State of the Union

David Olusoga began his four-part exploration of the history of the United Kingdom, Union, on BBC2 last night. It made for fascinating viewing as, while much of it was familiar (at least to people of my generation who learned about it at school) Olusoga's take on it was characteristically refreshing. 

For example, we were taught that Guy Fawkes and his co-conspirators in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 were English Catholics simply trying to assassinate a Protestant king. Olusoga showed, by reference to a contemporary document, that their real purpose was to frustrate James VI and I's proposal to set up a Commission to examine the formal union of his two kingdoms. This was due to be debated in a sitting of the English parliament on 5 November 1605. It still amounted to a protest about religion, of course, but its main objective was to preserve the sovereignty of Scotland as a majority Catholic country. 

As we know, the planned Westmister debate was never held and while James succeeded in uniting his two crowns, in what is known as a personal union, he failed in his objective of politically uniting his two kingdoms - that was not to happen for another century with the Act of Union of 1707, which abolished the Scottish parliament and moved political power to London. What James did succeed in doing, however, was to ruthlessly subdue his third kingdom, also Catholic, namely Ireland. Olusoga showed in meticulous and often gruesome detail how James's 'plantation' of English and Scottish Protestanta into Ulster broke the power of the old Catholic landowning families and consolidated the Protestant hegemony in the island.

Subsequent episodes of Union will go on to chart the various chapters in the development of the United Kingdom and its colonialist enterprise, which Olusoga shows began in Wales, moved on to Scotland, then Ireland and gradually out into the wider world. However, what the first episode clearly demonstrated was the fissiparous nature of unions. James had likened his union project to a marriage and, like marriages, strife, separation and even divorce are not uncommon. I can well see this happening to the United Kingdom in the not too distant future and, indeed, the process began in earnest in the modern era with devolution, a political process begun when Tony Blair was elected Labour Prime Minister in 1997.

However, this phenomenon has wider global implications. One only has to look at the current state of affairs in the United States and European Union to see similar stresses playing out there too. If Donald Trump continues to destabilise the Union in America and Vladimir Putin's geopolitical machinations exert existential pressures on the pan-European project, we could soon find ourselves living in a frightening new world order. The United States of America went through its own traumatising crisis of identity in the Civil War of the 1860s. The Union prevailed but the shock to a nation not yet a century old was profound.  Arguably, the issues that led to that horrific internecine strife were never truly resolved. The Soviet Union, itself less than a century old, finally collapsed on Christmas Day 1991, paving the way for Putin, his oligarchs and the global destabilisation that has followed. 

Could it be that political unions are only ever temporary expedients which eventually pull apart? They are often grubby and impermanent comprises so perhaps they inevitably carry within them the seeds of their own destruction. The British Union has been a work in progress for over four hundred years but it's by no means a final settlement and we may yet see an independent Scotland and reunited Ireland.

As the Irish poet, WB Yeats, observed, things fall apart...

Union with David Olusoga goes out on BBC2 at 9pm on Mondays and the full series is available on BBC iPlayer 

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