This kind of national pride is hard work. You have to decide what are the things your nation should be proud of and how it is going to achieve them in reality. Above, Yes supporters flags are displayed besides a block of flats on Leith Walk in Edinburgh, Scotland. Photograph: Matt Cardy/Getty Images
What does it mean to be a free country? No one is naive enough to believe that it means acquiring the capacity to do whatever you want. For governments, of big countries or small ones, room to manoeuvre is scarce. An independent Scotland would face the same limits on its freedom of action as it does now. The power of oligarchies and markets and inequalities to restrict democratic choice would not disappear. Freedom does not arrive just because you declare it. And if it ever does arrive, it is complicated, constrained and contested. Scots, coming late to the business of national independence, also come to it with few illusions. Too much has happened to too many dreams of national liberation for any sensible citizen to believe in a great moment of transformation after which everything will be simpler, purer, better.
But national freedom isnt meaningless either. Room to manoeuvre can be expanded. Democratic spaces can be opened up. The terms of the struggle between public and private interests can be renegotiated. Citizens can become more confident of their power to insist on decency and dignity. A place can be defined as a society and a culture as well as an economy. And the greater the constraints, the more naked the power of unaccountable elites, the more vital it is that whatever collective freedom remains is grasped.
Like everything else, though, even this qualified freedom has a price. Some of that price is literal the financial losses that have to be set against financial gains. But theres another kind of reckoning to be done, one that is more abstract but perhaps in the long term more important. National freedom isnt another word for nothing left to lose. Its another word for no one left to blame no one, that is, except yourself. If you make your own choices, you become responsible for their consequences.
This is, especially for small nations that have long been part of a larger imperial whole, a severe loss. Theres a deep and abiding satisfaction in imagining how wonderful you would be if only those foreign bastards would let you. Being free means having to live with the dawning realisation that you might not be so wonderful after all. Freedom in this sense is not an illusion its an act of deliberate disillusion.
What a free country quickly discovers is that the better Us of its imagination is not already there, fully formed, just waiting to blossom in the sun of liberation. It has to be created and in order to create it you have to genuinely decide you want it.
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