ABSTRACT
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is not a name that has encouraged loyalty. Indeed it hardly even conjures up an image of a country to be loved, as ‘England’, ‘Scotland’, ‘Wales’ and ‘Ulster’ have done for many people. Yet this difficulty for Britishness can be seen as one of its strengths. The United Kingdom as a nation-state flourished between the early eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries because it allowed a broad diversity of identities within itself. ‘The incredible vagueness of being British’, as Robin Cohen has called it,1
was not part of a crisis of identity but was one of the ways in which the British have tackled the complexities of an integrated yet diverse multi-national polity, formed over centuries, yet only fleetingly ‘complete’ between 1801 and 1922. Acts of Union had been passed with Wales in 1536 and 1543, with Scotland in 1707, and with Ireland in 1800. In 1922 Ireland became the Irish Free State, and neutrality in the Second World War and its declaration of itself as a Republic in 1949 completed the separation. Yet while the impact of the struggle for Irish separation between the 1880s and 1920s caused much political conflict in Britain, its completion was greeted with relief and the United Kingdom was restructured to accommodate a Home Rule parliament in the new ‘statelet’ of Northern Ireland with remarkably little trauma until the late 1960s.2
