The War of the League of Augsburg, the War of the Spanish Succession, the War of the Austrian Succession, the Seven Years' War, the American Revolution (Britain lost, but America won), the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, World War I, World War II, and the Cold War: these are the wars that made the modern world, and either the British or the Americans or both of them together have won every one of them. More than three hundred years of unbroken victory in major wars with great powers: it begins to look almost like a pattern. Edmund Burk’s observation about Anglo-American power however was striking: that as their power has grown, the Anglo-Americans have more and more often been dead wrong about what their growing power and their military victories mean for the world. That is, ever since Britain, having beaten back Napoleon's attempts at world empire, built what it hoped would be a lasting system of liberal prosperity and free trade in the late nineteenth century, Anglo-American writers and opinion leaders have seen, over and over, a stable and progressive world just ahead.

In fact the term "Anglo-Saxon" today is used to describe a cultural heritage that continues to influence Britain and the United States. For more than three hundred years, the English and then the Americans have seen their wars against countries like France, Germany, Japan, and Russia as battles between good and evil, between freedom and slavery. During that same time, the enemies of the Anglo-Saxon powers have seen the Anglo-Saxons as cold, cruel, greedy, and hypocritical. The Anglo-Saxon powers fight under the banner of liberal capitalism; their enemies oppose it. The first section of the book reviews three hundred years of clashing civilizations, explores the common AngloSaxon culture of the United States and Britain, and examines the rise of an "anti-Anglophone" ideology among the various forces that have opposed the English-speaking powers from the time of Louis XIV to that of Osama bin Laden. The Anglo-Saxon powers however did not just win wars. They changed the way the world lives, thinks, and organizes itself as much as any civilization of the past (and of course so did the Ottoman and Japanese Empires to give just a few other examples we are currently researching).

The decisive factor in the success of the English-speaking world, Burk argues, is that both the British and the Americans came from a culture that was uniquely well positioned to develop and harness the titanic forces of capitalism as these emerged on the world scene. This does not just mean that the British and the Americans were more willing and able to tolerate the stress, uncertainty, and inequality associated with relatively free-market forms of capitalism than were other countries in Europe and around the world although that is true. It also means that the Anglo-Americans have been consistently among the best performers at creating a favorable institutional and social climate in which capitalism can grow rapidly. Because AngloAmerican society has been so favorable to the development of capitalist enterprise and technology, the great English-speaking countries have consistently been at the forefront of global technological development. They have had the deep and flexible financial markets that provide greater prosperity in peace and allow government to tap the wealth of the community for greater effectiveness in war; the great business enterprises that take shape in these dynamic and cutting-edge economies enjoy tremendous advantages when they venture out into global markets to compete against often less technologically advanced, well-financed, and managerially sophisticated rivals based in other countries.

Burk finds the roots of this aptitude for capitalism in the way that the British Reformation created a pluralistic society that was at once unusually tolerant, unusually open to new ideas, and unusually pious. In most of the world the traditional values of religion are seen as deeply opposed to utilitarian goals of capitalism. The English-speaking world-contrary to the intentions of almost all of the leading actors of the period-reached a new kind of religious equilibrium in which capitalism and social change came to be accepted as good things. In much of the world even today, people believe that they remain most true to their religious and cultural roots by rejecting change. Since the seventeenth century, the Englishspeaking world or at least significant chunks of it have believed that embracing and even furthering and accelerating change-economic change, social change, cultural change, political change-fulfills their religious destiny. The idea that the world is built (or guided by God) in such a way that unrestricted free play creates an ordered and higher form of society is found in virtually all fields and at virtually all levels of the AngloSaxon world. It makes people both individualistic and optimistic, and it climaxes in what many have called the "whig narrative"-a theory of history that sees the slow and gradual march of progress in a free society as the dominant force not only in Anglo-American history but in the wider world as well. The whig narrative according to Burk, creates the expectation of progress and the imminent sense of a triumphant end of history that is always, somehow, just around the corner. The fifth and final section of the book addresses the final two questions: why Anglo-Saxon optimism has so often been wrong, and what three centuries of Anglo-Saxon success means for world history. Americans think of liberal capitalist democracy as a way to promote social peace and stability. It does these things, but it also produces a great and still proceeding acceleration in the pace of social, economic, and technological change-not only for Americans, but for everyone in the world.

