Confederation of the Isles
The British Isles constitute an archipelago located on northeastern Atlantic Ocean off of continental Europe, from which it is separated by the North Sea, the Strait of Dover, and the English Channel. Although there are more than 5000 islands including innumerable islets in the archipelago, the major islands are the large islands of Great Britain and Ireland, the island groups of the Orkney Islands, the Shetland Islands, and the Hebrides off of the Scottish coast and the Channel Islands off of the French coast; and, located squarely between Great Britain and Ireland, the Isle of Man.
Historically, this extremely fragmented geography has fostered immense ethnolinguistic and cultural diversity. At its peak in the 15th century, some of the major populations included:
Despite this diversity, the concentration of arable land in England, and that country's proximity to the major European trade routes, led to the establishment of a union of the British Isles under British leadership. In the 15th century, Wales and Cornwall had been incorporated into the English state as peripheral, outlying regions; in the 16th century, Ireland had been brought under firm English control; in the 17th century, Scotland was brought into a dynastic union with England and the rebellious Catholics of Ireland were massacred into submission by the radical Protestant regime of Cromwell; and, in 1707, the English and Scottish Parliaments merged into a single British parliament. An Irish assembly remained active until the Act of Union in 1801, when the Irish Parliament was dissolved into the British Parliament.
By the time that the Napoleonic Wars ended in 1814, the British Isles had been welded by the requirements of war and the benefits of trade into a single, superficially homogeneous state, known as the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. The United Kingdom was, as a whole, a more culturally homogeneous entity than the disunited British Isles -- the Norse languages of the Shetlands and Orkneys had been replaced by local variants of English, as had Cornish. In Ireland and the Scottish Highlands, the Gaelic-speaking gentries of Ireland and the Scottish Highlands had been assimilated into English culture; while the peasantries of both regions remained Gaelic-speaking, without any modern Gaelic-language education system or popular culture the long-term future for the Gaelic language in either community was dim. Even in Wales and Scotland, where the Welsh and Scots languages remained the mother-tongues of overwhelming majorities of local populations, neither language was a language of state like English. The rule of a single parliament over the entire United Kingdom also represented a decided centralization of political power from the norms of the 18th century.
Ironically, the first movement towards the decentralization of the British Isles came with the enfranchisement of Britain's Catholics and non-Anglican Protestants. When the government of the duke of Wellington granted Roman Catholics the right to hold local office in 1828, and in 1829 the right to sit in Parliament, it opened the way for Irish (and other) Catholics to take part in British electoral politics. The Whig Reform Bill, passed in June 1832, enlarged the electorate immensely throughout the British Isles, redistributing seats in favor of the growing industrial cities and a single property test that gave the vote to all middle-class men and some artisans, even as it encouraged the organization of both local and national political parties and weakened the influence of the monarch and the House of Lords.
The 1840's were a difficult decade for all of the British Isles. An economic depression in 1837 encouraged the growth of the Chartists, who urged the immediate adoption of the People's Charter. This charter would have transformed Britain into a political democracy (with universal male suffrage, equal electoral districts, and secret ballot), and was also expected to improve living standards as well. Millions of workers signed Charter petitions in 1839, 1842, and 1848; in 1848, there were some substantial fears that the Chartists might form the nucleus of a revolution on the model of Britain's European neighbours. Following Parliament's multiple rejections of the People's Charter, the Chartists turned massively in favour of the creation of worker-owned and -operated cooperatives on the Owenite and Saint-Simonian models, with the aim of undercutting the various "economic oligarchies" of the United Kingdom and giving ordinary Britons greater strength. The post-Chartist cooperative movement was particularly popular among the non-English minorities -- in particular, Welsh-speakers in Wales, Gaelic-speakers in western Ireland, speakers of both Gaelic and Scots in Scotland, and immigrants from all three groups in England -- as they sought to create viable societies on their own, outside of growing English domination.
