Some years ago, I made a futile attempt to persuade a Chinese diplomat that Taiwan should be allowed to declare independence – if that is what its people want. “If Scotland voted to be a separate nation,” I argued, “England would not stop it.” The diplomat smiled sceptically, like a man recognising a particularly crude falsehood. “I know that’s not true,” he said. “England would never accept Scottish independence. It would invade.”
I recalled that conversation in Edinburgh last week as I watched preparations for Scotland’s referendum on independence next September. 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.
Yet take a couple of steps back – and place the Scottish referendum in a historic and international context – and what is remarkable about it is how consensual and peaceful it is. The Chinese are not alone in finding it remarkable that the government of the UK is willing to allow the country to break up without a fight. Elif Shafak, a Turkish novelist living in London, told me that she had been pleasantly surprised by the speech in which David Cameron, the British prime minister, appealed to the Scots to vote against independence. As she put it: “Coming from Turkey, where more than 35,000 people were killed in Turkish-Kurdish conflict and the Turkish state is yet to recognise the Kurds’ right to education in their mother tongue, I was positively surprised to hear Cameron speak so peacefully about the possibility of Scottish independence.”