How the UK and London misread their hand
 

Truss learns the hard way that Britain isn’t America

I was reading this article earlier and I thought it brought up an interesting point: due to the relation London has with Wall Street and America, along with similar cultural aspects such as speaking English, many of the UK's power players completely miscalculated how much negotiation power they actually had.

I can see some truth to it. It almost felt like the last few years, the UK was mirroring US politics (Boris Johnson being the Trump-lite UK version), but maybe there is a different aspect I am not thinking of. What do you guys think?

The biggest UK misread seems to be soft power via language. English became the defacto global language due to postwar U.S. hegemony, but the UK seems to employ the worldview that it's a remnant of empire or something, even though French was the global language of diplomacy/cultural exchange at Britain's height.

This is critical, because it means the UK's greatest soft power is when it functions as a quasi-U.S. cultural/economic functionary within the European sphere, but the UK still seems to think it derives soft power via legacy of empire/royal silliness. The Anglosphere is obviously an remnant of empire, but its power is via U.S. postwar hegemony. London's advantages are almost entirely due to language and culture.

Interesting point

I never really thought of the UK-US as an equivalent almost like the Quebec-France relation. Where the (soft) power of language dictated where US companies set up offices to interact with the EU and beyond.

This doesn't mean that much. Tokyo is comparable to or bigger than Shanghai (at least in metro pop) and China is ~10 times the population of Japan.

NY is considerably bigger than London in metro population, and the US has several huge cities like LA or Chicago etc.



The premise of the article is true though, Britain seems to overestimate itself in modern times. It's a regional power whereas USA is another China or Russia, maybe more in some ways, less in others.

Nothing against Britain, it was a pleasant country to visit and obviously ruling the world ain't everything.

Yeah, I didn't get the relevance of that point.

Germany doesn't really have any huge or super impressive cities, but no one denies that Germany is Europe's dominant country. The most impressive/grand "German" city is Vienna, in geopolitically irrelevant Austria. What does it matter how the population is distributed?

I don't think Britain's calculation had much to do with its relationship with America. Of course some Americans fanned the flames of nationalism that British voters certainly heard, but I think it was ultimately just a misread of the degree to which the global political strength of the UK has diminished.

I still have a lot of reservations on whether the EU can last as an economic union without a strong political union, but Brexit might have bought the institution more time. But for Britain, the upside for being in the EU far outweighed the downside, considering that it is a resource poor island nation with a medium sized population.

Good point, but don't you think having one of the "Global Super Star" cities like NYC/Tokyo (which imo London is generally considered to be), led to the assumption or maybe over-estimation that their economic power was greater? Especially in the space of global banks and investment firms.

I don't think so. Wasn't London the only region of England to vote against Brexit?

I think everybody in Britain is pretty aware the Empire is over. The article is precisely about it: British politicians paying too much attention on American ones.

I find this very odd and counterproductive. They keep wasting too much time with it. They should have a more inward look when it comes to politics. Said that, political climate there is still way way better than in the US.

Brexit Map

You are right that London was one of the most "stay" voting regions.

True but it was Britians conquests that spread English around the world. Particular in former Asian and African colonies. Which was then heavily reinforced by the power of the US after WW2, which happened to have English as the primary language.

And needless to say it's not like London lacks of know-how as I finance centre either. They've been doing it for three centuries.

don't forget about all of australia and most of north america, to boot.

quite the prodigious colonizers.


https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...bution.svg.png
source: wikipedia

Britain's colonial history laid some groundwork, but by itself was not pivotal to English becoming the global lingua franca. In fact, many former British colonies were moving hard to ditch English in the immediate postwar era. English also isn't even the most widely spoken European language as a first language - that's Spanish. English probably had much closer global parity to French in the mid-20th century as well.

English fluency exploded in the post-WW2 era because of 1) the U.S. becoming both a military and economic superpower, and 2) because the U.S. opened itself (and its schools) to being a global magnet for highly educated immigrants.

3) hollywood

Yeah, Hollywood was definitely part of the equation, but the internet would be the third biggest factor.

English is by far has the largest number of speakers in the world.

English ~1.5 B
Mandarin ~ 1.1 B
Hindi 602 M
Spanish 548 M
French 274 M
Arabic 274 M




https://www.statista.com/statistics/...%20of%20survey.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...er_of_speakers





I love Indian English. Soon South Asia will have the most English speakers.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_English

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakist...0the%20country.

Right, but not native speakers.

English didn't become the defacto language for business and cultural exchange until well after WW2. English wasn't the most important global language pre-WW2.

My parents, who both grew up in postwar Germany, both went to college-prep high schools, where you have to master two foreign languages. My dad chose French and Latin, my mom chose French and Italian.

No one would do that anymore. Everyone learns English as one of the required two languages. French was the next most important language in Germany until probably the 1970's. There were probably more French and even Russian speakers than English speakers in Germany until the 1980's. Now practically every German under 40 speaks some degree of English.

for sure, here in the 21st century.

i was just adding to your post-WW2 era factors.

Yeah, French was the language of global academia until at least the 1940s, maybe into the 1950s.