The Economic Failure of English-Speaking Nations, the Prospects and the Real Solutions

Abstract

Until the early 1950s, as B. R. Cant points out, the British economy enjoyed nearly four centuries of uninterrupted economic success. Britain’s overseas colonies in North America and in Australasia had also succeeded economically beyond any possible historical precedent. The British Empire, after the Second World War, was decolonised partly under American pressure but also because of the moral arguments about the need for self-rule and independence in the colonies. Yet perhaps there was a third reason which outcropped both American pressure and the moral arguments for decolonisation. Britain’s politicians seemed to be utterly sure that Britain had eternally stamped various facets of its culture on the face of the planet. They were not wrong to believe this; it was inconceivable that any nation could become economically pre-eminent unless, at the very least, it adopted British industrialisation. In the post-war period, the future of the world seemed to reside in English-speaking hands, and Britain’s unique legacies seemed unassailable. There were pehaps three major facets of that legacy (apart from industrialisation itself): first, the ubiquity of English, which became and still is the lingua franca par excellence, making its polite borrowed bows to less successful rivals within the same language group; second, a curiously discriminating culture, within which thousands of influences incessantly struggled for ascendancy; and third, a cultural preference for gentleness (unless the state monopoly of violence and viciousness should prove to be necessary).