Orkney—the Next Dubai? Further Reflections on Scottish Independence

Recently in this blog I discussed the political machinations surrounding the fate of a group of godforsaken, windswept, rocky islands in the South Atlantic, the Falkland Islands.  Today I’ll turn my attention to a group of godforsaken, windswept, rocky islands in the North Atlantic, the northern, sub-Arctic fringe of the ex-kingdom of Scotland, which has of late been trying to find its way free of the United Kingdom.

The U.K. has agreed in principle that, as with the Falklands or Gibraltar, if the majority of Scots vote for independence, then the process of secession will be set in motion.  Recently the U.K.’s prime minister, David Cameron, visited Edinburgh to meet with Alex Salmond, Scotland’s First Minister and the head of the nation’s separatist Scottish National Party, to plead for unity.  The vote is pencilled in for some time in 2014, but Cameron would like it held sooner, so as to give less time for Salmond to try to rally Scottish support for independence above the current one third or so.  Ironically, there is more support in England for Scottish independence than there is in Scotland, but the English won’t be voting on it.  (There is also a very marginal English independence movement.)  Salmond would also like the voting age for the poll to be lowered to sixteen, since separatism is more popular among the young.

Alex Salmond

Details to be worked out before the vote include who would get which part of the British military, whether an independent Scotland would stay in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or the European Union or both or neither (a complicated legal issue which I discussed in detail last month), and who would get all that oil in the North Sea.  Much of the U.K.’s natural-gas reserves lie off of England’s coast, but if conventions on marine boundaries are applied to a partitioned Great Britain, Scotland would get most of the oil, which is farther north in the North Sea.  This would make it, economically speaking, a very viable state indeed.

The U.K.’s marine boundaries, with an independent Scotland’s boundaries shown in dark blue

Understandably, this aspect of the independence issue has the Conservative Party and others who represent British business interests in a tizzy.  And it has prompted the right-wing Spectator magazine to muse, in a recent article, how far the principles of right to self-government enunciated by the Scottish National Party would apply if parts of Scotland itself were to vote for independence.  The article’s author, Laurance Reed, a Scottish former Conservative member of (British) Parliament (who once proposed deporting all Irish citizens out of the U.K.), asks, rhetorically, why the Orkney Islands or Shetland Islands to the north of the Scottish mainland should not seek independence from Scotland itself and take with them vast oil reserves—or even Reed’s native Hebrides islands, which are closer, off Scotland’s western coast.  Reed asks, apocalyptically, “If oil and its riches can transform the fortunes of the Scottish National Party and destabilise the United Kingdom just a few decades after its discovery, what makes us think that the people of the Hebrides will not be changed by the black stuff?  Wait until the oil price goes through the roof as the result of demand in Asia, making the exploitation of the Hatton/Rockall Basin profitable.  The Icelanders and the Faroese may soon scramble for the riches.”

The marine boundaries of a hypothetical independent Scotland,

with the marine boundaries of a far more hypothetical

independent Shetland, Orkney, and Hebrides shown in darkest blue

In fact, there is more nascent separatism in Scotland than Reed may realize.  Some of these questions have been asked in recent years from an unlikely place, the so-called Crown Dependency of Forvik, one of many more or less frivolous micronation projects which the British Crown quietly tolerates within its boundaries.  (See my recent blog post on another British micronation, Sealand.)  Unlike others, Forvik’s cause has intersected with serious regionalist politics.  The nation was founded by Stuart “Captain Calamity” Hill, an English eccentric whose attempt to circumnavigate the British Isles in a private craft ended in 2001 when he was shipwrecked on Forewick Holm, a 2.5-acre islet in the Shetland Islands.  In 2008, after purchasing the island, he renamed it with the Norn name Forvik (Norn is the Scandinavian language spoken in the Orkneys and Shetlands until about a hundred years ago) and unilaterally declared it a Crown Dependency—like the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands—and thus not fully a part of the U.K. and not at all a part of the E.U.

Although Hill swears allegiance to Queen Elizabeth II, his arguments include his claim that the Shetlands’ and Orkneys’ transference in 1469, when King Christian I of Denmark essentially “pawned” the archipelago to King James III of Scotland to raise money for his daughter’s dowry, is illegitimate (a legal tangle that Reed also raises).  Christian never paid up, which is why the islands remain Scottish, but what if the Danish Crown suddenly paid its bill?  Hill told one journalist, “It’s all jolly good fun.  Every pensioner should do something like this.”  Still, it is not all a lark: some of Hill’s invocations of ancient Norse law were lauded by some in the Shetland Islands Council—the archipelago’s semi-autonomous government—during a recent legal challenge to the Crown for seabed resource rights, invoking ancient Norse law.  Orcadians (as people of the Orkney Islands are known) and Shetlanders have always been fiercely independent, and have always had a streak of Viking in their culture that is not found in Edinburgh or Glasgow or even the Isle of Skye.

