Adrian Hamilton: The best size for a nation may be a small one

The possibilities of Scottish independence are more clear cut now than 30 years ago

If Scotland really wanted to split from the rest of the United Kingdom, then its best chance was probably 30 years ago when North Sea oil production was just getting under way and Britain's new membership of the Common Market would have allowed it to develop a political, as well as an economic presence, within a wider community.

That they didn't was partly out of fear. The Seventies was the time when the cold winds of global manufacturing competition were beginning to blow at their hardest and Scotland had more reason than most to fear their effect. The North Sea promised riches but not necessarily jobs and even its promise was sullied by English fanning of the flames of separatism for the Orkneys and Shetlands.

Today, of course, the North Sea is past its peak - although relative to Scotland's population it could still provide a huge income for a generation to come, while the northern industrial base has been hammered to near extinction in favour of finance and the service industries centred in the South-east of England.

Yet, in some ways, the possibilities of Scottish independence are more logical today than then. Globalisation and the rise of the service industries have changed the name of the economic game. With modern communications it is possible to centre businesses almost on anywhere where there is a combination of economic inducement, stable law and an educated workforce - all of which Scotland has.

Politics, too, has changed in favour of the smaller nation state. Although Scottish as well as English ministers make much of the issue of parliamentary democracy and the value of Scottish participation in a central Commons, the truth is that parliament is less and less the focus of national debate and the advantage of minority membership such as Scotland's are fading.

The decision to go to war is the most obvious example, of course. The debates were on the street and on the airwaves. But it's also true of the other debates which ministers keep telling us are the crucial questions of our time - pension, energy security, environmental protection, global warming, health priorities. In none of these cases could it be said that the public, or even the participants, looked first to parliament to see the issues aired or the policy options decided.

Parliament, in that sense, has become just the place where the details of legislation are decided and the more particular, the more parochial indeed, the stronger it is. On the bigger questions of war, the environment and world trade, the question moves up to the international sphere and different regional and global institutions to be debated. If the war ever had a real debate it was at the UN in New York rather than Westminster.

It may be, indeed, that the best size for a country today is the medium one, such as Ireland, large enough to support ambitions as a global player but small enough not to be burdened with the post-imperialist delusion of importance that Tony Blair and Gordon Brown seem to harbour.

Which is where the European Union and its debate on its form of government is so important, and the debates about it so depressingly introverted. The future of the nation state is one of the most pressing - perhaps the most pressing - issues in international politics today.

For some of the bigger countries - the US, China and India - the nation state remains a traditional form of centralised power and international projection. But in a large number of countries, from Canada and Spain and the UK to Iraq and Sudan, the nation state is coming into increasing friction with its own minorities.

The centre cannot hold in countries such as Iraq, but not necessarily because they are "failed states" as such, but because their structure is no longer viable.

The EU provides one way out of these tensions. The fact that it has lost the confidence of its people and lacks inspired leadership (just look at Angela Merkel's speech to the European Parliament yesterday to see how leaden its idealism has become) does not negate the fact that it remains the greatest single experiment in political restructuring in the past century and more. Nor that it does not still provide the best route to the future.

Nationalism, of course, can be both a good and a bad development. At a time of growing insecurity, it is all too easily used as a form of ethnic distinction, and the smaller the unit the greater that temptation is. It's this, rather than a new idealism, that largely accounts for the resurgence of English patriotism of late.

But Ireland has shown you can be nationalistic and outward-looking. Given its past, there's no reason why an independent Scotland shouldn't prove the same.

a.hamilton@independent.co.uk