The late 1840's saw the disastrous potato famines. In 1844 and 1845, potato blight had quickly spread across Europe. Inasmuch as potatoes -- both nutritious enough to meet most nutritional requirements, yet occupying a minimum of land -- were the food of the poor, the very lives of Europe's poor were threatened. In all of continental Europe and most of the British Isles, the poor could afford, with government aid, foods other than potatoes, mostly wheat and corn. In Ireland, though, the poor were entirely dependent upon potatoes and could not afford to buy any other food. In the winter of 1845 and 1846, Sir Robert Peel's Conservative ministry repealed the Corn Laws that limited imports of corn in the hopes of assuaging this famine, but even those few Irish peasants that could afford corn did not know how to prepare it. By the time that the potato famine ended in 1848, more than a million Irish -- out of a pre-famine population of 8.3 million -- had died, while another millions were forced by circumstances to emigrate immediately. While the British colonies in the Southern Hemisphere and South America were popular destinations, a large number of Irish preferred to immigrate either to England or Scotland, as destinations that were both close and moderately attractive.
In the coming decades, the famine-era immigration of Irish would stand out as the beginning of the British Isles' radical demographic shifts. In the first half of the 19th century, the emerging social radicalism of the English working classes along with their poor living standards combined to produce a sharp decline in the English birth rate. By the 1850's, natural increase in English had shrunk almost to nothing. At the same time, the rapid growth of English industry and the modernization of English agriculture steadily drew the English peasantry towards the cities. Once this was accomplished, English industries would be left without any further sources of labour; English industrial centres would have to attract immigrants. In the nations of the Celtic fringe -- Scotland, Wales, and above all Ireland -- very high rates of natural increase were combined with very high rates of poverty and unemployment; throughout the second half of the 19th century, in fact, the Irish population would steadily decline as a byproduct of the collapse of rural Irish society in the 1840's.
The 1850's were the last decade in the 19th century that saw substantial migration from any of the component nations of the United Kingdom -- in the following decade, the 1860's, most of the British Isles' population shifts would be internal, as the centre of population in the British Isles shifted way from the Celtic fringes and towards England, as Scots and Irish immigrants came to form an increasingly large proportion of England's working class. In the course of the following generations, the continued low birth rate of native-born English, along with the continuing streams of Scots and Irish immigrants (Welsh immigrants were statistically negligible) and the high rates of natural increase among the Scots-English and Irish-English created a substantial demographic shift. The 1901 British census revealed that some 37.8 million people lived in the British Isles, that of these 25.1 million lived in England, and that of these, four million were mostly of Irish descent, while another 2.5 million were mostly of Scottish descent. Much to the concern of English traditionalists, only 74% could claim to be "English" as that term had been defined in the mid-19th century. This population shift in England changed the British society and the British polity radically.
For one, with almost five million Catholics living inside England, the Catholic hierarchy abolished in the mid-16th century by King Henry VIII following his formation of the Anglican Church had to be restored, in order to minister to the religious needs of the many Irish and Scottish Catholics living in the major industrial centres of England. There were now almost as many Catholics living in fiercely Protestant England as there were in fiercely Catholic Portugal, and the numbers of practising Catholics continued to grow sharply. The reemergence of popular English Catholicism forced a reappraisal of many of the conventional pieties of English life.
For another, the growth of large communities of ethnic minorities in England proper -- and the strong adherence of these minorities to post-Chartist cooperatives, which had come to replace many more conventionally-organized shops in the working-class districts of English cities, never mind their homelands -- made general reform essential, if only to accommodate these new ethnic minorities. Pressure towards universal manhood suffrage in the United Kingdom on the model of the Second Orleanist Kingdom of France and the American republics ultimately culminated in the extension of voting rights to all adult males in the United Kingdom in 1894, and the creation of truly mass politics.
