It is also sometimes referred to as the CANZUK union, after the initials of what will be its principal members. In this work the term “Commonwealth Union” will be used in that sense: A political federation having the character of a state, consisting of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom, and possibly other Commonwealth Realms — those states of which Queen Elizabeth is sovereign. It would be distinct from the Commonwealth of Nations, which would continue to exist and function as at present.
Source: Bennett, James C.. A Time For Audacity: How Brexit Has Created The CANZUK Option . Pole to Pole Publishing. Kindle Edition.
The existing Commonwealth of Nations should continue its present worthwhile activities, and perhaps serve to assist less developed nations to become ready to adhere to the Union in the future. Ultimately there will be forms of associate membership which will provide certain mutually agreed benefits of Commonwealth Union membership to those countries of the existing Commonwealth of Nations which are in an intermediate stage of development.
Source: Bennett, James C.. A Time For Audacity: How Brexit Has Created The CANZUK Option . Pole to Pole Publishing. Kindle Edition.
The single criterion they lack is geographic proximity. It is time to recognise that this criterion is no longer an insuperable barrier to union. This is so because of the rapid, low-cost transportation made possible by aviation, the globally flat cost of communications made possible by the internet and web, and the distributed manufacturing revolution now in process, by which the world is transitioning from trade in physical objects to trade in designs, services, and software. A Commonwealth Union – a loose, distributed confederal form linking the above-listed and possibly other members – possesses all of the requirements for a successful state.
The whole of such a Union will be materially greater than the sum of its parts. Each of the core nations will gain from constructing the Union, including increased trade and prosperity, better security, and a wider role on the world stage. The Union’s peoples will gain greatly by obtaining more options in mobility, more employment options, and greater scope for attaining their aspirations. Little or nothing will be sacrificed. Each member nation will have all it has now, but more will be added onto each.
Source: Bennett, James C.. A Time For Audacity: How Brexit Has Created The CANZUK Option . Pole to Pole Publishing. Kindle Edition.
Over time, the people of the Commonwealth Union will experience the great events of their times together, and will work together and share in a new, cooperative project. As a result, a new layer of identity will naturally form over time. As this identity forms, people will not abandon their former identities, but they will have an additional, new identity added to them.
Source: Bennett, James C.. A Time For Audacity: How Brexit Has Created The CANZUK Option . Pole to Pole Publishing. Kindle Edition.
Consider for a moment the choices available as a practical matter for young Americans. They have at their disposal the greater part of a continent. They can chose among several of the world’s great metropolises -- centres of finance, the arts, science and technology, and a government with global reach and interests. They can choose to live in one of hundreds of small or medium-sized cities, including many university towns. They can follow almost any vocation or avocation imaginable. The great aspirational cities offer plentiful employment, decent state schools, and low-cost, spacious, new homes on easy terms for those wishing to start or expand families. They can choose climates and ecosystems from dry desert to humid rainforest, from sub-arctic conditions to full tropics, and anything in between. World-class surf or Olympic-quality alpine skiing are available within an hour’s drive of several major metropolises. And all of this is available to every American at the cost of a drive or a cheap plane ticket. No passports, visas, work permits, or nosy interviews are required to access any of this. One gets on the plane, gets off, and finds work and a house. And if it does not work out to taste, one leaves and tries another place, or returns home, with little or no sunk cost in having tried something different.
All of these choices will be available, in even greater diversity and plenty, within the Commonwealth Union. At present these options are available only grudgingly and with substantial effort in dealing with the bureaucracy of the existing countries, with no success guaranteed. Giving the inhabitants of the Commonwealth Union these freedoms is merely a matter of demanding it. In fact, precisely this freedom existed two generations ago, and it could be restored with the stroke of a pen. The treaties to permit it could be written with a month’s good effort.
Source: Bennett, James C.. A Time For Audacity: How Brexit Has Created The CANZUK Option . Pole to Pole Publishing. Kindle Edition.
• First, creating a Commonwealth Union will shut the door permanently on any temptation to rejoin (whether officially or otherwise) the rEU once Britain has left it. Since Britain will always have substantial ties with Europe, the continent (as opposed to the EU, the organisation), Europhile elements in the UK will always be seeking to engineer a return. A Commonwealth Union will effectively preclude that option.
• Second, many Britons believe that the UK is too small, demographically, economically, and militarily, to play the important role on the world stage they once had. Some mistakenly believe Britain can regain a larger role by membership in the European Union. For the past forty years, it has unsuccessfully attempted to use its European membership as a means of augmenting British influence on the world stage. The problem, however, is that Britain’s values and policy preferences have often been at odds with those of its erstwhile European partners. There is no point contributing British money or military capabilities to a joint European effort if they are used to pursue goals tangential to, or entirely opposed to Britain’s own interests. On the other hand, Britain frequently finds itself viewing issues similarly to Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. For example, when Britain acts militarily, it usually finds one or all of those countries present and making a genuine contribution. In short, a Commonwealth Union will require far less compromise over goals or means, and deliver more desirable results, internationally, than either the European Union, or unilateral British action.
