Scotland and Nationalism

Regional resources and democratic secessionism

“…We analyze the electoral performances of the SNP and the Welsh Plaid Cymru, the two major parties promoting independence of Scotland and Wales from the UK, on the constituency-level over the period. Initially, oil was not an issue in either of the two regions (Harvie, 1995). After the Geneva Convention (1958) confirmed the nations' coastal rights, and offshore gas was discovered by the Netherlands in the early 1960s, "[t]he hunt was on for North Sea oil" (MacKay & Mackay, 1975, p. 184).…”

“…Hereafter, politicians from the SNP have tried to instrumentalize the large potential oil revenues as an argument for Scottish independence, and support for the party increased sharply (McGuinness et al, 2012). 2 The slogan "It's Scotland's oil", invented in 1972 and often quoted even today (Harvie, 1995), concisely reflects how politically relevant the oil discoveries were and still are for the SNP (Collier & Hoeffler, 2006;MacKay & Mackay, 1975).…”

Colonial State as ‘New Manu’? Explorations in Education Policies in Relation to Dalit and Low-Caste Education in the Nineteenth-Century India

“…The Indian Civil Service examination was introduced wherein the candidates had to pass the examination in Greek and Latin. This meant that only the British elite who had studied in grammar schools and Oxford and Cambridge universities could enter the services, while students coming from poor Scottish background lost out (Harvie, 2004). Henceforth, people like, Thomas Munro, John Malcolm and Robert Shortrede, could not come to India.…”

Pasts, Futures, and Connections between Scotland, Ulster, and Ireland: a critique of some historiographical tendencies

“…Christopher Harvie, also a noted analyst of contemporary Scotland and an enthusiast for a closer European union of the regions, further argues that given the high proportion of the Scottish population with Irish connections, a Scottish-Irish Agreement might have made a more positive contribution to the Northern Ireland question than the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement. 21 There is no necessary agreement amongst Irish and Scottish nationalists as to the specific implications of these recent economic developments in Britain and Ireland: the degree of autonomy envisaged for Scotland in some such quarters may be unclear, and valorization of the Celtic Tiger economy may be vitiated in other cases, such as Denis O'Hearn's, by a desire to prove that no state can be ideal in a partitioned Ireland. 22 But there is an agreement that the unitary United Kingdom state failed both Scotland and the island of Ireland, so that political reconstruction, or even territorial redivision, is or was necessary.…”

“…Harvie however seems elsewhere to naturalize the latter development in representing nineteenth-century Scotland as a society that failed to generate 'nationalism' in accordance with European norms. 28 More recent economic and political factors underscore problematic features of these assumed historical Scottish-Irish connections. Whatever the merits of treating Scotland and the island of Ireland as natural economic units, 29 the Scottish and Irish nationalist critique of the conduct of UK fiscal policy exposes the (doubtless considerable) limitations of English and British Euroscepticism more than it does advance a convincing rationale for why Scotland should reclaim the independence of its fiscal policy from Westminster in order to surrender it to the European Union.…”