Yes Scotland and Catalonia? No Donetsk?

Tomorrow, on 18 September 2014, the Scottish electorate – but not the many Scots now resident outside Scotland, including a good friend of mine here in Holland – will be allowed to decide whether Scotland should secede from the United Kingdom and become an independent country, as it was until it was steamrollered into union with England barely three centuries ago. Opinion polls have consistently indicated that a majority of those voting in the referendum will opt to remain in the UK – but the issue is an unusual one, and pollsters have warned that all kinds of unpredictable factors may influence the result in unexpected ways. For one thing, the turnout looks likely to be high – most Scots who are entitled to vote will probably do so. Whatever the outcome, no-one will fairly be able to claim afterwards that it was unrepresentative. And as polling day approaches the percentages of ‘yes’ and ‘no’ voters have been converging, to the point where the result is now ‘too close to call’.

Having spent the first eight years of my life in Scotland, I’m very much aware of the animosities involved. With an English father and an Irish mother, I was the odd boy out at my Scottish primary school. Whenever the teacher mentioned the battle of Bannockburn or Scottish hero Robert the Bruce, cold eyes would turn in my direction. I was the school Sassenach (from the Scottish Gaelic word for Englishman, originally ‘Saxon’). I picked up a posh version of the Glaswegian accent but got rid of it again in a matter of months after my parents moved to southern England – though I’m told it can still be heard in my ‘o’ sounds when I say ‘Scot’, ‘Scotland’ or ‘Scottish’.

In fact, having lived in many different places, in contact with people of many nationalities (many of whose languages I have learned), I’ve always thought I should submit my accent to one of those dialectologists that can listen to you for a quarter of an hour and pin down exactly what all the influences on it have been (‘lived within sight of the Franco-Swiss border for four years in his late twenties’, ‘has never been to Asia’, ‘heard Italian arias and German Lieder while in his mother’s womb’….).

Anyway – perhaps because I belong to a (sexual) minority and have lived in so many places without feeling particularly attached, let alone ‘loyal’, to any of them – I can sense why many Scots might want to cast off what they see as the Sassenach yoke and go it alone, whatever the political, economic or other implications might be. Like the Slovenes when they finally became independent in 1991, they surely want to feel responsible for their own affairs and stop having to blame what happens to them on decisions made by other people in other places. A kind of adulthood, if you like – and it applies to nations just as much as to individuals. After three hundred years they want to know what it’s like to be – in the words of the famous Irish pro-independence song – a nation once again. Maybe they’d end up regretting it – but it would be their choice and theirs alone, recalling the name of the Irish political party Sinn Féin, literally ‘we ourselves’, ‘we alone’.

But why am I, a dyed-in-the-wool non-nationalist, promoting the birth of a new nation? Perhaps it’s just that we’re all expected to feel part of some nation or other, and that’s unlikely to end any time soon. In this case the options open to Scots are to be (a) British or (b) Scottish. Some of them might prefer other options such as being (c) European or (d) citizens of the world, but those aren’t on offer, at least not yet. And, deep down, being British means condoning Scotland’s forced annexation in 1707 by a rich, haughty, aggressive England that was well on the way to becoming Britannia-rules-the-waves (and a quarter of the world).

Perhaps it’s simply a matter of bigness and smallness. Small political units tend to be more representative of the people that live there; in contrast, big ones tend to have grown big by attacking their smaller neighbours and absorbing them against their will. The UK is surely a case in point, for it’s basically a product of English expansionism over the past millennium. Perhaps the Scots would just as readily have absorbed England if they’d had the chance; but that’s not the way this particular cookie crumbled.

To my mind there’s a moral onus on nations that have grown big through political and economic aggression – notably Britain, France, Russia, China and the United States, which just happen to be the five countries with a veto at the United Nations – to pay extra special attention to the concerns of the nations they’ve absorbed or crushed on their way to bigness (I deliberately avoid the word ‘greatness’ here). Britain really shouldn’t be making so much fuss about one of its ‘constituent parts’ thinking seriously about secession, since Scotland never wanted to be part of the ‘United’ Kingdom in the first place.

And the same surely applies to Spain and its north-eastern region Catalonia (where there is a clear and growing majority in favour of independence). There are plans in Catalonia for a referendum on independence in November, but unlike in the UK the central authorities in Spain have declared any such move illegal and refuse even to discuss it – perhaps because Catalonia is the country’s most prosperous region and its departure would deal a serious blow to the already ailing Spanish economy (something that cannot be said of Scotland in relation to the UK). Another of Spain’s more prosperous regions, the Basque Country, has declared its support for a Catalan referendum, and by implication one of its own. This can only have added to the jitters in Madrid, and indeed in Paris – for France (like Spain) has a Basque minority who might themselves be tempted to secede and form a new Basque state with their Spanish brethren. The socialist French prime minister has apparently stated that he is ‘anxious’ about the prospects of a Catalan referendum, for France has not only a Basque-speaking but also a Catalan-speaking minority. And, in the wake of a ‘yes’ vote in Scotland, independence fever might even spread to France’s Celtic region Brittany and its semi-Italian island Corsica.

French politicians across the right-to-left spectrum have generally opposed any perceived threat to a république française une et indivisible – a notion that flies in the face of democracy and minority rights. If part of a country’s population consistently displays a majority in favour of secession – and especially if the people concerned speak a different language and, above all, were absorbed into the larger country against their will – by what right does the central government say them nay?

Other countries’ responses to the prospect of a Catalan breakaway have varied, but I’m disturbed to see a lot of red herrings about Spain being a democracy and this therefore being a matter for ‘the Spaniards’ to settle among themselves as an ‘internal affair’. It seems most unlikely that there would ever be a nationwide Spanish majority in favour of Catalan (or Basque) independence, even if 99% of Catalans or Basques wanted it. And this is where the democratic numbers game breaks down.

