17 - A discourse of sovereignty: observations on the work in progress

Summary

The editors of this book have further honoured me with the opportunity of reviewing its contents. I shall attempt to comment on the series of essays which furnish in every sense the greater part of the book, indicating the problems to which they give answers and the further problems which they open up. This is much the same as indicating the contexts to which they belong and the nature of the enterprise in which we are all engaged. I take that enterprise to be the exploration of Anglo-British history as presented in its political literature and the history of its political discourse. Within that scenario, the opening essay by J.H. Burns presents an initial challenge. The actors in his story were Scots whose intellectual and active careers were shaped and spent largely on the continent of Europe; yet the emphasis of the present book is overwhelmingly sub-insular and English – it presents a discourse formed in insular rather than continental Europe, and is focussed from near the beginning to near the end on the sovereignty of the English state and its problems. The Scottish theme launched by J.H. Burns does not recur until the concluding essay by John Robertson, when the question of Scotland within a British state and the character of that state itself are re-examined in ways that connect them with the current attempts at a re-consolidation of ‘Europe’.