What Do Others Think of the Scots?

Recently, I did a post that asked the question ‘Why to People Dislike the English?’ In the interest of balance I think we should now look at the Scots.

What do the people of other countries think of us? Do they like or dislike us? If so, do we bring it on ourselves?

Finding out other people’s true opinion of you is never an easy thing. This was recognised by Burns when he wrote:

O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!

This enquiry was triggered by the recent story about the Scottish Government complaining about how Scots are often portrayed in Germany as penny-pinchers, with the rock-bottom price usually described as the Schottenpreis. Personally, I was surprised at the complaint, as I’ve always regarded this marketing device as a reflection of the Lutheran admiration for their Calvinist cousins’ supposed thrifty ways and, as they say, any publicity is good publicity. It is certainly not meant as hostile.

I therefore set out to conduct a survey. I should admit up front that my approach was fairly unscientific and consisted mainly of getting people drunk and asking them questions.

The first part of my survey is based on what I managed to extract from my English cousin. It should be stressed that he’s a proud Yorkshireman, so he sees England somewhat as an outsider. He was at pains to point out that this is not what he personally thinks, but merely what he understands how many of his countrymen feel, many of whom he considers ‘soft southern bastards’. Regardless, this is what I managed to get out of him after four beers.

Apparently, many English men and women see Scots as:

1. Dour
2. Sanctimonious
3. Anti-English
4. People who drink too much
5. Parasitic and ungrateful for English generosity
6. Socialistic
7. Grasping
8. ‘Chippy’, i.e. having a chip on the shoulder (whatever that means)
9. Argumentative, as if constantly on the verge of aggression
10. Constantly boasting about Scotland’s achievements


Having read the opinion pages of the Spectator and Telegraph, this is pretty much what I expected. So I decided to try this on some other friends. These were French, Spanish, Norwegian and Irish. I stressed that the important thing was to say what they thought of Scots in general, not just about me. I should also point out that this survey was carried out in Glasgow, so Edinburgh or Aberdeen folk might give a different result. I asked them to be brutally honest, and to not worry about my feelings. This is not a proper survey, as these were people who had come to Scotland as enthusiastic visitors, and so were already well disposed towards me. Either way, here is the list of how some Europeans see the Scots, in no particular order:

1. Friendly
2. Honest, with a strong sense of what’s right and wrong
3. Hospitable
4. Surprisingly generous, ‘considering what we have heard.’
5. Proud, often passionate about their history, which as visitors they find fascinating
6. Seem to place a lot of importance on drinking to relax and meet people
7. Anti-English
8. Like to debate when people might just want to talk
9. Direct and plainspoken, sometimes to the point of tactlessness


Some Observations
Note the attributes that did not come up in the Euro survey: dour, parasitic, socialistic, grasping, chippy, boastful.

Note too the qualities that are not recognised by the English in the Scots: friendly, hospitable, direct and plainspoken, generous.

So do we put on a different face for the English? Or do we have more in common with our European neighbours? Or perhaps is there some truth to the idea that every observation is an expression of difference, not of an absolute quality? That an observation can say as much about the observer as the subject? For example, I know a Frenchman who thinks the English are two faced, mainly because their smiles are not necessarily invitations to friendship. The Englishman would see this as French surliness, which is not a far cry from a perception of dourness in the Scots.

And note also which of the Euro-observed qualities an Englishman might interpret as something else:

A. ‘Honest with a strong sense of what’s right and wrong’: could be easily seen as ‘sanctimonious’ by someone who does not feel they have to demonstrate their honesty, or by someone from a culture where deceit is admired as cunning and guile.

B. ‘Like to debate’ could easily be interpreted as ‘argumentative’ by someone more used to the wishy-washy pass-the-tea-vicar conversations on the weather that often pass for conversation in England.

C. ‘Proud, often passionate about their history’ might easily be seen as ‘chippy’ if that pride is at variance to the Englishman’s opinion of Scotland as a cultural and historical vacuum with nothing to brag about, and he is tired of having his long-held school-taught prejudices corrected. This reminds me of how, in the pre-Civil Rights America, white Southerners used to describe proud blacks who asserted their equality as ‘uppity’.


It makes you wonder whether English attitudes to Scots are based on:

- Scotland’s currently perceived parasitic economic situation vis à vis England,
- Long held English prejudices constantly stoked by their media (1) and education system, or
- How Scots do indeed react sometimes to Englishmen.


Note, however, the qualities that came up in both surveys: anti-English and drinking too much. Maybe there’s something to these after all. They do say the first step in getting help is admitting you’ve got a problem.

Personally, I consider the anti-English thing as a form of frustrated Scottish national identity, the natural result of four hundred years of being told your culture is inferior to another, and resenting it. (2) If that situation were to end, the sentiment would surely fade with time.

