Dommage en Catalunya
August 27, 2022 3:28 PM Subscribe
Progressivism is less a coherent doctrine than a mode of vanity, a wanting-to-be-seen-thinking-the-right-thing, and “linguistic minority,” “oppressed culture,” and “self-determination” all have a rousing sound to them. True, the Catalan language was not only thriving but had become requisite for entry into many professions and spheres of society; true, the people who looked most oppressed in Catalonia were not the Catalans themselves, but the Africans and Maghrebis working for peanuts in the fields or slaughterhouses, or the Latin American cleaning women and caretakers; true, the logic of self-determination had been used to justify Russian military intervention in South Ossetia and the Crimea, not noted liberal causes, and taken to its extreme could just as well rationalize Texas secessionism or white-majority Buckhead’s current scheme to break away from black-majority Atlanta. But beyond all this, it is curious that a movement led by Artur Mas, a conservative whose major policy initiatives had been the opaque privatization of Catalonia’s health care system and parts of its water supply, could be seen as an embodiment of progressive values––the same Artur Mas who had been hand-picked by Jordi Pujol, Catholic founder of the scandal-plagued center-right party Convergència Democràtica de Catalunya. from Hell, or Catalonia by Adrian Nathan West
A review (eventually) of Infierno, Purgatorio, Paraíso by Jordi Ibáñez Fanés
A review (eventually) of Infierno, Purgatorio, Paraíso by Jordi Ibáñez Fanés
I can barely read this large chunk of unindented text in italics. Frustrating because this looks important but I no longer have the spoons to click the link.
posted by Sheydem-tants at 12:21 AM on August 28, 2022 [11 favorites]
posted by Sheydem-tants at 12:21 AM on August 28, 2022 [11 favorites]
Hmmm. Is this true? When I was a teenager, all the intelligent, artsy, liberal people whom I admired were 100% behind Catalonian independence.
And the writer comparing Catalonia to South Ossetia is wrong. I do not see evidence that another country is behind this Catalonian independence movement... not to say that No evidence is equal to Evidence of none.
posted by Didnt_do_enough at 12:40 AM on August 28, 2022 [3 favorites]
And the writer comparing Catalonia to South Ossetia is wrong. I do not see evidence that another country is behind this Catalonian independence movement... not to say that No evidence is equal to Evidence of none.
posted by Didnt_do_enough at 12:40 AM on August 28, 2022 [3 favorites]
Yeah, this article seems to be nothing but some American really, deeply hating the idea of Catalonian independence and trying every way of discrediting the movement. I do not understand. I mean, I kind of get why a Spaniard might write something like this, as it is a pretty universal reaction to independence movements. But why this American?
posted by trotz dem alten drachen at 12:47 AM on August 28, 2022 [7 favorites]
posted by trotz dem alten drachen at 12:47 AM on August 28, 2022 [7 favorites]
I think the last paragraph sums up nicely the real point for those not inclined to read the whole thing:
I doubt the decline will be permanent. Contemporary radical posturing, irrespective of ideology, is closely linked to boredom, to the pathological FOMO and yearning for action borne of watching too much news and spending too much time online. Journalist Albert Soler entitled his tongue-in-cheek account of the schismatics’ foibles We Got Tired of Living Well, which is as good a formulation as any to describe the 1914-esque malaise and ardor common not just to Catalan separatism, but to the gilets jaunes, Brexit, QAnon, and any number of adrift populist movements whose appeal goes no further than the opportunity to be a protagonist, rather than a subject, of something.
posted by blue shadows at 1:40 AM on August 28, 2022 [4 favorites]
I doubt the decline will be permanent. Contemporary radical posturing, irrespective of ideology, is closely linked to boredom, to the pathological FOMO and yearning for action borne of watching too much news and spending too much time online. Journalist Albert Soler entitled his tongue-in-cheek account of the schismatics’ foibles We Got Tired of Living Well, which is as good a formulation as any to describe the 1914-esque malaise and ardor common not just to Catalan separatism, but to the gilets jaunes, Brexit, QAnon, and any number of adrift populist movements whose appeal goes no further than the opportunity to be a protagonist, rather than a subject, of something.
posted by blue shadows at 1:40 AM on August 28, 2022 [4 favorites]
Hmmm. Is this true? When I was a teenager, all the intelligent, artsy, liberal people whom I admired were 100% behind Catalonian independence.
The Catalan independence movement ranged from the conservative (Convergència i Unió, a joint party of Convergència Democràtica de Catalunya, CDC, and Unió Democràtica de Catalunya, UDC) to the left wing (Esquerra Republicana), mostly with ERC giving support to the CiU regional government during the Pujol era.
CiU split in 2015 and CDC under Artur Mas and Carles Puigdemont joined ERC in Junts pel Sí (but also Junts per Catalunya, JxCat) while the Candidatura d'Unitat Popular (CUP) took the further left wing vote.
tl;dr: since the establishment of democracy in Spain, Catalonia has tended to be ruled by conservative parties who have developed liberal policies (and some of them like the Pujol clan getting rich with corruption) while at the same time firing up the voters with promises of independence they've never been in a place to fulfill. And then they called for a non-legal referendum in 2017 that was grossly mismanaged by both the Rajoy government and even the king Felipe VI, with horrible scenes of riot police beating up old ladies. And then the Catalan government tried to do something that looked more like a coup than a declaration of independence, which failed. So Puigdemont fled to Belgium, some of the organisers went into jail for a time for rather spurious crimes (they were accused of sedition, which... no, it wasn't that), allegations of financial mismanagement were investigated and then things ~magically~ calmed down. Mariano Rajoy was ousted for outstanding corruption scandals in the conservative Partido Popular party, Pedro Sánchez was finally voted in with support from left-wing party Podemos (part of which is the CUP), and territorial conflict just wasn't in the best interests of anyone. And then in 2020 covid-19 hit and people suddenly were worried about other things.
posted by sukeban at 1:51 AM on August 28, 2022 [18 favorites]
The Catalan independence movement ranged from the conservative (Convergència i Unió, a joint party of Convergència Democràtica de Catalunya, CDC, and Unió Democràtica de Catalunya, UDC) to the left wing (Esquerra Republicana), mostly with ERC giving support to the CiU regional government during the Pujol era.
CiU split in 2015 and CDC under Artur Mas and Carles Puigdemont joined ERC in Junts pel Sí (but also Junts per Catalunya, JxCat) while the Candidatura d'Unitat Popular (CUP) took the further left wing vote.
tl;dr: since the establishment of democracy in Spain, Catalonia has tended to be ruled by conservative parties who have developed liberal policies (and some of them like the Pujol clan getting rich with corruption) while at the same time firing up the voters with promises of independence they've never been in a place to fulfill. And then they called for a non-legal referendum in 2017 that was grossly mismanaged by both the Rajoy government and even the king Felipe VI, with horrible scenes of riot police beating up old ladies. And then the Catalan government tried to do something that looked more like a coup than a declaration of independence, which failed. So Puigdemont fled to Belgium, some of the organisers went into jail for a time for rather spurious crimes (they were accused of sedition, which... no, it wasn't that), allegations of financial mismanagement were investigated and then things ~magically~ calmed down. Mariano Rajoy was ousted for outstanding corruption scandals in the conservative Partido Popular party, Pedro Sánchez was finally voted in with support from left-wing party Podemos (part of which is the CUP), and territorial conflict just wasn't in the best interests of anyone. And then in 2020 covid-19 hit and people suddenly were worried about other things.
posted by sukeban at 1:51 AM on August 28, 2022 [18 favorites]
And, I can't repeat this too often, since the Popular Party has pretty much no voters in Catalonia, it's always been good for them to piss off the Catalans with irrelevant culture war stuff, since they aren't losing voters in Catalonia but winning them in the rest of Spain. At the same time, real or imagined Catalan oppression and Espanya ens roba silliness has always been a way to stoke voters for the Catalan independence parties. A large part of the crispación comes from deliberate strategy from both sides.
posted by sukeban at 2:05 AM on August 28, 2022 [4 favorites]
posted by sukeban at 2:05 AM on August 28, 2022 [4 favorites]
Yeah, this article seems to be nothing but some American really, deeply hating the idea of Catalonian independence and trying every way of discrediting the movement. I do not understand. I mean, I kind of get why a Spaniard might write something like this, as it is a pretty universal reaction to independence movements. But why this American?
Maybe it's a corrective to uninformed Americans being in favour of literally every other separatist movement anywhere without that coming from a particularly sophisticated set of ideas about nationhood?
posted by atrazine at 2:28 AM on August 28, 2022 [8 favorites]
Maybe it's a corrective to uninformed Americans being in favour of literally every other separatist movement anywhere without that coming from a particularly sophisticated set of ideas about nationhood?
posted by atrazine at 2:28 AM on August 28, 2022 [8 favorites]
Yeah, this article seems to be nothing but some American really, deeply hating the idea of Catalonian independence
I read it more as an American being a bit snide about knowing enough about Catalonian independence to be skeptical of it. Which doesn’t produce an effect that I find totally endearing but doesn’t necessarily mean he’s wrong.
posted by atoxyl at 3:09 AM on August 28, 2022 [3 favorites]
I read it more as an American being a bit snide about knowing enough about Catalonian independence to be skeptical of it. Which doesn’t produce an effect that I find totally endearing but doesn’t necessarily mean he’s wrong.
posted by atoxyl at 3:09 AM on August 28, 2022 [3 favorites]
Forward-thinking friends outside the country, to the extent that they knew what Catalonia was, were universal in their embrace of its admittedly fine-sounding “right to choose.” This is to be expected. Progressivism is less a coherent doctrine than a mode of vanity, a wanting-to-be-seen-thinking-the-right-thing, and “linguistic minority,” “oppressed culture,” and “self-determination” all have a rousing sound to them.
Contrarians and reactionaries and intellectual conservatives aren't into poses at all, though. When you slide in a swipe at "forward-thinking" people worldwide into your piece on a regional movement, you're certainly not (anti-)virtue-signalling, or trolling, heaven forfend.
posted by trig at 3:11 AM on August 28, 2022 [7 favorites]
Contrarians and reactionaries and intellectual conservatives aren't into poses at all, though. When you slide in a swipe at "forward-thinking" people worldwide into your piece on a regional movement, you're certainly not (anti-)virtue-signalling, or trolling, heaven forfend.
posted by trig at 3:11 AM on August 28, 2022 [7 favorites]
Progressivism is less a coherent doctrine than a mode of vanity, a wanting-to-be-seen-thinking-the-right-thing...
