The most troublesome bits of the United Kingdom are once again showing signs of disuniting. In Scotland, the SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon is demanding a second independence referendum on the grounds that, contrary to the English, the Scots voted to remain in the EU by 62 per cent to 38 per cent. In Northern Ireland, a surge by Sinn Fein to within one seat of the Democratic Unionists after a divisive assembly election has revived the spectre of a united Ireland, now given further rhetorical push by the jubilant nationalists on the grounds that the province also voted to remain.
It is a curiosity that the SNP and Sinn Fein want to leave the UK in order to remain in Europe. In other words, they want to reclaim powers from Westminster in order to surrender them to Brussels.
Of course they don’t see it like that. The EU, which concentrates power in Brussels while reducing nations to the status of provinces, is conversely regarded by weak nations and provinces as a way of boosting their status and income.
Scottish nationalism and Irish republicanism are cultural phenomena rooted in romanticism and myth and hatred of the other in the form of the English or the Protestants.
Nevertheless, the genie of national identity is now out of the bottle. Trans-nationalism, or the drive to erode the autonomy of nations, has been stopped in its tracks by British voters. This raises some complicated questions.
Brexit expresses the desire for independent self-government by a sovereign state based on the history, institutions and cultural ties that constitute a nation. Great Britain, though, is a confederation of three ancient nations: England, Wales and Scotland. The UK is a super-confederation of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
If national aspirations are now validated for the UK, what about the national aspirations of its constituent parts? Do all national identities have equal status? What happens when one is in direct competition with another? Scotland says it is a nation. Republicans in Northern Ireland say Britain dismembered their nation which they want to unify again. Are these claims to national identity valid? If so, where does that leave the UK?
The historians Linda Colley and Benedict Anderson famously declared the nation to be no more than an artificial construct or “imagined community.” In this post-modern formulation, the nation could therefore arbitrarily be either declared or dissolved. The nation is not, however, artificial or imagined. It is solidly rooted in a group of people united by different things at different times: geography, language, law, religion, ethnicity, history, institutions, culture.
The UK is an extraordinarily complex web of identities: civic, ethnic, cultural, national. As the historian Jonathan Clark wrote in his book Our Shadowed Present: “Britain was not invented; it developed.”
The pattern of this development has been “the resilience of a diverse and plural system of identities”. Englishness, however, came to stand proxy for all the communities of the British Isles. Even Edmund Burke, although a loyal Irishman, wrote of himself as an Englishman rather than describing himself as British.
“Scotland has no right to rip the UK asunder if it wants to secede
The Scots developed over time the characteristics of a nation: a distinct language, religion, legal system and so on. The UK was formed in 1707 by the union of two distinct kingdoms, England and Scotland.
Kingship matters because monarchs unify tribes into a nation. Wales was subsumed into the English legal system by Henry VIII and so lost its separate identity except for residual ties to the Welsh language.
Northern Ireland is different again. The Unionists hate this being said but they are not British. They’re the bit that got tacked on to Great Britain to make the UK.
Does that mean Westminster should tear up the Good Friday agreement and bid farewell to Northern Ireland? No, because it has an obligation to the Unionists; and because the claim to unite Ireland is tenuous since Ireland itself has a tenuous claim to nationhood, having seceded from Britain as the Irish Free State only in 1922.
Britain, by contrast, is an authentic unitary nation. It didn’t begin with the union with Scotland but as the British Isles, an island nation defending itself (or not) against invaders from across the seas. Throughout its history, it was beset by attempts at secession by tribes across Hadrian’s Wall and across the Irish Sea.
The prime minister’s speech to the Scottish Conservatives last week was said to have attacked the SNP for wanting to do to Britain precisely what Mrs May was doing to Europe: seceding on the grounds of independence. The comparison, however, is spurious.
Britain is a nation with the right to rule itself. It is the EU which is the artificial construct, the imagined community that falsely claims for itself the hollow appurtenances of a nation. The EU therefore has no prior claim on its constituent nations which are under no obligation to remain. By contrast, the United Kingdom is a nation which is governed in accordance with its name. Scotland has no right to rip it asunder if it wants to secede from the Union (which in any event is highly doubtful).
Faced with the contemporary resurgence of regional or tribal uprisings, it’s the ancient British Isles that must hold itself together to take its place once again as a sovereign nation in the wider world.
