Description
The British Establishment responded to the crisis of Brexit with an Anglospheric foreign policy that explicitly revealed an imaginary that privileges the bonds with other English-speaking countries as the pinnacle of Britain’s hierarchy of international relations. Initially signified by ‘Global Britain’, it sought renewed and intensified connections with like-minded English-speaking partners to preserve and then rejuvenate Britain’s global role. While the Global Britain motif has now faded, the geopolitical imaginary it signified remains. Part of the reason for this is that Global Britain built on developments that were already in train. The burgeoning UK-Australian relationship is a sign of such and a crucial component of Britain’s ‘tilt to the Indo-Pacific’. Less studied than their respective relationships with the US, the UK-Australia relationship is characterised by a striking degree of person-to-person contact across state and society. Situated within a broader Anglosphere, this produces a shared cultural repertoire and transnational imaginary that constitutes a predominantly Kantian culture of anarchy. Beyond the boundaries of the community exists the Hobbesian state of nature, orienting the ‘extroverted’ members of the Anglosphere – Australia, Britain, and the US – towards the reactionary defence of the ‘rules-based international order’. Through a Lacanian discourse analysis of official and informal material alongside interviews with foreign policy elites, this paper unpacks Britain’s Anglospheric foreign policy and considers the nature of the UK-Australian relationship. It concludes that the unusual degree of closeness reflects a resonance-laden relationship that has been crucial to the post-Brexit quest for relevance but also exposes both to anxiety-inducing claims of anachronism.
