Brexit, Scottish Nationalism and the Virtues and Delusions of Smallness
The subject of this essay is, admittedly, squirrelling my own rules because Brexit, like death and taxes, will always be with us. Scottish nationalism, similarly, shows no sign of disappearing. So, as a kind of legal fiction, I’m going to pretend that I’m just talking about the referendums in 2014 and 2016 and their immediate aftermath. The points I’m making wouldn’t really change if I was able to talk directly about the events of the past year, although certainly it does seem that the COVID crisis (and the greater ability of the devolved Scottish government to project the appearance, if not the reality, of competence) may prove decisive in pushing the United Kingdom to dissolution.
As is the way of political divisions, once leaving the EU came to be associated with the political right, then the explanations for it, naturally enough, had to be searched for among the usual hangups of the political left. Of course, to an extent this is just a natural response to the realities. For example, it appears certain that the decisive factor in securing that crucial 52% was a concern about levels of immigration to the UK over the past 20 years, much of it explicitly racist and/or xenophobic. But the link is not always straightforward: the European Union is an institution that has always struggled to achieve popular consent, especially via referendums. In any event, on many social indicators, such as whether a person would be happy with someone of a different ethnicity or religion moving next door or marrying their child, the United Kingdom comes out as significantly more liberal than many of its European neighbours.
But all that is by the by. As said, there can be no doubt that popular opposition to immigration formed the backbone of the Leave vote.
What is significantly more doubtful is that the Leave vote was driven by a popular pro-imperialism, although that has become a surprisingly commonly-held opinion amongst the commentariat. For example, Gary Younge sagely informs us that “Britain’s imperial fantasies have given us Brexit.” This suggestion is wrong for a number of reasons. In the first place, it is a severe case of the Commentators’ Fallacy: where important media personalities assume that what they and people in their coterie are talking about is remotely reflective of what is being talked about elsewhere.
One suspects that among the British commentariat there very much are people (the kinds of people who doss out a column every week but inexplicably get to call themselves ‘journalists’) who are nostalgic for the British Empire and who regard British rule in parts of Africa as superior to what has come since. Similarly, there is no doubt that there is a certain nostalgia amongst certain members of the Conservative Party for the style of politics of the late 19th century.
But, by any measure, this does not translate to popular support for a revival of the Empire or a British imperial project. Certain polls point to the fact that a plurality of the public view the Empire in a generally favourable light but this reflects a general ignorance about the topic and an impulse to regard the period of the height of a country’s power as being generally a good thing. This may be distasteful to people of a certain political outlook but it is hardly unique to the United Kingdom: it is not for nothing that the Spanish refer to the Golden Age and the Kalmar Union is remembered fondly in Denmark.
The British Empire is not widely taught or understood in Britain, making widespread desire for its reinstatement implausible to say the least. Even during its existence it did not form as big a part of the national culture as is often assumed. One of my favourite statistics is that a 1948 social attitudes survey found that 51% of British people could not name a single British colony: 5% of people thought that the United States was one. While since 2016 we have been forced to endure various vacuous statements about post-Brexit Britain being “world-beating” in various industries, that seems to be more connected to a peculiarly bombastic and boosterish type of patriotism rather than a political platform for the restoration of British colonialism. Again, this is something neither particularly unusual to Britain nor unique to our moment.
Where we do hear hand-wringing about Britain’s place in the world, it is in fact from the Remain side. The idea that Britain would have it’s voice in world affairs reduced was a central claim during the Remain campaign, and the assertion that a particular twist in the Brexit negotiations has internationally embarrassed Britain has beens a common one in the years subsequent. Obviously, this is hardly the same as neo-colonialism but it is to say that the side primarily concerned with whether or not foreigners will listen to the opinions of British politicians was not Leave.
This is the similarity with the Scottish independence movement. There is certainly a xenophobic strain amongst senior Scottish nationalists that does come out if you scratch too far, what seems to be the dominant strain is an idea that the United Kingdom in its current configuration has become, in an important sense, an abnormal country and that only through independence can a sense of Scottish normality be retained.
(This is incidentally why the SNP would never go into coalition with Labour in Westminster because it fundamentally suits their project for the Conservatives to continue to (badly) govern in London — the idea that the SNP is Labour’s social democrat sister party is one of the more irritating myths of modern British politics.)
A sense of smallness, of normality, of community, then, is common to both. In the case of Brexit, it is not a case of wishing to restore the British Empire, it’s an assertion that it never mattered. In the case of Scottish independence, it is not a case of wishing to restore Scotland’s prominent position in the Union, it’s an assertion that it never mattered. It is also, to a certain extent, a delusion. Countries like Denmark, Norway and Sweden (so often mentioned positively as countries we “could be”) can be small because other countries are, relatively, big. What is the UK’s future trading relationship with the EU going to be like? Because there will have to be one. What currency will an independent Scotland use? Because it’ll have to use one. Those are questions that have to be answered and the world will not sit around and wait for us to answer them at our leisure.
Scottish independence and leaving the EU are both movements motivated by this desire for smallness but both of them are fundamentally grand (for the countries doing them, at least) geopolitical projects. This disjuncture is what is going to cause their ultimate philosophical failure even if and when the legal-political moves to accomplish them are successfully completed.
