ABSTRACT
THE NEW CENTURY has seen the return of a Scottish parliament, making peebling parliamentarians a more feasible proposition. To what extent, though, is having a formal legislature, albeit devolved, a radical departure from almost three hundred years of incorporating Union? Both opponents and proponents of ‘nationalism’ in Scotland would argue that it is. For the former, it sets up a forum which is likely to have its own dynamic and capacity to shift the political agenda, and that, in their view, is bad. For the latter, exactly the same outcome is likely, and that is good. This, to be sure, is a wager on history, and no-one can predict with any degree of certainty where ‘devolution’ will lead. Indeed, terms like ‘nationalism’ and ‘devolution’ carry their own confusions. There is a sense in which Scotland has always been ‘nationalist’ if by that we mean that Scotland has a sense of itself as a nation, an ‘imagined community’, in Benedict Anderson’s phrase. Politicians across the spectrum, be they ‘unionists’ or not, have had no trouble accepting this. The issue for debate has long been: what is the best set of constitutional arrangements to advance that national interest-incorporation, devolution or independence? In like manner, ‘devolution’ competes with the older 19th century Liberal term ‘home rule’. At root, devolution implies that Westminster delegates some of its powers to Holyrood to govern Scotland, while retaining sovereignty at the centre. ‘Home Rule’, on the other hand, is a more diffuse term implying a continuum of self-government, and recognises that Scotland retained and developed institutional autonomy within the British union. This is not simply a matter of choosing terms. At root, lies different conceptions both of that 1707 Union, and Scotland’s place within the British state. The Scottish anomaly has lain at the heart of the British state for nigh on 300 years. On the one hand, there was a single-British-parliament based on the English doctrine of Crown sovereignty and encompassed in a unitary state. Yet Scottish
civil institutions were and are autonomous, and in the course of the Union these have evolved as important means of self-governance. To be sure, this was quasifederalism of an administrative sort but lacking a separate legislature to manage and give them legitimacy-until 1999.
