The “Civic” Road to Secession: Political Ideology as an Ethnic Boundary Marker in Contemporary Scotland

Abstract

Civic nationalism is a weak vessel for secession. Nonetheless, contemporary Scottish nationalism has proven unusually successful, using the characteristically civic marker of political ideology as its signature boundary mechanism. Because a civic form of nationalism funnels toward civic markers of national identity, nationalist elites define Scotland as social democratic and England as neoliberal. This symbolic cultivation of a Scottish social democratic essence is deeply ethnic, however, through a mythological fusion of ideology with genealogy characteristic of ethnic myths of descent. Scotland’s “civic” nationalism points up the confused nature of the ethnic-civic dichotomy itself.