Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations (122 page)

Yet polls are poor long-term predictors, and in any case the future of the monarchy and the potential break-up of the British state are two very different things. If by some stroke of fortune, the republicans were to prevail, they would rebuild the machinery of government and change the sates’s name, perhaps to the ‘United British Republic’; but the elementary facts of the state’s territory, population and make-up would remain intact. Not so if the United Kingdom were to disintegrate, and spawn a series of new sovereign entities from its constituent parts. In the latter case, the monarch of the day would pushed into a choice between retiring gracefully or soldiering on in reduced circumstances. It is perfectly possible to imagine a small group of stoical, diehard royals clinging to the throne, stiffening their upper lips, and watching with noble resignation as their kingdom crumbled around them. That the captain goes down with his ship is an honourable British tradition.

Nonetheless, the monarchy’s fate is of secondary significance, if not largely irrelevant to the more profound issue of the state’s survival; the United Kingdom will still be facing dissolution whether a king or queen continues to reign or not. Permutations in the most likely sequence of future political landslips are numerous, offering a variety of alternative scenarios. Scotland, almost certainly, will make the first move, although it is not yet ready to do so. The SNP has held the reins of government in Edinburgh from 2009 and openly favours separation; its electoral triumph in May 2011 increased its standing but its further success is dependent on numerous unknowns.
¹¹⁹
Even if it manages to organize a referendum on Scottish independence, it is very unlikely to succeed at the first attempt. It was given a huge boost by the hostile stance of Mrs Thatcher’s right-wing regime in the 1980s, and a similar effect could be forecast if Westminster were to revert to a Thatcherite position. As matters stand, they were complicated in 2010 by the formation of a British coalition government of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, who were less abrasive than a straight Tory administration might have been. The Liberal Democrats, in particular, had still to prove whether they could salvage a support-base in Scotland.
¹²⁰
If they fail, the British government will be dependent for the first time ever on almost exclusively English representation.

Even so, the long-term trends are clear enough. English resentment against the ‘peripheries’ is sure to balloon in times of austerity, boosting support for specifically English-orientated organizations like the Campaign for an English Parliament
¹²¹
or, on the right-wing fringe, the English Defence League;
¹²²
this resentment as much as Scottish nationalism will be decisive in driving the Scots from the Union. What exactly will trigger the breach can only be imagined, but the ongoing problems of the euro conjure up some menacing perspectives. If the bail-out of Ireland in 2010, which cost 85 billion euros, were to be followed by a more costly emergency in a much larger country like Spain or Italy, one can well postulate that the British government would refuse to contribute; and in the ensuing fracas, it would reasonable to expect that a body of English Eurosceptics would seize the opportunity to demand Britain’s withdrawal from the EU. Such a demand could be the match that fires the keg. The Europhile Scots, the Europhile Welsh and the Europhile Irish would be enraged. If the SNP were to stage its referendum at a juncture when voting for Scottish independence was posed in terms of leaving the United Kingdom but staying in the EU, the SNP’s chances of winning would be greatly enhanced. If they won, the Act of Union would be revoked; Scotland would take its place alongside Ireland as a sovereign member of the EU, and the United Kingdom as we know it would disappear. Other Scottish escape routes can be plotted.

When Scotland departs, a crestfallen England – frustrated, diminished and shorn of its great-power pretensions – will be left in the company of two far smaller dependencies. Resultant discomforts will grow sharply. Autonomous Wales will compete with autonomous Northern Ireland to make the next move. Timescales are hard to estimate, but in ten or twenty years’ time, political evolution may have progressed further in Ulster than is Wales. Throughout the twentieth century Ulster Unionists could afford to be intransigent, because they possessed a local, democratic majority; in the twenty-first century they will be squeezed by the growing demographic advantage of the Catholic and nationalist community. How will they react? The Protestant heirs of Edward Carson and Ian Paisley are never going to be dragged willingly into the bosom of the Irish Republic, but they will have to compromise; and since they have long viewed Scotland as their ancestral home, they may well seek a rescue through some form of partnership ‘across the water’, jumping before they are pushed. Difficult adjustments would be necessary on all sides; the Irish counties may have to be repartitioned, and sectarian sensitivities calmed. European mediators may play a part. But a generation that has grown up in peace will strain every sinew to avoid a return to the Troubles. And once the Anglo-Scottish union has been broken, the environment for Belfast, Dublin and Edinburgh to seek a common destiny will be much improved.

That would leave Wales standing alone with England. Nothing could be more conducive to a sharpening of Welsh political instincts, to demands in Cardiff for further devolution and to a comprehensive rapprochement between ‘Welsh Wales’ and South Wales. The English would be losing heart; the Red Dragon’s departure would only be a matter of time. The Welsh, who once were the original Britons, would end up being the last of the Britons.

