The same sense of Britain’s lapsed capacity to deliver on the promise of global reach was viewed as a rare opportunity by Scottish and Welsh separatist parties, whose stunning rise to electability between 1961 and 1979 cannot be viewed in isolation from the broader implications of imperial decline. Here, the end of Britain was the avowed political prize, persistently and effectively packaged in the aspirational politics of ‘stopping the world’ so that older nationalities might be retooled for a post-British age. The chapter considers the electoral breakthrough of Plaid Cymru and the Scottish National Party during these years, both of whom won surprise electorial victories respectively at Carmarthen (1966) and Hamilton (1967). Contemporaries were quick to conflate the two events, detecting deeper ruptures in the tumult of Hamilton and Carmarthen. To this day, they mark the onset of ‘devolution’ as a major theme of contemporary British politics, but the connnections to the wider context of global decolonization are poorly understood. This chapter takes seriously the idea that the end of empire was heavily implicated in the rise of separatist political parties in the UK.

This concluding chapter draws together the strands of argument in the book by surveying the political thought of the 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum. The chapter then examines why the 2014 case for independence had changed in significant respects from the earlier versions of the case examined in this book. Finally, the chapter weighs up the changes that will be needed to the case for Scottish independence as nationalists look towards another referendum.

This introductory chapter surveys the existing histories of Scottish nationalism and gives an initial narrative of the independence movement’s trajectory across the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The chapter then argues that the methods of intellectual history can shed fresh light on this history by investigating in greater depth how nationalists have conceptualised and defended the goal of ‘independence’ in political argument. The chapter distinguishes the focus of this book on more analytic modes of political thought from other cultural histories of the period and delineates the complex ways in which the concepts of ‘nationalism’ and ‘unionism’ have been used in Scottish political debate. The chapter concludes by giving an overview of the structure and argument of the book.

Scottish nationalism understood as support for an independent Scottish state is notable by its absence from most of Scotland’s history after 1707. Although the initial organised advocacy for greater Scottish democratic autonomy within the United Kingdom emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the goal of Scottish independence only received its first sustained modern articulation after the First World War. This chapter examines the ideology of these early Scottish nationalists as they tried to construct a persuasive case for independence before the rise in support for the SNP in the 1960s. The aim of the chapter is not to offer an exhaustive account of the nationalism of this period but to set the scene for the rest of the book by clarifying the ideological resources that were already available for advocates of independence in the mid-twentieth century. The chapter looks in turn at the political economy and constitutionalist arguments that were framed by nationalists in the decades around the Second World War.

This chapter examines the cultural case for Scottish independence made from the 1960s onwards, understood in a broad sense as the view that the Union threatens the autonomy of Scotland’s distinctive institutions, particularly its egalitarian character as expressed through its democratic intellectual and educational traditions. The chapter focuses on the influential argument along these lines articulated by the philosopher George Davie and a number of cultural nationalists influenced by him. Although widely discussed, this cultural nationalism was considered to be a false start by many influential figures in the independence movement. The chapter concludes by reviewing why many leading advocates of independence instead looked to alternative intellectual sources, or translated the cultural case into a political one, to advance their cause.

This chapter analyses nationalist attempts to yoke together Scottish independence and the egalitarian politics of the left. From an initial embrace of the radical participatory politics of the 1960s to a later enthusiasm for the heritage of the British labour movement, this chapter shows that nationalists have presented independence as the route to a socialist Scotland. But as this chapter also demonstrates, the early twenty-first century saw some key nationalists turning away from this agenda and embracing instead a revisionist social democracy that accepted some significant capitalist constraints on the politics of independence.

This chapter turns to the nationalist critique of the British state from the 1960s. It demonstrates how indebted independence supporters have been to the writings of Tom Nairn and the wider New Left’s characterisation of Britain as an antediluvian relic that historically evaded an adequate process of modernisation. In particular, the chapter demonstrates the importance of ‘imperialism’ to nationalist thinking, insofar as nationalists saw the fundamental weakness of British national identity as its close connection with empire and the economic ‘decline’ of the British state as related to its loss of colonial possessions. However, the chapter also documents the fading away of the Marxist and economistic elements of this critique of Britain over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, to be replaced by a robust, but avowedly political, democratic republicanism, which identified the British state’s chief shortcoming as a failure to become a proper bourgeois democracy.

This chapter focuses on the concept of sovereignty and the twofold role it has played in nationalist thought. First, the chapter shows that an increasingly important argument for independence has been that a long-standing Scottish tradition of popular sovereignty is fundamentally in tension with the English notion of parliamentary sovereignty. Indeed, a rudimentary but highly effective argument for Scottish independence from the 1980s onwards was simply that in the absence of a Scottish state Scotland is often governed from Westminster by a party that the Scottish people did not vote for. On this account, Scottish independence is supported by the principles of democracy. But, second, the chapter also demonstrates that from the 1980s onwards Scottish nationalists frequently argued that the era of absolute state sovereignty had ended. Instead, an independent Scotland would be one among a whole raft of ‘post-sovereign’ European states, sharing membership of the European Union and pooling sovereignty where appropriate to advance their interests.