The talk these days in Britain is again about the possible break up of the UK.
Writing in 1977, during a decade marked by severe economic stagnation, IMF bailouts, and the initial emergence of the SNP, Tom Nairn famously predicted the "slow foundering" of the United Kingdom.
His core argument was that the UK is not a modern democratic nation-state, but an archaic, imperial relic whose structural flaws make its collapse inevitable.
Because Britain was the world's first industrial power, its rising capitalist bourgeoisie made a pact with the old agrarian aristocracy rather than overthrowing them. It never had a true democratic revolution
The UK retained a fundamentally "pre-modern," centralized constitutional framework based on the absolute sovereignty of the "Queen in Parliament" rather than the sovereignty of the people. Nairn mockingly dubbed this encrusted, uncodified political system "Ukania".
According to Nairn, this archaic state structure survived for nearly three centuries because of the immense success of the British Empire.
The wealth and global trade of the Empire acted as a powerful economic glue that bound Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland to England. Crucially, the Empire gave the elites of the devolved nations (particularly the Scottish intellectual and commercial classes) a direct, highly profitable stake in the British state.
The crisis of the 1970s was the direct result of the loss of Empire after World War. Once the external imperial framework collapsed, the UK's internal economy began to rapidly decline. Stripped of its global purpose and economic rewards, the British state had nothing left to offer its constituent nations except "rapidly accelerating backwardness, economic stagnation, and cultural despair"
Nairn saw the rise of modern Scottish and Welsh nationalism (what he called "neo-nationalism") not as a romantic backward longing, but as a rational mechanism for self-preservation. Peripheral nations realised they were being dragged down by a dying, dysfunctional English centre.
Breaking away was seen as a vehicle to leapfrog the archaic British state and plug directly into the modern world and the European project. The book concludes with a famous essay on the dual nature of nationalism.
Nairn argued that nationalism is always "Janus-faced" (looking forward and backward at the same time. It looks backward into history, myth, and romantic identity to mobilise the population. It looks forward by driving economic modernisation, democratic reform, and progress.
Nairn’s work is widely considered prescient by modern political theorists. Decades before the Good Friday Agreement, Devolution in 1999, the 2014 Scottish Referendum, or Brexit, Nairn identified that the centralizing, un-reformed nature of Westminster would eventually fracture the union along its national borders when under immense stress.
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