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Largo, Blebo, Dunino
Into Europe seem to go,
But plainly Scottish we may deem
Auchtermuchty, Pittenweem (2)
How to put Scotland in meaningful context? It is a seeming bundle of
contradictions. It is one of the oldest nations in Europe, established
more or less in its present frontiers 1000 years ago, and yet there is
an important sense in which it can be said not even to exist. Evidently,
it is not a state. Its people certainly had a sense of themselves as
a distinct nation as early as the middle of the 14th century, forged
in the wars with its larger and more powerful neighbour to the south.
Yet it more or less willingly gave up its constitutional independence
less than 400 years later, and embraced union with its auld enemy. In
so doing, it transformed itself economically to become the second country
in the world to industrialise, and to punch well above its political
weight in the context of the greatest empire the world has yet seen.
Are we then a nation? Some brave souls, furth of Scotland, as we say,
point out that we are too similar to the English, sharing a common tongue,
similar cultural, religious and political beliefs, to be that distinctive.
At this point, I usually give a peroration that one should look at the
Scandinavian peoples and try to sell them the argument that they, ostensibly,
are the same people, but I will mercifully spare you that, for I know
that you would knock it down in an instant, and I would have transgressed
your hospitality .
Our people remained fiercely and proudly Scottish, while adopting a
second, state, identity to be British also. We know who we are, and we
certainly know who we are not. We tell ourselves jokes: God created the
world, we say, and when he had finished, the angels marvelled at the
utopia Scotland seemed to be: it had oil, coal, a temperate climate,
water in abundance, and a spectacular landscape. What, the angels remarked,
could be more perfect? The Scots had everything they could ever want.
Huh, said God, just wait till they see the neighbours...
Those, the people who are most like us, we call 'the auld enemy', and
we celebrate as our oldest allies their neighbours, the French, who we
happily went to war against almost before the ink on the Treaty of Union
was dry. We treated that Union as a marriage of convenience, a 'mariage
de raison' as our erstwhile allies have it. We retained and grew
our own civil institutions of law, education and religion. We defended
with ferocity our money - it took, of course, a Tory, Walter Scott, to
do it best in his epistle of Malachi Malagrowther - and we organised
ourselves sufficiently to reinstate our parliament in 1999, a most peaceful
revolution. We inhabit a land of political contradictions. Those who
describe themselves as Scottish not British are not necessarily in favour
of constitutional independence; our nationalist party is supported by
many who want to keep the union; and lest our First Minister become complacent
at that, many of the supporters of his party are in fact in favour of
independence.
To coin the phrase; we contradict ourselves? - very well, we contradict
ourselves. Where I come from - Aberdeen, on the north-east coast, which
has its personality shaped by looking east to the Baltic - we tell the
story of the Gordon Highlanders marching down the main thoroughfare,
Union Street, and the proud mother commenting: my, they're all oot o'step
except oor Jock. Well, oor Jock may not be quite as oot o' step as some
have thought. I recall discussions with Danish scholars, and their conception
of Denmark as a 'big little country' insofar as it punched well above
its weight in geo-political terms as a state for much of its history,
and possibly Swedes have the bruises to show for it. Perhaps, on reflection,
Scotland is a little big country, because it had, and still has, a conception
of itself well out of proportion to its actual size.
Why the contradiction? We are neither simply 'North Britain', a northern
appendage to greater England, nor are we some kind of latter-day colony
waiting to have 'freedom' bestowed upon us in some liberation struggle.
In that respect, Ireland is a poor analogy for us, although our two countries
have much in common otherwise. Back in the early 1990s, I described Scotland
as a 'stateless nation', a country with a strong sense of being an 'imagined
community', with distinctive institutions, but without the apparatus
of statehood. Even at that time, I was properly taken to task for seeming
to ignore the self-governing apparatus vested in the Scottish Office,
which, I am told, had more civil servants than Brussels. Now that we
have our parliament, the first properly democratic one in our history,
to say that Scotland is stateless makes even less sense. Nowadays, I
have taken to calling Scotland an 'understated nation'.
Much of the problem in using terms like 'state' and 'stateless' is that
they set up the issue as a zero-sum game. You either are, or you aren't.
You are an independent, sovereign state, or you are nothing. I'm not
at all sure about that, and becoming less sure by the day. I look at
the list of intending EU states, and note that most of them are significantly
smaller than Scotland, and none have its economic clout. We are not alone.
The EU contains some very powerful understated nations and regions. We
make common cause with Catalonia, Flanders, Bavaria, and with our Celtic
cousin, Wales, and do not feel at all out of place. I am not suggesting
that Sweden may like to give up its sovereignty in favour of what we
have. Who, after all, is to play the part of England? We start, however,
from a different position. Scotland is a nation which has lived quite
happily within a loose confederation, a union, and now finds itself within
a bigger union - of Europe. We know from our history that political unions,
properly managed, do not destroy the identities of small nations, and
indeed allow them to prosper. The 'devolution' position, then, might
seem to be the best possible position in the best of all possible worlds.
This might be music to the ears of our own First Minister. I counsel
caution.
Academics are to modern politics what court jesters were to mediaeval
courts: licensed to say the unthinkable, to stand reality on its head,
but not to be taken too seriously. 'Academic' is, after all, also a pejorative
term in the English language, a synonym for being 'excessively concerned
with academic matters' it says in my dictionary, and that is not meant
as a compliment. I offer you an alternative perspective. I prefer the
old 19th century term 'home rule' to 'devolution' because it captures
much better what we are about. 'Devolution' implies power delegated,
but authority retained at the centre. 'Home rule', on the other hand,
is about self-government; where one is positioned on a spectrum; a matter
of degree, not of kind. Scotland, indeed, has always been self-governing.
