On the contrary, the Westminster political leadership’s last minute pledge to grant more powers to Scotland in the wake of the devolution process that started in the 1990s has already triggered what in the eyes of many observers is bound to be a complex and protracted constitutional debate over the terms of the relationship between London and Edinburgh and, ultimately, between Scotland and the rest of the UK. The jury, I suspect, will be out for some time to come.
But leaving these internal complexities aside, the Scottish referendum has undoubtedly reinvigorated British democracy and rekindled discussions about the legitimacy of state power and the consent of the governed. From an international perspective, the Scottish independence movement looks no terribly different to other separatist movements in Europe and elsewhere in the world that have variably combined throughout history socio-economic grievances with a distinctive vision of how to assert and preserve their identities within their homelands. It is no coincidence that the Scottish case has been closely watched by the Catalans, the Basques, the South-Tyrolean’s, among many others.
The inclusiveness of Scottish society and the essentially ‘civic’ democratic nationalism underpinning the ‘yes’ campaign should give everyone cause for reflection. ‘Independence is for people who are enslaved’ – said a 70-year-old interviewee born in India and migrated to Britain in the 1970s. ‘India was colonized, they fought for independence and got it. But being a colony is totally different from being part of a union’. Indeed. The sort of self-determination championed by US President Wilson to accommodate the ‘nationalities’ of Europe in the aftermath of World War I, did not make it to the table of post-1945 legal and political arrangements. The remarkable expansion of the international system generated by the UN-vetted process of decolonisation, with its attendant collapse of Europe’s empires and the institution of empire itself, was never predicated on notions of ethnicity or cultural homogeneity. True, this process came to benefit dominant groupings in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific, just as dominant groups benefitted from the break-up of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia in the 1990s. However, the international community’s ‘right to self-determination’ post-1945 has stayed largely clear of civilizational parameters or requirements of ethno-cultural unity for statehood. The latter had already emerged practically and politically bankrupt at Versailles, to which a sense of moral outrage was added by Hitler’s aggressive policies to protect the German minorities in Europe.
Scotland is not a colony, let alone an ‘oppressed’ community seeking (still legally controversial) ‘remedial’ secession. But the case of Scotland exposes the crucial significance of democratic participation as part and parcel of the language and process of contemporary self-determination within the state. Self-determination and human rights have been nested within each other since their post-World War II inception – operating first an emancipatory tool for anti-colonial nationalism and racial equality, and then as a tool for validating and/or reinvigorating the project of state sovereignty, including within multinational states. The United Nations Charter and international more generally do not sanction ‘national’ self-determination, that is, the capacity of the ethno-cultural argument alone to ground unilateral secessionist claims. Yet, as famously argued by Canada’s Supreme Court in the Reference case regarding Quebec’s prospect for independence, ‘a continuous process of discussion’ is what lies at the heart of processes of internal self-determination even in the absence of a unilateral right to secede under domestic and international law.
The Scottish independence movement has not appealed to ‘ethnic’ self-determination. Rather, the debate about Scotland as a constituent nation of the Union inevitably reworks the perennial and legitimate ‘national question’ in the language of cultural pluralism, civic engagement, policy- and institution-making within the larger United Kingdom. Internationally, the vocabulary of ‘peoplehood’ for distinctive ethno-cultural groupings within existing states has proved – and will continue to prove – remarkably elusive and unhelpful, with some exceptions. The split within the ‘people of Scotland’ between the yes and no vote speaks to the fuzziness of the concept and its multiple variants, in the same way in which ‘the people of Quebec’ does not account for significant sectors of that province, including English speakers and indigenous groups, that have consistently opposed independence. And experience shows that that vocabulary may prove politically manipulative (Crimea), may partly inhibit larger projects of social emancipation (Bosnia) or may not automatically settle questions regarding the correct level of ‘peoplehood’ within the state (Catalonia).
Unsurprisingly, the victory of the no vote in the Scottish referendum has been received with a considerable sigh of relief outside Britain. There was a sense that Scottish independence might have created havoc and further fragmentation within an already fragile European architecture. More than that, it might have set a dangerous precedent for other separatist entities to follow. On the other hand, the Scots are overwhelmingly pro-European and the European Union has committed itself to the protection of national minorities within a system of multilevel governance.
Recent practice shows that secession referenda are unlikely to work, unless they are part of lengthy and comprehensive negotiating processes involving all the parties concerned (e.g. in South Sudan). This is not to suggest that legitimate demands from relevant polities should be ignored. Far from it. In the Quebec case, the Supreme Court was adamant that a clear local majority in favour of secession would generate a moral and constitutional duty to respond upon the federal government by engaging in good faith discussions with the province of Quebec. No matter how close it got to achieve success, the yes campaign in Scotland did not muster a majority in favour of independence, and the United Kingdom is not (yet) a federal state. It would be politically and constitutionally disingenuous, though, to dismiss the substantial yes vote recorded on 18 September as the reflection of an illegitimate grievance towards the central government in London.
In reality, the Scottish vote on both sides of the argument represents a peaceful and democratic call for a constitutionally inclusive reconfiguration of the state. Much has been done in Western Europe over the past 60 years or so to devise institutions and power-sharing models that can make multinational states sustainable and even make ‘national’ polities increasingly more inclusive from within. Crucially, the Scottish vote signals that more can and should be done to put states within plural societies on firmer ground. The roadmap for doing so in the United Kingdom is already the subject of intense political debate and speculation. But the underlying lesson is one of democracy and open debate within regional and nation-wide polities, not delusional independence to be obtained at gunpoint.
Dr Gaetano Pentassuglia is a Reader in International Law and Human Rights at the University of Liverpool’s School of Law