Bye-bye Britain? Devolution and the United Kingdom

Recent changes to the constitutional structure of the United Kingdom have the potential to profoundly alter Great Britain's future. A signal development is the 1999 signing of the Belfast Agreement, which re-established a devolved parliament in Northern Ireland. Together with the new Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly, this accord is a milestone in the process of decentralizing the British state. In his campaign for election as prime minister, New Labour leader Tony Blair boldly promised to create regional governments for Britain. The constitutional changes enacted under his leadership now suggest the outlines of a federal state. Taken together, the new Scottish and Welsh institutions, the hard-fought settlement in Northern Ireland, fledgling development authorities for the English regions, and an elected mayor for London, all point in this direction. While the process has thus far been orchestrated by the governing Labour Party, there is also a possibility that national independence movements could split the country into separate nations, or into a confederation of semi-sovereign nations.

The changing balance of power in the British Isles is particularly significant when viewed within the context of the European Union. Traditionally a highly centralized state, Britain has thus far resisted the process of European integration. Now, however, it may be transforming itself into a more typically European actor: as a federal state with a plurality of regional interests, or as a British Isles confederation of sovereign states, the United Kingdom may more willingly and fully integrate into the European Union. This paper discusses the historical, economic, and political factors that will influence the outcome.

Northern Ireland: Elements of the Problem

The recent devolution of power to Northern Ireland, if successful, marks the end of the longest chapter in Britain's colonial history. Britain has embraced the Belfast Agreement as a welcome avenue of disengagement from Irish commitments stemming from its earliest acts of colonization. ¹

English presence in Ireland dates back at least to the twelfth century, when competing Irish clans first perceived the English settlers as a threat to their own territorial aspirations. A limited English presence continued around Dublin for the next four centuries, until military expeditions during the reign of Queen Elizabeth extended English control to most of the island. The Catholic clans of the northern province of Ulster held out against the English armies until the colonists' ascendancy was finally established in 1690 at the Battle of the Boyne, which has remained a Protestant and Unionist rallying cry ever since. The "Irish problem" of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries thus finds its roots in the seventeenth century Plantation of Ulster, a state-sponsored program of colonization that confiscated land from the conquered Irish and granted it to settlers from Scotland and England, most of whom where Protestant. Thus began an uneasy and unequal cohabitation of communities who perceived their differences in religious, cultural, and territorial terms. ²

The United Kingdom came into existence in 1801, just after the 1800 Act of Union that bound Ireland to Britain and abolished the Irish Parliament and government. Scotland had been drawn into the fold almost a century before. Scottish union deprived Scotland of its independence and parliament in 1707, but brought significant commercial advantages from membership in the mercantilist empire system while leaving the institutions of Scottish law and religion intact. These institutions later provided the basis for a cohesive Scottish nationalist movement in the twentieth century.

Rising Irish nationalism in the nineteenth century made Ireland an obstreperous member of the United Kingdom. Public debate revolved around the need to pacify increasing tensions. One popular and controversial solution was Home Rule, which had an advocate at the highest level in Liberal Prime Minister William Gladstone. His vision for Ireland was one of a united Ireland enjoying Home Rule within the United Kingdom. ³ Correspondingly, he viewed Ulster's Protestants not as a majority within the North, but as a minority population of the island as a whole.

Because...