The British American Project

Yeh, I suppose that the easiest way to do that would be to make Canada part of Scotland and Australia part of South England.

Personally, I’d rather Israel and Palestine to both join the United States and impose some real Federalist control over their shenanigans. Having the UK as an American state will ruin study abroad options for countless American college students too incompetent to learn another language.

US culture is deeply individualistic because the essential US political ethos is deeply individualistic, and vice-versa. I think you’re not taking into consideration that while UK culture would moderate US culture noticably in this respect, in the legal realm this moderation would face immediate and extremely resilient barriers. And I suspect the folks on the other side of the pond would not tolerate the possibility of such insurmountable barriers were they to truly understand they exist.

I partly grok that your point is at least somewhat satirical. But I also can’t help but intuit the same sort of unrecognized ignorance about American society that I encountered with my former Canadian inlaws (and spouse). Legally, the US is a very different place, even from Canada.

At this point, I’d gladly take Tony Blair as President of the US. Would he be a native-born citizen under the transitional regime, though? Tough questions.

Why is it that any time I click on a link on a Crooked Timber page, the page scrolls up slightly, as though the link is running away from my mouse, and only then am I able to click on it? (The same goes for the “post” buttons.) I’m using Mozilla Firefox… blah, blah, blah.

Daniel, your idea is breathtaking! This is the geopolitical equivalent of a man eating his own head. I also thoroughly applaud the notions of incorporating Canada and Australia, and would only offer the following:

• What about New Zealand, South Africa, Singapore, and Belize? If we’re going to unite the English-speaking world, let’s do the whole job.
• Since the new acquisitions include Quebec, naturally the rest of us should take advantage of this interim get a head start translating our various telephone directories, street signs, laundering instructions, etc. into French.

Aren’t you low on the number of new states and thus on representation in the Senate?

There are 290 million people in the US, and so, on average, 5.8 million per state. At 5.1 million people, Scotland has about the right number of people. A united Ireland would have a population of 5.5 million, which is just about right, too. That leaves 50 million Englishmen, which should have about nine states. Luckily, England is already divided into nine regions, each of which has about the right population.

Interesting! An alliance of convenient inconvenience! here’s a piece by a Brit. org about the debacle in Ohio, if anyone’s interested. Cheers!

http://www.gregpalast.com/printerfriendly.cfm?artid=392

This is a tougher proposition than you think. You need to consider what happens to the BBC and Eurotunnel. Then there is the British Army: as Dan Hardie has pointed out in earlier threads, they no longer consider bombing to be a suitable method of dealing with civil unrest. Come to that, what happens to the Queen? Does trooping the colour mean marching past a guy in a stetson?

I am also unhappy with your solution to the Irish abortion question. I thought we had cracked that one: strictly forbidden in Ireland, cheap transport to the UK readily available. I think you might be wiser to think in terms of a couple of tiny states, like Vermont and New Hampshire but without the skiing. (As a bumper-sticker, No Surrender is pretty much the same as Live Free or Die.) Will the preservation of the Irish language qualify for federal support?

Then there are the serious issues: will the Americans ever get the hang of football? (I know they have a game they call football, but I’m not talking about that, I’m talking about football.) What happens to the rugby internationals? Will India and Pakistan consent to play test cricket against mere states of the USA?

At least America should win the Ryder Cup.

Daniel of course is ignoring the important question of Scottish nationalism.

“You wouldn’t get 110 electoral votes, since the size of the House is capped.

California has about 70 times as many people as Wyoming ( according to), but it doesn’t have 70 times as many representatives.”

I’d never thought of this. Are the big states getting underrepresented in the House on top of everything else?

It seems like the only ways around this would be expanding the House, or drawing district lines across state boundaries. Would you need a constitutional amendment to change this, or would a federal statute suffice?

Yes, Pat is quite right. To complete the USA, it’s India you need: a strategic barrier to Chinese ambitions, an end to silly arguments about outsourcing and a practically limitless supply of software engineers. Also enough troops to police Iraq properly, not to mention Syria and Iran if required.

The only trouble is, that’s a hell of a lot of voters.

Would Quebec become part of Louisiana or remain it’s own independent state? Or would it finally be cast loose from the Anglosphere? I vote for this last possibility.

Do the various Caribbean islands like Jamaica qualify? I’m all for it, either as a joint (ha-ha!) state or as part of Florida.

This Wyoming/California representative disparity in the Electoral College is absolutely alarming. More alarming is the fact that people with zero understanding of voting theory keep appearing on Cable News programs to discuss ‘plurality’ vs. ‘electoral college’, as if the dichotomy exhausted all the possibilities.

On Wyoming v California: the distribution of representatives is basically population-based, but with the exception that states have to have at least one representative. So a lot of rounding-up gets done.

Were this serious, which of course it isn’t, it’d be quite spectacularly stupid. As a piece of satire, amazingly, it actually manages to be even stupider.

