Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies Volume 1: Issue 2 Unions: Past – Present – Future AHRC Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies, University of Aberdeen JOURNAL OF IRISH AND SCOTTISH STUDIES Volume 1, Issue 2 Unions: Past – Present – Future Published by the AHRC Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen in association with The universities of the The Irish-Scottish Academic Initiative and The Stout Research Centre Irish-Scottish Studies Programme Victoria University of Wellington ISSN 1753-2396 Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies Issue Editors: Cairns Craig and Michael Brown Associate Editors: Stephen Dornan, Rosalyn Trigger, Paul Shanks Editorial Advisory Board: Fran Brearton, Queen’s University, Belfast Eleanor Bell, University of Strathclyde Ewen Cameron, University of Edinburgh Sean Connolly, Queen’s University, Belfast Patrick Crotty, University of Aberdeen David Dickson, Trinity College, Dublin T. M. Devine, University of Edinburgh David Dumville, University of Aberdeen Aaron Kelly, University of Edinburgh Edna Longley, Queen’s University, Belfast Peter Mackay, Queen’s University, Belfast Shane Alcobia-Murphy, University of Aberdeen Ian Campbell Ross, Trinity College, Dublin Graham Walker, Queen’s University, Belfast International Advisory Board: Don Akenson, Queen’s University, Kingston Tom Brooking, University of Otago Keith Dixon, Université Lumière Lyon 2 Luke Gibbons, Notre Dame Marjorie Howes, Boston College H. Gustav Klaus, University of Rostock Peter Kuch, University of Otago Graeme Morton, University of Guelph Brad Patterson, Victoria University, Wellington Matthew Wickman, Brigham Young David Wilson, University of Toronto The Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies is a peer reviewed journal, published twice yearly in September and March, by the AHRC Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen. An electronic reviews section is available on the AHRC Centre’s website at: http://www.abdn.ac.uk/riiss/issjournal.shtmll Editorial correspondence, including manuscripts for submission, should be addressed to The Editors,Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies, AHRC Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies, Humanity Manse, 19 College Bounds, University of Aberdeen, AB24 3UG or emailed to [email protected] Subscriptions and business correspondence should be address to The Administrator. Subscription information can be found on www.abdn.ac.uk/riiss/publications CONTENTS Editorial vii ‘Taphy-land Historians’ and the Union of England and Wales 1 1536 – 2007 Geraint Jenkins War of Words:Daniel Defoe and the 1707 Union 29 Anne M. McKimm James Arbuckle and the Anglo-Scottish Union of 1707 45 Richard Holmes Linguistic Choices: 59 Analysing Dialect Representation in Eighteenth-Century Irish and Scottish Literature in English Barbara Fennell The Move towards Written Standard English in Eighteenth- 71 Century North-East Scotland Janet Cruickshank Enunciating Difference: 85 Sydney Owenson’s (extra-)National Tale Aaron Clayton The ‘ethno-symbolic reconstuction’ of Scotland: Joanna 95 Baillie’s The Family Legend in Performance Penelope Cole ‘Steadfast supporters of the British connection’? Belfast 107 Presbyterians and the Act of Union, c. 1798 – 1840 Jonathan Wright Scotland is Britain: 127 The Union and Unionist-Nationalism, 1807 – 1907 Graeme Morton Emigrating from North Britain: 143 The Importance of Little Magazines in the Interwar Movement for Scottish Renewal Margery Palmer McCulloch ‘Curable Romantics’: Alistair Reid and Derek Mahon 157 Fran Brearton An Guth and the Leabhar Mór: 175 Dialogues between Scottish Gaelic and Irish Poetry Peter Mackay The New Linguistic Imperial Order: 189 English as a European Union lingua franca or lingua frankensteinia? Robert Phillipson Does the United Kingdom have a Language Policy? 205 John M. Kirk The Effect of United Kingdom Policy on the Irish Language 223 in the North of Ireland Janet Muller Unions and Language: 241 Irish in the European Union – A Personal Appraisal Dónall Ó Raigáin The Disintegration of the USSR: 251 A Complex Protracted Process Mary Buckley ‘An Unbreakable Union of Free Republics’ 265 Ronald J. Hill Regional Identity in the United States: The Southern Question 283 Quincy R. Lehr ‘1867 and all that’: 293 ‘Federalism’ and the Union in Britain and Canada James Kennedy The Idea of British North American Union 1854 – 1864 309 Ged Martin EDITORIAL When European communism collapsed in the late 1980s, many nations which had seemingly been ushered into historical oblivion in the previous century re-emerged to claim their places as sovereign nation-states. The resurgence of these old nations – and of an even greater number of old nationalisms – not only defied that ‘withering