Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World

before I begin I will warn you that our guest has been in this room previously when he was in this room previously about 20 minutes before the end of the program the District of Columbia had a necessity to turn out all of the power in this quadrant the room went dark and our guests continued speaking as if nothing had happened so none of you boat bolt for the doors if we have an interruption he knows how to continue on good morning and welcome to the Heritage Foundation and our Douglas and Sarah Allison auditorium we of course welcome those who join us on our heritage org website on all of these occasions reminding our internet viewers that questions or comments can be sent to us at any time simply emailing speaker at heritage org for those in house your main duty at the moment is to check that your cell phones have been turned off before we begin and we will of course post the program on our web site for everyone's future reference as well hosting our special guest today is dr. Niall Gardner dr. gardeners director of our Margaret Thatcher's Center for freedom and a former aide to Lady Thatcher he has worked at the heart of the Washington policy world for over a decade and is a leading expert on the US UK special relationship dr. Gardner is a regular contributor to the London Daily Telegraph and appears frequently on American and British television he received his doctorate in history from Yale University police join me in welcoming Niall Gardner John thank you very much for that introduction good afternoon everybody welcome to the Heritage Foundation I'm honored to introduce a long-standing friend of heritage and the American people Daniel Hannan a conservative member of the European Parliament for southeast England I've known Dan for over two decades since our days of students studying modern history at Oriel College Oxford the alma mater of some of the greatest figures in British history including Sir Walter Raleigh and SATA Rhodes we both owe a huge debt of gratitude to our senior tutor Jeremy Cato one of the most brilliant historians of his generation and described by a Conservative MP as quote the quintessential Oxford Don if one were to devour CP snow goodbye mr. chips and Port House blew there was a smattering of Cato in each dan graduated from Oxford with a double first and soon after leaving University he became director of the European research group and later a leader writer for The Daily Telegraph he also served as an advisor and a speechwriter to both Michael Howard and William Hague in the late 1990s in 1999 dan entered the European Parliament where he swiftly became a leading nemesis of euro Federalists and Eurocrats he is currently serving as the secretary-general of the Alliance of European conservatives and reformists in the European Parliament which campaigns for radical reform of the European Union no easy task in addition to his work in Brussels Daniel Hannan is one of the most prominent political commentators in Britain through his highly influential blog at the Daily Telegraph his writing has become a sensual reading for anyone who wishes to learn more about the nightmare the European project and why Britain needs to escape from it he is also a distinguished a transatlantic author who has made a significant impact in the United States with his New York Times bestseller the New Road to Serfdom a letter of warning to America his latest book inventing freedom how the english-speaking peoples may the modern world he's already making waves on this side of the Atlantic and is essential reading not only for America's political leaders but for all who care about American global leadership and the future the Anglosphere the engine of the free world we're delighted to have Daniel back here at Heritage with us today well Niall thank you very much it's wonderful to be back at Heritage wonderful to see many old friends here and indeed to be reminded of that power cut episode I'll tell you why I naturally spoke through a power cut it's because I was brought up in Peru I'm very used to power cuts they were a big part of my childhood and one of the things I noticed when I moved from Peru to the United Kingdom is that power cuts didn't happen now of course this was before labour started introducing all its green energy levies power cuts may now become a regular feature of UK life again but the reason I say that is because it's human nature to take things for granted sometimes you need to have lived somewhere else to appreciate what is unique about the place where you now find yourself when I was four years old a mob attacked our family farm there was a footpath into the hills a back entrance and my mother led me there by the hand and she said you know we're gonna play a game if we have to come this way again we must do it without making a sound my father was recovering from one of those chronic diseases that periodically affect British people in tropical countries I remember him he was sitting in his dressing gown loading his revolver with paper-thin hands saying I'm not leaving I have a responsibility to the people who work here this was a piece of empty land now it's a flourishing farm these are hooligans who have been brought in from the city what's gonna happen to the farmworkers well it makes an impression on you in the event the danger passed purity guards fired shots into the air the crowd dispersed it didn't happen everywhere not everyone was as lucky as we were there were seizures and confiscations all over the country this was the Peru of general Juan Velasco whose leftist push in 1968 had thrown the country into a state of squalor from which it is only recently recovered almost everyone moved out during those gloomy years the large Anglo Peruvian community into which I'd been born pretty much disappeared I may not look it but I am your typical Latino target voter now right I'm that I am the demographic that