The Independence of Scotland Self-Government and the Shifting Politics of Union

After three hundred years, the Anglo-Scottish Union is in serious difficulty. This is not because of a profound cultural divide between England and Scotland but because recent decades have seen the rebuilding of Scotland as a political community while the ideology and practices of the oldunionism have atrophied. Yet while Britishness is in decline, it has not been replaced by a dominant ideology of Scottish independence. Rather Scots are looking to renegotiate union to find a new place in the Isles, in Europe, and in the world. There are few legal, constitutional or politicalobstacles to Scottish independence, but an independent Scotland would need to forge a new social and economic project as a small nation in the global market-place, and there has been little serious thinking about the implications of this. Short of independence, there is a range of constitutionaloptions for renegotiating the Union to allow more Scottish self-government on the lines that public opinion seems to favour. The limits are posed not by constitutional principles but by the unwillingness of English opinion to abandon their unitary conception of the state. The end of the UnitedKingdom may be provoked, not by Scottish nationalism, but by English unionism.

Michael Keating is Professor of Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute, Florence; and Professor of Politics at the University of Aberdeen. He previously taught at the universities of Strathclyde and Western Ontario and has been visiting professor in the United States, France, Spain and Norway. He has published widely on Scottish politics as well as on comparative nationalism, regionalism and public policy.