r/CANZUK

Hmmmm, maybe the UK should stick these on their type 26 warships....

This is a bit of a ramble but I thought I’d share some thoughts I’ve been having with some like-minded people.

The first thing to say is that I used to think of CANZUK as a bit of a gimmick, or an expression of post-imperial nostalgia by some people on the right of politics.

There was something to that view - in the past the most important relationships each of our countries had were with our neighbours. From the British perspective that meant the EU for our economy and the US for security; for Oz/NZ it was China for the economy and the US for security, and for Canada it was the US for both.

In happier times that made perfect sense; geography is very real, and the so-called ‘gravity model’ of trade must be acknowledged to be a real phenomenon. Likewise, the US was a reliable anchor for the entire western security order via NATO and its bilateral alliances with Oz/NZ. UK-Canada relations, for example, were important but naturally secondary. I think that essentially explains why we drifted apart after WW2.

However I’ve come around to the idea that this view undersells the most valuable commodity of all: trust.

We obviously share institutions, legal systems, political culture etc., but it goes deeper than that to a kind of shared cultural reference frame. When I look at Americans and see what they view as acceptable and normal in their country I feel their mindset is pretty alien, even though we share a language and are exposed to a lot of their cultural output. The level of trust isn’t quite the same.

Trust lets you do things together that are difficult or impossible otherwise. A good counterexample is the EU. Because the EU contains nations as diverse as Norway, Bulgaria and Portugal it demands a high level of harmonisation and standardisation to keep the show on the road, all enforced by Brussels. This means that EU states are necessarily not quite sovereign states any more, even to maintain the EU single market as it is currently.

This works fine for trade in goods, but most developed economies nowadays are much more services based by value, and the EU’s single market in services, by their own admission (see: Draghi Report), is pretty thin. Why don’t they have better integration of services trade in the EU single market? Reforms are politically difficult, but, crucially, they don’t trust each other enough to eg recognise each others’ professional qualifications. The same can be said for a capital markets union, or even the more federalist stuff like a fiscal (tax) union (German taxpayers subsidising Greek pension liabilities forever).

This is where CANZUK is interesting. Because of the high level of trust between us we could, for example, have mutual recognition of professional qualifications with minimal oversight from a centralised body ie we could have an arrangement that is more flexible, more seamless and more sovereign than what exists in the EU. It’s not even a theoretical concept - I understand Oz and NZ have such an arrangement already. It would just be a matter of expanding it to the UK and Canada.

That’s quite a narrow (but potentially very lucrative) example, but you can extend the logic to other areas of trade, or other policy areas entirely eg an Australian general leading British and Canadian troops (as happened in WW2).

Again, in the relatively stable world of the late 90s none of this would make sense, but in the 2020s and 2030s, with the world fracturing, with the existence of NATO in question; with the US and China pressuring CANZUK states, it makes sense to have as close ties as possible with the guys you know will always have your back.

That doesn’t mean we ignore our neighbours - eg the UK will always need to have a close (ideally closer) relationship with the EU on goods trade, but the world would benefit from a core group of states around which coalitions or broader agreements can form.

It also sits quite nicely with Carney’s farsighted Davos speech on ‘middle powers’. The geopolitical reality demands something of that nature.

The question is why isn’t this being pursued more aggressively? At least in the UK this can be explained by inertia - the bureaucracy and political class are still largely europeanist in their view of economic relations and Atlanticist in security. There will need to be a cultural change at the heart of government for things to change, but it does feel like it’s happening (albeit slowly).

I might get down voted but while I like the idea of this I don't see it as economically rational. The one trading partner between all these nations is the US and excluding them doesn't make any sense.

I'm an American with a Canadian passport and wish both countries would be more open with each other. It's amazing how difficult it is to work and live in opposing countries if you're not a citizen. Especially an American going to Canada.

I feel like the anchor point to all four countries would be the US so why not include it?