you're all looking for I am someone who has moved from the Hispano sphere to the Anglosphere and I can't help noticing that the movement has been overwhelmingly one-way right and it's worth standing back and asking why that is the two great land masses of the new world might serve almost as a controlled experiment they were settled at around the same time in fact during the sixteenth century Spain was probably on every measure the stronger power than England South America is has the edge in terms of natural resources and yet it never quite developed the civil democracy the individualism the freedom and the property rights that you take for granted it was something that kept occurring to me when I was going to school in the UK and returning to Peru in vacations that attack had not surprised anybody that was the really shocking thing it was assumed that property rights were contingent that constitutions were ephemeral that governments would come and go without any rule of law that what you had could be snatched away at any moment with or without official sanction and it was also taken for granted by Peruvians that such things didn't happen in the english-speaking world why is that why is it that this became such desirable living space attracting people not just from South America but people in their tens of millions from every continent and archipelago by its dream and promise of freedom you know as I say we take things for granted the conceit of our age is to think that the things that we now take to be comfortable and modern and rational such as regular elections and personal freedom and jury trials equality between men and women habeas corpus uncensored newspapers that these things are somehow the natural condition of an advanced society that every country will get there when its people become educated enough and wealthy enough history tells a rather different story those ideals were overwhelmingly developed in the language which I am now talking to you in there are very few places where any of them emerged through as it were a process of parallel evolution and you don't have to go back very far to find a time when freedom under the law was confined to the Anglosphere to the community of free english-speaking democracies on the 10th of August 1941 Franklin Roosevelt made the longest walk of his presidency in a way that is nowadays almost unimaginable the US media had contrived to hide the fact of his polio from the electorate up until that moment he'd always been photographed standing unaided or seated but on that occasion invited by Winston Churchill to join him on the decks of HMS Prince of Wales off Newfoundland he was determined literally to rise to the occasion and to the horror of his advisors who'd worried that a rolling pitching deck might leave the president in an undignified heap he made his slow way across the boards leaning heavily on a cane supported on one side by a naval officer and on the other by his son band of HMS Prince of Wales played Stars and Stripes forever and what followed was a carefully choreographed demonstration of what bound the english-speaking democracies together Roosevelt had gone as far as he could to support the Anglo spheres war effort but he was working within the constraints imposed on him by the founders of the Republic and then reinforced in a number of neutrality laws in the 1930s he'd opened facilities to the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force he'd come out with the extraordinarily generous lend-lease agreement he'd gone as far as a benign neutral can go within the law and Churchill trying to attempt America to take the extra step needed to show that the concentrate between the english-speaking powers rested on a broader cultural affinity and that was what he wanted to display that morning the 10th of August 1941 it happened to be a Sunday and the cruise of the two vessels the USS Augusta which had carried FDR and HMS Prince of Wales were paraded on deck for a joint religious service Churchill had chosen every detail personally he wanted everything to be perfect down to the hymns down to the readings which of course came in the language of the King James Bible alike revered in both nations chaplain read from Joshua one as I was with Moses so shall I be with thee I will not fail thee nor forsake thee be strong and of good courage and afterwards exultant Lee the Prime Minister declared the same language the same hymns the same ideals and when he said the same ideals Churchill was not making some bland generalization about being the good guys think of the world as it appeared from the perspective of August 1941 the whole of the Eurasian landmass from Seoul and Vladivostok to Brest and Lisbon was under one form or another of authoritarian government and you didn't even have the consolation of saying it's only become that way because of conquest by occupying armies it's true that in a small number of countries in Scandinavia in France and in the Low Countries parliamentary regimes had been overthrown by invaders but there was a much longer list of countries that had turned from democracy and freedom to fascism or communism without needing to be invaded through their own domestic process nobody in those days thought there was anything inevitable about the triumph of what the Nazis and the Communists both called decadent anglo-saxon liberalism and they called it dicker and for a reason it looked as though it was on the way out the coming idea was that you should marshal people together that you should elevate the herd above the individual they were confident that the future was theirs how could a system that allowed the individual freedom over the collective possibly triumph over their systems that stressed discipline and martial valour and glory well no one would have thought it at the time but our system of government was superbly victorious and thank God it was it raised our species to a higher level of wealth and happiness than