Scotland’s vote against independence offers lessons for British politicians and their European partners faced with a UK referendum on whether to stay in the EU which Prime Minister David Cameron has promised for 2017.
The fact that the 5.3 million mostly pro-European Scots will remain part of the British electorate makes it mathematically more likely the United Kingdom will vote “Yes” to EU membership.
A Reuters Breakingviews calculator based on opinion surveys estimated the chances of a rump Britain voting to leave the EU were two-in-three, while the risk of such a “Brexit” fell to one-in-five if Scotland stayed.
But three years is a long time in politics and much can change between now and then.
Britain has avoided a traumatic break-up that would have caused a deep political shock and fanned English nationalism. But it has plunged into constitutional turmoil with Cameron promising at the last minute a devolution of many powers that may come close to federalism.
One possibility is that Cameron’s Conservatives will lose next year’s general election, partly due to Scottish votes, and a Labour-led government will drop the plan for an EU referendum, which Labour leader Ed Miliband says he would call only if more powers were to be transferred to Brussels.
If a plebiscite does go ahead, European officials and pro-EU analysts hope the same “better together” arguments that worked in Scotland can be applied successfully to European Union membership.
“It’s very interesting to look at the parallels between the Scottish-UK debate and the UK-EU debate,” said Fabian Zuleeg, chief executive of the Brussels-based European Policy Centre, speaking by telephone from Edinburgh.
“Look at the comments made by many of the pro-union campaigners within the UK: you could replace the benefits of the UK one-to-one with the benefits of being in the EU. But the same politicians don’t seem to be making quite the same arguments.”
Fear trumps hope?
One possible reading of the Scottish result is that fear trumped hope.
Many Scots burned with a nationalist passion to jettison dependence on what they perceived as conservative, austere, arrogant England. Yet in the end, enough of them were worried by economic uncertainty to keep the union alive.
With their hearts, they yearned for independence, but with their heads and wallets, they chose to play safe.
Yet Zuleeg says fear of economic harm is not enough to sustain support for EU membership indefinitely.
“We have seen a campaign which basically was about fear succeed in the end. But in the long run to maintain a union you have to have a more positive argument,” he said.
“You have to actually say what does this union stand for and that applies to the United Kingdom but it certainly also applies to the European Union.”
British politicians find this harder than their continental peers.
As Roger Liddle, EU adviser to former Prime Minister Tony Blair argued in a book called The Europe Dilemma, they prefer to present a narrow case based on the comparative economic advantage of the single market rather than an emotional argument for the benefits of peace, cooperation and stability in Europe.
