| The Anglosphere refers to a grouping of English-speaking states, whose core is said to consist of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. In international relations, the term is usually used to describe and/or prescribe civilization, empire, military coalitions, customs union or even a political association. The Anglosphere is a neologism, but one rooted and reflected in long-standing international phenomena such as the Anglo-American Special Relationship, the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), the Australia-New Zealand-United States Pact (ANZUS) Pact and the Commonwealth of Nations. In addition, quantitative research on the sources of international security cooperation clearly shows a pattern of behavior particular to the Anglosphere.;While it offers no shortage of explanations of international conflict and cooperation across different groupings of states, the field of International Relations (IR) is silent on the subject of the Anglosphere. This dissertation seeks to open up the research agenda by investigating two basic questions: how did the Anglosphere become possible and what effects does it have on international politics? The dissertation considers these questions in parallel, via two complementary analytical tasks. The first task is to provide a genealogy of the Anglosphere as a grouping of states characterized by shared identity. To second is to develop and evaluate a theoretical framework which links state/national identity to foreign policies generative of the Anglosphere.;The genealogical account shows how the relations between and among the states of the Anglosphere came to be seen as exempt from the standard rules that govern international conflict and cooperation, such as those on the use of force, appeasement, reciprocity, face-saving, institution-building, defection or punishment. While the identities constitutive of the Anglosphere varied in their content and contestation, the five states at the putative core of this community have managed to continually sustain it for more than a century. Far from being natural or inevitable, this genealogy concludes, the Anglosphere is contingent on the past interactions and is likely to be subject to contestation and re-construction in the future.;In positing state/national identity as a cause, the theoretical framework developed in this dissertation proposes that collective identity at the level of the state will have made one state action more likely over others, thus leading to differentiated outcomes in international conflict and cooperation. The empirically testable proposition is twofold: first, identity shapes state action by making some cooperative policies more likely than others. Second, foreign policy debates on the fit between identity and the perceived reality influence the continuity and change of state action. The test proceeds in four sets of case studies of security cooperation between and among the states of the Anglosphere core: the turn of the twentieth century Anglo-American "great rapprochement"; the negotiations over the Pacific Pact in 1950-1; alliance politics over the Suez crisis (1956) and the Vietnam escalation (1964-5); and the politics of the "coalition of the willing" in the run-up to the Iraq War (2002-3). The empirical findings support the first proposition; the empirical record is mixed with the second proposition. The contestability of state/national identity seems to increase with the perceived misfit between identity at home and the perceived reality abroad.;The dissertation represents the first attempt to explain and understand the Anglosphere as a phenomenon of major significance in international relations. The dissertation also has the potential to achieve a broader impact on the research agenda on identity and international cooperation, particularly within the constructivist research program in IR. Last, the relatively new methodology in this project could be used across subfields in IR and in other disciplines. |