Next.
posted by flabdablet at 3:23 AM on August 28, 2022 [15 favorites]
Next.
posted by flabdablet at 3:23 AM on August 28, 2022 [15 favorites]
Next.
Yeah, this is not very good.
However, I think the topic is FASCINATING and relevant. I'm not talking about the separatism of Catalans in particular, though that example is complex and interesting, but the multi agent 'game' of separatism and how it takes shape in different examples.
Ever since learning about agent provocateurs in literature and then getting a more thorough history of WW1 and seeing how the dynamics of politics in the Russian Revolution informed both WW1 and WW2, all of my naivete about politics was replaced by this dense multilinear mess of how real people were playing for power.
The segment that captures my imagination the most is the role of the technocratic class as handmaidens of the powerful. The posts I've seen here about the DNC and British Labour party were excellent.
To give a US perspective, it does seem like the separatist play often works from both sides to support conservative interests. As a not very informed observer of this, I guess I'd point out that it seems a lot of the gains in our system have come from radical movements that sought not to revolutionize the system, but instead to improve it with reform. (I'll admit that this could just be another layer of my own naivete or a poor reading of history, but that's what it looks like to me)
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 4:00 AM on August 28, 2022 [4 favorites]
Yeah, this is not very good.
However, I think the topic is FASCINATING and relevant. I'm not talking about the separatism of Catalans in particular, though that example is complex and interesting, but the multi agent 'game' of separatism and how it takes shape in different examples.
Ever since learning about agent provocateurs in literature and then getting a more thorough history of WW1 and seeing how the dynamics of politics in the Russian Revolution informed both WW1 and WW2, all of my naivete about politics was replaced by this dense multilinear mess of how real people were playing for power.
The segment that captures my imagination the most is the role of the technocratic class as handmaidens of the powerful. The posts I've seen here about the DNC and British Labour party were excellent.
To give a US perspective, it does seem like the separatist play often works from both sides to support conservative interests. As a not very informed observer of this, I guess I'd point out that it seems a lot of the gains in our system have come from radical movements that sought not to revolutionize the system, but instead to improve it with reform. (I'll admit that this could just be another layer of my own naivete or a poor reading of history, but that's what it looks like to me)
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 4:00 AM on August 28, 2022 [4 favorites]
it does seem like the separatist play often works from both sides to support conservative interests
Should be unsurprising, given that the very essence of conservatism lies in a group identity constructed for the specific purpose of separating the "deserving" from those considered not to be.
One of the huge tells for this, naturally, being the rabid eagerness that self-styled conservatives so often display when given an opportunity to denounce "identity politics".
posted by flabdablet at 4:38 AM on August 28, 2022 [6 favorites]
Should be unsurprising, given that the very essence of conservatism lies in a group identity constructed for the specific purpose of separating the "deserving" from those considered not to be.
One of the huge tells for this, naturally, being the rabid eagerness that self-styled conservatives so often display when given an opportunity to denounce "identity politics".
posted by flabdablet at 4:38 AM on August 28, 2022 [6 favorites]
To give a US perspective, it does seem like the separatist play often works from both sides to support conservative interests.
Why? Most European parties striving toward regional autonomy or independence tend left-of-centre, and the European Free Alliance even shares a fraction in the Europarliament with the European Greens. Wanting to have smaller, less powerful states (within international coöperative frameworks) also looks like a leftist position to me. How does this look different from the US?
posted by trotz dem alten drachen at 5:27 AM on August 28, 2022 [4 favorites]
Why? Most European parties striving toward regional autonomy or independence tend left-of-centre, and the European Free Alliance even shares a fraction in the Europarliament with the European Greens. Wanting to have smaller, less powerful states (within international coöperative frameworks) also looks like a leftist position to me. How does this look different from the US?
posted by trotz dem alten drachen at 5:27 AM on August 28, 2022 [4 favorites]
Since moving to Berlin and visiting Croatia and using these as jumping off points for digging more deeply into regional histories — about which I am obviously still not an expert! — I have found myself becoming a staunch opponent of nationalism and therefore nationalist separatism. No matter what, it relies on the Romantic idea that a nation-state exists, which means it relies on the idea that there is a coherent people who belong to the land or to whom the land belongs. It further postulates that when these people are grouped with others, it is only "natural" for these groups to dominate and so freedom can only be found in being a majority somewhere.
But if you look at any border redrawing, say post First World War, post Austro-Hungarian changes, you see that flipping the power to a former minority generally leads to oppression for the next smallest group, and this will continue until you have a country per house. Because inherent to the idea of nationalism is the idea that one group has a right over others. But some books suggest that the idea that there is a deep ethnic difference between "different kinds" of Eastern Europeans is rather ahistoric and prior to the period of nationalism becoming in vogue, it was a linguistic difference, not an ethnic one. And therefore was changeable.
Do you all recall the Kenyan ambassador's speech to the UN at the start of the Ukrainian war? He spoke about how accepting extant dividing lines — even where they did separate an ethnicity — and focusing on cross-border co-operation was the correct, war-avoiding choice in post-colonial Africa. And I think he was right. I want to hear this more and more.
What if the Austro-Hungarians had been able to make a real case for the values of cosmopolitanism? What if today we were able to create a social story about the rightness and naturalness of dividing ethnic groups from political states, and instead focused on minority rights, true equity, etc? What if being a stranger and knowing the world were as respectable as never leaving where you were born?
We might get to move away from some atavistic violences. But the first step is pointing out that the notion that a group deserves a state because inherently a land belongs to a people is corrosive and just as constructed as any other cultural belief.
(Also European progressivism is not always so racially progressive; worth keeping in mind. The US is shit at living up to this but it at least postulates that a nation made up of ethnic diversity is good and that the child of an immigrant born in the US is definitely American. Germany isn't even that far yet. Fuck I can't even retain American citizenship AND vote where I pay taxes now that I live here.)
posted by dame at 6:13 AM on August 28, 2022 [25 favorites]
But if you look at any border redrawing, say post First World War, post Austro-Hungarian changes, you see that flipping the power to a former minority generally leads to oppression for the next smallest group, and this will continue until you have a country per house. Because inherent to the idea of nationalism is the idea that one group has a right over others. But some books suggest that the idea that there is a deep ethnic difference between "different kinds" of Eastern Europeans is rather ahistoric and prior to the period of nationalism becoming in vogue, it was a linguistic difference, not an ethnic one. And therefore was changeable.
Do you all recall the Kenyan ambassador's speech to the UN at the start of the Ukrainian war? He spoke about how accepting extant dividing lines — even where they did separate an ethnicity — and focusing on cross-border co-operation was the correct, war-avoiding choice in post-colonial Africa. And I think he was right. I want to hear this more and more.
What if the Austro-Hungarians had been able to make a real case for the values of cosmopolitanism? What if today we were able to create a social story about the rightness and naturalness of dividing ethnic groups from political states, and instead focused on minority rights, true equity, etc? What if being a stranger and knowing the world were as respectable as never leaving where you were born?
We might get to move away from some atavistic violences. But the first step is pointing out that the notion that a group deserves a state because inherently a land belongs to a people is corrosive and just as constructed as any other cultural belief.
(Also European progressivism is not always so racially progressive; worth keeping in mind. The US is shit at living up to this but it at least postulates that a nation made up of ethnic diversity is good and that the child of an immigrant born in the US is definitely American. Germany isn't even that far yet. Fuck I can't even retain American citizenship AND vote where I pay taxes now that I live here.)
posted by dame at 6:13 AM on August 28, 2022 [25 favorites]
Seems to me that there's an important difference between separatism, a doctrine that attempts to justify itself on the basis of group identity, and mere support for increased regional autonomy that follows from practical concerns about effective and responsive administration.
posted by flabdablet at 6:15 AM on August 28, 2022 [7 favorites]
posted by flabdablet at 6:15 AM on August 28, 2022 [7 favorites]
I think I agree, although often the latter is often justified in terms of the former because it's such a Big Story.
For instance, I am reasonably pro–Scottish independence, in particular because the versions I have heard of it are focused on wanting a more progressive state than can be had alongside England over centuries-old ethnic lines, but ... still not an expert!
posted by dame at 6:30 AM on August 28, 2022 [3 favorites]
For instance, I am reasonably pro–Scottish independence, in particular because the versions I have heard of it are focused on wanting a more progressive state than can be had alongside England over centuries-old ethnic lines, but ... still not an expert!
posted by dame at 6:30 AM on August 28, 2022 [3 favorites]
Scottish independence is a good illustration of the difference. If I lived in Scotland I'd want autonomy from the present shower of fuckwits occupying Westminster too.
There is currently no effective nor responsive administration to be had from there, given that the UK Government's main concern remains Getting Brexit Done at the expense of all other considerations including maintaining the peace in Northern Ireland. And Brexit itself was clearly won on no basis other than straight-up separatism, given that every single one of the administrative advantages ever claimed for it was a flat and transparently obvious lie.
posted by flabdablet at 6:57 AM on August 28, 2022 [7 favorites]
There is currently no effective nor responsive administration to be had from there, given that the UK Government's main concern remains Getting Brexit Done at the expense of all other considerations including maintaining the peace in Northern Ireland. And Brexit itself was clearly won on no basis other than straight-up separatism, given that every single one of the administrative advantages ever claimed for it was a flat and transparently obvious lie.
posted by flabdablet at 6:57 AM on August 28, 2022 [7 favorites]
That's a lot of words just to say, "Lefties are virtue signaling and progressives have no ideas." If you lead with the disingenuous framing that cryptofascists use, you'll have to excuse me for not giving the author the benefit of the doubt.
Contemporary radical posturing, irrespective of ideology, is closely linked to boredom, to the pathological FOMO and yearning for action borne of watching too much news and spending too much time online.
That's laughably untrue, but a good bit of rhetoric if you want to dismiss an issue without actually having to dive into it. And it's always a chuckle when a journalist chides people for being too online.
I'm not informed enough on Catalan independence to have a stance, and I doubt I'll get much useful information from this article. But the MeFi comments have been good.
posted by AlSweigart at 7:44 AM on August 28, 2022 [5 favorites]
Contemporary radical posturing, irrespective of ideology, is closely linked to boredom, to the pathological FOMO and yearning for action borne of watching too much news and spending too much time online.
That's laughably untrue, but a good bit of rhetoric if you want to dismiss an issue without actually having to dive into it. And it's always a chuckle when a journalist chides people for being too online.
