I was looking for James Bennett's 2004 book, The Anglosphere Challenge to provide a link to our latest Australia piece, “Lifeboat Australia”—Could Abbott’s Victory Attract Anglosphere Refugees? The first book that comes up when you Google "Anglosphere" is this one, from Stanford University Press.

It's called The Anglosphere A Genealogy of a Racialized Identity in International Relations, and as you see, is illustrated with the helmet of one our mutual Viking ancestors. It's by Srdjan Vucetic of the University of Ottawa.

The Anglosphere refers to a community of English-speaking states, nations, and societies centered on Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States, which has profoundly influenced the direction of world history and fascinated countless observers.

This book argues that the origins of the Anglosphere are racial. Drawing on theories of collective identity-formation and framing, the book develops a new framework for analyzing foreign policy, which it then evaluates in case studies related to fin-de-siècle imperialism (1894-1903), the ill-fated Pacific Pact (1950-1), the Suez crisis (1956), the Vietnam escalation (1964-5), and the run-up to the Iraq war (2002-3).

It's not clear, on the face of it, whether Professor Vucetic thinks that "Racialized Identity in International Relations" is a Good Thing, or a Bad Thing. I don't think it's a Bad Thing, and if it is, it's not unique to the Anglosphere, which is only a concept, unlike the African Union, the Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf, or OPEC, in which Ecuador and Venezuala are more or less tokens.

See previous letters from this reader.