Scottish Independence is tied to national identity

My basic position on this sort of thing is that if places want to be independent, they should be independent, unless the reason that they’re seeking independence is so they can have more freedom to oppress minority populations. Yet I can’t say this seems like a good idea, for reasons that my friend Alex Massie has ably outlined. Scotland is a net recipient of transfers from the UK government, so going it alone will probably require some belt tightening. The process of separating all the intertwined institutions, from banking to education, will be daunting. But the very closeness of the vote shows how hard it can be to focus on bloodless practical considerations in the face of ethnicity and culture. Even in our enlightened age, people really don’t like having their fates controlled by outsiders.

Nice enlightenment liberals who come up against this fact frequently seem bewildered. After 9/11, I heard Europeans link the attack to the US’s admittedly much higher rate of car accidents and gun homicides. I’ve seen a few people suggest that no one should care what Russia is up to in Ukraine, because after all, that government is pretty corrupt and awful, too. In the wake of the riots in Ferguson, Missouri, a number of people asked why there wasn't a focus on black-on-black crime, which, to be sure, claims many more young black lives each year. These questions were entirely sincere, but also curiously naive, as if someone commiserated about a mugging by asking you why you weren’t more concerned about your spouse’s drinking problem.

For those who remain puzzled, Jonathan Haidt has a good word for it: People are groupish. Our first major advance as a species was forming small, social, cooperative groups. That has many survival advantages, but one of the characteristics of those groups that helps them survive is that they are extremely sensitive to the difference between “Us” and “Them,” more concerned about threats from strangers than intimates — often irrationally so. Some people will do themselves great harm in order to punish others they think have wronged them. But this outsized overreaction often follows a deep and persuasive evolutionary logic.

The cosmopolitan class finds it easy to forget how deep these sentiments run, even though many of us are nonetheless moved by them, as I, for one, discovered after 9/11. Really, it’s not that we don’t understand or, for that matter, endorse groupish behavior; it’s just that we find it a lot easier to do the cost-benefit calculations when our own group isn’t involved. It’s not really all that surprising that groupish instincts might prove more convincing than fiddling details about how to handle redenomination of Scottish bank accounts if the new nation should find it necessary to develop its own
currency.

There’s one easy way to override them, of course: an outside threat from an even bigger, stranger group. Small differences are easily glossed over when there are some really foreign people knocking at the gates. But the rich world is largely peaceful now, which gives people more time to worry about the jerks next door. 

I still assume that Scotland will ultimately choose to stay. But even if it does, it will do so knowing that a near majority of voters wanted to be citizens of Scotland, not a United Kingdom. Nationalism really isn’t dead; it’s just resting.

Courtesy: Bloomberg