If Secession Is Good Enough For Scotland, Why Not Texas?

We'll never know for sure how deeply involved Rep. Steve Stockman (R-TX) was in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people and injured another 700. But we do know that the militia groups involved were in touch with his office about the bombing and that he has been highly sympathetic to their paranoid-- if not psychotic-- cause. And now he seems to be gaining traction on the far right fringes of the Texas Republican Party in his deranged primary run against John Cornyn.

A former drug addict and derelict who dropped out of school for what he calls "partying syndrome," the Michigan-born Stockman would love to see Texas and other Confederate states secede from the United States. And with Scotland getting ready for secede from the U.K., don't be too surprised if a Stockman victory against Cornyn leads to a more open discussion about Texas leaving the Union again. Wait… you didn't know Scotland is in the process of breaking up with the rest of the U.K.? David Bowie asked them not to last night-- though he himself abandoned the U.K. for NYC long ago and didn't even attend the award ceremony where he "made" the remark.

Texas departing-- hopefully with Mississippi-- doesn't have to be as wrenching as it was the first time they tried going it alone. And, writing for the Financial Times yesterday, Gideon Rachman offers Scotland as the example of a good breakup, while admitting that "there are remarkably few examples of nations breaking up in a civilized way."

George Osborne, the UK chancellor, had travelled to the Scottish capital to give a speech warning that an independent Scotland would not be allowed to keep the pound as its currency. A few days later, José Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, said that it would be “very difficult, if not impossible” for an independent Scotland to join the EU. This is tough, even brutal, politics-- and it has provoked complaints of bullying from pro-independence campaigners.

The international reaction to the Scottish debate makes me think that the prime minister got something wrong in his speech on February 7. Mr Cameron argued: “If we lost Scotland... we would pull the rug from our reputation.” On the contrary, I think the UK government’s willingness to allow the centuries-old union to be dissolved peacefully is a boost to the country’s reputation. To adopt Mr Cameron’s marketing speak, the British brand is built around tolerance, the rule of law and democracy. There is no better demonstration of those values than the Scottish referendum.

There are remarkably few examples of nations breaking up in a civilised way. The most famous is the velvet divorce between the Czechs and the Slovaks in 1993. A better analogy to Scotland’s situation may be Norway’s referendum on independence from Sweden in 1905. After briefly contemplating war, the Swedes thought better of it and negotiated a divorce.

Given its brutal history, the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991 was surprisingly peaceful-- but the Russians have since fought a savage war to prevent the secession of Chechnya. Even in democratic Europe, Spain is refusing to contemplate the idea of an independence referendum for Catalonia. The US, of course, fought a civil war to save its union. If modern-day Texas decided to secede from the US-- as Rick Perry, its governor, once hinted that it might-- my guess is that Washington would once again fight to keep the country together.

So why is the UK government behaving differently? Why has it decided to imitate Canada, which allowed Quebec to hold a referendum on independence, rather than China or the US which take a harder line with Taiwan and Texas? Probably because the government in Westminster recognises that the UK is a union of separate nations with historically distinct identities: morally and practically it can only be kept together on the basis of consent. Britain did put up a fight to prevent Irish independence, almost a century ago, and that was clearly a mistake. Ending the long-running Troubles in Northern Ireland also involved making it explicit that the province’s destiny is ultimately up to the people who live there.