Its not a new idea, and there are good reasons why the Balkanisation (total break-up) of the United Kingdom is an idea that causes alarm; just look what *happened* in the Balkans when Yugoslavia broke up in the early-1990s. Endless war, constant political and civil turmoil, mass murder, near-genocide. You could argue, Well yes, but that was a country made up of different ethnic groups with a volatile history of tensions between each other. Given that the UK is made up of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and given the centuries of blood-soaked relations between the four nations when acting independently of each other, I have to ask, Whats the fornicating difference? I cant see one. While I do support Scottish independence, it is more for reasons of supporting greater localised Government than for obsolete notions about national identity. The total break-up of the UK could have terrible consequences, and there are doubts as to whether the likes of Wales could survive on its own. Taking this even further though, the sleeping tensions in the UK arent just those of former nations, but of regions as well. England for instance is made up of Anglian lands, the Cornish in the south-west, Viking peoples in the north-east. England only ever came into being due to an uneasy alliance between these peoples after they had spent centuries fighting each other, and even today, there are tensions between different English regions; Merseyside is ignorantly shunned by much of the rest of England, the West Country is regarded as the English version of the US Deep South, and so on. Equally, Scotland was a union of three warring kingdoms - Strathclyde, Pictland and Dalriada. Regional prejudices, especially rivalry between Glasgow and Edinburgh, as well as sectarian hostility between Catholic and Protestant, remain an issue there today. Wales too is a fusion of smaller kingdoms that fought each other as much as they fought the English. Restore the status quo of the medieval era, and who is to say that the break up of the UK cant lead to a further break-up of the four smaller countries that it is made up of? After all, what we call England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are no more real or default than the UK itself. All five are just labels given to a national grouping formed from a smaller set of kingdoms that preceded them. Walk these islands in the sixth century, and you would find no one who would know what you were on about when you talked of England or Scotland, as neither had even been thought of yet. There was Britannia in the south and there was Caledonia in the north, and neither of these were real or default either, as these too had succeeded a previous established order. Re-assert the divisions of the past on national or ethnic lines instead of on practical ones, and there is a danger of gradually re-creating the old tensions as well. The history of England and Scotland as separate entities is a bloody one indeed*, and dividing them off from each other again needs to be done for the right reasons, or not at all. The right reasons are if it is in the interests of the country withdrawing from the union (and it is). Just because, Its the way it used to be and Theyre not the same country are *not* the right reasons. (*And by no means was Scotland a particularly innocent party in that history - as a whole, Scottish armies invaded England slightly *more* frequently than vice versa, Malcolm III being a particularly savage and incessant butcher of Anglo-Saxons in the borderlands around the time of the Norman Conquest, and during the 12th Century the Scots even conquered and annexed large stretches of Cumbria and Lancashire while England was being torn apart by a Norman civil war.)
Posted on: Sat, 12 Jul 2014 22:33:35 +0000
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