Joyce McMillan: If global problems are to be overcome, then we need to set aside petty national chauvinisms

ONE week in politics, three stories that seem worlds apart and yet they are linked in ways that go to the heart of our current political hopes and nightmares.

To begin at the beginning, on Wednesday in the City of London, shadow chancellor George Osborne rose to deliver a lecture on Britain's economic future. His warning was stark: Britain's budget deficit must be cut deeply and rapidly or the markets will lose confidence in the UK as a well-managed economy, investors will flee and our international borrowing costs will soar, with grim consequences.

Osborne is arguing, in other words, that we must do what the markets demand – slash public spending, and increase taxes on those with no option but to pay – or face severe punishment. He remarks that if we do not do this, we will "lose our sovereignty". But what he is effectively saying is that we have lost it already and have no choice but to do the markets' bidding. What that means is that we must now allow the very market-makers who created the economic crash of 2008 – including those same international credit ratings agencies which failed to identify any structural problems in the British and US banking industry until the very hour of the Lehman Brothers' crash – to decide, on the basis of "market sentiment", whether blameless elderly people in Britain should or should not have free care and fuel payments, and whether nurses on 20,000 a year should be allowed any pay rise at all between now and 2014.

Osborne, of course, is a Conservative, and will take the view that the markets simply reflect economic realities; he will believe this, even in the teeth of overwhelming evidence that for more than a decade, up to 2008, they were doing nothing of the sort. Yet it seems fairly obvious to me that the markets are run by people who have much to gain from small government and low taxes, and who therefore tend systematically to underrate the long-term economic importance of public spending and public services, particularly in promoting social cohesion and trust.

And thanks to the current structure of the global economic system, they have immense power to play one government, or one currency, off against another, in the effort to impose the kind of economic management they like; the kind which, as a matter of hard economic fact, they often tend to overvalue, against more stable social democratic models.

While the markets have become global, though, the political life that should check and balance their power has remained resolutely national, to the extent that the most striking exception to that rule, the European Union, remains an object of scepticism and derision for many in the English-speaking world.

It was in the European Parliament in Brussels on Thursday that my second story of the week emerged, when Ukip MEP Nigel Farage rose up to inflict a few methodical insults on the new president of the European Council, the Belgian Herman van Rompuy, calling his native land a "non-country" and the president himself a "damp rag".

Now it's true that Farage represents only a small minority of British voters. But it can't be denied that his invincibly rude and patronising attitude to "foreigners" is still surprisingly common in the UK, etched like the name in a stick of rock through much of our popular journalism and bar-room chat.

It has kept us out of the euro, and made us a distant and often disruptive member of the EU.

Combined with similar chauvinisms of other countries, it helps to weaken and undermine all those international institutions which should now be protecting our interests, as ordinary global citizens.

And it continues to wound and baffle the minds of those working-class Britons who just cannot understand why their Britishness no longer guarantees them a position of superiority. Witness the painfully televised struggles, this week, of a group of unemployed people from Wisbech who were invited to replace groups of workers from eastern Europe in the humble jobs which migrants are said to have "stolen", but which these men and women often seemed to find humiliating beyond endurance.

All of which brings us, at last, to Scotland, and the faint possibility of a coming referendum on independence; for if ever there was a time when it was worth reminding ourselves of the Janus-faced nature of nationalism, facing both backwards and forwards, this is it. On one hand, it's clear that independence for Scotland would offer a chance to escape from what commentator Pat Kane last week called the "toxic" aspects of old-style Britishness; that strain of proud post-imperial chauvinism that Farage represents so clearly.

There is ample evidence that small nations on the international stage often make better internationalists than big ones and, in that respect, countries such as Norway and Ireland have records of which they can be proud.

That kind of positive future will only beckon for Scotland, though, if we remain constantly on guard against the danger of simply replacing one chauvinism with another; of sliding towards the casual racism of the thuggish Scottish Defence League, which made its presence felt on the streets of Edinburgh last Saturday or – far more likely – of falling victim to that marginal SNP tendency, well demonstrated in the current debate about cultural appointments in Scotland, to prefer the ghastly and patronising expat tartanry of events such this week's Great Scot Award Ceremony in London, to the real commitment of those who are willing to live, work and build a future here in Scotland, whatever their origins.

To meet the challenges of this 21st century, we need the political strength of true internationalism as never before.

But we also need to remember that internationalism begins at home, in our attitude to the cultural differences we find on our doorstep, and in our capacity to make common cause against the abuses of our age with all those who share our best values and hopes, as brothers, sisters and friends.