I don’t mean to sound reflexively cynical but I really don’t think we need ascribe idealism to the EU stance. At least not in the conventional sense. The EU is fundamentally driven by the wars (and Balkanisation / nationalist movements of the 19th early 20th century) and the devastation , the economic ruin, they caused. It is also hugely influenced by the post WWII institution building by the US in Europe. The US funded unions in Germany, avant garde music festivals, and the kind of pan European young people’s events that the likes of Angela Merkel would have met her Western counterparts. It’s really about making markets work and pesky countries are a barrier.
I do agree with you and @smulder that the EU should have the effect of diminishing seccessionist tendencies by making the national layer less important. The doctrine of EU law supremacy holds (and it, and the written constitution that comes with it are certainly part of some of the Tory Brexit people’s rationale for leaving. I’m thinking of Theresa May in particular who supported Brexit except when it looked bad for her career) and the federal nature of the EU (like the German system, US inspired, and as with all those systems the US fostered having no president as they realised it was a stupid fucking idea if you want to avoid fascism) makes it easier for populations with seccessionist tendencies to remain in the colonial state. Look at Scotland and Northern Ireland now. They are both a lot less happy in the UK than they were before the English decided to leave the EU.
It’s one thing being ruled by the English Tories if they have EU oversight and have to toe the line, it’s another when they have carte blanche…
London doesn’t need all that to drive tourism and much of it would still be there if you became a constitutional republic. London has more tourism than it needs. It’s a world city. There are millions of reasons to go there, many of them very good or even world class. The queen and all that is one I guess, but it’s mostly ticking a box and not like anyone comes away going the royalty thing was a profound experience for them.
There is an element of gawking at the freaks about it too.
“Making the national level less important” through devolution and EU membership is the foundation of the Belfast Agreement. If most things are decided in Belfast or Brussels, Northern Ireland can have a constructively ambiguous identity, Irish enough for most Nationalists and British enough for most Unionists. This (and not just practical border issues) is why Brexit pulls the rug from under everything.
But you don’t need a monarchy for any of that: I doubt many republicans are proposing demolishing Windsor Castle or melting down the Crown Jewels.
Versailles gets way more visitors than any British royal site, and France hasn’t had a monarchy since 1870. And they have a changing of the guard too, at the Élysée Palace.
I don’t see how that can work logistically. That would require a hard border between it and England. And there is no way trade with the continent can replace it. The only container port worthy of the name in Scotland is Grenock, which is both small and facing the wrong direction.
If secession implicitly repealed the Act of Settlement, it would presumably also implicitly unrepeal the Act of Security 1704, which gave the Parliament of Scotland the power (and duty) to determine the succession to the throne after Anne.
(And Salic law requires legitimate descent in the male line, which would rule out Franz if Salic law applied in Scotland, but it doesn’t.)
I’d definitely agree with you there; with the caveat that there is a sense in which that is arguably an idealistic stance:
The EU is unquestionably driven in no small part by how WWII got really dark there for a while(with the also-grim postwar concern that any region of sufficient political fragility was a candidate to involuntarily host a ghastly proxy war, a prospect that makes merely staring nervously at a zillion battalions of Warsaw Pact armor but not having anything happen look like a picnic); but their stance is idealistic in the sense that it seems to include at least somewhat sincere, definitely well lip-serviced, concern for human rights and such in member states.
If the interest were largely confined to worried about chaos and disruption one could actually imagine a (fairly plausible) alternate-earth EU that is essentially in the business of making ethnic nationalist separatism commercially unobtrusive:
Any asshole with some thugs, grievances, and a significantly contrafactual history of the regional blood and soil can start up a nation state; but they’ll find themselves a trifle short on trade relationships, currency anyone respects; and all those zillions of tedious-but-useful laws about pharmaceutical quality control and such. Brussels is abjectly unsuited to providing you with regionally appropriate nationalism; but just so happens to have drop-in solutions for trade, currency; and widely recognized standards you can just harmonize into law more or less wholesale.
I’m notably not saying that the actual EU does this(they very much don’t seem to, for some combination of idealism about their moderating influence on the excesses of member states, deep historical fear; and member state disinclination to support their own disintegration); but hypothetical-EU could actually mesh really well if they were interested in keeping commerce on an even keel but not invested in slightly more idealistic notions of universalism and free movement of people rather than just goods and capital:
I suspect that there are even some ice-blooded Utilitarians or strong skeptics of the possibility of pluralistic polities that think they ought to work this way: if you are either committed to your little ethnostate or believe homogeneous societies to be more stable states in the long term, you could run the EU on the implicit or explicit understanding that, so long as the hostilities didn’t drag on too long and the states that emerge after the bloodletting is finished rebuild themselves in full accordance with EU and Eurozone specs; and treat balkanization as a normal sorting process that is ultimately desirable because it produces more stable member states and disruption is minimized because all the economic stuff is standardized across each little ethnic fiefdom.
I think I like the “if the ECHR is doing its job separatism should simply stop being worth the trouble” concept a lot better; but you could play it the other way, which is why I tend to see the EU not doing that as at least somewhat idealistic.
Pedant alert: the ECHR is a body of the Council of Europe which you need to be a member of to apply to join the EU but it is separate. There is a developing human rights jurisprudence in the ECJ though.
I’m not necessarily saying it’s a good idea. I’ll leave that to the Scottish people who actually live in Scotland to decide. But independence was on the table before Brexit, and I think Brexit might drive a second, successful, independence referendum.
If the first independence referendum passed, it would have resulted in two nations both in the EU so the M6 and the dozen other highways and roads would stay exactly as they were. If the split happens after Brexit, then Scotland will have to depend on things coming in through England, which is already expecting massive delays and shortages for goods coming from Europe, and then have a second customs check to slow things down even more. Even if European firms wanted to trade with Scotland, they simply couldn’t afford to have trucks sitting idle for days to do so.
It wouldn’t amount to a return to Europe, it would be a Brexit on top of a Brexit.
It would be Brexit with all the mitigation measures and the solidarity that the rest of the trading bloc is now showing to Ireland. All the incentives are there for the rest of the EU to demonstrate the full extent of the differences between the way members and non-members are treated.
It’s not like things have been that great even when there was no possibility of Scottish independence or Brexit. I was far too familiar with the 6 miles of shitty road between the M6 and the A74(M) that existed for 16 years in the 1990s and 2000s.
Solidarity doesn’t beat cold hard reality. You have one small container port facing the wrong direction, and you have one limited roll-on-roll-off port at Aberdeen and those are already being used, so they don’t have much excess capacity. Scotland gets its European goods mostly from the south by truck. No matter what, Scotland is going to face whatever England faces with Brexit. Putting a hard border between it and England will just make things worse. What incentive will England have to make Scottish goods flow quickly? Or at all?