Another spectacular example of this was the extension of Home Rule to Ireland in 1884, to Scotland in 1895, and to Wales in 1901, as the growth of very large pro-Home Rule constituencies inside England made support for federalization and decentralization of the United Kingdom a necessity for any politician who hoped to be reelected. These Home Rule Assemblies -- coupled, in Ireland's case, with legislatures in each of Ireland's four provinces -- began with comparatively few powers, but by virtue of their existence they had come, by the second decade of the 20th century, to exert considerable local power. This political decentralization, though, came at the same time that anglicization began to overtake the non-English populations of the British Isles.
The most dramatic case of anglicization was that of Ireland. Long after the potato famine had ended, the Irish population continued to decline throughout the second half of the 19th century until it finally stabilized in 1901 at a total of 4.3 million. This population decline had affected all of the regions of the Ireland save the industrialized areas of eastern Ulster province and Dublin, but it was most severe in the mostly Gaelic (or Irish)-speaking west of Ireland, which had already suffered disproportionately from the potato famine. In the early 1840's, half of the Irish population spoke Irish; in the 1860's, only a quarter of the Irish population spoke Irish; in 1901, the census recorded only 15% of the Irish population as Irish-speakers. Irish nationalists suggested that the Irish language might one day be revived, on the model of the Finnic languages of the Russian empire and Catalan in Spain, but in both the Russian Empire's Finnic provinces and Spanish Catalonia the local languages remained the languages of most of the population. the continuing depopulation of Irish-speaking districts in the west of Ireland and the economic advantages associated with fluency in English ensured the Irish language of a continued decline.
The decline of the Irish language, though, certainly did not discourage the rapid growth of indigenous Irish political life through the medium of the Home Rule Assembly (based in Dublin) and the four provincial legislatures (based in the provinces of Ulster, Leinster, Munster, and Connaught). Throughout the late 19th century, the Irish Nationalist party fought, in the provinces, in Dublin, and in the London Parliament, for radical social reform throughout Ireland. The most pressing issue that faced Irish nationalists was the need for land reform, for the redistribution of lands held by absentee landowners to the peasants that farmed it and the creation of agricultural cooperations to help the peasants maintain it. The limited taxation abilities of the Irish assemblies made it difficult for the Irish government to begin the process of land reform, but a bond offer floated on international money markets in 1891 intended to finance land reform let Ireland begin the difficult process. The general sentiment among Irish nationalists was in favour of the gradual transformation of Ireland's autonomy inside the United Kingdom into Irish independence inside the British Empire, on the model of Canada or Australia. In the province of Ulster, though, Irish Protestants -- forming more than half of Ulster's population, and maintaining close links to Scottish Protestants -- continued to resist, through the medium of the Ulster provincial legislature, any movement towards greater Irish independence.
Less dramatically than in Ireland, Scotland also saw substantial cultural shifts. The Gaelic-speaking Highlands -- save the remote Hebrides islands, located off of the west coast of Scotland -- were being rapidly anglicized. The Scots language did survive as the vernacular of everyday Lowland Scots, and the growth of an indigenous Scottish middle class did lead to a modest fluorescence of the Scots language, but the English language continued to dominatee as the language of public life and of the press. Even after the extension of Home Rule to Scotland, though, most Scots did not mind, since Scotland remained proud of its intimate connections with the British Empire. The textile, steel, and shipbuilding industries of the Lowlands made major contributions to Britain's commercial greatness, while Scottish statesmen and administrators helped govern the British Empire, Scottish colonists helped people it, and Scottish soldiers helped defend it. Much less so than in Ireland, dreams of independence were kept only by a small minority, since Home Rule was viewed by Scots as by far the most popular situation. Most causes for Scots discontent came from the competition that Scotland's thriving cooperative sector faced at the hands of foreign (usually English-owned) corporations.