previous generations would have thought possible but don't think that that was some natural process the move away from oligarchy away from autocracy towards Liberty under the law towards individualism happened in one place and in one language now why what was the secret ingredient what made the Anglo sphere miracle possible well that's the question that I set out to answer in inventing freedom I don't want to spoil the whole thing so I hope some of you gonna buy it so on sale afterwards I'm told outside but I try to approach the question as an anthropologist would the real take off we have old roots for some of these freedoms they go right back to the dark ages but the real take off began from the end of the 17th century that was the move away from guilds and monopolies and aristocracy privilege towards modern contract-based individualist capitalism of the kind that we recognized today so I thought here's a way of tackling it what did foreign visitors to North America and Great Britain during those years find remarkable if there was something going on in the Anglo sphere that wasn't happening elsewhere you would expect overseas observers to notice and we had some very distinguished men of letters visiting us throughout the 18th century and into the early 19th century Voltaire and Montesquieu and Tocqueville and a host of less well-known ones who nonetheless kept journals and wrote letters home and running through their observations are a number of common themes first of all they were struck by how materialistic we were they found the english-speaking peoples uncommonly interested in profit they were not very polite about it they thought it demeaning they thought that we've forgotten about higher values again thank God we had I would rather live in a place that values freedom and privacy and the honest pursuit of self betterment than in a place that Lords honor and faith and martial glory they tend not to be very happy places to live in they were stunned by religious pluralism not by religious toleration that existed in lots of places but complete equality including the freedom for every denomination to proselytize that was pretty much a unique Anglo sphere characteristic the individualism the elevation of personal freedom over his on data of of the single owner over the extended family or the kin group again they wandered it we had a remarkably weak system of extended families both in law and in custom and something that they all noticed our countries were remote many of the Anglosphere states outside North America in fact almost all of them were literally islands the Anglosphere beyond North America is an extended archipelago Great Britain Ireland the Caribbean Hong Kong Singapore Australia New Zealand and although the u.s. of course is not an island in geopolitical terms it was more isolated than any of them it had the mentality of an island nation look at Washington's farewell address still reverentially readout in the same way she who knows what the senator up to this tearing up all their rules are you know even by the time I finished speaking about her probably done away with that one but oh look at look at look at Jefferson's inaugural address kindly separated by Nature and the ocean from the exterminating havoc of one quarter of the globe these are people who felt secure in their geographical isolation why does that matter an island country doesn't need an army in peacetime that obsession running through all of the debates that along with your foundation about standing armies that was an ancient anglo-saxon you find exactly the same concerns in the 1640s in the civil wars in Great Britain because there was no standing army in peacetime the government lacked a mechanism for internal repression when the regime wanted something from the people usually tanks but anything else it had to ask nicely it had to summon people's representatives in an assembly and that was the guarantor of constitutional government and then one last thing on which every foreign observer who was versed in the subject remarked him in fact which they wrestled with which to this day they still struggle with I see this every week in the European Parliament the miracle of the common law in most countries people have a variant of what they do in continental Europe the Roman law or Bonaparte is model where a law is written down in the abstract and then applied to specific cases you would have thought is the natural way of doing it and if you're raised in that tradition you just go up in wonder at the idea that somehow the law can just grow on its own like a coral case-by-case each judgment serving as the starting point for the next case the law came up from the people not down from the regime it was an ally of freedom not an instrument of state control again and again it laid itself across the path of tyranny Thornton the stewards and George the third declaring that slavery was dissolved the moment someone set foot on English soil that beautiful and ominous system that John Adams recognized as the foundation of all and rose fear freedoms almost without precedent in the world we've lost its roots we don't know where it came from but it has been the strongest friend and ally of Liberty now I should at this stage address those of you since this is Washington DC who were thinking well this is all fine but surely these liberties were developed here wasn't this all kind of invented in 1776 and didn't we didn't we create this propositional nation based on on Liberty and so on well I don't want to diminish that right I went to insisted on going to Philadelphia yesterday on my way here my publisher said no don't go to Fenny there are no conservatives in Philly you won't sell any books right and all right you know what it's pretty much true there are very few conservatives in Philadelphia and I didn't sell many books but how could you not go to Philadelphia if you're writing about Anglo sphere exceptionalism right this is our