Nation States

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace

So says naive multi-millionaire John Lennon. I wonder what he would have made of the murderous misogynists of ISIS. All of which childish speculation is my clumsy way of morphing into a consideration of the nation state in modern Europe.

The nation state is not a firm concept and to the extent that such states exist I concede that they flow in and around other competing  repositories of sovereignty. See The Myth of the Nation State for a sociological perespective. If we confine ourselves to the purely British condition we have all these states, sub-states and super states to consider: the United Kingdom, Scotland, Wales, Nothern Ireland, the city state that is London, and the super state (empire?) that is the European Union. Depending on your point of view, I've probably missed a few although I do draw the line at Cornish Separatism. I have left England off the list since that remains non-existent in political terms.

These competing entities manage, to varying degrees, to co-exist. The United Kingdom has fluxed and thrived for three hundred plus years but is now pulled to its limits by the burgeoning self-assertiveness of Scotland and the mass delusion of a united Europe. Scotland rather wants to have its cake and eat it and patrician English Tories tolerate this out of an outmoded loyalty. Wales would like as much cake as Scotland but is too meek to push its way to the front of the cake queue. Northern Ireland, well enough said. London is another country, alluring, contrary, expensive. Which brings us to the EU. Ah yes the EU. Le Grand Projet with its porous borders and many tongues. There is a magnificent irony in the emergence of English as the closest thing the EU has to a lingua franca. Ironic because the British (actually most notably the English) are as a breed ambivalent bordering hostile about the whole shooting match.

Any sentient lawyer understands that the EU (EEC as it was less portentously known when the process really got into gear) has long since been ceded great chunks of sovereignty by the UK's dim parliamentarians. And of course sovereignty is like virginity - it's bloody hard to get back once gifted away. So, to cut a long, sorry story short, we get the undignified spectacle of our Prime Minister asking the EU pretty please for the return of a little bit of our virginity - Cameron letter  

Cameron is asking for very little. In this one might conclude that he is at least being realistic. The nation state of the United Kingdom does still exist but in denuded form, hacked away from below and above. Eventually the realisation will come that the nation state has to be revived as the self-deceiving superstructure of Le Grand Projet tumbles in on itself. C'est la vie as we say in Birmingham.