ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a model by which various levels of sociocultural organization and their interaction may be described and interpreted, illustrates this model with examples from Scotland, and attempts to use this model to speculate about the future of the European Community (EC) after 1992. It addresses the larger issue of how and when, in a world system, economic interdependence of ethnic groups is likely to diffuse nationalism – an issue that is at the heart of the future of European boundaries in the New Europe of the EC and beyond. Ethnic identity is culturally constructed and dependent on historical factors. Ethnos is variously translated as people, culture, and race. Keating defines Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales as "peripheral nations" within the United Kingdom, or "nations that have had their own distinct political concerns and where the balance of political forces has often differed from that in England."