But whatever one says about the maritime order that we (World Journal) at the start of this website suggested the British, and now the US (justapoxing them with another oceanic empire China) is, they likely it won't be remembered that way. Like the Greeks and the Romans, like the ancient Chinese, the maritime powers have left an indelible mark on history, and unlike those and other great ancient human societies, the maritime powers have made their imprint worldwide. For the first time ever, human beings all around the world are part of the same political and economic order. They travel and trade with one another across oceans and deserts on an unprecedented scale and over unprecedented distances, and, ever since the undersea cable boom of the nineteenth century, they have had access to virtually instant information about what people are doing on the other side of the world. The archeologists of the future are going to find Coca-Cola bottles in trash dumps all over the world; they will see "made in China" on trade goods everywhere they look, and they will find, along with millions of discarded pieces of Japanese-designed "Hello Kitty"-branded memorabilia, evidence of global consumer and cultural fads that sweep the entire planet almost overnight. There will be the traces of golden arches in the ruins of Beijing, and evidence of Chinese restaurants in the half-buried remnants of Manhattan. Archeological architects will be able to trace the rise and fall of international building styles that show techniques and designs leaping from continent to continent; such basic features as freeway exits and on-ramps will look similar whether found in Stockholm or Santiago de Chile. Linguistic evidence will show the spread of English words, especially in sports, medicine, business, and technology. The archeologists will painstakingly track flows of migrants that overshadow anything found in earlier eras; mass graveyards in Europe, Africa, and Asia will point to an era more explosive and murderous than anything found in the past. The layers of ash scattered integration proceeded farther and faster than ever. Although the poor remain largely excluded from it, this rapidly expanding global society is nevertheless an extraordinary development.

In a very odd way, this emerging global society shares some key traits with the dynamic societies that grew up in the English-speaking world. Most of the countries and cultures in the world today are not very much like Queen Anne's England. But the world as a whole is. That is, today's world is divided among three competing sets of visions, and no one vision can impose its values on global society as a whole. In one group are the advocates of reason, who believe that universal logic, principles, and law are the only suitable or even feasible basis for an international system. This approach is particularly influential in Europe, but also has its advocates in the United States and elsewhere. For this group, the establishment of a powerful system of institutions that can enforce the global rule of law is the obvious and natural goal of international society. Whether inspired primarily by the French or by the Anglo-American revolutions, advocates of this position believe that universal human rights, universally valid legal principles, and the ideals of the Western Enlightenment should shape international institutions and domestic policy all around the world.

A second group is composed of the advocates of religion: people who believe that one of the world's great religions (as they understand it) is the necessary foundation for any just international order. For some, this foundation is Wahhabi Islam; for others it is the Shi'a faith that was taught by Ayatollah Khomeini. For others it is the Roman Catholic faith; still others believe that Pentecostal or evangelical Protestant Christianity is what the whole world needs in order to prosper and to stay at peace. Like the quarreling Christian sects in Queen Anne's Britain, the advocates of a religionbased international order disagree on the details, but share a common commitment to base both international and domestic society on the precepts of revealed religion. While such groups may, depending on their understanding of religious truth, accept larger or smaller portions of the "Enlightenment agenda" proposed by the votaries of reason, they insist that religion must have the last word, and they are determined to resist any efforts, however well intentioned, to build a rationalistic and secular international system according to Enlightenment principles.

Finally, there are the devotees of tradition, partisans of various forms of cultural and identity politics. These are often populist nationalists who believe that their own values and culture ought to be the basis for international life or at least that they must be protected from the soulless internationalism of others. I have written elsewhere of the Jacksonians, populist integration proceeded farther and faster than ever. Although the poor remain largely excluded from it, this rapidly expanding global society is nevertheless an extraordinary development.

In a very odd way, this emerging global society shares some key traits with the dynamic societies that grew up in the English-speaking world. Most of the countries and cultures in the world today are not very much like Queen Anne's England. But the world as a whole is. That is, today's world is divided among three competing sets of visions, and no one vision can impose its values on global society as a whole. In one group are the advocates of reason, who believe that universal logic, principles, and law are the only suitable or even feasible basis for an international system. This approach is particularly influential in Europe, but also has its advocates in the United States and elsewhere. For this group, the establishment of a powerful system of institutions that can enforce the global rule of law is the obvious and natural goal of international society. Whether inspired primarily by the French or by the Anglo-American revolutions, advocates of this position believe that universal human rights, universally valid legal principles, and the ideals of the Western Enlightenment should shape international institutions and domestic policy all around the world.

A second group is composed of the advocates of religion: people who believe that one of the world's great religions (as they understand it) is the necessary foundation for any just international order. For some, this foundation is Wahhabi Islam; for others it is the Shi'a faith that was taught by Ayatollah Khomeini. For others it is the Roman Catholic faith; still others believe that Pentecostal or evangelical Protestant Christianity is what the whole world needs in order to prosper and to stay at peace. Like the quarreling Christian sects in Queen Anne's Britain, the advocates of a religionbased international order disagree on the details, but share a common commitment to base both international and domestic society on the precepts of revealed religion. While such groups may, depending on their understanding of religious truth, accept larger or smaller portions of the "Enlightenment agenda" proposed by the votaries of reason, they insist that religion must have the last word, and they are determined to resist any efforts, however well intentioned, to build a rationalistic and secular international system according to Enlightenment principles.