away’ of the nation which had been predicted by Marxism but defied, too, the assumptions of liberal western theorists who expected that the convergence brought about by economic ‘development’ would make ‘nationalism’, if not nations, irrelevant to a modern world sys- tem. The ‘new world order’ might revolve around the fact that the United States was the world’s only superpower, but the fragmenting of old states into new claimants to the status of nationhood (as in the territory of the former Yugoslavia) was capable of producing a disorder that not even a superpower could control. As a result, the nature of the nation and of nationalism was suddenly propelled to the forefront of a wide range of academic disciplines. The unexpected survival of nations and the unanticipated revival of national- isms demanded a better understanding of what the real nature and purpose of the nation might be in a world of ever closer economic integration and mutual interdependence. Insofar as they appeared in these debates, Ireland and Scotland played con- trasting roles: Ireland was a classic case of resistance to colonial oppression, mobilised in the name of a separate language, distinctive religious beliefs and an ancient culture; Scotland, on the hand, was what Tom Nairn dubbed a ‘neo- nationalism’, one based not on substantial cultural distinction – Scotland was almost entirely English-speaking, was traditionally protestant, and had a popu- lar national culture which was clearly a nineteenth-century fabrication – but on the perceived economic injustice of its current role within the UK economy: ‘it’s Scotland’s oil’. Ireland was a model for the colonial resistance movements which were to bring about the end of Empire; Scotland was a partner in impe- rial exploitation which had lost the economic benefit that Empire had brought it. There were paradoxes to both these views. In the Irish case, not only was nationalist Ireland an uncompleted project, part of whose territory still clung viii to Union with the rest of the United Kingdom, but the ancient language of the nation had never been restored as a common language of the people. Moreover, Ireland might have been an independent nation but it only reversed the haemorrhage of its population when it achieved economic prosperity through joining another Union, the European Union. This rejection and reac- ceptance of Union was even more striking in the case of Scottish nationalism, whose rise took place under the rubric of ‘Scotland in Europe’, of a nation- alism, in other words, which did not simply want to break the Union with England to be again a sovereign nation but wanted to do so in order immedi- ately to rejoin another Union of which it was, de facto, already a part. In this respect both Ireland and Scotland reflected the paradoxical situation of the newly independent nations of Eastern Europe which were aspirants to membership of a European Union whose founders had designed it pre- cisely to reduce and to constrain the power of the nation. Indeed, some in the older member states had come to fear that the EU would make the tradition- al nation-states of Europe redundant by taking decision-making away from national governments and moving it upwards to Brussels or downwards to ‘regions’. Given the failure of the Soviet Union, what did the history of politi- cal unions imply for the future of Europe? Was it to become a version of the American Union, a ‘United States of Europe’, or was there some other model by which its development, and its rapid enlargement, could be governed? 2007 was both the three hundredth anniversary of Scotland’s Union with England and the fiftieth anniversary of the Treaty of Rome which estab- lished the European Economic Community, and thus began the process of European Union. The issue of ‘Unions’ was therefore adopted as the theme of the 2007 Irish-Scottish Academic Initiative conference, held at the University of Aberdeen in September of that year. Many of the papers in this issue of the Irish Scottish Studies Journal derive from that conference and address politi- cal and cultural issues in a wide range of historical and continuing Unions. That the month of the three hundredth anniversary of the UK Union was the very one in which an SNP government for the first time ever took charge in Scotland only added to the urgency of understanding what Union, both in Britain and Europe, had meant in the past and might mean in the future. Cairns Craig Aberdeen, September 2008 ‘Taphy-land historians’ and the Union of England and Wales 1536 – 2007 Geraint H. Jenkins The night winds shake the tall trees above the hillside graves; Awake them not, O night winds, awake them not to-night; Let them not know our crazier, sorrier plight; O night winds, do not murmur to our fathers in their graves.1 These lines figure