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The America that I encountered on my first speaking tour after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington was more sombre, reserved and intense than the America I had known. Six weeks after the outrage, with the war against al-Qaeda and the Taliban entering a new phase, there was only one issue on everyone’s minds, only one message it was imperative to convey:

In Britain we know how much we owe to America. We understand how close our countries are. America’s cause is, and always will be, our cause. The message I bring to you today is that Britain is united with America in the war against terrorism.*

I have now been paying regular visits to the United States for more than thirty years. But there is something more subtle and less explicable than mere experience that binds me to America. I have reflected upon what this ‘something’ is.

Charles de Gaulle famously remarked that he had ‘a certain idea of France’.† In fact, more accurately, he said that he had ‘created for himself’ that idea. To have an idea of a country is not necessarily to have a distorted view of it. It is, if the idea is a true one, to gain an insight into the mystery of a nation’s identity.

I too have a certain idea of America. Moreover, I would not feel entitled to say that of any other country, except my own. This is not just sentiment, though I always feel ten years younger – despite the jet-lag – when I set foot on American soil: there is something so positive, generous and open about the people – and everything actually works. I also feel, though, that I have in a sense a share in America. Just why is this?

There are two reasons. First, in an age of spun messages and fudged options I am increasingly conscious that Winston Churchill was right about this – as about other things – in his famous speech in Fulton, Missouri in 1946:

We must never cease to proclaim in fearless tones the great principles of freedom and the rights of man which are the joint inheritance of the English-speaking world and which through Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus, trial by jury, and the English common law find their most famous expression in the American Declaration of Independence.

Consciousness of the underlying commonalities of that ‘English-speaking world’ and of its values has never been more needed.

But the second reason for my sense of belonging to America is that America is more than a nation or a state or a superpower; it is an idea – and one which has transformed and continues to transform us all. America is unique – in its power, its wealth, its outlook on the world. But its uniqueness has roots, and those roots are essentially English. Already at the time of their foundation, the settlements across the Atlantic were deeply affected by religious, moral and political beliefs.

This fact is unforgettably recalled by the words of John Winthrop delivered in 1630 upon the deck of the tiny Arbella off the coast of Massachusetts to his fellow pilgrims:

We must be knit together, in this work, as one man. We must entertain each other in brotherly affection. We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities …

We shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all the people are upon us so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword throughout all the world.

The pilgrims were in search of freedom to worship as they chose, but, as Winthrop’s words demonstrate, they were by no means relativists or liberals. They were imbued with a deep sense of individual and collective responsibility. They practised self-discipline and lived according to a dogged, undoubtedly severe spirit of community. The pilgrims were Calvinists, whereas my own upbringing was against the somewhat less forbidding background of Methodism. But in and around my old home town of Grantham there were preachers who spoke in the tones of Winthrop, and we all lived in a not dissimilar atmosphere. So I feel that I understand the pilgrims, who symbolise for me one aspect of the American character, one feature of the American dream.

But America was not just the new Jerusalem. It could not have been made by the saints alone, or if it had been it would not have prospered. As the years went by more and more people left their homes in the Old World to seek a life in the New for straightforward material reasons. And they are not to be despised for that. They wanted better prospects for themselves and their families and they were prepared to make enormous sacrifices to achieve them. These men were fearless, tough, dynamic. They too, whatever their origins, their destinations or their hopes, are a vital part of the American story. They represent the risk-taking, the enterprise and the courage which endured every danger, natural and man-made, to bring virgin forests and open prairies into productive use. Whether trappers, farmers, traders or (later) miners, these are the men whose spirit underlies American individualism in all its manifold forms today.

A sense of personal responsibility and of the quintessential value of the individual human being are the twin foundations of orderly freedom. In the years before the American Revolution the colonists, because of circumstances, developed such awareness to a high degree. But the political culture from which the American colonies sprang – that is English political culture – had always been imbued with it too.

One American scholar, Professor James Q. Wilson, has listed the following factors as important in shaping English (later British) freedom: physical isolation (which helped protect us from invasion); a deep-rooted and widespread commitment to private property; ethnic homogeneity (which helped create a common culture) and a tradition of respect for legality and the rights it guaranteed.* The Founding Fathers of the United States of America inherited all this. Their thinking about the rights of the subject and the purposes of a constitution were developments of what had occurred over more than five centuries in the country whose yoke they were determined to break.

I advanced this thesis in the course of a speech I delivered on my investiture as Chancellor of William and Mary College in Williamsburg, Virginia in February 1994.†

The historical roots of our [Anglo–American] relationship are many. A shared language, a shared literature, a shared legal system, a shared religion, and a finely woven blanket of customs and traditions from the very beginning, that have set our two nations apart from others. Even when the founders of this great Republic came to believe that the course of human events had made it necessary for them to dissolve the political bands that connected them to Britain, and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitled them, it was from our Locke and Sidney, our Harrington and Coke, that your Henry and your Jefferson, your Madison and Hamilton took their bearings.‡

These considerations are not just of academic importance. Their significance lies in the fact that they allow us to grasp an important truth about America – namely that it is the most reliable force for freedom in the world, because the entrenched values of freedom are what make sense of its whole existence.

That is why I felt equally entitled in another lecture on the same theme some two years later to make the following claim:

The modern world began in earnest on July 4th 1776. That was the moment when the rebellious colonists put pen to parchment and pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honour in defence of truths they held to be self-evident: ‘That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights … and that to secure these rights governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.’ Henceforth patriotism would not simply be loyalty to the homeland, but a dedication to principles held to be both universal and permanent.*

Similar claims have, of course, been made for other revolutions. But they cannot ultimately be sustained. The French Revolution sacrificed Liberty to Equality – Fraternity never really mattered at all – and then Equality quickly gave way to centralised dictatorship. Today the only constructive results of that upheaval are to be found in the administrative reorganisations which succeeded it. The Bolshevik Revolution can be seen in retrospect to have been a reversion to the most odious kind of age-old tyranny, supplemented by the technological apparatus of totalitarianism. And it had no constructive results whatever.

The American Revolution, however, was not a revolution in either of these senses. It was successful through war, but its intentions were to secure peace and prosperity. It broke the political link with Britain, but it contained no programme of social or cultural transformation. Its novelty was at once more limited and more radical, for on the basis of English thinking about the rights of the subject, the rule of law and a limited government, it pronounced a doctrine that would be the basis of democracy.

On frequent occasions, especially when I have a speech to make in the United States, I take in my handbag a well-thumbed little yellow volume – a Bicentennial Keepsake Edition of the United States Constitution, given me by President George Bush Sr and signed by the members of the United States Supreme Court. In the introduction to it, the late Warren Burger, one of the great American judges and the nation’s longest-serving Chief Justice, notes: ‘The [US] Constitution represented not a grant of power from rulers to the people ruled – as with King John’s grant of the Magna Carta at Runnymede in 1215 – but a grant of power by the people to the government which they had created.’

And this really sums up what the American Revolution means to the world – and America to me.

These reflections lead me to certain conclusions about the conduct of international politics.

 America alone has the moral as well as the material capacity for world leadership

 America’s destiny is bound up with global expression of the values of freedom

 America’s closest allies, particularly her allies in the English-speaking world, must regard America’s mission as encompassing their own.