Let me make a few predictions in the time-honoured academic way of trying to put them into context.

The first context is the unpredictability of predictions, especially about the UK constitution. Writing in the 1970s when talk of the break-up of Britain had become fashionable, the political scientist Hugh Berrington pointed to an enduring problem of political interpretation. ‘There is the tendency to give the ephemeral a permanence it does not warrant, to lend the anxieties of the day a consequence they do not deserve; the other, equally seductive, is to regard real and lasting changes as sudden and transient incidents’. These interpretative uncertainties remain true today: which is not to say that one shouldn’t make predictions.

The second context is the nature of the choices to be made. I would argue that there are three possible constitutional strategies.

• Those who support the continuation of the multi-national United Kingdom are trying to sustain the authority of British association through the re-distribution of instrumental responsibilities to its component nations - with the exception of England. And, though this is a more contentious issue, they are also trying to sustain the international authority of the United Kingdom through common policies with other states in the European Union.
• Nationalist parties are trying to displace British association mainly by expanding the instrumental responsibilities of the devolved institutions and enhancing the authority of their own nations. This does not involve (necessarily) provoking conflict with Westminster, rather it requires convincing citizens in Scotland, Wales, England and even Northern Ireland (though it remains a special case) that forms of self-government within the Union are a poor substitute for self-determination outside it. The European Union is a useful functional enterprise in this strategy for independence because it means that separation does not carry with it the taint of political isolation.
• The constitutional strategy of those who seek to promote the European Union as the answer to national, regional and global questions is to shift its competence from being instrumental to the projects of its member states to becoming more recognisably a self-sustaining association in its own right. This is a very uncertain enterprise since both of the other constitutional strategies are likely, from their different perspectives, to resist that objective.

Of these three, the British strategy still appears the most convincing both in the short and medium term (accepting that in the long run we’re all dead). In their judicious and measured conclusion in Has Devolution Worked?, John Curtice and Ben Seyd suggest that it has neither helped to strengthen British national identity nor served to undermine it. ‘Perhaps the lesson is that devolution is valued not for what it achieves but for what it represents; recognition by the British state of the distinctive national identities of its stateless nations’. But how do we now understand this new relationship?

The third context is how the UK should function in the second decade of the new millennium. Peter Madgwick and Richard Rose in, The Territorial Dimension in United Kingdom Politics (1982) coined the expression: ‘the UK is a fifth “nation” in Westminster’. When he came to develop the idea at greater length in Understanding the United Kingdom which was published in the same year, Rose provided a different stress. In that book he described it thus: ‘To understand the parts, we must also understand the government of the whole. Parliament is more than the sum of representatives from diverse constituencies. It is, as it were, the fifth nation of the UK; it is the first loyalty of some and the last loyalty of others’. What is the difference in the use of the definite and indefinite articles?

• To think of the UK today as the fifth nation is to continue to think of the Westminster Parliament as dominant and limited autonomy in the devolved territories.
• To think of the UK as a fifth nation suggests a different governing perspective, one in which autonomy is extensive and the role of central government as primus inter pares, coordinating and managing diversity in order to maintain union.

One could argue that ‘fifth nation’ still captures an important truth about the UK, that it helps to explain continuity in the state, but that devolution is a process which involves a modification such that the indefinite article becomes more appropriate in domestic matters than the definite. However, this still leaves the English Question unaddressed. English nationalists argue that it is the last ‘stateless nation’. I have a lot of sympathy with that complaint but their problem is convincing most of the English to see things that way so and far they have been unsuccessful.

After that tedious academic circumlocution, and with my three contexts in place, my predictions for 2010:

1. There will be movement towards – to use James Mitchell’s expression – a ‘state of unions’, ie more extensive self-governance for Scotland and Wales. In short, there will be further moves towards greater fiscal responsibility for the first and primary legislative power for the second. The UK will remain a fifth nation in both countries but of no less significance because of this indefinite article.
2. In England the UK will continue to be the fifth nation, with Westminster as the focus of national debate and the West Lothian Question unresolved. The definite article here will become increasingly problematic.
3. In Northern Ireland there will continue to be problems with the operation of devolution since talk of a new and widely shared democratic narrative is to put words into the mouth of history. However, crisis has become a political way of life and the lesson of the policing and justice debate is how desperate republicans are to sustain the operation of British sovereignty.

Arthur Aughey is Professor of Politics at the University of Ulster.

This post is part of the Constitutional Futures series.