politics-2/ One week after the Scottish vote, has life for the EU come back to normal? Life is short, and we should not spend so much time on things that are highly unlikely to occur. About 75% of what we read in the newspaper concerns things that might happen and don't. The Scottish referendum was one such story. It turned out to be closer than people thought, but the probability that it was ever going to pass was always in single digits. (The same goes, by the way, for the probability that

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... tain will ever vote to pull out of the EU or that the British government, faced with such a vote, would actually do so.) So why was so much attention paid to it? In ten years, nobody will talk about the possibility of Scottish independence anymore from an international relations or EU perspective. Insofar as the Scottish referendum is worthy of our attention, it is almost entirely from an internal British perspective. One, if you try to reconstruct rationally the set of considerations for the Scottish people in this referendum, and you see that close to 50% of the Scottish people voted in favor of independence, then it shows that the political process in Scotland got out of control. That is interesting, but not from an EU perspective. Two, it has left the UK in a bit of constitutional turmoil, which could change how domestic politics is made in that country. Was the discussion on whether an independent Scotland would have been able to remain part of the European Union -both legally and politically -then entirely futile? This is not an interesting question, because it involves too many hypotheticals. Interesting questions arise from what we know. We know this: the heads of state and government, all 28 of them, are set against encouraging separatist movements within an EU member state. In fact, the British government was the government most positively inclined toward it, as they did go along with the Scottish wishes to some extent. Others were more opposed. I do not want to suggest that the Spanish government is taking a particularly sensitive stance towards the Catalan independence movement, but from a practical, political standpoint, independence is a complete nightmare not just for the Spanish government, but for all EU governments -regardless of what you think of the ethical case, or the legal case, or the issue of self-determination, balancing values and so on. The instant that EU internal borders are up for decision on the basis of inexpensive expressions of popular demand, anything is up for grabs. Think about a country like Belgium where you could end up renegotiating village by village where the border is. Leaders do not support this, because they know that such a process would be incredibly disruptive and the adjustment costs would be higher than the potential gains. Whatever would have or could have happened with Scotland, we do know this about the attitude of leaders, and I take this seriously. While I understand the ethical arguments as to why one might support independence movements, the precedent is scary and there is no political majority in favor of it. While I have no position on these issues, I do understand that view. So would you agree with Joseph H.H. Weiler that the Scottish referendum reflected a regressive tendency of nationalism and disintegration threatening the very idea upon which the European Union was built? No, I don't think that is an accurate description. Of course I respect the views of Prof. Weiler, a friend and former colleague. But it makes this into an issue of principle-nationalism vs. cosmopolitanism-when it is not. (The practical problem of assuring legal stability, which I have alluded to above, is different.) I disagree that issues like Scotland represent a broad nationalist challenge to the EU for the following two reasons. First, it treats as nationalistic a general problem, whereas in fact they are complex circumstances that are more complex, but also rarer. Look at the cases that might erupt: Scotland, Catalonia, Belgium or Northern Italy. These are not cases where people are simply indulging in some atavistic 19 th -century primitive nationalism. These are unusual