In any case, if we’re going to indulge in acid-fuelled neo-Versaillean geopolitical fantasies for the express purpose of screwing Republicans, why don’t we start small and just merge all the states west of the Mississippi and north of 36°30′, with the exception of Colorado, Washington, and Oregon, back into one bigass Republican ghetto? Bang go at least sixteen electoral votes, a good dozen completely useless senators (as well as Kent Conrad and Byron Dorgan, but that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make for the cause) and any number of complete wastes of space in the House of Representatives.

mike huben — Any nation can already apply to join the US if it wants in; it’s in Article IV section 3 of the Constitution. Please note that over the last hundred years or so, the only territorial entity to have done so is the District of Columbia. (And arguably Puerto Rico, but why should their opinions count here any more than they do in, say, the U.S. Congress?)

Based on your original proposal, the actual electoral votes would be about:

North England 27
South England 39
Scotland 8

Massachusetts, interestingly enough, wouldn’t gain any at all.

If this were the situation in the last election, with only the states they won, Bush would have 261, Kerry 209. You would need 273 to win.

“Would Quebec become part of Louisiana or remain it’s own independent state? Or would it finally be cast loose from the Anglosphere? I vote for this last possibility.”

Us Louisianians will happily take the Quebecois. We can all sit back and sneer and joke about the Anglophones.

Speaking of prejudices…

Canada part of Scotland? Sorry, but our 30 million people (including 13 million with some Scottish ancestry) would have to do the annexing.

Likewise, the population of Quebec (over 7 million) is nearly double that of Louisiana. Welcome home, cajuns!

I have a better idea. Canada is centrally-located, intermediate between American and British culture, and knows how to make federalism work. Perhaps Britain should follow the path of future Canadian provinces like Pacifica, New Michigan, and the Southeast Territories and join Canadian confederation.

After all, it worked for Newfoundland…

William,

what you say about Wyoming/California isn’t quite true. In the Electoral College, Wyoming has three votes. The House of Representatives is somewhat more respectful of proportionality, but the Electoral College adds to the number of representatives, two more votes–corresponding to the number of senators the State has. Thus Wyoming ends up with 3 EV’s, a figure completely disproportionate to its population.

Getting back to Mike Huben’s idea: as a way of determining which nation most wants to join the U.S. in the current cycle, why not a reality T.V. show? Morocco, Ukraine, and the Philippines (say) compete with each other for a season to find out which can show the most convincingly American attributes. Hosted ideally by Schwarzenegger were he still in show biz; other suggestions welcome.

Then there are the serious issues: will the Americans ever get the hang of football?

Oh, I think we’re managing OK at that (#11 in the latest FIFA rankings).

Dubious: For California, 10 million votes divided by 55 EV is about 181,000 votes per EV. For DC, 205,000/3 = 68,000. So the difference is about a factor of 2.7.

Ahh, I see someone had the good graces to draw my attention to another article by the odious Mark Steyn. And the day was going so well up to now.

Luckily, England is already divided into nine regions, each of which has about the right population.

Erm, you picked exactly the wrong week to suggest that kind of political subdivision.

Oh, and Palast’s from L.A. — prophets in their own country, etc.

I’m for any re-ordering, though, as long as it leaves Mark Steyn rotting in a garret somewhere.

That may be one of the silliest ideas I’ve heard in a long time. We have our own theocracy already, thanks very much, we don’t need an even more corrupt and venal one to attach ourselves to.

Irishboy dribbled:

“The supremacist strand to so much British thinking reveals itself, why would Scotland be a presumtative state (falling population, declining economy etc.) and not Ireland (with a higher and growing population, booming economy).”

British supremacist thinking? Ireland with a higher population than Scotland? Have you been at the whiskey?

Far from Ireland having a higher population, Scotland’s population is almost 1.5 – 2 million higher than Ireland’s. It’s not the British participant’s here who are indulging in supremacist thinking. :-)

Admittedly Irish GDP per capita is higher than Scotland’s but not by an extraordinary amount. Scottish per capita GDP is around OECD average and is far from ‘depressed’.

Actually, the size of the House of Representatives is only legislatively capped. The Constitution allows for Congress to increase its size. It’s simply chosen not to do so since the 1920s (before that, the size of the House was regularly expanded as the US grew).

Brit-Am Project or not, I actually think that increasing the size of the House of Representatives is an underdiscussed, but potentially very important, electoral reform. Smaller districts would allow for cheaper, and more small-d democratic, races. And it would lower the disproportionately high representation of very small states.

Sandriana says “We have our own theocracy already, thanks very much, we don’t need an even more corrupt and venal one to attach ourselves to.”

and the funny thing is, I can’t work out if he/she is a US protestant moaning about the EU oran EU catholic moaning about the US. Give us a clue.

For maximum political power, you want as many new states as possible: you get more benefits from the small-state rounding error in the House, and you get more Senators. How about each county as a state?

A post about merging the UK and US, and 59 comments, and no one mentions Oceania?