The small islands groups lying off of the coastline of the island of Great Britain also faced anglicization. Though neither the Shetlands nor the Orkneys had any kind of autonomy beyond that of an English county, their sheer distance from the major population centres of the United Kingdom afforded them considerable free will, besides which their separation from Scotland just prior to Scottish Home Rule underscored their autonomy. The Channel Islands retained, as always, their traditional institutions of government and their near-independence in free association with the United Kingdom, but the Norman French dialect spoken by Channel Islanders was placed under pressure by English immigration -- that French held its own owed much to the presence next door of a prosperous French nation-state of 47 million people (in 1901). On the Isle of Man, the ancient Tynwald Parliament -- a functioning institution of government since the 10th century CE, and an icon of Manx independence -- was uninterested in the preservation of the local Manx dialect of Gaelic, which accordingly became a language of those old who had not yet died and those peasants who had not yet emigrated to Manchester.
The only one of the British nations, in fact, that had not yet begun to anglicize severely was Wales. In large part, Welsh resistance to anglicization stemmed from the 18th century conversion of the Welsh to Calvinism. This variant of Protestantism, which encouraged literacy through placing a premium on the individual's reading of Biblical texts, inadvertently encouraged the creation of a Welsh-language popular literature. Too, by the mid-19th century the Welsh had also gained renown as the western European nation with the highest rate of natural increase. This growing Welsh population, organized in Welsh-language community organizations like language groups and agricultural cooperatives, possessed the sheer demographic presence necessary for the 1864 creation of a Welsh-medium school system in Wales. The tentative exploration of south Wales' coal mines encouraged many people -- most of these Welsh-speakers from north Wales -- to settle in the area; most of the non-Welsh immigrants in south Wales soon were assimilated. By 1901, some three-quarters of the Welsh population continued to speak Welsh as their first language. The extension of Home Rule to Wales that same year simply underscored Welsh distinctiveness. Perhaps more significant still was the population of cooperatives among Wales, which claimed in 1900 to have the membership of some 85% of the heads of household in the country, thanks to Wales' long indigenous traditions of radicalism and nationalism alike.
The first 14 years of the 20th century saw continued changes inside the British Isles. A decline in Scottish birth rates, along with the growing attraction of Irish Catholic immigrants to the prosperous labour markets of the Southern Hemisphere, created a shortage of unskilled labour in both England and Scotland. Scotland was able to attract both Catholic and Protestants from the poorer Irish province of Ulster, while Birmingham and Manchester also acquired Welsh-speaking underclasses in this period. For the first time since the late 17th century exodus of the Huguenots, England's high wages and political stability attracted large numbers of immigrants from outside the British Isles -- perhaps 1.2 million, in all, between 1901 and 1913. Almost one-half of these immigrants were Germans, while another quarter were Dutch; the remaining immigrants were mostly Jews and Poles, from the Russian Empire and Germany. While the German immigrants became increasingly unpopular as Anglo-German tensions built, and English anti-Semites remained quite hostile to the rapid growth of England's Jewish populations, the willingness of most of these immigrants to adopt the English language and English customs eased the worst of the tensions.
The First World War was a tremendous shock to the British nations. Out of an estimated population of 41.8 million in 1914, almost 400 thousand residents of the United Kingdom died in the horrific trench warfare that marked the Western Front of that terrible conflict. In 1915 and 1916, mobs attacked German immigrant enclaves in east London and Birmingham, encouraging some terrified German-English to emigrate.
More catastrophic for British unity was the so-called "National" Rising in Ireland in May of 1916. This uprising by a tight-knit band of terrorists managed only to occupy a few city blocks in Dublin before it was crushed by the British Army, but the harsh post-rebellion suppression of even law abiding Irish nationalists managed to radicalize Irish popular opinion, and the Irish assemblies. In July of 1917, a National Army raised by the Irish Parliament was put into the field, and the provoked and radicalized Irish Parliament unilaterally declared the independence of the entire island of Ireland. The subsequent Irish civil war was a mercifully brief conflict, lasting only for the remainder of 1917 and most of 1918. Exhausted by the European conflict, the United Kingdom was in no mood to wage a war of reconquest against Ireland, and on the 6th of September, 1919, the government of the new Irish Free State, or Saorstat Éireann -- centered around the Irish Home Rule Assembly, renamed the Dail Éireann or Irish Parliament, and the provincial legislatures of Leinster, Munster, and Connaught -- and the United Kingdom signed a treaty that recognized the Free State's independence within the British Empire.
