ABSTRACT
Union is deeply interconnected with the notion of sovereignty. Because the Falkland Islands were part of the union of the British Empire, the invasion of the Argentinians could not be tolerated. It was an invasion of sovereign territory, and so the affront to a part, even a tiny and very remote part, was an affront to Britain and to her Queen, and had to be answered with force. What was overlooked at the time, particularly in the popular press coverage of the war, was that the concept of union has to change, as indeed sovereignty does, to accommodate itself to new circumstances. In 1800 an Act of Union, with the consent of the Irish parliament in Dublin, created a union of the kingdoms of Britain and Ireland. But in 1922 a part of that union separated and acquired autonomous status: the Irish Free State was created, which in time became the Republic of Ireland. This meant that the notion of a sovereign unity of Great Britain and all of Ireland had to be adapted in order to accommodate the new reality: that there now was a sovereign state, with rights, institutions and freedoms, which was not constitutionally in place before. In 1922 the Union was a union between Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the United Kingdom. There might be now a few, a very few, who would still argue that the establishment of the Irish Republic, and prior to that the Irish Free State, was an illegal and unconstitutional act, and that for Lloyd George and his government to tolerate Irish seccession from the Union
was something that no individual statesman or government had the power to do. But the notion of sovereignty has to change to adapt to new circumstances. After all, the Glorious Revolution of 1688-9 was ‘Glorious’ because it got rid of one king, James II, in order to install a new king, William III, to protect (so the argument of that high constitutionalist, Edmund Burke, runs) the true spirit of the constitution, the true sovereignty of the British crown. The trouble is that the notion of sovereignty remains a very fixed one for people who have a keen interest in things remaining always the same. Claudius throws a union into the cup to keep things as they are, to accomplish which he has to kill Hamlet. George Moore in The Lake writes that ‘the law of change is the law of life’; to keep things the same you have to kill the new life emerging.
