Waiting and watching Scotland’s vote

It's natural that most of us should be focused on the significance of the outcome as the polling day for Scotland's referendum on independence approaches. However, for many groups in continental Europe involved in "separatism" and "unionism" the most significant thing has already happened. London has permitted this referendum and has agreed to accept an independent Scotland.

True, other European multinational states have sundered recently without bloodshed and with relatively little drama – for example, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. But the bloody break-up of Yugoslavia is an abiding reminder of how violent such processes can be.

So the spectacle of the venerable and still very powerful United Kingdom accepting self-determination and secession seems pregnant with precedent to many European observers – though the principle was perhaps already prefigured by the Downing Street declaration.

The issue of self-determination is a notoriously unstable political missile, and stands on the slippery ground of concepts of nation, state and ethnic and cultural identity. Historians and political scientists grapple endlessly with these terms but their conclusions can be summarised in this way: a nation is a group of people that believes itself to be a nation; a nation becomes a state when it can persuade or force other peoples to accept its statehood.

Europe – not to venture further afield – is a patchwork of such groups, some of whom believe, with varying degrees of conviction, that they are wrongfully trapped within alien nation states. The encompassing nation state often treats such claims as bogus. They insist these groups are simply regional variants of the national prototype, and dismiss distinct languages, for example, as dialects or obsolete vestiges of the distant past.

That is the traditional Spanish nationalist stance towards the Catalans, Basques and Galicians, and was brutally enforced under Gen Franco’s 40-year dictatorship. It remains the unitary French state’s position in relation to Bretons, Basques and Corsicans. It is noteworthy that this view was never dominant in the UK, which always gave at least formal recognition to the distinctive national characteristics of Scotland, Ireland, Wales and England.

‘Common fatherland’

Spain’s 1978 democratic constitution reluctantly admitted that the term “nationality” could be applied to Basques, Catalans and Galicians but the idea that these peoples are “nations” remains distinctly toxic in Madrid. Moreover, this constitution insists, in the same sentence, that the “Spanish nation” is “indissolubly united”, the “common fatherland” and, in case you still haven’t got the message, “indivisible”.

The notion of self-determination, therefore, is anathema today to both major Spanish political parties. The decision of Catalan nationalists to hold a referendum on independence in November is regarded as virtually seditious, and has been ruled illegal by the Spanish constitutional court. Basque nationalists have already found that this road to nationhood can be blocked.

Catalan nationalism, however, is a more powerful and more united, if less militant force than its Basque counterpart, and some form of referendum may well go ahead, with unpredictable consequences.

Small wonder, then, that the Catalans have brandished the Scottish process as an exemplary exercise in democracy, one that Madrid should be obliged to follow. And since the Catalans have also been threatened with loss of European Union membership should they manage to secede, they are scrutinising how Brussels is responding to the prospect of an independent Scotland.

The Scottish nationalists are, however, very mindful of the influence Madrid will have over the EU's attitude to Scottish membership. They have not expressed unequivocal solidarity with Catalonia.

When a Spanish journalist asked Scottish first minister Alex Salmond recently whether he supported the Catalan right to a referendum, he pointed out that the two situations are different: Scotland is voting with the UK's blessing.

Mainstream Basque nationalists, meanwhile, are being careful not to pin any particular hopes on the Scottish outcome. "We will not accelerate [our campaign] if there is a Yes vote, nor will we put on the brakes if there is a No vote," a leader of the Basque Nationalist Party said last week. But he continued: "Whatever the result, it will give impetus to a similar process here." It's an eminently pragmatic and perceptive position: the fact that a major EU country has conceded self-determination is itself a game-changer in the eternally contentious debate about the future shape of Spain.

French Basques

Might it change the picture elsewhere in the EU? That’s hardly likely in

France

, where the ideology of the 1789 revolution forged a much more successful centralist nation state than has ever existed south of the Pyrenees. The French Basques do not even have a regional department, while the Basques in Spain have carved out very extensive powers of self-government since 1978.

In Belgium, however, the powerful right-wing Flemish nationalists have certainly been encouraged by the UK precedent, and this may exacerbate fissiparous tendencies at the heart of the EU's administration. The Scottish referendum has also raised flagging spirits in the often rather contrived nationalist parties in the north (and far south) of Italy, but is less likely to have lasting impact there.

Just outside the EU, the pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine have also used Scottish analogies in their propaganda. And this reveals again the double edge of the self-determination weapon – Scotland could be used just as accurately (indeed rather more so) to justify Kiev’s independence from Moscow.

Paddy Woodworth is the author of The Basque Country: a Cultural History paddywoodworth.com