Dismay is likely to be the response in different parts of the world to the post-referendum agitation in Scotland. Britain, one of the world’s most high-profile states, voluntarily ceded a referendum, which it only had the power to grant in constitutional terms. Despite the absence of territorial grievances or economic hardship, a huge number of Scots backed secession but not enough. Yet the losing party disparages the result even though the question, voting roll, and length of the campaign were tilted towards its needs. This amounts to an acute disincentive for centralized state without such benign conditions to give in to pro-autonomy pressures. In many places, it may well mean that the demands of minorities are now treated with hostility even if they are well-grounded ones. Ethnically dominant but insecure states (of which there are many) may now determine never to paint themselves into the corner that an old, consolidated but surprisingly brittle state like Britain appears to have done. So concessions to unfulfilled minorities which may have previously been contemplated, may now be off the table in states nervously watching the continuing British rumpus.

The unsettling Scottish referendum may also provide food for thought for states without ethnic strains but where much of the population may be disconnected from the political process. In Scotland, a populist proud of his hell-raising abilities managed to span this chasm. Salmond reached out to the YouTube and Facebook generation as no Western politician has so far managed to do. Members of this generation are now enlisting for further epic battles against the Westminster goliath, even though what economic benefits they can derive are impossible to detect.

Exactly a century ago, in September 1914, the young men of Glasgow flocked to enlist in the British Army in greater numbers than anywhere else in Britain. A glorious cause turned out to be a hellish ordeal and those who survived returned to a city sunk in depression. Their successors, many with university degrees and a cosmopolitan outlook, are showing the same blind faith in a cause perhaps far more simplistic than the British imperial one. Where their ride on Salmond’s magic carpet will take them is hard to discern. But Britain’s ongoing territorial crisis preoccupies the rest of the world, because the separatist contagion is a real one with echoes very close to Britain’s own shores.

Tom Gallagher is an Edinburgh-based political scientist. Manchester University Press will publish his next book, Europe’s Path to Crisis: Disintegration Through Monetary Union, in October.

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