Hew Strachan: We cannot stand alone on the world stage

First light on 25 April this year found me at Anzac Cove, on the Gallipoli peninsula. As dawn broke over the Aegean, the sound of waves breaking gently on the shore formed the backdrop to the speeches of Australia’s prime minister, Julia Gillard, and New Zealand’s minister for veterans, Nathan Guy. They invoked the founding national myth of their two countries. So too did the Turks. There are few vantage points on the Gallipoli peninsula from which you fail to see an image of Mustafa Kemal or Ataturk, the hero of the Ottoman defence on that day in 1915, and the man who created the modern Turkish republic.

Today’s relationships between the former enemies are heart-warming, characterised by reconciliation and amity. All three states speak of peace and a stable international order. But these democratic values are offset by a paradoxical militarism.

As goose-stepping, helmeted Turkish soldiers march forward bearing their nation’s wreath, debates about the political aspirations of Turkey’s army still shape newspaper headlines. In Canberra, the parliament building looks across the lake and up the long sweep of Anzac Parade, lined with an ever-growing number of triumphalist war memorials. At Anzac Cove that morning, young Australians applauded the towering figure of the immensely likeable Corporal Ben Roberts-Smith of the Australian SAS, rugby player and winner of the Victoria Cross.

Scotland is similarly schizophrenic. The mood music is pacific and even pacifist. Here, more than was the case down south, opposition to the war in Iraq in 2003 was strong from the outset. Aware of our own good fortune in living in one of the most secure corners of the planet, we are blasé about the need for defence. But the actual music is belligerent; the great Highland bagpipe, the instrument of war, increasingly defines us a nation, and not just for non-Scots. This identification with a mythologised and military past is not simply the stuff of tourism. We become emotional about the Scottish regiments. No Scottish wedding today seems possible without the bridegroom wearing what is a derivative of a militarised form of Highland dress. At Murrayfield, we invoke the memory of the battle of Bannockburn as we sing Flower of Scotland – sadly this year to such little effect.

In reality, the military record of the independent Scottish state after 1314 was nothing to write home about. From Pinkie to Flodden, the English did better. Defence required population density to generate not just a mass army but also the taxable base to provide the revenue to pay and equip it. The act of Union in 1707 may have been prompted precisely by this economic weakness but it also reflected a military reality. Ambitious Scots desiring a military career had already begun to forsake service in their own army for that of England.

Belonging to an army that goes nowhere, has limited promotion opportunities and is not able to provide the latest equipment is hardly a challenge for those called to a job whose very essence rests on the appetite of young people for adventure and even risk. That was precisely why so many Scots had gone to serve in the armies of European states in the 17th century. It is not hard to see the best taking the same decision if confronted with a comparable choice in the 21st.

The soldiers of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps who fought and died at Gallipoli, like the many Scots who did so, carried multiple and overlapping identities. They saw themselves as soldiers of the British empire. That mattered not just in a cultural sense but also in a military and political one. In general terms, the pattern of state formation between 1707 (and even more after 1789) and 1914 was one of aggregation, not disaggregation. By 1871, the newly formed Germany ruled a territory that a century before had been divided between more than 300 city states and independent principalities. It was militarily stronger and politically more influential as a result; by 1914, it was also the second largest industrial power in the world. Since 1918, when four empires were broken by war, and when the principle of national self-determination became at least one basis for self-determination, the number of states in the world has increased almost fourfold. These new states are by definition relatively weaker in military terms, and they have, therefore, often sought security through collective arrangements. Since 1945, the United Nations has enshrined the norm that going to war is no longer the prerogative of a sovereign state except in cases of self-defence. Since then, the incidence of inter-state war has remained low, but it has also – except in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War – remained constant. War between states has not gone away, even if Europe is less marked it by it than other continents. Given their relative weakness, and given the priorities of other demands – primarily social services, education and health – on their budgets, states have preferred to seek security through alliances. Cohesion has been the route to cheaper defence, not the reverse.

For Britain (and also Turkey and even Australia and New Zealand – all of whom have troops in Afghanistan), for over 60 years, that alliance has been Nato. Its resilience has been extraordinary: it has coped with the demise of the enemy that gave it life, it has not shattered under the pressures of Afghanistan despite dire predictions to the contrary, and last year it got its act together in Libya. In regional terms, as well as global, it is the obvious defence partnership not just for the United Kingdom but also for its constituent parts – including Scotland if it were to be independent. Scotland’s geopolitical position gives it little choice.

And yet still the formal position of the SNP is that an independent Scotland would not be part of Nato, because Nato is an alliance predicated on possession of the nuclear deterrent. It can be argued that extended deterrence has produced stability in world affairs, and that has benefited non-nuclear states as much as those which, like the United Kingdom, possess an independent capability. One of them has been the state with which Scotland is wont to compare itself – Norway. Norway’s stance in defence and foreign policy is the reverse of that of the SNP. It is in Nato, despite its aversion to nuclear weapons, but not in the European Union. In 1905, it seceded peacefully from Sweden, and for the next 35 years it developed an ethos which possessed few of the current paradoxes of Anzac or Scottish identity. And then on 9 April, 1940, war came to Norway, unsolicited and unwanted.

For Norwegians, possibly even more than Scots, war created a nation. And they know it. Scotland needs to be realistic about defence, and a hard-headedness about its own past might be a good place to begin.

• Hew Strachan is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, former director of the Scottish Centre for War Studies and an adviser to the Ministry of Defence. He is keynote speaker at The Scotsman conference Defending An Independent Scotland, on the 15 May: www.scotsmanconferences.com