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most successful nationalist movements of postwar Western Europe, should be a good case to test
out this controverted proposition. Does territorial autonomy for stateless nations reduce or
redirect nationalist demands for secessionism? Does devolution, in other words, kill the nats
dead?
I argue that while devolution might not harm nationalist sentiment, it does damage the
prospects for any constitutional, territorial political change. Scotland, like some similar high-
profile stateless nations, has a strong set of regionally based organizations that have consistent
interests, like all organizations, in their autonomy and environmental stability. As regional
organizations, they can therefore benefit from informal or formal regionalization, but while this
can lead them to support regionalization, it is unlikely to lead them to support highly
destabilizing secession. Putting them at the center of the devolution story in Scotland, responding
to 1980s and 1990s assaults on traditional, informal, Scottish autonomy can explain the rise of
and overwhelming victory of devolution in the 1990s better than the presence of the SNP. Since
devolution, I will argue, there has been broad support for the assumption that formal devolution
would increase the environmental stability, autonomy, and even desirability of public policy
outcomes for Scottish regional organizations. Two short case studies of education and health,
devolved Scotland’s biggest policy areas, make this point. In other words, the interaction
between the UK state and Scottish regional organizations both destabilized the Union in the
1990s when it created a surge of support for Scottish autonomy, and stabilizes the Union now,
when devolution has firmly reinserted Scottish regionally based organizations as supporters of
the status quo.
The theoretical case for autonomy
Perhaps the most important thing asked of autonomous governments in multinational
states, ahead of their economic development, public administration, or social policy concerns is
that they reduce the likelihood of secession or conflict. One practical and theoretical debate to
which the Scottish and Catalan experiences and turn to regionalization matter is the one about
the conditions under which territorial autonomy arrangements stave off or limit conflict.
Repeated upsurges of national and group conflict around the world have justified decades of
scholarly and practical work on institutional solutions to ethnic conflict. One of the most
common proposals, desirable because it prevents state breakup while permitting cultural
autonomy, is federalism or territorial decentralization to ethnic groups (Smith, G. 1995; Stepan
Convention