mecca we english-speaking people's if we if we turned and faced somewhere five times a day to pray our Kaaba stone would be that little brick building in Independence Hall right that's where our conception of Liberty reached highest and most sublime form but the people who wrote those documents the authors of the Declaration and then of the Constitution they didn't think they were inventing any new rights in modern parlance they were not radicals but conservatives if they were revolutionaries they meant the word in its 18th century term whereby a revolution was a 360 degree turn of the wheel a placing upright of that which had been turned on its head they saw themselves not as defying or rejecting their British nationality but rather asserting the privileges that they assumed they had been born with as Englishmen and they traced a long lineage back through our glorious revolution back through the Magna Carta back to that folk right of anglo-saxon common law which emerged in the earliest days darken dun chronicled the for England had been formed out of the head taki Jefferson Franklin Adams they were in no doubt that they were the beneficiaries of an ancient tradition whose roots dug deep into the cold and muddy soil of Great Britain I always tell this story to skeptical friends here because it neatly illustrates how the story has been edited rewritten there was a time when every American school child was taught about Paul Revere's ride right how he thundered through the townships of eastern Massachusetts with his cry of the British I oh and I don't know if they teach anything in public schools here now but there was a time and some of you are looking pretty young which is great but there was a time when everyone was told this story the British are coming right now you stop and think about that story for a few seconds and you you will realize that there is a pretty major flaw in it the entire population of Massachusetts was British at the time I know that there are some eccentric people in Massachusetts I know that they vote for some pretty strange candidates at election time but even in Massachusetts it would be a truly bizarre thing to shout the British are coming at a completely British population what he actually said for the record was the regular coming out but my point is look at how that story has been doctored the language that the tour guides now use at Lexington and Concord the Americans were here the British Way no one would have recognized that at the time everyone involved was British that it didn't before the French became involved in 1778 it didn't occur to anyone to treat this as a conflict between two different countries it was seen for what it was an argument within a common polity which divided public opinion on both sides of the Atlantic you watch a Hollywood epic now and you see people marching you know under the stars and stripes the famous Betsy Ross flag one or two of them did but far more common was the Grand Union Flag congressional flag which had the Union colors in the corner and then the 13 stripes where they are now and that symbolized what it was that the Patriots thought they were fighting for namely their rights as Freeborn Englishmen to use the phrase current at the time in fact even the word patriot is telling patriot as it became here people favoring the Ulster Scots dialect Patriot was what Whigs on both sides of the Atlantic had called themselves for decades before anyone dreamed of a split so when they talked about patriotism what they meant was cherishing the exceptionalism of the Anglosphere model against the more statist hierarchical alternatives that were favored by Tories on both sides of the Atlantic now why do I stress the uniqueness of these values well it carries a big flipside Britain and then the u.s. defined their nationality in civil rather than ethnic terms we were very unusual in Britain if we were very early in defining nationality not by blood or ancestry but by signing up to a set of values and as so often in the u.s. people distilled and took further took to greater potency a tendency that was present in the old country this is a creedal polity you become America because of what you believe not because of where your ancestors were from which think about that it means that if you then change those values you if face your identity much more thoroughly than a country which defines itself by blood or territory if America ceases to be a policy based on the elevation of the individual then it ceases to be American much more thoroughly than anywhere else right Japan or Sweden or Ethiopia they could be monarchies or republics they could have state churches or they could be atheist they could be capitalist or communist they would still be recognized to be the same countries if this country gives up on the idea that the law is above the state and the individual is the master of the government rather than the other way around it ceases to be American at this point I should nod to the current president for teeing me up so nicely on this point with his intervention yesterday we don't all this pettifogging Constitution standing in the way of what plainly there is a majority for if you wanted to summarize Anglo sphere exceptionalism in one phrase you could do a lot worse than what John Adams said talking about the Massachusetts State Constitution a government of laws not of men incidentally that phrase was not John Adams as he was quoting a 17th century English week called James Harrington yet another illustration of the common roots of our shared inheritance government of laws not of men you don't get to change the system because of a transient majority the law is above the state it is not an expression of the will of the rulers now for what it's worth I do not share President Obama's view of what the founders intended he said oh he couldn't they couldn't have possibly meant the Senate always to be blocking things and you know what I think