The institutions created by the Good Friday Agreement are part of a wide program of constitutional reform initiated by the New Labour government in 1998. This includes the creation of devolved political institutions in Scotland, Wales, and London, although the attempt to create English regions was rejected in a referendum in the North-East in 2004. Besides these institutional developments, the Blair government reformed the House of Lords, the judicial system, and local government. This collection of essays edited by John Coakley, Brigid Laffan, and Jennifer Todd is an excellent overview and analysis of the first part of these reforms—the political institutions of devolved government in Northern Ireland and Great Britain—and asks whether we are witnessing a “revolution” or simply a “renovation.”

Arthur Aughey sets the scene in chapter 2 by placing U.K. devolution in the historical context of British constitutional exceptionalism, whereby the United Kingdom, unlike other European countries, evolved a pragmatic state tradition that permitted the coexistence of different nations within its fold. He argues that this was undermined by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, whose reforms led to excessive centralization and individualism. These alienated those outside of the South-East of England and, in particular, the Scots, who began to demand the return of their parliament. David McCrone (in chap. 3) provides an excellent description of the setting up the new Scottish Parliament, massively endorsed in a referendum and with primary legislative and tax-raising powers, but he also raises the issue of what its significance is for the United Kingdom as a whole. Will it lead to the “break-up of Britain”? The pressure to set up a Scottish Parliament had inevitable knock-on effects in Wales and England. The Welsh, still more sympathetic to Old Labour than the Scots, were reticent about devolution. This meant the Welsh Assembly was much weaker than the Scottish Parliament and was only given powers of secondary legislation and no tax-raising powers. But once the assembly was established (approved by the skin of its teeth in the referendum), there has been pressure for it to become more like the Scottish Parliament. In chapter 4, John Osmond describes this evolution. Finally, there is the “English question.” There are two main questions here: first, How can England be represented in the “new” United Kingdom alongside the new representative institutions of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland? Second, should there be regional institutions within England? The Blair government ignored the first question, or at least, thought that by answering the second in the affirmative, it was also answering the first. The result has been that the Westminster Parliament represents both England and the United Kingdom as a whole, and that there has been a botched attempt to set up elected regional governments in England. Simon Partridge (in chap. 5) gives a history of English regionalism to provide some context for these English problems.

By far the best part of the book is the section dealing with the institutions deriving from the Good Friday Agreement. The agreement identified three “strands,” or sets of relationships, each of which was to receive a specific institutional expression: strand 1 (internal to Northern Ireland) concerns relations between the two communities in Northern Ireland and finds expression in the power-sharing assembly; strand 2 concerns North-South relations in Ireland, and these are expressed in the North-South Ministerial Council; strand 3 concerns British-Irish relations, and these are expressed in the British-Irish Intergovernmental Conference and the British-Irish Council. Jennifer Todd (in chap. 6) provides an excellent analysis of strand 1 in terms of different structural types of conflict and how states can provide institutional responses to these. The power-sharing assembly is based on the principles of consociationalism, equality, and binationalism, thus helping to change the structures of the conflict itself. John Coakley (in chap. 7) deals with strand 2 and shows both the limitations and the possibilities of the new North-South bodies, of which there are several types, some of which continued to function despite the suspension of the assembly at different periods. Ronan Fanning (in chap. 8) gives an extremely interesting account of the transformation of the strand 3 relationships between the two sovereign governments from a position of mutual suspicion to close collaboration. This is symbolized by the fact that in previous agreements (Sunningdale in 1973 and Hillsborough in 1985) the two governments provided two separate texts, since they could not even agree on the nomenclature of the two states in northern and southern Ireland. In the Good Friday Agreement, there is a single text.

The final part of the book attempts to place the reforms in a wider context. Both Elizabeth Meehan (in chap. 9) and Brigid Laffan (in chap. 10) look at the influence of the European Union (although one chapter would have sufficed), while Adrian Guelke (in chap. 11) places them in the wider international context of the end of the cold war and 9/ll. It is clear from these chapters that these wider influences had an impact, although the influence of the European Union was more indirect, while the U.S. influence was more immediate, particularly during the Clinton years. Finally, the three editors try to provide a theoretical framework to interpret these developments. This is set up by Todd (in chap. 1), who uses three principal models—state realism, European regionalism, and the imperial legacy—as possible explanatory models. Coakley and Laffan (in chap. 12) return to these and argue that state realism and European regionalism, but particularly the former, are the most useful explanatory models. In my opinion, these three models do not exhaust the possibilities, and it would also have been useful to draw on recent theories of the transformation of the state in the forms of the nation-state and the welfare state as well as current reflections on the nature of “governance.” But, despite this minor criticism, I must say that the editors have produced an excellent study of devolution and British-Irish relations that can be highly recommended to scholars and students of Britain, Ireland, and territorial politics in general.