The situation in the province of Ulster, though, was considerably more complex. As part of the island of Ireland, and as the home of almost 900 thousand Irish Catholics, Ulster was seen by Irish nationalists as an integral part of any Irish nation-state. However, the province of Ulster was also home to almost a million Irish Protestants, closely linked by their religion and ethnic background to Scotland's Protestants, and extremely reluctant to join any Irish state that would be numerically dominated by Catholics. Ultimately, the province of Ulster was divided in two by the 1920 Government of Ulster Act, which partitioned Ulster into Free State counties -- Donegal, Fermanagh, Cavan, Monaghan, south Armagh, and the Catholic-majority city of Derry in Londonderry county -- and a rump East Ulster. This East Ulster possessed a Protestant majority of almost three-to-one, and included the industrialized district of Belfast, and possessed its own constitution, parliament, and administration for local affairs. Much as the Free State wished to gain control over the enclave, the simple refusal of the United Kingdom to countenance ceding the territory against the will of its inhabitants made the new borders approximately stable by necessity.
The thirty years that followed the independence of the Irish Free State were difficult. The Free State itself, under the Fine Gael political party headed by William Thomas Cosgrave, tried to modernize the Irish economy, with mixed results, while the designation of Irish as the "first official language" of the Free State in the 1921 constitution inaugurated a new period for the Irish language that included the introduction of the Irish language as a mandatory subject in schools. For the most part, though, the Irish Free State in this period remained detached from the mainstream of European affairs, with its substantial natural increase whittled away by mass emigration -- from 1921 to 1951, the Irish population grew only from 3.5 million to 3.8 million. Further political problems came from the provincial legislatures of Leinster, Munster, and Connaught (this last now including the Irish counties of Ulster), which greatly resisted the stripping of their powers by the Irish national government and favoured the decentralization of the Irish state. East Ulster was somewhat more prosperous, but the systematic discrimination against the region's Catholic minority proved a perennial irritant in inter-Irish relations.
On the island of Great Britain, the decade that followed the end of the First World War was marked by sluggish economic growth and relatively high unemployment among the United Kingdom's industrial working classes. In England, the problems of unemployment were less severe, while the effects of population aging made continued labour immigration necessary. Over the 1920's, almost two million people -- including a half-million Irish and Scots each, up to a quarter-million Welsh, Dutch and Germans, and assorted refugees from the Soviet Union -- entered England. By the end of the 1920's, England was beginning to be recognized by the English as a veritable country of immigration no less so than France or any of the countries of the Southern Hemisphere.
It was in the Celtic fringe of the United Kingdom -- in particular, the Scottish Lowlands and the coal-mining districts of south Wales -- that economic decline was particularly severe. The First World War had deprived the heavy industrial bases of both Scotland and Wales of the investments needed to make them competitive internationally in a free-trade environment, and so, as more efficient competitors to Scottish steel and Welsh coal appeared in the Southern Hemisphere, Japan, and southern and central Europe, the Scottish and Welsh economies skidded. Wales was practically depopulated, as almost a quarter-million unemployed coal miners and their families were forced to emigrate to England and elsewhere in search of jobs. In both countries, this emigration greatly encouraged local nationalists, who argued that neither country would have experienced such a calamitous decade if they, like Ireland, were independent nation-states. This was aggravated, in Wales, by fears that the mass emigration of the 1920's might precipitate the general anglicization of the Welsh population. The passage, by the Home Rule Assembly in Caerdydd, of the Welsh Language Act of 1927 that required all government services operating in Wales to offer Welsh-language services and offered subsidies to private corporations that did the same created an uproar in England, but the overwhelming support in Wales for this legislation proved sufficient for the act to survive even an unprecedented review by the London Parliament. The 1929 recognition by the United Kingdom in the Statute of Westminister of the effective independence of the remaining Dominions -- Australia, Newfoundland, Prince Edward Island, and South Africa -- inspired many Welsh and Scottish nationalists to dream of a day where their countries, too, might enjoy similar independence.