It retained and developed considerable civil autonomy within what purported
to be a 'unitary' state of the United Kingdom. As long as (a) Scotland
was allowed to govern itself without upsetting the constitutional applecart;
and (b) it more or less voted in the same way as England did, all was
well. All this began to change in the second half of the 20th century.
Perhaps it was always going to be thus. After all, the UK was and is
a democracy with full adult suffrage. The problem was that majoritarian
democracy is a blunt instrument, conferring on the territorial majority
power to govern the minority. In a unitary state with a simple first-past-the-post
electoral system, Scotland was always likely to get the government which
the English - 85% of the UK population, after all - voted for. The wonder
was that the contradictions did not emerge sooner and more often. But
happen it did with considerable regularity since 1979, though in practice
for much earlier than that. Thus did the 'democratic deficit' enter our
political lexicon. To be sure, Scotland was always going to be the big
anomaly in the British state: a distinctive nation, with considerable
institutional autonomy, but governed by a unitary state. To put it another
way: until 1999, the UK was a unitary, but also a multi-national state.
To coin another phrase, if you were us, you wouldn't have started from
here either.
So what do we now have? - in large part, we have quasi-federalism, territories
with variable and assymetric powers. There is no game-plan, no template,
for unrolling at variable speeds the same set of powers the length and
breadth of the United Kingdom. This is not a failure of political will;
it simply reflects the reality of the place. Some are critical that there
is no enshrined and formalised powers, constitutional tablets of stone,
to which, periodically, we the peoples of the UK can make supplication.
This state of affairs has allowed governments to react and devolve as
needs be, according to the circumstances of the day. Muddling through
may be a symptom of a wider British disease, but it has its uses.
The academic, of course, not only plays the part of court jester, but
also rune-reader. My runes are numbers, and they tell me that Scots are
content, for the moment, with the home rule settlement. There are 10%
hardy souls who want to turn the clock back, but they are, literally,
a dying breed. Around 25-30% claim to want independence, and they are
by no means simply found in the ranks of the SNP. Devolution is the main
game in town; for the moment at least. What is more intriguing is that
Scots are really quite promiscuous in their attachment to constitutional
options. They are rather bored with the constitutional battlings of our
two main political parties, Labour and the Nationalists, and are much
more interested in policy outcomes - what makes Scotland a better place
to live and work in. On the one hand, they do not care much for arguments
that further constitutional change will make it all better. - good news,
perhaps, for our First Minister. On the other hand, if making Scotland
a better place requires further powers for its parliament, even to the
point of independence, then so be it. - maybe not so good news for our
First Minister. If currently there is no great demand for independence,
then there is little popular hostility either. It is a matter of means
and ends. Constitutional matters are treated properly as secondary to
social and political outcomes. For the main political parties in Scotland,
this sounds a bit like one of those old jokes which begins; there is
good news, and there is bad news.
This, of course, is not simply a Scottish, or even a British, story.
We live in a 21st century world where the very meaning of 'independence'
is attenuated. Sovereignty should be thought of as layered and shared,
not an either/or condition. Further, it is a matter of politics and sociology
as much as constitutional law. The Scotland Act of 1998 might say that
the Scottish parliament is a subordinate one, existing at the whim of
Westminster, but Scots are not given to such legal niceties, and confer
upon it at least equality of prestige, but even popular primacy. They
may like to 'peeble it wi' stanes' but it is their right so to do, and
no-one will take it away from them. If anyone tells you that they know
where this process of self-government is going, they are either a prophet
or a fool, or possibly both. Neither is it especially wise to accuse
one's political opponents of living in the past if one cannot know the
future. Let me end on a provocative note: all Scotland's political parties
are 'nationalist' in the sense that all accept without demur that Scotland
is a nation, not a region, free to decide its own fate inside or outwith
the United Kingdom. Pre-devolution Tories would argue that the best way
of preserving and developing Scottish national identity and interests
was to remain within an undevolved UK. There was never any question that
Scots did not have the right to decide their own collective fate.
Where stands Scotland? We have grown somewhat used to explaining our
complexities to a puzzled world. We are also aware that, like that soldier
in Aberdeen's Union Street, Jock may actually not be so out of step after
all. If we now recognise a world of constitutional contradictions, a
messy and incomplete world, then maybe that is how the world is meant
to be at the beginning of the 21st century. The Scottish poet, High MacDiarmid,
once wrote what was probably his own epitaph; that he would 'hae nae
haufway hoose, but 'aye be whaur extremes meet; it's only way I ken to
dodge the cursed conceit o' bein' richt that damns the vast majority
o' men'. - a most Scottish of conditions, if one may say so.
David McCrone
University of Edinburgh
Footnotes
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(1)
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The poet Hugh MacDiarmid wrote a poem called 'Nothing but Heather!'
which begins:
Scotland small? Our multiform, our infinite Scotland small?.
It ends:
'Nothing but heather! - How marvellously descriptive! And incomplete!'
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(2)
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Quoted in Douglas Dunn's Scotland: an anthology (Fontana, London,
1992), and attributed to that shy but prolific poet 'anon'.
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(Published Online: 16 October 2002)
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