United Kingdom

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Not to be confused with England, England and Wales, Great Britain or, god forbid, the European Union.

With feeling, there is:

• England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland as four discrete political entities. Does not include the Republic of Ireland.
• England and Wales, and Scotland, and Northern Ireland, as three discrete things each of which has its own devolved legislature. Does not include the Republic of Ireland.
• Great Britain the political entity comprising England, Wales, Scotland, and their outlying islands (such the Isles of Wight, Anglesey, and Shetland), but which does not include Northern Ireland nor, needless to say, the Republic of Ireland,
• Great Britain the geographical entity, being the largest single Island in the British Isles, comprising most of England Wales and Scotland, but not the parts that spill over onto little islands like the Isle of Wight. We are unsure what to think of “islands” like Canvey Island, the Isle of Dogs and, apparently, all of Essex, which are separated from the rest of Great Britain by water, but it is only river, not sea water. Unclear whether brackishness changes anything. People from Essex probably think it does.
• The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, being the political entity of Great Britain, as above, and Northern Ireland,
• The British and Irish Lions, being a rugby team comprising of representatives from England, Scotland, Wales and the island of Ireland (the Republic and Northern combined), and —
• The British Isles being the whole damn cotton picking geographical lot, including the Republic of Ireland.

Continental drift

What are the continents of the world? A fairly fundamental geopolitical one, you might think, but there is no settled answer. Is Oceania one? What is its boundary with Asia, Melanesia, Australia, or Australasia? Are the boundaries of even these units settled.

The answer is very clearly no. Not only are our ideas about each not aligned now, but they are constantly changing. It is a dancing landscape, a complex system.

As a metaphor

This serves as a suitable metaphor for the fundamental irreducibility of larger organisations into smaller ones, notwithstanding the modernist urge to force them into alignment. When we speak of, for example, Britain, we do so loosely: we could be referring to any of these current configurations, of historical ones, and we may even be mistaken (as salespeople often are when — cue eagle chortle — they talk about “U.K. law”). This looseness isn’t a transient error, in need of correction, but rather a genius flexibility. We can leave construction to the infinite game we are playing, in which the only rule is to be imaginative in understanding what each other mean to keep the game going, and even where that fails, it is a matter of stopping, checking, clarifying, and putting the ball back into play.

Hence the folly of trying to correct this looseness — to tighten the language up, to avoid doubt, to crystallise the rules’’, and constrain the game with boundaries, thereby consigning it to finitude — is to rob the game of its flexibility, resilience: its antifragility.

Inevitably, here we also run into our old friend the battle between form and substance. Substance has no form.

Therein the basic conceptual problem with grand unifying political projects. Being, as they are, necessarily collections of millions of differing opinions, the harder edged a political project, the less fundamentally stable it is. It's apparent convergence on federation — you are either in, as a serf, or out, as an exile is what did for UK’s membership European Union. The embrace of one ultimate political authority involves sacrificing the other. The penumbra of Europe has always been complicated: Europhiles have tolerated this; there are signs they may be embracing it with the idea of tiered memberships, or affiliations, to that central organisation. If it is true, this is a smart idea, as it allows individual states — who wage their own internal battles of form and substance — to hold onto their own views of preferred sovereignty. The idea that one should be “in” or “out” of as monolithic a political idea as “Europe” is fantastical when you think about it.

See also

L*Brexit means Brexit