- 03 Nov 2013 16:31
#14324833
The concept of a state itself is hardly set in stone in regards to Scotland. Hell, it's mentioned frequently that the Scottish were invaded by the Irish. Of course, the Irish were called Scots at the time, being from Scotia Major, and moving to Scotia Minor (Scotland). And then there's even the royal families switching around their kids like it was going out of style between the islands. The dominant house of Ard Ris could see present day Scotland on clear days.
And a nation was whatever...Philip II made pretty much all of the known world, "a nation," with the exception of France...whom he was too busy trying to put under heel to get his wife, Mary Queen of England, pregnant; she dies, Phillip loses claim to England and tries to marry Elizabeth who proudly marries nobody and has to face Philip's armada; England remains independent from Philip as his "state" unravels; she dies and James, king of Scotland, becomes the first king of the UK to rule under the Union Jack. Some English bristle at the thought of England losing its independence to Scotland, gunpowder plots become a sign of Englishness to oppose foreigners; civil war and Calvinism further skew what it means to be Scottish or Irish or English; and you don't really get a notion of the beginnings of nationality at all until civil war ravages Scotland-now called Ireland, uniting all the heaps of royalists, old Celtic whatnot (itself problematic), Norse, catholic, and Protestant to die at Cromwell's feet and the aristocracy is removed with the Flight of the Earls leaving a mismash of divergent people that identify with each other because they don't identify with anyone else any more. Even then it takes a century or two for that to begin to spark into nationality there; Scotland doesn't spark that way-as a nation instead of the lines of a treaties kingdom-until, hell, arguably today.
Alis Volat Propriis; Tiocfaidh ár lá; Proletarier Aller Länder, Vereinigt Euch!