After Crimea, will Scotland be next to vote on independence?
By Laura Smith-Spark, CNN

London (CNN) -- Exactly six months from now, Scots will go to the polls to vote on the future of their country.

It's a vote that could end Scotland's 300-year union with England and Wales as Great Britain -- and see it launch into the world as an independent nation of some 5.3 million people.

Russian lawmakers have drawn a parallel between Scotland's vote and the referendum held in Ukraine's Crimea region Sunday.

But any such comparison is disingenuous: The referendum in Scotland is being held with the consent of the UK government, it will be internationally recognized, and Scotland's people have had years to consider what is a genuine choice.

By contrast, the referendum held in Crimea was illegal under Ukrainian constitutional law and took place under duress, only days after armed "pro-Russian forces" took effective control of the peninsula. Voters also did not have the option of saying "no" to cutting ties with Kiev.

What are the Scottish voting on, and why?
Scottish independence: Euro or pound?
Scotland's rocky relationship with England

On September 18, voters will be presented with a simple yes/no question: Should Scotland be an independent country?

The Scottish government, led by the Scottish National Party, says this is a "once in a generation opportunity" for Scotland's people to take control of the decisions that affect them most. A "yes" vote means that "Scotland's future will be in Scotland's hands," it says, and that life will be better and fairer for its people.

British Prime Minister David Cameron wants Scotland to remain part of an undivided United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. He says that it is a decision solely for the Scottish people -- but that remaining part of the United Kingdom will give them security and strength. "There will be no going back," he warns.

Because the United Kingdom has no written constitution, there's no established law to govern the process. So these are truly uncharted waters.

What's the history behind this?

Scotland has long had a testy relationship with its more populous neighbor. The Act of Union in 1707 joined the kingdom of Scotland with England and Wales, but many Scots were unhappy at being yoked to their longtime rival south of the border.

Since 1999, Scotland has had devolved government, meaning many, but not all, decisions are made at the Scottish Parliament in Holyrood, Edinburgh. In May 2011, the nationalist Scottish National Party, which had campaigned on a promise to hold an independence referendum, surprised many by winning an outright majority in the Scottish Parliament.

In October 2012, the UK and Scottish governments agreed that the referendum would be held, and the question to be put to voters was agreed on early last year.

Dauvit Broun, a professor of Scottish history at the University of Glasgow, says one driving force for the vote is the widening gulf between the policies pursued by the coalition UK government in Westminster, led by the Conservative Party under Cameron since 2010, and what the Scottish people want.

Many Scots are strongly opposed to the current Westminster government's attempts to reform -- or in their eyes dismantle -- the welfare state. Illustrating that sentiment, there's only one Conservative MP in Scotland at present.

"Since the period of Margaret Thatcher, there has been a growing divide, and a sense that what Scotland feels consensus about ... has become more and more different to England," Broun says.

Looking further back, Scotland and England have been growing apart since the demise of the British Empire, Broun says. The decline of the Presbyterian church in Scotland, which provided a sense of self-government and Scottish identity, has also played a part in fueling the desire for independence, he says.

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(Reuters) - The leader of Scotland's separatist movement predicted on Friday that the United States would not try to stand in the way of the breakup of Britain, Washington's staunchest ally for decades, if Scots vote for independence at a referendum this year.

Instead, the Obama administration could use the reasonably orderly debate in Britain about Scotland's future as an example to other countries facing constitutional crises, said Alex Salmond, the separatist leader who heads the Scottish National Party and who is Scotland's first minister.

"I don't foresee pressure. I don't think that is what the United States would want to do," Salmond told Reuters. "There are certain principles involved here. One is the principle of self determination. Secondly, the principle of a consented and peaceful process."

Pro-independence campaigners have long lagged in opinion polls behind supporters of maintaining Scotland's 307-year-old union with England. But Salmond's nationalists have closed the poll gap slightly ahead of the vote in September.

A March 20 poll showed that around 40 percent of Scots plan to vote for independence in this year's referendum while 45 percent intended to vote against it.

Such surveys have begun to be noticed by U.S. policymakers, who had previously presumed the unionists would win easily, said Heather Conley, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank in Washington.

Salmond said U.S. government officials had made public comments holding up the Scottish referendum process as an example of how to air separatist sentiment, as opposed to the abruptness of the recent Crimean referendum held in the shadow of Russian troops.

Russia's annexation of Crimea has not been recognized by the United States.

"The referendum in Scotland is an agreed, consensual, democratic, consented process," said Salmond, who was visiting New York to promote Scottish business and culture. "Who knows? It might become a template for how the world should conduct these matters."

Debate over Scotland has been mostly civil, and the British government of Prime Minister David Cameron agrees with holding the referendum but it strongly opposes the independence campaign and warns that Salmond's idea that Scotland could keep using the British pound after independence is badly flawed.

NATO, NUCLEAR SUBS

In the United States, government officials have started to worry about the possible dissolution of traditional ally Britain and plans by Salmond to throw Britain's Trident nuclear submarine fleet out of the Faslane naval base in western Scotland.

"The main questions on the U.S. side have so far been on the security front. On the idea of what's going to happen on the nuclear deterrent because obviously the U.S. has a large vested interest in the nuclear submarine capacity," said Fiona Hill, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution think-tank in Washington.

Salmond said U.S. officials had been balanced on the Scotland issue so far. "America, through the administration, has quite rightly adopted a platform of studied neutrality," he said.

A veteran of the British parliament in London as well as the devolved Scottish parliament in Edinburgh set up in 1999, Salmond was a strong critic of Britain's role in the Iraq war.

He acknowledged that while the debate over Scottish independence has been mostly constructive, there has been an explosion of online abuse between backers of union with England and Scottish nationalist "cyber-nats," who launched a campaign against singer David Bowie for calling on Scotland at a music award ceremony not to break away.

Salmond urged an end to the online bitterness.

"You say, 'Right look. Everyone raise your game. Do what you should do. Let's live up to this debate,'" he said.

He said claims that Scotland's more than 5 million people would suffer economically under independence are "just a hotchpotch, a ragbag of fears, smears, scare stories, some of them ridiculous, some of them with the attempt to be credible."

Companies and business groups have warned that Scotland could lose jobs if it splits from Britain, but Salmond's campaign received a boost last week when The Guardian newspaper quoted an unnamed British minister as acknowledging that London would eventually agree to let Scotland use the sterling currency if it became independent.

(Reporting by Alistair Bell; Editing by Leslie Adler)

Sumber:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/...A3402220140405