It's a pleasure to be here tonight. What I'm going to talk about for a foreign affairs audience will really be the question of Anglo-America, if we can call it that and its role in the world at this point. It's a fascinating counterpoint, because as was mentioned in the book, I raised the question of the parallel to Rome. There hasn't been anything as substantial as the present hegemony of the English-speaking countries and the political linguistic domination that's involved-- which really goes back two hundred, two hundred fifty years since the five or six hundred years' hegemony of the Romans. Clearly, Spain in the era of Christopher Columbus or France under Louis XIV and other efforts to create hegemonies were nothing like the one we have now. It's fascinating, as we have the unfortunate mess in Washington and the trial of the President, it's taken attention away from the enormity and the success of this achievement by the English-speaking countries and the influence they have and really what that influence means for everybody who lives in one of those countries and speaks English.

I think it's appropriate to talk about this in California, perhaps more than in other places, because when you talk about Anglo-America and use that term, what I'm talking about is perhaps more easily understood in California where an Anglo is anybody essentially of European heritage. I gather it now even includes people with a Middle Eastern background. Whereas in Connecticut, where I live, "Anglo" still has its connotations of Mayflower descendants, and that's not remotely what the whole idea of Anglo America is. The role of the English-speaking peoples goes far beyond the countries that we think of as English ethnically or even as British in the much larger sense of Northwestern European ethnically. And as I say, California is a great example of that and an example of the sort of reach that we can say Anglo-America has when you define it in this broad linguistic way.

The reason I found myself getting into this question of relative power in terms of world affairs, and then the historical comparisons that yield that, has to do with the rather unusual look at the three major civil wars of the English-speaking nations. I've written, as was mentioned, a number of books; after 1994 and the election of a Republican Congress and the face-off between Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton, I just had the sense I didn't want to write about American politics anymore with these two men who I thought represented a kind of quicksand. I was looking around to pursue another topic, and I thought, well, having written a book many years ago about the emerging republic, and the majority of it did, in fact, dominate American politics for about a quarter of a century from 1968 to 1992, I thought I'd go back. I've looked at the first emerging republic (small "r") that was around for the Revolution. The emerging republic and the majority, so to speak, of 1775. Then, as I got into that, I found myself saying "Well, there's so much in this that goes back into English history that I thought well, it makes sense to go back and look at the English Civil War." In a sense, the Puritan Parliamentary side there had the first emerging republic (small "r" again) majority in English-speaking politics. Then I found myself looking forward from the American Revolution to look at the American Civil War. So this book became the first look at trying to string together these three English-speaking civil wars. It turned out as I got into it that what we were really talking about was the central staircase, in many ways, of Anglo-American political development and the way in which these two countries came together as two separate nations that were in essence a political and linguistic pairing, not all the time but for the portion of time that was necessary to create what we now have and the role of English and the English-speaking peoples that is so important to everything from profits to culture. Quite simply, I think the linchpin of this was the American Revolution where you had what was really a civil war within the English-speaking peoples, where almost every colony had a major internal war as well as a war for independence against Britain and even, for that matter, in Britain where there was major dissent within England and lesser dissents in Scotland and very significant dissent in Ireland and a lot of sympathy for the Americas.

Once you start looking at all of these civil wars it begins to be clearer what the links are between them, but from the standpoint of international relations there have been many, many things written about the American Revolution and what it meant. People have talked about how the French Revolution was inspired by this because many of the French people that came over in the military went back and talked about the American Revolution, but I think far more significant than that was the fact that the English-speaking peoples were divided as a result of that war and division was the source of their strength.

None of the other major European powers ever remotely achieved anything like this because, basically, they would not look at the new world and say "This is a place where we can build an empire based on our political dissidence and our religious dissenters and our ethic fringe populations." The Spanish had a very large empire but it never really represented any alternative Spanish civilization that mattered in the European balance of power. The French wouldn't let their French Huguenots, their Protestants, go to Canada, the Dutch really didn't matter very much, the Germans weren't united until 1870, and so forth and so on. Nobody did it but the British. As a result of Britain doing this, you created a very different type of English-speaking power in North America relative to the English- speaking power in the British Isles. The principal divisions were that you had a much more democratic country in North America. You had a country that was populated by Protestant dissenters, not by the people of the state church, the Church of England. You had an entirely different type of attitude toward authority, a much more entrepreneurial-minded country in terms of just the commerce of moving across a continent as opposed to the British imperial approach and overseas trade and what have you. The long and the short of it is, simply, that in contrast to any other culture, the English-speaking peoples really put two teams on the field: you had the aristocratic and imperial English-speaking power that was well- equipped to dominate as they did in the end of the 18th century, the 18th century and then the 19th century, and you had the democratic, much more ecumenical in terms of religion, and egalitarian English-speaking power that was then equipped to dominate the 20th century.

