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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 central argument of this book is that devolved government was the culmination of processes that had evolved over many decades but devolution was never inevitable. The original different unions have been important in the development of the UK's territorial politics but so too have been other forces. Social and economic pressures gave rise to different conceptions of what the state at the centre should do, how much it should intervene in society and the economy, and this had consequences for its territorial constitution and issues of territorial management. The greatest problem with the idea of the UK as a union state is that it focuses exclusively on only some or even one of the unions which created the state. If the unitary state understanding of the UK was inadequate because it only described the English polity, the union state understanding is inadequate because it ignores England and Wales.

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.