The Vote on Scottish Independence

In September the Scottish people will vote on whether to secede from Britain and form an independent country. To this I say, how could anyone living in Scotland look around and say, "We need to make this place more like the Balkans or Ukraine"?

Nationalism is stupid. It is based on the illusion that the people of one country have something profound in common that they do not have in common with others, so that rule by fellow Scots or Serbs or Americans means rule by "us," whereas membership in a larger, multi-ethnic state means rule by "them." Right now, there is a sense in which this is true for Scotland, which is more socialistic than Britain as a whole and would like to have a stronger welfare state than southern England will accept. So? How likely is it that this small political difference will still exist in 50 years, or 300? To me it smacks of taking your ball and stomping off home when you can't set the rules. I am about as American as it is possible to be, with ancestors on one side stretching back to seventeenth-century Jamestown, and nineteenth-century immigrants on the other. Yet I often feel that America is ruled by people alien to me and my ways of thinking. Does any Scottish nationalist think that it wouldn't be the same for an independent Scotland? Any community bigger than a small town is a place of strangers, and people in small countries hate their governments just as much as people in big countries do. Just ask the Belgians.

When I was last in Scotland I found myself in some monument -- the Walter Scott tower in Edinburgh? -- that features a long row of busts of great Scotsmen. Except for Robert the Bruce and John Knox, all of them lived while Scotland was part of Britain. Did Adam Smith or David Hume or Charles Rennie Mackintosh or any of the many great Scottish engineers suffer from British rule? No. If anything it helped them get a broad audience for their work.

Conflict between England and Scotland is old, old news. The big traumas of recent Scottish history, such as the Highland clearances, have been inflicted by Scots on each other. The divide between Highland and Lowland Scots is deep and historically significant; to Highland historians, the biggest villains are Lowlanders like James VI and I. Rob Roy MacGregor was hunted by James Graham, the Duke of Montrose. The language divide in Britain runs through Scotland, leaving most Scots on the English-speaking side. To my mind the difference between Glasgow and Skye is much greater than the difference between Glasgow and Manchester.

The world does not need more localism, chauvinism, or anger against outsiders. The world needs more effort to get along, and this applies in Scotland as much as anywhere else.