I first learned about CANZUK when I was in the final years of my doctoral program, sometime immediately after Brexit. A grouping promoted by some people who talk in lost accents in eccentric London circles, it was considered an oddity in academic and policy settings: a fringe, unachievable idea from empire nostalgics, American think-tankers, and revisionist historians, championed by the Brexiteer and economist Andrew Lilico, the American businessman James Bennett from Alexandria, and Andrew Roberts, Baron Roberts of Belgravia. I quite liked it.

For one, it was an original idea, a rarity in foreign policy. Second, it can be visualized, in some form, the moment you cut it out of the weird Anglosphere or the catastrophic Commonwealth delusions. The Anglosphere in its totality includes the United States, the core of South Africa, and at least up until the pre-Modi days, India; countries which, while broadly British offspring, are also unique in history and development, and large enough in their own ways to be equal members of a grouping. The less said about the British Commonwealth, on the other hand, the better. It is an actual imperial cope, from those whose main achievement in life was to lose the empire built by their far greater forefathers. 

But CANZUK was different. And it is now formally back in discussions. “With the U.S. losing its long-held place as Canada's most trusted partner, the country’s leaders are now clamouring to revive ties to like-minded countries, most notably historic allies like Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom,” CBC reported after the Canadian Liberal leaders’ debate.

“More than ever we need to be close to the UK,” Melany Joly,  foreign affairs minister and leadership candidate, told reporters Monday after her trip to London. Two other frontline candidates endorsed CANZUK in the official party debate platform. “Canada's Conservatives ( @CPC_HQ ) have championed #CANZUK for a decade. The Young Liberals came on board a couple of years ago, and now @MarkJCarney has followed. I understand some senior NDP figures are on the point of endorsing the idea. It's starting to look like when not if,” tweeted Lord Dan Hannan, a liberal peer in the British House of Lords. 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is the liberals in both Canada and the UK who are now aggressively rooting for this. Often forgotten in the madness of the past seventy years of post-colonial theoretical turmoil is that the liberals and whigs in the core Anglosphere (and in the U.S.) were the original champions of muscular progressivism abroad, as well as champions of free movement and free trade. The true-blue “Tories” were narrow in their scope and scale. Soviet influence in the left-wing parties of the UK, coupled with a desire to be close to a conservative superpower, resulted in the fading away of that historical narrative, but the British Empire was primarily a socially liberal and emancipatory force (with a distinct Scottish evangelical bureaucratic and moral backbone), spending political and financial capital across continents in eradicating slavery, sati, and the jizya. 

They were of course not the first priorities, as some have suggested; politics and foreign policy was always determined by interests. But the empire provided a space for liberals to promote, propagate, debate and defend their worldview. The Asiatic Society journal in Calcutta still has a seal of William Jones. It was Lord Amherst and Lord Bentinck who worked with social reformers like Rammohun Roy, often going against their own small-c conservative leadership in the imperial metropole. Cecil Rhodes, David Livingstone, and Thomas Macaulay perhaps did more advocating for African and Indian education and infrastructure than any actual African (or Indian) leader. 

So is CANZUK trying to get the band back together, and is it possible? On paper, some form of formal arrangement looks like a great idea. The total manpower and productivity will instantly rise, with the combined population of four countries being around the same as Russia, making it a large bloc and a strong resilient internal market on its own. It will be placed in four different continents, giving it a global reach. The total GDP of the bloc will rival that of the EU, and will be third after the U.S. and China. It will be second only to the U.S. in higher education and research. The total surface fleet of the bloc, not just from tonnage but by capability, will perhaps also be second to the U.S., with its own nuclear deterrent, shipbuilding, and aircraft carriers. What’s not to approve? In fact, with imperialism formally returning in world politics, it is a perfect time to think of alternative arrangements to the hackneyed “rules-based order” nonsense that British elites have gotten used to for over half a century. 

Nothing is more interesting for a historian than to live through the birth of a new order, with all the chronicling possibilities that it entails. The debate about CANZUK is perhaps one of the most original ideas. Yet the debate ignores a key historical reality, which is often unmentioned in academic circles: The reason the British Empire collapsed was only partially socioeconomic. Mostly it was cultural. It was a combination of the rise of “ethnic” nationalism and democracy, not just in the domains, but also in the core of the empire. It is not the details of trade disputes between, say, New Zealand and Canada that will be a cause of friction in CANZUK. It will be free movement and the resultant friction with increasingly nativist ideas in the four countries. In fact, a cautious (and understudied) claim can be made that Scotland increasingly drifted away from England partially because “Little England” gave up on the empire and thus gave up on the two things Scotland was really good at, global trade and Presbyterian evangelism. 

Consider that the Sikhs were a massively loyal force in the British Indian army, often a foil against Hindu sectarianism. Both Sikhs and Hindus, even those who are native-born, are increasingly a cause of discontent in Canada. Likewise, a major debate about what constitutes English identity is now taking place in the UK. Is it geographical—all those who are born within the geographical boundary of the land that currently constitutes England, including Rishi Sunak or Idris Elba, are to be considered Englishmen? Is it racial—only white Europeans are English? Or is it only the purest of Anglo-Saxons? Who would determine the one-drop rule to decide who’s a Scot and who's not? 

Americans usually don’t often have to confront these problems, due to their historical “melting pot” peculiarity and a combination of superpower status and success that provides a unifying ethos and optimistic narrative. (Although the risk of Balkanization is always lurking in the background with any loss of relative power, as the losers of any historic competition tend to fall back on grievances.)

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But it’s a little different in the older parts of the world. For what it’s worth, the British Empire had such a unifying narrative. The imperial identity was basically cultural, A Victorian sense of Anglo rationalism, and an upper class idea of stiff upper lip, propriety, and fair play. Nirad Chaudhuri famously wrote, “I am a Bengali and an Englishman, a striking illustration of the survival of the unfittest.” Indian maharajas figure in the paintings of imperial statesmen of the First World War in the Tate Britain. The empire was also far less democratic, thus avoiding the volatility of public passions. And while there was indeed free movement, it was also mostly among the intellectual and financial elites, thus not disrupting local dynamics. 

Unfortunately, there’s no such unifying narrative within the United Kingdom, the potential financial and military leader of CANZUK, about what or who constitutes as members of such a bloc, and the UK has descended into a weird, ethnically divided land, in part due to active efforts of British liberals to divide the country per ethnic minoritarian sinecures, thus resulting in a total ethnic majoritarian backlash. Will the Canadians be fine with British Indian techies working in Canadian companies? Will the Australians and Kiwis be fine with Canadian Sikhs working on temporary farming visas? Would anything bind them? (And to which authority will they be loyal?) 

Maybe they will, maybe they won’t. But a nation that will cheer on someone named Bukayo Saka in an England jersey but refuse to call him an Englishman will have some serious national questions to address before attempting to form and lead an international, quasi-imperial bloc, based on common culture and common market.