Acts of Union and Disunion
What has held the UK together – and what is dividing it?
Linda Colley
Having read it
★★★★☆
A book that gets across good historical nuggets and political points, mostly of, but also around, the isles north-western of continental Europe in a way that engages and allows the reader to appreciate the abilities, weight of traditions, languages and also arrogance somewhat of Anglo-Saxon connections about who knows best, sort of trying to work together, historical legacies and a monarchy that sort of holds bits of it together.
It was published in 2014 – an era of possible Scottish independence and then the UK’s referendum about being part of the EU – so, in hindsight and with regard to those particular points it’s a tiny bit detached. However, it still makes for a good read with its short chapters that get across many parts of the UK’s union (and its disunion) making for a still relevant, insightful and short book.
From finishing The Celts by Simon Jenkins (who in fact references this book in his book!) I was thinking about constitutions and eventually wrote this paragraph for its review:
Writing down a UK constitution – regulating it as well as nurturing and developing it where relevant, helpful and necessary – would be a good start (as well as decentralising power from Westminster), wouldn’t it?
But, on reaching the last part of Acts of Union and Disunion, it seemed much more suitable here.
As life is full of interconnections and the books talked about here share that noun over a few views and historical points, it was pleasing to see my interpretation of some contemporary matters made clear in this still relevant set of essays from 2014 (and first, or sort of as well as, a BBC Radio 4 programme of the time). Hence why these sort of closing words from Linda Colley feel relevant to show and end my review of her book with:
As the late Lord Scarman, a distinguished English Law Lord and human rights activist, once remarked: Britain’s constitution is not so much unwritten, as hidden amidst a mass of legal precedents and political conventions, and is therefore difficult for anyone except experts to access and understand. In order to function effectively, this system requires that so-called ordinary people have trust in their politicians, judges, lawyers, and civil servants to know what the British constitution actually is, and to implement it correctly. Citizens in the UK cannot purchase a copy of the British constitution in a bookshop, or call it up online, or borrow it from a library, and check out its content for themselves.
[...]
The fact that written constitutions can potentially make the workings of government more widely accessible and transparent is one of the strongest arguments in their favour. One has to be careful, of course. Camelot does not exist in real life. There is no perfect political system. And even the most distinguished written constitutions can get out of date or work badly: witness the political shenanigans and deadlock in Washington DC during the federal government shutdown in October 2013. But, given that the United Kingdom’s government is now so much more complex than in [James] Bryce’s day [late nineteenth century and early twentieth century], that its population is much larger and more diverse, and that deference of the sort he took for granted now barely exists, it is worth considering whether a new constitutional order might contribute to addressing some of the fault-lines in these islands.
[...]
A written constitution is not a magic bullet. All depends on its content and implementation and on its regular revision. But, if the Union is to continue, creating one could prove invaluable, for different reasons and across the political spectrum. Eurosceptics, for instance, might well find it reassuring to entrench the distinctive workings of the UK’s governments and rights in a codified constitution.
And as well as serving to entrench and communicate citizen rights and the workings of a devolved political system, a new constitution might supply some fresh constitutive stories for a new kind of Union. As we have seen, many of the old sustaining stories and shibboleths – Protestantism, empire, and sagas of the sea – are played out. Inventing a new constitution for a revised Union, with a preamble setting out what this involved and what were its aspirations, would be challenging, but other polities in the past have risen to comparable challenges. I am reminded of the words of a shrewd Canadian observer of the United Kingdom at the close of the nineteenth century. He took note of the ‘pessimism which sees danger in every new form of political evolution; the repugnance to change in an old country with forms of government more or less fixed’. The United Kingdom is not all that old in fact, but this man’s conclusion still seems an apt one: ‘A policy of drift will never result in united strength.’
Quite so.
A good passage
[...] while liberty has provided a broadly accessible and multiform master narrative whereby varieties of Britons over the centuries have been able to tell and organise stories about themselves and their state, the political repercussions of this have been decidedly mixed. At one level, radicals and reformers in these islands have often invoked ancient liberties, real and imagined, in order to campaign for new freedoms. At another level, references to the country’s proud heritage of freedom have frequently been drawn on to characterise and legitimise British interventions overseas. In addition, a cult of superior British liberty has often been deployed to uphold and maintain the political status quo at home.
