As hypothesis-testing goes, that strikes me as putting the cart before the horse. If they have a hypothesis for how the data should behave, then why are they not just fitting directly to their hypothesis?

If you then colour-code the points and find that the former Soviet Republics and the English-speaking countries form two distinct clusters in the sense that the within-group variance in the two-factor space is smaller than the between-group variance, then you have discovered something. Assuming that the two factors, together, explain a sufficiently high amount of the overall variance to begin with.

Most economists teach a theoretical framework that has been shown to be fundamentally useless. -- James K. Galbraith