Scottish independence: a good idea or a bad idea?

Today the people residing in Scotland can decide whether they want to see an independent Scotland or to have Scotland remain in the UK. The betting markets concur with the opinion polls and favour the status quo: the markets give roughly 20% chance that the ‘yes’ vote will win and that Scotland will become independent.

The majority of economists talking about the referendum have focused on whether or not the Scots would be financially better off with their own country, debating things like North Sea oil revenues and currency unions. I think that is a distraction: looking at small and large countries in Europe, you would have to say there is no noticeable advantage or disadvantage to being a small country and that the Scots are hence unlikely to be materially affected in the long run by independence.
Independence is more about self-image and identity than it is about money. Even though the push for independence might well come from politicians and bureaucracies that gain prestige and income if they ruled an independent country, the population deciding on the vote will probably vote on emotional grounds, not economic. Young male Scots appear overwhelmingly in favour of independence; females and old people prefer to keep things the way they are. The latter groups are bigger and are expected to sway the day.

Personally, I have two related reasons to oppose the breaking up of larger countries in Europe into smaller ethnically defined states, not just Scotland, but also Catalonia, the Basque region, the Frisian province, Bavaria, and all the other regions of Europe:

1. These independence movements are ethnic and hence by definition exclusionary. This is a big concern: large nation states have slowly moved away from the story that they exist for people of the ‘right’ bloodlines and with ancestors who lived in the ‘right’ place. The UK, the US, France, Australia, and even Germany and Spain have moved towards an identity based on stories about what it means to be British, American, French, Australian, etc., rather than a ‘blood and earth’ ethnic nation state story. Speaking tongue-in-cheek, the Brits have an upper lip story, the Americans have an exceptionalism story, the French have been convinced they like reading Proust, the new Australians are told in their citizenship exams that they believe in a fair go, etc. These stories contain treasured national stereotypes, complete with imagined histories. The key thing is that are inclusive, ie any newcomer from another place can participate in such stories. The Australian national anthem is a beautiful example of this super-inclusive attitude as it, almost uniquely, mentions neither ethnicity nor religion as a basis for being Australian. The ethnic stories of the independence movements are, in contrast, exclusionary and hence harmful to the self-image of any migrant. It is a move to a past that we have little reason to be proud of, as it marginalises current and future migrants. The story surrounding Scottish independence is thus not that the Scots are people who like to wear kilts and enjoy haggis, but that they make up the people who have suffered 700 years of oppression by the English. What is a recent newcomer from, say, Poland to do with such a self-image but conclude that they do not really belong there?
2. The mixing of populations inside the UK due to factors like work, marriage, and retirement, now means that large parts of the ‘Scots’ live elsewhere and large parts of the population living in Scotland come from elsewhere. So there are reportedly close to a million Scottish-born people living elsewhere in the UK, and half a million people living in Scotland who were in fact born in England. Becoming independent from those ‘evil English that oppressed us for 700 years’ means marginalising both the 10% of the resident Scottish population actually born in England and putting a traitorous label on the million that decided the supposed oppressors were people you could marry and work with. If we consider the fractional heritage that nearly every UK citizen has, with some ancestors from Scotland and some from elsewhere, nearly every UK citizen will then almost arbitrarily be ‘forced to choose’ whether their fractional Scottishness counts as 1 or as 0. This is a problem: the roughly 5% of my ancestry that is probably Scottish does not want to be alienated from the 45% that comes from other parts of the British Isles!

These two reasons amplify each other: the damage that an ethnic-story based independence movement does gets amplified if the mixing is very large and is somewhat less of a factor when there is very little mixing.

What goes for Scotland goes doubly for many other regions in Europe: for instance, I believe some 40% of the people living in Catalonia are born outside of Catalonia and in other Spanish regions. The population mixing between regions of France and Germany is similarly large. The reality of a joint national economy is that the populations have internally mixed and artificially going ‘back’ to supposedly ethnically pure groups that define themselves in terms of adversity to the others is a regression.

It is of course these mixed populations that provide a counter-weight to any break-away movement, and they provide clear policy prescriptions for those who want to keep their countries intact: mix the population around to emasculate those who want to pull any geographic ethnicity card.

So I will be hoping that the betting markets are right, that mixing populations over the last few decades has done its integrative job, and that the ‘No’ vote wins.