‘Good Governance’ and Entrenched Self-Government in Scotland: A Success?

Abstract

The inclusion of a chapter on self-government in Scotland in this volume alongside the Åland Islands, the Faroe Islands and Greenland might, at first glance, be puzzling. The population of Scotland, at just under five and a half million people, is around 100 times that of the largest Greenland (56,000 inhabitants) and almost 200 times that of the smallest (Åland Islands, 30,000). Indeed, Scotland’s population is much closer to that of Finland (5.5 million) and Denmark (5.8 million), the core states from which the small Nordic autonomies derive their self-government. Nevertheless, there are some basic similarities across the cases which aid in our comparative attempts here. Each of the Nordic cases ‘are the result of top-down creation of autonomy under core state supremacy’ (Sundberg & Sjöblom, 2021) which was replicated in the United Kingdom (UK) under the constitutional reforms of the New Labour government in the late 1990s. In each of the cases, although the establishment of autonomous institutions initially seemed to pacify resident populations, bottom-up demand for further autonomy has increased—and, indeed, in the case of Scotland, led to a referendum on secession in 2014. In the Nordic cases, the degree of autonomy is high (Ackrén, 2009) and this is also comparable with the Scottish case. Also apparent is the degree of asymmetry within the core state. The cases here have more autonomy than other component parts of the core states, which also provides a further factor for analysis. And they each have movements that desire further autonomy and even secession from the core state. Of less relevance politically though still of note is that the Faroe Islands—and, indeed, Greenland—are closer to Scotland than they are to the core state (Denmark). Scotland does tend to take note of political developments within its Nordic neighbours. There were expressions of admiration for the ‘Nordic Model’ in 2014’s independence referendum—but this admiration was largely confined to the spending side of the ledger, with limited support for increasing taxation as a means of paying for vastly improved public services (Harvey, 2015; Keating & Harvey, 2014).