Join the Anglosphere Consortium!

An initiative whose time has come, thanks to Churchill's Parrot and Sunlit Uplands. Sir Winston Churchill, of course, believed in the fraternity of the English-Speaking Peoples, so he would no doubt approve of any effort that furthers the coming together of English-speaking countries and their citizens.

The 'Anglosphere' is not so much an idea as a reality, for any Anglophone who walks and talks in cyberspace is automatically part of this linguistic-cultural bounded universe called the Anglosphere. Everyday we communicate with each other and become more interconnected through interfaces such as Hotmail, Facebook, Blogger, Google...and a multiplicity of other forums and information-sharing tools that can be collectively referred to as the 'Network Commonwealth'. James C. Bennett has written extensively on this concept, and so I defer to his expertise, but the thinking is that we are still in the early stages of this new network civilization, whose interconnectivity and cooperation across all fields of human activity will only accelerate in the years to come. We ain't seen nothing yet.

The notion that we were somehow headed for a borderless multicultural world is simply not the case, other than in a global economic sense. The international business language is English, but that's where it stops. Countries are not going to dispense with their culture and language just because of business, nor should they, nor will their citizens. Although some sovereignty has devolved to transnational regulatory organizations such as the WTO and World Bank; a world economy and world markets do not mean we are eventually headed for world government. If anything, civic states and their national borders are becoming even more emphatically pronounced, such as in the United States (domestic security), Russia (territorial integrity), China (sphere of influence), Canada (Arctic sovereignty), etc., and in Europe where the elites busily diminish internal borders, their populations stand opposed.

It is far more likely in the 21st century, that nations will maintain their borders, but seek greater cross-border institutionalization and cooperation where it is culturally contiguous to do so, to fight cybercrime and other foreign threats, or just to bond in ways previously unimaginable. It is already happening in the Anglosphere between our police forces, defence forces, intelligence agencies, medical researchers - to an extent not replicated elsewhere. This will only continue and accelerate. We can either let this reality overtake us, or deliberately embrace our fate. You can do your bit by joining the Anglosphere Consortium today!