In the aftermath of the Scottish No vote, my thoughts go back to 2002 - a time when not many observers would have predicted Europe's current troubles.
Paul Mason sketches a picture of "Scotland's Yes Generation."
"Scottish politics has been about class, community, land and nation. But the working-class youth of Clydeside found themselves cut adrift from these traditional markers. ... To them, neoliberalism was not a spectacular historical eruption but simply the world around them. As it destroyed the remains of the industrial society their fathers knew, rendering the stone churches and granite docksides as meaningless and depopulated as medieval ruins, they did what they were told to do: get an education and a low-paid job."
The mood after the vote has been fickle. Relief did come early Friday morning. At 4:50 a.m. London time, when much of New York had just gone to sleep, the results that came in from Glasgow had put Scottish independence to rest.
Yet as Ian Bremmer pointed out, this was a vote against "crippling uncertainty," not independence, and the question of what happens now is one Britain's leaders are left grasping to answer. Their stumbling approach to the referendum reveals the gap in understanding between the people of Scotland (and the rest of the union) and the political elite in Westminster. How did they get it so wrong? This after all represents no abrupt shift in national sentiment in the United Kingdom. The decline of love for the union has been consistently charted:
"According to a study by Nuffield College, Oxford, in 1997, the numbers of people whose Britishness was described by themselves as weak or non-existent had risen from a minority in each country to 66% of Scots, 43% of the Welsh and 26% of the English.
A decade later, another survey (cited by Varun Uberoi and Iain McLean in Britishness: A Role for the State?) found that the number had risen to 47% in England."
Let's go back to 2002 and focus outward to all of Western Europe. As an American studying in Italy, I was impressed that year by the optimism I saw expressed for the European Union. My peers welcomed the arrival of the euro, and the Erasmus student exchange program that allowed pupils to study for a year in a different country seemed the very embodiment of what Europe could offer: peace, prosperity and opportunity without borders. The quixotic workings of the European institutions were even less cause for personal bother than they were well understood. National issues of course mattered and in Southern Europe were particularly acute, but the promise that problems could be subsumed by gradually deepening integration seemed real enough. Europe as an identity had a broad appeal; that its roots were shallow mattered little. The inability of European institutions to clearly explain their workings and benefits to European citizens seemed a concern for academics to discuss.
Everything of course changed just a few years later. Now, as Europe's crisis has moved from modifier to modifier - financial and economic becoming firmly political - its effects have spread outward and upward. Discontent takes various forms. There are familiar if updated manifestations of nationalism - UKIP in the United Kingdom, France's National Front - and the pitch of anti-immigration leaders such as Geert Wilders in the Netherlands. There are protest parties such as Beppe Grillo's Five Stars Movement in Italy that corral the contempt of younger voters who feel left behind by the ruling class.
The Scottish vote amalgamates both these currents. Listening to the Yes voters and reading the placards still pinned up around Edinburgh, you don't get the sense of a single unifying platform: The referendum for many became the chance to issue a catch-all protest vote.
That vote took place against the backdrop of history, and that it became contested at all is a worry for all of Europe. Mason's accurate picture of the youth of Scotland shows why, because it is a picture that has its answer across the European landscape. Along with the results in the European Parliament elections earlier this year, and the success in this month's election of the Sweden Democrats, it cements the spread of Europe's crisis. Young Europeans are starved for opportunities, and they are seeking new identities - identities that the arrangements of traditional national politics no longer seem to offer, and that Europe apparently never did. A political vacuum exists not only in Italy, Greece and Spain, but also in the United Kingdom, in Sweden and in the Netherlands. The sick man of Europe is Europe. Scots ultimately voted against uncertainty. With that decision comes an expectation. A proper response is going to require far more effective, transparent, responsive and self-aware leadership than what we are seeing from London, Brussels and Berlin.
