The commonalities across the Irish Sea and the English Channel — severe disquiet over immigration, the continued rise of populism, and the spread of extremist discourse, especially online — reflect the similarities of the challenges. The question of how to accommodate plural identities is a pressing one.

As the United Kingdom and the rest of Europe wrestle with societal and national fragmentation, it is worth looking at how some of the most diverse states coped with difference in the past. And it would be hard to find a better example than the Habsburg Empire, or Austria-Hungary as it was known during the last phase of its existence. Of a total population of 51.4 million in 1910, 23% mainly used German, 19.6% Hungarian, 12.5% Czech and 9.7% Polish. The rest mainly used Italian, Croatian, Ruthenian, Romanian, Slovak and Slovene. It was a veritable Babel and reflected, roughly, the profound national divisions between the peoples who made up the empire. Yet thanks to a series of expedients the Habsburgs were able to muddle through — fortwursteln — without a catastrophic internal breakdown until defeat in the First World War.

Because of this long-term survival, some in the UK saw in Austria-Hungary a solution for their own problems of how to reconcile the English, Scots, Welsh and Irish. As the historian Alvin Jackson points out in his ground-breaking study of these issues, when Prime Minister William Gladstone tried to address the “Irish Question” in the late 19th century, he studied the “compromise” reached between the Habsburgs and the Hungarians very carefully. Arthur Griffith, who founded Sinn Féin in 1905, even hailed that agreement as the “resurrection” of Hungary which could serve as an example for a dual Anglo-Irish monarchy.

Both the United Kingdom and Austria-Hungary emerged out of early modern composite monarchies, polities where the crown ruled over territories which were governed in very different ways. In the British case, the solution was found in the establishment of a parliamentary union, in 1707 and then expanded upon in 1801, in which everybody was represented on an equal basis — according to the franchise of the time — at Westminster. England, Scotland and Ireland ceased to exist, politically; Wales had been abolished some time earlier. This arrangement facilitated the basis for the rise of one of the most powerful states the world has ever seen.

The Habsburgs took the opposite route. After various experiments of their own they settled on a “composite democracy” with a monarch at its head. In 1867, Emperor Franz Josef’s Ausgleich — “compromise” — divided the empire into two halves, both with parliamentary representation. Despite making up only 40% of the population of the “Hungarian” half, the Magyars lorded it over the “subject” Slovaks, Romanians, Serbs and Croats. The other half had no official name but had a plurality (about 37.5%) of German speakers mainly in Bohemia, Moravia and present-day Austria. Because the two parts were divided by the river Leitha, they were known as Cisleithania and Transleithania.

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How Britain ignored its ethnic conflict

By Aris Roussinos

Both the United Kingdom and the Habsburg Empire faced the onslaught of late 19th-century European politics: rising nationalism with the resulting identity politics over language, education and employment, and class conflict. Both saw demands for solutions based on partition, and both were subjected to the rigours of the First World War. But they coped very differently.

Austria-Hungary staggered from crisis to crisis as it tried to cope with what the historian Steven Beller calls a “witches’ brew” of competing demands and hatreds. Vienna sought to keep the lid on things through a series of “compromises” in Croatia, Moravia, and Bukovina and Galicia. Governance, as the veteran Prime Minister of Cisleithania Viscount Eduard Taaffe once remarked, was a matter of keeping the various groups in a state of “well-tempered discontent”. For example, the “compromise” with the Poles was at the expense of letting them dominate the Jews and Ruthenes of Galicia. Parliament was a zoo. The capital city, home to a huge immigrant population, especially Slavs from all parts of the Empire and Jews particularly from Galicia, also spawned a vicious xenophobic and antisemitic discourse. It was no wonder the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus referred to the empire as a “Laboratory for World Destruction”.

The United Kingdom performed far better at managing tensions between its territories. Most of the British Isles developed an ideological, rather than national, form of politics: the Conservatives, Liberals and later the Labour Party won support across three of the four nations. Only in Ireland, where differences between Catholics and Protestants continued to play a major role, did nationalism come to dominate. But, despite their best efforts to obstruct and disrupt parliament, Irish nationalists never managed to bring Westminster to the same state of confusion as Czech, Polish, Slovene, Italian and even German nationalists inflicted on the Reichsrat in Vienna.

