The Anglosphere

An excerpt from a very enlightening conversation between Nick Cater and Daniel Hannan:

NC: How do you respond to the accusation that the theory of Anglospheric exceptionalism adopts a racist interpretation of history?
DH: That’s the default setting for people who can’t be bothered to read the thesis. It’s demonstrably false. The Anglosphere is why Bermuda is not Haiti. It’s why Hong Kong is not China. It’s why Singapore is not Indonesia. The beauty of these values is they are transferable.
There was a time in the Victorian period when Anglosphere values became mixed up with the then-prevalent ideas of racial determinism. But I don’t think anyone could conceivably claim now that Anglosphere values are transmitted genetically rather than intellectually. Every Anglosphere country, including the United Kingdom, has received massive populations from elsewhere—and the extraordinary thing about this is that it applies to all individuals. Your grandparents could have come from the Ukraine or Vietnam, but once you get the hang of living in a society characterised by personal liberty and the rule of law, there is no going back.
NC: Is this an argument in support of multiculturalism? Is the nation’s shared philosophical framework adopted by all those arrive?
DH: It depends what you mean by ‘multicultural.’ In Britain, the Left sees the word as almost synonymous with ‘multi-ethnic,’ which plainly it isn’t.
If by multiculturalism you mean valuing different sets of civic values equally, then I am an opponent. It’s possible to have a cohesive state where people will eat differently and dress differently and pray differently, but it is not possible to have a functioning state where they have completely opposed views about the role of democracy, the relationship between the individual and the state, the role of secularism, and so forth.
One of the things English-speaking societies were very good at until recently is accepting people as individuals without hectoring, or saying that you have to leave behind your cultural tradition, but you did have buy in to a certain way of doing politics. And the reason people were happy to buy into the way they did politics was it works.
When I was last in Australia I was struck, and quite moved, by the multi-ethnic makeup of the people who had come to listen to me hymning the virtues of the Anglosphere. And as far as I could tell, they were pretty ethnically representative of the cities I was speaking in. That’s a tremendous tribute to a political system that holds out something people want to belong to. Personal freedom, free contract capitalism, common law—people want to buy into that. They cross half the world to find a better system than the one they are choosing to get away from.

Worth a read in its entirety:
http://www.cis.org.au/publications/transcripts/article/5078-conversation-with-daniel-hannan