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Support for the old Union is falling in Scotland. This is part of a general restructuring of states in Europe, with the emergence and re-emergence of sub-state territories. The old territorial management formula, based on redistribution from the centre, no longer holds. Class solidarities no longer favour the Union. Scots increasingly identify primarily with their nation rather than the United Kingdom. The governing class has lost its ability to articulate an ideology of union. Yet public opinion has not been converted to independence. Rather, most people favour deeper self-government, within a new Union. The European context is important, not because Scots are particularly pro-European, but because it lowers the threshold of independence.

The unified nation-state has exerted a powerful grip on the sociological imagination, with history often presented as a teleological process marked by territorial integration and functional differentiation. In practice, both function and territory have always marked political and social order. States have had different degrees of success in integrating territories within their borders. Territory is not just a feature of pre-modern societies but is reproduced in successive phases of modernization.

The post-2008 recession has made territorial management increasingly difficult. Postponing fiscal reform or buying off territorial demands has become impossible, given European rules about debts and deficits. Territorial politics has become increasingly competitive. In some territories that combine economic wealth with a strong sense of identity, separatist pressures have grown. Yet, when pro-independence parties are pressed on their visions for independence, they tend to revert to ideas more akin to confederalism or asymmetrical federalism. Centrifugal tendencies are balanced by centrifugal tendencies so that the outcome is more likely to be further rescaling rather than the formation of new nation-states on the lines of the old ones

The United Kingdom was created over time without a clear plan. Creation of the state largely coincided with the creation of the Empire so that there was not a clear distinction between the two. The union preserved many of the elements of the pre-union component parts, but was kept together by the principle of unitary parliamentary sovereignty. Within the union, the distinct nationalities developed in the modern period and produced nationalist movements. Most of these aimed at devolution within the state, but some demanded separation. Management of these demands was a key task of statecraft in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the post-World War Two era, the nationalities question appeared to have gone away but it returned in the 1970s. Devolution settlements at the end of the twentieth century represented a move to stabilize the union on new terms.