Scotland and How Identity and Economics Move in Opposite Directions

Scotland is weird. Scotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has two goals that seem at odds with one another. She has already led one - failed - effort to break Scotland off from the UK. Now that the UK has voted to leave the EU, she has renewed that call for separation in order to ... [wait for it] ... be a part of the EU. Leave the UK but remain in the EU? If you are wondering how that makes sense and whether she's mad, stay tuned for an explanation of how it not only makes sense but helps to illuminate an important distinction (and no, Nicola is not mad but is instead delightfully wise).

The EU was formed as a means to create the largest economy in the world. People and goods can easily move across national borders within the EU, giving every employee in the EU access to more employers, every employer access to more employees and everyone access to more goods and services that can originate anywhere and be sold and consumed anywhere (else). 

Scotland was first made a part of the UK to unite kingdoms that shared a monarch. A nation-state is not just an economy. It lends an identity to the people within it. We can talk about the British or French or Americans and believe that we instantly know something about them. And more importantly, a child who grows up singing La Marseillaise or saying Pledge of Allegiance to the Stars and Stripes will believe something about who he or she is. "I'm an American," is a statement that is rich with meaning in spite of how very different Americans are from one another.

The EU is about economics and the UK is about identity. 

When our focus is on identity, we move towards something smaller. Identity distinguishes us from others. "You're tall but I'm short." "You're Canadian but I'm French." "You're straight but I'm gay." "You're a Lord of the Rings fan but I'm a Harry Potter fan." Identity does not stop until we reach the point of the individual. The fewer people with whom we share an identity, the better.

By contrast, when our focus is on economics, we move towards something bigger. What we can do as an individual is paltry compared to what we can do as community. If we have the specialization and knowledge and skills that come along with a set of 7 people, we live a life of poverty. If we have the specialization and knowledge and skills that come along with a set of 7 million - or even 7 billion - people, we have the potential to live a life of abundance. The more people with whom we can exchange goods and ideas, the better. 

Your Californian blog author meets
Scotland's First Minister in 2017.

It is dangerous to confuse identity and economics. Smaller worlds economically make us poorer and bigger worlds in terms of identity make us invisible. (To be one of a billion Muslims or Christians with no further distinction is to disappear.)

And now we return to Nicola Sturgeon who wants for her Scotland an identity more precise than UK and for her Scotland an economy bigger than the UK. Why? She's intent on giving her people a distinct identity in which they are more likely to make themselves visible and a broad set of economic opportunities in which they can find jobs, create businesses, and buy products from a broad menu of options. Why the abundance of choices that come from a bigger economy? In no small part because it gives the distinct individual a better chance of finding a distinct job or product that matches their unique history and aspiration, skills and passions. 

We're going to see more communities that look like Scotland in that they will - at first glance - seem to be moving in two, opposing directions. Look more deeply at this, though. What we will see is a process of identity creation that won't end until we are all individuals and a process of economic integration that won't end until this is a global economy.

The Lesson of World War One (That is too costly to learn twice)

Today is the 100th anniversary of the end of "the Great War." This war killed 15 to 20 million people but within a generation we had a second world war that killed 60 million. In between, the Great Depression caused so much economic misery that it gave power to communists and fascists throughout the world.

The decades after the first world war were a time of misery. The decades after the second world war were a time of peace and prosperity.

Between 1350 and 1950, there was at least one major military confrontation between European powers in every decade. What changed after 1950 is that we created international institutions.

There is a quip that nations either exchange goods or gunfire. Economic development and trade have been a boon to peace. The West also has institutions that link it together: NATO, the UN the IMF and the EU. These didn't really exist until after WWII and they do a great deal to explain why the time after the second world war was so starkly different from the time after first world war.

Just as the institutions of families, city councils, federal governments, corporations, churches and banks all deserve continual criticism and drive to improve them so that they adapt to changing realities and new possibilities, so do these post WWII institutions. They need improving. Without institutions we are like the other primates, though. We can't afford to neglect or discard them. And the West without these post-WWII institutions would be more like the world of Stalin, Franco, Mussolini, and Hitler than JFK and Reagan, Thatcher and Blair, Trudeau and Mulroney, de Gaulle and Chirac, and Kohl and Merkel.

The lesson of WWI is that without creating institutions that transcend nations we again slip into the the madness that goes by a variety of names (patriotism, nationalism, self-interest) and devolves into the worst kind of competition rather than raise us to the best kind of cooperation. It is a lesson too costly to learn twice.