Anglo-Saxon Attitudes
The Making of the Modern World
Article Summary and Author Biography
Walter Russell Mead rightly argues that the United Kingdom and the United States made the modern world. But his call for Washington to pursue both a maritime grand strategy and Niebuhrian realism will not fly.
OWEN HARRIES is a Visiting Fellow at the Lowy Institute for International Policy, a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies, in Sydney, and Editor Emeritus of The National Interest.
Walter Russell Mead laments at the beginning of God and Gold, "The study of British history and culture has about vanished from American schools today; as a result, many Americans are unaware of just how deep the connection between the two countries go." Mead sets out to dispel that ignorance, but his deeper purpose is to expound a thesis: that the modern world is the creation of the United Kingdom and the United States. This, Mead writes, is "the biggest geopolitical story in modern times: the birth, rise, triumph, defense, and continuing growth of Anglo-American power despite continuing and always renewed opposition and conflict." In his view, militarily, politically, economically, and culturally, their will has prevailed, first with the United Kingdom leading, then with the United States taking over. Americans need to know how and why this has been the case -- not only to understand themselves fully but also to appreciate the nature of the world they have created and to cope with the problems it presents.
To describe the United Kingdom and the United States as Anglo-Saxon countries is to describe not their ethnic makeup but their culture -- to underline how it differs from that of the world at large and even from that of the rest of the West. Mead sees Anglo-Saxon culture and its success across the globe as the product of four elements: a slowly evolved liberal political system amenable to compromise, adjustment, and innovation; a Protestant religious tradition that has become tolerant enough to accommodate different sects and accept the separation of church and state while retaining a strong sense of purpose; a capitalist system preoccupied with material wealth not for its own sake but because of "a passion for growth, for achievement, for change"; and a maritime strategy, initially borrowed from the Dutch, that has used both the freedom of action provided by detachment from the European mainland and ready access to the rest of the globe to manipulate the world's balance of power. Each of these four elements has in itself been a powerful force for change. And each has supported and reinforced the others, constituting a virtuous circle whose impact has been dynamic and self-perpetuating.
Mead puts plenty of flesh on these bones, taking his readers through four centuries of history, from Elizabeth I and Oliver Cromwell to Wal-Mart and George W. Bush. His account is rich in anecdote, laden with quotations, and impressive in its range and erudition. Some things, such as his use of Lewis Carroll's "The Walrus and the Carpenter" to capture the combination of impractical idealism and cynicism that sometimes characterizes Anglo-Saxon enterprises, work brilliantly.
On other occasions, perhaps because Mead is trying to address different audiences at the same time, his tone is disconcertingly uncertain. There must be a better way to illustrate a supposed affinity between Cromwell and Ronald Reagan than with reference to a passage from a speech by the Lord Protector being suddenly interrupted with, "Don Felipe, tear down that wall!" And it is surprising to find Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's awful poem "Excelsior" quoted at all, let alone favorably, after what James Thurber did to it.
WEST SIDE STORY
A more substantive, and substantial, problem is that Mead's emphasis on what is special and distinctive about Anglo-Saxon culture downplays the features that all Western countries have in common while focusing on what divides the continental nations from the maritime ones. There is, for example, little acknowledgment of the West's shared Greco-Roman inheritance. Mead's readers will get no sense that during the centuries of the United Kingdom's ascendancy, the education of the British ruling class consisted overwhelmingly of the study of Greek and Latin languages and culture. Yet that education must have shaped these elites' understanding of the world, perhaps as much as the Old Testament and its "Abrahamic narrative," on which Mead lays heavy emphasis. He also gives scant attention to the vast imprint -- positive, negative, and complicated -- of the French Enlightenment and the French Revolution on the minds of the educated classes of the United Kingdom and the United States, and Europe as a whole. And Germany, whose malign influence did so much to determine the contours of modern world history, gets very short shrift.
These weaknesses are not negligible, but nor are they life threatening. Mead's basic case is sound: the two great maritime, capitalist democracies have been the main shapers of the modern world. There are important virtues in the way Mead makes this case. In his treatment of the international behavior of the United Kingdom and the United States, he is without illusion or sentimentality. If anything, his criticism of the two countries goes too far: "Greed, cowardice, arrogance, complacency, sloth, and self-righteousness: every vice known to history has flourished in the politics and policy of the maritime states. They have committed about every possible folly and crime." Still, he is right to stress the ruthlessness that characterized the ascendancy of both powers, a quality that reflects "the unique mix of cynicism and faith at the heart of the Anglo-American view of the world."
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