London Telegraph India's relationship with the Anglosphere will define the twenty-first century
By _Daniel Hannan_ (http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/author/danielhannan/) _Politics_ (http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/category/politics/) Last updated: September 25th, 2010 The Anglosphere, for anyone who still doesn’t know, is the community of free, English-speaking nations linked, not by governmental decree, but by shared values. Which nations, exactly? Good question. The UK and Ireland, obviously, the US and Canada, Australia and New Zealand, plus what’s left of the Britain’s extended archipelago (the Falkland Islands, Bermuda and so on). Who else? I’d say Malta, Singapore and perhaps Hong Kong. I hope these territories won’t take it amiss, though, if I point out that, relatively speaking, they’re tiddlers. The elephant – for once the metaphor seems apposite – is India. The Indian Question dominated a fascinating conference on the Anglosphere in Winchester yesterday, co-hosted by two of the greatest conservative editors on the planet: Daniel Johnson of Prospect, and Roger Kimball of The New Criterion. Some of the cleverest and most contrarian men in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and India were present. Mark Steyn – _the Anglosphere’s one-man news-service_ (http://www.marksteyn.com/) (http://www.marksteyn.com/) – made the depressing observation that some Caribbean states, with their Hansards and maces, their horsehair wigs and stiff blue passports, seemed more British than the EU-oppressed mother country. West Indians, like Indians, appeared to value parliamentary democracy more than the country which had developed and exported the concept. James Bennett, who more or less invented the Anglosphere, saw India as the key. While it might be awkward to talk of a nation of 1.3 billion people “ joining” a club of 400 million, the orientation of India would determine the relative power of the English-speaking democracies for the rest of the century. When passing through Delhi recently, _I p_ (http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/danielhannan/3676521/The_borders_of_the_Anglosphere/) _ointed out_ (http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/danielhannan/3676521/The_borders_of_the_Anglosph ere/) that the city feels more familiar, less foreign, than it did a decade ago – partly because the Indian middle class is ballooning, partly because the English language is more widespread and partly because of migration. Communities of Indian descent remain in almost every corner of the Commonwealth, including those which British settlers evacuated long ago: Fiji, South Africa, Malaysia, East Africa, the Caribbean, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Canada – and increasingly, of course, the US. In Madras, once, I asked directions of a young woman in an exotic sari. “Sorry, love, I dunno,” she replied in broad Cockney. Like me, she was a tourist – a small reminder of how affordable air travel has led to a convergence of nations separated by oceans and deserts, but bound by language and law. What Jet Airways has done for millions, the Internet has done for hundreds of millions, drawing the English-speaking peoples into _a common conversation_ (http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/danielhannan/100051187/the-internet-is-gradually-reorient ing-britain-away-from-europe-and-toward-the-anglosphere/) . I don’t want to overstate my case. There are lakhs of Indian villages where Jet Airways and the Internet are as remote as the Moon. But the trend is encouraging. India’s institutions – its courts, its parliament, its armed forces – are Anglosphere-compatible. When the US, Australian and Indian navies co-ordinated the tsunami relief efforts six years ago, they found they had a functional interoperability that is not always present even among Nato allies. Almost all post-colonial governments begin by emphasising their distance from the former occupiers, and India was no exception. But technological change and rapid embourgeoisement are realigning India with the other Anglophone democracies. David Cameron, to his credit, grasps that power is shifting eastward, and sees the opportunity for Britain. Barack Obama, by contrast, seems to scorn the vast ally which Bush had secured. Fortunately, Indians seem content to wait for a different attitude from Washington. They are a patient and courteous people -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org