that's exactly what they intended that is the precise function of the Senate he was supposed to act as a brake on the radicalism of the popularly elected House right so as far as I can see blocking and delaying is not an abuse of its function it is its function but let's say I'm wrong about that let's say he's right and I'm wrong he's not the guy who should get to decide because he's a player on the pitch he can't be the referee that's what we mean by a government of laws not of men once you start saying I am bigger than the rules once you lack the humility to see that you are passing through institutions that are greater than you are you open the door to what your founders called arbitrary government that is the responsibility that we have to preserve intact our patrimony this is why I like the name of this foundation heritage heritage is about teaching our kids that they are not a random set of individuals born to a different random set of individuals but they are rather the inheritors of a unique and sublime tradition began with Paul Revere let me finish with the guy who sent him on his famous ride Joseph Warren medical doctor was killed later in the fighting leaving a young family and just before he sent Paul Revere off on his ride he uttered words that ring down the ages and inhalation are present he said on your decision tang the happiness and liberty of millions yet unborn act worthy of yourselves you my friends are the custodians and inheritors of the finest constitutional dispensation evolved by human intelligence you now have the responsibility to invigilator and preserve that tradition and to hand it on intact to those who come after on your decision hang the happiness and liberty of millions yet unborn act worthy of yourselves thank you very much for a tremendous very powerful presentation today and we now have time for some questions from the audience we already have a question over here from the gentleman thank you very much your historical insight that war on the continent had led to the growth of the state that well you know war is the health of the state as this had been said is I think spot-on and certainly verified in history what do you make of our current situation in this country we've been now in perpetual war for perpetual peace for the past decade or so what do you think that has done if anything to our liberties plainly there is a price to be paid the expansion of government for the purpose of waging war carries that a domestic price in terms of diminished freedom there is that contradiction in Russell Kirk's famous phrase between an American Republic and an American Empire I have to say though I coming as a observer as a friend of this country but nonetheless as an occasional visitor I am slightly shocked by how polarized this argument over foreign policy has become between two doctrinaire positions there is a view that says all foreign intervention is wrong you know that let's call it for in shorthand of the Rand Paul view of the world you know we should never ever get involved and then there is a kind of I don't know what you would call neo neo con but you know okay it didn't work out in Iraq let's try it in Syria right now what what what both of those points of view have in common is something that seems to me intrinsically unconservative which is that they start with a theoretical template and then they try and fit the facts to the theory now that is not something that conservatives do we should approach things case-by-case and say where is it right to deploy proportionate force in defense of Liberty so I am for example incredibly grateful that this country was prepared to wage three wars for liberty in the 20th century there were three global conflagrations the first and second world wars in the Cold War between the two rival models the one that put the individual above the state and the one that did the opposite I think the list of countries on the right side in all three of those wars is a short one but it includes your country and mine and the rest of the Anglosphere it doesn't follow that the u.s. is the frating with the responsibility of being an imperial power your founders understood better than anybody that colonies are ungrateful and expensive when you have a 17 trillion dollar debt you do not have the luxury of maintaining Garrison's all over the world say you need to pick and choose I was an opponent of the Iraq war at the time I was unusual among conservatives at the time but I think I can now say at this distance in time wouldn't you have rather kept the trillion dollars for something else knowing what we now know I was an opponent of Syrian intervention but I do see that there may be a case for a direct involvement in Iran if that were the way of preventing Iranian --hz from acquiring nuclear technology you have to approach these things case-by-case where often I'm often accused of being a sort of American Stewart as British people are by our continental friends are you're just an aircraft carrier and I was given the same answer yeah our shared heritage shapes us in similar ways when we are confronted by the same problem we react in a similar fashion because we've been taught by our institutions to do so and part of that shared heritage is a readiness to take up arms in defense of freedom I'm sorry I'm sorry that your past and not cross yesterday in philadelphia with wisconsin Governor Scott Walker because he also I hope you read each other's he is a believer in a practitioner of Tocqueville II and democracy aside I would like you to explain please you meant in the paper Saturday by the United States being unique as a propositional state okay first of all III my path did actually cross governor Walker's in New York and he is a great man who has turned his stage into a template of job creation and individual liberty and I was honored to have the chance to thank him for doing that why is the u.s. unique in being credo well it goes right back to the