Britain’s anti-Unionists

A row over Scotland’s place in the United Kingdom has implications for the EU, too.

When, last December, David Cameron played the UK’s veto against the EU’s fiscal-reform package, one of his major domestic critics was Britain’s most formidable politician, the leader of the Scottish National Party (SNP), Alex Salmond. In itself this was unsurprising; after all, it is second nature for Salmond to attack the policies of the UK’s Conservative Party. He paints the Conservatives – correctly enough – as an English party that has limited support outside its heartlands in the south and midlands of England, and certainly no mandate in Scotland, where it has a only one member of the UK parliament. 

Yet there was nonetheless something oddly jarring in Salmond’s critique of Cameron. Salmond has made his career as an anti-Unionist, a critic of the Union of 1707, which combined the kingdoms of England and Scotland under a single monarchy and parliament. He depicts that as a shady deal that was carried out against the wishes of Scottish public opinion and that stifled the will and flattened the culture of the Scots. Why was this arch-critic of the British Union criticising Cameron for threatening British participation in the European Union? Are unions not supposed to be bad for the health of nations? Or does this hold good for only some unions?

Cameron returned fire this month. The SNP won an overall majority at last year’s general election to the devolved Scottish parliament, and has a mandate, it argues, to bring in a referendum during its term to consult the people of Scotland about options for future constitutional change. Salmond proposes two alternatives to the status quo: full independence for Scotland from the British state, or full fiscal autonomy for Scotland under the umbrella of the British state’s diplomatic and military protection, what is colloquially known as ‘devo-max’.

As part of an early January offensive against the SNP, Cameron made clear that the referendum was beyond the Scottish parliament’s powers according to the terms of the Scotland Act passed in 1998 by the UK parliament, which set up the devolved legislature; however, the UK government would graciously allow the Scots to have a two-option referendum (minus devo-max) and that referendum would have to take place in 2013, not 2014 (the latter, Salmond’s preferred date, the 700th anniversary of the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314 when the Scots regained their independence from England).

Salmond insisted that he would press on with a three-option referendum in 2014, arguing that the popular sovereignty of the Scottish people trumped the sovereignty of the Westminster parliament.

Preserving the Union

Throughout the furore, Cameron, whose party’s full name is the Conservative and Unionist Party, made clear that he wanted to preserve the British Union, for unions allow friendly nations, such as the Scots and English, to punch above their weight in international affairs – except, of course, the European Union, which, unlike the British Union, thwarts the desires of the British nation. Salmond and Cameron are either hypocrites – a character trait not uncommon in the profession of politics – or they each possess acute, but very differently wired, antennae for assessing the effects of political unions on constituent nations.

It seems likely that the European Union will continue to feature prominently in the debate over the ‘Scottish question’ in the run-up to the referendum of 2013 or 2014, whether held on Cameron’s terms or Salmond’s.

The SNP was a highly marginal political party for most of its life. It was formed in 1934 and until the energy crisis of 1973-74, which brought economic and political turmoil to the UK, had won only one seat at a UK general election, with a couple more at local by-elections. Its breakthrough as a political force occurred at the two UK general elections of 1974, when the SNP won seven and then 11 seats in the UK parliament. The UK had only recently joined the European Economic Community and the SNP stood as an anti-European party. What was the point of exchanging Westminster sovereignty for the diktats of Brussels? However, in the late 1980s, after a period of stagnation in the SNP’s fortunes, the party discovered the vote-winning policy of ‘independence in Europe’. Scots no longer needed to fear going it alone after independence from England. The EU provided a comfort blanket for timid nationalists who had the insurance that their country might thrive as a member state of the European Union.

But would an independent Scotland automatically gain entry into the European Union? This is a question that has much vexed politicians and commentators, and will play an important role in the current debate.

The Vienna Convention on State Succession in Respect of Treaties states, in Article 34, that: “When a part or parts of a territory of a state separate to form one or more states, whether or not the predecessor state continues to exist: (a) any treaty in force at the date of the succession of states in respect of the entire territory of the precedent state continues in force in respect of each successor state so formed.” That would seem to support the argument of the SNP that an independent Scotland would automatically remain a member of the EU, as would the remainder of the UK.

However, matters are not so straightforward. When, for instance, is a treaty not a treaty? When, for example, as under the Treaty of Rome, it establishes a new legal order.

Membership of the EU would, most likely, depend on negotiation. Certainly, that was the view of Romano Prodi and the European Commission when in 2004 a written question in the European Parliament asked whether a newly independent region within a member state would have to leave the EU and re-apply for admission. Prodi’s reply was unequivocal: “When a part of the territory of a member state ceases to be a part of that state, eg, because that territory becomes an independent state, the treaties will no longer apply to that territory. In other words, a newly independent region would, by the fact of its independence, become a third country with respect to the Union.”

A significant consequence of having to reapply for EU membership is that new members do not receive an opt-out from the euro. This presents Salmond – a former economist – with a further headache, for he has more enthusiasm for the grand vision of European Union than he does for the practicalities of monetary union. Indeed, he has suggested that an independent Scotland might adopt the pound sterling. What Salmond really wants is continued membership of the EU and the valuable bequest of the UK opt-out from the single currency.

Ironically, in the unlikely but far from impossible scenario of a referendum victory for full independence, the Scottish Nationalists might well obtain what some of the most outspoken British nationalists in Cameron’s Conservative Party most desire: uncomfortable withdrawal from the European Union.

Currently, however, opinion polls show that a higher proportion of English – than Scots – voters support Scottish independence from England. How convenient it would be for all concerned – for the Scots, for the English and for the EU – if the English seceded from the Scots. Then the Scots could remain in the EU as the successor state of the UK, the English could enjoy life outside the trammels of Brussels, and the European Union would be free at last of the English incubus against which Charles de Gaulle so presciently warned in the 1960s.

Colin Kidd is professor of intellectual history and the history of political thought at Queen’s University Belfast and author of “Union and Unionisms: political thought in Scotland, 1500-2000”.