I'm not informed enough on Catalan independence to have a stance, and I doubt I'll get much useful information from this article. But the MeFi comments have been good.
posted by AlSweigart at 7:44 AM on August 28, 2022 [5 favorites]
This article has two components;
i) a reasonably debatable analysis of the corruption and necessity of the Catalan separatist movement as practiced compared to its the movement's stated aims and claims
and
ii) an evidence-less anti-liberal clickbait-seeking tirade at beginning and end; whose conclusions have nothing to do with the body of the article or, indeed catalan sepratism, and appear to be the authors axe-grinding turned up to 11 (e.g. comparing Qanon to catalonian independence, really?)
posted by lalochezia at 8:23 AM on August 28, 2022 [5 favorites]
i) a reasonably debatable analysis of the corruption and necessity of the Catalan separatist movement as practiced compared to its the movement's stated aims and claims
and
ii) an evidence-less anti-liberal clickbait-seeking tirade at beginning and end; whose conclusions have nothing to do with the body of the article or, indeed catalan sepratism, and appear to be the authors axe-grinding turned up to 11 (e.g. comparing Qanon to catalonian independence, really?)
posted by lalochezia at 8:23 AM on August 28, 2022 [5 favorites]
Progressivism is less a coherent doctrine than a mode of vanity, a wanting-to-be-seen-thinking-the-right-thing...
Any -ism connotes a form of idealism, which implies a smart theory of everything that goes unlabeled or is merely assumed. We all want progress, for example, even those who want to see a feudal system reinstated, so that word is least useful. Flabdablet's link above to a comment describing the main democratic goal as anti-conservatism deserves a mulling over. It is better to unite people around what they oppose rather than what they think they want, to avoid the same mistake. This does not exclude social or economic progress and doesn't require any wordy social theory that often entails authoritarian components in the fine print, as a means to an end. The impulse to replace weaker power with stronger power is so culturally human that it can often be described as history itself. But if we stick to the main idea of decomposing traditions of power and corruption without leaving a vacuum, then it suddenly opens up real possibilities for everyone to be regarded as equals, rather than just on the same page.
posted by Brian B. at 8:59 AM on August 28, 2022 [3 favorites]
Any -ism connotes a form of idealism, which implies a smart theory of everything that goes unlabeled or is merely assumed. We all want progress, for example, even those who want to see a feudal system reinstated, so that word is least useful. Flabdablet's link above to a comment describing the main democratic goal as anti-conservatism deserves a mulling over. It is better to unite people around what they oppose rather than what they think they want, to avoid the same mistake. This does not exclude social or economic progress and doesn't require any wordy social theory that often entails authoritarian components in the fine print, as a means to an end. The impulse to replace weaker power with stronger power is so culturally human that it can often be described as history itself. But if we stick to the main idea of decomposing traditions of power and corruption without leaving a vacuum, then it suddenly opens up real possibilities for everyone to be regarded as equals, rather than just on the same page.
posted by Brian B. at 8:59 AM on August 28, 2022 [3 favorites]
Contemporary radical posturing, irrespective of ideology, is closely linked to boredom, to the pathological FOMO and yearning for action borne of watching too much news and spending too much time online.
Believe me, I feel my activism is an unfortunate duty, which is another word for a toll or hidden tax. There is absolutely no FOMO about it. How I would love not having to go door to door to save my nation! And being very online is what coalesces my vague and impotent uneasiness into specific facts that I can communicate and act on. Of course my malefactors would prefer I didn't understand the game so they have their minions and cutouts publish stuff like this. Thanks, Adrian Nathan West, people like you are how I know I'm still doing the right thing.
posted by hypnogogue at 9:06 AM on August 28, 2022 [3 favorites]
Believe me, I feel my activism is an unfortunate duty, which is another word for a toll or hidden tax. There is absolutely no FOMO about it. How I would love not having to go door to door to save my nation! And being very online is what coalesces my vague and impotent uneasiness into specific facts that I can communicate and act on. Of course my malefactors would prefer I didn't understand the game so they have their minions and cutouts publish stuff like this. Thanks, Adrian Nathan West, people like you are how I know I'm still doing the right thing.
posted by hypnogogue at 9:06 AM on August 28, 2022 [3 favorites]
Since moving to Berlin and visiting Croatia and using these as jumping off points for digging more deeply into regional histories — about which I am obviously still not an expert! — I have found myself becoming a staunch opponent of nationalism and therefore nationalist separatism.
Should Ireland have been denied independence from Britain? Should Finland still be part of either Russia or Sweden? Should Wales, Scotland, and Greenland each with their own distinctive identities be denied home rule? Should Lichtenstein be absorbed back into Austria, Luxembourg into Belgium and San Marino into Italy?
Nationalism is often awful. Having a national identity and wanting self determination are not.
posted by plonkee at 11:06 AM on August 28, 2022 [5 favorites]
Should Ireland have been denied independence from Britain? Should Finland still be part of either Russia or Sweden? Should Wales, Scotland, and Greenland each with their own distinctive identities be denied home rule? Should Lichtenstein be absorbed back into Austria, Luxembourg into Belgium and San Marino into Italy?
Nationalism is often awful. Having a national identity and wanting self determination are not.
posted by plonkee at 11:06 AM on August 28, 2022 [5 favorites]
Wanting to have smaller, less powerful states (within international coöperative frameworks) also looks like a leftist position to me.
“within international coöperative frameworks” is doing literally all the work here - otherwise that sounds precisely like a conservative-libertarian position
posted by atoxyl at 11:16 AM on August 28, 2022 [2 favorites]
“within international coöperative frameworks” is doing literally all the work here - otherwise that sounds precisely like a conservative-libertarian position
posted by atoxyl at 11:16 AM on August 28, 2022 [2 favorites]
Should Ireland have been denied independence from Britain?
I think you can make cause to liberate yourself from oppression without resorting to ethno-nationalism. Did it make sense to not want to be governed in an oppressive manner? Yes! Did it make sense for Ireland to state its cause in the language of nationalism given its context? Sure! But would Ireland have needed to sever its ties from the United Kingdom outside the context of ascendant nationalisms and the oppressions they fostered? Maybe not.
It's like when you are a pacifist and people think they've tripped you up by being like "well, would you have just let Hitler roam free?!" And of course they have chosen the moment, the war, that appears just. But a pacifist can point out that without the First World War, there would be no Hitler, so let's give up wars before that.
Let's give up the nationalism that underlies laws like Ireland revoking birth-right citizenship and find a better reason for opposing oppression.
Should Finland still be part of either Russia or Sweden?
I am with the wonderful Kenyan ambassador and believe that we should leave the lines where they are.
Should Wales, Scotland, and Greenland each with their own distinctive identities be denied home rule?
If that's the only reason for them? Yes. And in place we should articulate notions of plurality and equity that get the citizens of the country what they want, which may in the end require separate governments — but not because they are the special people to whom the land belongs. (As I mentioned, I find the case for Scottish independence quite strong outside a concept like "home rule".)
Should Lichtenstein be absorbed back into Austria, Luxembourg into Belgium and San Marino into Italy?
Again leaving the borders where they are, but Belgium is a pretty rad example of attempts for equality within plurality (even if it's not "efficient"), so like Luxembourg could do worse.
Nationalism is often awful. Having a national identity and wanting self determination are not.
What I am proposing here is: maybe they are. And that you can only pose these questions of freedom and oppression in terms of national identity and self-determination, as sides of one coin, is a historical artifact, one that we would be better off jettisoning for a differentiation between ethnic group and political entity, as existed once before. But better!
In fact, some former Yugoslavians are considering what they lost when they got "home rule." (I've heard from some folks that they wish this article were more complex and in depth but not that it's fundamentally wrong.)
Anyways, I am not going to do this for every response, but I think it's really worth thinking through how the cultural concept of national identity, which we know underlies such wickedness, is not necessary for goodness.
posted by dame at 12:19 PM on August 28, 2022 [3 favorites]
I think you can make cause to liberate yourself from oppression without resorting to ethno-nationalism. Did it make sense to not want to be governed in an oppressive manner? Yes! Did it make sense for Ireland to state its cause in the language of nationalism given its context? Sure! But would Ireland have needed to sever its ties from the United Kingdom outside the context of ascendant nationalisms and the oppressions they fostered? Maybe not.
It's like when you are a pacifist and people think they've tripped you up by being like "well, would you have just let Hitler roam free?!" And of course they have chosen the moment, the war, that appears just. But a pacifist can point out that without the First World War, there would be no Hitler, so let's give up wars before that.
Let's give up the nationalism that underlies laws like Ireland revoking birth-right citizenship and find a better reason for opposing oppression.
Should Finland still be part of either Russia or Sweden?
I am with the wonderful Kenyan ambassador and believe that we should leave the lines where they are.
Should Wales, Scotland, and Greenland each with their own distinctive identities be denied home rule?
If that's the only reason for them? Yes. And in place we should articulate notions of plurality and equity that get the citizens of the country what they want, which may in the end require separate governments — but not because they are the special people to whom the land belongs. (As I mentioned, I find the case for Scottish independence quite strong outside a concept like "home rule".)
Should Lichtenstein be absorbed back into Austria, Luxembourg into Belgium and San Marino into Italy?
Again leaving the borders where they are, but Belgium is a pretty rad example of attempts for equality within plurality (even if it's not "efficient"), so like Luxembourg could do worse.
Nationalism is often awful. Having a national identity and wanting self determination are not.
What I am proposing here is: maybe they are. And that you can only pose these questions of freedom and oppression in terms of national identity and self-determination, as sides of one coin, is a historical artifact, one that we would be better off jettisoning for a differentiation between ethnic group and political entity, as existed once before. But better!
In fact, some former Yugoslavians are considering what they lost when they got "home rule." (I've heard from some folks that they wish this article were more complex and in depth but not that it's fundamentally wrong.)
Anyways, I am not going to do this for every response, but I think it's really worth thinking through how the cultural concept of national identity, which we know underlies such wickedness, is not necessary for goodness.
posted by dame at 12:19 PM on August 28, 2022 [3 favorites]
Contrarians and reactionaries and intellectual conservatives aren't into poses at all, though. When you slide in a swipe at "forward-thinking" people worldwide into your piece on a regional movement, you're certainly not (anti-)virtue-signalling, or trolling, heaven forfend.