beginning it goes right back to the first pilgrim settlers even before the Revolution famous line of John Winthrop's about the city on the hill the eyes of all people shall be upon us what's less quoted is the thing he said just before that we are entered into a contract and covenant with God we are here to live in a particular way in gratitude for having been given this country how is early in the DNA of this country night you know you don't have to be a Puritan you don't have to be a Christian you're having to be a believer to see the importance of people feeling that they are they have an ideology bigger than where they happen to live that then took form in the revolution in a constitution that defines nationality ideologically no country in the world has been so good at assimilating newcomers from other places and making them feel part of that shared inheritance people can come from Asia from South America from Africa and they are turned into Americans and they become patriotic and freedom-loving and their view of the world is Americanized very few countries have pulled that trick off as well as you have there was that lovely characteristically optimistic phrase of Ronald Reagan where he said every immigrant makes America more American now I know this is controversial gonna be some of you in the room thinking I was with this guy up until now on the immigration thing you know this is you know what you can't read American history without being struck by something every generation of Americans every single generation has taken the view that immigration was always a good thing up until now but this time it's different right and there's always an apparently plausible reason for thinking that ah but up until now they were all english-speaking up until now they were Protestants you know what it's never been true this is still an amazingly successful country and the fact that the in queue is so much longer than the out queue is a tribute to what you're achieving here but you have to be proud of it give the settlers give the newcomers something that they want to belong to don't go around apologizing yeah where does that leave the guy who's trying to just settle in give people patriotism British politics for a second um where do you see you kept the you can't party going where how do you work with Nigel Faraj in the EU Parliament and why have you not decided Thank You Nigel is a good friend of mine he and I both represent the same region that could be a recipe for a very bad relationship but it isn't he's always been a wonderful gentleman and a colleague I think that the fracturing of the center-right in the UK could be devastating similar thing happened in Canada at the beginning of the 90s there were two right-of-center parties they have the same electoral system that you have in that we have majoritarian first-past-the-post it ruthlessly punishes that kind of division and the risk is that if the right-of-center Euroskeptic vote is split between two different parties then ylabel will get in with a minority of the vote but with a large majority in parliament that is the quirk of our electoral system so I think there needs to be some kind of rapprochement between you Kipp and the Conservative Party if we can't do that I mean look if we were all rational calculating machines we'd have already done this right there the logic is so overwhelming but of course human nature gets in the way and personal animosities and rivalries get in the way but if they were to prevent a deal and thereby put a labor back into government giving them the car keys all over again to trash it to exhaust our treasury and our credit all over again that I think would reflect badly on all concerned my party will have a referendum if we win on leaving the European Union right the only way to get that referendum to happen so that we can walk away from the European Union and rejoin the community of english-speaking democracies is to get people in the House of Commons who will go through the right lobbies when the moment comes and if you keep were to be the vehicle that prevented that outcome I think all of us would be to blame Adam Brickley I'm with heritage we talk a lot since we're in the United States about the anglo-american relationship the role of Britain and the United States but I wanted to pull back to the broader Anglosphere since I know you're a specialist in that and wondered if you might address the other commonly accepted Anglosphere nature nations and their roles namely Canada Australia and New Zealand and then maybe a quick word on whether our Irish friends are drifting out of that with their political system sure I think the other three if you like core Anglo sphere countries are much better exemplars of Anglo sphere exceptionalism and liberty than either my country or yours if the free world has leaders now they are Stephen Harper and Tony Abbott and to a lesser extent John Key in New Zealand I'm afraid they if you if you want to find individualist law based parliamentary government working well you wouldn't look at either the US or the UK at the moment but I'm hopeful I mean first of all on on Ireland they have the moment of maximum orbital distance the a past Ron from the rest of the ambulance fire has long since passed in the Irish Republic there has been approximation between the UK and Ireland in politics which would have seemed extraordinary twenty years ago there was always into mixture and intermarriage and intermingling between the populations I mean on a cultural level a visitor from the other side of the world would find it hard to understand what the fight had been about you know everyone's watching the same TV following the same football teams listening to the same music but the politics had always remained apart until very recently that the approximation of the two countries were sealed by the Queen's visit last year which is not being returned by the President of the Republic next year to the