The United Kingdom is going to the polls on Thursday. Elections electrify the countries in which they are held, but in most cases they make little difference. In this case, the election is a bit more important. Whether Labour or the Tories win makes some difference, but not all that much. What makes this election significant is that in Scotland, 45 percent of the public voted recently to leave the United Kingdom. This has been dismissed as an oddity by all well-grounded observers. However, for unsophisticated viewers like myself, the fact that 45 percent of Scotland was prepared to secede was an extraordinary event.
Moreover, this election matters because UKIP - formerly the United Kingdom Independence Party - is in it, and polls indicate that it will win about 12 percent of the vote, while winning a handful of seats in Parliament. This discrepancy is due to an attribute of the British electoral system, which favors seats won over total votes cast. UKIP's potential winnings don't seem very significant. However, the party represents a movement in Britain that is not unlike what is going on in the rest of Europe, and in addition, creates a new dimension to British strategic policy that might well be important. Most of the vote that UKIP is attracting comes from former Conservative voters. That means that Prime Minister David Cameron might lose the election. That does not change Britain's strategic position much. UKIP and the Scottish vote might.
The UKIP and Scottish Factors
UKIP is both anti-European and anti-immigration. It opposes British integration with the European Union, based both on practical matters and ideological matters. UKIP sees the European Union as undermining British economic well-being and British sovereignty, and it sees British sovereignty as a moral imperative. It also sees British culture as an essential characteristic of British sovereignty and, in that sense, regards immigrants as a threat to Britain.
The United Kingdom is a European nation. Its national identity emerges from a shared history, language and culture. You are born to a European nationality. It is not easy to become something whose essence is in birth. In this sense, European nationalism is profoundly different from American nationalism, whose identity is built around the accommodation with a dynamically changing culture.
European nationalism simultaneously binds and repels. It binds those with the common heritage together. It repels, purposefully and incidentally, those who are different. This is why the Scottish elections are so significant. Even after 300 years, 45 percent of Scots were prepared to think of Scotland as an independent nation, based less on any specific issue than on the principle of divergent national identities.
The British elections represent the current state of Europe. There is the deep ambivalence about the European Union and the rise of the anti-European parties not yet ready to govern but still affecting the system (as shown by Cameron's promise to hold a referendum on Britain's EU membership). There is the anti-immigration sentiment, currently driven by fear of Islamist terrorism and the influx of immigrants from Eastern Europe taking some of the lower-wage jobs, but actually having deeper and less tractable roots. Finally, there is the rise of nationalist movements within countries where it had been thought that the question of nationality had been settled centuries before, drawing its energy from the questions raised in the other movements and becoming unexpectedly powerful.
