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The West as Anglo-America1
Peter J. Katzenstein
Anglo-America is a clearly identifiable part of what is commonly referred to as the West. The West exists, this book argues, in the form of multiple traditions that have currency in America, Europe, the Americas, and a few outposts in the Southern hemisphere.2 Led by the British Empire until the beginning and by the United States since the middle of the twentieth century, Anglo-America has been at the very center of world politics. Bridging the European and the American West, Anglo-America is distinctive, not unique. These multiple Wests coexist with each other and with other civilizations, as parts of one global civilization containing multiple modernities. And like all other civilizations, Anglo-America is marked by multiple traditions and internal pluralism. Once deeply held notions and practices of imperial rule and racial hierarchy now take the form of hegemony or multilateralism and politically contested versions of multiculturalism. At its core Anglo-America is fluid, not fixed.
Anglo-America is, in the lexicon of contemporary conservative political supporters in the major English-speaking countries, called the Anglosphere. In the tradition of Winston Churchill it enjoys today support among conservatives as a community of states that is united by traits such as liberal values, Protestantism, individualism, an achievement culture, a life of private grace testified to by worldly success, the use of the English language, common law, Parliamentary rules, and other ancient British traditions. Supporters of this conservative project oppose other forms of the West, such as the European Union.3 Left-wing critics see in the Anglosphere instead a neoliberal, imperialist, and at times furtively racist project. These critics can point to George Orwell’s nightmarish novel 1984, which detailed the tyrannical rule inside Oceania, conceived of as a political amalgam of Britain, the United States, Latin America, and Africa.4 The political Left has therefore put its energy behind the support of the United Nations and some of the new transnational governance institutions. All political disagreements aside, the historical record shows that Anglo-America has won all major wars since the late seventeenth century. In the twentieth century, in hot and cold global wars, Anglo-America defeated challenges from both the Fascist Right and the Communist Left. Despite local and temporary setbacks, Anglo-America has been a central axis around which international politics has revolved for more than three centuries.
The West is frequently invoked in public discourse as the most encompassing source of collective identity that tells us who we are, where we came from, and where we should be going. Yet Sigmund Freud argued in his essay Civilization and Its Discontents that the individual Self is not unitary but continues inward without any sharp delineations.5 And so it is for civilizations. As political constructions, civilizational complexes have a direct bearing on core concepts of international relations such as empire, race, sovereignty, and interdependence, as well as on political practices such as diplomacy and alliance formations. This is not to argue that Western civilization in its different manifestations is the only source of collective identity. Nations and their various regions or localities, as well as group, family, and individual identities, are also significant in situationally specific ways. Incessantly invoked, the “West” remains, however, the most general social category that provides elites rather than mass publics with a sense of direction as they seek to understand what they believe in and what governments, groups, and individuals should do. As a modern equivalent to the now outdated concept of “Latin Christendom,” invoking the “West” can serve different political purposes, such as highlighting its distinctive contributions to or detractions from humanity, or extolling some of its values as inherently superior or inferior to others.6
After briefly discussing the existence of many Wests, I develop two arguments in this chapter. First, with specific reference to Louis Hartz’s and Samuel Huntington’s insistence on the unity and singularity of America and Western civilization, I argue for the pervasiveness of multiple traditions. Referencing the chapters in this book, I then sketch Anglo-America’s gradual evolution away from race and empire, analyzing varieties of international communities and three different patterns of internal multiculturalism typifying contemporary Anglo-America. I end with a brief conclusion.
Many Wests
Winston Churchill is proof of the West’s internal tensions and contradictions. When, as a lieutenant, he stepped in front of a ballroom crowd in the Waldorf Astoria eager to hear about the Boer war, he was introduced by Mark Twain, no friend of Britain’s imperialist exploits in Africa or America’s against Spain: “We have always been kin: kin in blood, kin in religion, kin in representative government, kin in ideals, kin in just and lofty purposes; and now we are kin in sin, the harmony is complete, the blend is perfect, like Mr. Churchill himself.”7 It was Churchill the racist who supported and participated in campaigns of ethnic cleansing and the establishment of detention camps in British colonies. And it was Churchill who hated Gandhi and Hitler equally, a fact that may help explain his callousness during the great 1943 famine in Bengal – which was caused largely by Britain’s mismanagement, then under Churchill’s leadership.8
This was Churchill’s first face. His second was the fearless and eloquent leader of Britain and the West, the man who helped greatly in defeating Hitler and the Nazis. At the dawn of the Cold War, Churchill argued in his Fulton, Missouri, speech:
Americans and British must never cease to proclaim in fearless tones the great principles of freedom and the rights of man which are the joint inheritance of the English-speaking world and which through Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, habeas corpus, trials by jury and the English common law find their most famous expression in the American Declaration of Independence.9
For Churchill and his intellectual followers, the English-speaking peoples are the specific manifestations of Anglo-America and the loftiest representation of the West – as discussed by Duncan Bell in Chapter 2.10
Drawing on the second of Churchill’s faces, a unitary conception of the West still enjoys wide currency today, especially in conservative quarters. The “special partnership” between Britain and the United States, for example, was very much in evidence in the first decade of the twenty-first century. During the run-up to the attack on Iraq, Prime Minister Blair was the USA’s most important comradein-arms, ready to pay the “blood price.”11 In 2007, President Bush called the ties between the United States and Britain the “most important bilateral relationship … primarily because we think the same, we believe in freedom and justice as fundamentals of life.”12 Blair reminded Bush of Churchill: “I heard of Winston Churchill in my friend’s voice.”13 And Gordon Brown’s visit to the United States in March 2009 was explicitly designed to revitalize the special relationship tarnished by an unpopular war and American high-handedness.
