Review: The Anglosphere A Genealogy of a Racialized Identity in International Relations
| Published date | 01 March 2012 |
| DOI | 10.1177/002070201206700119 |
| Author | Kim Richard Nossal |
| Date | 01 March 2012 |
| Subject Matter | DebatesReview |
| 260 | Winter 2011-12 | International Journal |
| Reviews |
collection’s title and the rich literature on the topic, it is surprising that the
contributors did not cover this subject explicitly.
Of course, the editors and contributors may not share my concerns
about the Department of Foreign Affairs or Canadian diplomacy writ large.
That’s fine. Still, I cannot shake the image of an old sea turtle, washed up and
flipped over on some forlorn beach, buffeted by waves, tangled in detritus,
and pawing furtively in the air.
Daryl Copeland/University of Ottawa and London Academy of Diplomacy
THE ANGLOSPHERE
A Genealogy of a Racialized Identity in International Relations
Srdjan Vucetic
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011. 253pp, $24.95 paper.
ISBN 978-0-8047-7225-9
The Anglosphere is a word of very recent vintage. Indeed, it is so new that it
doesn’t yet appear in the most recent edition of the Oxford English Dictionary
and was only added to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary in 2007. It made
its first appearance in the language in 1995, in The Diamond Age, a novel
about a future in which humankind is divided into “phyles,” or groups of
people who are not territorially organized, but whose loyalty to each other
comes from shared ethnic, linguistic, or cultural similarities. One of the
“phyles” is New Atlantis, a group of predominantly Anglo-Saxon people
but which also includes other ethnicities that shared cultural and linguistic
similarities with the Anglo-Saxons, which the author, Neal Stephenson,
termed the “Anglosphere.” But Stephenson’s vision of the future of world
politics very much reflected his own times and the “civilizational” discourses
then emerging in the post-Cold War period. Certainly, the idea of an
Anglosphere fitted perfectly with Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations.
Moreover, the response of three English-speaking leaders—George W. Bush,
Tony Blair, and John Howard—to what many saw as a manifestation of a
civilizational struggle after the attacks of 11 September 2001 popularized the
term. And the enthusiastic celebration of the idea of a global community of
English-speaking peoples who shared common cultural and sociopolitical
values by mainstream commentators like Christopher Hitchens and
historians like Robert Conquest helped entrench it in the language.
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