Notes for Budapest: The Anglosphere and Europe (or perhaps "Anglospherism and Europeism"?)

Many thanks for giving me a chance to participate in this very unique gathering, unique as always when it is organized by the Danube Institute, by John and Melissa. When I received the invitation at a conference with the title “The Anglosphere and Europe”, I was not sure I was the right person to be asked to say something relevant on such a topic.

I have many times visited, but never lived on the territory of the Anglosphere – with one exception: in the spring of 1969 I spent a semester at Cornell University. At that time Students for a Democratic Society tried to start a Marxist revolution there and I remember feeling that I – who came from a communist country – was to the right of everyone I met there.

The second reason why I hesitated to accept the invitation was that I didn’t feel like a true European (at least in the current European sense defined by Madame von der Leyen). I, of course, live in Europe and have lived in Europe all my life, but I feel a much stronger identity as a Czech, as a Central European and as a Slav.[1] This combination gives me a special perspective, which had been “enriched” by my four decades of life in the communist Czechoslovakia.

As an economist who believes in methodological individualism, I don’t like continental thinking. After discussing the topic of the conference with my friends and colleagues in Prague, I understood that the debate doesn’t have to be about geography or continents, but about the way of thinking of people who live there, which means about worldviews, about ideology. And this motivated me to accept the invitation despite my uncertainty about the quality of my stances when one is left without a reliable theoretical background.

Let me start by redefining the title. My suggestion is not to discuss it under the heading “Anglosphere and Europe”, but under the heading “Anglospherism” and “Europeism”. The first term is probably new. The second one has been used by many of us for a long time. The artificial, not authentically evolving European unification process has been connected with the birth of an ideology, which has been sometimes and by some of us called Europeism. In 2006, I published a small book on this topic with the title “What Is Europeism?”.[2]

It is worth stressing here today that I mentioned in it several names that inspired me the most and one of them was – not surprisingly – John O’Sullivan and his article “The EU’s usual crisis” (published in Quadrant in December 2005).

I characterized Europeism as “a conglomerate of ideas, as a highly heterogeneous structure” (p. 8). I pointed out that this doctrine is “insufficiently specified and unsystematically formulated”, that there is almost no one who advocates it explicitly, and that Europeism “brings together people with very different worldviews”. I used the term metaideology and stressed that “Europeism is essentially an illiberal view” (in its original European sense). I also spoke about the arrogant authoritativeness of this doctrine (p. 7) and argued that it expresses “a powerful supranational tendency standing against the intergovernmental principle” (p. 14). I considered it “a new, extremely naive and romantic utopism” (p. 17) which leads to “a revolutionary turn of the normal course of events”.

My formulations suggest – at least I hope – that I am not an exponent of Europeism. It should be taken into consideration that I published this text as a President of an EU member country who had signed the EU membership treaty only two years before. This looks surprising now. There was still some freedom in Europe those days.

I don’t have a book about “Anglospherism“. This term has been undoubtedly used by someone, but I am not aware of it. The Anglosphere has not been explicitly politically unified (and I am not aware of any attempts to do it), nevertheless, this term exists, and has so many vocal advocates and supporters that we may talk about an ideology behind it. However, this doctrine does not have its explicit bible. Yet.

I am afraid that the implicit exponents of anglospherism who are here with us today will start protesting against being labeled as such. Nevertheless, I dare argue that something like this exists. I feel something special, something different in the behavior, the thinking and the rhetoric of people I would call anglospherists. 

Let me return to my communist experience. It remains to be my main comparative advantage in such discussions.[3] It gives me a useful historic perspective. At that time, we used to speak about the West and the East.

It spite of that, our heroes had always been Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, not Mitterrand and Kohl, the University of Chicago, not “die Frankfurter Schule”, explicit opposition to Soviet imperialism, not the Helsinki peace process. I remember how we – in the post-August 1968 Czechoslovakia – hated the idea of the Helsinki initiative. The West Europeans were not able to understand us. Nevertheless, I don’t recall ever using the term Anglosphere then. This was for me the stage No. 1.

It changed in the early post-communist years. Let’s call it the second stage. Confronted with the – in our eyes – in many respects socialist Europe and with the collectivistic, centralistic and non-democratic model of European integration, we came to the conclusion that the Anglosphere is different and much more inspiring as a model for us. Not surprisingly, our transformation process was better understood by Prime Minister Thatcher than by any other of the world’s political leaders.

I founded at home very rapidly a conservative or classical liberal party (regretfully the term conservative was stolen at that moment in my country) based on the Anglo-Saxon political and economic way of thinking and won the first free parliamentary elections with it. The French and German politicians expected that we would copy their political and economic structures, but we explicitly criticized both “die soziale Marktwirtschaft”, as well as the European proportional election system and the demonization of political parties on the right. Our only friend among political parties was the British Conservative Party.

That was, however, not the end of the story. The third stage came at the beginning of this century. To our great regret, America (meaning the US and Canada) and Great Britain started to change more than Europe (which has more or less stayed the same or changed less radically). The aggressiveness of new ideologies of environmentalism, human-rightism, multiculturalism, genderism and wokeism hit the United States and Great Britain more than us in Europe. The reason could be that we are older, less dynamic, lazier, less flexible, less enthusiastic. We are also less naive – our personal experience with destructive nondemocratic ideologies helps us.

There is an interesting case of Great Britain. Brexit didn’t help this country. London itself – as we see it now – is able to regulate even more than Brussels and to be extremely progressivistic even without the European Commission.

As a result, the dangerous virus of progressivism is spreading more rapidly and deeply in the Anglosphere. For that reason, the Anglosphere becomes a collectivity sui generis and deserves to have its own ism. Potentially its own institutional structure as well.

Putin has shifted us to stage No. 4. He – with his Ukraine war – united the West, which was certainly not his aim. The war has become a strategic disaster for Europe. The European elites don’t want to see it. The military, political and economic weakness of Europe has become more visible. As Peter Robinson expressed it recently: “Europe has lost faith in its beliefs, traditions and legitimacy” (Hoover Digest. Spring 2020). The Brussels elites are using the war as another instrument for transforming the European Union into a superstate, into the United States of Europe instead. We, the citizens of smaller EU countries, are the victims of it.

The Anglosphere – because of the European weakness – once again dominates the West. To be frank, and it is not easy to say it here, I am not happy with this turn of history. We always understood Anglospherism as a positive way of thinking, which used to look optimistically forward, but we feel loss of this historic optimism in the US today. Anglospherism is a much-needed advocacy of individualism, but with a recent switch to group and collectivist thinking it slowly disappears. It used to be the stress on self-responsibility and self-reliance, but it has been impaired by a century of the welfare state. It used to be the symbol of dynamism and workaholism, but we are witnessing a loss of the work ethics there as well. I could continue tentatively listing the positives of the normative anglospherism, but there should be a serious attempt of the descriptive side of it, of the positive anglospherism as well. [4]  (I still believe in the methodology of science advocated by Milton Friedman.)

I hope Europe is becoming aware of its passivity and irrelevance. Especially its “superpowers”, France and Germany, are now talking about it. Macron’s recent speeches about “the strategic autonomy of the EU” suggest that something is in the air, but I feel in it more rhetoric than substance. Is it a new version of 1968 Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber´s Le Défi Américain or just a short-sided preelection initiative? I don’t believe it is serious. It would need a systemic – meaning political and economic – change as well. It seems to me, however, that it is not possible.

Václav Klaus, The Danube Institute Conference, Lonyay Hatvany Theater, Budapest, April 5, 2024