In the latest New York Review of books, Jonathan Freedland has an article explaining the upcoming vote on Scottish independence to an American audience. It's worth reading the whole thing, but I'd like to focus on one issue. According to Freedland, the Scottish independence movement is not based on "The Braveheart notion of Scottish nationalism—spear-carriers, faces painted in woad, crying freedom against the English oppressor", but rather on a civic nationalism that is increasingly different from England's finance-driven, elitist, liberal democratic politics:
For the Nationalists, Scotland has become a land of social democratic consensus, one that believes it has more in common with the high-tax, high-spend northern neighbors of Scandinavia than it does with the turbo-capitalism of the City of London. “There is a strong sense that the UK is evolving towards the US model, where you can never give enough to the top one percent,”
I couldn't help but think of differences in political culture that I'm more familiar with. Namely, the differences in Quebec, and in the southern United States, specifically.
Let's start with a quote from dreamy Liberal Party leader Justin Trudeau.
“There is a way of viewing social responsibility, openness to others, a cultural pride here in Quebec that is necessary to Canada,” he told talk show host Franco Nuovo, a well-known Quebec nationalist writer. “And I always say that if I ever believed Canada was really the Canada of Stephen Harper and we were going against abortion and going against gay marriage, and we were going backward in 10,000 different ways, maybe I’d think of wanting to make Quebec a country.”Trudeau's quote, if anything, underplays the difference between Quebec and the Rest of Canada. Quebec plays an interesting role in Canadian politics because public opinion in Quebec usually pulls the ROC in a social-democratic direction. Thus, it's easy to think that Quebec is simply more left-wing than the ROC, in the same way that Alberta is simply more right-wing than most of Canada. In other words, Quebec doesn't differ from Canada qualitatively.
I don't think that's correct. Quebec leans more towards continental laïcité and dirigisme than Anglosphere secularism and liberalism. The controversy over Quebec's secular charter is a great example of this. As Andrew Potter argues: it's easy to dismiss supporters of the charter as bigots, but a more charitable and nuanced explanation is that Quebec, and especially Francophone Quebec, has a different conception of secularism than the Rest of Canada. That doesn't mean the charter isn't racist. It is. But racism is often more complex than bigotry, and there's plenty of bigotry to go around in Canada, but only one secular charter.
The 2012 tuition protests are another example of Quebec's different political culture. It would be one thing if students in Ontario or Alberta had protested against tuition, but acquiesced due to lack of power or will. But that isn't what happened: analogous movements just don't exist outside of Quebec.
These issues make Quebec's political culture look more like France than the Rest of Canada.
Quebec fits the continental social market model better than Canada, and Scotland fits the Scandinavian social-democratic model better than the UK. It's not as easy to sum up the South; The former Confederacy is possibly unique in the world in its combination of traditionalism, its culture of honor and its particularly enduring legacy of slavery.
I have less to say about the United States because I have trouble writing about the politics of the South charitably, because I share everyone's outrage over the Zimmerman trial, bewilderment at David Duke's near-miss in his Louisiana gubernatorial campaign, and contempt for Republican lies, ignorance and nihilism.
Fortunately, so does much of the United States. Including, increasingly, North Carolina and Virginia.
The interesting thing is that these schisms have played out so differently in American and Canadian political institutions. In my lifetime, Quebec has gone from supporting a weakly federalist conservative party, to a separatist party (note that I don't say a left-wing separatist party, I wouldn't accuse Lucien Bouchard of being a left-winger), and now a weakly federalist social democratic party. In parts of anglophone Canada, that instability is chalked up to Quebec voters being crazy or ignorant. But that's ridiculous: Quebec just didn't fit easily into an Anglophone liberal democracy.
The American South is quite different. In my lifetime, the South has completed its transformation from the "solid south" of frankly white-supremacist conservative Democrats, to a stronghold for conservative Republicans, continually in fear of primary challenges. But in both cases, southern politicians have relied on parliamentary procedure to hold power despite only holding a minority of public support. In the past, that meant senior conservative Democrats would prevent legislation from leaving committee. Today it means Republican senators deploy any and all procedural tactics to slow down Senate business and prevent the functioning of the government insofar as it might hurt favored industries or redistribute income to "those people".
Quebec and the South both manage to hold some power despite their minority status, albeit through very different means.
So what does this all mean for Scotland? Scotland probably isn't big enough to swing Canadian elections like Quebec, and the United Kingdom's parliamentary system won't allow Scotland to game the system like the South. So I can understand the drive for independence. But the Euro crisis should make Scotland wary of separation nonetheless.
At one point, it looked like the EU could provide a technocratic umbrella for every ethnolinguistic group in Europe to be independent, from Flanders to Catalonia. To extend the metaphor, it's turned out that the EU's technocratic umbrella is a shitty umbrella that sucks. The European Central Bank has failed spectacularly in its duties to the Eurozone economy, but it faced a difficult challenge. The ECB has had to manage the diverse Eurozone economy without the benefit of fiscal transfers that the United States, Canada and the UK rely on. Even worse, Germany's dominance and inflation-phobia has meant that the ECB has had the impossible task of keeping weaker Eurozone countries afloat while holding German inflation to under 2%. The parallels to Scotland should be obvious. Scottish nationalists want to stay on the pound, but the rump United Kingdom will have little interest in fiscal transfers to an independent Scotland, nor would an independent Scotland top the Bank of England's list of concerns. And even if Scotland could join the Euro, why would they?
That's all to say that the Scottish referendum presents a bind between political culture and policy concerns. Scotland will have to navigate carefully towards what we in Canada have joked about Quebec: An independent Scotland as part of the United Kingdom.
Canada has prospered despite its unpredictable party system, and the United States is struggling along despite congressional intransigence. We'll see what happens in Scotland.
