Union and its Challengers in the United Kingdom

The United Kingdom was created over time without a clear plan. Creation of the state largely coincided with the creation of the Empire so that there was not a clear distinction between the two. The union preserved many of the elements of the pre-union component parts, but was kept together by the principle of unitary parliamentary sovereignty. Within the union, the distinct nationalities developed in the modern period and produced nationalist movements. Most of these aimed at devolution within the state, but some demanded separation. Management of these demands was a key task of statecraft in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the post-World War Two era, the nationalities question appeared to have gone away but it returned in the 1970s. Devolution settlements at the end of the twentieth century represented a move to stabilize the union on new terms.

The Millennium Settlement

Devolution to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland in 1999 was the culmination of over 100 years of intermittent debate about the territorial constitution. It aimed to reconcile the transfer of power to the peripheral nations with the maintenance of untrammelled sovereignty for the Westminster Parliament. This was achieved by allowing different interpretations of the settlement and leaving critical issues in abeyance. The settlement did not resolve the constitutional question. The devolution acts themselves were revised several times over their first twenty years. Wales which initially had a weaker form of devolution, moved towards the stronger Scottish model. The Northern Ireland settlement was punctuated by crises. The Scottish settlement was challenged by the independence referendum of 2014. There was no devolution for England, although an ill-specified ‘English question’ emerged.

Social Union

Unionists have defended the United Kingdom as a social or ‘sharing’ union in which resources are distributed according to need. It is true that income support payments and pensions are largely reserved and distributed across the union according to the same criteria. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are net beneficiaries. On the other hand, welfare has been detached from older understandings of social citizenship and ideas of the deserving and undeserving poor (strivers and skivers) have returned. Spending on devolved matters including health, education and social services is not equalized across the union. Instead, the Barnett Formula, based on historic spending levels and population-based adjustments, is used. Contrary to the claims of many unionists, there is no needs assessment underlying it, apart from a safeguard provision for Wales. The claim that the UK is a sharing union thus needs to be qualified.

Union at the Centre

The devolution settlement of 1999 introduced radical changes at the periphery but changed almost nothing at the centre. England remained subject directly to the Westminster Parliament and UK Government, so the system is asymmetrical. Intergovernmental relations are weakly institutionalized. While UK Governments have not systematically intervened in devolved matters, Whitehall departments are often insensitive to the effects of their decisions on Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. England is not represented in the constitutional settlement but an English level of politics and administration has emerged by subtraction of the devolved territories. An inchoate sense of dissatisfaction has crystalized around the issues of ‘English votes for English laws’ and the supposedly favourable treatment for Scotland I public expenditure. As long as the English Question is poorly specified, a more complete answer to it remains elusive.

Economic Union

Unionism has stressed the benefits of economic union but this is an elusive concept. The United Kingdom was formed as part of a wider imperial market, committed historically to global free trade, not as a national market. Only from the 1930s did a closed national market and national development strategy emerge. From the 1970s, the UK formed part of the wider European market. Policies for territorial cohesion were introduced in the 1930s and greatly expanded in the 1960s, but from the 1980s these were largely abandoned in favour of a laissez-faire approach. The UK now has some of the largest territorial disparities in Europe. The 1999 settlement devolved most of the regional development powers to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The recent re-commitment to regional development on the part of the UK Government has not been accompanied by measures on the scale of those deployed in the 1970s.

The Sovereignty Conundrum

There are two ways of understanding the UK constitution. The classic Diceyean view is that sovereignty lies with the monarch-in-parliament alone. This is a fact, which requires no historical or normative justification. The other interpretation is that there are multiple sources of legitimate authority, including those embedded in the original union settlements, conventions, European Union law (before Brexit), European human rights law, normative principles and the devolution settlements. According to the first interpretation, devolution means that Westminster has lent power to the devolved institutions but can take it back at any time. According to the second, devolution is a constitutional measure, introducing federal principles into the union. In ordinary times, these conflicting interpretations can coexist but at times of crisis they come into the open.

Nation States and Political Unions

A political union is a distinct form of polity. Unlike the nation-state, it does not require consensus on demos (the people), telos (purpose), ethos (common values) or the locus of sovereignty. At one time it was believed that unions would give way to nation-states in the process of modernization. In recent years, the concept of union has been revived, to refer both to plurinational states and to international bodies like the European Union. Thinking about sovereignty has been revised to encompass shared and divided sovereignty. Union has several dimensions, including political, social and economic, which do not necessarily coincide in space. Managing unions requires distinct forms of statecraft to balance centrifugal and centripetal tendencies.

The Future of Union

The UK Union is facing strong centrifugal pressures, especially in the wake of Brexit. This is not because fundamental political values differ among the constituent nations. It is rather that the UK is facing the same forces of spatial rescaling and pressures on the welfare state as other European states. This is refracted as a crisis of the territorial polity. Unionism, which was historically quite successful as a form of statecraft within Great Britain, has lost its touch. In seeking to combat the peripheral nationalisms, it has itself become a form of nationalism, with the idea of Britishness bearing too heavy a burden. The rival nationalisms of the periphery have not, for their part, forged a comprehensive counter-narrative of state and nation, so that the Union survives by default.

Between Two Unions

The devolution settlement of 1999 was introduced during UK membership of the European Union. The EU provided an external support system for it. Ideas of shared and divided sovereignty, on which the EU is (for many) based, complement similar interpretations of the United Kingdom as a union rather than a nation state. Like the UK, the EU has no fixed demos, telos, ethos or agreed locus of sovereignty; these are, rather, contested. The EU also provided for market integration through the internal market, obviating the need for internal market provisions in the devolution settlement. EU membership for both the UK and Ireland meant that the physical border could be dismantled. UK withdrawal from the EU therefore destabilizes the settlement, especially given the Remain majorities in Scotland and Northern Ireland. This has revived demands for Scottish independence and Irish reunification. There is a protocol allowing Northern Ireland to remain within the regulatory ambit of both the UK and the EU. A demand for similar provisions for Scotland was refused.

Union and Unionisms in the United Kingdom

Unionism is a complex set of doctrines with various strands. There is assimilative unionism; patriot unionism, which accepts the multinational nature of the UK but insists on Westminster supremacy; contractual unionism, which insists on the historic rights of the nations; and a smaller devolutionary unionism. After 1999, unionists almost all accepted the new dispensation and regrouped against the renewed secessionist demands. This neo-unionism has sought a set of normative and constitutional principles to underpin it, but this has proved elusive. Historic unionism did not have such a comprehensive doctrine but combined the different strands according to time and place. Nor are neo-unionists agreed on the place of the UK within Europe. Neo-unionism is thus reduced to caricaturing its opponents as parochial and backward-looking at a time when peripheral nationalism, by and large, has accepted Europe and the pooling of sovereignty, and is mostly socially progressive.