The effect of this was to have two sequential powers essentially promoting the same language and the same traditions and, again, quite unlike anything the world has ever seen. And it's these dynamics that have created the circumstances in which, essentially, English has become the dominant cultural force, the dominant language of computers, the dominant language of finance, the dominant language of transportation around the world, of multinational corporations and many, many things. It goes back on a number of dimensions to these three wars and the extent to which they sorted out the advance and interrelationship of the English-speaking peoples. It's the pursuit of these three wars, really, which has brought me to the point of trying to spell out and identify the forces that created the larger role of the English- speaking peoples. Their victories were not coincidental by any means in the other tests that were war related: the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars and then World Wars I and II. The German defeats in World Wars I and II you can actually relate to the extent to which the Germans lost potential Germanic population to North America. It was very significant because, if the average person in the States, were to guess the number of Americans who have German as their principal ancestry they'd probably go way under the mark. The number is 53 million and it's by far and away the largest group. The English come second with about 43 or 44 [million] in the 1990 census, so there's a huge Germanic population, and its coming here basically changed the balance of power in Europe and in the larger Western world.

But let me go back to the question of these "cousins' wars," the three principal civil wars of the English speaking peoples. They really were wars that identified these characteristics of the two English- speaking peoples and brought them to a boil, and as they did this, each of these three civil wars basically resulted in a victory for the dissenting-- as opposed to state-church Protestantism. This was very important, because the United States became a country of religious toleration and ecumenicalism in terms of having no state church and outreach, and was unique, of course, among the Western nations for a number of years in really having that role.

The other thing that was the result of [each of] these three wars was that the side that was more republican (with a small "r"), more democratic and less aristocratic and less monarchical won each time. The next dimension is that, whether it was in the English Civil War or the American Revolution or the American Civil War, you had a similar ethnic group, and a similar ethnic group is very simply identified. It was the people in the eastern part of England, east England and southeast England, where the principal forces and the parliamentarian and Puritan side of the English Civil War, these were the people who settled New England. New England was really the cockpit of asserting liberty in the American Revolution. Greater New England, having spread out from New England and going West across New York and the Great Lakes and into Minnesota and Wisconsin and out to Oregon and Washington and Northern California, that Greater New England was the gestation section of the American Civil War and the support of the Republican Party and the victor in the anti-slavery drive. So you have this culture that actually reached across the centuries and basically dominated the outcomes of these extremely significant wars. It's not true today to say that the English- speaking hegemony has the same ethnicity. Ethnicity is no longer the key. But in terms of the culture that won these wars, the culture that moved the values of the English-speaking countries across the Atlantic and across the North American continent was relentless and quite important in terms of the result for the English- speaking countries' force. To get into the results of all of this was to understand a lot better how the two countries also sorted themselves out, because one of the things that you see loud and clear when you look at the relationships of these civil wars to the two countries, was that both sides of the Atlantic were always involved and they were involved in ways that guided and structured the future of how they related together.

Regarding the first of the three, the English Civil War: half of the graduates of Harvard between 1640 and 1650-- and you're not looking at a huge group of people obviously-- but half of them went back to England and fought or worked alongside their cousins on the Puritan and parliamentary sides. When the English Civil War was over, the involvement of the people from Massachusetts and Connecticut, and the extent to which that civil war became something that lived on in the minds of the American colony, became a force in dealing with King George and the British ministry and the British government in the 1770s because, essentially, the message of the English Civil War was that if you have an unjust king revolution is warranted, and in the case of the English Civil War the king was even executed. So this tradition became very important to the Americans. On the English side, the reaction against the English Civil War was strong after the restoration of the king and strong enough so that you really began to develop the English sense of disliking radicalism and emphasizing where they could [use] a much more conservative approach, so the difference between the two countries was well underway by the end of the 17th century.

You get to the American Revolution and this, of course, is the linchpin, because it separates the two countries. A number of people were observing even by the 1790s and the first third of the 19th century, that both countries did better when they were separated because the United States, or the American colonies, were in many ways a drag on the British. They convinced the British government to look back historically, because the American colonies represented an old Whig type of England. It was an England that was not looking as the English [actually] were by the 1790s and early 19th century to India and to the whole empire that was emerging. It was a different mindset and, when the British got rid of the American colonies, they actually did much better because they were able to be wholeheartedly in the business of being arrogant and imperial and some of the other less-than-endearing qualities of our cousins. As for the Americans, of course, the sky was the limit when they were out from under the British restraints on migration, the British restraints on what you could produce, and British restraints on trade and everything like that.

