A Retrenchment of British Loyalism in the Current Year?

There has been a revival of British Loyalism on the right-wing in Canada.

It seems astounding that there is anyone in the younger generations, and really anyone who was born after World War II, that would even consider being a British Loyalist at all, that said, we should still have a more serious inquiry into the underlying reasons for a revival of this reactionary political tendency without just dismissing it all as historical cosplay.

The main reason for this retrenchment seems to be about addressing a loss of identity from the last few decades of neo-liberalism, finding our place in the emerging multipolar world, and a need for security in relation to Canada’s faltering relationship with the United States of America.

With the renewed threat of expansionism from the American Empire, this has led to here some who call themselves “nationalists” to revert back to a desire for “Daddy Britain” to take care of their Dominion, hence the formation of these contemporary British Loyalist groups like the Dominion Society.

In previous centuries, even as recently as a century ago before World War II, British Loyalism was an active political position in the British Commonwealth due to the preeminent great power status of the British Empire.

The main point of difference here between the historical British Loyalism and the retrenchment of these groups that resemble a live action role play with deeply unserious “meta politics” is their ignorance to geopolitics around the changing material conditions both in North America and the world overall, especially regarding the withered away status of the British Empire.

Putting aside historical debates around the morality British colonization — something that British Loyalists seem to see with rose coloured glasses and something that Canadian Republicans see as the subordination of our own sovereignty and that of the colonies in the British Commonwealth — this fantasy of retrenchment is simply unfeasible from the pragmatic perspective. We cannot even go back to this mythologized past even if we wanted to since the British Empire simply does not exist as it once was prior to World War II.

Since the Breton Woods conference in 1944, there was a hand off from Britain to its progeny America bestowing the role of the preeminent military power in the West. While the transnational nodal points of global finance that were established from British mercantile operations are indeed still intact, such as those in Toronto and Singapore, this skeleton of financial control is largely facilitated today by the miliary might of the American Empire.

In the current year, the British Empire is not the military force that governed a quarter of the world’s land mass, hence, this reactionary position of British imperial retrenchment cannot even be considered an option because it simply is not one from the position of realpolitik.

In fairness, some these groups also focus on addressing some of the excesses of of the neo-liberal globalization, such as issues around mass immigration, which do need to be addressed around hyper-exploitation of migrant labour, suppressing the wages of working citizens, and the lack of overall adequate infrastructure, in an attempt to transform the country into a low-wage techno-feudal serfdom in a post-national landscape of adversarial ethnic tribes at odds without the cultivation of a common Canadian identity.

That said, the corresponding rhetoric of “remigration” being copied directly from some European nationalists shows a lack of political innovation from these groups in Canada. Furthermore, the driving factors around these trends in migrant labour are directly related to the geopolitical ecosystem of the British Commonwealth and our country’s historic position as a legacy state of the British Empire, something conveniently ignored by these British Loyalists.

While the reactionary political tendency seems to be more emphasized from some on the far-right, a more mainstream version of this phenomena also exists in the Conservative Party, and even the Liberal Party, with those who are looking for alternatives to America seeking to strengthen the Anglosphere alliance called CANZUCK between Britain and the historic British Dominions.

The retrenchment in CANZUCK, essentially a softer version of the more overt retrenchment in the British Empire, is a somewhat more understandable tool of realpolitik around trade and defense, but overall, countries like Canada and Australia would be far better off focusing on their immediate global regions, being the Americas and the Asia-Pacific, respectively, by forming geopolitical alliances with nearby smaller countries on the principle of non-alignment to mitigate the influence of great powers, such as the American Empire.

The reemergence of British Loyalist groups like the Dominion Society who are paradoxically branding themselves as “Canadian nationalists,” along with defaulting to CANZUCK shows in the mainstream, shows the demoralizing state of what passes as “patriotism” on the right-wing in Canada.

As Canadians, we need to shed this dependency mentality, one that is exactly rooted in the historic experience of being subordinated first as a Dominion of the British Empire and then later as a vassal state of the American Empire. We need to break this false binary that we can only be a possession of another great power, and instead, strive to become an independent country as a sovereign republic by and for the people of Canada.