How a Centralized Europe Makes Scots Feel the Oats of Independence

(2 of 2)

"The 1707 union between Scotland and England was partly an act of hard-nosed economic pragmatism," says TIME London correspondent Betsy Gleick. "Scotland benefited from a convenient market for its goods south of the border, but retained its own judicial, educational and religious institutions -- and its sense of difference."

But a federal Europe is changing the economic scenario. A single European economy and the supra-national state that will support it allows regions of some of the current nation states to reimagine their sovereignty in a broader European economy. "The Scottish independence campaign is based on the anticipation that Scotland would become another component state of an increasingly federal Europe," says Gleick. That and, of course, its claim to almost total ownership of Britain's money-spinning North Sea oil reserves.

Thursday's vote made Blair's party pay a price for its attempts to deepen British democracy by transferring more power to the regions. But that may have had less to do with Blair than with Margaret Thatcher. "The Conservative government had so little support in Scotland that they used it to test-drive such unpopular policies as the poll tax," says Gleick. "Many people in Scotland came to equate Britishness with Thatcherism."

The Scottish nationalists believe they've put Scotland on an irreversible path toward independence. But economic logic will likely keep it in Britain for the foreseeable future. Unless, of course, those stingy Tories are returned to power in London and start cutting off all that public spending.