What I don’t agree with is the common English assertion, based on a complete ignorance of the subject, that Scottish nationalism is anti-English or xenophobic. If it were, it would not be enjoying its current popularity as a movement. Neither would this explain why so many English people in Scotland support it. Or the English members of the SNP. If anything, the SNP message to Scots seems to be ‘check your anglophobia at the door’.

Bring on independence and mutual respect.

UPDATE

Dana Linnet: This country is spoiling me
Obama’s woman in Scotland is diplomatic to the core, heaping praise on her new home nation




Notes

(1) I read this just today in the Times: Alex Salmond was ‘brash, self-righteous and a little bit chippy’ in an article about the proposed referendum on Scottish independence. See Gillian Bowditch, ‘Policy dressed in tartan shows a lack of culture,’ http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/scotland/article6907837.ece TimesOnline, 8 November 2009

(2) This is recognised by historians as a direct result of the Scottish crown moving to England in 1603, and taking the Scottish cultural elite with it.

Is Scottish Unionism Treachery?

Treachery has been a reviled and despised quality as long as history and literature have been recorded. In his Inferno, Dante went so far as to reserve the ninth and lowest circle of Hell for traitors.



The question is: is the language of treason entirely appropriate in a supposedly healthy debate on Scottish independence, considering that the Scots in the Labour Party are not technically betraying their own country by opposing Scottish nationalism?

Nationalists may argue that it is their own people and the nation of Scotland they are betraying, but to the paid-up Labour Unionist, his or her country is the United Kingdom.

What about ‘Vichy’ and ‘Quisling’? Are these charges too strong, considering Scotland is not yet an independent country, and not at war? In the online forums of the press, we often hear these words leveled against Labour politicians – those who would aid and abet London’s continuing colonial control of Scotland for their own personal gain. Personally, I consider Scotland’s SUKCUP press fair game.

But do these words alienate undecided voters, rather than persuade? How much does this level of invective hinder rather than help the cause of Scottish independence?

To help answer these questions, I thought it would be useful to summarize the different forms of traitorous accusation, putting them in their original historical context, to determine if indeed they are appropriate to Scotland today, or simply over the top.



1. Judas


Judas Iscariot betrayed Jesus to the Romans soldiers for thirty pieces of silver by identifying him with a kiss. He died alone, probably by hanging himself.

Not particularly relevant to Scotland, since Unionists are quite open in their allegiances. They do not see themselves as traitors to a country which they deny even exists.

Fair enough, I say.

In the same vein, Judas betrayed a friend, whereas Unionists are utterly loyal to their London masters. They may be servile colonial lickspittles in the eyes of nationalists, but they are not betraying any friendships by their actions.



2. Benedict Arnold

American Colonial War of Independence (I refuse to call it a revolution). Arnold was a successful general in Washington’s army who switched sides. Still regarded in American history as the embodiment of treachery. Even though he lived out the rest of his life in Britain, he was never entirely trusted by anyone. He had, after all, fought on the other side first. A reformed rebel is still a rebel.

And the reason he switched sides? Wait for it…he had been passed over for promotion and ordered to repay expenses.



3. Fifth Columnists

Spanish civil war. Not strictly traitors (although they were opposing the elected government in a civil war) but rather an enemy within. In 1936, as four columns of Franco’s fascists approached Madrid, Fascist radio claimed that a ‘fifth column’ of supporters inside the city would help them take it. The campaign failed, and the Spanish government forces held off Franco for three more long years.

The term gained currency during WW2 in relation to the Germans living in Britain. Fearing a ‘fifth column’ within, Churchill gave his famous ‘collar the lot’ command and they were rounded up and held on the Isle of Man until the end of the war. The term is often used in Israeli press today to describe Israeli Arabs, whose loyalties lie with the Arabs in the occupied territories.



4. Quislings

Norway’s greatest ever traitior, Vidkun Quisling, led the Norwegian Nazi Party, and was set up by Germany as Norway’s puppet leader during their occupation. His fate? To be found guilty of high treason and shot as a traitor after the war.

His greatest grammatical achievement was to be both nouned and verbed. One can be a Quisling, or one can quisle. This is a verb that should be revived.

Incidentally, ‘Quisling’ sounds a lot like usling in Norwegian – a slippery, deceitful, slimy person.



5. A Vichy Regime

Also from the Second World War. Still a sore point in French history, and one that excites much scholarly debate. After surrendering in 1940, France agreed to become a client state of Nazi Germany and the central and southern region was left to run its own affairs, unoccupied by German troops, run from the small spa town of Vichy. De Gaulle tried to rally the Resistance from London, but the indisputable fact is that many French collaborated with the Nazis.