But one aspect that's not always remembered about the impact of these wars was that the British population during the American Revolution was divided very sharply. There were actually petitions organized, and loyalists addressed the crown in support of coercion, and in a number of towns they petitioned the Crown and Parliament in support of conciliation of the American colonies. A number of the generals appointed were actually from the camp of Whigs who had been very friendly to the American colonies and who wanted to be peace negotiators and were very, very loath to stifle the American Revolution militarily. It's quite clear that some of them would not. Even Burgoyne, who surrendered at Saratoga in 1777 within a few years, was saying that the war against the Americans was part of a plot to subvert the British constitution. So the extent to which you had this dissent within Britain was quite important, and losing that war was convulsive for the British. They undertook a number of reforms -- they tried to get corruption out of Parliament and out of some of their procurement systems, and their way of giving out contracts, they modernized the army, they reformed the way in which the navy was managed, they changed the arrangement of fiscal policy and William Pitts' funding scheme was brought in. To make a long story short, they modernized just in time for the fight with France and the fight with Napoleon that began ten years later. If you had not had the American Revolution you probably would not have had a reformed Britain by the time the war with France came. You might have had a Britain that lost to Napoleon, you probably would have had a Britain that would have had to fight that war while anywhere from nine to all of their colonies were still there, seething, ready to revolt. And they would have revolted at the time the British were facing the French challenge and Napoleon. Who knows what would have happened to Britain and who knows what would have happened to the British colonies in North America? I think it's fair to say that without the American victory the English-speaking future would have been quite different than what it was.

[Then] we get to the American Civil War. The British were very, very much involved in this. They were at first inclined to intervene in the American Civil War or to really seriously consider it, because England's principal industry at the time was textiles. They got their cotton from the South, and as soon as the Northern blockade went into effect they couldn't get cotton from the South. Unemployment shot up in the cotton industries and the aristocracy in Britain was ill- disposed towards the Union because they were still unhappy with this example of democracy that was spun off and if you could squelch it then you would subdue the democratic currents that were, but then drew back in late 1862 and 1863 when the tide turned against the Confederates militarily. But at the same time, a huge portion of England was radicalized to favor the North because, not only did they agree with the North on the slavery issue, but they had the sense that the victory of the North in the American Civil War was critical to the future of politics and constitutional reform in Britain. And as the Northern troops won the battles in 1864 and 1865, pressure mounted for reform and expansion of the franchise in Britain. Ultimately, after Appomattox, the Reform Act of 1867 was passed which vastly enlarged the British electorate and really spelled an end to the notion that Britain could somehow turn around and go back in a more aristocratic and less democratic dimension. The English textbooks tend to agree on this--that the influence of the American Civil War was very powerful in the Reform of 1867.

By this point we've had all these wars always involving both sides of the Atlantic, unanticipated effects, effects of each country on the other country, and somehow retaining a relationship and a guidance factor. By the 1890s as the American frontier closed--and that was a source of major problems with Britain--you had the beginning of the coming together of the two countries in a more overt collaboration. The anger of the problems along the frontier, the problems of the ships, the crews that took American prizes in the American Civil War, the Alabama and some of those, it was all over by the 1890s and you were starting to see an entente develop between Britain and the United States. What really started to bring this to a head was not just the size of the American navy, which the British could see was becoming more and more important, but the Spanish American War. The British were very enthusiastic about the United States' fighting Spain, because they saw the Spanish Empire about to collapse and the Germans were hoping to enlarge their very short-lived empire at that point because Germany had only existed in the united sense since 1871. The British wanted the Americans to take over the rotting carcass of the Spanish Empire, and helped arm the American fleet that ultimately beat the Spanish fleet before it sailed into Manila Bay. The British were thought by the Spaniards to be militant on behalf of the Americans and ready to violate all kinds of neutrality and so forth so they ordered the sailors of the British navy not to cheer the American fleet as it sailed but they didn't order the soldiers and sailors on a hospital island in the middle of Hong Kong Harbor. So as the America fleet sailed out a small group of British soldiers and sailors were busy cheering. It had been 137 years since the British and the Americans sailed together against a Spanish target and that had been Havana in 1761, which they captured together. For all the talk about the Spanish-American War being a kind of dinky and inconsequential, almost embarrassing, war for the bringing together of Britain and the United States it was quite significant because it was an old shared enemy. Spain was symptomatic of the part of Europe that Britain and Americans had opposed together, whether it was on the Georgia border for Americans or, obviously, in many other wars for the British. Ever since that point, of course, the Anglo-American alliance has been emerging in a very powerful form.

