CANZUK and the Post-Liberal Turn
In Britain and across the West we are living through an age of political convulsion, a post-liberal turn if you will. This is not just a movement of the right, its shadow has fallen across both the Conservative and Labour Parties. For those of us who firmly believe in CANZUK as the greatest foreign policy objective of the 21st Century, the question must be asked, what places does this idea have when our politics is increasingly dominated by post-liberalism?
The certainties of the post-Cold War age are over and the liberal triumphalism of figures such as Fukuyama now seem almost laughable. The decline of the liberal consensus has many causes, both domestic and international. Spanning from the rise of China and globalisation to the hollowing out of the state and the decline of community. In Britain and the West the decline of the liberal consensus has led to a new term, post-liberal. Whether this is a new idea or just a revival of communitarianism is not all together clear, because post-liberal is a fairly vague term. Peter Franklin’s essay, What do post-liberals really want? is one of the best examples of an attempt to define and set out what post-liberalism is and what it seeks to achieve. At its core though post-liberalism is an idea rooted in place and community. It is in, Matthew Goodwin’s terminology fundamentally an ideology of the somewhere people. One which rejects the excesses of liberalism, globalism and centralisation. On the right, post-liberalism is an increasingly dominant outlook, how then do those of us on the right continue to make the case for CANZUK?
CANZUK is after all an internationalist and globalist project, whether you believe in CANZUK as a loose alliance, a supranational entity or even a pan-global federal state there is no getting away from that basic fact. Yet at its core CANZUK is more than just an economic argument or a neo-liberal attempt to lower trade barriers, if that is all it was you would have to ask the question, why those four nations, why CANZUK at all? The reason we on the right are drawn to the CANZUK concept is because it is an idea rooted, just like post-liberalism, in place and community. As already mentioned, Franklin’s essay What do post-liberals really want? is one of the better attempts to explain this new thinking. In that essay Franklin talks of The Kinks’ Village Green Preservation Society as the best expression of the post-liberal idea. That song, with its appeal to nostalgia, place and sentiment talks to people of a certain political persuasion in a way which is difficult to explain, it tugs at the heart strings as it were. CANZUK is the same, we feel a bond, an unbreakable tie with the nations of Australia, Canada and New Zealand which goes beyond shared institutions and language, it is a sense of kinship and community.
If we are living through the post-liberal moment, if this is the, and I hesitate to use the word, ideology, that is going to dominate the thinking of the right in the years to come it must evolve into a fully functioning and well-rounded world view, one which is more than just woolly nostalgia for strawberry jam and all the different varieties. Post-liberalism must offer a view of Britain’s place in the world, after all, if post-liberalism empowered rejects globalism and by extension Global Britain what does it replace it with. What better place than to start than by embracing CANZUK with its appeal to history, to tradition and to the reforging oldest international community in the world.
For the proponents of CANZUK then we must make the case for this idea in a new way, one that does more than just repeat economic statistics, after all that is the same mistake Cameron and the pro-EU campaign made in 2016 and we all know how that turned out. Instead let us embrace CANZUK’s appeal to history, its sense of community, its kinship and ultimately let us use the way this idea tugs on the heart strings to drive forward our vision to secure this fantastic opportunity.
Councillor Jack Sowerby
Deputy Director Conservatives for CANZUK