I got an interesting take on this from one of my French amis: if France had fought tooth and nail for every centimeter of la patrie, all those pretty French villages that we love to visit on our driving holidays would have been destroyed. He believes that surrender was the best policy at the time to save France’s architecture and culture, given the overwhelming odds stacked against it.

Cheese eating surrender monkeys, or the pragmatic rationalizers of the military reality at the time?


Are these terms appropriate?
From a nationalist perspective, the fifth column idea of an enemy within seems most relevant to the role Unionists play in maintaining Scotland’s position within the Union, but since the relations between Scotland and the rest of the UK are peaceful, it is still too strong.

Indeed, none of these terms would therefore seem suitable for the debate on Scotland’s independence, considering (1) Unionists happen to believe in a different identity, and do not see themselves as traitors, and (2) there is no secessionist war between Scotland and the UK.

That is why I believe that the most appropriate historical equivalent for our Scottish Unionists friends – be they Scots in the Scottish Office, members of the UK government, or Unionists employed by the Scottish TV and print media to talk down Scotland – is that of a besieged colonial elite in its last days of colonial rule.



The Colonial Elite
No colonial power in history ever ruled without the help of a local elite in the subjugation of its own people. The key to understanding their essential bridging function is that the colonial power cannot do it without them, and that once the colonial relationship is over, they are without exception despised by all sides – by both their own people and by the ex-governing power. They are usually remembered by the ex-colonial power as failed flunkies, and by the newly independent country as former collaborators in their own people’s subjugation.

For these reasons, this is the group that always fights hardest for the colonial arrangement and their colonial privileges to continue: they know full well that once independent comes, the game is up. They will become pariahs, despised by all, with no part to play in either the new domestic political scene or in future diplomatic relations between the ex-imperial power and its newly independent former colony. In summary: useless, washed up, redundant.

If there is a violent transition to independence (as there was for the United States, Ireland, Algeria and Kenya) they tend to die either at the hands of their countrymen, or like Benedict Arnold in exile as old men in the imperial homeland, trusted by no one, hated by their countrymen from a distance, passing away in obscurity and exile as bitter, friendless, alcoholics, ‘unwept, unhonoured and unsung’.

If on the other hand the transition is peaceful (as it was for Australia, Canada and New Zealand, and as it will be for Scotland) former Unionists can quickly become absorbed into the political structure of the newly independent country and play their part. The challenge in forming new states is in incorporating all the former factions into the newly independent political spectrum. They are usually intelligent men and women who have much to offer a fledgling nation.

Whether or not they choose to depends a lot on the level of rhetoric used against them in the run up to independence.

It also depends on whether the newly independent nation can ever bring itself to trust them, based on how vehemently they opposed independence as Unionists in the colonial regime.

The Accidental UK

I often wonder how Britain would have turned out today if certain world events had not gone quite the way they did. Because, as any historian will tell you, history is most definitely not a long sequence of predictable outcomes. Rather, it is a series of throws of the dice, random results and accidents, every one of which could have gone a very different way, with vastly differing consequences for all subsequent events.

The historical record is in fact littered with moments where something utterly different, or the exact opposite – or nothing at all – could just as easily have happened.

So for a bit of fun, I thought I might try my own hand at counter-factual history. It’s what no serious historian will admit to doing but for many it's an obsession. The idea behind it is this: if history is all one long inexorable progression of inevitable facts and dates, how come no one actually knows what’s going to happen next? Just as random things happen today, events in the past could equally well have had many outcomes.

The relevance for all you budding English and Scottish nationalists out there - or indeed for any political activist - is this: if you can’t see all the possible outcomes at certain key historical turning points, how on earth can you recognize the possibilities that lie right in front of you at this very moment?

For me, this is what makes history interesting.

Take, for example, the Spanish Armada: if it had avoided the storm, dealt with the English fire-ships and allowed Parma to mount a successful Spanish invasion of England in 1588, England might well have reverted to Catholicism after its brief flirtation with Protestantism. The plantation of Ulster would never have happened, the Americas could have become entirely Spanish and Catholic(1), regal union with Scotland would not have occurred in 1603, and England would have been divided religiously from Protestant Scotland instead of Catholic Ireland.

Or had the wind that held the French fleet off the Irish coast turned, allowing them to land at Bantry Bay in December 1796, it might easily have led to a successful French invasion(2), sparking an Irish rebellion two years earlier than 1798 and possibly the end to British rule in Ireland, which would have had a republic 125 years earlier, a base for any subsequent French war with Britain, and the Peace of Amiens might have held.(3) Napoleon might have died in his sleep in Paris as an old man.

