The contemporary crisis of the United Kingdom

The contemporary crisis in the United Kingdom cannot be explained solely as an electoral episode or a temporary shift in British political sentiment. What is currently affecting the British state structure is a deeper phenomenon: the progressive erosion of the historical, economic, and territorial legitimacy of the Union itself. For the first time since the modern consolidation of the United Kingdom, three of its four constituent nations—Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland—are politically or electorally dominated by nationalist forces that, with varying degrees of intensity, challenge the continuity of the British territorial order.

In Scotland, the Scottish National Party (SNP), under the leadership of John Swinney, maintains its objective of holding a new independence referendum around 2028. In Wales, Plaid Cymru managed to break Labour's historic hegemony and become the main political force in the Senedd. In Northern Ireland, Sinn Féin consolidated its position as the main regional force under the leadership of Michelle O'Neill. This is a significant point: Westminster is no longer able to produce a homogeneous national consensus within the United Kingdom itself.

The historical paradox has a touch of cruel irony. The same state that for centuries organized enclaves, protectorates, and colonies around the globe now faces an internal process of territorial fragmentation. London continues to project global power: it maintains a permanent seat on the Security Council, retains nuclear weapons, possesses one of the world's leading diplomatic networks, and continues to control a portion of international maritime trade through admiralty law, marine insurance, and historical structures linked to Lloyd's of London. However, behind this persistent geopolitical muscle, an increasingly uncomfortable question arises: what legitimacy does the British project retain today among the very nations that make up the Union?

The British power architecture extends far beyond the metropolitan islands. London continues to rely on overseas territories and offshore jurisdictions—such as the Cayman Islands, the British Virgin Islands, and the Isle of Man—which function as strategic hubs for global finance, maritime registries, and the transnational flow of capital. Simultaneously, the United Kingdom maintains logistical and military corridors in the Atlantic and Indo-Pacific through bases, naval alliances, and defense agreements closely linked to the United States and NATO. London's contemporary challenge is no longer simply managing the remnants of its old imperial system, but preventing internal fractures from reaching the very core of the United Kingdom.

 How the Kingdom Was Invented

Britain's own historical construction helps us understand why the current crisis is not an anomaly but rather the return of tensions that were never fully resolved. The United Kingdom was never a homogeneous nation-state in the continental European sense. It was, instead, a complex political-imperial structure organized around England and projected through profoundly asymmetrical power relations.

Wales was legally absorbed through the Laws in Wales Acts of 1535 and 1542, enacted under Henry VIII. These acts administratively integrated Welsh territory into the English legal system, imposed English as the administrative language, and dismantled much of Welsh legal autonomy. There was no union of equals, but rather a subordinate incorporation into the English state apparatus. Scotland followed a different path. The Union of the Crowns of 1603 initially constituted a dynastic, not a state, union. True political integration came with the Acts of Union of 1707, which formally established the Kingdom of Great Britain. However, even this “negotiated” union was subject to strong economic and geopolitical pressures, particularly after the failure of the Scottish colonial project in Darien and the English need to ensure the Protestant stability of the monarchical succession (Colley, 2009).

Ireland represents the most traumatic case in British imperial architecture. The Anglo-Irish relationship was marked for centuries by conquest, territorial expropriation, Protestant colonization, and political subordination. The Act of Union of 1800 formally created the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, but it never managed to forge a shared national legitimacy. The Great Famine, repressive policies, and nationalist rebellions deepened a structural fracture that culminated partially in the independence of the Irish Free State in 1921 and the continued membership of Northern Ireland within the United Kingdom. The very official name of the contemporary British state is a legal remnant of that partial disintegration.

The United Kingdom lacks a codified written constitution in the modern classical sense. Its legal order comprises parliamentary acts, case law, common law, and historically accumulated constitutional conventions.

The British constitutional structure further exacerbates contemporary tensions. The United Kingdom lacks a codified written constitution in the classical modern sense. Its legal order comprises parliamentary acts, case law, common law, and historically accumulated constitutional conventions. For decades, this flexibility was presented as a sophisticated institutional advantage over continental rigidities. However, in contexts of increasing territorial fragmentation, this elasticity is beginning to reveal its ambiguity.

Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland have their own parliaments and governments thanks to the devolution process initiated in 1998 through the Scotland Act, the Government of Wales Act, and the Northern Ireland Act. However, these powers do not constitute original sovereignty, but rather powers delegated by Westminster. Legally, sovereignty continues to reside in the British Parliament, which retains the formal capacity to unilaterally redefine these powers (Bogdanor, 2001).

