The Fate of the British Dominions in the Multipolar World

The decline of the American Empire has led to a wide scale reconsideration of the geopolitical alliances for Canada going forward in the 21st Century.

This has led to a review of and retrenchment in some past configurations based around the British Commonwealth, such as CANZUCK: Great Britain, and its historic settler-colonies being Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

The idea around a revival of CANZUCK — as identified in the previous piece by J. Niu titled “What Comes Next After CANZUCK?” — has been relegated to an economic project, rather than a civilizational project, but that said, there is a recognition here of multipolarity being the main tend in the world today.

A core point of multipolar world theory is how the Westphalian notion of the nation-state has been eclipsed by civilizational poles which take precedence as the driving political forces in global politics. The question here around CANZUK is if this loose constellation of countries can actually constitute a coherent civilizational pole in the multipolar world of “great spaces?”

The main issue with using the “great space” argument is that all of the other “great spaces” in the world — such as with Russia and China — are built off of a contiguity of land, in other words, they are continentalist.

However, the British Empire encompassing the British Dominions, and the other colonies of British Commonwealth, more broadly, was historically built using the mercantile model, sometimes referred to as “Atlanticism.”

This maritime trade was structured around controlling the seaways, literally being built from piracy, to pillage its land holdings in the colonies. As such, the British Dominions, and the other colonies, are lacking a continuity linked by land, something that is essential in the civilizational “great spaces.”

While enduring the continentalist civilizations like Russia, China, and India have existed for millennia in the East, we can look at another example of a “great space” in the “new world,” that likewise, if controversially, came into being more recently, as a result of being bound by a history of Western European colonization: La Patria Grande, based around Latin America.

The argument around CANZUCK may try to use similar logic about the historic settler-colonies being bound by British colonization, however, let’s look at another comparison, again related to Spanish colonization that does not simply fit in the above civilization pole, due to its distant location relative to these other more concentrated of the former colonies in the Americas.

The Philippines — named after the Spanish Monarch King Phillip II — also share a history of Spanish colonization, but due to the archipelago’s physical position in the Asia-Pacific, is not part of La Patria Grande.

Here we can see here that a common history of colonization — which, again, if controversially does bind the fates of different peoples together — is not a sole factor for creating a more modern civilizational pole without the contiguity of land to share together as a “great space.”

Here lies the problem with the CANZUCK position, you cannot have a continentalist rooted in Atlanticism.

These countries share common ground in the historical context of being geopolitical configurations of the British Empire, and to varying degrees in the contemporary context, under the influence of the American Empire, but beyond these contradictions, they exist in vastly different parts of the world.

If the correct move for the Philippines is regional integration in the Asia-Pacific and the correct move for the Latin Americans countries around La Patria Grande is to do regional integration in the Americas, then so too should the British Dominions do the same.

Each country should strive to become their own constitutional republics, fully integrating with their respective regions: the Americas for Canada; the Asia-Pacific for Australia and New Zealand; and, still adjacent to this conversation, Africa for South Africa.

This is not to say we cannot have a decent level of trade with one another, but the above moves should certainly be prioritized over a reintegration with Great Britain (which is no longer even the main beacon of the colonial project beyond retaining some of its framework with the British Commonwealth).

An integration in the Americas would also feature a rebuff of the imperialism, expansionism, and annexation attempts from the United States of America, an anti-imperialist revolutionary Pan-American solidarity, linking up with the working class movements within the United States and likeminded factions in the Caribbean, Central and South America who are advocating for their own sovereignty in the face of a renewed Monroe Doctrine or “Donroe Doctrine.”

The response from the political establishment to the recent tariffs from the Trump administration, fixating on the United Kingdom and European Union, and perhaps some vassal states of the American Empire in East Asia, as the “international community,” is missing the context of the emerging multipolar world, it is small thinking limited by the historic position of British Loyalism.

In Canada, many of the British Loyalists who seem to brand themselves as “nationalists” cannot really be considered “nationalists” in the sense of truly being “Canada First.” They hold onto a geopolitics that depends upon being a part of the British Commonwealth, this cannot be classified as “nationalism,” since it is focused on a configuration beyond that of solely a nation-state.

This is not to cancel the heritage of how one of our major civilization roots comes from the British Isles. However, these “European identity” types on the far-right often hold a mirror up to the “decolonator” types on the far-left who seek to negate the historic naturalization of European settlers to Canada.

For Canadians of European-descent, of which many of our families have lived here for centuries now in North America, at what point can we identify as being of this continent, as Canadians? For example, the Indigenous people here don’t refer to themselves as being “Asians,” despite having historically migrated to these lands from Siberia over the Bering Straight.

The British Loyalists insist solely on an identity rooted in the “old world,” but just as people will change the land, the land too will change people, it is this symbiotic relationship which has created our distinct identity as a people who are a product of this continent, Canadians.

As Canadian Republicans, our geopolitics also goes beyond simply that of a nation-state, transcending our history as a legacy state of the British Empire, conceptualizing a civilization building from the British, French, and Indigenous foundational roots of Canada.

To answer the question around CANZUCK, the “great space” which we will be a part of as a unique civilizational pole in the multipolar world is Canada.