Coyne: For our sake, as much as Britain’s, pray for a No vote in Scotland referendum

Supporters of the pro-union 'Better Together' campaign hold 'No' signs as they listen to Scottish MP Jim Murphy address crowds in Edinburgh on Sept. 8, 2014, ahead of the upcoming Scottish independence referendum. Photo: Andy Buchanan/AFP/Getty Images

It has been an entertaining, if unnerving, couple of weeks, recalling the referendum of 1995 and speculating about what would have happened had the separatists won. Now, thanks to the Scots, we may be about to find out.

Next week’s referendum on Scottish independence is indeed looking eerily reminiscent of the 1995 near-disaster: the same early complacency in the No camp, the same unbridled panic as the Yes side surges in the polls; the same unappealing mix of threats (“one million jobs”) and accounting on the No side, the same fraudulent claims (“we’re subsidizing the English”) and utopian fantasies on the Yes; the same blurring of the lines on both sides, independence made to look like the status quo (“we’ll keep the pound”) even as the status quo is made to look like independence (“devo-max” is the British term for special status). Add a charismatic Yes leader and an unpopular, seemingly disengaged prime minister, and the picture is complete.

Learning nothing from our experience, the Brits made all the same strategic errors we did, first conferring an unwarranted legitimacy on the separatist project, then attempting to pacify it with powers and money, only to watch it grow more ravenous in response. They have ended up in the same game of heads-I-win, tails-you-lose: a No vote simply marks the launch of the next campaign, while a Yes, supposedly, is forever.

A pro-independence supporter wearing a ‘Yes’ T-shirt stands amid pro-union ‘Better Together’ campaign supporters as Scottish MP Jim Murphy addresses crowds in Edinburgh on Sept. 8, 2014, ahead of the upcoming Scottish independence referendum. ANDY BUCHANAN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Notwithstanding that shock poll over the weekend showing the Yes ahead for the first time, the betting sites (there’ll always be an England) still make the No the odds-on favourite. But a slim Yes victory is entirely possible. Either way, the formerly United Kingdom is headed for the unknown. The package of powers to be offered the Scots this week appears to have been hastily cobbled together, with little thought to what this could mean for the role of Scotland’s 59 MPs at Westminster. They could hardly expect to vote on matters for the rest of the U.K. that other MPs were excluded from voting on as they applied to Scotland.

And if the Yes wins? Here things get quite unsettling — and not only for the U.K. It is probable that the negotiations on separation, should they even get under way (the narrower the win, the weaker the mandate), would reach the same insoluble impasses — over the debt, over territory, over the currency, among a long list — they would here. There would have to be an election in the meantime, possibly further clouding the issue (what if the Scots returned a majority of unionist MPs?).

But what if British pragmatism conquers all? What if, against the odds, they do manage to reach an agreement, in good time and with a minimum of fuss? Then we are in a pickle, that’s what — us, here, in Canada. Just when we thought we had put the separation issue to bed, at least for a while, the Scots might succeed in reawakening it.

We should not underestimate how much of separatism’s decline in this country can be explained by sheer exhaustion, especially post-Clarity Act. A great many soft nationalists, for whom it retains a romantic appeal, were persuaded it was simply too arduous an undertaking, full of too much uncertainty and upheaval. But if that premise appeared to have been debunked — if the British pull off the same quick divorce that the Czechs and Slovaks did in the 1990s — we might yet see the issue resurface. You see, the Parti Quebecois would crow? It is just as we told you. And Britain, of all places, has proved it.

Republican writing supporting the Yes vote in the Scottish referendum is seen on a mountain in West Belfast, Northern Ireland, on Sept. 8, 2014. PETER MORRISON/THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

It wouldn’t prove anything of the kind, of course. The two situations are vastly different, in ways that make nonsense of the comparison. Canada is not a bipolar arrangement, like the former Czechoslovakia, still less a quasi-unitary state like the U.K.: It is a federation of 10 provinces, each with its own jurisdiction and prerogatives. There is no representative body for “rest of Canada,” and any attempt to cook one up on the fly would find its legitimacy massively contested. Whereas there is little doubt that the government at Westminster would represent the U.K. in any negotiations. What is more, the British government could give effect to any needed constitutional modifications on its own, without, as in Canada, having to seek the (unanimous) approval of the provinces.

There are other important differences. Scotland was a sovereign country prior to the union, within its present borders. The province of Quebec, by contrast, was created by Confederation; its current territory is the product of successive acts of Parliament. Unlike Quebec, the withdrawal of Scotland would not divide one part of what remained from the rest. Where Quebec makes up nearly a quarter of the population of Canada, Scotland is less than a tenth of the U.K.’s. There is no Scottish equivalent to the Crees, the Mohawks, or the Inuit in Quebec: distinct sub-sub-national populations, with their own territorial claims (though the inhabitants of Shetland, Orkney, and the Hebrides, many of them descendants of the Vikings, might dispute this). And so on.

But of course all of these distinctions would be lost in the propaganda rush that would follow, should Scotland secede. Pray, then, for a No vote next week — for our sake as much as Britain’s.