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Whereas the Irish nationalist tradition analyses the relationship between Ireland and Great Britain in the terms of colonial paradigm, unionism insists that the Act of Union (1800) made the island an « integral part » of a new State considering the archipelago as a single unit. However, on two occasions during the 20th century, the unionist community was forced to imagine an Ireland without the British. During the first crisis linked in to the Home Rule question, unionism could call on networks of support in Britain and throughout the Empire. However, this support had all but vanished when a second crisis erupted at the end of the 1960s, becoming particularly intense in 1985 at the time of the Anglo-Irish Agreement. From that period, certain sections of the unionist community began to put together a discourse designed to emphasize on the differences existing between unionist identity and that of the « dominant culture » in Ireland. One might wonder whether this interest in cultural issues does not suggest the emergence of an embryonic nation, one of the objectives being perhaps to give the community distinguishing features that could be used to obtain constitutional or territorial concessions in the event of a British withdrawal.