Thinking of "progressive" as a woolly label for people who don't have serious politics is something that I see more often from the socialist left than from the right. There are people who call themselves that who think the highest marginal rate of taxation should be 2% higher but who have no coherent political theory that could be called remotely left wing. I appreciate that things are a little different in the US because Americans are so allergic to the word "socialism" that you need another word and so "progressive" might actually mean something narrower there that it does in Europe but if a European tells me they are progressive, it tells me nothing useful about their politics.
Why? Most European parties striving toward regional autonomy or independence tend left-of-centre, and the European Free Alliance even shares a fraction in the Europarliament with the European Greens. Wanting to have smaller, less powerful states (within international coöperative frameworks) also looks like a leftist position to me. How does this look different from the US?
Wanting less powerful states in order to move power to different entities is one type of leftist position (anarcho-syndicalists, anarchists, etc) but mainstream left-wing opinion isn't really about less powerful states. International frameworks, looks a lot like unaccountable technocracy to me. Everyone likes UNESCO but on the other hand, nobody really likes Investor State Dispute Resolution so I'd treat the role of international cooperation quite carefully.
More generally, the roles of the state and national identity has an extensive set of analytical frameworks and ideas associated with it in socialist thought. Notoriously, the chap that the Bolsheviks put in their charge of The Nationalities Question was a bit of a shit so it goes back as far as that.
The Trotskyite answer is theoretically clean but practically difficult: global revolution and one single global working class who have the power. No need to think about countries when they don't exist.
The Stalinist answer is practical but theoretically arbitrary: just keep the countries the way they are and run socialist societies in them individually.
Mainstream non-Stalinist socialism and social democracy is nonetheless aligned with the Stalinist position on national borders.
This doesn't really give you a good way of answering any questions about what those borders should be. If you believe that the revolution will happen everywhere within a generation, it's kind of an irrelevant question whether region X should be its own country since it will soon be moot and I think this explains the dismissive attitude of earlier generations of the organised left to these questions.
Seems to me that there's an important difference between separatism, a doctrine that attempts to justify itself on the basis of group identity, and mere support for increased regional autonomy that follows from practical concerns about effective and responsive administration.
Agreed but also agreed with Dame's point. It's worth noting that Catalonia was already highly autonomous and indeed that sterile discussions about administrative spans of control are rarely enough to motivate secession movements in practice. Unfortunately two of the major threads running through the Catalonian discussion were
1) "we're richer and subsidising these lazy Spaniards" - basically the exact same argument made during Brexit and as part of Flemish separatist movements.
2) A nasty sort of Catalan language supremacy. This one is incredibly complex because that is also attempting to right a historic wrong and protect a language that was previously suppressed but what do you do when a minority movement reaches its goals of language parity but doesn't switch off the legitimate grievance engine and just keeps on cruising towards language supremacy?
I also think of it a bit differently. I think there is a pragmatic span and scope of control argument for the level at which decisions should be made - what should be decided by elected town councils vs regional bodies vs nations vs transnational bodies. I.e. you can't effectively address problems like global warming at a lower level than globally.
However set against that is the fact that some levels have emotional content and are meaningfully linked to how people conceive of themselves and it is at those levels that the really meaty political decisions have to be made. The idea of the county of Hertfordshire deciding its own healthcare policy in a meaningful way (i.e. deciding to not have an NHS anymore or to increase taxes substantially to better fund it) is so wrong as to be actually ridiculous and we instinctively "get" that some levels of government are less real than others. Those identities change over time. People in Scotland start feeling less British and more Scottish and decisions that 50 years ago most Scots would not have wanted made at a "Scottish" level (which anyway didn't exist) now seem natural at that level. Autonomy also feeds on itself. If you're used to a decision being made differently in Scotland than England, you may well start feeling progressively more Scottish and less British without that having been inevitable in the absence of devolution.
The challenge comes when you have the perception that decisions are being made at a level that doesn't feel legitimate to you and I think that perception played a role in Brexit. It is also playing a role in Scottish independence. Most of the issues that animate Scottish independence are more effectively made (in a pure execution-of-intent-once-made sense) at the Westminster level but if Scots feel that this is no longer an appropriate decision to be made in Westminster then the system can't continue.
Scottish independence is a good illustration of the difference. If I lived in Scotland I'd want autonomy from the present shower of fuckwits occupying Westminster too.
There is currently no effective nor responsive administration to be had from there, given that the UK Government's main concern remains Getting Brexit Done at the expense of all other considerations including maintaining the peace in Northern Ireland. And Brexit itself was clearly won on no basis other than straight-up separatism, given that every single one of the administrative advantages ever claimed for it was a flat and transparently obvious lie.
It is a good illustration.
First, because I think it's worth considering whether relatively transient political events and trends are a sound basis for permanent decisions like this. I don't think you can just secede and un-secede based on the quality of political leadership. Those things change over pretty short periods of time. The question is: has the centre ground of Scottish politics moved so far from the centre ground of the UK as a whole that it is better to separate? I don't think there is an easy answer to that. In my experience, people who have never lived outside the UK for extended periods of time have an exaggerated sense of the differences but they're real enough.
Ok, yes the current government is not just bad but actually absent, but we had 13 years of extremely popular centre-left government (led by two Scots!) that preceded it.
I'm a little sceptical of the idea that you can somehow have a "left wing" or "right wing" independence because once you've separated, the party / movement that brought you there falls away like a booster rocket and who knows which direction things will go? I.e. It can't be the case that Brexit is the "wrong kind" of separation because the people who happened to push for it were right wing in this generation but Scottish independence is different because the SNP is left wing - that means very little in the long term and we should make these decisions based on the long term. The same thing applies to Catalonia. Are a number of its prominent backers right-wing crooks? Certainly, yeah. Does that make Catalonian independence necessarily right-wing? Nope.
I don't think its entirely unfair to be critical of a "progressive" consensus which is totally for Catalonian independence, for Scottish independence, against Brexit without really seeming to have an animating principle for differentiating between them. Not that there aren't analytical frameworks that you can use to think about which ones of those are desirable and which ones aren't - but I do get the sense that this consensus isn't actually based on any on those and is in fact a little mindless.
Second because I think it plays to your point of the difference between separatism and regional autonomy and how these can change over time. The SNP of the 1970s had a strong reactionary strain of Presbyterian golf-clubbery. It got nowhere in Catholic parts of Glasgow because they saw the party, probably rightly, as a sort of Scottish DUP and voted for Labour instead. As recently as the Alex Salmond days, there was a sense that maybe this was a party for people who thought the overall power structure of the country was fine but they needed to be at the top of it instead. It was after shedding these people that the party really gained electoral momentum by moving away from an ethno-centric separatism.
posted by atrazine at 12:40 PM on August 28, 2022 [8 favorites]
Thinking of "progressive" as a woolly label for people who don't have serious politics is something that I see more often from the socialist left than from the right. There are people who call themselves that who think the highest marginal rate of taxation should be 2% higher but who have no coherent political theory that could be called remotely left wing. I appreciate that things are a little different in the US because Americans are so allergic to the word "socialism" that you need another word and so "progressive" might actually mean something narrower there that it does in Europe but if a European tells me they are progressive, it tells me nothing useful about their politics.
Why? Most European parties striving toward regional autonomy or independence tend left-of-centre, and the European Free Alliance even shares a fraction in the Europarliament with the European Greens. Wanting to have smaller, less powerful states (within international coöperative frameworks) also looks like a leftist position to me. How does this look different from the US?
Wanting less powerful states in order to move power to different entities is one type of leftist position (anarcho-syndicalists, anarchists, etc) but mainstream left-wing opinion isn't really about less powerful states. International frameworks, looks a lot like unaccountable technocracy to me. Everyone likes UNESCO but on the other hand, nobody really likes Investor State Dispute Resolution so I'd treat the role of international cooperation quite carefully.
More generally, the roles of the state and national identity has an extensive set of analytical frameworks and ideas associated with it in socialist thought. Notoriously, the chap that the Bolsheviks put in their charge of The Nationalities Question was a bit of a shit so it goes back as far as that.
The Trotskyite answer is theoretically clean but practically difficult: global revolution and one single global working class who have the power. No need to think about countries when they don't exist.
The Stalinist answer is practical but theoretically arbitrary: just keep the countries the way they are and run socialist societies in them individually.
Mainstream non-Stalinist socialism and social democracy is nonetheless aligned with the Stalinist position on national borders.
This doesn't really give you a good way of answering any questions about what those borders should be. If you believe that the revolution will happen everywhere within a generation, it's kind of an irrelevant question whether region X should be its own country since it will soon be moot and I think this explains the dismissive attitude of earlier generations of the organised left to these questions.
Seems to me that there's an important difference between separatism, a doctrine that attempts to justify itself on the basis of group identity, and mere support for increased regional autonomy that follows from practical concerns about effective and responsive administration.
Agreed but also agreed with Dame's point. It's worth noting that Catalonia was already highly autonomous and indeed that sterile discussions about administrative spans of control are rarely enough to motivate secession movements in practice. Unfortunately two of the major threads running through the Catalonian discussion were
1) "we're richer and subsidising these lazy Spaniards" - basically the exact same argument made during Brexit and as part of Flemish separatist movements.
2) A nasty sort of Catalan language supremacy. This one is incredibly complex because that is also attempting to right a historic wrong and protect a language that was previously suppressed but what do you do when a minority movement reaches its goals of language parity but doesn't switch off the legitimate grievance engine and just keeps on cruising towards language supremacy?
I also think of it a bit differently. I think there is a pragmatic span and scope of control argument for the level at which decisions should be made - what should be decided by elected town councils vs regional bodies vs nations vs transnational bodies. I.e. you can't effectively address problems like global warming at a lower level than globally.
However set against that is the fact that some levels have emotional content and are meaningfully linked to how people conceive of themselves and it is at those levels that the really meaty political decisions have to be made. The idea of the county of Hertfordshire deciding its own healthcare policy in a meaningful way (i.e. deciding to not have an NHS anymore or to increase taxes substantially to better fund it) is so wrong as to be actually ridiculous and we instinctively "get" that some levels of government are less real than others. Those identities change over time. People in Scotland start feeling less British and more Scottish and decisions that 50 years ago most Scots would not have wanted made at a "Scottish" level (which anyway didn't exist) now seem natural at that level. Autonomy also feeds on itself. If you're used to a decision being made differently in Scotland than England, you may well start feeling progressively more Scottish and less British without that having been inevitable in the absence of devolution.
The challenge comes when you have the perception that decisions are being made at a level that doesn't feel legitimate to you and I think that perception played a role in Brexit. It is also playing a role in Scottish independence. Most of the issues that animate Scottish independence are more effectively made (in a pure execution-of-intent-once-made sense) at the Westminster level but if Scots feel that this is no longer an appropriate decision to be made in Westminster then the system can't continue.
