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If the Scots Secede, Who’s Next?
In yesterday’s New York Times, Scottish actor Alan Cumming, argued in favor of an independent Scotland as follows:
This is not about hating the English. It is about democracy and self-determination. Scotland is weary of being ruled by governments it did not vote for.
A question for Mr. Cummings and — for that matter — for my pro-independence friends here at Ricochet:
If the Scots secede from the United Kingdom, on what principle could they prevent the Orkney and Shetland Islands from seceding from Scotland, and taking with them the roughly a third of the active North Sea oil wells that lie within their waters?
Ruled by various Scandinavian dynasties until the sixteenth century, the Orkneys and Shetlands have undergone a very different cultural and political development from that of the rest of Scotland and — while most of Scotland now leans to the left — politics in the Orkneys and Shetlands are more centrist. Why should the people of those scattered islands be ruled by governments for which they did not vote, as they almost certainly would in an independent Scotland? Shouldn’t they also be entitled to democracy and self-determination?
Why, I repeat, shouldn’t the Orkneys and Shetlands secede from Scotland if Scotland secedes from the UK? Or Catalonia and the Basque country from Spain? Or Flanders from Belgium? Or Milan and the Po Valley from Italy?
Is there a limiting principle? Can you name it?
Image Credit: Eric Gaba (Sting – fr:Sting) [GFDL or CC-BY-SA-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0], via Wikimedia Commons
Published in General
I still haven’t given up on my dream of swamping the Tasmanian native population by recruiting a half-million like-minded settlers and then calling for an independence referendum. We get our own country and teach Australia a lesson about the folly of wide open borders. Win-win!
Voted most likely to secede, in no particular order:
As for the Scots, they are socialist twits who will immediately bang on the EU’s door and be free nevermore.
Should The US Deploy Troops To Scotland?
Sort of like we did in Texas?
Nonsense. Texas has standards.
If I still lived in Charlottesville I would agitating to partition Nova (Northern Virginia) into a separate state. Let the Old Dominion be the first state to split into 3 parts!
Funny.
Texans generally self-identify as patriotic Americans, though we will usually answer “Texas” when we are overseas and someone asks where we are from. I suspect that most Scots do the same when traveling abroad.
For the majority of Texans to seriously consider secession, a catalyst would be necessary.
We almost had one in recent years when our legislature proposed to outlaw TSA pat-downs in our airports, but Rick Perry as governor suppressed it. The TSA threatened to shut down all Texas airports if the bill passed. Texans would not have stood for that.
In the foreseeable future, the most likely scenario for secession might be if California’s reckless budget collapsed and the consequences were explicitly passed onto Texas.
Or, sadly, Texas might one day lose territory to Mexico or to the narco-terrorist state forming along the Rio Grande. Texas won its independence from Mexico after exactly the sort of unchecked immigration we are experiencing today, only the immigrants were mostly German and Irish. The regional culture ceased to be Mexican, so eventually there was a hunger for politics to reflect that. Today, more and more of our street signs are in Spanish only and our schools are full of kids who don’t speak English. There would be nothing wrong with people knowing multiple languages and customs, but the driving culture is changing and eventually the politics will follow.
As to the fallout from the Scottish Independence Campaign the most pressing question is:
Who will be King In The North?
Price CharlesI believe
The Yes campaign swears that they intend to keep QEII as Scotland’s sovereign. As far as I know, they have not made the same promise regarding her successors.
Just to further illustrate my own point:
Looks like the United States was a little ahead of the curve, there.
Seawriter
Like “all Gaul.”
What they should is petition that the original outline of the District of Columbia be restored.
The Scots are only citizens of the EU through their British citizenship. If they take up Scottish citizenship they would lose their EU citizenship.
This is all totally chattering class stuff as the people in Scotland (not synonymous with Scots) will vote No to independence. Socialists don’t give up on the funder of their goodies.
Yabbut, it was the Socialists and the Greens who were pushing hardest for independence.
The vote looks like it will be no and I consider that a good thing. If the yes vote were to carry the day, I think the best that we can about Scotland and the EU is that it will be subject to negotiation. It is not true at this time that a yes vote terminates the EU citizenship of those living in Scotland.
I do think the pressure from other EU member states to force an independent Scotland to apply for new membership will be tremendous. If Scotland were to be admitted by a simple amendment of the Lisbon treaty it sends a green light to every disgruntled minority in the EU to toss their national governments too. On the other hand the EU doesn’t want to lose members either. It creates the possibility that life can be better outside the Union rather than in its embrace.
I suppose the Québécois have given up at this point?
Whether Scotland begins a wave of secession depends on how well Scotland succeeds in the next decade?
Is the proper analogue for an independent Scotland, the Isle of Man?
No. The Isle of Man lets Westminster handle its foreign affairs. It is not an independent member of the EU.
The Isle of Man and the Channel Islands could, on the other hand, be a potential model for how real British federalism could work.
Comme ci, comme ça.
Québec has gotten virtually everything it has demanded from Ottawa statutorily (though not constitutionally), and it gets a metric whackload of cash from Canadian taxpayers in transfer payments that it would never be able to make up for as an independent country (unless massive oil reserves are discovered underneath Olympic Stadium).
I mean, the Conservative Prime Minister even made a big speech acknowledging les Québecois (though not Québec itself) as a separate nation within Canada. That satisfied most of those for whom independence is an emotional issue rather than a political one.
As such, for the moment the séparatistes are pretty much a Potemkin Army.
Your viewpoint is given considerable support in recent articles at the ‘Mises Daily’ (on-line paper of the Ludwig von Mises Institute).
The first,which appeared shortly before the Scottish referendum, was written by Peter St. Onge, “Is Scotland Big Enough to go it Alone?”
The second, by Ryan McMaken, “Five Lessons from the Scottish Referendum”, appeared today.
Both articles make the wider comparison with other secession movements and are laden with interesting facts and statistics.