Narratives of Belonging and Union Anne Crerar (University of Aberdeen)

Narratives of Belonging and Union Anne Crerar (University of Aberdeen) A review of Linda Colley, Acts of Union and Disunion: What has held the UK together - and what is dividing it? (London: Profile Books Ltd, 2014), ISBN 978-1781251850; Paperback, xiv+171pp; £8.99. Colin Kidd, Union and Unionisms: Political Thought in Scotland, 1500-2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), ISBN 978-0-521-70680-3; Paperback, ix+312pp; £19.99. Alvin Jackson, The Two Unions: Ireland, Scotland, and the Survival of the United Kingdom, 1707- 2007 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), ISBN 978-0-19-959399-6; Hardback, xv+467pp; £35. With only a matter of months until the referendum on Scottish independence and an increasingly tense debate taking shape in the public sphere, scholarship on union is in demand. A series of short talks commissioned by BBC Radio 4 in 2012 from Linda Colley form the basis of her latest publication, Acts of Union and Disunion . A leading historian of British identity, Colley maintains the professional historian should offer an alternative to the constant stream of media commentary and has woven the distant past into her essays which were broadcast in January 2014 (x). The possibility of a future referendum on UK withdrawal from the European Union also provided a starting point for this work. Accordingly Colley not only includes relations between England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland but transatlantic connections, links with mainland Europe and the configuration of the British Empire within the scope of Acts of Union and Disunion. Comments on the pressures of globalisation also feature, widening the scope of this work still further. A requirement of the commission was that Colley’s words would be ‘intermixed with snatches of music, poetry, diaries, biography, novels, drama and political speeches’ (ix). With consummate ease Colley introduces and deconstructs such source material offering thought-provoking historical perspective in a bid to provide answers to two questions; ‘What has held the UK together and what is dividing it?’ The essays are organised in three sections; a section on narratives of identity and belonging; a section on divisions, in which England, the English North/South Divide, Wales, Scotland and Ireland are considered in turn and a section on contexts, in which links with the wider world are discussed. Colley covers an impressive amount of ground within the tight constraints imposed by the broadcaster and displays expertise on the history of the British Empire throughout, although a couple of essays concerned with what is dividing the UK might have benefitted from closer attention to the more recent past. 1 The central thesis of Colley’s highly influential and justly acclaimed book Britons Forging the Nation 1707-1837 , first published in 1992, was that Protestantism, warfare and empire contributed to the formation of British national identity in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. A sense of Britishness developed in the context of recurrent warfare, particularly war against the French who were construed as the ‘other’. It drew heavily from the commercial and imperial success of Great Britain. She also notes that it co-existed with Welsh, English and Scottish cultural and national identities. Colley concluded that key pillars of British identity began to collapse in the latter half of the twentieth century. Protestantism was no longer central to identity. Warfare with continental Europe had come to an end. Britons found it increasingly difficult to maintain the conceit that they were superior to their continental neighbours or subject peoples. The days of commercial supremacy and imperial hegemony were long gone. A re-evaluation of Britishness appeared unavoidable. In this latest publication Colley revisits such ideas. Under the headings of islands, sea, liberty and monarchy Colley analyses concepts which have helped build a collective sense of identity and highlights some of the more problematic aspects and consequences of traditional narratives. The island motif has been used variously; to highlight England’s distinctiveness even though it is not actually an island, to assert a geographic imperative for union between Scotland and England, to promote the notion of a shared island history despite the diverse histories of the numerous islands which surround Great Britain, to propagate myths about a divinely ordained Protestant island which fed the sense of mission and racial arrogance within British imperialism (Acts of Union and Disunion , pp.14-18). A providential Protestant insularity was a narrative of belonging with which the Protestant Irish minority could identify, at the same time it marginalised Catholics (p. 17). In addition the sea has been seen as a protective barrier, something over which Britain exercised extensive mastery, a metaphor for Britain itself. A view which has been severely threatened by the steady erosion of British supremacy as a military and commercial power, undermined by mass air travel and the discovery of North Sea Oil which fuelled the debate over the economic viability of an independent Scotland (pp. 27-31). Colley traces the history of these ‘master narratives’ with apparently effortless aplomb while at the same time ensuring her audience face unpalatable truths about aspects of British identity, for example the ‘cult of superior British liberty’ which more often than not was used to provide arguments to invade the liberty of others abroad and ‘maintain the political status quo at home’ (pp. 38-40). To Colley then, the decline of master narratives has loosened bonds between the constituent parts of the United Kingdom; monarchy, alone has provided ‘a semblance of continuity where little really exists’ (p. 51). 2 This broad-brush approach has its drawbacks when it comes to a consideration of the factors dividing the UK. The essay on England includes the remark ‘It is striking that, in the 1990s, Wales and Northern Ireland were each accorded devolved national assemblies, and Scotland received its own Edinburgh parliament. England, however, was left to muddle along as before: not so much Cinderella, as the big sister whose reliability could be taken for granted’ (p. 61). Colley suggests that England lacks a forum solely devoted to its own affairs because politicians assume it is a cohesive political unit. This characterisation of the devolution settlement fails to scrutinise debates over the West Lothian Question and efforts to address the constitutional anomalies within the devolution settlement through English regional assemblies. Nor does it take account of the fact that London received an assembly at roughly the same time as devolution in Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland. The essay on Scotland also suffers from a lack of engagement with the recent past. Colley is keen to point out that historically unionism in Scotland was a form of nationalism and states that a different type of nationalism has arisen since the 1970s which inaccurately portrays Scotland as a colonised nation. Colley seems unwilling to delve further into the reasons for the emergence of a new type of nationalism other than attribute it to the decline of manufacturing industry and of narratives of belonging (p. 93). Acts of Union and Disunion bears comparison with other recent studies of union. Colley describes layers of British identity based on shared attitudes, institutions and endeavours. That being so, it becomes apparent from Colin Kidd’s Union and Unionisms: Political Thought in Scotland, 1500-2000 that unionism in Scotland has deep roots. Kidd sought to challenge attitudes towards unionism which have developed within Scottish historical and literary studies since the time of the Scottish literary Renaissance which preceded World War II (p. 2). Typical assumptions were that that Scottish unionism was somehow un-Scottish, a quisling ideology which subordinated Scottish interests to those of English paymasters. Kidd sees this as a caricature of unionism but one that was given greater credibility by Thatcherite unionism described as ‘a stridently unitarist conception of the British state which left little scope for the defence of Scottish particularity within the Union’ (p. 4). Unionism increasingly came to be seen as merely a willingness to do ‘Westminster’s bidding’ (p. 4). He warns that there has been a tendency to foreground nationalism within Scottish studies and pay insufficient attention to the unionism for long embedded in Scottish political culture thereby distorting our treatment of the past. Countering this tendency Kidd traces the origins and development of Scottish unionism through an analysis of debate from the juridical, ecclesiastical, constitutional, cultural and historical spheres. In seven detailed and eloquent chapters Kidd introduces and analyses a wide variety of unionisms in 3 Scottish political discourse. He begins by outlining problems in the historiography of unionism. Drawing from studies of nationalism he fashioned the term ‘banal unionism’ to describe the silences over union from the 1750s to the 1970s, when union was so generally accepted that it sparked little interest or comment (p. 24). To avoid confusion Kidd capitalises Unionism when referring to the political platform of the Scottish Unionist Association, a fusion of Scottish Conservatives and Liberal Unionists in 1912 who objected to Home Rule for Ireland and a were major force in Scottish politics in the first half of the twentieth century. Having prepared the way Kidd traces the emergence

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