Scottish independence is a good illustration of the difference. If I lived in Scotland I'd want autonomy from the present shower of fuckwits occupying Westminster too.
There is currently no effective nor responsive administration to be had from there, given that the UK Government's main concern remains Getting Brexit Done at the expense of all other considerations including maintaining the peace in Northern Ireland. And Brexit itself was clearly won on no basis other than straight-up separatism, given that every single one of the administrative advantages ever claimed for it was a flat and transparently obvious lie.
It is a good illustration.
First, because I think it's worth considering whether relatively transient political events and trends are a sound basis for permanent decisions like this. I don't think you can just secede and un-secede based on the quality of political leadership. Those things change over pretty short periods of time. The question is: has the centre ground of Scottish politics moved so far from the centre ground of the UK as a whole that it is better to separate? I don't think there is an easy answer to that. In my experience, people who have never lived outside the UK for extended periods of time have an exaggerated sense of the differences but they're real enough.
Ok, yes the current government is not just bad but actually absent, but we had 13 years of extremely popular centre-left government (led by two Scots!) that preceded it.
I'm a little sceptical of the idea that you can somehow have a "left wing" or "right wing" independence because once you've separated, the party / movement that brought you there falls away like a booster rocket and who knows which direction things will go? I.e. It can't be the case that Brexit is the "wrong kind" of separation because the people who happened to push for it were right wing in this generation but Scottish independence is different because the SNP is left wing - that means very little in the long term and we should make these decisions based on the long term. The same thing applies to Catalonia. Are a number of its prominent backers right-wing crooks? Certainly, yeah. Does that make Catalonian independence necessarily right-wing? Nope.
I don't think its entirely unfair to be critical of a "progressive" consensus which is totally for Catalonian independence, for Scottish independence, against Brexit without really seeming to have an animating principle for differentiating between them. Not that there aren't analytical frameworks that you can use to think about which ones of those are desirable and which ones aren't - but I do get the sense that this consensus isn't actually based on any on those and is in fact a little mindless.
Second because I think it plays to your point of the difference between separatism and regional autonomy and how these can change over time. The SNP of the 1970s had a strong reactionary strain of Presbyterian golf-clubbery. It got nowhere in Catholic parts of Glasgow because they saw the party, probably rightly, as a sort of Scottish DUP and voted for Labour instead. As recently as the Alex Salmond days, there was a sense that maybe this was a party for people who thought the overall power structure of the country was fine but they needed to be at the top of it instead. It was after shedding these people that the party really gained electoral momentum by moving away from an ethno-centric separatism.
posted by atrazine at 12:40 PM on August 28, 2022 [8 favorites]
Ultimately I think there is a desire for completely easy answers that are undeniably correct and safe and national borders, especially if you start changing them, don't have a "definitely correct and just" answer.
Scottish independence means cutting some Scots off from their British identities against their wishes but not doing it keeps people British against their wishes.
Brexit did that analogously. Irish independence did that as well - although after the Easter Rising very few Irish people felt losing their UK identity as a loss, it is important not to forget that this wasn't absolutely universal and that it shifted radically because of the outrageous reaction of the UK government. In that way it's analogous with Russian speaking Ukrainians who had genuinely conflicted national identities until before 2014. Putin has rather clarified those conflicts for them. Catalonian independence means telling some Catalan/Spanish people that part of their identity has been cancelled.
Fine, you can apply a principle of majority decision if you want but that doesn't solve the problem of deciding what political units may take such decisions. Obviously 50% + 1 vote of a town cannot legitimately make such a decision (or can they?) so we're back to defining which political units are "real enough". Was the majority decision of Northern Ireland to separate a legitimate one, considering that the lines around which the majority was decided were essentially gerrymandered to get that result? Certainly the Catholic minority didn't think so.
"Self determination" is kind of an interesting term because it really depends on creating the "self" and then the right to that self becomes self evident.
Like dame, I have complicated feelings about the old continental empires. In many ways they were beastly things but then others there's a certain lost cosmopolitanism to them that maybe we can recapture without the imperial domination. The nasty thing is, they worked by excluding everyone equally from political power. There was no need for political groups to compete over power vested entirely within the person of the emperor. I don' t think that's quite the way we want to go.
posted by atrazine at 12:57 PM on August 28, 2022 [5 favorites]
Scottish independence means cutting some Scots off from their British identities against their wishes but not doing it keeps people British against their wishes.
Brexit did that analogously. Irish independence did that as well - although after the Easter Rising very few Irish people felt losing their UK identity as a loss, it is important not to forget that this wasn't absolutely universal and that it shifted radically because of the outrageous reaction of the UK government. In that way it's analogous with Russian speaking Ukrainians who had genuinely conflicted national identities until before 2014. Putin has rather clarified those conflicts for them. Catalonian independence means telling some Catalan/Spanish people that part of their identity has been cancelled.
Fine, you can apply a principle of majority decision if you want but that doesn't solve the problem of deciding what political units may take such decisions. Obviously 50% + 1 vote of a town cannot legitimately make such a decision (or can they?) so we're back to defining which political units are "real enough". Was the majority decision of Northern Ireland to separate a legitimate one, considering that the lines around which the majority was decided were essentially gerrymandered to get that result? Certainly the Catholic minority didn't think so.
"Self determination" is kind of an interesting term because it really depends on creating the "self" and then the right to that self becomes self evident.
Like dame, I have complicated feelings about the old continental empires. In many ways they were beastly things but then others there's a certain lost cosmopolitanism to them that maybe we can recapture without the imperial domination. The nasty thing is, they worked by excluding everyone equally from political power. There was no need for political groups to compete over power vested entirely within the person of the emperor. I don' t think that's quite the way we want to go.
posted by atrazine at 12:57 PM on August 28, 2022 [5 favorites]
We should articulate notions of plurality and equity that get the citizens of the country what they want, which may in the end require separate governments — but not because they are the special people to whom the land belongs.
There are many different kinds of belonging, but I honestly feel like this sentiment is missing something really important about the post-colony and post-coloniser experience which I'm struggling to articulate. National identity in Europe is really complicated, nationalism has rarely been a force for good here and yet to me if people want independence then they should have it.
posted by plonkee at 1:02 PM on August 28, 2022 [3 favorites]
There are many different kinds of belonging, but I honestly feel like this sentiment is missing something really important about the post-colony and post-coloniser experience which I'm struggling to articulate. National identity in Europe is really complicated, nationalism has rarely been a force for good here and yet to me if people want independence then they should have it.
posted by plonkee at 1:02 PM on August 28, 2022 [3 favorites]
Again leaving the borders where they are, but Belgium is a pretty rad example of attempts for equality within plurality (even if it's not "efficient"), so like Luxembourg could do worse.
While I do agree that Belgium is a pretty succesful example of a pluralistic society, I also have to point that this may have much to do with Belgium’s historical oppressed minority being rather more numerous than their francophone oppressors, which is a somewhat exceptional situation in Western Europe. Also, Belgium itself split from a larger country in 1830, quite rightly so, and with good results.
Also, Luxembourg never has been part of Belgium, and in fact, the threat of it becoming part of another country by peaceful means has very nearly lead to war in the past.
posted by trotz dem alten drachen at 1:47 PM on August 28, 2022 [1 favorite]
While I do agree that Belgium is a pretty succesful example of a pluralistic society, I also have to point that this may have much to do with Belgium’s historical oppressed minority being rather more numerous than their francophone oppressors, which is a somewhat exceptional situation in Western Europe. Also, Belgium itself split from a larger country in 1830, quite rightly so, and with good results.
Also, Luxembourg never has been part of Belgium, and in fact, the threat of it becoming part of another country by peaceful means has very nearly lead to war in the past.
posted by trotz dem alten drachen at 1:47 PM on August 28, 2022 [1 favorite]
Wanting to have smaller, less powerful states (within international coöperative frameworks) also looks like a leftist position to me. How does this look different from the US?
The framework in the US is enforced at least as much as it’s coöperative - our Civil War was also about the ability of the Federal Government to make and enforce laws. The people who want to undo that now are mostly right wingers, and I don’t think that’s just current happenstance.
Echoing atrazine's excellent post, aiui, leftism seeks broader and broader representative government as we recognize how widely we affect each other and how the only just way to deal with those problems is for everyone to be in the structure that comes to a decision and enforces it. But for things that can be local, devolution is more just.
posted by clew at 2:43 PM on August 28, 2022 [2 favorites]
The framework in the US is enforced at least as much as it’s coöperative - our Civil War was also about the ability of the Federal Government to make and enforce laws. The people who want to undo that now are mostly right wingers, and I don’t think that’s just current happenstance.
Echoing atrazine's excellent post, aiui, leftism seeks broader and broader representative government as we recognize how widely we affect each other and how the only just way to deal with those problems is for everyone to be in the structure that comes to a decision and enforces it. But for things that can be local, devolution is more just.
posted by clew at 2:43 PM on August 28, 2022 [2 favorites]
A bit further upthread, someone suggested:
Maybe [this article is] a corrective to uninformed Americans being in favour of literally every other separatist movement anywhere without that coming from a particularly sophisticated set of ideas about nationhood?
And that comment may seem funny now, because most Americans in this thread have been arguing quite vigorously against separatism, but the lack of a sophisticated understanding of European national identities remains quite clear.
Take for instance atoxyls comment, who quite rightly points out that
“within international coöperative frameworks” is doing literally all the work here - otherwise that sounds precisely like a conservative-libertarian position
But in Europe, this framework already exists and has, for all its faults, been rather succesful at protecting minority rights. Much moreso, anyway, than the individual states themselves.
Later on, another commenter dismisses international coöperation out-of-hand for speculation on hypothetical Trotskist and Stalinist positions, saying:
International frameworks, looks a lot like unaccountable technocracy to me.
Which they are! I agree! But they’re also there, right now, in the form of the European Union and the Council of Europe, and they do already curb the power of their member states quite a bit. This is not fringe anarchist theory. This is right now, right here and frankly, the complete absence in this thread of any notion of how regional separatism and supranational institutions interact may be a large part of what makes discussing separatism with Americans so exasparating.
Another area where I miss nuance, and this might be what plonkee refers to above, is in acknowledging the inherently oppressive nature of large countries. Take for instance this romantic (but not uncommon) view on Austro-Hungary:
What if the Austro-Hungarians had been able to make a real case for the values of cosmopolitanism? What if today we were able to create a social story about the rightness and naturalness of dividing ethnic groups from political states, and instead focused on minority rights, true equity, etc?