“Captain Calamity” Hill, a one-man secessionist movement that has raised deep legal issues

Jurists and statesman have already begun studying the legalities of the Acts of Union of 1706-07 which created the United Kingdom out of the kingdoms of England and Scotland.  Organizations representing culturally distinct groups within Scotland such as the Shetland and Orkney councils may see independence as the chance to claim their own, probably more limited autonomy (which tends to be the pattern, as we continue to see in the Soviet Successor States).  So far, a political party called the Orkney and Shetland Movement is demanding devolution and its own parliament, but not outright separation, and so far the S.N.P. is tolerating the O.S.M. as uneasy allies.  But, depending on how far these questions are pushed, the very basis of Scotland’s original claims over its own territory may be called into question.  Indeed, if Orcadians and Shetlandes tried to push for their own separate states—which right now they have no plan to do—then it would probably make the S.N.P. pull back.  A Scotland without much of its North Sea oil would be far less viable economically.  But if those archipelagoes became independent, then their tiny population would have a mathematical relationship to their nations’ natural-resource wealth that would make them as rich as the emirs of Dubai and Kuwait.

King Christian I of Denmark, who pawned the Orkneys and Shetlands

to Scotland to pay for his daughter’s marriage.

See, doesn’t it look like he regrets it already?

Scotland, it should be noted, also administers, within the United Kingdom, the tiny rocky islet called Rockall (also mentioned sarcastically in Reed’s article), about equidistant between Ireland and Iceland.  Both Dublin and Reykjavík claim Rockall—and, by extension, the vast resource-rich seas around it—while the Danish government insists it is part of their self-governing Faroe Islands territory (which itself has its own separatist movement, the inspiration for the Icelandic singer Björk’s 2008 hit “Declare Independence”).

In 1972, the British parliament, which claims Rockall by right of possession, asserted the rock was not just part of Scotland but was specifically part of the Scottish county of Inverness-shire (which also, by the way, includes the Inner Hebrides).  (Rockall, though uninhabited, did have its own brush with independence, in 1997, when Greenpeace occupied the island as a publicity stunt and declared it an independent “global state” called Waveland.  It lasted only a matter of days, though the Crown made a point not to interfere.)

Waveland

What all of this reminds us is that the legal basis of marine and land boundaries in the North Sea and western Scandinavian region are far from settled.  Scottish independence has the capacity to reopen cans of worms like that of Rockall.  Suddenly, an independent Scotland would find itself responsible for a dormant territorial dispute with Ireland and Denmark, one which further resource exploration could reawaken.  This is to say nothing of what will happen as the Arctic Ocean continues to melt.  Already countries around the Arctic rim are positioning themselves for a race for the polar seas’ wealth of natural gas and who knows what else.  An independent Scotland would be well positioned to take part in that mad scramble as well. 

Map showing different nations’ maritimes claims in the Arctic Ocean

(see a larger map showing this complex issue here)

Could Scotland go the way of Ukraine with its Crimean and Trans-Carpathian Ruthenian separatists? or Georgia with its Abkhazian and Ossetian ones?—breaking free of an empire only to find itself fracturing within (a phenomenon of nested identities I like to call matrioshka nationalism)?  Not likely, since an independent, oil-rich Scotland would be a mighty comfortable, prosperous, progressive place to live.  But we can expect the Shetlands and Orkneys and maybe the Outer Hebrides to demand status as special autonomous regions, and, now that the legal experts have questioned our assumptions about marine territories and about the legal basis of sovereignty in the British Isles, the legal field may be wide open and the economic stakes for that might be fairly high.

Remembering Odumegwu Ojukwu: On Biafra and on an African Continent Riven by European Borders

Africans are mourning the death last week of Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu, at the age of 78, in a London hospital.  The Igbo leader was president of the Republic of Biafra from its declaration of independence from Nigeria in 1967 until its reabsorption into Nigeria in 1970 after one of the most brutal wars of even that most brutal of centuries, the 20th.  He lived in exile until his return to Nigeria in 1982, dreams of a separate Igbo state by that point having long since withered.

Since there is no current significant Igbo separatist movement, African leaders have felt free to praise Ojukwu as they buried him.  Nigeria is now debating whether to give Odumegwu-Ojukwu, who waged war on the Nigerian state, a state funeral, as many would like—Igbo and non-Igbo alike.  But the Biafran freedom-fighter’s life and death remind us that post-colonial African history has not erased the scars of history left scrawled across it by European cartographers.

Like many African populist leaders of the 1960s, Odumegwu-Ojukwu was bicultural, his biography a mix of African and European cultural influences.  He attended an élite preparatory school in England and earned a degree in history at Oxford University, where, the New York Times notes, classmates recall “he was popular, dressed stylishly, drove a bright red MG sports car, and loved discussions of Machiavelli, Hobbes, Louis XIV, and Shakespeare.”  He was a fluent speaker of English, French, Yoruba, Igbo, and Hausa—though such multilingualism is common in sub-Saharan Africa.  His choice of Sibelius’s “Finlandia” as the Biafran national anthem is the type of factoid that causes more traditionalist African intellectuals to bemoan a version of the Stockholm (or in this case perhaps Helsinki) Syndrome.  But Odumegwu-Ojukwu for a while achieved what almost no African leader has done before or since: replace a European-drawn international border in Africa with an African-drawn one.

