
capitalism, xvi, 8
Bush’s crony capitalism, 168
competition benefits, 52–53, 54
criticism of, 54
European“third way,” 84
“jungle capitalism,” 54
Rhineland model, 77
Roosevelt and, 66–67
technology and global, 54
Castro, Fidel, 143
Cato Institute, 160
centralization, 50. See alsoEuropean Union (EU)
as big government, 60–61, 76, 162, 168
Bush administration and, 157, 168–69
Constitutional amendments and, 64–66
deleterious to economic prosperity, 52
European integration and, 24–25, 44, 47, 49, 53–54, 56, 74, 75, 84, 120, 123, 124
factors that drive, 61–62
Franklin Roosevelt and, 63, 66–70
problems of, 70, 71, 80, 84, 96–97, 115, 185
protection against, 62
Theodore Roosevelt and, 63
times of crisis and, 70–71
Woodrow Wilson and, 63–64, 65, 66
world government and, 144–45
Chang, Ben, 149
Chávez, Hugo, 13
Cheney, Dick, 122
China, 50, 52, 125, 133
Christian Democrats, 54, 84, 158
Christian Right, 103
Churchill, Winston, 66
climate change, xvi, 12
Bush administration policy, 127–28
cap-and-trade rules, 15, 128
carbon taxes, 76
global governance and, 57
Obama policy, xxi, 57, 74
Rio-Kyoto-Copenhagen process, 75, 128
U.S. vs. Europe, emission data, 128
Clinton, Bill, 13, 93
Clinton, Hillary, 161
“coca-colonialism,” 8, 137
Coercing Virtue: The Worldwide Rule of Judges (Bork), 140
Cole, Harold L., 68
Common Sense (Paine), vii
communism, 7, 54
consumerism, 8
The New Road to Serfdom Page 14