Spain has only been a genuine democracy for the past forty years – and it was under the Spanish monarchy and other dictatorships (the most obvious and perhaps most vicious one being General Franco’s, from 1939 to 1975) that Catalan and Basque autonomy were suppressed. Of course, both Catalonia and the Basque Country are now ‘autonomous’ regions of democratic Spain – but refusing even to discuss the issue of independence is surely tantamount to leaving Franco’s strictures in place. Spain’s current conservative prime minister Mariano Rajoy has even tried to influence the outcome of the Scottish referendum – and, indirectly, the Catalan one – by suggesting that an independent Scotland’s application to join the EU could and would be vetoed by Spain. Democracy? Hardly.

I am reminded here of what happened in postwar West Germany to homosexuals persecuted by the Nazi regime. The laws that had led to their imprisonment, mistreatment and in many cases death were simply left in place (whereas other Nazi legislation was automatically repealed), and the notorious Article 175 of the penal code that effectively outlawed sexual contact between men led to the number 175 becoming a nickname for homosexuals generally – ein Hundertfünfundsiebziger. It took until 1969 for this article to be removed from Germany’s statute books.

And so in Spain and France (but, to its credit, not the UK – which has allowed the Scottish referendum to take place, complete with an act of the Westminster parliament signed into law by Queen Elizabeth) the dictatorial laws that made Catalan- and Basque-speakers part of a ‘single and indivisible’ country – or at least the attitudes such laws have spawned – are still in place.

So what is Donetsk doing in the title of this post? The answer is, of course, self-determination. Right now we’re seeing a largely Russian-speaking population in the east of Ukraine trying to break away from a country they feel has been foisted on them, and Russia pursuing its Heim ins Reich policy of protecting ‘ethnic Russians’ wherever they happen to be. President Putin keeps pretending that Russia hasn’t been pouring weapons and troops into Ukraine, but surely no-one outside Russia seriously believes that. The missile that killed a planeload of innocent Dutch, Australian, Malaysian and other passengers over eastern Ukraine must have been Russian-made and Russian-supplied. Sorry, this isn’t Russophobia, as many Russian media are trying to claim – simply harsh political realism, in which ex-KGB officer Putin is a past master.

But OK, why shouldn’t the Russian-speakers in eastern Ukraine be as entitled to self-determination as the Scots in the United Kingdom or the Catalans in Spain? To put the question in these simple terms is, I feel, to miss a crucial point – namely the moral responsibility of big, powerful countries.

The very presence of a disaffected Russian-speaking population in Ukraine is essentially due to both tsarist and communist Russia’s centuries of aggression and expansionism against all its neighbours (from Estonia and Finland to Armenia and Azerbaijan to Mongolia and Japan, plus the native Arctic peoples with no governments of their own to defend them). Ethnic Russians have always been encouraged to settle in other people’s territories and so create a demographic majority, or at least a substantial and vociferous minority, that would justify intervention on their behalf if the indigenous population ever tried to protest. That is essentially what has happened in Ukraine, and not only there.

However long the Russian-speakers and their ancestors have been there, it has been on sufferance. For the Russians of eastern Ukraine to protest that they are being mistreated by the Ukrainian authorities is crudely self-serving historical revisionism that is being actively encouraged by the present Russian government. They are in someone else’s country and should surely behave with appropriate respect, which they are quite clearly not doing. It was Russia that invaded and conquered Ukraine, not vice versa. When I read recent Russian accusations that America is bent on ‘taking Ukraine away from Russia’, I wonder what planet the accuser is on – for Ukraine never belonged to Russia in the first place, and certainly doesn’t now. Its people have always spoken a distinct language and maintained separate traditions, and now it wants to go its own way.

For comparison, suppose that the Scottish Lowlands now had a large minority or even majority of English settlers (luckily not the case) and these had taken up arms – helpfully supplied from London – in ‘defence of their ethnic rights’. Would an independent Scotland not be entitled to suppress the insurrection, and perhaps even revoke the insurgents’ passports and right of abode? Once again, it was England that invaded and conquered Scotland, not vice versa.

Ultimately the issue is power, and misuse of power. When big nations oppress small ones, they should not be surprised – let alone indignant – to see the worm turn and the biter bit. That is the essence of self-determination.

So, like Ireland a century ago, Scotland surely has every right to break away from the ‘United’ Kingdom; but the ‘Republic of Donetsk’ is a Trojan horse for Russian expansionism and should just as surely be treated accordingly.

Ukrainians were incorporated into Russia (and later the Soviet Union) against their will, and the restoration of an independent Ukraine is surely only fair. If Russian-speakers in and around Donetsk no longer want to be in Ukraine, why not move to nearby Russia, just as unwilling English residents of an independent Scotland could – and should – move south of the border? Or take another example from early twentieth-century history – the German-speakers who had ruled the roost throughout the Austro-Hungarian empire and continued to live in the newly independent countries that sprang up when the empire collapsed in 1918, including Yugoslavia. In 1941 the Nazis invaded Yugoslavia, with almost unanimous support from the German-speaking population – another Trojan horse. So it is surely not surprising – let alone unfair – that at the end of war the German-speakers were encouraged (in practice, forced) to get out. And the same surely applies to the German-speaking population of Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia, who in 1939 largely welcomed Hitler’s invading armies with open arms and were violently expelled in 1945 when the war was over.

I expect these comments will elicit all kinds of criticism. But all I can do is look at, and compare, the facts as I see them – and hope that Scotland will choose an independent future tomorrow.