This is where the core of the contemporary Scottish conflict emerges. The SNP argues that the persistence of pro-independence electoral majorities grants sufficient democratic legitimacy to call a new referendum on self-determination. Westminster responds by invoking the classic doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty: no subnational entity can unilaterally dissolve the Union. The British Supreme Court reinforced this interpretation in 2022, ruling that the Scottish Parliament lacks the power to unilaterally call an independence referendum, even an advisory one (BBC News, 2022). The contradiction is clear: the United Kingdom simultaneously asserts that the Union is voluntary, yet legally maintains that no member nation can leave it without the express authorization of Westminster.

Brexit brutally deepened these tensions. Scotland voted overwhelmingly to remain in the European Union during the 2016 referendum, but was swept out of the bloc by the aggregate British vote, essentially dominated by England. From then on, Scottish independence reformulated much of its discourse. It is no longer solely about national identity or control of North Sea energy resources, but also about a geopolitical dispute regarding Scotland's place within the international system.

Global Britain and the return of English nationalism

The “Global Britain” doctrine, developed especially from the Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy published in 2021, is probably one of the most explicit attempts at the strategic reconstruction of British identity post-Brexit. The document presents the United Kingdom as a “global power” capable of projecting diplomatic, technological, financial, and military influence in multiple regions of the world, particularly in the Indo-Pacific (HM Government, 2021).

However, behind the grandiloquent rhetoric lies a structural contradiction that is difficult to conceal: while the United Kingdom attempts to expand its global presence once again, it simultaneously faces a progressive erosion of internal political consensus regarding the very continuity of the Union. “Global Britain” functions, to a large extent, as a narrative of strategic recomposition by traditional British elites—the City of London, the Foreign Office, transatlantic diplomacy, and the military-industrial complex—rather than as a genuine reconstruction of homogeneous popular consensus.

In this context, contemporary English nationalism emerges as another major factor in internal fragmentation. For centuries, England managed to render its own nationalism invisible by presenting it simply as “Britishness.” Westminster appeared as a common institution, the Crown as a symbol of unity, and the Royal Navy as a shared source of national pride. Ultimately, this “Britishness” often functioned as a refined form of English hegemony (Kenny, 2014).

 …in trying to “recover British sovereignty”, Brexit ended up strengthening peripheral Scottish, Welsh and Irish nationalisms.

Brexit partially shattered that fiction. The rise of Nigel Farage and Reform UK expresses an explicitly sovereignist, Eurosceptic, anti-immigration English nationalism nostalgic for British imperial autonomy. Paradoxically, in attempting to "restore British sovereignty," Brexit ended up strengthening peripheral Scottish, Welsh, and Irish nationalisms.

The situation in Northern Ireland is even more delicate. There, the national question revolves not primarily around state independence, but rather reunification with the Republic of Ireland. The 1998 Good Friday Agreement also introduced a legally explosive element: the British government must call a reunification referendum if it believes a majority in favor of leaving the United Kingdom is likely.

The Northern Ireland Protocol and later the Windsor Framework attempted to avoid a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland by shifting some regulatory controls to the Irish Sea (European Commission, 2023). The solution was technically sound but politically explosive. For large segments of Protestant unionists, it amounted to acknowledging that Northern Ireland was legally closer to Dublin and Brussels than to London.

Meanwhile, Scotland represents the most institutionalized form of British territorial divergence. The SNP no longer proposes independence solely as a means of redressing identity issues, but as an international positioning strategy linked to a return to Europe and an exit from a British dynamic dominated by the English vote (Scottish Government, 2022). Wales, for its part, is progressively strengthening a managerial nationalism in the face of London's political exhaustion and the old Labour dominance.

British foreign policy further exacerbates these tensions. The security establishment remains aligned with Washington through the special relationship, nuclear cooperation, and agreements such as AUKUS. China is increasingly presented as a “systemic challenge” capable of contesting global technological, financial, and geopolitical leadership (HM Government, 2023). However, British universities, financial services, and companies continue to rely heavily on Chinese investment and capital (Biskup, 2024). Following the invasion of Ukraine, Russia has once again assumed its traditional role as a continental military threat, allowing London to regain a central position within NATO. But this external projection does not resolve the internal tensions within the Union itself.

 Why the Malvinas?

And it is precisely here that the Malvinas/Malvinas issue inevitably reappears. For decades, the 1982 conflict functioned as one of the great narratives of British national restoration following the postwar imperial collapse (Freedman, 2005). The military victory allowed for the temporary reconstruction of a narrative of national pride and global capability.

Margaret Thatcher quickly grasped the political significance of that conflict. The Malvinas War was not merely a territorial dispute: it was an operation to symbolically reposition a power beset by deindustrialization, labor unrest, and a loss of imperial centrality (Anderson, 2013). The United Kingdom found in the South Atlantic a way to remind itself that it could still send a fleet eight thousand miles from London and win a limited war.