In fact, however, Austro-Hungary’s cosmopolitanism was mostly restricted to a very small elite (mostly stemming from Austria or Hungary, as the name of the empire suggests), and I have a hard time seeing how minority rights and true equity could have been accomplished without the empire falling apart one way or another.
This might be easy to miss from the very large and culturally very homogeneous US, but the cultural dominance of the political core of a country always is a threat to the continued distinctiveness in its periphery – and large states have a great deal more of the latter than of the former. And so these separatist movements are not putting new evils in the world by creating and advancing new, smaller forms of nationalism: they are resisting states that already operate their own much more oppressive and destructive nationalist programs. France only became French because of an aggressive campaign of eradicating local culture and languages – a campaign that, by the by, is still going on today – and if the corresponding processes in other European countries have been less destructive than in France, that might just have been so only because France is bigger.
All this is just to say: self determination is good, actually, even if it involves nationalism. Constellations of small states should be preferred over large empires. Catalonia should be independent. Scotland should be independent. The island of Ameland (pop. 3,6k) should be independent, as it was annexed into the Batavian Republic, in 1801, without a proper referendum. We never have had a more free and peaceful continent with fewer small states than we have now. More would be even better.
posted by trotz dem alten drachen at 2:57 PM on August 28, 2022 [6 favorites]
Maybe [this article is] a corrective to uninformed Americans being in favour of literally every other separatist movement anywhere without that coming from a particularly sophisticated set of ideas about nationhood?
And that comment may seem funny now, because most Americans in this thread have been arguing quite vigorously against separatism, but the lack of a sophisticated understanding of European national identities remains quite clear.
Take for instance atoxyls comment, who quite rightly points out that
“within international coöperative frameworks” is doing literally all the work here - otherwise that sounds precisely like a conservative-libertarian position
But in Europe, this framework already exists and has, for all its faults, been rather succesful at protecting minority rights. Much moreso, anyway, than the individual states themselves.
Later on, another commenter dismisses international coöperation out-of-hand for speculation on hypothetical Trotskist and Stalinist positions, saying:
International frameworks, looks a lot like unaccountable technocracy to me.
Which they are! I agree! But they’re also there, right now, in the form of the European Union and the Council of Europe, and they do already curb the power of their member states quite a bit. This is not fringe anarchist theory. This is right now, right here and frankly, the complete absence in this thread of any notion of how regional separatism and supranational institutions interact may be a large part of what makes discussing separatism with Americans so exasparating.
Another area where I miss nuance, and this might be what plonkee refers to above, is in acknowledging the inherently oppressive nature of large countries. Take for instance this romantic (but not uncommon) view on Austro-Hungary:
What if the Austro-Hungarians had been able to make a real case for the values of cosmopolitanism? What if today we were able to create a social story about the rightness and naturalness of dividing ethnic groups from political states, and instead focused on minority rights, true equity, etc?
In fact, however, Austro-Hungary’s cosmopolitanism was mostly restricted to a very small elite (mostly stemming from Austria or Hungary, as the name of the empire suggests), and I have a hard time seeing how minority rights and true equity could have been accomplished without the empire falling apart one way or another.
This might be easy to miss from the very large and culturally very homogeneous US, but the cultural dominance of the political core of a country always is a threat to the continued distinctiveness in its periphery – and large states have a great deal more of the latter than of the former. And so these separatist movements are not putting new evils in the world by creating and advancing new, smaller forms of nationalism: they are resisting states that already operate their own much more oppressive and destructive nationalist programs. France only became French because of an aggressive campaign of eradicating local culture and languages – a campaign that, by the by, is still going on today – and if the corresponding processes in other European countries have been less destructive than in France, that might just have been so only because France is bigger.
All this is just to say: self determination is good, actually, even if it involves nationalism. Constellations of small states should be preferred over large empires. Catalonia should be independent. Scotland should be independent. The island of Ameland (pop. 3,6k) should be independent, as it was annexed into the Batavian Republic, in 1801, without a proper referendum. We never have had a more free and peaceful continent with fewer small states than we have now. More would be even better.
posted by trotz dem alten drachen at 2:57 PM on August 28, 2022 [6 favorites]
No, I know the Austro-Hungarian empire as constituted, marinating in nationalism as it was, was not able to make that case. That’s why I used the word imagine. I also know its destruction did not result in more freedom and fewer wars and freer minorities. (Also let’s be careful implying people are ignorant while calling the US culturally homogeneous lol. We are all experts in our own places but we probably disagree for reasons outside stupidity.)
posted by dame at 4:02 PM on August 28, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by dame at 4:02 PM on August 28, 2022 [1 favorite]
All this is just to say: self determination is good, actually, even if it involves nationalism. Constellations of small states should be preferred over large empires.
This might be easy to miss from the very large and culturally very homogeneous US
I think there is a bigger cultural-historical reason that some left-leaning people from the U.S. might default to skepticism of this position, starting (formally) in 1861…
“States’ rights” is one of the most famous right-wing dogwhistles in our history.
posted by atoxyl at 5:29 PM on August 29, 2022 [2 favorites]
This might be easy to miss from the very large and culturally very homogeneous US
I think there is a bigger cultural-historical reason that some left-leaning people from the U.S. might default to skepticism of this position, starting (formally) in 1861…
“States’ rights” is one of the most famous right-wing dogwhistles in our history.
posted by atoxyl at 5:29 PM on August 29, 2022 [2 favorites]
You’re right that this contradicts the original claim that Americans back separatist movements by default, though. I think the force that weighs on the other side is the American Left’s desperation to be part of something international. Regardless I’m not going to disagree that in actuality most of us don’t have a deep understanding of the logic of European separatist movements.
posted by atoxyl at 5:36 PM on August 29, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by atoxyl at 5:36 PM on August 29, 2022 [2 favorites]
It can't be the case that Brexit is the "wrong kind" of separation because the people who happened to push for it were right wing in this generation but Scottish independence is different because the SNP is left wing
Quite so. But it can be and clearly is the case that Brexit is the wrong kind of separation because every point ever made in favour of it during the referendum campaign that brought it on except for the raw racist subtext was a blatant lie, but Scottish independence is different because it would give Scotland an opportunity to join the EU as a newly independent member state that it would probably take up very quickly, avoiding a great deal of the short-, medium- and long-term structural economic and ecological damage that the present UK administration seems hell-bent on self-inflicting.
posted by flabdablet at 4:27 AM on August 30, 2022 [2 favorites]
Quite so. But it can be and clearly is the case that Brexit is the wrong kind of separation because every point ever made in favour of it during the referendum campaign that brought it on except for the raw racist subtext was a blatant lie, but Scottish independence is different because it would give Scotland an opportunity to join the EU as a newly independent member state that it would probably take up very quickly, avoiding a great deal of the short-, medium- and long-term structural economic and ecological damage that the present UK administration seems hell-bent on self-inflicting.
posted by flabdablet at 4:27 AM on August 30, 2022 [2 favorites]
trotz dem alten drachen,
Which they are! I agree! But they’re also there, right now, in the form of the European Union and the Council of Europe, and they do already curb the power of their member states quite a bit. This is not fringe anarchist theory. This is right now, right here and frankly, the complete absence in this thread of any notion of how regional separatism and supranational institutions interact may be a large part of what makes discussing separatism with Americans so exasparating.
Fair, but I think that this doesn't solve the ultimate problem of the tension between sitting sovereignty with the political units that have the greatest legitimacy vs those potentially being quite parochial.
If we get rid of the current layer of sovereign states within the EU (and most power sits with those states) and instead split it into a lower level (Ameland, or Brittany, or Bavaria, instead of The Netherlands, France, and Germany) and a higher level (the EU). How do we avoid ending up with some combination of the micro-states being impotent to carry out substantial action and the supra-national entity lacking democratic legitimacy?
So, sure, right now it's great that the supra-national entity curbs the rights of the member states because a lot the principles embedded in the supra-national entity are ones that I (and I imagine, you) agree with. But that's cheating I think as far really thinking about where sovereignty should sit because we're not guaranteed that this supra-national entity will continue to reflect our values and without effective democratic control, I don't think it can have the required long term legitimacy to replace that layer of historical sovereign states and govern a sort of Holy Roman Empire of micro-states.
France of course is also a good example of the historic and logical link between "reactionary" thought and separatism. It was the linguistic minorities on the periphery of France who maintained royalist sympathies for the longest time and not because of any innate monarchism but because they correctly understood the flattening and totalising nature of the fully mobilised unitary French revolutionary state. Mobilising large ethnic minority groups behind a non-majoritarian state is very logical.
I'm reminded of the fact that the Bahraini Shura council has one of the 40 seats reserved for one of the (36) Bahraini Jews, I think there was a Christian on the council at one point as well, also a miniscule minority among Bahraini nationals.
Or Syria, of course, where other religious minorities have allied themselves with the Assad family. (The Kurds are an ethnic minority in Syria but their geographic position gives them at least some independence of action that the distributed and urbanised religious minorities of Syria don't have)
Or many other cases where linguistic, religious, or ethnic minorities have allied themselves with governments that are at best counter-majoritarian and at worst absolute dictatorships.
All majoritarian governments have a homogenising tendency and democracies are inherently majoritarian so it's not easy to see the way through to the desired system. I think that some people want to put important things like protecting "basic human rights" with the supra-national layer without acknowledging that the supra-national layer gained those values in the first place because people fought political battles at the national level[s]. So either:
a) Politics has to be introduced at the EU level in a much bigger way than the current system so that future political battles can be fought at that level. I used to travel to Brussels frequently to discuss matters at the commission and I still sometimes have to look up what the parliament can and cannot do. Remember the Spitzenkandidat process? Complete farce. But... then by gaining politics, the EU itself becomes the kind of homogenising state that you correctly identify as inimical to minority identity.
b) We lose the ability to have political discussions in a meaningful way at all and end up with a static set of basic values enforced by a sterile notionally technocratic body. At that point, the political battle goes underground and becomes focused on politicising the judicial and executive bodies i.e. we end up like the US where real politics is about who gets to be on the supreme court.
c) We keep everything the same but with smaller states. I think this is what you're proposing
Quite so. But it can be and clearly is the case that Brexit is the wrong kind of separation because every point ever made in favour of it during the referendum campaign that brought it on except for the raw racist subtext was a blatant lie, but Scottish independence is different because it would give Scotland an opportunity to join the EU as a newly independent member state that it would probably take up very quickly, avoiding a great deal of the short-, medium- and long-term structural economic and ecological damage that the present UK administration seems hell-bent on self-inflicting.
