State and Nation in the United Kingdom by Michael Keating, Hardcover | Indigo Chapters

The United Kingdom has often been seen as a unitary nation-state. This book argues that it should be understood as a plurinational union in which they key elements of demos, telos, and ethos are contested. Except in the mid-twentieth century, its territorial boundaries have been contested and the matter of sovereignty has never definitely been settled. Since the end of the twentieth century, devolution to Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland has made this more apparent. With the weakening of theBritish national project, tensions between the centre and the peripheral nations have grown, greatly exacerbated by Brexit. Eurosceptics have long argued that membership of the European Union is inconsistent with the sovereignty of the British people and Parliament. On another reading, however, boththe UK and the EU are plurinational unions and highly compatible. The EU, indeed, served as an important external support system for the devolution settlement. Brexit destabilizes it. Unionism historically served as a set of doctrine and practices seeking to reconcile a unitary state with aplurinational reality. Since devolution, it has struggled to come to terms with the new constitution or ideas of shared sovereignty. The union is under increasing strain but there is no simple way of resolving these strains, either by secession of the component nations, or a return to the unitarystate. The peoples of these islands need to find constitutional thinking about how to live together in a world in which traditional ideas of national sovereignty have lost their relevance. | State and Nation in the United Kingdom by Michael Keating, Hardcover | Indigo Chapters