Finally, there are the devotees of tradition, partisans of various forms of cultural and identity politics. These are often populist nationalists who believe that their own values and culture ought to be the basis for international life or at least that they must be protected from the soulless internationalism of others. I have written elsewhere of the Jacksonians, populist American nationalists who often resist the transfer of power to international institutions because they do not trust foreigners and see these institutions as threatening deeply held American values. The United States is not the only country in the world where such views are popular. Across much of Asia many people can be found who are suspicious of international organizations as disguised forms of colonialism that seek to perpetuate European or Western power. Powerful and prominent people attack the idea that the French and American Enlightenment ideals constitute a universally valid approach to human rights. They argue that "Asian values," generally seen as more communal and less confrontational, must also be taken into account. The West should not use international institutions as vehicles to impose Western ideas on Asian societies. Issues connected with the rights of women also elicit opposition from those who claim that it is illegitimate for the West to impose its own models of appropriate gender relations on different societies with different roots.

Often these arguments lack credibility in Western ears. When Robert Mugabe defended his increasingly brutal and destructive misrule of Zimbabwe by invoking African identity politics against Anglo-American and European calls on his government to respect human rights, few Western observers were convinced by what they perceived as his self-serving rhetoric. Yet Mugabe's rhetoric continued to resonate in much of postcolonial Africa. This was not a tribute to Mugabe's economic management, and most of those who applauded his rhetoric had no interest in living under his rule; but identity politics remains a potent force throughout much of Africa today. From Argentina northward, Latin America also has strong traditions of populist nationalism whose adherents reject the universal applicability of ideals and ideas rooted in the Anglo-American Enlightenment.

Global society is as divided among the three poles of attraction today as Britain was in Queen Anne's time. Furthermore, as in Queen Anne's Britain, no one tendency in the world is strong enough to compel the others to conform. Radical Islam cannot conquer the world through jihad and impose a universal caliphate and Sharia law. The European Union cannot impose the rule of reason and of civil law on the affairs of nations. The United States cannot impose either the Christian religion or its own folk and cultural values on humanity at large. China and Japan can and will successfully resist the Westernization of international life, but they cannot impose Asian values as a replacement.

What this means is that to the degree a global society can establish itself and common institutions can serve the needs of the world's different societies and cultures, that society and those institutions will have to be anglican. That is, they will be limited in power; they will proceed from sometimes contradictory assumptions; they will be built in such a way that they can be interpreted and justified from opposed points of view. They will be a hodgepodge, not a systematic whole.

The world of global institutions and international law already seems to be based, like English common law, more on precedent and historical accident than the result of rational principles consistently applied. The most conscious proponents of a law-based and institutionally defined international system generally deplore this condition, hoping instead for a more rational system. That is probably a mistake. Tolerating and even welcoming a more diverse and less uniform approach to international life and global governance is likely over time to lead to more effective and widely accepted institutions. This will partly be expressed by a shift of power to regional institutions where specific cultural values and circumstances can be better accommodated than in global and universal ones. Looking ahead, the path to a more effective and just international society is likely to be at least as crooked and devious as the road the English-speaking societies took toward the development of their own unique blending of the values of reason, tradition, and religion.

In any case, the English-speaking countries have led the effort to create the first global society, created the economic and political systems that have sought and at least to some degree succeeded at keeping pace with its rapid development, and found ways that people with radically different values and priorities can work together in an open and dynamic system. This is not a bad showing for three hundred years; the English-speaking world has already had an influence over the human story as profound as that achieved by the great civilizations, east and west, which laid the foundations for the modem world, and the story of the maritime system does not yet appear to be drawing to a close.

As Francis Fukuyama noted in The End of History, there has always been something sad and unfulfilling about the Hegelian picture of the end of history. After all the fire and storm of the historical process, the struggles between good and evil, progress and reaction, the long and difficult climb from barbarism and slavery up into the light of civilization and finally of free civil society, at last and at length we struggle up to the peak of the mountain to encounter the culmination of generations of human striving.