Well, this is likely to be agree-to-disagree situation but I personally think that the Scottish independence debate is equally full of people who are either deluded or liars as Brexit was, although as you say it doesn't have the same whiff of xenophobia to it.
The SNP's view that greater trade with the EU, which it would rejoin, will make up for trade friction with the rUK or that it wouldn't be tremendously disruptive to leave the union are simply not plausible. The reason they aren't is for exactly the same reasons that it was implausible that greater trade with non-EU world would make up for EU trade frictions.
Evasiveness around what exactly the detailed plans are for all kinds of major post-independence questions is common, as it was during the Brexit debate. Exactly the same aggressive, hectoring tone about not "believing" in the country is bandied about when people press the pro-separation side for details as it was during the Brexit debate. There have been, within only a decade or so, SNP proposals for post independence economic models that looked like Ireland, like Denmark, like The Netherlands, and like the way Scotland is already run using devolved powers.
If the centre-of-gravity of Scottish politics is now permanently so far from the rUK that the only way to govern Scotland in a way that comports with the wishes of its people is full independence then economic considerations shouldn't necessarily get in the way of doing it but... the same could have been said of Brexit. In both cases, I think that an adult debate about economic models and trade impacts has never been had, it wasn't had during the Brexit referendum, I don't really think it was had during the previous referendum on Scottish independence either.
During the Brexit referendum, I made a list of de jure freedoms of action that the UK would gain through Brexit and how they interact with likely power balances in order to produce de facto options that are an awful lot more constrained than those, which I think it's worth setting out because the same framework applies to Scottish independence (although there's no reason it needs to lead to the same answer).
1) Ones which are de facto constrained because they are governed by other supra-national compacts. I.e. lots of things that were never going to happen in the post-Brexit UK because they are violations of WTO rules, energy charter rules, or other rules. It is now no longer EU rules which restrict government procurement from favouring domestic content... it's WTO rules instead (and also see (2) because the UK's trade agreement with the EU contrains them and see also (3) since France has some very "interesting" rules on solar PV subsidies which look a lot like local content).
2) Ones which are de facto constrained because they are governed by supra-national compacts which are likely to be made as part of the separation process. You can see how tightly the existence of a land border between NI and the Republic has coupled the UK to EU rules as part of the withdrawal agreement, something very similar will happen as part of the discussions between rUK and Scotland. The EU is bigger than the UK but the rUK is bigger than Scotland by an even bigger margin. For the same reason, they may find that their notional freedom of action is constrained by requirements imposed by the larger party.
Ok, Scotland can't get rid of nuclear weapons without leaving the UK. What happens if maintaining those bases is an absolute condition the rUK places on something like being able to continue using the pound? Keeping the pound is now official policy, since the Euro crisis and what happened to Greece and Ireland has made joining the Euro less popular. It does no good saying that these conditions would be unfair. Arguably some of the concessions the EU extracted on fisheries were "unfair" but tough, that's negotiation and the stronger party has the upper hand.
3) Powers which haven't even been used to their full extent yet. It was noted during the Brexit debate that the UK routinely followed the most restrictive possible interpretation of EU rules when France and Italy often don't do that. Scotland has additional income tax raising powers which are barely being used, only a 1% extra on the higher bands. While I accept that they would run corporation tax differently and might well introduce a wealth tax if they had those powers, it is also the case that UK corporation tax is already only slightly below that of the Scandinavian countries / Netherlands which are often proposed as a model and when it goes up next year will be third highest in the EU (tied at 25% with many other countries). Most countries in the EU either don't have wealth taxes or raise barely any of their tax receipts from them.
4) Things that haven't been done, not because they aren't allowed by rules set by the larger entity (EU or UK), but because the sub-entity (UK or Scotland) doesn't want to do them / there are other reasons for not doing them but the larger entity is used as a "boogeyman". In many cases, the constraint is a fiscal one and is effectively set by capital markets. If you think that MMT means that doesn't matter then a) that is only true for sovereign issuers so Scotland would need its own currency and b) MMT-based ideas are still constrained by trade flows and currency strength unless you are the US and are much closer to autarchy in essential inputs.
5) Ones for which there might not be a domestic political consensus. The UK's political centre of gravity doesn't actually want to do a lot of the things which are now technically possible because the UK is no longer in the EU. This one is less relevant for Scotland because I think there really *is* a political consensus to be a higher-tax, better public-service country with more equality. On the Brexit side, see literally anything that Patrick Minford says. Yes, economic models say that if you were to get rid of all import tariffs on agricultural products, the net benefit of cheaper food for everyone would outweigh the impact of destroying the farming industry. Good luck getting political consensus for doing that one guys!
Whenever the usual rats talk about missing out on the "opportunities of Brexit" they mean the kind of Singapore-on-Thames stuff like this. Essentially they've blown up the UK's main trading relationship in order to gain powers that they will never be able to use and which would horrify many of their supporters if they did.
6) Things which are proposed but where it is unclear that the domestic civil service and political leadership has the capability to execute them. Can the UK make a better agricultural and fisheries policy than the EU? Probably, no expert on either within the EU thinks that even the current reforms go remotely far enough. But... where's our UK policy then? They've had years to work this up, any time now chaps.
7) Areas where they can make a reasonable case for a gross benefit through tailoring of a regulatory regime which nonetheless gets wiped out by trade friction to leave no net benefit. Could the UK come up with a better version of REACH? Probably, there's plenty to fix. Could the UK come up with an alternative so much better that it outweighs the sum of the implementation costs of UK REACH, the costs of compliance with two regimes, and the trade friction? Definitely not! See also proposals to use greater flexibility in regulation of genetically modified food crops. I happen to think that's a great idea but where are you going to export them to?
Finally we are left with things that pass all of those tests but that I happen to think are bad ideas. That isn't a good reason for me to object to a permanent change of sovereignty because I think those should be made based on enduring principles and not on the fact that the current EU rules suit me better than the desires of the current government.
Anyway you're left with a grab bag of the trivial and the irrelevant. Are we going to get any additional UK productivity from repealing the WTD? No as it was widely opted out of anyway. Do I think it would make us a better society not to have it? Also no but that's a personal view.
That doesn't mean that Scottish independence has to be an equally bad idea as Brexit and it certainly doesn't mean that other people can't disagree with my conclusions that both Brexit and Scottish independence are bad ideas. I do think that it is ultimately on the proposer of radical change, in this case the SNP, to make a compelling case for what the new model looks like. Unfortunately they may well have taken a lesson from Brexit that you can get your political goals through without doing any such thing.
I think that Scottish independence has a stronger ultimate motivation than Brexit but I also think the challenges and costs of doing it are substantially higher. If I still lived in Scotland, would definitely vote against. As I don't, wish them good luck whichever way.
Also two further points (As if this comment isn't long enough, I know...)
it would give Scotland an opportunity to join the EU as a newly independent member state that it would probably take up very quickly, avoiding a great deal of the short-, medium- and long-term structural economic and ecological damage that the present UK administration seems hell-bent on self-inflicting.
Geography dictates that there is no escape from deep economic ties to England, just as there is no way for the UK and the EU not to have a shared economic future.
Ecological damage I don't quite get since many such issues are devolved and are scarcely better in the rEU than in either England or Scotland.
posted by atrazine at 7:45 AM on August 30, 2022 [8 favorites]
Which they are! I agree! But they’re also there, right now, in the form of the European Union and the Council of Europe, and they do already curb the power of their member states quite a bit. This is not fringe anarchist theory. This is right now, right here and frankly, the complete absence in this thread of any notion of how regional separatism and supranational institutions interact may be a large part of what makes discussing separatism with Americans so exasparating.
Fair, but I think that this doesn't solve the ultimate problem of the tension between sitting sovereignty with the political units that have the greatest legitimacy vs those potentially being quite parochial.
If we get rid of the current layer of sovereign states within the EU (and most power sits with those states) and instead split it into a lower level (Ameland, or Brittany, or Bavaria, instead of The Netherlands, France, and Germany) and a higher level (the EU). How do we avoid ending up with some combination of the micro-states being impotent to carry out substantial action and the supra-national entity lacking democratic legitimacy?
So, sure, right now it's great that the supra-national entity curbs the rights of the member states because a lot the principles embedded in the supra-national entity are ones that I (and I imagine, you) agree with. But that's cheating I think as far really thinking about where sovereignty should sit because we're not guaranteed that this supra-national entity will continue to reflect our values and without effective democratic control, I don't think it can have the required long term legitimacy to replace that layer of historical sovereign states and govern a sort of Holy Roman Empire of micro-states.
France of course is also a good example of the historic and logical link between "reactionary" thought and separatism. It was the linguistic minorities on the periphery of France who maintained royalist sympathies for the longest time and not because of any innate monarchism but because they correctly understood the flattening and totalising nature of the fully mobilised unitary French revolutionary state. Mobilising large ethnic minority groups behind a non-majoritarian state is very logical.
I'm reminded of the fact that the Bahraini Shura council has one of the 40 seats reserved for one of the (36) Bahraini Jews, I think there was a Christian on the council at one point as well, also a miniscule minority among Bahraini nationals.
Or Syria, of course, where other religious minorities have allied themselves with the Assad family. (The Kurds are an ethnic minority in Syria but their geographic position gives them at least some independence of action that the distributed and urbanised religious minorities of Syria don't have)
Or many other cases where linguistic, religious, or ethnic minorities have allied themselves with governments that are at best counter-majoritarian and at worst absolute dictatorships.
All majoritarian governments have a homogenising tendency and democracies are inherently majoritarian so it's not easy to see the way through to the desired system. I think that some people want to put important things like protecting "basic human rights" with the supra-national layer without acknowledging that the supra-national layer gained those values in the first place because people fought political battles at the national level[s]. So either:
a) Politics has to be introduced at the EU level in a much bigger way than the current system so that future political battles can be fought at that level. I used to travel to Brussels frequently to discuss matters at the commission and I still sometimes have to look up what the parliament can and cannot do. Remember the Spitzenkandidat process? Complete farce. But... then by gaining politics, the EU itself becomes the kind of homogenising state that you correctly identify as inimical to minority identity.
b) We lose the ability to have political discussions in a meaningful way at all and end up with a static set of basic values enforced by a sterile notionally technocratic body. At that point, the political battle goes underground and becomes focused on politicising the judicial and executive bodies i.e. we end up like the US where real politics is about who gets to be on the supreme court.
c) We keep everything the same but with smaller states. I think this is what you're proposing
Quite so. But it can be and clearly is the case that Brexit is the wrong kind of separation because every point ever made in favour of it during the referendum campaign that brought it on except for the raw racist subtext was a blatant lie, but Scottish independence is different because it would give Scotland an opportunity to join the EU as a newly independent member state that it would probably take up very quickly, avoiding a great deal of the short-, medium- and long-term structural economic and ecological damage that the present UK administration seems hell-bent on self-inflicting.
