The Crown is vital in binding the Union together

The second Elizabethan age began with an empire and a union, but could conceivably end with England alone. In just seven decades the United Kingdom has evolved from a country with substantial global reach and presence to an offshore island with an uncertain future. The empire that existed in 1953 has gone and the Union, as it now exists, is not wholly steady on its feet.

Queen Elizabeth II’s signal achievement has been to anchor the country over which she has reigned; she has been a focus of stability and reassurance — even as national and international change was all about. That is an astonishing achievement which is rightly being celebrated.

Dean Acheson, US Secretary of State from 1949-53, was wrong when he infamously remarked in 1962 that Britain had “lost an empire”. It hadn’t been “lost” but surrendered, often painfully and with many scars and complications left in its wake. Resentful already at the rise of the US and the decline of an empire which had underpinned its international standing, British governments fretted at the prospect of relegation in the “Great Power” stakes.

Enter then the much-caricatured Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, who sought, in the early 1960s, to square an increasingly difficult circle. With more success than he is sometimes credited for, he managed to sustain a revived Anglo-American partnership (including the provision of Polaris nuclear missiles); press forward with decolonisation in Africa; and, whilst encouraging the development of the Commonwealth — of which the Queen was a dutiful head and advocate — push at the entrance door of the (then) European Community (EC). Macmillan did not wholly succeed in his “Grand Design”, especially not as regards relations with Europe; but a ship-of-state resistant to change began to turn in new directions and his successors as Prime Minister stayed on the same course and eventually took Britain into the EC.

For forty of the Queen’s seventy years on the throne, the UK seemed intent on following the path Macmillan had set, re-orientating its post-imperial engagement with the rest of the world and especially with its near neighbours. A more confident UK also began to loosen its hold over its constituent parts, which before long began to be called nations. But by the second decade of the 21st century, there were increasing signs of instability in the relationship with the (now) EU and within the UK itself. To paraphrase the poet Yeats, it seemed “the centre” might not “hold”. Tensions between the two sets of relationships, external and internal, grew sharply and for very different reasons had reinforcing effects. Whilst Northern Ireland achieved a new settlement with the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, and nationalist voices remained relatively muted in Wales, the SNP generated an increasingly strong independence-focused voice and devolved administration in Scotland. What produced unexpected effects was growing discontent with the impact of the financial crisis of 2008 and increasing public unease with heightening levels of immigration. The outcome of the Brexit referendum in 2016 brought all these developments into an increasingly unsettled pattern.

Until the Brexit vote and the UK’s departure from the EU, the UK had achieved what many outside the country viewed as a masterly transition from its imperial past into membership of a community of European nations and a leveraged set of wider international relationships, including with the US. After the referendum, a further transformation had to be attempted. This time to restore or renovate what many felt had been lost as a consequence of four decades of membership of the EC/EU, whilst advancing wider political and trading outreach as “Global Britain”. For those constituent parts of the UK which had voted in favour of remaining in the EU, there seemed to be a new kind of nationalism in play, namely an English nationalism. Tensions, which had grown with the ongoing process of devolution, found new resonance and discontent, most acutely in Northern Ireland as a direct consequence of the Protocol signed by the UK with the EU and where dormant troubles risked being inflamed once again.

None of this has — yet at least — affected the constitutional position of the monarchy. The Queen remains monarch of the UK, but, post-Brexit, the political union linking the nations of which it is formed has an unsteady gait, a less assured future. The Union may well hold and continue to prosper despite the various current tensions. If it does, part of its continuing adhesive will have been the Crown, in the person both of Elizabeth and her successors.

The UK is a product of a dynastic union as well as a political project and has been so for over two hundred years. But after seven decades and for a complex of reasons, there is a real possibility of a reversion from a mid-20th century imperium, with tentacles spread across the globe, to an island nation not far removed from the geographical extent of the kingdom over which the first Elizabeth reigned in the 16th century.