The 1930's were, all told, a calamitous decade for the British Isles. Perhaps surprisingly, the economy of the Irish Free State did not suffer particularly badly, as an Fine Gael-led program of industrialization driven by competitive import substitution created a marginally self-sufficient Irish state. In the United Kingdom, living standards deteriorated so sharply that in 1934, a coalition Labour-Communalist government was elected with the substantial support of England's once-Conservative middle classes. Operating in the framework of Keynesian economics, the United Kingdom led the League of Nations in erecting a global Keynesian strategy for the reflation of the world economy. As effective as this reflation was for the United Kingdom, it did nothing to forestall the growth of expansionistic political regimes in both Germany and Japan. As a result, in the first half of the 1940's the British Empire was forced to commit to two exhausting wars in central Europe and Southeast Asia.
The decolonization of the British Empire that began with the independence, in 1947, of India, Bengal, and Pakistan, and the close integration of the United Kingdom and Ireland (an independent republic since 1946) into the emerging European Confederation and the League of Nations, necessarily wrought tremendous changes throughout the British Isles.
The most immediately significant of these changes was the wave of immigrants from the Empire's once and present colonies in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean that began to arrive as early as the late 1940's. As the only major industrialized country in Europe to avoid significant damage in the Second World War, the United Kingdom enjoyed an industrial boom that lasted until the end of the 1950's. Although this economic growth coincided with a rapid increase in English and Scottish fertility rates above replacement levels, the United Kingdom suffered from immediate shortages of unskilled labourers. To meet this need, the British government began to recruit immigrants, mostly Anglophone Afro-Caribbeans from the British colonies in the Caribbean. By 1961, unrestricted immigration and the attraction of relatively high British wages had led to the immigration of more than 400 thousand Afro-Caribbean workers and their families to the United Kingdom. Most of these settled in London and the other large cities of southern England, where they came to constitute an indispensable class of labourers. Another significant immigrant community was the South Asian community, created by immigrants from independent India and Bengal who generally filled unprestigious jobs in the United Kingdom as shopowners and low-profile professionals and who numbered some 300 thousand by 1961. This immigration of non-European non-whites created significant racial tensions in the United Kingdom, which until then had thought of itself as a non-racist society.
Wales, Scotland, and the outlying island groups of Great Britain also saw significant changes during this period. Although all of these countries and archipelagoes did share in the general prosperity of the post-Second World War world, only the Channel Islands kept up to English rates of economic growth: The rest of the United Kingdom was simply too peripheral to share substantially in European prosperity. The failure of the British government to devise any policies to reverse the relative economic declines of the outlying districts of the United Kingdom encouraged the growth of nationalisms among the various non-English peoples of the United Kingdom. This period also saw a relative hardening of cultural boundaries, despite the infiltration of consumer mass economies and global pop culture throughout Great Britain. The most spectacular sign of this was Wales, and the strenuous efforts of the Home Rule Assembly to promote the Welsh language at the expense of English in most realms of public life. The natives of the Channel Islands turned to their Norman French roots, inadvertently aided by the large number of French immigrants who brought their language with them in the search for a nearby tax shelter, while the Isle of Man followed Ireland in proclaiming its variant of Gaelic as an official language despite the near-extinction of Manx Gaelic. The decline of the British Empire necessarily weakened Scotland's role as the industrial power that drove the construction of the Empire in the first place, and along with concerns over the future of Scots and Scots Gaelic -- the latter now virtually confined to the Hebrides -- encouraged the growth of the separatist National Party of Scotland. Even in the northern islands of the Shetlands and the Orkneys, islanders who resented depopulation demanded British subsidies to maintain their insular existence.