And Oceania it will be. Under US media rules BBC is toast, Fox News rules, talk radio is ruled by the right, and Murdoch papers dominate (even more than now). The UK working class will find they have tons in common with the average Limbaugh listener .. the UK psyche is still very anti-coloured people.

And we can all get guns!

You’re just imitating, someone else already came up with this British Empire II plan. And his name was a lot more fun: the League of Good Nations.

Though my favourite has to be: Places Where Nicole Kidman is Famous, but Angelina Jolie is Disliked.
Waspistan isn’t that bad either.

If we’re going to call it anything, we’re going to call it Honkistan. On this, I will not budge. However, there is a better solution that is much less logistically daunting: just give Texas back to Mexico. Poof. Problem solved.

The post makes the assumption that UK customs will moderate US customs. The more likely result is for the UK to become another series of Red States with one or two large Blue States.

I don’t know. If I were a populous island and I wanted to become a U.S. state, I’d ring up Puerto Rico first and see what they have to say. Also, I’d phone Hawaii and ask to speak to the queen.

Give Texas to Mexico. Chuckling there since some gents seem to be forgetting what happened the last time Mexico let in a bunch of Southerners (something about losing half of their country to the pinche gringos…)

OK, Irishboy has a fair point. I was specifically thinking of Eire rather than the whole island – since Eire is the one with the high GDP, etc. The combined 32 counties does, of course, have a larger population than Scotland.

However, I’d be careful about lumping all ‘Brits’ into the group that condescends to the Irish. As a Scot from a family that’s predominately composed of Glasgow Catholics I’m not normally guilty of that particular sin.

I was just smarting at the characterisation of Ireland as some kind of thrusting new power and Scotland as some fading and decrepit nation in the midst of some economic and demographic decline.

In fact, as anyone whose spent any time in most of the major Scottish cities over the past 10 or 15 years will tell you, things have improved immeasureably there over that period.

Love it. The Boston Irish would really love to have the Emerald Isle back, too. Though the Irish would be horrified at living in a political entity that celebrates St. Pat’s with green beer.

bad jim: It’s been suggested that California should leave the U.S. and join the European Union. …. Washington and Oregon may want to come with us.

Only the Blue coastal fraction of each state would have any interest in leaving the US. The geographic majority of counties in these states is pinkish-Red:

California
Oregon
Washington

taylor: As part of the deal the US should have to … switch to a parliamentary system …

No thanks. It is an advantage of our system that one party only rarely controls both the executive and legislative branches of government.

There are more Irish living in the US than in Ireland anyway; may as well reunite them all.

While such a loose definition may have done wonders for Jack Charlton in the 1980s, it certainly doesn’t pass muster elsewhere. There’s a reason why Dubliners clear out of the city when the Oirish crowds arrive for St Paddy’s. (One wonders, in fact, whether the training of Indian call-centre workers to take British/American names and accents has its origin in the fake-Irish bars of the north-eastern US, where New Jerseyites rechristen themselves as sons of Erin.)

As for dsquared’s proposal: it’s obvious that Welsh independence would soon lead to a north-south civil war, ending in a bloody battle as the north is pushed back to Anglesey / Ynys Môn.

I forgot to mention that I am 100% in favor of Daniel’s idea, especially if it can be arranged before March, so that we can get the real BBC over here in the United States (not BBC America!) so I can see the new Doctor Who series when it starts running in Britain and not have to wait until some US channel picks it up.

So in this presumtive new US who would pay the transfers to NI and Scotland

The Republic of Ireland (or as I like to think of it, Western Massachussetts) would bear the cost of reunification, rather like the Germans did.

Scotland would not need transfers under my plan; if you look carefully, you’ll see that I sneakily gave them the oil.

There would be a certain amount of military kerfuffle, however; the enclave of Ynys Mon would take a leaf out of Iceland’s book and engage in some adventurous guarding of its fishing rights.

You have it backwards. Have the United States join Briatian, not the other way about. Then they would have things like something resembling democracy, instead of that election every four years crap.Inasmuch, however, tht I left the states 35 years ago to live in Canada, woud you want to be the same nationality as those twerps?

As much as I love England — Great Britain — the United Kingdom, or whatever it is that is the politically correct cognomen –there are two problems with the Anglosphere as proposed:(1) y’all are Socialists and we already have enough problems with our Democrats; and (2) having one queen has already disrupted the US version of the Anglican Communion, I don’t think the US is ready for another.

One possible solution would be to limit suffrage to Tories, but as far as I can tell, they generally don’t like Americans, and in any case once y’all get in the U.S., you’d probably raise some silly Constitutional objection to that requirement, and we have too many lawsuits as it is.

So, why don’t you limit the proposed Union to a military-intellence-economic union with the US and Australia (the Canadians and Kiwis are lost cousins, to be mourned but not embraced). That way, you keep your culture free from us, and you don’t have to put up with those nasty supercilious Frogs or Brussels Sprouts.