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Disunited Kingdom

Podcasts Jan 28, 2020 David Edgerton and Elmira Bayrasli

Will Brexit break up the United Kingdom? Historian David Edgerton says that the time has come to let go of the idea of a “British nation.”

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David Edgerton

David Edgerton is Professor of Modern British History at King's College London and the author of The Rise and Fall of the British Nation.

Elmira Bayrasli

Writing for PS since 2016
3 Commentaries

Elmira Bayrasli is the co-founder and CEO of Foreign Policy Interrupted and the author of From The Other Side of The World: Extraordinary Entrepreneurs, Unlikely Places.

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reachout andtouch Jan 29, 2020

This nonsense again. Scotland had its say, and no one talks about Catalunya, where those fighting for a democratic say in their future were arrested and imprisoned, and now have been rejected by the hypocrites in the European Parliament. But they don't speak English so PS and its readers don't care about them.
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j. von Hettlingen Jan 29, 2020

In his interview with Elmira Bayrasli, British historian David Edgerton believes Brexit is a necessary crisis and a useful lesson, because the potential breakup of the United Kingdom would let the fantasy of the “British nation” die. For four decades, the EU membership served as an adhesive that held a fragmenting UK together. Now Brexit is tearing it apart, and there will be consequences for Northern Ireland and Scotland, whose citizens overwhelmingly voted to remain in the 2016 EU referendum.
After Brexit, Northern Ireland (NI) will be outside the EU while the Republic of Ireland will remain inside. The UK and EU agreed this should not lead to new checks or controls on goods crossing the border between the two parts of Ireland. NI will continue to follow EU rules on agricultural and manufactured goods, while the rest of the UK will not. The whole of the UK will leave the EU's customs union but NI will continue to enforce the EU's customs code at its ports. This will mean some new checks and processes for goods moving between NI and other parts of the UK.
Boris Johnson’s plan to avoid a hard Irish border will create a border between NI and Britain for the first time in modern history. The unionists and loyalists in NI, who are dedicated to defending the “sanctity” of the UK, see it as an astonishing betrayal. Drawing NI into the same regulatory system as its southern neighbour poses a remarkable opportunity for the nationalists and republicans, who seek a united Ireland. In the December election NI elected more Irish nationalists to Britain's parliament than pro-British unionists, a first since the partition of Ireland in 1921.
Nationalists also won an overwhelming victory in Scotland, prompting calls for a second independence referendum. Scotland held an independence referendum in September 2014, with the No campaign winning 55% of the votes. But in the 2016 referendum the UK voted to leave the EU by 52%, while Scots voted to remain by 62%. The Scottish National Party (SNP) saw this as a "material change in circumstances" which would justify a second independence vote, because Scotland faced being taken out of the EU "against its will".
Scotland are not happy that Northern Ireland remains in the EU single market, while it has to leave. Nicola Sturgeon, the SNP leader, has already formally requested that the Scottish parliament be given powers to hold a second independence referendum, which Johnson has rejected, but he may not be able to block it forever.
The break-away of Scotland and Northern Ireland would leave England and Wales, a “mini-union,” which itself could break up under pressure from Welsh nationalists. Although the breakup will not be easy and pleasant, but it may be one of the few good things to come out of Brexit — not just for Scotland and Ireland but also, and perhaps especially, for England – according to Edgerton.
The unionists in NI could reconcile with the nationalists and look forward to having a bright future – a flourishing economy and a more liberal society – in Ireland. The Scots could finally forge their own destiny, forcing them to deal with challenges and face divisions in their own society, depriving them of an excuse to blame Westminister for their woes. An independent Scotland will gain its own political identity.
According to Edgerton. England would benefit too. The decaying British nationalism, a leftover from the 1970s, is now disrupting the union. Strong in England but weak elsewhere, with the exception of a handful of hard-core unionists in Northern Ireland, this British nationalism manifested itself in the calls for leaving the EU. The Brexiteers wrongly believe that independence from the EU will make the UK great again. More than three quarters of Tory Leavers in England would sacrifice the Union to see Britain exit the EU, according to a poll last year.
On its own England could finally be done with its delusions of grandeur. Fanciful beliefs about British importance in the world would crumble. England would be only around the eighth-largest economy in the world. And it would probably have to give up its nuclear weapons — the United Kingdom’s nuclear submarine base is in Scotland.
Edgerton says the idea of breaking up the union is not as outrageous as it might seem. The “United Kingdom” is neither ancient nor stable. Before 1945, “national” Irish, Welsh, Scottish and English identities were for many not local varieties of national Britishness but part of something much bigger: an imperial identity.
According to British World War II propaganda the UK was just one equal element of a British Commonwealth of Nations that, along with India and the colonies, made up “the British Empire.” It was the empire that fought the war, not the UK.
Brexit and the delusions of the grandeur that go with the UK are the politics of elderly Britons, of those who remember that brief experience of a united, national United Kingdom. The young people of England, like those in the rest of Britain, overwhelmingly supported remaining in the EU. They also understand they need to free themselves from the practices of Westminster and Whitehall, not Brussels, and from the self-defeating rage of the old. There is hope that they will take their country back to the EU one day.
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