Micro Nations

Some Scots want to secede from the UK to create an independent nation of 5 MM people. Some Walloons want to secede from Belgium to create an independent nation of 3MM people. In this news item about Belgium's possible break up, Czechoslovakia’s split in 1993 into the Czech Republic and Slovakia is admiringly described as a “velvet” partition.

Yet ever more countries want to join the European Union. Big nations like Poland and Hungary are in. Giants like Turkey and Ukraine seem likely to become European within my lifetime (the next 50 years?).

So is Europe splintering or coalescing? What’s going on? The dynamic that feels under-observed, that Scotland beautifully illustrates, is that the two processes reinforce each other.

Chest-thumping micro-nationalism is great fun. It derives from the same emotions that cause people to support the home team at football games; these are powerful emotions. What limits the political potency of micro-nationalism is that micro-nations simply don’t have the scale to build the institutions that, ultimately, make people better off.

As European institutions become stronger micro-nationalism gradually becomes costless. People will gradually figure out that the institutions that make people better off are located in Europe. Might as well thump the micro-national chest and have a bit of fun.

The Scottish parliament voluntarily dissolved itself and threw its lot in with Westminster in 1707, at the cusp of the British Empire. Their reasoning was coldly economic (or so says the Lonely Planet guide). Scotland wanted to be on the winning side of the greatest opportunity-to-plunder/ economic engine that history had ever seen. Three hundred years later, the pro-union rhetoric coming out of Scotland is still economic.

Over time, the Euro-zone market will get bigger and deeper, European courts and parliaments and regulators will figure themselves out, the Trans European Motorway will get built. Maybe a European lingua franca will emerge (will it be English?). Union with England will just matter less to a Scotland that is part of a functioning Europe.

What are the odds that Scotland will be an independent European nation 50 years from now? I’ll offer you 50-50. Much longer odds though, on the European lingua franca becoming English.