Neal Ascherson: Will Scotland Go Its Own Way?

Neal Ascherson is the author, most recently, of “Stone Voices: The Search for Scotland.”

“THE Breakup of Britain”? It sounds like a fantasy fiction title. To many people across the world, including the English themselves, it is inconceivable that this deep-rooted United Kingdom, the oldest royal democracy in the world, could split apart.

In the last few weeks, however, official London has panicked over the rising clamor of voices from all over the British Isles suddenly agreeing that the archaic structure of “Great Britain” is overdue for a shake-up — even a breakup.

Nowhere are these voices in better harmony than in Scotland. If “Britain” is more than a word on a passport, why do most Scots now feel their primary identity is not British? What would it mean to be English if the Scots walked away? And should the Welsh follow them? A fresh wind of new ideas is blowing from Scotland and tempting all the queen’s subjects to reimagine their identities....

The roots of this crisis lie far back in British history. After co-existing under the same monarch for a century, in 1707 a poverty-stricken, failing Scotland agreed to enter an “incorporating union” with England, in which Scotland gave up its independence in return for access to English markets and to the widening English empire overseas. But there was a fateful misunderstanding between two very different constitutional traditions. The English regarded the union as irreversible; the Scots, then and now, regarded it as a treaty that could be modified or even ended by mutual agreement.

Scotland prospered in the subsequent two centuries, from the profits of empire and then from the industrial revolution that those imperial profits and markets made possible. And yet the awareness of past independence never quite faded. The most basic political feeling among Scots, pro- or anti-union, is the memory of statehood. It’s an instinct, rather than a formed idea, that the nation still retains a “residual sovereignty” that cannot be taken away. The poet Robert Burns wrote that Scotland had been “bought and sold for English gold.”

But between the last Jacobite rising in 1745 and the end of World War II 200 years later, there was no serious political challenge to the union. It took the cumulative effect of the Depression, the decay of Scotland’s industries and the collapse of the British Empire in the mid-20th century to reignite and spread a sense that the bargain was no longer paying off....