At one time it was common to write about the United Kingdom as the fruit of a steady expansion of the English Crown into the neighbouring territories. The subsequent politics of the resulting state was a matter of centre and periphery with all roads leading to London. Distinct histories of the smaller nations existed but strictly for local consumption.
From the 1970s historians began to question this model, taking instead an ‘islands’ approach examining the linked histories of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Since devolution to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland quarter of a century ago, matters have become more complicated. Once we include the Republic of Ireland, an independent state but with a role in Northern Ireland and links to the other nations, it is even more so.
Indeed, we even lack an agreed vocabulary. The word ‘Ireland’ officially applies to the 26 counties of the Republic but sometimes it refers to the island of Ireland. To cover Britain and both parts of Ireland we are reduced to phrases such as ‘these islands’ where a stranger might be at a loss to understand which islands we mean. The expression ‘four nations’ is used in United Kingdom politics but Northern Ireland is not actually a nation. It is geographically part of Ireland but contested between two national communities. It used to be known as a province but the historic Province of Ulster covers a wider territory.
This semantic confusion is one reason why there are so few genuinely comparative studies of the national question across these islands. For our new book Political Change across Britain and Ireland[1] we assembled a group of scholars on either side of the Irish Sea to examine some aspects of the existing and emerging relationships. National identities in Scotland and Ireland cannot be compared using the same scales but our authors instead work with ‘grammars of identity’ to put the two cases within a common problematic. The result takes us a long way from any idea of fixed identities and rigid boundaries.
Evolving Union
The union of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a complex asymmetrical polity not reducible to the usual categories of statehood. This does not mean that it must remain a mystery beyond analysis; it just means we need new vocabulary and concepts. There is not an English nationalism if by that we mean something directly comparable to the nationalisms of Scotland Ireland and Wales but there is an emerging English national question concerning England’s place in the union.
The classical view of the British constitution is the ‘Westminster doctrine’ of the absolute sovereignty of the Monarch-in-Parliament. This has always been contested in the smaller nations and is an ever-more inadequate way of exploring power dynamics or forging a constitutional consensus. Yet British governments have doubled down on the doctrine even as it becomes less intellectually coherent or democratically defensible. Where once the United Kingdom was on the road to becoming a plurinational quasi federal order embedded in a broader supranational European Union, recent governments have sought to turn back to a unitary state that never really existed. Yet if sovereignty and independence are problematic concepts for British unionists, the same is true over their nationalist opponents.
Nationalism is a powerful force although it is never found on its own but is woven into other social identities including class, gender and left-right politics. One chapter in our book looks at the intersection between nation and gender. Another makes the unusual comparison between the Conservative Party and Sinn Féin. Both are nationalist parties where the nation is contested and they compete also on left-right alignments that themselves are complex and territorially differentiated. Parties that have long taken the union for granted now have to think it through including, for the first time, England as a component nation rather than just the centre. Used to dealing with the individual nations on a hub and spoke basis, they have failed to create a vision of the whole.
Several chapters chart the new relationships emerging across the sovereign and devolved polities and within England. Big things are happening but, in the midst of change, their shape and significance has yet to become clear. To paraphrase Gramsci, the old order is dying but the new one struggles to be born.
First published by the Centre on Constitutional Change
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