Modern states are fragile in the face of local nationalism

[Jefferson23]

World View: It is striking how little political resistance has been offered to the break-up of the Union

Sunday May 10, 2015

I have spent most of my working life writing about countries where communal or nationalist differences determine and, on occasion, convulse the political landscape. My first experience of this was at Queen’s University Belfast, where I was writing a PhD on the Irish Home Rulers in Ulster pre-Irish independence, during the worst years of the troubles in Northern Ireland between 1972 and 1975. I moved on to Lebanon at the beginning of the civil war, and later reported on the Soviet Union before and after it broke up. I first went to Iraq in 1977 and over the following decades have watched it torn apart by communal conflicts stoked by foreign intervention.

Knowing these countries has given me a strong sense of the fragility of nation states when confronted by strongly rooted local nationalisms. The glue holding together nations is always a mixture of myth and self-interest which tends to become ossified and discredited over time. At the height of British imperial power in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the Scots were part of a British super-nationality that acted as the ruling caste of the empire. Working class solidarity within an industrial economy fostered a sense of British identity, as did loyalty to national institutions, industries, utilities and infrastructure, from the army and the navy to the shipyards and the railway system.

The triumph of the Scottish Nationalist Party on Thursday and the annihilation of all other parties in Scotland has led to lamentations on left and right over the likely passing of Great Britain as a unitary state. There are panicky whiffs in the air as people who had scarcely noticed there was such a thing as the union between England and Scotland come to realise that it may soon be dissolved and wonder what the future will hold. It is ironic to recall that a decade ago British officials talked glibly about “nation building” in Afghanistan and Iraq, without a thought about the staying power of their own nation.

in full: http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/modern-states-are-fragile-in-the-face-of-local-nationalism-10238913.html

[bemildred]

1. +1 nt

[geek tragedy]

2. Not only that, look to the colonial past where countries like

Iraq, Jordan, Syria etc were created by the UK and France drawing lines on a map.

the UK undone by the same forces it unleashed on millions of people for generations.

[Jefferson23]

3. Yes, the irony is rich. n/t