Where will an independent Scotland stand?

John Fullerton

Focusing on an independent Scotland\’s foreign policy, writer John Fullerton embraces the hope that Scotland would join the Non-Aligned Movement.

The morning we wake up to an independent Scotland, and we surely will do so, most of us will know who we Scots are, what we have become. We’ll have a notion, no matter how vague or half-baked, how we came to be here and we’ll appreciate the immense struggles still ahead.

We’ll tell one another it won’t be business as usual. We’ll have plans, ambitions, a determination that at last things will be different and somehow better.

But how will others see us, especially the Great Powers? From Berlin to Moscow, they’ll have made their assumptions if indeed they’ve thought about us at all. If they haven’t, it’s up to us to give them good reason to do so.

This quaint little state, another Denmark planted in the North Sea, a paltry few million souls with a pretty blue and white Saltire and more rain than anyone could wish for, will be counted as ‘western’ with all that implies.

Sooner rather than later, they’ll say, we’ll be acquainted with the harsh realities of our situation.

We’ll be harnessed to the neoliberal oligarchies in Washington and London, taking our places as junior players among the unaccountable, unelected bureaucrats of that corporate playground known as the EU, our youths recruited by customary pipes and drums into ancient battalions, this time under the command of the soldier-politicians of an expansionist NATO, all paid for with City of London hedge funds and commodity futures traded in Shanghai. Plus ça change.

Is that what we want? By then will it matter what we want?

After all, we’re used to fighting wars without being consulted at the behest of imperial interests and in furthering the cause of global Capital.

Why would anyone possibly object? We have a warrior tradition, don’t we? We’re natural entrepreneurs, too. Our leaders were at the cutting edge of colonial conquest, resource exploitation and slavery. As for the majority of us, we are still low-skill, low-wage mercenaries at the beck and call of bankers. Why should that change? We’ve grown to love our fetters, haven’t we?

Instead of taking our place on the right of the line in British regiments, we’ll have our very own modest units in NATO’s illegal wars. We too will be able to despatch a Scottish plane or two to join the squadrons bombing Syria, Yemen or Libya as a wee player in yet another ‘coalition of the willing’. A little thrill for political egos at Holyrood, perhaps, until the reports of civilian casualties hit the front pages and we wake up to the fact that we’re now a priority target ourselves.

David Mundell, by this time the former viceroy for Scotland and now ‘elevated’ to the peerage, will doubtless applaud such a painless transition from subject nation Mark 1 to subject nation Mark 11. We can almost hear his sibilant Tory whisper: ‘Let them have their flag, their pride – but when they march, it will be to our tune.’

There is an alternative, Mr Mundell. To work, though, it has to be discussed, thought about, and worked out long before that dawn of our freedom from the egregious Westminster.

NATO is no longer a mutual defence association in which all members rally to the defence of one member under attack. Under U.S. leadership, it has become a global force for regime change, from Afghanistan to Syria. Its primary role today is resurrection of the Cold War, to surround Russia with missiles and bases, to ‘reassure’ the Baltic states and Poland that the ‘West’ will fight their corner.

Membership is extremely expensive. Instead of simply defending Scotland’s 7,000 km of coastline, its offshore energy, its fisheries, its territorial waters and its sea lanes, Scottish forces will be expected to contribute ‘global’ warships, capable of operating anywhere. We can see how this has affected Denmark for example; its numerous small vessels capable of national defence have been sacrificed for fewer, larger, more expensive warships for far-flung combat. The same goes for the Royal Navy, which is tasked with projecting power ashore from the sea. It has fewer than 19 substantial surface warships and has to borrow maritime patrol aircraft to monitor its own waters.

Do Scottish tax-payers want to subsidise our part in more imperial adventures?

The pressure to fall into line will be immense. Scotland lies hard by the strategic Iceland-Faroes Gap, the channel through which Murmansk-based Russian ballistic missile submarines must travel to their deployment areas in the Atlantic, a channel monitored by Nato’s seabed sonars and its hunter-killer submarines. We cannot escape geography, our new masters will tell us.

But there is another way.

The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) has had its ups and downs. For a while, after the end of the Cold War, it was on life support as it sought a new and meaningful role for itself. Yet it still has 120 member-states representing almost two-thirds of the U.N. members and some 55 percent of the world’s population. It strongly supports the founding principles of the United Nations, a global organisation that the United States and, more recently, Russia, have treated with contempt.

The NAM was founded in Belgrade in 1961. Its founding fathers were a varied lot: Jawaharlal Nehru, Sukarno, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Kwame Nkrumah, Josip Broz Tito. It managed to bridge wide ideological divides. It survived – indeed thrived – in the polarised world of Cold War politics but almost collapsed in the wake of the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Its mainly African, Asian and Latin American members still face immense problems of indebtedness, low investment, inadequate infrastructure and widespread poverty. NAM still fights inequality and colonial exploitation. It opposes foreign occupation, invasion, violent domestic intervention and it still supports non-aggression and peaceful coexistence.

Sadly, its only European member today is Belarus.

By playing our part in the NAM, by building bridges and getting involved and above all by listening, Scotland would be taking the high moral ground in international affairs, something that’s sadly lacking in this cynical, dog-eat-dog world. It would refuse to take sides in the new Cold War and it would send an unambiguous message to a resurgent Moscow, a neoliberal Washington, a Tory England, a Merkel-directed Europe and that corporate lobbyists’ paradise, the EU Commission.

Change for good, for a better, fairer world, is possible.

As for me, I\’m a former Reuters correspondent, the author of one work of non-fiction and five novels, the contributor of the odd article and review to Commonspace and Scottish Left Review. An SNP member, I live in Glasgow when not travelling abroad.

John Fullerton is a former Reuters correspondent, the author of one work of non-fiction and five novels, and a contributor to Commonspace and the Scottish Left Review. An SNP member, John lives in Glasgow when not travelling.

Disclaimer: articles published on Red Thistle are the views of the individual authors and not necessarily those of SNP Socialists as a whole.