Moreover, unlike the Habsburg Empire, which collapsed in 1918, the UK emerged from four years of conflict in the First World War as a victor, losing only the Irish Free State in its aftermath. Six of the nine counties of Ulster remained in the United Kingdom. Partition was traumatic to be sure, but remained a largely contained event which did not affect the rest of Europe much. In fact, the separation of the 26 counties was made possible by the British victory over Germany, because it was hard to envisage how a separate state on the western flank would present an immediate military challenge.

Despite the relative success of the British model, when compared with its European alternatives, the demand for national recognition grew throughout the late 20th century. In Northern Ireland, the introduction of a devolved parliament in 1920 facilitated discrimination against the Catholic population. After the end of the Cold War, and the apparent passing of strategic threats to the United Kingdom, Prime Minister Tony Blair introduced devolution in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. There were now representative bodies across the Irish Sea, on the other side of the Wye River, and beyond the Tweed, which dealt with matters not “reserved” to Westminster. Some, such as the Shadow Secretary of State for Scotland, George Roberston, predicted that “Devolution will kill Nationalism stone dead”.

The British Ausgleich was also lopsided. It gave expression to the nationalism of only three of the four nations. England had no separate parliamentary assembly, and politically was defined by being non-devolved. All of England’s laws were voted on by representatives from all four nations, but the country had no say in the laws passed by the devolved assemblies. The largest nation seemed to be left out.

The UK, then, in the 20th century seemed to draw on the experience of the Habsburg Empire — but its legacy is disputed. The failure of the successor states, whether fascist or communist, put things in perspective. As they stewed in the Soviet Bloc, many Central European intellectuals developed a nostalgia for a framework which had allowed them to coexist in relative freedom. Shortly after the end of communism, the renowned Hungarian historian István Deák argued in his 1990 book, Beyond Nationalism, that the “Habsburg Experiment” in supranational organisation should be revisited. “I am convinced,” he wrote, “that we can find here a positive lesson while the post-1918 history of central and east central European nation-states can only show us what to avoid.” The historian Solomon Wank, by contrast, pointed out in 1997 that the empire had simply “stoked the fires of national rivalry” which ultimately consumed it.

Either way, it is not obvious what the UK now can learn from the Habsburgs today. First, because they had little useful to say about immigration, one of the main preoccupations of the recent riots. Indeed, the mayor of Vienna Dr Karl Lueger famously exploited antisemitic hatred of Jewish migrants for personal political gain. Secondly, as we have seen, because the Austro-Hungarian leadership aggravated national differences, as much as they mitigated them.

What the UK can do is learn from the mistakes of the Habsburgs. State indulgence of nationalism before 1914 simply increased the chaos. Likewise, the introduction of devolution in the UK, far from “killing” the demand for separation “stone dead”, actually whetted appetites. In Scotland, the establishment of the assembly in Edinburgh increased calls for separation from the United Kingdom so much that London was forced to concede a referendum in 2014 which at one point it feared to lose. In Wales, interest in independence, though still weak, grew after the introduction of devolution. In Northern Ireland the devolved institutions may have helped bring some form of peace, but they also facilitate continuous squabbling between the two communities. We therefore have enough, and perhaps too much, devolution — we do not need any more compromises.

The UK Union is based on the assumption that we have four nations whose members are English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish, but also — if they want to be — British as well. If the UK followed the Austro-Hungarian example any further, the result might be the “resurrection” of Ireland, Scotland, Wales and even England — but it would also be the death of Britain.

Yet just last week one of the SNP’s more excitable parliamentarians made the startling claim that the recreation of this medieval border could be an engine of job creation — something that hasn’t obtained since Geordie Burn and “Kinmont Willie” Armstrong were stealing cattle and rustling sheep in Tweeddale and Tynedale. Indeed, the very remoteness of these borderlands, beyond the reach of London — or even Edinburgh — created a unique and lawless civilisation, home to feuding bands of Scots and English highland clans who lived a guerrilla life of arson and plunder, and whose nomadic ranching culture and traditions of military service and recreational belligerence would eventually be transplanted wholesale to the dangerous “back country” of the American colonies.