In the meantime, Ireland began to experience interesting changes. The young Irish Republic eagerly embraced the general trend towards European and global economic and political unity, as a way of escaping the shadow of its immensely larger eastern neighbour. Even as Irish national and provincial governments tried to save Irish from extinction and claimed to favour the role of the Catholic Church in Irish politics, they promoted Ireland to North American investors as a platform for foreign investment, as an Anglophone country closely linked to the wider European market with a well-educated yet inexpensive workforce. In the 1940's, Ireland enjoyed prosperity from its agricultural exports to Europe; in the 1950's, Ireland began to enjoy a significant industrial boom brought about by United States investment in the Republic. Even though the Republic's economic growth was not enough to allow it to close the gap in living standards that existed between it and England -- or for that matter, between the Republic and East Ulster -- it did herald the beginning of a decided shift towards a stronger Ireland. Emigration began to decline throughout the 1950's, as the presence of jobs in Ireland discouraged emigration, and the Republic's population grew from 3.9 million just after the Second World War to 4.3 million in 1960. East Ulster shared in the general marginalization of the outer regions of the United Kingdom, and as always, East Ulster's Catholic population -- growing in numbers relative to the Protestant majority, thanks to a substantially higher Catholic birth rate -- looked towards the Irish Republic. Increasingly, though, East Ulster's Protestant population began to consider the possibility of developing an East Ulster nationality.
In 1961, England suffered a major recession, brought on by the reconstruction of continental Europe's industry using more advanced technologies than English industry. For most of the 1960's, English economic growth dropped sharply behind that of its major continental European competitors. During this period an English counterculture grew, inspired by global and North American popular cultures and a desire to "make it all new" as Anglo-American poet Ezra Pound proclaimed, and "swinging" London became a world capital of popular music, theater, and fashion. For all of England's renewed cultural preeminence, the simple truth was that England, like the Celtic fringe of the United Kingdom before it, was now experiencing the phenomenon of relative economic decline. This recession in England inspired the British government to reduce its spending in new areas, including cutting off regional equalization payments to the Celtic fringe. This policy decision outraged Wales, Scotland, and both the Catholics and the Protestants of East Ulster.
Ultimately, the breakup of the United Kingdom was precipitated not by a single political cataclysm, but rather by myriad small irritants: the concerns of Scotland and Wales to promote their national languages at the expense of English, the resentment of the inhabitants of the Celtic periphery of the United Kingdom at their region's economic decline relative to English, the growing cross-frontier links between the Irish Republic and East Ulster, the growing reluctance of the English to subsidize the dissident (and anti-English) fringes.
The regional and national elections in the United Kingdom, in 1968 and 1969, made the end of the United Kingdom inevitable. In Scotland and Wales, the National Party of Scotland and the Plaid Cymru were elected as majority governments, and each government promised to hold referenda on independence in early 1970. In East Ulster, the (Protestant) Union Party and (Catholic) Sinn Fein took two-thirds of the vote between them, but the bicommunal Ulster Party won more than 25% of the East Ulster vote on its platform of a Connaught-Ulster association that would reunite East Ulster with its republican hinterland. (The Irish Republic was lukewarm to this idea, not only because it was short of full unification but because it could conceivably threaten the territorial integrity of the Republic.) These elections, in turn, encouraged a general backlash against the accepted national parties in the 1969 United Kingdom election. In the Celtic fringe, local nationalist parties swept the area and drove the Labour and Communalist parties from the region; if it was not for the two parties' strong support in the pluriethnic cities of southeast and north England, they might have been destroyed. Elsewhere in England, the Conservative Party swept England through appeals to English nationalism demanding radical reform of the United Kingdom to represent English financial and political interests. Fortunately, the negotiations for the United Kingdom's European Confederation membership had been concluded before either of these elections, but the division of the London Parliament between a half-dozen competing and hostile political parties paralyzed the United Kingdom.
