5 - Sovereignty and Post-Sovereignty

Summary

This chapter focuses on the concept of sovereignty and the twofold role it has played in nationalist thought. First, the chapter shows that an increasingly important argument for independence has been that a long-standing Scottish tradition of popular sovereignty is fundamentally in tension with the English notion of parliamentary sovereignty. Indeed, a rudimentary but highly effective argument for Scottish independence from the 1980s onwards was simply that in the absence of a Scottish state Scotland is often governed from Westminster by a party that the Scottish people did not vote for. On this account, Scottish independence is supported by the principles of democracy. But, second, the chapter also demonstrates that from the 1980s onwards Scottish nationalists frequently argued that the era of absolute state sovereignty had ended. Instead, an independent Scotland would be one among a whole raft of ‘post-sovereign’ European states, sharing membership of the European Union and pooling sovereignty where appropriate to advance their interests.