• Third, Britain today finds itself in many ways over-institutionalised for the set of tasks it has set for itself as a single nation. Its finance sector, diplomatic service, and (until recently) military and intelligence capabilities are still sized, in many ways, for a world-spanning entity rather than a smallish island off the coast of Europe. A Commonwealth Union will provide the scope of action for these capabilities and also will share the costs and benefits of those capabilities with its partners. The UK by itself today struggles to maintain strategic deterrent forces, meaningful conventional land, air, and sea forces, interoperability with advanced US capabilities, and an ability to project force outside of the European theatre. It ends up doing a bit of each of these tasks, and doing them only at the most minimal level needed to stay in the game. A Commonwealth Union will be able to afford this suite of capabilities, at a reasonably effective level, to the benefit of all members.
• Finally, the UK is demographically hemmed in by the dense population of the islands and the difficulty of meeting the aspirations of its people. Every other Anglosphere nation benefits from its aspirational cities, where young people find cheap decent housing, jobs, and the opportunity to pursue entrepreneurial creation. Phoenix, Dallas, Calgary, Queensland’s Gold Coast – there is no real British equivalent, although the far exurbs of London serve that function to some degree. Free movement of peoples throughout the Commonwealth Union will make the Australian and Canadian aspirational cities Britain’s as well. The Britons moving to these communities to pursue their aspirations will still be contributing to the entire Union, to Britain’s benefit. Thus Britain will retain a substantial portion of the investment it made in raising and educating these people, as it would if they emigrated to foreign destinations.
Source: Bennett, James C.. A Time For Audacity: How Brexit Has Created The CANZUK Option . Pole to Pole Publishing. Kindle Edition.
Source: Bennett, James C.. A Time For Audacity: How Brexit Has Created The CANZUK Option . Pole to Pole Publishing. Kindle Edition.
Another obstacle to Imperial Federation was that the technology of the day was not yet advanced enough to make it work. Advocates in the early Twentieth Century still remembered the era before mechanical transport and telegraphs. They correctly saw that there were enormous improvements in communications and transportation relative to earlier eras. The world, they thought,had shrunk so much that Imperial Federation could work. But in fact, the cost and time of transportation between Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand was still a deterrent to quick, cheap, and easy movement and communications between the prospective members of the Federation. But now technology, after a century, has caught up to the dream. The assumptions of cheap and easy communications between the parts of the CANZUK nations that were over-optimistic in 1916 have now come true in 2016. A Skype conference between London, Sydney, Auckland, and Toronto is not just cheap, it is free. And it is not just quick, it is instantaneous. Meanwhile, the disparities in population, wealth, and power among the four CANZUK partners are much smaller today.
The Victorian era was marked by the emergence of audaciously ambitious visionary figures such as Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Charles Babbage. Brunel envisioned high-speed trains and enormous transatlantic steamers, but was frustrated by having to work with iron rather than steel, and with low-pressure steam engines that strained to power the fast trains and massive ships he built. Brunel’s visions began to come true only a half-century later, as trans-Atlantic steamers finally caught up to the standards set by his Great Eastern. Charles Babbage correctly understood the implications of machine intelligence, and envisioned an “Analytical Engine” a century or more ahead of its time. But he was frustrated by the limits of the technology of his day, trying to do with metal gears what we now do with semiconductors. As a result there was a lack of visionary support to afford the persistence that probably might have permitted Babbage to achieve a computer revolution a century early using mechanical computing engines.
Brunel and Babbage had their equivalents in the political sphere, the Imperial Federationists, men like the historian and writer J.R. Seeley and New Zealand Prime Minister Sir Julius Vogel. These men theorised that the “annihilation of distance” created by railways, steamships, and telegraphs permitted an unprecedented possibility: Turning the British Isles and its colonies of settlement into a new form of state. It would have been a globe-spanning federation of equal members governed by an Imperial Parliament. Although this vision excited a great many of the intelligent political thinkers of the day, it never came to pass, largely because the annihilation of distance offered by the technology of the day was still too incomplete to make such a scheme practical. As with Brunel’s ships and Babbage’s computers, the vision of the Imperial Federationists exceeded the available means.
The Commonwealth Union will be the political equivalent of the modern liner or computer, with the web and the jet aircraft providing the true annihilation of distance that steamships and telegraphs could not.
Source: Bennett, James C.. A Time For Audacity: How Brexit Has Created The CANZUK Option . Pole to Pole Publishing. Kindle Edition.
Source: Bennett, James C.. A Time For Audacity: How Brexit Has Created The CANZUK Option . Pole to Pole Publishing. Kindle Edition.
Source: Bennett, James C.. A Time For Audacity: How Brexit Has Created The CANZUK Option . Pole to Pole Publishing. Kindle Edition.