Introduction

In 1996, the New Labour government of Tony Blair embarked upon an ambitious programme of constitutional modernization for the United Kingdom (UK). In Northern Ireland, this involved a dramatic series of initiatives culminating in the Good Friday Agreement of April 1998, that sought to reconcile the warring communities in Northern Ireland and create a new power-sharing arrangement for that troubled province. At the same time, New Labour, in the course of 1997, organized referenda for Wales and Scotland which, it was contended, legitimated the creation of new directly elected assemblies for these regions of the United Kingdom. Moreover, the House of Lords was persuaded in the course of 1998 to cull radically its hereditary peers, and the government put proposals in place to elect a mayor for London. Apart from these new constitutional initiatives within the United Kingdom, the new government also launched the Jenkins Commission to examine the majoritarian or “first-past-the-post” (FPTP) voting system and propose more equitable, minority friendly alternatives. This attempt to remodel the United Kingdom as a planned rational arrangement eminently suitable for merging a weakening British identity into a prospective Euroland composed of functionally integrated regions constitutes a radical departure from British constitutional practice and raises a number of questions concerning the relationship between national identity and its democratic representation, the state and the region in an era economically shaped by globalized investment, Internet trading, and rapid capital flows.

Retrospectively, it was one of the achievements of the British “nation” that evolved in the United Kingdom after the Act of Union (1707) that it contained a plurality of communities. From distinctively unpromising resources, a British union came initially to embrace North and South Britons, Scots, Welsh, Irish and, after 1945, included Chinese, Cypriot, Jamaican, Trinidadian, Guyanese, Gujerati, Nigerian, and Bangladeshi migrant communities. This essentially pluralist construct was even flexible enough to tolerate a variety of religious affiliations: Sikhs, Jews, Muslims and even Catholics, seemingly facilitating Prince Charles’ desire to reign as a multi-faith monarch.