The people of Scotland have spoken. Millions of them, an astonishing 97 per cent of the electorate, went to the polls to cast their votes on Thursday on whether or not to secede from Britain.
No one can say it was not an impassioned election or an exciting day, a day when to Yes voters national pride outweighed economic risk, and to No voters the break from Britain, a realm they had been seemingly comfortable tethered to for 300 years, was a notion beyond all rational understanding. Finally, the nay-sayers had their day, and the secessionists had their eclipse.
Why, you ask, all the brouhaha? There are a mere six million Scots around, a smidgen of the total citizenry of the world and less than a tenth of the population of the United Kingdom. But that is precisely the point: If a little people like the Scots, with their own rich history, unique culture and national character, could do it — if they could reinvent for themselves a more reassuring identity in their own independent nation — then why shouldn’t that set a trend in the countries in the EU and beyond among like-minded communities? It was not to be. Those 44.7 per cent of Scots who voted Yes to independence were not of course setting a precedent for secession when they went to the polls. In our lifetime, secessionist movements have proliferated all the way from Belgium to Brazil, from Cyprus to Central America and from the Netherlands to Canada.
In Canada in 1995, for example, the Parti Quebecois, spurrred by the Movement Souveraniste du Quebec, held a referendum on the question of whether Quebec — the predominantly French-speaking province, with a population of 8 million —wished to break away from the rest of the country. The response was a No, though by the close margin of 51 per cent. (The next year, as a consolation prize to the Yes voters, the House of Commons of Canada passed a symbolic resolution recognising Quebec as a “nation within a united Canada”.) It was all done in a thoughtful, not to mention civilised manner — and then everyone went about their business, as Scotsmen and Scotswomen will no doubt be doing soon.
And sometimes secession could be messy, as happened in the landlocked Republic of South Sudan, whose independence was gained in 2011 by force of arms not by force of the ballot. From the outset of the referendum campaign, those Scottish Yes voters had a powerful argument to make for their vote. And given Scottish history, a powerful emotional argument. (The spectacle of Yes voters kissing their ballots before casting them was quite telling.) That history is suffused with the lore of struggle against English kings, going all the way back to legendary heroes like William Wallace and Robert the Bruce, starting in the 13th century.
Grim reminder
Wallace, a leader during the Wars of Scottish Independence, inflicted a resounding defeat against the army of King Edward I at Stirling Bridge in 1297 — only to be captured seven years later, tried for treason in Westminster Hall and executed. Later, fragments of his body were distributed among several Scottish cities as a grim reminder of the price of revolt. (Mel Gibson’s puerile 1995 movie about Wallace, Braveheart, is pure Hollywood fluff.)
Following Wallace’s short-lived rebellion, it was Bruce who, after 18 years of struggle, finally threw off the yoke of the English. He was crowned king of Scotland from 1306 to 1329. (Michael Penman’s recently published biography, Robert the Bruce: King of the Scots, is a brilliant narrative of the life of this Scottish patriot.) Alex Salmond, leader of the Scottish National Party, and one of the foremost proponents of independence, is a product of that tradition. He just tapped into it during his campaign, for it was a tradition encoded in the Scottish people’s national consciousness, their highly developed sense of “at-homeness” — that unconscious, immemorial intimacy the Scots have with their native acre. Alas, 55.3 per cent of these Scotsmen and Scotswomen deemed that sentiment too arcane at this time in their lives. Well and good.
On Thursday, a BBC reporter interviewed a middle-aged Scotswoman outside a polling station. Asked why she voted Yes, she responded: “I did it for my life, for my ancestors’ life and for the life of my children and grandchildren”. This sentiment, I say, may be formidably difficult to translate to some people. Yet to a typical diaspora Palestinian like this columnist, who has family in Scotland, including nephews and nieces who were born and raised there, it is a sentiment cut from the same cloth out of which his own national sensibility is woven.
Good luck, Scotland. You have spoken and we all respect what you have said. Yet, my sense is that your No vote leaves modern-day Scots, perhaps along with the next generation or two of them, with the question: What would it have been like to have voted for a zestful, independent nation where one would’ve been the only determining force in one’s own destiny?
Fawaz Turki is a journalist, lecturer and author based in Washington. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile.