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opinion

Ben Wellings is senior lecturer in politics and international relations at Monash University, Australia.

The EU’s summit in Brussels has kicked the Brexit can down the road. The negotiations are not dead yet, but the signs are not good. An extra month has been added to try and secure an amicable deal. Most of the areas for agreement have been covered but one major sticking point is blocking them all: the question of the new U.K.-EU border on the island of Ireland.

When the United Kingdom joined what is today the European Union back in 1973, it was experiencing serious nationalist challenges from its peripheral nations. Welsh nationalists were setting fire to vacant holiday homes. Scottish nationalists were warmed by the promise of North Sea oil. Northern Ireland had already experienced its worst half-decade of sectarian violence, with another 25 to come.

But the ship of state steadied. The nationalist challenges in Wales and Scotland faltered. Northern Ireland entered a long and bloody stalemate. In the end, it was European integration – originally designed to overcome Franco-German antagonism and consolidate peace in Europe – that helped cement a fragile peace in Ulster.

Brexit threatens this fragile peace.

But what precisely is this Brexit that we are so used to hearing about? The main attraction of this neologism when it was coined in 2014 was that it rhymed with Grexit, a term which surfaced in the early years of the Eurozone crisis to signal a Greek exit from the single currency.

But words hide meaning – as well as reveal it. Brexit is more and less than this term implies. It should, of course, be technically UKexit because it is the United Kingdom, not Britain, that is leaving the European Union.

That said, given that the vote to leave the EU was disproportionately strong in England, we should really just be talking about Eexit. But if we end up with the EU’s plans to maintain the single market or customs union throughout the entire island of Ireland, then we may end up with only Britain leaving the EU – and it will be Brexit after all.

The possibility that there will be an internal border in the U.K. between Northern Ireland and Britain is of course an anathema to the British government. This is why Theresa May’s position has become deadlocked. She won’t tolerate a division of the U.K.

If only that view were more widely held. Research conducted by the Centre for Conditional Change and LBC-YouGov earlier this year has shown that most voters who chose the leave option want to get out of the EU more than they care about the United Kingdom staying together. Given that leave voters are mostly to be found in the two parties holding the government together – the Conservatives and the Democratic Unionist Party – this leaves the idea of a United Kingdom very much in the balance.

This shows how much the politics of nationalism in the U.K. has changed since 1973. If anyone had suggested back then that the people who cared the least about the unity of the United Kingdom were to be found among English Conservatives and Ulster Loyalists, they would have been quickly consigned to a home for deranged political scientists.

But such madness is the new normal in Brexit Britain. Old loyalties have been riven by new political cleavages. The variables multiply: Will a deal be done? How long will Theresa May last? Will Boris Johnson’s career be saved by a catastrophic exit from the U.K.’s largest market?

The more serious question is about peace in Northern Ireland. When Arlene Foster, the leader of the Democratic Unionist Party says that some of her party’s lines in the sand are “blood red, we have to take this rhetorical escalation seriously. Purely technocratic solutions overlook the symbolism of a border, visible or otherwise.

But this diehard attitude from the DUP and Ms. May’s British rhetoric masks the fact that Brexit is English nationalism’s most significant moment in decades. England is the elephant in the room of the politics of Brexit. Since the referendum, there has been significant effort to out this large object back into its political box. But the sides of the box are straining apart. How well any – or no – deal is received will cause this box to burst at the first opportunity.

The effort to preserve British sovereignty from the perceived perils of European integration poses the greatest threat to the unity of the United Kingdom since Irish independence in 1921. Against this historic backdrop the leadership machinations and hollow Britishness of the Conservative party will soon be but a mere footnote in history.

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