Disturbingly, and in consideration of the plethora of examples we have from even recent history, there are many in Scotland who do not believe the process of struggle towards independence will lead to some level of British state violence against our country. It is widely assumed that all that stands between the present and future independence is a referendum and a democratic and peaceful transition to Scottish statehood. But this is not the case. Scotland’s journey to independence will almost inevitably pass through a period of violent conflict with the British state, and it can only be assumed that beneath all the liberal democratic posturing of the Scottish government and the independence movement there exists a fully formed understanding that eventually this process will become violent.
Great Britain is, as all states are, founded on force. While we speak of democracy and political debate and a civilised route to independence, we live in a country garrisoned by the British Army and in which there is a nuclear weapons base at Faslane on the Gare Loch. These things do not exist merely for show or as meaningless prestige items. Their primary function is ‘defence’ — and not simply for the defence of the realm against foreign threat, but against domestic threats too. ‘Defence of the realm’ is an idea that also implies the use of armed force against those who would threaten the cohesion and integrity of the British state as it is presently constituted. This is very much how the British state understands the notion of the state’s monopoly on violence:
‘Every state is founded on force,’ said Trotsky at Brest-Litovsk. That is indeed right. If no social institutions existed which knew the use of violence, then the concept of ‘state’ would be eliminated, and a condition would emerge that could be designated as ‘anarchy,’ in the specific sense of this word. Of course, force is certainly not the normal or the only means of the state — nobody says that — but force is a means specific to the state. Today the relation between the state and violence is an especially intimate one. In the past, the most varied institutions — beginning with the sib — have known the use of physical force as quite normal. Today, however, we have to say that a state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.1
What Max Weber is saying here is that Britain’s use of force is legitimate only when it is used within the territory claimed by the state — and this includes Scotland. The United Kingdom, as an interventionist power, has never shied away from the illegitimate use of force beyond its own territory. And here we are not speaking about events as long ago as the history of the British Empire in India. We are talking about the Anglo-American invasions and brutal military occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan in which British soldiers terrorised civilians and committed serious human rights violations. And of course these ‘wars’ were fought to secure US and British oil interests — still the world’s most important economic and geopolitical resource, a resource Scotland has in abundance in its territorial waters.
Well within living memory the British government deployed colonial troops — special units of the British Army used to crush independence movements in Africa — against British citizens inside the United Kingdom. Over the course of a thirty-year-long military campaign the British Army deliberately targeted civilians, perpetrated massacres in broad daylight, imprisoned people without trial, and tortured people — even to death — in special prisons across the statelet of Northern Ireland. It is now known that, in its campaign of harassment and intimidation, the British government provided arms and intelligence to paramilitary groups in order to crush the Irish civil rights movement, and the nationalist and republican movements. This was how the British state dealt with an independence movement within the United Kingdom between 1969 and 2007 — and that was only fourteen years ago.
Ireland does not have oil and does not have the same strategic value to the British state as Scotland, and yet it was willing to use extraordinary levels of violence against a civilian population to maintain control of this part of Ireland. The naïve belief that Britain will not do the same in Scotland flies in the face of everything we know of the British state — the most consistently violent state entity in the whole entire history of human civilisation. This belief is not only a form of exceptionalism, it is also dangerous because it leaves Scottish people ignorant of and unprepared for the threat that lies ahead of them if they choose to continue in their campaign for independence. Britain will only continue with the charade of democracy until we reach the point democracy no longer secures the union.
The Scottish Pamphleteer
1. Max Weber (1919) Politics as a Vocation
The Scottish Pamphleteer 