According to French President Nicolas Sarkozy, last weekend’s G20 summit was a big success. “Never before have Anglo-Saxons agreed to subject credit ratings agencies to oversight and regulation,” he declared.
You know what, he’s right. Check out the ‘Historia Ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum’, the 8th century AD masterpiece by the Venerable Bede. This greatest of all Anglo-Saxon chroniclers had nothing to say about credit ratings agencies, and not just because he wrote in Latin.
Almost every day, all over the European media, one comes across the term ”Anglo-Saxons”. It is usually intended to mean Brits and Americans, with perhaps a glance in the direction of Australians, Canadians and New Zealanders.
To my mind, the term carries a deeply unpleasant undertone of invoking alleged racial origin to define nationality and establish a stereotype of national character. Weren’t Europeans supposed to have stopped doing things like that after the destruction of Nazism? Moreover, the term is, of course, utterly inaccurate.
After all, whom did American voters just elect as their next president? A direct descendant of the Venerable Bede? (A Belgian newspaper reported two days after Barack Obama’s victory that genealogical researchers had discovered he was 1 per cent Belgian. But that’s another story.)
The millions of African-Americans, Hispanics, Asians and many others who live in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles would be flabbergasted, and possibly rather amused, to hear that in Europe they are categorised as Anglo-Saxon. So would all sorts of people in Montreal, Toronto and Sydney.
It goes for the UK, too. Huge numbers of Londoners are no more Anglo-Saxon than my cats. Look at the family tree of any Englishman – which is what is generally meant when “Anglo-Saxon” is applied in a British context - and you will soon discover an Irish father-in-law here, a Scottish aunt there, a Polish or Indian grandmother somewhere else.
So, speaking as someone with three half-Japanese nephews, two of whom recently played in the famous Eton v Harrow annual cricket match, I say – it’s time to stop calling us, or them, Anglo-Saxons!
Across the globe: Gideon Rachman and his FT colleagues debate international affairs on