Reimagining the enlightenment: Alternate timelines and utopian futures in the Scottish independence movement

ABSTRACT

This article explores how Scottish National Party (SNP) activists in Edinburgh reimagine the enlightenment past to provide alternate timelines that are appropriated in the projection of utopian futures for an independent Scotland. Starting with the question ‘what if history had happened differently?’, SNP activists harness the ‘what ifs’ and ‘would haves’ of alternate timelines where the enlightenment continues uninterrupted by the political union of Scotland and England. This approach facilitates a form of futural revisionism which captures the potentiality of the past to become utopian future without foregoing the SNP’s commitment to civic, rather than ethnic, nationalism. Thus, SNP activists are able to tow the party line of rejecting nostalgic historicism to remain open to all citizens of Scotland while still affectively engaging with the past to provide wishful utopian images for their independent future.

KEYWORDS:

• Utopia
• Scotland
• independence
• time
• future
• enlightenment

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The official name of the constituency is ‘Edinburgh Central’. This constituency is for the Scottish parliament only, and not Westminster. SNP activists identified with the Scottish parliament boundaries and grouped themselves as such for most campaigning activities.

2 It is worth mentioning that although this article works with the distinctions of ethnic and civic nationalism there is some controversy on the analytic value of an ethnic-civic divide (see Paul 2020).

3 My SNP informants would strongly disagree with my labelling of these independence dreams as utopian. However, this I believe is a politically motivated response that was necessary during the 2014 referendum, where the vision of independence they were selling was derogatively described as utopian, and therefore fanciful and unachievable. For SNP activists this future they are imagining is entirely possible, grounded in Scotland’s current potential and therefore it is neither fanciful nor unachievable, as the utopian label might suggest. Because of this, I use utopia here not in this common vernacular sense, but following Ruth Levitass’ (2007) definition of utopia as an imaginary re-construction of society that continuously strived to better itself, working both as a negation of the present and affirmation of the future.

4 Conservative governments have a reputation in Scotland for introducing aggressive welfare cuts in in the country throughout the decades. From Margaret Thatcher’s attempt to introduce the Community Charge in 1989, to the austerity measures implemented in 2008–2012 by Prime Minister David Cameron, where Scotland saw its budget cut by almost 10% many in the SNP believe Conservative governments (and to a lesser extent Tony Blair’s Labour governments) are to blame for the high rates of poverty and unemployment in Scotland.

5 ‘Looking to the future' is a sentiment that the ex-leader of the party Alex Salmond often used when defining Scottish nationalism. Ironically, he himself often failed to do so, invoking historical battles and treaties in his speeches.

6 Although these cuts are a direct result of Scotland’s overall budget being cut, rival political parties in Scotland argue that the SNP failed to protect Scottish schools from Conservative Westminster cuts through budget mismanagement. SNP activists disagree, and argue that the SNP did all it could to mitigate the impact of austerity measures in Scotland.

7 Those of the older generation who engaged with the Scottish enlightenment and Scottish history. As discussed, this is a phenomenon that was not present amongst the younger generation of activists.