National borders are imaginary, so we can reimagine them – Joyce McMillan

Nicola Sturgeon and Boris Johnson’s spat over whether there is a Border between England and Scotland is a reminder that we can reimagine our nation state, writes Joyce McMillan

While Scotland’s nationalist extremists are mostly on Twitter, their British equivalents are in government (Picture: Victoria Jones/PA Wire)

If there’s one thing that no dyed-in-the-wool nationalist of any sort ever wishes to hear, it’s the truth that all nations are “imagined communities”. The phrase belongs to the political theorist and philosopher Benedict Anderson, in his 1983 book on the subject; but the fact that modern nations are formed by acts of human imagination and political will, and made real through the construction of institutions that can record and in some way represent the culture and people of a given area, has been obvious for centuries. This is true of the United Kingdom, shaped and forged after 1707; nor, if we care to dial back a millennium or so, would the process of creating the kingdoms of Scotland and England, out of the island’s early-mediaeval patchwork of smaller kingdoms and fiefdoms, look entirely different.

And as with the idea of a nation, so with its borders, which are essentially, in most cases, lines drawn on a map by a human hand, and made real only as governments seek to administer policy and enforce laws within their jurisdiction. We can perhaps blame geography – and that great myth-maker of English nation-building, William Shakespeare – for the fact that people in southern England often find this truth hard to grasp. Surrounded on three sides by sea, they have always fallen for the idea of themselves as inhabitants of a “sceptred isle”, described by Shakespeare’s John of Gaunt as “a fortress built by Nature for her self/ Against infection, and the hand of war”; so that when Boris Johnson declares in the House of Commons that “there is no border between England and Scotland”, he is only perpetuating the time-honoured British establishment habit of preferring to see England – and by extension Britain – as a single unified isle, with minor Celtic complications best ignored.

Yet this view of the God-given unity of the island is at almost comic variance with view of some deep-dyed Scottish nationalists, who see the English-Scottish border as a sacred and immutable thing, dividing two “real” ancient nations which should never have been united in the monstrosity that is the UK. And the point about all of these national fundamentalists, whichever flag they wave, is that they are historically and practically wrong, both about the nature of borders, and about their uses; and when their illusions collide with a major real-world crisis like the current Covid pandemic, they can become actively dangerous.

Now there is no need, at this stage in the crisis, to elaborate further on the UK Government’s disastrous handling of the public health emergency, partly inspired – it seems – by the kind of island exceptionalism embodied in that great John of Gaunt speech. This week, though, they have turned their attention to the Scottish Border, which manifestly does exist for administrative and governmental purposes, as it has throughout the Union, and has now been thrown into high relief by the Scottish Government’s success, over the last month, in pushing down Scotland’s levels of Covid infections and deaths to a point where the disease might possibly be brought close to eradication. As Scotland gradually edges out of lockdown, there are natural fears that a surge of tourists and other travellers crossing the Border might lead to a new wave of infections; and the First Minister, when asked, was not able to rule out the possibility that travel across the Border might have to be restricted, should cases begin to increase again.

Now in normal circumstances, this would simply be part of a common-sense repertoire of responses to a serious pandemic. Governments all over Europe have been using national, regional and city boundaries in the effort to keep the virus under control; and both the Welsh and Scottish borders have already been lightly policed at points during the pandemic, when people were suspected of driving long distances in defiance of the rules.

Yet in the current polarised state of Scottish and British politics, the mere mention of the Scottish Border is enough for extreme nationalists on both sides to lose all focus on the epidemic itself, and to clamber into their respective trenches. The crucial difference, of course, is that whereas the Scottish nationalist extremists strut their stuff mainly on social media, the British hyper-nationalists at Westminster are actually in government, desperately talking up the Border issue in order to distract from their own performance, lying fluently about what the First Minister has actually said, and allowing Jacob Rees-Mogg to stand at the dispatch-box in what is supposed to be a Union parliament absurdly dismissing Scotland as a mere “district or area” of the UK.

What genuine Scottish unionists must make, in private, of this insulting and historically illiterate nonsense from the UK Government is anyone’s guess. What is clear, though, is that the idea of rigid borders – particularly in an interconnected 21st-century world – goes with rigid ideas about national identity and sovereignty that are generally, in their nature, illiberal, exclusionary, and authoritarian – as illiberal, you might say, as the British Government’s recent treatment of the Windrush generation, or its shameful trumpeting of “the end of freedom of movement”.

That the Covid crisis has forced a shutting-down of some borders that have long been open is therefore a tragedy, and one that all decent governments should be working to reverse as soon as is prudent; and as Nicola Sturgeon rightly pointed out on Wednesday, when those decisions are made, voters do not want to hear blustering constitutional rhetoric, but sound scientific reasons for deciding what is relatively safe, and what is not. That tone will not please many in her party, who want to hear her exploit this crisis to make the case for Scottish independence, and make it hard. For many of us in Scotland, though, the current situation speaks eloquently enough for itself. And if we want to see the Covid-19 virus driven from our lives, fast and soon, we are also able, during this strange time, to think long and hard about the leadership we will want, in the aftermath of the pandemic; and about which imagined community, in our judgment, is most likely to be able to provide it.

A message from the Editor:

Thank you for reading this article on our website. While I have your attention, I also have an important request to make of you.

With the coronavirus lockdown having a major impact on many of our advertisers - and consequently the revenue we receive - we are more reliant than ever on you taking out a digital subscription.

Subscribe to scotsman.com and enjoy unlimited access to Scottish news and information online and on our app. With a digital subscription, you can read more than 5 articles, see fewer ads, enjoy faster load times, and get access to exclusive newsletters and content. Visit www.scotsman.com/subscriptions now to sign up.

Our journalism costs money and we rely on advertising, print and digital revenues to help to support them. By supporting us, we are able to support you in providing trusted, fact-checked content for this website.

Joy Yates

Editorial Director