These families were more loyal to their kinsmen than to abstract notions of nationality. Indeed, at the Battle of Pinkie Cleugh outside Edinburgh in 1547, one observer noticed how Scottish and English border levies could be seen chatting cordially with each other — until spotted by their commanders, whereupon they put on a spirited show of combat. On his accession to the English throne in 1603, James VI may have remarked that “hath not God first united these two kingdoms, both in language, religion, and similitude of manners?”, but this was especially so in the Borderlands and adjacent counties of Northern England.

In Linda Colley’s key text Britons: Forging the Nation she records how the poor in the North East consumed oatmeal like the Scots and “to pass from the borders of Scotland into Northumberland”, a Scottish clergyman wrote at the end of the 18th century, “was rather like going into another parish than into another kingdom”. John Buchan would make similar observations as he passed into England from his beloved Tweeddale. By the early 1500s, there were hundreds of Scots living in Newcastle, including John Knox who was appointed a preacher at St Nicholas’s Church in 1550. Many of the coal miners and keelmen on the Tyne in the 17th and 18th centuries had come down to England from Lothian and the Borders, as did Captain James Cook’s father, a farm labourer who arrived on Teesside from Roxburghshire.

By the time of the ’45 so many Scots had made Tyneside their home that the native Northumbrians differentiated what they saw as the savage highlanders from the more civilised lowland Scots, with whom they shared a loyalty to “King Geordie” and the Protestant succession. Similarly, the unusually high levels of literacy in Northumbria owed much to an appreciation for the neighbouring system of parish education in Scotland, and Northumbrians shared many other traits with the Scots including a taste for classical architecture well into the Neo-Gothic period, and for living in flats (which was highly unusual in England), as well as an obsession with football — a macho and martial strain that was useful on imperial battlefields — and a debilitating enthusiasm for alcoholic beverages.

A second wave of Scots migration to Tyneside shipyards and coal mines helped to establish what can be seen as a North British Industrial Zone, linking places such as Newcastle, Glasgow, Liverpool and Belfast as well as outliers like the shipyard town of Barrow-in-Furness. North East England and West Central Scotland were the only places in the world with large-scale engineering, shipbuilding and coal mining all in the same place, a nexus critical to the technological developments essential to capitalism and the wealth of Britain: Scotland gave us the steam engine, the pneumatic tyre and the telephone, while North East England gave us the locomotive, the turbine and the lightbulb.

Some of Tyneside’s greatest industrialists had strong Scottish connections: George Stephenson had worked in Scottish collieries as well as those on his native Tyneside, and Sir William Armstrong’s business partners were the Scotsmen Charles Mitchell and Andrew Noble. Indeed, Scots played a huge part in the North East’s maritime trades: John Barbour’s wax-jacket empire grew from supplying the Tyneside fishing fleet, hundreds of Scots “fisher lassies” who followed the trawlers down the East Coast settled in North Shields, and so many Scotsmen came to work at Andrew’s Leslie’s shipyard that Hebburn became known as “Little Aberdeen”.

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Thousands of families, including mine, crisscrossed the Anglo-Scottish border in the late 19th and early 20th century — and figures such as Arthur Henderson, Manny Shinwell and latterly James Herriott and Mark Knopfler spent their early lives swapping Tyne and Wear for the Clyde (and vice versa). You see this in the career of the theatrical impresario Arthur Jefferson who owned theatres across “North Britain” but principally on the Tyne and the Clyde. It is significant that his son, Stan Laurel (who always considered himself a Tynesider), actually made his first professional appearance in his father’s theatre in Glasgow.

Coming from Northumberland, Scottish things have been a constant in my life: nurtured first by grandparents who took the Sunday Post and bought me The Broons and Oor Wullie annuals at Christmas. My father’s best pals were his Glaswegian workmates who’d relocated to Newcastle from IBM’s plant at Greenock, and I can vividly remember the boisterousness of “Glasgow Shipyard Fortnight” when holidaying Scots would migrate en masse for fun and frolics at Whitley Bay.

As kids we drank Barr’s pop and ate Scotch pies, Tunnock’s teacakes and “McCowan’s Highland Toffee”. Many of us followed Celtic, Rangers, Hibs and Hearts as our “second teams”, and took character-building family holidays in the midge-infested highlands, or on the freezing coasts of Fife and Ayrshire — not to mention regular trips to the Edinburgh Tattoo. McEwan’s Best Scotch was the first pint I ever bought (at 3.6 ABV a good “training beer” for thirsty teenagers), and my first flat was around the corner from St Andrew’s Kirk in Newcastle — right by the old Deuchars Brewery on Sandyford Road.