Or if General Lee’s strategic intentions had not been discovered via his lost Special Order No. 191, the South’s invasion of the North might then have been an enormous success, the traumatised Northern population would have sued for peace and the South would have won the Confederate War of Independence. Lincoln's war to save the Union would have failed, and the Confederacy would have become the independent CSA with a slave-based cotton economy.(4) With the defeat of the American democratic experiment, US General Sheridan would not have toured Germany in 1870 to advise the Germans on how to wage total war on the French(5) , the French would not have thirsted for revenge for 44 years, the catastrophe of WW1 might have been averted, and Martin Luther King would not have been demanding civil rights in 1963, but an end to slavery.

As for Britain, if the South had won, the electoral franchise would probably not have been extended in the wake of the US Civil War. Patriotic British historians like to dispute this, arguing that Lincoln’s victory had minimal influence on Britain’s own idea to extend the franchise with the Reform Act of 1867.(6) However, the evidence strongly suggests that with their powerful pro-Confederate bias, Britain’s ruling landowning classes would have liked nothing better than to see American popular democracy crushed.(7) A year after Appomattox in April 1866, future Prime Minister William Gladstone recognised the true significance of the victory:

“The one single and important point of the effect that has been produced in America by a largely-extended population franchise [is] …the wonderful…almost incredible effect that has been produced by that system of giving expression to the national will…we ought to… appropriate the lessons.”(8)

And without the vote of the working class, Keir Hardie would have had no reason to form the Labour Party.(9)

And if in 1914 General Oskar Potiorek had remembered to tell Archduke Ferdinand’s driver of the change of route, they would have avoided the assassin Gavrilo Princip, who had given up waiting for them and was having a sandwich.(10) There would have been no assassination, no ultimatum, and the First World War might easily have been avoided. With Britain not distracted by war, there would have been no Easter Rising in Dublin. Neither would there have been a Russian Revolution, a lost generation, German hyperinflation, a Nazi Party, and the British Empire might have lasted another hundred years.

The British parliament might also have passed the first Scottish Home Rule Bill of 1913, already approved on its first reading.(11) Instead, in the rush to war it was forgotten and, rather than getting a devolved Scottish parliament within the Imperial British state on the edge of a peaceful Europe, Scotland saw 110,000 of her sons sent to their deaths in the trenches, nearly 20% of Britain’s war dead.(12)

A sobering thought, and something to think about for those who think Scottish nationalism is a recent reaction to the discovery of oil.

There is also something here to ponder for those who think there is something special, noble, pre-ordained, planned or sacred in the structure of the United Kingdom today. As we have seen, history shows it to be little more than a series of ad hoc reactions to historical accidents - which will continue to happen - and that the current political structure has no more legitimacy than any other.

Notes

(1) Geoffrey Parker, “The Repulse of the English Fireships: the Spanish Armada Triumphs, August 8, 1588”, in What If?, Pan, London, 1999, pages 139-154

(2) It was a significant French invasion force of 15,000 troops. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Rebellion_of_1798

(3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Amiens

(4) Harry Turtledove’s Timeline-191 novels deal with this perfectly plausible scenario, and extend the timeline as far as WW1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline-191

(5) When the French defeat at Sedan in 1870 did not lead to expected cessation in hostilities from the French people, US General Sheridan gave the following advice to Bismarck: “The proper strategy consists in inflicting as telling blows as possible on the enemy’s army, and then in causing the inhabitants so much suffering that they must long for peace, and force the government to demand it. The people must be left nothing but their eyes to weep with over the war.” As the record shows, Bismarck subsequently followed Sheridan's advice.

Henry R. Winkler, Review of ‘Heard Round the World: The Impact Abroad of the Civil War,’ in The Journal of American History, 56, 2. Sep.1969, pages 388-389

(6) A typical denial is found in David M. Potter, Political Science Quarterly, 86, 2, June 1971, p288.

(7) Dean B. Mahin, One war at a Time: The International Dimensions of the American Civil War, Brasseys, Dulles VA, 2000, pages 25-26

(8) From H.R. Allen,‘Civil War, Reconstruction and Great Britain,’ in Heard Round the World: The Impact Abroad of the Civil War, Harold Hyman (ed.), Knopf, New York, 1969, p48

(9) In 1888 Keir Hardie helped form the Scottish Labour Party (no connection with the Unionist lapdogs of today), whose party president was the socialist Robert Cunninghame-Graham, who went on to found the National Party of Scotland, forerunner to the SNP. In 1893 Hardie then helped form the Independent Labour Party in England. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keir_Hardie

(10) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gavrilo_Princip

(11) Murray G.H. Pittock, Scottish Nationality, Palgrave, New York, 2001, pages 100-102

(12) Pittock, p103