Our former Colonial master, the UK, has now come full-circle, and is trying to implement its own "Articles of Confederation." For those of us who may be rusty on our high school American History class lessons, the Articles of Confederation led to a very weak, dysfunctional federal government and very strong state governments in the early US. The minimalist central government struggled to conduct foreign affairs as individual states conducted their own affairs. The economy was overtaken by hyperinflation before our current governing document was drafted at the Constitutional Convention in 1789.
Now post-Brexit, Britain seems to want to take a step in a similar direction:
The governance of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland should be reinvented within a new voluntary union in a bid to save the UK from disintegration, an independent all-party group of experts will argue this week.
The Constitution Reform Group, convened by former Conservative cabinet minister Lord Salisbury, is to make the the case for radical constitutional change in the UK by claiming the need has been boosted by the vote to leave the European Union.
Their proposals say the existing union should be replaced with fully devolved government in each part of the UK, with each given full sovereignty over its own affairs. The Westminster parliament, the group says, should then be reduced to 146 [from a current 650!] MPs. The individual nations and regions of the UK would then be encouraged to pool sovereignty to cover the matters they wish to be dealt with on a shared basis.
And lest you thought to yourself ‘But these changes might not be enough to bring back the merry olde Englande of yore,” alas, it also contains provisions which would seem to set the stage for a smooth transition to good olde fashioned medieval-style city states:
The government of England would either involve a directly elected English parliament or a continuation of the current evolution towards self-governing English city-regions.”
After being in a union that they considered weak and ineffective for many years, would the British be willing to drain their own union (Kingdom) of its vitality by disunting the nations which compose it? Perhaps the experience of our founding fathers would be useful to them as they decide.