Irish nationalists and unionists badly need to understand what is happening to the United Kingdom after Brexit if they are to navigate their way towards a better set of relationships on this island. So do the growing numbers in Northern Ireland and the Republic who accept neither designation, and the point applies as much to citizens as to policymakers.
We are living through a potentially momentous set of changes in which Ireland and Britain are exposed to similar shocks and strains. The fractured union of Michael Keating’s subtitle will affect both islands, whether it is able to heal itself by reform and statecraft or breaks up into an England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales, all requiring new relations with each other.
This book is a really good place to stimulate and encourage such an understanding. Keating is a political scientist who has previously extensively researched the role of nationalisms in Scotland, Catalonia and Quebec in a comparative and historical context. His study is informed by a deep knowledge of European integration and its effects on EU member states.
Unusually, too, he approaches the task of analysing where the UK is going with a deep understanding of Ireland’s historical and comparative contribution to British developments. That shows up especially in his treatment of devolution and its home rule antecedents from the 1880s, including the spectacularly different story of Irish secession Keating also identifies clearly.
The book is thematic rather than chronological, and analytical rather than prescriptive, as befits Keating’s discipline. He uses a number of theoretical ideas to bring order to his account. His central case is that the UK should be understood as a union rather than a unitary state.
As he puts it: “The principle of union, properly understood, precludes a single, consistent narrative about the constituent people (demos), its historic trajectory and purpose (telos) and its special values (ethos). Unions are sites of contested sovereignty and borders. Unionism has consequently taken different forms, has often been unstated or ‘banal’ and has had to articulate itself explicitly only at critical moments. At other times, it is better understood as political practice or statecraft.”
Keating’s previous work on sub-state nationalisms has given him a well-deserved reputation for emphasising plural identities, the rescaling of state sovereignty and borders in a period of Europeanisation and globalisation and the ways they affect a changing UK. These insights are brought to bear in his survey of nation states and political union challengers in the UK. There is a central focus on the “millennium settlement” under Tony Blair’s New Labour, which brought devolution all round to the UK in the late 1990s. Typically though, this was asymmetrical – different in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales – and it left final authority unabridged in London.
Such a dual sovereignty conundrum, based on absolute parliamentary sovereignty, is an abiding feature of UK governance and a recurrent theme of the book. Keating says it is basically a tawdry and tautological intellectual construct, which does not survive systematic comparative criticism. Devolution provides for self-rule but falls far short of the necessary accompanying shared rule between centre and periphery characteristic of federal systems.
EU framework
That devolution happened while the UK was in the EU was taken for granted at the time and typically understated. EU membership provided the framework for greater UK economic integration as well as for integration across the Irish Border. The importance of both is underscored in retrospect, after Brexit, and reinforced by the hard version of it espoused by Boris Johnson’s government. Thus the 2020 UK Internal Market Bill systematically unpicks many of the policy competences devolved to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, enabling London to recast devolution; but it simultaneously deepens their growing disenchantment with the union.
Keating tracks this assertive Conservative “neo-unionism” through his accounts of the UK’s economic and social unions. In a masterly overview of public opinion polling and surveys, he revisits its notional demos, telos and ethos, strongly cautioning readers against making facile links between expressed identities and support for secessions. Identities are so mixed between nationalities and Britishness that such support depends crucially as well on the supply of political solutions in response to demands for change. That leaves space for revised sovereignty settlements as well as for break-up.
Ironically, by making Britishness more assertively unitary – in fact more nationalist – Johnson’s Brexiteers undermine the union. Their centralism is exposed when they criticise EU federalism for the same reason but say it would break up the UK. In that they fail to understand how good a fit in practice and in statecraft EU membership was for a changing UK.
