The interconnection of two issues: Scottish independence and Euroscepticism.
These debates are about how we practice and interpret democracy, about the power of open debate and challenging and holding to account of elites and concentrations of power. They are also occurring in the context of the reassertion of ‘the national interest’ – from Berlin and London to Athens and Edinburgh – and the disruptive power and collective irrationality of markets.
The British state has never fully understood the nature of the United Kingdom, that it is a state of several unions, and a supposed equal partnership between Scotland and England based on shared sovereignty. The old potent accounts of Tory unionism and to a lesser extent Labour unionism, which implicitly understood this have been reduced to threadbare, unconvincing accounts (16). This leaves us with a set of multiple, connected crises. How will the British political classes deal with the challenge of Scottish independence and statehood; and how will the problematic relationship of parts of Westminster to the notion of sharing sovereignty in the European Union be resolved?
A more loose European union is the dream of Westminster sovereigntists. More likely, however, is a major integration in the euro-core, which will pose a huge challenge to the UK. Such a union may also prove more hospitable to a Scottish nationalist movement that has shown itself comfortable with sharing sovereignty. Indeed, similarities may begin to emerge over the next few years in where the European Union and British union evolve to – as the ‘ever closer union’ envisaged in the Treaty of Rome comes to pass with a euro-core but stops short of a European unitary superstate, while the British state slowly departs from the last vestiges of a unitary nature and becomes an even looser union.
The idea of absolute sovereignty held and exercised by the British state is now enduring fundamental crisis and decay. These are the twilight days of the British state.