UK even down to the pardoning of the people who had deserted from the Irish Army to fight for the Anglo sphere in the Second World War that was a tacit admission by the Kenney regime that the law itself was wrong that Island should have been playing his part as an Anglo sphere ally in the battle against Hitler so relations have never been better and I think Ireland is now convincingly rejoining the atmosphere but let me say that that applies big time to a country that is a lot larger than Ireland and indeed a lot larger than Britain and larger than the u.s. the biggest Anglophone common-law democracy in the world is India now I'm not sure we can talk about India joining the Anglo sphere because you don't talk about a country with twice the population of all the rest of it put together joining it but a positive relationship between India and the rest of the Anglosphere is for me the central challenge of this century geopolitically like Ireland and indeed like the American Republic India in the early stages after independence underlined the fact of its independence by doing things differently so a generation went down the road towards autarky Swadeshi Soares self-reliance you know equal distance between the Western and Soviet bloc's promoting Hindi as the common language and great preparation for the Internet age that would have been you but that's over you know India has become more Anglo sphere now than it was last decade or the decade before that it's become more Anglophone and if you like the the colonial cringe has gone because Anglo sphere culture now is accented in American rather than British and so there's no implication that you you're lost aldrick for the the old regime what India now how it now defines itself against its neighbors is through its Anglosphere characteristics there are regular elections nobody gets exiled or shot the army doesn't interfere in politics English has become the language not just of government but of the univer of business and critically there is a legal system open to the individual seeking redress that preserves property rights through common law now I reckon that if you place India at the heart of an enlarged Anglo sphere alliance based on free trade suddenly the 20th the 21st century looks a lot brighter some coat so I have a particular perspective miss as a fellow British Tory Bolshevism a word of our sister party in Australia and now in the concert to come into Canada so I obviously relate to what you're saying as a follow-up to that question I mean you've been very eloquent about our historic about our bonds so I be interested to just building on what you said about the Anglosphere lines so what are the practical ways moving forward the english-speaking peoples of freedom can can do to work together like we've got the five eyes community which is more of a security young political thing and then obviously the Commonwealth as well so I'd just be interested in how we can actually being analyst for people's we should be modest and practical and pragmatic and not visionary I mean I've had enough of visionary schemes I've been a member of the European Parliament for 15 years heaven knows we don't need any plans for currency unions or pan Anglo sphere Parliament's or anything like that let's stick to something achievable and realistic and that goes with the temper of our peoples I would settle for a free trade area with an element of free movement labor mobility and an enhanced military alliance which were very close to already I made this point earlier about reacting in the same way to the same events because we've been shaped by our institutions lovely vignette ten years ago the Indian Ocean was devastated by that terrible tsunami and the cleanup operation was coordinated by the US Australian and Indian Navy's they found a greater interoperability than is typically found among NATO allies despite the fact that India had up until then had only the most perfunctory ties with the other two why because they have the same habit of thought because they had the same political structures so I would settle simply for that an enhanced alliance based on prosperity jordon long Heritage Foundation my question is to what extent do you see traditional English for your liberties and rights being grounded in a theory of natural law as opposed to just sort of a happy historical happenstance there is a huge difference between our tradition and the Continental tradition the Continental i-i've not claimed that the Anglosphere invented law right that the fathers of the English were groping around with their pigs in the cold soil of North Germany when Moses was coming down from Sinai right that was someone else got their way before we did nor do I claim we invented democracy that is a very old word for a very old concept what we invented was constitutional Liberty and our concept of democracy was as a guardian of individual freedom rather than as an expression of the will of the majority there is an immense philosophical and practical difference between the Continental tradition of Jacobin ism of the French Revolution tradition ultimately rooted in herder in Rousseau in the concept of the collective of the general will of the people and our system which is practical individualist and that points to specific rights contractually guaranteed and I have to say ours has worked better we didn't ever fall to fascism or communism to dictatorship or revolution in fact in the whole of the Anglosphere we never elected a single fascist MP and no more than half a dozen communists in all of the Anglosphere countries in all of the 20th century I think we have one in the House of Commons at the moment actually rather bizarrely that's a pretty good record you think that you know 800,000 members of the French Communist Party 1.6 million members of the Italian you know when we talk about the West the Western tradition we're being polite we mean countries that adopted the anglo-american system