As most students of history know, European empires carved up Africa with little regard to the extents and boundaries of the continent’s already existing kingdoms, states, and ethnic territories.  Although the tale that Mt. Kilimanjaro is part of Tanzania rather than Kenya because of a birthday present from Queen Victoria to her cousin, the Kaiser of Germany, is apocryphal, nonetheless the arbitrariness and ridiculousness of many African colonial borders can serve to excuse anyone for believing the story on first hearing.

Since the wave of African independence in the early 1960s, numerous secession movements have tried to draw new boundaries, but these nearly always follow half-forgotten lines drawn by the same European cartographers.  When Eritrea split from Ethiopia in 1991, the new border (which separates national groups so sloppily as to cause several costly wars which still have not budged it, incidentally) in a way merely sacralized cease-fire lines negotiated between Winston Churchill and Benito Mussolini.  The Polisario Front’s decades-long struggle against Moroccan kings to establish the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic in what was once the Spanish Sahara is in fact a battle to reinscribe a line negotiated between French and Spanish empires.  Namibia’s independence from South African control in 1990 merely restored the old boundary between Deutsch-Südwestafrika and Britain’s Cape Colony.

And most of the separatist movements in Africa today that are having any kind of success get traction from tracing old divisions between European colonies.  Ambazonian and Ambazanian (sic) separatists in Cameroon seek a state using the exact boundaries between English and French zones of occupation in Kamerun after the Germans lost the First World War.  Zambians who want to establish an independent Barotseland draw the lines where British colonizers set apart a special economic zone within Northern Rhodesia.  The Barotses’ brethren just to the west in Namibia would like to establish a new state in the Caprivi Strip, the precise awkward shard of land that Germany purchased from Britain in 1890 as a supply route between South-West Africa and Tanganyika.  Zimbabwe’s Matabeleland separatists argue that they were a separate colony until Cecil Rhodes folded them into Southern Rhodesia on a whim.  And the international community might not tolerate the de facto independence of Somaliland to the extent that they do if it did not draw its border precisely on the old boundary between British and Italian pieces of what is now the dysfunctional Somali Republic.

The game-changer in this regard was the birth, in July 2011, of the Republic of South Sudan, comprising the southern, non-Muslim, non-Arab portions of a Republic of Sudan whose boundaries had been drawn by the English.  Sudan’s irreconcilable cultural chasm between north and south was only the most bloodily contested of a whole string of European-designed countries running the length of Africa, where northern Muslims and Arabs are asked to share power with vastly cultural different sub-Saharan peoples to the south.  This has been the cause of brutal conflicts in Chad, Ivory Coast, Morocco, and Mali, to say nothing of Nigeria, which, if it does ever split apart, might well do so with the secession of the increasingly violent Hausa Muslims in the more arid north of the country.

So why did South Sudan get to do what no other African separatists have done—win international (i.e. Western) approval of a separate state using African-drawn divisions between national and ethnic groups?  Well, for one thing it isn’t entirely an African-drawn boundary.  For another, we can thank George W. Bush, who during his presidency stepped up support for South Sudan separatists and arm-twisted Khartoum to accept a referendum on southern independence—since held and implemented under Barack Obama’s sponsorship—mainly as a way to punish an increasingly Islamist state which had long harbored al-Qaeda and its affiliates within its vast borders.  (Remember when Bill Clinton timed the bombing of what turned out to be a pharmaceutical factory in northern Sudan in 1998 so that it would chase Monica Lewinsky’s congressional testimony off the newspapers’ front pages?  Ah, those were simpler times.)  South Sudan, though it had been fighting for a separate state for decades, was hurried along the final, critical stages of the secession process to serve America’s War on Terror.  The demarcation between north and south that the international community agreed upon rather lazily followed a line of demarcation between northern and southern provinces agreed upon when Britain allowed the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan to become the Republic of Sudan in 1956.  And it is South Sudanese themselves—who are now waging battle against better-armed northerners along nearly the entirety of the poorly drawn and cursorily negotiated new boundary—who are paying the price in blood every day.

The South Sudan debacle quite rightly worries African leaders who fear that their own violent separatists might be emboldened.  But luckily, even the fanatics of the northern Nigerian Islamist separatist movement Boko Haram know better than to seek Western approval and oversight for their struggle.  They’d rather have no border at all than a Hausa republic whose boundaries are scrawled out in haste by Hillary Rodham Clinton as part of some global chess game.

Africans may not be perfect, and their politics may at times range from the tragic to the absurd, but, as even Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu knew, there is no way they could cock up Africa more than the Europeans have.

[For those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with my forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements, Independence Struggles, Breakaway Republics, Rebel Provinces, Pseudostates, Puppet States, Tribal Fiefdoms, Micronations, and Do-It-Yourself Countries, from Chiapas to Chechnya and Tibet to Texas.  The book, which contains dozens of maps and over 500 flags, is now in the layout phase and should be on shelves, and available on Amazon, by early fall 2014.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even though you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook.]