Now let me wind this down by looking at the other dynamics of the hegemony of the English- speaking nations. This is a kind of Machiavellian analysis. It's nothing that the history books generally talk about because there are some odd angles to this. The first is that, contrary to a whole lot of Fourth of July discussions the United States did not make itself into a melting pot. It became a melting pot in the 18th century because it was British and because Britain was the country that was the protector of European Protestantism. As a result, all the different ethnicities of Protestant Europe, especially those that were religious dissenters and wanted to go to a new land, went to British North America. The Dutch already had when New York and New Jersey were Dutch. But you had French Huguenots, you had Scotch-Irish from Ulster, you had Germans, you had Swedes and Finns in parts of Pennsylvania, but it was essentially a Protestant melting pot. What appealed to these people was that it was British. It was the territory of the country that had fought for their religion and their ethnicity in the great battles of the 17th and early 18th centuries.

For the first forty or fifty years as an independent nation, American immigration was received from Europe and was again largely from these same areas and was of Protestant migration. As the Jacksonian Era came to pass, you had more Irish immigration to the United States, and you started to have Jacksonian democracy-- a politics that worked for both Irish Catholics and Scotch-Irish Protestants. Bit-by-bit you got more Catholic migration to the United States, and the centrality of this is another thing that relates to the results and context to the American Revolution, because America was the creature of dissenting Protestantism, not a state church. You were going to have a multiplicity of Protestant religions, you were going to have to disestablish a church, because there were some many types of Protestantism, you were going to have to have an ecumenical approach, you were going to have to have toleration. Other countries were not nearly so far along in this. Now as a result, you had this openness to Catholic migration, and also in the later part of the 19th century the Jewish migration.

The American colonies, because of this religious heritage, were also in a very unusual way open to Jewish migration in a way that most of the European countries were not, because a lot of the settlers of the United States came from the British dissenting Protestant traditions of countries that thought and peoples who thought they were chosen nations. They would talk about Israel and they would talk about all the biblical citations. The Puritans were always talking about Israel, so were the Scotch covenantors and they regarded themselves as the new Israelites in the Western Hemisphere. The British were very cynical about this. As people who were sophisticated and caught up in the enlightenment [they] thought that the "chosen people" notion of the Scots and the Puritans and the Ulster Presbyterians was kind of funny. They joked about how all of these groups knew more about the geography of Palestine than they did about the geography of the British Isles, and this is true because the part of Connecticut we live in has all these little towns named Sharon and Bethlehem and Goshen and so forth. It's all very biblical, and they stretch across the country. The upshot was that, in contrast to the countries of Europe with their state churches, you had in the English- peaking Protestant dissenting viewpoint this enormous openness to Israel and the whole biblical tradition. I think there's a considerable relationship between that and the extent to which you have the toleration and the openness that invited not simply Catholic but Jewish migration.

The upshot of all this was that the emergence of the United States as nation had major effects on the balance of power in Europe and the arrangement of the British Isles. If you go back to, 1600 or so there were as many Irish, Scots and Welsh as there were English. It was about the same number and there were more Protestants, but not by any great margin because Ireland and a fair part of Wales and even Scotland had a considerable number of Catholics. But the British, in contrast to the other ethnic groups, had the sense of moving people to the New World. As they moved them, basically, they got rid of their troublemakers. Now the other countries tried to do this too but they weren't as organized as the British. First of all, prison ships came frequently with a flotsam of English and Irish prisoners. It was organized. Indentured servitude was organized, and that brought over a fair number of poor people. When the Scots and the Irish fought and lost battles with the English they found themselves on a ship and they were heading-- guess where? So bit by bit, what you created was the English got rid of their political troublemakers, they got rid of their jailbait, and they did this for Scotland and Ireland, too. A lot of Irish and Scots feeling put upon in different ways by landlords and by discriminatory legislation left. The upshot of all this was that Ireland and Scotland and these Celtic peripheries in the British Isles were never seriously able to threaten for very long the English dominance of the British Isles and this enabled Britain to grow into the power that it did in f act become. It was also critical to the emergence of North America as an English-speaking area, because if England has been overwhelmed by a French alliance, let's say, with Ireland in the 18th century that would have just starved the English-speaking colonies in North America. But in the end, by the time of Queen Victoria you had essentially five or six times as many people in England as you had in Ireland. The Irish were further helped to move by what could be called a poor potato harvest in the 1840s. There were some people who thought that was an English conspiracy, but I think it was just short of laissez-faire of the time. But in any event you had this huge migration of Scots and Irish which made the British Isles safe for the English, safe for conservatism, safe for the Church of England up to a point, and a whole set of associations which really enabled Britain to be what it was - a country that proved the success of the imperial mentality. In so doing it also safeguarded the United States with the British Navy being a central protection of the United States, which isn't as often acknowledged, as it should be.

