'Independence after the crash', James Stafford, Renewal, Editorial, Vol 22 No 1/2 2014

[...] Here is a useful test that watchers of the debate on Scotland’s independence might want to apply to the competing statements of the contending parties: ‘Could you have said that in 2007, or even 1999’? If the answer is ‘yes’, then the statement might not mean much. The global financial crisis, and its corollary in the eurozone, should by rights have transformed the terms of what is now a decades-long debate on the possibility of Scottish independence. But it is not immediately apparent that they have done so. Activists from both camps paint rosy pictures of possible futures within and without the UK. Scotland’s legion of cultural commentators ruminate on the politics of identity, much as they have done for decades. The Radical Independence Campaign and Common Weal excitedly speculate about deliberative democracy and economic justice. All participants have an interest in reducing the salience of the ‘crises of democratic capitalism’ (Streeck, 2011), since none are seriously dedicated to dispensing with it. [...]

Now that Europe’s mixed constitution has strayed into the field of macroeconomic management, it is replicating the crises of revolutionary France and post-revolutionary America on a vastly bigger scale, and under the merciless gaze of a finance capital which enjoys vastly greater power and independence than that of the eighteenth century. The crisis has revealed that, through the device of monetary union, the EU’s pluralistic legal order has stripped effective economic sovereignty from individual states without transferring it to institutions that are legally or democratically authorised to write off debt, bail out banks, or engineer fiscal transfers on behalf of Europe’s citizens (Blyth, 2012). The collection of states, treaties and indirectly authorised bodies that regulate monetary union are no match for the tightly woven web of hierarchies, oligarchies and incentives that organise and protect the interests of the banks ultimately responsible for its crisis. The euro’s strategy for survival serves the interests of the latter by default, offering free ECB credits to the continent’s banks and imposing permanent austerity on its poorest citizens. At least within the eurozone, the formal equality of Europe’s member states under the legal order described by MacCormick is rendered practically meaningless by the haphazard and arbitrary power of the Troika. The real contest in Europe, between the markets and the streets, is defiantly extra-legal in character. [...]

'Independence after the crash', James Stafford, Renewal, Editorial, Vol 22 No 1/2 2014

http://renewal.org.uk/articles/independence-after-the-crash/