An overlapping of many shared identities (Part 2)

So it seems to William Ferguson, the doyen of Scottish historians, whose remarkable study The Identity of the Scottish Nation, published last year, demonstrates that the effort to convince the Scots they were in no way Irish by descent or cultural disposition led to the invention of the Picts as "Prussian-style battlers, most probably brisk and Protestant in demeanour", as the writer Tom Nairn puts it in these pages. A de-hibernicised, sentimental Highlandism was also invented in the years following the defeat of the Jacobites as a necessary means of protecting Scottish identity from anglicisation. The French, agrarian and industrial revolutions and imperial expansion drove further wedges between Scotland and Ireland. Scotland's identity became intimately bound up with industry, empire, Protestantism and military achievement in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This was bolstered by the development of a strong labour movement and after the second World War by the welfare state, which Scottish leaders had a disproportionate role in creating.

Commonalities nevertheless continued: especially through the uneven and much more fractured participation of Ireland in many of these processes, whether in Ulster's industrialisation and imperial unionism or the emigration from Ireland of hundreds of thousands of Catholics to western Scotland in the period 1850-1920, where they gradually became a bedrock of its politics and society - not least its labour movement.

It was only in the 1970s and 1980s that this picture changed profoundly - precisely when those pillars of identity and interest began one by one to disintegrate (as they also did in Northern Ireland).

Nairn has written that Margaret Thatcher "set out to restore British grandeur; instead she broke the back of British identity". Her neo-liberal revolution consistently cut across Scottish interests and was perceived there as systematically Anglo-centric - "Thatcherism Rebuffed", as she puts it in her memoirs. It was accompanied by the long-term decline of her party's fortunes there - in 1955 they had over 50 per cent of the vote and were still called the Unionist party.

It was in these circumstances that demands for the restoration of Scotland's parliament became much more focussed after they were rebuffed in the 1979 referendum. The ebb and flow is described in these pages, culminating in the dramatic installation of the devolution government this year as part of a wider constitutional rearrangement including the Belfast Agreement and the British-Irish Council.

In the words of Vernon Bogdanor, professor of government at Oxford University, this "symbolises the changing power relationships of the Atlantic archipelago. Its establishment could presage the final termination of the long Anglo-Saxon hegemony in these islands".

Debate continues on how settled these new arrangements will prove to be or whether are part of a longer term process of change that could result in Scotland's independence as advocated by the Scottish National Party. Labour has become the new unionist party, arguing with Mr Dewar that Scotland undoubtedly benefits from remaining part of a reconfigured United Kingdom. But he readily acknowledges that devolution is a step change for all concerned - in increased political activity, democratic accountability, wider horizons and international recognition of Scotland's changing identity. Effectively that is irreversible, being the product of popular sovereignty, despite the theoretical continuation of Westminster's parliamentary one.

Ireland's example of independent statehood and its recent successful development within the European Union have become ingredients of the Scottish debate, often upending deep layers of prejudice and ignorance of the many Irelands. This is facilitated by economic convergence as international investment, oil industries, technological innovation and financial services have replaced the older steel, shipbuilding, mining and textile industries. Economic relations are developing fast between the two countries as a result of these changes.

IRISH people likewise need to become much more aware of the many Scotlands. In addition to the Celtic/Rangers divide and continuing if diminishing sectarian divisions there is the deep-seated west/east one, including Glasgow's edgy resentment of the devolved institutions' location in Edinburgh; the contrast between the heavily populated central belt and the rest of Scotland including the Highlands and the Islands; equally the sharp contrasts between Aberdeen's oil-based prosperity, Edinburgh's financially-based one and the Motherwell's industrial black-spots.

Multiple identities are more and more the norm in contemporary politics as we adjust to globalisation, European integration and British-Irish transformations. Scotland tempers narrow Irish nationalist fixation on the "Anglo axis" by teaching us that most Scots accept overlapping identities with Britain as the old elision between England and Britain becomes unacceptable. The Belfast Agreement offers the same plural identity to unionists who want to be Irish and Scottish and British. Scotland shows that is not an evident absurdity, even if it could be a volatile or unstable mix as the new arrangements are created.

he distinguished Presbyterian minister, John Dunlop, writes here that the new Northern Ireland Executive will have an important role to play in ensuring that Edinburgh's new relationship with Ireland is triangular, so that Belfast's axis with Edinburgh is not subsumed within either London or Dublin. That would betray the many emergent commonalities and diversities President McAleese's visit to Scotland is intended to celebrate.