Tag Archives: seccessionistpolitics

The Scottish Independence Campaign and Contemporary Scottish Nationalism: Lessons from across the Irish Sea? – Part 1

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March 24th 2016. The streets of Edinburgh and Glasgow are coloured blue and white with Scottish Saltires. A public celebration to mark the first Scottish Day of Independence is taking place on the Edinburgh Royal Mile, with Alex Salmond giving the main address as the first head of government of an independent Scotland since the eighteenth century. Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, still Sovereign of Scotland, has already sent her good wishes and an expression of hope that Scotland will continue to flourish, now as an independent nation.

Is this a likely scenario? We offer no polling predictions, which are uncertain at the best of times in any case. But what is certain at this time is this: in September 2014 (on the seven-hundred year anniversary of Robert the Bruce’s victory over the English at Bannockburn) the people of Scotland will go to the polls for a referendum on independence, and if the Scottish electorate votes ‘Yes’, March 24th 2016 will be the (projected) date of independence day.

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Historians of, to use a popular expression, ‘these Isles’, particularly those interested in nations and nationalisms, can hardly fail to be struck to the parallels, contrasts, and precedents offered for the Scottish independence question by the break-up of a previous Union: the Union of Great Britain and Ireland of 1800, which came to an end with the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922. It is perhaps itself noteworthy that these parallels and contrasts seem to be much less often remarked upon south of the border than in Scotland. Yet the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries offer a rich history of Irish-Scottish political debate on the Union, both nationalist and unionist, ably charted by works such as Alvin Jackson’s The Two Unions: Ireland, Scotland, and the Survival of the United Kingdom. At least up until the financial crisis of 2008 Alex Salmond regularly cited Ireland as a role model for Scottish independence; he does so less now, at any rate less forcefully. Still, there is only one precedent for a nation-state to have emerged from the United Kingdom by breaking with it – the present-day Republic of Ireland.

The new secessionist wave – Reflections on the crisis of the neo-liberal state

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As part of our current series on Scotland and secessionist movements, SEN Journal: Online Exclusives is excited to present this original piece by Professor Daniele Conversi, Research Professor at the University of the Basque Country and the Ikerbasque Foundation for Science, who has written about the wider issue of secessionist politics and the state.

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One can study the new secessionist wave in the West and elsewhere from a number of perspectives: by looking at how nationalist leaders mobilize their constituencies, at the form of the state, at the international dimension, and so on. However, I believe what is paramount is that we are witnessing a rather precipitous fall of political legitimacy of the neoliberal state. Beyond nationalism, this can be seen in the rapid rise of anti-system movements, like the M-15 or indignados (aka “outraged”) in Spain, Beppe Grillo’s direct democracy movement in Italy, the Occupy movement in the USA, UK and elsewhere, and the electoral gains of Syriza in Greece, each of them with its different organizational roots, but all deeply dedicated to change the current political system. At the same time, the spread of populism, often accompanied by anti-Europeanism, threatens to twist the European Union’s hard-won achievement of tolerance through a seemingly unstoppable wave of xenophobia, Islamophobia and racism – a trend amplified by the challenge of the extremists’ intense online activism (Conversi 2012a).

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