of government as a result of military victories by the english-speaking peoples the Second World War of the Cold War had ended differently would not be Western values today hi my name is Carlos was something here privately I'd like to know what you think of the remainder of the century for the Anglosphere exceptionalism how will it bear up in the face of challenges from powerful but not democratic countries thank you I'm optimistic and this always puts me in a minority in conservative audiences Hey pessimism seems to be part of the conservative temperament we are hardwired to expect imminent catastrophes a bit like what I was saying about the immigration thing before it's always different this time right and every generation has a different catastrophe looming right it could be ice ages or it could be global warming or it could be bird flu or swine flu or it could be asteroid strikes or nuclear holocaust or drugs resistant superbugs or Islamization or the dead crisis the fact the cause changes decade a decade but the argument doesn't the argument is always this time it's going to be different and maybe it will but it never has been yet so I am actually pretty optimistic I think the Anglos fear emphasis on individualism is perfectly suited to the Internet age and I suspect that a generation from now Americans will be living happier longer healthier and more fulfilled lives than at any time in the past now I could have made that statement at any time since the Mayflower and people would have scoffed at it the people would have been sitting in their britches and with their flag and cigar rubbish you know it's been good up until now this time is gonna be different it would have always been true I think you couldn't look forward to a bright prospect here with driverless cars and additive and subtractive manufacturing and incredible advances in healthcare and genetic technology and so on you know the future is bright it's true you have this huge debt crisis but there's there's gonna be a way around that I mean if government can't pay it won't pay and then when there's a default people won't lend it any more money it's gonna have to live within its means there's a there's an upside even there right and I think that the Anglosphere values are transferable know someone you know my book has been on sale for two days now I'm sure that if you look at the Amazon site now people have said this is a very racist smug triumphalist imperialist colonialist but you know before they've had a chance to read any of it I mean that's what that's what always happens but the great thing about Anglo sphere values is they will take root anywhere they are why Bermuda is not Haiti you know they are why Singapore is not Indonesia they're why Hong Kong isn't China if you get the structures right the liberty and the happiness will follow yeah I can do that in 30 seconds I think it should be all right I think there is a need for health care reform when people showed all these polls saying 80% of Americans support healthcare reform I find it incredible that 20% didn't right I mean you know we can all think of things that we would do to improve the current system to change the litigation rules now I would like to see a system of personal health care accounts where you can carry your portable account with you instead of having it based on insurance all right I think the singapore style system but reform should be approached in the spirit of the constitution respecting the jurisdiction of the 50 states and respecting the supremacy of the individual now what I would say I mean what do I know about this my website still works but I would make one just one point about this which is if you go down the road towards a state-run health care system you will find that you switched the incentives so that people begin to depend on the new dispensation right one of the most brilliant phrases ever uttered in politics was that fantastic insight of Milton Friedman's the tyranny of the status quo I sometimes think you have to have actually served as a representative to see how spacious those words are the tyranny of the status quo once you have the government supplying health care physicians and administrators and politicians and even patients start to depend on the existing system and it then becomes impossible to attempt any radical reform that's pretty much the situation where the United Kingdom is today so if you are gonna go down this road you embrace it properly and you grit your teeth and you do it otherwise don't start down the road at all but don't imagine there are four or five years from now you can say well this didn't really work maybe we can reverse it it's not going to work like that this is your one chance like to thank Daniel Hannan for a tremendous a speech today and Q&A session as well and Daniel very welcome to come back anytime we'd love to have you back here and very grateful to all of you for joining us as well today here as heritage Dan will now be signing copies of his book I believe they're all sold actually that's so the all went like hotcakes earlier so if you'd like down to sign a book please to do bring it up and thank you to everybody for for joining us today and thank you especially to 2-down Hannon for a terrific presentation thank you you you

Channel: The Heritage Foundation

Views: 65,943

Rating: 4.8170581 out of 5

Keywords: Heritage, Heritage Foundation, GOP, Conservative, Republican, Inventing Freedom, Daniel Hannan, UK, Anglosphere, English Speaking World, United States Of America (Country), First Principles, American Revolution (Event), European Union, Australia (Country), India (Country), New Zealand (Country), Canada (Country), United Kingdom (Country), Ireland (Country), History, Magna Carta, England, Conservative Party (Organization), UK Independence Party (Organization), European Parliament

Id: uep7GA9hCKM

Length: 54min 0sec (3240 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 22 2013