ABSTRACT
Arguments about how the European Union could or should develop tend to polarise around positions for or against a ‘federal Europe’. Substantial ‘federalisation’ is already perceived in the transfers of sovereignty over some economic matters from member states to the EU as a whole, and further moves in that direction are widely anticipated. Despite opposition from defenders of existing state sovereignty, these developments have encouraged the imagining of federal scenarios to solve the problems of conflicting nationalisms in the United Kingdom and, particularly, in Ireland. It is argued that reconstructing the over-centralised British state on federal lines would recognise the diversity of its regional political cultures. It could be a way of accommodating pressures for devolution or ‘buying off’ demands for independence in Scotland and Wales. It could help address the problems of a ‘pre-modern’ and absolutist conception of sovereignty as the indivisible preserve of the Westminster Parliament – problems of an ‘archaic’ constitution and the lack of a written one. But others see it as the ‘slippery slope’ to the ‘break-up of Britain’.
