Joyce McMillan: The play Dunsinane serves as a reminder that nation-building has its problems

SOMEWHERE near the beginning of David Greig's Dunsinane - the thrilling and infinitely debatable new sequel to Shakespeare's Macbeth, which opened at the Royal Lyceum in Edinburgh this week - there's a telling scene in which the rebel Scots lord, Macduff, who has joined the English intervention force sent to overthrow Macbeth, tries to explain to the English general Siward the internal politics of the country they have just occupied. On the floor, he unfurls a vast canvas map of Scotland, and begins to point out the heartlands of the various clans and groupings: to the north and east the Morays, to the west the Alba, known as McAlpine, and in Fife large numbers loyal to himself, as thane.

And although Scotland has come a long way since the 11th century - the period of Macbeth's reign - the scene comes as a valuable reminder of the nature of the nation-building project, about which Shakespeare always writes so brilliantly, at least where England is concerned.

Both England and Scotland were forged, in the early middle ages, out of earlier patchworks of allegiance and governance; then later, in the early modern period, the United Kingdom was forged again, out of the nations of the islands. Macbeth itself represents one of the earliest and most influential documents in that forging process, a heavily spun political play written in 1604 to flatter a Scottish king, James, who had just left his homeland for good to come to London and claim his English birthright; and was therefore susceptible to the play's clear suggestion that Scotland would do well to accept a dose of enlightened English influence, and of direct rule from the south.

All of which provides a powerful historic and cultural backdrop to the fine words spoken by Alex Salmond in the Scottish Parliament on Wednesday, on the occasion of his formal re-election as First Minister. As a man formed by the progressive Scottish politics of the 1970s and 1980s, Alex Salmond offered an impeccable post-modern account of Scotland's national identity, expressed with unusual lyricism and power.

"When Donald Dewar addressed this parliament in 1999," he said, "he evoked Scotland's diverse voices: the speak of the Mearns, the shout of the welder above the din of the Clyde shipyard, the battle cries of Bruce and Wallace. Now, these voices of the past are joined in this chamber by the sound of 21st-century Scotland; the lyrical Italian of Marco Biagi, he formal Urdu of Humza Yousaf, the sacred Arabic of Hanzala Malik. We are proud to have those languages spoken here alongside English, Gaelic, Scots and Doric. This land is their land, from the sparkling sands of the islands to the glittering granite of its cities; and it belongs to all who choose to call it home."What Alex Salmond embraced on Wednesday, in other words, is the dynamic and inclusive self-image that all modern nations must adopt, if they are to deal intelligently with the reality of the world in which we live; and as Scotland moves on into a new political era, we have good grounds to hope that the work done since the 1970s on forging an outward-looking modern Scottish identity will put us in a strong position to maintain that enlightened approach to nationhood, in whatever negotiations lie ahead. Alex Salmond is too shrewd a poltician, though, to imagine that that task will necessarily be easy. Inspiring though the images of the Queen's reconciliation visit to Ireland have been, for example, they come as a sharp reminder that Scotland, too, still has a long way to go in healing its internal legacy of damage from the old conflict between Catholic Ireland and Protestant Britain.

Then there is the question of how Scotland's inclusive approach to nationhood will thrive, in a Europe where liberal ideas about national identity are increasingly being replaced by a mean-minded xenophobia that amounts to little more than legitimised racism. Only last week, the nations of the European Union quietly and ominously ditched the main provisions of the Schengen agreement, under which the citizens of 25 European countries have, for the last two decades, been crossing each other's borders passport-free.

And then finally, there is the question of how Scotland's self-image will evolve, if England too finally begins to move towards a new, flexible, and inclusive 21st century sense of itself. The growing prospect of Scottish independence, in some form or other, will force the pace of change in England, provoking responses that will range from the sulky petulance of the Unionist establishment to angry English nationalist resentment, as well as a growing serious recognition, in some quarters, that a renegotiation of the relationship is long overdue.

The coming of a play like Dunsinane, in other words - four long centuries after the mighty Shakespearean drama that inspired it - is just one sign of the re-emergence of a Scotland that is no longer willing to be defined by England, even if Scottish audiences still tend to laugh a shade too obligingly at the English soldiers' stereotyping of the place as rough, incomprehensible and "cold".

Yet in a world where the idea of nationhood itself seems increasingly fragile - threatened both by the scale of the economic forces that limit national sovereignty, and by the increasingly obvious failure of the West to impose western-style national structures in regions from West Africa to Afghanistan - it will be as well if the peoples of these islands can maintain a strong and friendly conversation about our shared future, as we try to navigate through such uncertain territory.For as the First Minister seems to recognise, whatever emerges from the political transition ahead will be something born of the century we live in, and not of an urge to "be the nation again" that we were in 1314.

And it will be inspired by a concept of nationhood we could barely have imagined even two generations ago; far less in 1604, when James and his court began to build the idea of a United Kingdom, or in 1040, when Macbeth won the crown of Scotland, and succeeded, for a long 17 years, in beginning to create something like a single nation, here in this island's northern lands.