Whoever was right — the French Anglophile or the Scottish Francophile — there is no denying the distinctive contribution of the English-speaking peoples. Daniel Hannan, whose article on Europe appears on page 40 in this issue, has written a book about the Anglosphere entitled Inventing Freedom, to be published by HarperCollins in November. Among the fundamental ideas for which he gives the Anglophones credit are free and regular elections, equality for women, freedom of contract and private property. While others may dispute this or that detail, the overall achievement is undeniable. The world would be unrecognisable without the cultural matrix of which the English language is merely the most visible manifestation.  

Can the British themselves, who make up an ever-diminishing fraction of more than a billion people who speak English, still offer something unique to the world? In an exchange with Robert Conquest in the New York Review of Books in 2000, Michael Ignatieff argued that Britain had irreversibly joined Europe and hence diverged from English-speaking countries such as the US or Canada. He accused Conquest of nurturing the "romantic illusion" of a union of English-speaking peoples. Thirteen years later, that idea may still seem romantic, but it is much less of an illusion than the chimera of European unity. There the scales have finally fallen from British eyes, enabling us to see how divergent our interests are from those of the infernal contraption that the EU has become.

British leaders of public opinion need to think again about the Anglosphere in political as well as cultural terms. "Go West, young man," was Horace Greeley's advice to Americans after the Civil War, and many young Britons are drawn to the Western hemisphere rather than the Continent. But the fastest-growing region of the Anglosphere is actually India and the Far East, where British talents are in demand.

The glittering prizes of tomorrow will go to the politicians who can best articulate the case for embracing with enthusiasm the inevitable realignment of British interest and interests towards the Anglosphere. Our best hope of renewing and defending Western civilisation is to play to our strengths, above all the fact that we have the good fortune to speak the modern world's lingua franca. "Our tongue is rough," says Henry V, and so it is; but English has conquered the world without a drop of blood being spilt. If the British cannot turn that fact to advantage, we do not deserve to regain our independence and our pride.