The fragility of unions: the United Kingdom and Moldova

ABSTRACT

The emergence of majority unionism represents a threat to the stability of a union. Majority unionism drives policy and this is often met with centrifugal responses. This is a matter of institutional design, since institutional mechanisms to prevent such majoritarianism can and should be built into agreements on unions. The intensity of disputes between the centre and smaller region over policy and the viability of alternative political arrangements effect how great a threat to the union is posed by majority unionism.

KEYWORDS:

• Unionism
• Unions
• Northern Ireland
• Brexit
• Moldova
• institutional design
• federalism

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to Jennifer Todd and the two anonymous reviewers for their comments on this paper and to the Irish Research Council for financial support which assisted in this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Dr Dawn Walsh is the Director of the Institute for British-Irish Studies and an Assistant Professor in the School of Politics and International Relations at University College Dublin. She researches institutional design as a device to manage conflict and facilitate more inclusive decision-making. Her work has been published in academic journals including Regional and Federal Studies, Ethnopolitics and Irish Political Studies. She is the author of two books - Territorial self-government as a conflict management tool (Palgrave, 2018) and Independent commissions and contentious issues in Post-Good Friday Agreement Northern Ireland (Palgrave, 2017).

Notes

1 In the case of the UK, England accounts for 84% of the population, Scotland 8.4%, Wales 4.8% and Northern Ireland 2.9% (Office for National Statistics, 2012). In Moldova, the ethnic Moldovans living in the core region account for almost 70 per cent of the population, those living in the break-away Transnistria region 15%, and the Gagauz 4% (National Bureau of Statistics, 2017).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Irish Research Council [grant number ELEVATEPD/2014/21].