If by any chance the monarchy were to keep functioning, it would be obliged to readapt its titles to each successive shift. When Scotland leaves the United Kingdom, ‘Great Britain’ will be dropped from the royal title, which will change perhaps to the neologism of ‘kings (or queens) of England, Wales and Northern Ireland’. When Northern Ireland leaves, the title could revert to that of ‘kings (or queens) of England and Wales’, as under Henry VIII in 1536. If a monarch were still in post when Wales leaves, he or she will be back to being ‘king (or queen) of England’. This is a title which many misguided English subjects believe to have been current all along. It would not apply, of course, if an English Republic had been declared in the meantime, or if at some point the House of Windsor had morphed into the House of Balmoral and had mounted the Scottish throne.

As ever, when a political community dissolves, the residue will include a collection of songs, and of emotions which the songs embody. The key emotion will be nostalgia, that is, a wistful sentiment inspired by loss, the pain of being separated from one’s home. Nothing is more powerfully nostalgic than the words and haunting melody of Ireland’s most deservedly famous song:

Oh, Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling

From glen to glen, and down the mountain side.

The summer’s gone, and all the roses falling.

‘Tis you, ‘tis you must go, and I must bide.

But come ye back, when summer’s in the meadow,

Or when the valley’s hushed and white with snow.

‘Tis I’ll be there, in sunshine or in shadow.

Oh, Danny boy, oh Danny boy, I love you so!
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Saturated with ‘Celtic melancholy’, these words were written, surprisingly and appropriately, by an Englishman.
¹²⁴
The melody, the incomparable ‘Londonderry Air’, is classed as Irish Traditional.

CCCP

The Ultimate Vanishing Act

(1924–1991)

CCCP

The Ultimate Vanishing Act

(1924–1991)

I

Estonia reaches the world headlines only sporadically. It did so in 1994, when a sea-going ferry sank in the night in the Gulf of Finland with the loss of nearly a thousand lives, and it did so again in April 2007. On the latter occasion, the Estonian government had ordered the removal of a war memorial from the centre of the capital to a suburban cemetery. The result was violent rioting, followed by a strange episode that some commentators called ‘the world’s third cyber war’, organized, or so it appeared, by or from the country’s largest neighbour.
*
A very tiny flea had somehow enraged a very big bear.

Estonia joined the European Union in 2004. One of ten new member states, it was one of three entrants which, until recently, had formed part of the Soviet Union. Its accession substantially extended the EU’s frontier with Russia that had first come into being to the north of St Petersburg, Russia’s second city, as a result of Finland’s accession in 1995.

Estonia, 17,370 square miles in area, is twentieth in size of the EU’s present member states, larger than Denmark but smaller than Slovakia. In terms of population, with 1.3 million inhabitants, it ranks twenty-fourth, between Cyprus and Slovenia.
¹
Its culture and history are nearest to those of its northern neighbour, Finland, from which it is separated by an arm of the Baltic Sea. Its name for itself, as seen on its postage stamps, is
Eesti
, which derives from a Scandinavian label given to the peoples of the eastern Baltic, and which even appears in Tacitus.

The Estonian language belongs to the Finno-Ugrian group; apart from Finnish, it has no close linguistic relatives in Europe (its other geographical neighbours – Swedish, Latvian and Russian – are Indo-European). It owes its origin to a prehistoric migration from western Siberia, where other Ugric peoples still survive. Its sound system is characterized by an unusual triple gradation of phoneme length – short, long and overlong. Its morphology, like that of Turkish or Hungarian, is ‘agglutinative’, meaning that simple verbal units are often ‘glued together’ to form lengthy compounds; its orthography has been adapted since the seventeenth century to the Latin alphabet. It has three main dialects – one connected with Tallinn; another with Tartu; and a third called
Kirderraniku
based on the north-east coastland. The final amalgam is almost totally incomprehensible to the outside world. The opening sentence of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Estonian reads ‘
Kõik inimesed sünnivad vabadena ja võrdsetena oma väärikuselt ja õigustelt
’ (‘All people are born free and equal in their dignity and rights’).
²

Tallinn, the capital, is a Baltic port city of some 400,000 people. Its name is usually explained by the phrase ‘
Taani-linna
’, meaning ‘Danish castle’, which reflects the fact that it was long dominated by foreign seafarers, while the Estonians lived primarily in the interior. (For much of its long history, it was best known by its German, Swedish, Russian and Danish name of Reval.) There are three distinct quarters. The
Toompea
or
Domberg
, ‘Cathedral Hill’, was formed round the original medieval fortress built in 1219; the Lower City crowds round the port area; and the outer suburbs developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when rural Estonians moved in to work in the city’s expanding industries. The ethnic breakdown of the citizens (2007) indicates 54.9 per cent Estonians, and 42 per cent Slavs, mainly Russian. These figures are very different from those of the period immediately before 1940, when few Russians but many Germans were present.
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