Why the "Anglosphere" Is No Alternative

The Brussells Journal has a superb article by John Laughland, my cousin. Some issues are beyond the liberal/conservative boxes that we like to place them in.

At a deeper level, however, the “Anglosphere” proposal illustrates the fatal intellectual flaws of British Tory Euroscepticism. In spite of all the rhetoric about national sovereignty, what most British Tory Eurosceptics are basically expressing is their dislike of Catholic countries. If Carl Schmitt was right to say that all political concepts are really secularised theological concepts, then the “Anglosphere” is nothing but old fashioned anti-Popery, with all the humbug and dishonesty which that cultural movement contains.

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The difference between England and the continent does not, therefore, lie in liberalism or even in prosperity. It lies instead in England’s post-Elizabethan economic orientation towards the sea, which contrasts dramatically with the more land-based economic practices of continental Europe. It was when English buccaneers like Francis Drake started to set up what later became Britain’s hegemony of the seas that England disentangled herself from continental politics and started to become “an island nation” instead of one European power among others.

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