The hills and lochs of Scotland are an unlikely place to recall the words of India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, but they kept echoing in my head last week as I headed west from Glasgow: “A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.” This affirmation of the 20th-century religion of national self-determination was made on the eve of India’s independence from British rule. Its memory couldn’t help but evoke some ironies to this Indian in Scotland.

How, for instance, Great Britain, which hastily drew arbitrary lines in the sand in too many places, condemning hundreds of millions of people across the world, from Ireland to Kashmir, Sudan to Palestine, to decades of violence and hatred, should now be facing drastic scission. Or that Scotland, avid participant for over two centuries in the splendour and folly of empire, as the opulent houses near Glasgow and the Indian cemeteries full of young Campbells attest, should now wish to disown its senior partner.

This shrewd complicity with empire doesn’t, of course, disqualify Scots from a separate nation-state today. My own ambivalence has a source different from the glory and shame of the union, which some Yes and No partisans atavistically invoke. It lies in the fact that most of us from the post-colonial world, though intuitively sympathetic to the idea of self-determination, cannot claim to have fulfilled even partially its extravagant promise.

It was also in Scotland last week that I heard about the death of UR Ananthamurthy, one of post-colonial India’s greatest writers (who wrote in Kannada, and so remains scandalously unknown in the west). A consistent critic of nationalism — or what Rabindranath Tagore presciently called “organised selfishness” — Ananthamurthy claimed late last year that he would not want to live in a country whose prime minister was an authoritarian-minded man with fascist supporters. He spent his last weeks fending off Hindu zealots trying to bully him out of India.

Nationalism in many of Britain’s former colonies today is the first refuge of the political scoundrel and the intellectual thug. In the mid-20th century, however, nationalism, though tainted by the blood of European minorities, was the default consensus-building ideology of ruling elites everywhere in Asia and Africa. The nation-state alone offered sustainable freedom from imperial exploitation. It was widely touted, even while suppressing recalcitrant diversity, as the carrier of political and economic modernity to backward peoples; and modernity itself was defined explicitly as social justice and gender equality, expedited through planned and protected industrial growth.

However, the map of the world today is far from being a perfectly fitted jigsaw of successfully modernised nation-states. The “new world order” heralded after the end of the cold war betrays everywhere, in Clifford Geertz’s words, a “pervasive raggedness”. Nations that had been insufficiently or too fervidly imagined — Burma and Pakistan come to mind — could not break free of their flawed origins, and have kept lurching for much of the last half-century between civilian and military despots. Today, even ruthless despotism, as the implosion of Iraq, Libya and Syria reveals, is no longer a reliable bulwark against militant disaffection.

Modernisation now has the meaning Reagan and Thatcher gave it: privatisation and deregulation (and, for many countries, de-industrialization and political submission to markets). Thus, China moved from being the world’s most egalitarian country to one where the top one per cent of the population now has one-third of the country’s wealth, and the bottom 25 per cent has less than one per cent. Original national compacts to ensure dignity and freedom for the weakest have not survived in democratic nation-states either. India and Israel have seen their foundational commitments to collective welfare reconfigured by a nexus of neoliberal extremists and majoritarian nationalists, who hope to bludgeon their disaffected minorities into loyalty to a “Jewish state” and a “Hindu nation”.

Scotland may not spawn such perversions, but recent history has taught us suspicion of collective identities, especially those that disguise their innate conservatism by ethnic minstrelsy. The best argument against Scottish independence may be Alex Salmond, who seems to have a surer grasp of Braveheart than of the complicated issues about North Sea oil and currency union invoked by the No campaign.

But, as Raymond Aron once put it, “it is a denial of the experience of our century to suppose that men will sacrifice their passions to their interests.” Certainly, lavish subsidies and awesomely high GDP growth have not seduced the Tibetans into fealty to Beijing. Self-determination was always about the right to make your own choices — and mistakes. To the imperialists shouting “Après moi, le deluge,” Gandhi famously retorted, “Leave India to God.”

In any case, the determination of many Scots to take charge of their destiny and protect their cultural identity is far from exceptional, or grounded in irrational passion. Since the end of the cold war, metropolitan elites everywhere have identified progress and modernity with the cornucopia of global capitalism, the consolidation of liberal democratic regimes and the secular ethic of consumerism. Attachment to a different conception of the good life became by default a pitiable recoiling into crude medievalism. Such was the new global consensus that Tibetan Buddhists resisting the radical “modernisation” of their society and landscape invited the scorn of Rupert Murdoch as well as of Hu Jintao.

That particular ideological bluff is being called. Anyone with a degree of political sentience knows that the new kind of “modernisation” has enriched tiny elites — often, plain kleptocrats — everywhere while often dispossessing and disenfranchising many. Uncontrollable capital flows have demoted even the elected leaders of former imperial nation-states such as Britain and France into enablers of investor-friendly climates.

Political elites look increasingly interchangeable: Blair, Brown, and Cameron have all tried to provide cover for the surrender of sovereignty to foreign investors with invocations of “British” values, and, more opportunistically, anti-immigrant rhetoric. Public contempt for politicians is now reflected in low poll turnouts. Political and business elites empowered by globalisation also face potent challengers in many places: from Uruguay, now led by a chrysanthemum farmer, to Indonesia, where a small-town mayor who championed the virtues of batik over mass-manufactured textiles has just been elected president, and even Hong Kong, the old hub of Asian materialism, which has erupted in protest against its mainland Chinese overlords.

It turns out that globalisation, while promising sameness through brand-name consumption, was fostering, through uneven economic growth, an intense feeling of difference. Minorities within nation-states frayed by global capitalism are naturally more resentful of hollowed-out but still heavily centralised systems of political and economic domination. Subsistence-level villagers in the Indian state of Orissa, who successfully campaigned to expel multinational bauxite miners from their sacred mountain, are among those who defiantly reject the remote-control politics that destroys social bonds as well as long-term economic possibility and environmental sustainability.

To such catastrophic “modernity”, the most likely political response is often conservatism — with a small “c”, as distinct from the self-annulling Conservatism of today’s radical modernisers. The long-suppressed soul of a nation may not find utterance on Sept 18. But the Scots won’t be the last of the many peoples demanding self-determination in a rapidly shattering old world order.

—By arrangement with The Guardian

Published in Dawn, September 1st, 2014