A second good passage
Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the idea that the monarchy was integral to Britain’s providential destiny and prosperity ceased to be identified so powerfully with Protestants, and was strengthened by the course of events. In harsh reality, the British monarchy has been the beneficiary of successive global crises that were almost entirely outside its control. Had the United Kingdom been defeated and/or invaded during the Napoleonic Wars before 1815, or had it been overwhelmed in the First World War or the Second, then monarchy here – as in many other parts of Europe – might well have collapsed or been irredeemably tarnished. As it was, victory in all three of these massive conflicts helped to secure the monarchy’s existence, and bestowed on it a kind of superstitious attraction and charisma.
A third good passage
The British Isles are situated on the outer edge of Europe, and they are (multiple) islands ‘contradistinguished from [the] Continent’, as the Encyclopaedia Britannica put it in 1797, a year of war with France. As this remark suggests, geographical separation from Continental Europe has exerted a strong influence on how Britain and (sometimes) Ireland have been imagined by their respective inhabitants, but not invariably so, and not straightforwardly. At intervals, as we’ve seen, these islands were politically linked to parts of Continental Europe, and ruled by monarchs who viewed their position very much in European terms. And, while the sea could deter invasions and operate as a psychological barrier, it was also a highway and a bridge. It was not just money and culture that rendered elite Britons such incorrigible European Grand Tourists in the eighteenth century. Nor was it simply politics that made London such a haven for Continental exiles in the nineteenth. In both cases, the seas around these islands and the easy transport they afforded aided European-wide contacts and exchanges.
Such connections did not, of course, prevent the British state from regularly going to war with particular Continental European powers. But it usually did so only in alliance with other European powers, a point that is underlined by some of the most conspicuous, so-called British victories. The Duke of Marlborough won the Battle of Blenheim in 1704 only because he could draw on Austrian, Dutch and German regiments as well as British troops. The British fought the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 with the help of Russia, Sweden, Austria, Spain, Portugal and other Continental states. Without its Prussian allies, especially, Britain might conceivably have lost. And if – as some historians maintain – Bletchley Park’s code-breaking work was the UK’s most significant contribution to Allied victory in the Second World War, then this too was something of a pan-European achievement. It was mathematicians and wireless intercept stations in Poland that first began breaking the Germans’ Enigma ciphers in the early 193os, information that the Poles subsequently and generously passed on to the British and French.
Moreover, while the multiple divisions that have always characterised Europe often resulted in conflict, such hostilities did not preclude a strong sense of the collective superiority and distinctiveness of European civilisation. Until the Second World War, and for some time after, most educated English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish individuals seem to have shared a flattering conviction of the primacy of European culture of which they were a part.
[...]
Even though the commercial heft of the European Union is formidable, post-war Europe as a whole has experienced a decline in terms of hard power and global clout. Given its evident weakness in regard to some regions of the world, and its own increasing cultural and ethnic diversity, invocations of Europe’s supreme civilisational distinctiveness have come to seem ever more inappropriate and offensive. Connected by the web and social networks to the entire world, young people especially are now less likely than earlier generations to see Europe as a uniquely exciting place, or as a compelling political cause and ideal. In the late 1940s a Scottish Conservative MP and lawyer, Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe, devoted enormous effort to drafting what became the European Convention on Human Rights. He did so in part because, having acted as prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, he knew what damage Europeans could inflict on each other, and was eager to help create a new Europe that might work together decently and in peace. Now that much of Europe has been peaceful for almost seventy years, this type of commitment and vision has become scarce. Dangerously so, since protracted European peace is historically a rarity and cannot be taken for granted.
But while relative decline and a measure of apathy and disenchantment are Europe-wide phenomena, rejection of the idea of Europe as a political project has often seemed particularly noisy and explicit in parts of the United King-dom. As I have been suggesting, it is inappropriate to claim that people in these islands have somehow always felt detached from ‘Europe’. The level and quality of negativity existing now in some areas are relatively recent phenomena.
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[...] Could it be that, at the root of some of the Euroscepticism which seems so evident in parts of these islands, there is actually a more unfocused uncertainty about identity at home? According to some recent surveys, Euroscepticism in the United Kingdom is most rooted in England, and – within that country – it is strongest among those who call themselves English, not British. Can it be entirely a coincidence that the only national grouping in the UK that lacks its own separate parliament or assembly – namely, the English – is also, apparently, the one that is most likely to express alienation from the European Union?