Well, this is likely to be agree-to-disagree situation but I personally think that the Scottish independence debate is equally full of people who are either deluded or liars as Brexit was, although as you say it doesn't have the same whiff of xenophobia to it.
The SNP's view that greater trade with the EU, which it would rejoin, will make up for trade friction with the rUK or that it wouldn't be tremendously disruptive to leave the union are simply not plausible. The reason they aren't is for exactly the same reasons that it was implausible that greater trade with non-EU world would make up for EU trade frictions.
Evasiveness around what exactly the detailed plans are for all kinds of major post-independence questions is common, as it was during the Brexit debate. Exactly the same aggressive, hectoring tone about not "believing" in the country is bandied about when people press the pro-separation side for details as it was during the Brexit debate. There have been, within only a decade or so, SNP proposals for post independence economic models that looked like Ireland, like Denmark, like The Netherlands, and like the way Scotland is already run using devolved powers.
If the centre-of-gravity of Scottish politics is now permanently so far from the rUK that the only way to govern Scotland in a way that comports with the wishes of its people is full independence then economic considerations shouldn't necessarily get in the way of doing it but... the same could have been said of Brexit. In both cases, I think that an adult debate about economic models and trade impacts has never been had, it wasn't had during the Brexit referendum, I don't really think it was had during the previous referendum on Scottish independence either.
During the Brexit referendum, I made a list of de jure freedoms of action that the UK would gain through Brexit and how they interact with likely power balances in order to produce de facto options that are an awful lot more constrained than those, which I think it's worth setting out because the same framework applies to Scottish independence (although there's no reason it needs to lead to the same answer).
1) Ones which are de facto constrained because they are governed by other supra-national compacts. I.e. lots of things that were never going to happen in the post-Brexit UK because they are violations of WTO rules, energy charter rules, or other rules. It is now no longer EU rules which restrict government procurement from favouring domestic content... it's WTO rules instead (and also see (2) because the UK's trade agreement with the EU contrains them and see also (3) since France has some very "interesting" rules on solar PV subsidies which look a lot like local content).
2) Ones which are de facto constrained because they are governed by supra-national compacts which are likely to be made as part of the separation process. You can see how tightly the existence of a land border between NI and the Republic has coupled the UK to EU rules as part of the withdrawal agreement, something very similar will happen as part of the discussions between rUK and Scotland. The EU is bigger than the UK but the rUK is bigger than Scotland by an even bigger margin. For the same reason, they may find that their notional freedom of action is constrained by requirements imposed by the larger party.
Ok, Scotland can't get rid of nuclear weapons without leaving the UK. What happens if maintaining those bases is an absolute condition the rUK places on something like being able to continue using the pound? Keeping the pound is now official policy, since the Euro crisis and what happened to Greece and Ireland has made joining the Euro less popular. It does no good saying that these conditions would be unfair. Arguably some of the concessions the EU extracted on fisheries were "unfair" but tough, that's negotiation and the stronger party has the upper hand.
3) Powers which haven't even been used to their full extent yet. It was noted during the Brexit debate that the UK routinely followed the most restrictive possible interpretation of EU rules when France and Italy often don't do that. Scotland has additional income tax raising powers which are barely being used, only a 1% extra on the higher bands. While I accept that they would run corporation tax differently and might well introduce a wealth tax if they had those powers, it is also the case that UK corporation tax is already only slightly below that of the Scandinavian countries / Netherlands which are often proposed as a model and when it goes up next year will be third highest in the EU (tied at 25% with many other countries). Most countries in the EU either don't have wealth taxes or raise barely any of their tax receipts from them.
4) Things that haven't been done, not because they aren't allowed by rules set by the larger entity (EU or UK), but because the sub-entity (UK or Scotland) doesn't want to do them / there are other reasons for not doing them but the larger entity is used as a "boogeyman". In many cases, the constraint is a fiscal one and is effectively set by capital markets. If you think that MMT means that doesn't matter then a) that is only true for sovereign issuers so Scotland would need its own currency and b) MMT-based ideas are still constrained by trade flows and currency strength unless you are the US and are much closer to autarchy in essential inputs.
5) Ones for which there might not be a domestic political consensus. The UK's political centre of gravity doesn't actually want to do a lot of the things which are now technically possible because the UK is no longer in the EU. This one is less relevant for Scotland because I think there really *is* a political consensus to be a higher-tax, better public-service country with more equality. On the Brexit side, see literally anything that Patrick Minford says. Yes, economic models say that if you were to get rid of all import tariffs on agricultural products, the net benefit of cheaper food for everyone would outweigh the impact of destroying the farming industry. Good luck getting political consensus for doing that one guys!
Whenever the usual rats talk about missing out on the "opportunities of Brexit" they mean the kind of Singapore-on-Thames stuff like this. Essentially they've blown up the UK's main trading relationship in order to gain powers that they will never be able to use and which would horrify many of their supporters if they did.
6) Things which are proposed but where it is unclear that the domestic civil service and political leadership has the capability to execute them. Can the UK make a better agricultural and fisheries policy than the EU? Probably, no expert on either within the EU thinks that even the current reforms go remotely far enough. But... where's our UK policy then? They've had years to work this up, any time now chaps.
7) Areas where they can make a reasonable case for a gross benefit through tailoring of a regulatory regime which nonetheless gets wiped out by trade friction to leave no net benefit. Could the UK come up with a better version of REACH? Probably, there's plenty to fix. Could the UK come up with an alternative so much better that it outweighs the sum of the implementation costs of UK REACH, the costs of compliance with two regimes, and the trade friction? Definitely not! See also proposals to use greater flexibility in regulation of genetically modified food crops. I happen to think that's a great idea but where are you going to export them to?
Finally we are left with things that pass all of those tests but that I happen to think are bad ideas. That isn't a good reason for me to object to a permanent change of sovereignty because I think those should be made based on enduring principles and not on the fact that the current EU rules suit me better than the desires of the current government.
Anyway you're left with a grab bag of the trivial and the irrelevant. Are we going to get any additional UK productivity from repealing the WTD? No as it was widely opted out of anyway. Do I think it would make us a better society not to have it? Also no but that's a personal view.
That doesn't mean that Scottish independence has to be an equally bad idea as Brexit and it certainly doesn't mean that other people can't disagree with my conclusions that both Brexit and Scottish independence are bad ideas. I do think that it is ultimately on the proposer of radical change, in this case the SNP, to make a compelling case for what the new model looks like. Unfortunately they may well have taken a lesson from Brexit that you can get your political goals through without doing any such thing.
I think that Scottish independence has a stronger ultimate motivation than Brexit but I also think the challenges and costs of doing it are substantially higher. If I still lived in Scotland, would definitely vote against. As I don't, wish them good luck whichever way.
Also two further points (As if this comment isn't long enough, I know...)
it would give Scotland an opportunity to join the EU as a newly independent member state that it would probably take up very quickly, avoiding a great deal of the short-, medium- and long-term structural economic and ecological damage that the present UK administration seems hell-bent on self-inflicting.
Geography dictates that there is no escape from deep economic ties to England, just as there is no way for the UK and the EU not to have a shared economic future.
Ecological damage I don't quite get since many such issues are devolved and are scarcely better in the rEU than in either England or Scotland.
posted by atrazine at 7:45 AM on August 30, 2022 [8 favorites]
@atrazine, don't apologise! This is really interesting stuff, and more insightful than most commentary on these issues than most media analysts.
posted by vincebowdren at 1:29 PM on August 30, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by vincebowdren at 1:29 PM on August 30, 2022 [2 favorites]
Geography dictates that there is no escape from deep economic ties to England, just as there is no way for the UK and the EU not to have a shared economic future.
Agreed. It does seem to me, though, it's not so much that frictionless trade with the EU would make up for the inevitable impediments to trade across any new Scottish-UK land border, as that the UK is currently doing such a comprehensive job of burning its own economy to the ground that Scotland might well need frictionless trade with the EU just for the sake of hanging onto a few ashes to rise from.
Ultimately the UK will be left with no choice but to attempt to rejoin the EU. Even with all the intractable structural problems involved, an economically unified Europe with internal freedom of movement cannot help but be more secure and more prosperous than an economically fragmented one. As you say, it's all about the geography and the British Isles are part of Europe despite what "heavy fog on Channel, Continent isolated" nuff-nuffs like Rees-Mogg think.
Brexit was a massively and fundamentally stupid move exactly because it was predicated on denying that reality. If what's left of the UK ends up with two land borders with EU member states, both of which would have to end up doing better economically than it, then the stupidity of staying out becomes that much more apparent and trying to get back in will be approached with that much more urgency.
posted by flabdablet at 4:24 AM on September 1, 2022
Agreed. It does seem to me, though, it's not so much that frictionless trade with the EU would make up for the inevitable impediments to trade across any new Scottish-UK land border, as that the UK is currently doing such a comprehensive job of burning its own economy to the ground that Scotland might well need frictionless trade with the EU just for the sake of hanging onto a few ashes to rise from.
Ultimately the UK will be left with no choice but to attempt to rejoin the EU. Even with all the intractable structural problems involved, an economically unified Europe with internal freedom of movement cannot help but be more secure and more prosperous than an economically fragmented one. As you say, it's all about the geography and the British Isles are part of Europe despite what "heavy fog on Channel, Continent isolated" nuff-nuffs like Rees-Mogg think.
Brexit was a massively and fundamentally stupid move exactly because it was predicated on denying that reality. If what's left of the UK ends up with two land borders with EU member states, both of which would have to end up doing better economically than it, then the stupidity of staying out becomes that much more apparent and trying to get back in will be approached with that much more urgency.
posted by flabdablet at 4:24 AM on September 1, 2022
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The comparison absolutely boggles and Catalonia is a bit higher in GDP.
posted by clavdivs at 4:22 PM on August 27, 2022 [2 favorites]