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 st...
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51