Now another dimension to this, getting us closer to the 20th century, was the enormous impact of the role of the United States as a receptacle for German migration. This had an enormous impact on the balance of power in Europe because you had 100,000 Germans who came to North America in the 18th century and 4-1/2 million in the 19th century. They were drawn to British North America partly because the ruling house in England, the House of Hanover, was German and George I spoke German, George II spoke German, George III was the first Hanoverian that did not, but the Hanoverian German alliance was important enough so that German speakers moving west went essentially to English-speaking territories. If they had for some reason made a second United States in Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Chile you could have seen a rival power in the Western Hemisphere that might have neutralized the United States in two world wars while Germany dominated and defeated the English and the French. Instead, by the time World War I rolls around you have a German population in the United States that was about 20 million and by 1940 you had a German population that was about 30 to 32 million and it's up to 53 million now. Essentially what happened to the potential might of Germany was that it was sent to learn to speak English and to wear a kaiki uniform and to contribute the American commander in Europe in 1917, General Pershing whose family came from the Rhineland. And then you had in World War II the American contribution to the military effort, General Eisenhower, whose family also came from the Rhineland. So the whole role of North America in sapping the strength of Germany relative to the English-speaking peoples and in providing a vehicle for the transformation of Germans as so many other nationalities in the people who would speak English and then serve in English speaking armies was a critical part of the emergence of the hegemony we're talking about now.

Let me close by looking at where it's likely to go, and this is purely speculation so I won't take much time here. I think what we're seeing at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st is the increasing salience again of ethnicity and religion and the extent to which international groupings are likely to involve more of this. We're seeing it with the rise of Islam, you're seeing it with China, and the two Chinas are probably coming back together. I think you'll see it with the Russians in Eastern Europe. You're seeing it with the pull of France and Quebec and I think what we'll see is the further emergence of this English-speaking bloc, which is no longer entirely English or British or even Northwestern European by ethnicity. I think we have the United States, we have Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, but then you have a secondary tier that consists of, I think it's fair to say, Ireland, you probably have Holland in there, I think Israel is in there, I read in the paper, I think yesterday, that the Israeli government is so concerned about English taking over Israel that they were trying to pass legislation that 50% of the songs on the radio had to be in Hebrew. My sense from when I was growing up is that the Jewish fellows my age were about as committed to learning Hebrew as the Irish were to studying Gaelic to get ahead.

Nevertheless, it's symptomatic of how there's this broadening of the English-speaking community, and I even have the sense some of the time that it's teetering in the balance, that the Germans are probably going to wind up being part of this to, and the Swede. That's sort of where I think the boundaries would be. It's clear that language is more important to the economic future of countries in the communications age. It has much more relevance to what makes money for people than it did when agriculture and industry were the central forces and it may be that it's worth a lot for English to be the language of corporations, finance, computers and such. But it may not be because we have no idea what the technological advances of the next 20 or 25 years will be, and it's possible that the technology will advance so

far that it will be language-neutral and that countries with very little technology can swing into a technological era simply by getting the technology as easily as the Third World has been able to industrialize now just by getting the technology-- and it didn't matter that it was invented in the West. So I guess I'm a little skeptical about that.

I think if we have a new border developing in the world it has something to do with language and culture and it may in fact be what we could call the minaret line, the line between Islam and the West which is getting more and more tense. More and more of the confrontations are occurring there, whether it's in North Africa with fundamentalists or the tensions in the major European cities with North African immigrants, in Cyprus, in the Balkans, in the Middle East, in the Persian Gulf, through what used to be Soviet Central Asia, and in Indian Pakistan, down through Indonesia and Malaysia and on into the South China Sea. This is all Islam, and a lot of it is radicalizing and it's hard to see that this is going to stand down. There's a pattern that seems to be emerging of the Chinese finding themselves on that side, and so it's possible that that the study of linguistic and cultural blocs may be even more relevant to the alignments of the 21st century than we might guess.

Let me simply close here by saying that what the English-speaking peoples have achieved in broadening themselves and developing in this fashion really is an extraordinary accomplishment for anybody who's tired of seeing the current sort of triangle of the President and the Congressional Republicans and Ken Starr. There's a much more uplifting set of circumstances to think about and this achievement is striking. We have to hope that it will continue to be striking in the coming century.