Yet the White House this time around invoked a “special partnership” rather than a “special relationship,” which raised eyebrows in London.14 President Obama had written at length about his grandfather’s accounts of having been tortured by British soldiers in Kenya; and he had the bust of Winston Churchill removed from the Oval Office and returned to Britain. Prime Minister David Cameron acknowledged new political conditions during his first visit to Washington after becoming prime minister in 2010. Undermining the notion of Britain as America’s Trojan poodle, Cameron sought to replace misty-eyed emotion with hard-nosed national interest in a “partnership of choice” as the foundation of Britain’s special relations with the United States.15
“The West” is often referred to in the singular as a civilizational complex that differs from “the East.” This is implausible. After all is said and done, it is not clear why 1,700 miles and three flight hours to the west of Athens, Rabat is part of the Orient. Conceived as unities, East and West are inaccurate labels that offer a profoundly misleading view of the world. Although they invite questions about demarcations that can undermine their persuasiveness, more specific regional designations such as “Europe” or “Asia” encounter similar problems. Europeans find themselves in fundamental disagreement over whether Russia and Turkey are parts of Europe. And the concept of Asia, in the singular, makes no sense in trying to impose a unity on South, Southeast, and East Asia that simply does not exist for the peoples living in these disparate parts of the world – except in the powerful imaginations of popular pundits and pan-Asian political theorists. The story is no different when we talk about the West. In the singular, it does not exist and needs to be replaced by the idea of many Wests that, often in tension, coexist with one another.
Maps representing civilizations in single colors suggest a social homogeneity that is misleading compared to more complex visual representations.16 Focusing specifically on the writings of Louis Hartz and Samuel Huntington, I argue here for pluralist notions of Anglo-America. The substantive chapters in this book illustrate great variations in what we mean by Anglo-America and what the politics of Anglo-America look like in practice. In the nineteenth century it was widely believed that there existed only one Anglo-American standard of civilization.17 Furthermore, Anglo-America served the purpose of a liberalism suffused by racist and imperialist ideas. Those ideas have lost much of their credibility in a multicivilizational world in which complex sovereignty, diplomatic cultures, and special relations mark the international relations of Anglo-America. In recent decades, across the various parts of Anglo-America, we are witnessing the democratic politics of multi-racialism, embryonic triculturalism, and contested multiculturalism.
Besides Anglo-America, there exists a second conception of the West, as in the New World of the Americas. Building on the work of Arthur P. Whitaker, Arturo Santa-Cruz delineates the Western Hemispheric Idea as a distinct sphere of communication, interaction, and interest that constitutes what is considered legitimate in politics.18 Ever since Jefferson, the idea of a not necessarily peaceful pattern of interaction has grown up around the notion that the New World is different from the Old. Over time, the internal division of the Western Hemisphere has diminished, as illustrated by the pan-American movement. Starting with the Washington Conference of 1889, the modern inter-American system dates back to the very moment at which US interventions in Central America and the rise of anti-Yankee feelings were on the upswing. Tensions and disagreements about the normative order of the American version of the West did not abate until President Roosevelt initiated the “Good Neighbor Policy” in 1936, with the USA accepting unconditionally the principle of non-intervention. At that time, the USA affirmed with all its partners in the Americas the commitment to democracy, peace, and justice. The self-proclaimed distinctiveness from Europe thus had given way to an expression of shared solidarity based on the principles of representative democracy, expressed subsequently in the Bogotá Charter as the founding document of the Organization of American States in 1948. The Western Hemispheric Idea as a distinct version of the West thus is based on the principle of rights-based representative government (supported most forcefully by the USA) and non-intervention (supported by the states of Latin and Central America fearing the USA), with both principles informing but not determining political practices – which have often deviated from these lofty ideals.
Shmuel Eisenstadt, Edmundo O’Gorman, and Jeremy Smith have offered complementary arguments of the Americas that reconfirm and illuminate the idea of many Wests from a more explicitly civilizational perspective. As the point of departure, they reject out of hand Louis Hartz’s Eurocentric theory of the Americas as “frozen fragments” of Europe.19 European patterns were instead radically transformed in the process of transplantation from the Old World to the New. Like that of Santa-Cruz, Eisenstadt’s comparative analysis stresses both commonalities and differences of American civilization.20 He points to the relative weakness of primordial criteria such as language and territory. Instead, new collective identities emerged among the settlers, imbued by a universalist ethos in the United States and a formal hierarchical one in Latin America. The principles of social order offered mirror images of each other. Equality, achievement, and transient, reformist protest orientations prevailed in the British North; clientelism, ascriptive social status, and cyclical, radical protest in the Hispanic South. In their relationship with the old European world, the two American variants were not clashing as much as they were undergoing divergent processes of self-differentiation from kindred European societies. Transplanted to the Americas, the impulses of the Reformation and Counter-reformation were affected deeply by what British and Hispanic settlers shared: the experience of European colonialism and the confrontation with indigenous populations. O’Gorman adds that the originality of the American political project rather than the colonial imitation of the mother countries’ political institutions and practices in Latin America led to the identification of the USA with all of America and made US citizens Americans par excellence.21 Smith, finally, disaggregates American civilization further by analyzing distinctive Canadian and Caribbean variants that Eisenstadt bypasses, and by adding America’s indigenous civilizations and perhaps the American South as further variants to illustrate the existence of many Wests.22
Finally, there exists the enduring debate about the relations between Europe and America. Even in moments of externally induced crisis and in times of change, the two are viewed as distinct though deeply related. For example, President Kennedy’s speech, delivered in Philad...