Following the conflict, London constructed the Mount Pleasant military complex, inaugurated in 1985 and operational since 1986, as a permanent hub for South Atlantic defense (UK Parliament, 2015). The base was designed to prevent a repeat of the 1982 scenario and to accommodate a joint presence of the RAF, the Army, and the Royal Navy. Its maintenance continues to require significant budgetary resources, air infrastructure, naval patrols, ocean logistics, and a constant rotation of military personnel.

The strategic importance of the archipelago remains evident to the British military-diplomatic apparatus. The Malvinas allow for maintaining a forward position in the South Atlantic, projecting a presence towards South Georgia, the South Sandwich Islands, and the Antarctic border, reinforcing maritime surveillance, and preserving a logistical link within the British global network (Dodds, 2002). The presence of HMS Forth, the periodic deployments of Typhoon aircraft, and the infrastructure at Mount Pleasant demonstrate that London does not view the Malvinas as a sentimental relic, but as a strategic asset.

However, 44 years later, the British social context appears radically different. The Malvina Islands retain strategic value for the state, but their emotional significance within British society is beginning to show generational divisions. A survey published in 2026 indicated that only 9% of Britons aged 18 to 24 consider it “very important” to maintain British control of the archipelago (The Telegraph, 2026). In 2023, YouGov also recorded that only 35% of Britons would be upset if the Malvinas were to be returned to Argentina, while 46% stated that they would not care (YouGov, 2023).

This does not imply an immediate shift in British foreign policy, but it does reveal a growing disconnect between the state's strategic apparatus and public sentiment. For the Ministry of Defence, the Malvinas remain a geopolitical platform. For a segment of the British public, they are beginning to resemble a remote remnant of the imperial map.

The Malvina Islands are no longer just a bilateral dispute between Argentina and the United Kingdom. They have also become a symptom of the contemporary British dilemma: a power that still maintains military bases, global finance, maritime law, and nuclear capabilities, but whose society seems increasingly less cohesive around the old imperial consensus.

The comparison with the UK's internal crisis then becomes inevitable. Scotland is debating its return to Europe; Wales is strengthening a pragmatic nationalism; Northern Ireland is increasingly looking towards reunification; and England is retreating into a sovereign and nostalgic nationalism. In this context, the Malvinas/Malvinas cease to be merely a bilateral dispute between Argentina and the UK. They also become a symptom of the contemporary British dilemma: a power that still maintains military bases, global finance, maritime law, and nuclear capabilities, but whose society seems increasingly less cohesive around the old imperial consensus.

The budgetary issue is also significant. Maintaining a permanent garrison, air infrastructure, naval patrols, and ocean logistics for a small population may be justifiable from a strategic state perspective, but it is less obvious for a society facing a housing crisis, a deteriorating NHS, inflation, and post-Brexit fiscal pressures (O'Toole, 2021).

This does not mean that London will abandon the Malvinas. The British defense apparatus, diplomacy, the Crown, and strategic sectors linked to the South Atlantic continue to consider the archipelago a relevant part of Britain's global presence (HM Government, 2021). But the relationship between state power and social support appears to be changing.

Therein lies perhaps the deepest contradiction. The Malvinas remain a powerful symbol for the British state, but less so for a segment of the British people. It is an enclave defended by military doctrine, maritime logistics, and diplomatic continuity, though no longer necessarily by a homogeneous national passion.

And that difference matters. Because the United Kingdom, which aspires to project itself as “Global Britain,” is beginning to discover something uncomfortable: it is not enough to simply maintain overseas territories and military bases. It also needs to preserve an internal political community capable of recognizing this material and symbolic effort as its own. If the British Union continues to erode from within, the Malvinas will remain a strategic position, but also an uncomfortable mirror: that of a power still managing the remnants of its empire while trying to prevent the Kingdom from unraveling.

Juan Facundo Besson is a lawyer (Faculty of Law, National University of Rosario). He specializes in Labor Law (Faculty of Law, National University of Rosario). He is a doctoral candidate in Law (Faculty of Law and Civics, Catholic University of Argentina). He is an Adjunct Professor of Integration Law (Chair C) and a Teaching Assistant of Political Law (Chair C) at the Faculty of Law of the National University of Rosario; Professor of Public International Law (Chair A). He is the Director of the Malvinas, South Atlantic and Antarctic Observatory (National University of Rosario) and President of the Institute of Studies on the Malvinas, South Atlantic and Antarctica of COLABRO. He coordinates the Arturo E. Sampay Study and Research Group (Renato Treves Center, Faculty of Law, National University of Rosario).

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