Farewell Britannia: Break-up or new union?

New Left Review

Volumn , Issue 7, 2001, Pages 55-72

  Nairn, Tom ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0040927951     PISSN: 00286060     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (9)

1. Based on a talk given for the Barry Amiel and Norman Melburn Trust at the London School of Economics in May 2000. I take this chance of expressing my gratitude to the Trust for the opportunity to give their annual lecture. I have added some remarks in reply to the two critiques of my book After Britain, by J. G. A. Pocock and Francis Mulhern, which appeared in NLR 5, Sep-Oct 2000.
2. England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales, as one used to recite them in the schoolroom. There were at least seven, in fact; but at that time no-one bothered mentioning the Isle of Man, Jersey or Guernsey. And there were of course too few immigrants to qualify or upset the old map.
3. See Brendan O'Leary, 'The Nature of the British-Irish Agreement', in NLR 1/233, Jan-Feb 1999. Professor O'Leary has since then updated this very valuable account of the new system. As any reader can at once see, it describes a political universe utterly different from the conventional one of UK constitutional lore.
4. Although more 'original' here also means more 'normal', as Arend Lijphart points out in his recent panorama of the world's democratic constitutions, Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performances in Thirty-six Countries, New Haven, CT 1999. The Westminster 'model' is now effectively confined, Lijphart notes (without undue sadness) to Westminster itself and the small island state of Barbados (pop. 250,000). Professor Pocock's New Zealand jumped ship in 1996.
5. The most useful background here is Tom Devine's recent book on the history of anti-Catholic ideas and agitation in Scotland, Scotland's Shame, Edinburgh 2000.
6. This much was unintentionally revealed in the late Donald Dewar's review of After Britain (Scotland on Sunday, 16 January 2000). The First Minister snapped in fatherly fashion at 'the air of unreality about this author's views ... Who, apart from him, believes that the British-Irish Council is "intended to profoundly modify, and possibly even to succeed the United Kingdom"?' Indeed, Mr Dewar was like most other Unionists in viewing all forms of devolution as shallow modifications designed to prop up the United Kingdom.
7. La communauté des citoyens: sur l'idée moderne de nation, Paris 1994, translated as Community of Citizens: on the Modern Idea of Nationality, New Brunswick & London 1998, preface by Daniel Bell.
8. La communauté des citoyens: sur l'idée moderne de nation, Paris 1994, translated as Community of Citizens: on the Modern Idea of Nationality, New Brunswick & London 1998, preface by Daniel Bell.
9. Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, Cambridge, MA 1992.