Anglo-America vs. Continental Europe
an interesting excerpt that I came across recently
Do not be afraid! This is not a long, boring, dry essay on political philosophy.
I have been reading Gotham: A History of New City To 1898 and have been pleasantly surprised by its incredible depth. The text clocks in at over 1,400 pages, so there is quite a lot of room for exploring even the most arcane moments in the city’s history. This book is going to take months for me to get through and absorb, simply because there are so many points from which to launch into digressions and detours along the way. I have always found the city’s history fascinating, particularly the Ellis Island era and the Depression, but also the Civil War period, the Dutch and early British phases, and, of course, the grim and grimy 1970s.
As I continue to ponder (and argue online) the clumsy approach of the new Trump Administration’s diplomacy towards Europe, I am forced to re-think and re-evaluate one of the viewpoints that most often gets me into trouble with others; the view that Anglo-America and Continental Europe are two different beasts due to basic philosophical differences. I am not going to write at length about this today, but the gist of my argument is that the European continent (despite its own diversity) tends to be more collectivist while Anglo-America has a stronger focus on the individual and his or her rights. This major difference is what separates the two, as these philosophical underpinnings inform and influence governance, culture, and society.
In the book I came across this great bit:
The succession crisis in England was meanwhile coming to a head. What had held the Whigs in check thus far was the fact that James II, having no male heir, would in time be succeeded by one or the other of his two daughters, both of whom had remained Protestants. The elder of the two, Mary, was the wife of none other than Prince William of Orange—awkward, to be sure, but preferable, the Whigs figured, to having a Roman Catholic on the throne.
But in the summer of 1688, even as Andros was preparing for his journey down to New York, the queen gave birth to a son. Now faced with the certainty of a Roman Catholic succession, the Whigs reached out to William and Mary for assistance. A Dutch army landed on the coast of England in November 1688 and marched toward London. James chose not to make a fight of it and fled to France. Early the following year William and Mary accepted the crown from a grateful—not to say relieved—Parliament.
This bloodless coup, hailed by Whig apologists as the Glorious Revolution, proved to be a turning point in Anglo-American history. It secured the Protestant succession. It laid to rest the theory of royal absolutism in England. It established the supremacy of Parliament. In time, too, as Whig propagandists like John Locke labored to justify what had taken place, it would alter, fundamentally, the structure and vocabulary of Anglo American political discourse. Natural rights, popular sovereignty, constitutionalism, the inherent tendency of power to encroach upon liberty—these and other Whig commonplaces would become the conventional wisdom on both sides of the Atlantic, so broadly accepted as to seem self-evident and timeless, a national creed rather than sectarian dogma.
“A turning point in Anglo-American history.” “Conventional wisdom”. “Self-evident”.
The authors of this book, Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace, seem to agree that this is specific to Anglo-America despite the Dutch factor that helped make it happen.
When I brought this up elsewhere, many protested by mentioning just that: “What about the Dutch element?” My response is two-fold:
That Dutch Republic is long gone
Holland is integral to the Rhine-Danube system and therefore locked into the continent
The Dutch are one of history’s great merchant peoples and have a long and storied liberal tradition, but I argue that they did not adopt such an individual-centered worldview as the Brits, and later on, the Americans.
This is a work in progress in my brain, so we’ll return to it over and over again going forward. Maybe you guys know better than I do? If so, let’s hear it.
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I use a lot of terms that are presently out of fashion, and so I suppose perhaps my phrase for the concept you are describing, Anglo-Saxon, is hopelessly outdated. But I have been using it for decades and I believe it precisely encapsulates the theory that the culture, law, language and traditions that emanated from English history and spread around the world on the back of empire are unique and distinct. And from my point of view, as a staunch Anglo-Saxon myself, it is a highly desirable philosophy for combining high trust society with liberal political and social freedoms.
I think most of us understand what is meant by “Anglo-Saxon,” in terms of culture and politics. There are only a handful of Anglo-Saxon countries, with outsized influence on eth rest of the world, and except for maybe Gibraltar, none of them are on the Continent.
The most important contributors to the Anglo-Saxon tradition are the English language and English Common Law, and you can probably say that countries where these two things coexist are Anglo-Saxon countries and enjoy all the other benefits of Anglo-Saxon culture and ideals. Most of these countries are ethnic British majority or at least governed by ethnic British, with a strong admixture of assimilating ethnicities from all over the world; except for one, Singapore, which is a polyglot nation governed largely by Chinese Anglo-Saxons.
Despite the fact the English literally invented the idea of legally protected human rights, which even the CCP disingenuously parrots, Anglo-Saxonism is unfashionable now. The British themselves appear to be repudiating it, and the basic freedoms embodied in its political traditions have been abandoned in places like New Zealand and Australia. I fear the USA might be the last bastion of enthusiasm for Anglo-Saxon ideals, thanks to a native bullheadedness.
Full disclosure: I am an American long-time Anglophile and also Francophile, who has lived in the UK and married a French woman. But now I do not understand what happened to Britain, it is no longer the proud nation I once loved. And recently when I commented to my ex-wife, who now lives in California because she perceives her home country France as too dangerous to return to (think about that for a minute), that America and Europe are engaged in an economic war that could well bloom into something worse, she agreed with me. And it was clear whose side she is on in that war.