The Disunited Kingdom

In his much-acclaimed recent book "The Wealth and Poverty of Nations," David Landes speculates about why Britain led the world into the industrial revolution:

Britain had the early advantage of being a nation. By that I mean not simply the realm of a ruler, not simply a state or political entity, but a self-conscious, self-aware unit characterized by common identity and loyalty. ¹

Landes' conclusion will be familiar to many people in Britain. It is a commonplace in Britain to argue that the country is set apart from many of its European neighbours, because it has a much longer and more settled history as a political and geographic unit. Germany and Italy, for example, were only unified in the nineteenth century. Even France has seen its boundaries contract and expand with the changing fortunes of war. Britain by contrast has "a thousand years of history" behind it, to use the phrase of John Major, Tony Blair's predecessor as prime minister.

Major's proclamation has a ringing tone to it. But in modern Britain, it rings increasingly hollow. For Major is English and he was committing a common English mistake--to confuse England, which contains 86 percent of the population of the United Kingdom, with the country as a whole. England arguably has roughly 1,000 years of political continuity behind it--the last successful foreign invasion was led by the Normans in 1066. But Britain is a much more recent construct. Wales was legally unified with England in the 1500s, and Scotland only became part of Britain in 1707 when the Act of Union was passed. Northern Ireland is, formally speaking, not even part of Britain but is instead part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. In fact, this very confusion of names with England, Britain and the United Kingdom often used interchangeably in popular parlance, but in fact covering different geographical areas, reflects the continuing confusion surrounding national identity.

The relatively recent and fissile nature of the United Kingdom has already been demonstrated once in the last hundred years. Ireland, which had been an unhappy part of the union since 1801, broke away and became independent in 1921. The dominant question for the United Kingdom over the next twenty years will be whether this process of break up has further to run. Will Scotland become independent? Will Northern Ireland eventually join a united Ireland? Might even Wales make the break with England, after almost five hundred years of political union?

These questions have been raised in large part by the political changes initiated by the Blair government. Over the past year, Scotland has been given its first Parliament in almost three hundred years and Wales has been granted its own assembly. After the many stops and starts of the peace process, Northern Ireland too has set up its own assembly, as well as formal administrative links to the Republic of Ireland--links which are quite deliberately intended to blur the absolute nature of British sovereignty.

Many British intellectuals now argue that a process has been set in motion that will expose the essentially transient nature of the British nation. Historians, who in the nineteenth century did a great deal to glorify the notion of a God-given British identity (the so-called "Whig interpretation of history") are now leading the way in the deconstruction of national identity. A book by Linda Colley, published in 1992, was entitled Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837. The pun around "forging" is entirely intended for Colley's analysis that Britain, as opposed to England, was always a relatively fragile construct. The creation of Britain was essentially an economic bargain between the Scots and the English. In particular, the loyalty of Scots was won in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries because the expanding British empire offered the Scottish a compelling argument for a union with England. However, Colley argues that the historic basis for Britain has now been eroded:

The factors that provided for the forging...