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The External Realm and Domestic Politics in Territory and Power in the United Kingdom

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2013

Helen Thompson
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Abstract

This article addresses Jim Bulpitt's innovative approach to conceptualizing the relationship between the external realm and domestic politics in Territory and Power in the United Kingdom. The first part draws out the argument that Bulpitt made about the relationship between the external world and domestic politics to explain the historical development of the UK's territorial politics. In doing so, it fleshes out Bulpitt's own account. It also adds empirical detail and integrates arguments from his later work on the Thatcher governments into his analysis of where the UK's territorial politics went after the early 1980s. Second, the article demonstrates how Bulpitt's analytical framework about the external–domestic political relationship can help us make sense of another state's territorial politics at a crucial historical moment, namely Weimar Germany and the Bavarian problem between 1919 and 1924.

Type
Articles
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 45 , Special Issue 3: Territory and Power and the Study of UK and Comparative Politics , 2010 , pp. 386 - 405
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2010.

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References

1 Bulpitt, Jim, Territory and Power in the United Kingdom: An Interpretation, reissued edn, Colchester, ECPR Press, 2008, pp. 175–80Google Scholar.

2 Ibid., p. 88.

3 On his thoughts on the relationship between domestic and international politics and his conviction that analytical primary belonged with domestic politics, see Jim Bulpitt, ‘The Ever Present Outsider: Primat Der Innenpolitik and the International Relations Fraktion’, paper presented to the British International Studies Association Conference, 1995.

4 Bulpitt, Territory and Power, p. 64.

5 Ibid., p. 64.

6 Ibid., pp. 78–9.

7 Ibid., pp. 74–5 and 93–4.

8 Ibid., p. 87.

9 Ibid., p. 88. For recent scholarship of this historical moment see Alan Macinnes, Union and Empire: The Making of the United Kingdom in 1707, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007.

10 Bulpitt, Territory and Power, pp. 88–9. Bulpitt moves rather quickly on the Anglo-Irish Union and I have fleshed out some of the detail. For an extensive study see Geoghegan, Patrick, The Irish Act of Union: A Study in High Politics, 1798–1801, Dublin, Gill and Macmillan, 1999 Google Scholar.

11 Bulpitt, Territory and Power, pp. 91–2.

12 Ibid., p. 93.

13 Ibid., p. 93.

14 Ibid., p. 99.

15 Ibid., p. 99.

16 Bentley, Michael, Politics Without Democracy: England, 1815–1918, 2nd edn, Oxford, Wiley Blackwell, 1999, chapters 4–6Google Scholar.

17 Bulpitt, Territory and Power, p. 103.

18 Ibid., pp. 115–17.

19 Jackson, Alvin, Home Rule: An Irish History 1800–2000, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004, p. 174 Google Scholar.

20 Bulpitt, Territory and Power, pp. 115–17.

21 Ibid., p. 123.

22 Bulpitt was more explicit on the version of the empire constructed during the inter-war years as an external support structure in ‘Accommodating the Imperial Frontier: The Domestic Policies of Empire/Commonwealth after 1918’, paper presented to the Political Studies Association Conference, 1998.

23 See Helen Thompson, Might, Right, Prosperity and Consent: Representative Democracy and the International Economy, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2008.

24 Bulpitt, Territory and Power, p. 120.

25 Ibid., pp. 123–39.

26 Ibid., p. 145.

27 Ibid., p. 146.

28 Bulpitt, Jim, ‘The Discipline of the New Democracy: Mrs Thatcher's Domestic Statecraft’, Political Studies, 34: 1 (1986), pp. 19–39 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jim Bulpitt, ‘Rational Politicians and Conservative Statecraft in the Open Polity’, in Peter Byrd (ed.), British Foreign Policy Under Thatcher, Oxford, Philip Allan, 1988, pp. 214–56; Jim Bulpitt, ‘The European Question: Rules, National Modernisation and the Ambiguities of Primat Der Innenpolitik’, in David Marquand and Anthony Seldon (eds), The Ideas that Shaped Post-War Britain, London, Fontana, 1996, pp. 214–56.

29 Bulpitt, Territory and Power, p. 158.

30 Ibid., p. 163.

31 See Helen Thompson, The British Conservative Government and the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, London, Pinter, 1996.

32 Bulpitt, Territory and Power, p. 170, and Bulpitt, ‘Mrs Thatcher's Domestic Statecraft’.

33 See David Smith, The Rise and Fall of Monetarism, rev. edn, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1991.

34 Bulpitt, Territory and Power, p. 178.

35 Ibid., p. 183.

36 For an intelligent applications of Bulpitt's approach to the move to devolution see Bradbury, Jonathan, ‘ Territory and Power Revisited: Theorising Territorial Politics in the United Kingdom after Devolution’, Political Studies, 54: 3 (2006), pp. 559–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

37 D. R. Dorondo, Bavaria and German Federalism: Reich to Republic, 1918–33, 1945–49, London, Macmillan, 1992, pp. 1–2.

38 David Clay Large, Where Ghosts Walked: Munich's Road to the Third Reich, New York, W. W. Norton, 1997, pp. 63–4.

39 Ibid., pp. 85–6.

40 Helmut Heiber, The Weimar Republic, trans. W. E. Yuill, Oxford, Blackwell, 1993, pp. 25–9; Dorondo, Bavaria and German Federalism, p. 3.

41 Heiber, The Weimar Republic, pp. 82–4.

42 Wright, Jonathan, Gustav Stresemann, Weimar's Greatest Statesman, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 212 Google Scholar.

43 Heiber, The Weimar Republic, pp. 105–7.

44 Wright, Gustav Stresemann, pp. 239 and 255.

45 Large, Where Ghosts Walked, p. 202.

46 See for example, Michael Keating, The New Regionalism in Western Europe: Territorial Restructuring and Political Change, Northampton, Edward Elgar, 1998. For an argument that the ‘Europeanization’ of UK territorial politics leaves Bulpitt's analysis redundant see Carmichael, P., ‘The Changing Territorial Operating Code of the United Kingdom: Evidence from Northern Ireland’, Public Administration, 74 (autumn 1996), pp. 413–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar. But, as Jonathan Bradbury has remarked, there is no reason at all why the expanded scope of the EU since the early 1980s cannot be integrated into Bulpitt's analytical framework for considering the relationship between external conditions and domestic politics; Bradbury, ‘Territory and Power Revisited’, pp. 565–6.