A wee note on nationalism.

2 min read

Brief twitter exchange with that Paul Kingsnorth (who as well as being a good person to follow on twitter and being half of Dark Mountain, has been nominated for some literary award or other...)

His thinking on the rise of Celtic nationalism is that the likely endpoint is a federal structure, with 4 countries, each with their own parliament, under a stripped-down "federal UK" government. Having loads of independent countries under a federal government sounds a bit like the European Union to me, and I think it is interesting that one of the (many) arguments around Scottish Independence is whether or not they would be members of the European Union. 

There's no earthy reason to assume not (despite some very unearthly fearmongering from the Westminster political parties), but it is possible to take this further (and some have done so) and say that an independent Scotland would be more secure in Europe than a UK that has Messrs Cameron, Johnson and Farage in it. Basically, you could be pretty confident that Scotland would be in the EU in 2017 (say), but not as confident that the UK would be.

So a vote for independence is actually - if you think like this - a vote for closer European integration than would otherwise exist.

Amongst my political foibles, I am pretty strongly pro-Europe because I think that the difficulties humankind face are global and needs people working together in as large a number as possible. Stuff like a global minimum wage, or copyright reform, for instance, can't be done nation by nation. But because people tend not to want to be engaged on a level outside of their own country (and because, despite the web, most political press is *very* national in outlook) the transnational bodies that actually exist tend to be a bit rubbish, at best.

If no one is engaged, nothing happens.

So yeah, no idea where I am going with this, but this is my starting point.