An axiom of nationalism is that independence is a natural condition to which all countries aspire and that no country ever seeks to extinguish itself by joining in the kind of political union that the UK represents. Neither of these assertions is correct, indeed there are two outstanding examples which run counter to the idea that Scottish independence is part of an inevitable tide of history, including, somewhat surprisingly, the USA. The other isn’t very far away from us. The former East Germany, nominally sovereign but actually a Soviet satellite state for 40 years, became in reality independent in 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell, the old Iron Curtain frontier dissolved, and the Soviet Union did nothing as its empire dissolved.
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