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Killing the Nats Dead: Scotland, Devolution, and Nationalism
Unformatted Document Text:  1 Killing the nats dead?: Policy, parties, and the stability of devolution in Scotland Scott L. Greer University College University of London s.## email not listed ## Prepared for delivery at the 2004 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, September 2 - September 5, 2004. Copyright by the American Political Science Association. Comments are welcome, but please do not circulate or cite without permission. --- For at least the last decade it has been comparatively easy to find Scots who will sign up to the proposition in the title of this paper– that devolution, the creation of a separate Scottish Parliament within the UK, would “kill the Nats dead,” i.e. be the death of the Scottish National Party (the SNP). In fact, it is so easy that there is some difficulty attributing this quote, although most of the people to whom we see it attributed are prominent Labour politicians making the case for devolution to sceptics within their own party 1 . Before devolution, it was an appealing argument for devolutionists who could promise adherents of the Union that the threat of separatism would decrease with devolution; after devolution, it is a useful journalist’s explanation for the poor electoral performance of the SNP and its seeming disarray as a party. Nor is it hard to find professional political scientists, concerned with Scotland or not, who are interested in the abstract version of the proposition– namely, that granting political autonomy to the territory occupied by a stateless nation will ease that stateless nation’s threats to the integrity of the state within its borders. There certainly are plenty of policymakers who apply that, with or without benefit of political scientists’ guidance; in keeping with the long and often successful history of indirect rule in various empires, there have been innumerable efforts to propose autonomy as a solution to the problems of multinational states. And there have been many critics, within and outwith academic political science, who argue the reverse- that autonomy can stoke demands for further autonomy or separatism. Scotland, which had one of the 1 As far as I can tell, George Robertson gets the credit most often.

Authors: Greer, Scott.
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1
Killing the nats dead?:
Policy, parties, and the stability of devolution in Scotland
Scott L. Greer
University College
University of London
s.## email not listed ##

Prepared for delivery at the 2004 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association,
September 2 - September 5, 2004. Copyright by the American Political Science Association.

Comments are welcome, but please do not circulate or cite without permission.
---
For at least the last decade it has been comparatively easy to find Scots who will sign up
to the proposition in the title of this paper– that devolution, the creation of a separate Scottish
Parliament within the UK, would “kill the Nats dead,” i.e. be the death of the Scottish National
Party (the SNP). In fact, it is so easy that there is some difficulty attributing this quote, although
most of the people to whom we see it attributed are prominent Labour politicians making the
case for devolution to sceptics within their own party
1
. Before devolution, it was an appealing
argument for devolutionists who could promise adherents of the Union that the threat of
separatism would decrease with devolution; after devolution, it is a useful journalist’s
explanation for the poor electoral performance of the SNP and its seeming disarray as a party.
Nor is it hard to find professional political scientists, concerned with Scotland or not, who
are interested in the abstract version of the proposition– namely, that granting political autonomy
to the territory occupied by a stateless nation will ease that stateless nation’s threats to the
integrity of the state within its borders. There certainly are plenty of policymakers who apply
that, with or without benefit of political scientists’ guidance; in keeping with the long and often
successful history of indirect rule in various empires, there have been innumerable efforts to
propose autonomy as a solution to the problems of multinational states. And there have been
many critics, within and outwith academic political science, who argue the reverse- that
autonomy can stoke demands for further autonomy or separatism. Scotland, which had one of the
1
As far as I can tell, George Robertson gets the credit most often.


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