From this point of view, America is not only an empty society of ice-cold businessmen pursuing their dreary tasks. It is the enemy of meaning, morality, and authenticity wherever such things still exist. As American economic, social, and political values spread around the world, and as American consumer culture insinuates itself into the global consensus, everything that makes human life worth living, that makes people nobler and more interesting than cows, begins to disappear. The triumph of America is the death of humanity: that perception is what can unite a not-very-exNazi like Martin Heidegger with not-very-ex-Stalinists like Jean-Paul Sartre, and unites both these men with Latin American humanists like Rod6 and with both Sunni and Shi'a radicals in the Islamic world. "We worship God by hating America," as Tareq Hilmi puts it. To fight America and its insidious influence is to fight for the survival of authentic human experience and values, however we may construe them.

In the classic Hegelian view, humans make history for the same reason that oysters make pearls. Something, a grain of sand in the case of the oysters and a social disequilibrium in the case of the humans, is causing discomfort; we do what we can to make the discomfort go away. Oysters secrete soothing layers of slime to cover the irritating sand; people have struggled to overcome the social imbalance and establish ajust society. In both cases, we'll stop if the pain goes away. To believe this is to miss the essential point of the Anglo-American project and, more broadly, to miss the grandeur of the human race. The open-ended dynamism that powers Anglo-American and capitalist society owes more to Bergson than to Hegel. The quest for more scientific and technical knowledge, and for the application of the fruits of that knowledge to ordinary human life, is not simply a quest for faster cars and better television reception. It is a quest to fulfill the human instinct for change, arising out of a deep and apparently built-in human belief that through change we encounter the transcendent and the divine. The material and social progress that is such a basic feature of Anglo-American society and of the broader world community gradually taking shape within the framework the Anglo-Americans have constructed ultimately reflects a quest for meaning, not a quest for comfort and wealth. And unlike Hegelian history, this quest has no foreseeable ending point because the quest itself is a permanent feature of human nature.

If this is true, society will never reach a final stage, politics will never stop changing, and human beings will continue to reinvent themselves and to quarrel as long as humanity exists. We remain the heirs of Abraham, called to an encounter with transcendence that requires us to leave the familiar and embrace the challenge of a new kind of life in an everdeveloping world. From the Anglo-Saxon point of view, participating in this adventure is not materialistic, even if the quest brings material benefits. Abandoning the quest is materialistic; to turn aside from this challenge is to embrace a merely material existence and to abandon the spiritual values that make human life truly human.

This transcendent call into an unknown future is what men like Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and Henry Ford were responding to when they poured their life's energy into business enterprise. Carnegie and Ford were both political as well as business visionaries; Carnegie's vast philanthropies included an endowment for peace that continues today to fund projects aimed at building a new and better world; Ford's peace ship was a well-intentioned if much-mocked effort to bring the slaughter of World War I to an end through private activism and moral suasion. (I am not defending the business methods or the political vision of either man; I am merely trying to understand what these men and others like them believed they were doing. Carnegie's labor practices were reprehensible; Ford's anti-Semitism even more so. Nevertheless both men were driven by much larger passions than mere greed.)
Capitalism gives full expression to the side of human nature that responds to this Abrahamic call to embrace dynamic religion with all its perils and its risks. This is why the Anglo-Americans under the influence of a culture and psychology shaped by the dynamic religious movements emerging from the various phases of the English and Scottish reformations have been so strongly drawn to capitalism and why they have worked so persistently to give it full scope.

This Promethean drive to acquire all the power that can be acquired, to do everything it is possible for humanity to do, to learn what can be learned, to build what can be built, and to change what can be changed is the force that impelled the three maritime powers to their global position. Societies that grasp this dynamic and embrace it become wealthier and more powerful; those that reject it or fail to handle its challenges become weaker. Within societies something similar happens: the more dynamically oriented individuals, regions, institutions, and industries tend to gain power at the expense of those who prefer a slower and safer path. The unique role of the Anglo-Americans in modem times stems in part from the way in which these societies have come to believe that dynamism is their tradition: that they honor their past and acknowledge their roots by pressing on into the future.

Unlike the Hegelian oyster seeking quiet and peace, the Walrus and the Carpenter want a permanent revolution. There is no resting place, no final destination for this process, and the real goal of Anglo-American civilization is to get the permanent revolution well and truly under way. We are launching a space ship, not building a rest home.

We do not yet know what humanity is capable of, what intellectual, spiritual, technological, and cultural limits-if any-there are on humanity's abilities. The maritime order represents at the deepest level an organization of human abilities and societies, open to all nations and all cultures, for a voyage of exploration into unknown waters.

 

Continue to Rethinking Sea Power.

Anglo-American Ascendance P.2.

Anglo-American Ascendance P.3: Asia in the New Spatial Order.

Anglo-American Ascendance P.4: The China Blockade.

Anglo-American Ascendance P.5: The Japan Blockade

Anglo-American Ascendance P.6: Opium War

 

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