I liked this comment to Iain McWhirter’s piece about the Scots Nats, and their inevitable triumph:
it is just as wrong to try and rule Wales from Cardiff as it was to try and rule it from Westminster. Wales needs more devolution. Wales used to be and will be again, I hope, a collection of cooperating but politically independent valleys.
But what about hilltops? Can’t they be imagined communities too?
It’s interesting to compare current politics in Scotland with events in Taiwan, where the KMT look like making a clean sweep of the legislature and presidency in this year’s elections, and with the particular moral being “how the nationalists screwed up from a very strong position.”
There are a number of parallels between the Kuomintang in power and Scottish Labour: monolithic, unionist, liable to corruption and nepotism – the usual points of similarity between parties gone rancid after a long time in power (though it should be pointed out that Scottish Labour were never responsible for anything like this).
For their part, the DPP in Taiwan, like the Scots Nats, drew support from a real sense of local identity, but also from the fact that the ruling party simply couldn’t be put up with anymore. Like the Scots, most Taiwanese voters oppose independence. But, also like the Scots, Taiwanese voters don’t like being lectured to by Big Brother over the border and the DPP has always benefited from Beijing’s insistence on unification. Lesson to Gordon: if you want to preserve the union, don’t bang on about it so much.
All the DPP really needed to do once in power was to build free, distinctive institutions that worked and give the status quo of de facto independence greater meaning and substance. Instead, they veered off into Taiwanese identity politics:
Chen even argued that the Taiwanese were never Chinese. He ordered the Education Ministry to revise school textbooks to promote the idea that the Taiwanese people were fundamentally different, practically a different race from the Chinese. Clearly, Chen's hatred of dictatorship, whether Communist or KMT, consumed him, limiting his ability to think clearly.
DPP supporters point out that a growing numbers of people in Taiwan “feel Taiwanese” according to opinion polls, though a majority still “feel both Taiwanese and Chinese.” Well, yes, and so what? What are people supposed to do with these feelings? In what way are they the business of the government?
Salmond seems to have kept things real so far. All the changes he’s made and the ones he’s proposing seem to focus around making Scottish life materially different from that lived south of the border, and letting the matter of identity take care of itself on that basis. But as ever with nationalism, you do wonder if he’ll someday discover his inner Taiwanese and insist that others discover theirs too.
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