The independence of Scotland
Subtitle: self-government and the shifting politics of union
By: Michael Keating
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2009
Place of publication: Oxford; New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 214
ISBN-13: 9780199545957
Subjects: Home rule; Politics and government; Selbstverwaltung; Unabhängigkeit; Self-determination, National
Description: "Three hundred years after its conception) the Anglo-Scottish Union is in serious difficulty. This is not because of a profound cultural divide between England and Scotland but because recent decades have seen the rebuilding of Scotland as a political community, while the ideology and practices of the old unionism have atrophied. Yet while Britishness is in decline, it has not been replaced by a dominant ideology of Scottish independence. Rather Scots are looking to renegotiate the Union to find a new place in the British Isles, in Europe, and in the world. There are few legal, constitutional, or political obstacles to Scottish independence, but an independent Scotland would need to forge a new social and economic project as a small nation in the global market-place, and there has been little serious thinking about the implications of this. Short of independence, there is a range of constitutional options for renegotiating the Union to allow more Scottish self-government along the lines that public opinion seems to favour. The limits are posed not by constitutional principles but by the unwillingness of the English to abandon their unitary conception of the state. The end of the United Kingdom may be provoked not by Scottish nationalism, but by English unionism."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [187]-205) and index.
Table of contents: title: State and nation; title: Understanding the Union; title: The strange death of unionist Scotland; title: Becoming independent; title: The political economy of independence: large states and small nations; title: Constitutional futures: state and nation in the twenty-first century; title: Beyond devolution: evolutionary change; title: Scotland and the future of union.