December 6, 2010
John Howard, in delivering the seventh Margaret Thatcher Freedom Lecture address to The Heritage Foundation, earlier this year used Anglosphere in the Churchillian sense of the “English-speaking peoples”.
Howard's address was entitled The Anglosphere and the Advance of Freedom and Howard replays the basic argument in this conservative tradition, that there are certain values and institutions associated with old or core Anglosphere societies – that are, or should be, a model for all others to follow. These are the common values that both unite us and imply good governance and good citizenship and they represent a "civilizational" alliance of English-speaking nations.
One undercurrent is an argument against the "melting pot", cultural-pluralism, or multicultural model of national identity and an argument for the preeminence of the original Anglo-Protestant cultural identity. The cultural absorpton argument is that Each wave of immigrants to the U.S. or Australia entered a society where Anglo-Protestant values prevailed; each generation quickly conformed to these values, thus swelling the numbers of those to be encountered by succeeding generations. It is the r core values and characteristics that have made the Anglosphere societies dynamic, and it is to those values that we must return.
|