I’m sure that any catalog of massacres would mention a lot of non-Arabic speaking countries.
I thought that someone would have a special reason why the unification of English speaking countries would me more feasible than in that of non-English speaking countries. I don’t think there is.
I agree with Leopold Kohr, who in “The Breakdown of Nations”, shows that “throughout history, people who have lived in small states are happier, more peaceful, more creative and more prosperous. He argues that virtually all our political and social problems would be greatly diminished if the world’s major countries were to dissolve back into the small states from which they sprang. Rather than making even larger political unions, in the mistaken belief that this will bring peace and security, we should minimise the aggregation of power by returning to a patchwork of small, relatively powerless states where leaders are accessible to and responsive to the people.”
Besides the infeasibility of it politically, I would love to form a EU-style Anglosphere because it might cause the USA to become more like those other countries, and would lead to stronger trade. I would love a Schengen-style travel and work agreement as long as it is implemented right so that the vast swaths of relatively unpopulated America are not bought up by foreigners looking for cheap land. Over the long run it might ease housing price pressure in those other countries due to this but that would take at least a decade IMO.
I am not familiar with the theories of Mr Kohr, but the way you are presenting them he might be confusing cause and effect. Small states like Switzerland that find themselves in the fortunate situation of being politically and economically stable have a good chance of existing for a long time. Those that are not so fortunate often disappear - gobbled up by the bigger fish in the pond. If only the “happy” small states survive, that may create the impression that living in a small state makes you happy.
If you look at recent examples where bigger states dissolved into smaller ones (the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia) you do not get the impression that a lot of happiness has come out of it. In fact, at least where the legacy of the Soviet Union is concerned, the only states that seem to be clearly better off today are the Baltic states. They are also the only ones that are members of the EU today.
Given the spread of neo-liberalism and peculiar cultural artifacts like creationism, I’m not sure that’s a good idea. Europe might become more like America instead.
Same problem with anarchist worker collectives or pining for the hunter-gatherer era. Big states eat everything in their path. Small states inevitably join together to do the eating or prevent themselves from beating eaten. There are efficiencies of scale.
I’m interested how he justifies some of those claims.
Most economic partnerships are beneficial but any sort of Anglo-sphere political union is a challenge to our country’s identity as a bilingual nation. Unless of course this is just some sort of unimportant cultural society like La Francophonie or The Commonwealth; then it is totally irrelevant.
Amother factor worth pointing, out isn’t a UK/America political merger utterly impossible due to American domestic politics. As has been pointed out, our Rightwing Prime Minister is a mainstream Democrat by American standards. Adding 60 million new potential voters would give the Democrats a lock on the Presidency, House, and probably the Senate (Depending if we became mutiple states) for at least a Generation, probably longer.
Who is going to agree to this on the Republican side?
It sounds like the OP is describing something a bit like the British Commonwealth before Britain joined the EEC.
I think it’s a great idea. A major point of contention in this part of the world is that Australia & NZ stood shoulder to shoulder with the UK during not one but two World Wars and have been historically extremely close - yet now, we have to stand in the Foreigners & Other Assorted Riff-Raff queue at Heathrow then get the hairy eyeball from the immigration staff even if we’re only coming on holiday.
I’m told up until the late 70s the British & Commonwealth Citizens got to stand in the Cool People queue and could basically come and go from the UK as they liked - particularly if they were from places like Australia, Canada or New Zealand.
I think it makes good sense, myself. Ultimately I’d like to see an Australia-NZ type arrangement, whereby citizens of the UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand can all move between and live/work/study in the other agreement countries more or less without restriction.
Historically and culturally we’re all reasonably close anyway so I think the positives (interchange of ideas/trade/skills etc) would outweigh the negatives.
A decision of the Commonwealth Conference in 1947 was that the various Commonwealth realms would legislate for distinctly separate nationality. Until the British Nationality Act 1948 there was no separate passport for them (Canada led the charge with separate passports from 1947). Restrictions gradually increased over the years, partly aimed at coloured immigration from the ‘New Commonwealth’ and partly due to Britain joining the Common Market and being required to treat other member nations of it on a ‘most favoured’ basis. Irish nationals can still move pretty much without let or hindrance.
Nitpick: The Irish Free State issued its own passports from 1924. This led to a bit of a row.
British immigration law is semi-detached from British nationality law, with the surprising result that, historically, there have been many British subjects with no general right to enter the UK.
Initially all British subjects had the right to enter and settle in the UK (although it should be noted that they didn’t necessarily have similar rights in other territories of the empire/Commonwealth). This was fine as long as relatively few people exercised this right, and most of them were white, but when this ceased to be the case the Britisn introduced the concept of “patriality” as a basis for immigration to the UK. It was no longer enough to be a British subject; you needed to have a connection with the UK either in the form of having been born there, or of being descended (through the male line) from a father or grandfather born there. By an astonishing coincidence, most of the people who could satisfy this requirement were white, so that was OK. British subjects who weren’t patrials could still immigrate if they could satisfy tests regarding having a job in the UK, or skills in short supply there.
Then in the early 1980s they brought UK nationality law into line with immigration policy. They created five or six different classes of British nationality, one of which more-or-less corresponded to the old class of citizens with patriality. The other classes had qualified or no rights to settle in the UK. The old overarching concept of “British subject” was converted into a residual category for people who didn’t qualify for any other kind of commonwealth citizenship. In one of history’s many ironies, most of the remaining British subjects are Irish citizens, and they qualify for British subject status because Ireland left the Commonwealth, and therefore they don’t hold any Commonwealth citizenship.
It can have strong alliance with both, and indeed it does.
The problem arises where the terms of the alliances are in conflict. The UK’s relationship with the EU involves free movement of persons between the UK and all other EU countries. A proposal has been floated that the UK should also enter into a “free movement” arrangement with the Anglosphere (or at any right the white parts of it). What this in practice would result in is free movement between the Anglosphere and the EU, which is not necessarily something that the Anglosphere or EU countries want. So each will be happy to have a free movement arrangement with the UK only on terms that the UK doesn’t have a free movement arrangement with the other.
So the UK has to choose; it can have free movement with the rest of the EU or (assuming the Anglosphere countries are willing) free movement with the Anglosphere, but probably not both.
As far as the UK is concerned, that is more or less what he had with the Empire/Commonwealth relationship - until immigration controls started to tighten in the 1960s. Not going to happen, and certainly not with the racial tinge on it (where did that come from - those days are long gone).
Not that long, I think. As Martini-Enfield points out in post #48, the UK’s “Commonwealth Citizen + British Patriality” immigration rules effectively operated as a whites-preferencing immigration policy for the UK until the early 1980s (though it wasn’t quite a free movement area since the “white dominions” didn’t necessarily reciprocate). And post #40 in this thread references an attempt to establish a free movement arrangement between the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. If we’re looking at former British possessions or anglophone countries, there are some conspicuous omissions there.