For all of the angst occasioned in the hearts of traditional British nationalists, the Welsh and Scottish referenda on independence in January of 1970 -- supervised by local, British, and European Confederation electoral authorities -- had at least the virtue of resolving at least part of the United Kingdom's political dilemmas. In Wales, 57% of the electorate cast their votes in favour of independence from the United Kingdom; in Scotland, 61% of the Scottish electorate also voted in favour of secession. The British government contested the validity of these referenda on procedural grounds, since two-thirds of the total electorates of Wales and Scotland did not vote in favour of separation. Nonetheless, these referenda made it clear that the British political system had to changed radically. The February Resolution of the Home Rule assembly of East Ulster further demanded that East Ulster be consulted in any changes; similar statements were soon made by the governments of Man, Jersey, and Guernsey, and by the island councils of the Shetlands and the Orkneys. Moreover, English nationalists -- organized mainly in the Conservative Party -- also demanded that England be consulted.
It was in this context of general political ferment and instability that the Liverpool Conference was called in April of 1970. The separatist Welsh and Scottish governments sent delegations, as did the East Ulster government in a delegation including members of all three political parties, and the governments of the various islands. The British government was also represented; however, following the withdrawal or voluntary self-exclusion of the Scottish and Welsh parliamentarians from the London Parliament, what was left was effectively an English delegation. The Irish Republic also sent a team of observers to Liverpool.
It quickly became apparent that neither the Welsh nor the Scottish were willing to give up their claims to political independence, and that the British government, for its part, was entirely willing to wash its hands of the periphery. The East Ulster delegation reiterated the desire of the province's entire population for self-rule; critically, the East Ulster delegation was willing to accept limited political independence. The Irish Republic remained aloof from the acrimonious internal debates of the United Kingdom, but Irish delegates hinted that the Republic might be willing to take some part in a loose confederation. All parties concerned found themselves attracted by the model of the Nordic Council -- a loose grouping of northern European countries that created a labour market and supranational political and cultural institutions in common. In the end, that model was adopted. On the 5th of July, 1971, the British Parliament and the assemblies of Wales and Scotland announced the dissolution of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (The various self-governing islands attached to the British Crown were attached to the English Crown.) The sudden exclusion of Northern Ireland from the British state forced the Northern Irish government to try to form an independent state. For the first time, Northern Ireland seriously considered one of the southern Republic's offer of Federation.
The Treaty of Liverpool was signed by the prime ministers of all of the British successor states on the 7th of September, 1971, and the Confederation of the Isles was created. Under the terms of the treaty, residents of any of the Confederation's member-states had an automatic right to citizenship in any other member-state, while the principle of absolute freedom of movement and residence inside the Confederation was confirmed, and institutions created to continue formal political and cultural cooperation between the successor states, while military and other government assets were divided based on each successor state's share of the United Kingdom's population. All of the successor states automatically acceded to the European Confederation on the model of Algeria after that country's secession from France. Perhaps most importantly, a consultative assembly was created, based in Liverpool, and charged with regulating the affairs of the confederation.
In the 30 years since the Confederation's foundation, the British Isles have evolved into a model association of sovereign states. The 1974 creation of the Federation of Ireland, and the 1975 accession of the Irish Republic to associate Confederation membership, have only reinforced these trends, as has the formation of a popular pan-Celtic movement centred on Wales and the Irish Republic but including outliers in Man, Scotland, the French province of Brittany, and even certain Canadian enclaves. Continuing internal migration and mass immigration from outside the Confederation -- of the 39 million English, nine million are first- or second-generation immigrants -- has further mixed up the British Isles' populations. Despite Irish concerns over sovereignty, Welsh concerns over language, English concerns about the rapid growth of Scotland and especially Ireland, and the concerns of the entire Confederation in regards to their nation-state's marginality in the European context, the Confederation has endured.