The sense of similarity and affinity between Scotland and North East England has shaped my own unionist outlook, but also my growing sense that England is, in the radical analysis of Alex Niven, “a nebulous half-country”, riven in two for centuries by a geological fault-line that separated a prosperous and dominant South East, centred on London, from the poor and sparsely populated lands north of the Trent. The medieval North was simply a different country, and the Far North was more different still — a quasi-autonomous border country, run as a buffer zone against the Scots by warlord aristocrats and (uniquely for the British Isles) ruling Prince Bishops — the longevity of whose power meant that North East England was only fully integrated into a centralised English, then British, polity not that long before Scotland was.

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This sense of Northern difference was cemented still further in the 18th and 19th centuries with the emergence of the distinctive working class culture of the North of England, whose politics built on the anti-Anglican traditions of recusant Catholicism and muscular Methodism, and birthed a municipal Labourism that raised working-class living standards, and underpinned what Ian Jack, in The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain described as an “independent civilisation”.

And yet the history of the North of England is basically a litany of defeats (both militarily and politically) at the hands of the South: starting with the brutal “Harrying of the North” by the Normans, the Wars of the Roses (where the North lost), the Catholic rebellions of the 1500s (ditto), the Civil War (where the King’s heartlands were in the North and West), and then the failure of any subsequent challenge to the power of London and the South East — from the Jacobite risings, to the Chartists, and then the General Strike and Miners’ Strikes.

In her 1921 book, The Kings’ Council of the North (about Elizabeth I’s brutal suppression of the Rising of the Northern Earls’ in 1569), the historian Rachel Reid wrote that North is “the natural refuge of lost causes”, and yet as the late Scottish historian Christopher Harvie once put it, English regionalism is “the dog that never barked”. Something did seem to stir during the pandemic though, when Northern grievance found its champion in Andy Burnham, and not long afterwards a Northern Independence Party was founded committed to “Northumbrian” secession  — and cringey tweets.

But the North has never been able to stand up to London alone. In his book The Shortest History of England James Hawes made the brilliant observation that, after 1885, the South of England became “a virtually impregnable Tory bloc while the North voted otherwise”, the North therefore had to look for “alliances with the Celts [the Scots and Welsh] to outgun them: we call that alliance, which lasted until 2015, when the Scots deserted it, ‘the Labour Party’”. With the SNP now dominant in Scotland, and then Red Wall in the North crumbling, the South East looks more invincible than ever.

For those dismayed by Northern enfeeblement, and the prospect of a border being reimposed between Berwick and Carlisle —  with the potential for a brassic Scotland becoming a client state of a hostile power, as it was under Mary of Guise – what should be the response?

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Well, if I were tasked to save the union, I would focus on two things: firstly rekindling those alliances between the North of England and Scotland, and thinking creatively about how to knit them together economically and culturally — not just dualling the A1, but how about a maglev joining Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle, Edinburgh and Glasgow, with a tunnel to Belfast too.

I often get the impression that the Scots — and even the Irish to an extent — don’t mind sharing sovereignty with their larger neighbours, as long as it isn’t the English calling the shots. But my hunch is that it’s the caricatural Southern English that the rest of these islands finds so insufferable. Far too many English Tories fit into the sneering stereotype of Tim Roth in Rob Roy or Tobias Menzies in Outlander, whereas in my experience Scoto-Northumbrian relations are almost always extremely cordial.

I think the strong horse theory explains why high-status opinion in Scotland is so wedded to “independence in the EU”. I’m reminded here of the Catalans, who like the Scots in the British Empire were ardent Spanish imperialists, but as Spain’s power and prestige declined after the loss of Imperio Español, they were beguiled by a new imperial power in Brussels. Ambitious Scots, looking South to an increasingly threadbare post-imperial Westminster, had similar feelings.

So, forget constitutional tinkering, and even emotional appeals to former glories and “our NHS”; the Scots are too hard-headed for that. I suspect that the one thing that will change attitudes to Britishness in Scotland is for the UK to just be a wealthier and more successful country. Easier said than done, but 4% on GDP will do more than any Royal Commission to raise the prestige of the Union in Northern Britain. Can Boris Johnson pull this off? For those of us who fear the imposition of border controls at Carter Bar, we’d better hope so.