As with the imperial past, so with present global policing: nationalists like Gay would be happy to see Scotland (and England) withdraw from it. What is not clear is whether they think that it doesn't need doing or that others would do it better. Unless they have bought entirely into a sunny Enlightenment view of human beings, they will acknowledge that malevolent leaders can sometimes move nation states (like empires) to do atrocious things. And unless they are pacifist, they will also acknowledge that sometimes atrocious things must be stopped by force. Perhaps they think that the UN should do the policing — but the UN has only as many regiments as nation states choose to loan it. No doubt an independent Scotland, like Ireland, would lend its modest troops for peacekeeping purposes. But who, then, would fight the wars to make the just peace to be kept? Perhaps it is not that Gay wants the United States and the UK to stop making war altogether, but rather that he wants them to make it only when authorised by the UN. If so, he would be content for the enforcement capacity of the UN to be at the mercy of the threat of veto by Putin's Russia and Communist Party-run China, neither of whose records of humanitarian concern are exactly enviable. He would also join Alex Salmond in condemning Nato's 1999 military intervention to end ethnic cleansing in Kosovo as a "misguided" policy of "dubious legality and unpardonable folly". Embarrassingly, however, the result would be to align Scottish nationalism against former UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, and most contemporary international lawyers, who view Nato's action as at once illegal but morally legitimate.
The irony here — and it's a damning one — is that the issue that is supposed to make the rationale for Scottish independence clearest is one to which Gay has evidently given little serious thought. And this is symptomatic of Scottish nationalism more generally. David Torrance observes of Salmond that he has "no obvious interest in the world beyond Scotland". And Stuart Crawford, army officer and former SNP candidate, has commented that "the SNP hasn't got a foreign policy apart from being nice to everybody". Notwithstanding smug claims to morally superior internationalism, Scottish separatism actually suffers from marked narcissistic tendencies.
The sense of Scottish independence as an article of faith in search of sufficient reason deepens. What other options remain? As Alex Salmond's Dublin speech shows, anti-imperialism can be turned to more than one nationalist use. On the one hand, we're told, British empire is an enterprise from which the Scots should repent; on the other hand, English empire is an oppression from which they should liberate themselves. Here the Scots get to swap the role of perpetrator for that of victim. Thus Doug Gay represents the post-colonial school of Scottish nationalists, when he draws on Frantz Fanon's ideology of "inferiority complex", whereby the colonised internalise an image of themselves as inferior to the coloniser, to explain the psycho-social costs of being a minority partner within the Union. As empirical examples of "colonising" behaviour by the English he lists the tendency to speak of "England" when Britain or the UK is meant, the naming of the UK central bank as the Bank of England, the complacent domination of coronation rituals and House of Lords representation by the Church of England, the designation of Queen Elizabeth as the Second, and the appropriation of "God Save the Queen" and the Union flag by English sporting teams.
It is true that Scotland has always had to fight for its status as an equal partner in a Union where it usually lies in the shadow of its larger and more powerful neighbour. To some extent, the Scottish experience of being regularly overlooked is but an instance of the perennial plight of small countries adjacent to larger neighbours: we can be sure that Berlin would have less political reason to pay attention to an independent Scotland than London now does to (a semi-independent) North Britain. Nevertheless, English obliviousness is slighting and hurtful even when inadvertent; and if English people think Scottish irritation overblown, that is only because they have not had to listen to themselves being habitually written out of the story. The English do have something to repent of here, and I hope that the current debate about Scottish independence will have the beneficial effect of inducing English institutions to make some appropriate and generous adjustments. In particular, I hope that my own (and Alex Salmond's) Church of England will make a point of going far beyond the call of duty in supporting the Church of Scotland's formal representation in a reformed House of Lords, and in ceding sole ecclesiastical control of the next coronation service. Symbols and gestures of acknowledgement really do matter.
The irony here — and it's a damning one — is that the issue that is supposed to make the rationale for Scottish independence clearest is one to which Gay has evidently given little serious thought. And this is symptomatic of Scottish nationalism more generally. David Torrance observes of Salmond that he has "no obvious interest in the world beyond Scotland". And Stuart Crawford, army officer and former SNP candidate, has commented that "the SNP hasn't got a foreign policy apart from being nice to everybody". Notwithstanding smug claims to morally superior internationalism, Scottish separatism actually suffers from marked narcissistic tendencies.
The sense of Scottish independence as an article of faith in search of sufficient reason deepens. What other options remain? As Alex Salmond's Dublin speech shows, anti-imperialism can be turned to more than one nationalist use. On the one hand, we're told, British empire is an enterprise from which the Scots should repent; on the other hand, English empire is an oppression from which they should liberate themselves. Here the Scots get to swap the role of perpetrator for that of victim. Thus Doug Gay represents the post-colonial school of Scottish nationalists, when he draws on Frantz Fanon's ideology of "inferiority complex", whereby the colonised internalise an image of themselves as inferior to the coloniser, to explain the psycho-social costs of being a minority partner within the Union. As empirical examples of "colonising" behaviour by the English he lists the tendency to speak of "England" when Britain or the UK is meant, the naming of the UK central bank as the Bank of England, the complacent domination of coronation rituals and House of Lords representation by the Church of England, the designation of Queen Elizabeth as the Second, and the appropriation of "God Save the Queen" and the Union flag by English sporting teams.
It is true that Scotland has always had to fight for its status as an equal partner in a Union where it usually lies in the shadow of its larger and more powerful neighbour. To some extent, the Scottish experience of being regularly overlooked is but an instance of the perennial plight of small countries adjacent to larger neighbours: we can be sure that Berlin would have less political reason to pay attention to an independent Scotland than London now does to (a semi-independent) North Britain. Nevertheless, English obliviousness is slighting and hurtful even when inadvertent; and if English people think Scottish irritation overblown, that is only because they have not had to listen to themselves being habitually written out of the story. The English do have something to repent of here, and I hope that the current debate about Scottish independence will have the beneficial effect of inducing English institutions to make some appropriate and generous adjustments. In particular, I hope that my own (and Alex Salmond's) Church of England will make a point of going far beyond the call of duty in supporting the Church of Scotland's formal representation in a reformed House of Lords, and in ceding sole ecclesiastical control of the next coronation service. Symbols and gestures of acknowledgement really do matter.
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