To see yourself as others do

Robin McAlpine

Very shortly after the independence referendum I got an email. It was from a Basque body set up as part of the post-ETA peace process and they wanted to meet. I was delighted to do so, but slightly dismayed by the reason I was asked. The Scottish Government, the SNP and every MSP they had contacted refused to agree to any form of contact.

It set me on a path which, over the last ten years, has led to the major conference happening in Edinburgh next weekend (some tickets are still available). It brings 14 nations and regions to Scotland to meet and plan. All of them are seeking independence or greater autonomy.

My experience over those ten years has been overwhelmingly positive and part of the reason for organising the conference was to let others have that same experience. Because if there is something that I've discovered over this time it is that understanding and talking to those in the same situation as you really helps, but not in the way you might think.

When people think of the benefits of international cooperation they tend to think either in terms of coalitions or 'policy imports'. My experience has been, on the whole, that those are the least effective outcomes from meeting with people from other nations. In fact it's not the hard stuff that has benefitted me most but the soft stuff. As so often, it's about culture.

What engagement with others shows you is, frankly, how strange you are in some ways and how lucky you are in others. From my experience, in engaging with people beyond your usual political environment you learn more about yourself than you do about them. That's it's value.

But first, why is someone who set up a think tank based on looking round the world for best policy practices in other countries and trying to work out how to implement them in Scotland (the original Common Weal Project from 2013) now writing that engaging with other nations to identify policy ideas isn't actually all that productive? 

The reason is fairly simple; policy is about the details more than the ideas. Lots of places have similar ideas but what works or doesn't work is generally down to the way the policies based on these ideas are constructed. Unless you're on a very specific fact-finding mission into a very specific policy with the people who implemented it, you won't get the necessary detail.

For example, I'm sure you're aware of (for example) the pioneering work on adapting health improvement strategies to violence reduction in Scotland. It has been very successful and studied internationally. But my guess is that, for the big majority of you, no matter how political you are, you wouldn't really be able to tell someone all that much about it.

And why is someone who is always writing about international alliances and solidarity writing now that building coalitions isn't the best outcome? Because that takes time. You can't rock up to somewhere for three days and come away with a fully-formed coalition.

Policy is something you research from websites and publications where you can get the necessary detail and analysis, or by firing questions over to an experienced expert. International coalitions are mostly created by email, or at least most of the work is done that way.

What general meetings with politically-active people in other countries gives you is perspective on the nature and differences of our political cultures. For example, have you ever taken someone from outside Britain to see the Houses of Parliament? If you thought it was weird and archaic before, just wait until you see it alongside someone seeing it for the first time.

This is known in psychology as 'the Observer Effect'. We behave differently when we are being watched or someone is watching alongside us. The latter makes us empathetic with their perception and so defamiliarises things that we've seen many times. We 'see it through their eyes'.

Or let me give you a non-political example. I am constantly learning how Scottish I am mainly when outside Scotland. I was living in London with two English flatmates in the 1990s when I got a skelf in my pinkie. So I went through to hunt out a needle to get it out, announcing that I needed it to get a skelf out my pinkie. They looked blankly at me. This is the first time I discovered that 'skelf' and 'pinkie' are Scots words.

My assumption was that they all obviously knew what a skelf was given that that's its name (apparently they think it is called a 'splinter', the poor souls). I discovered that my own language was heavily littered with words that don't come from English. It changed how I saw myself.

I'm in a few international coalitions and I've learned different things from all of them. For example, via a lobbying transparency network I discovered things like the culture of the European Union towards lobbying (it really can't see the problem or the need for transparency), the attitude towards alternative media in Serbia (where they were in a fight against cuts in funding for non-corporate media sources), the attitude to corruption in Italy ('it's just like air').

I learn that in Scotland we at least understand the need for transparency even though the politicians are as tone-deaf as the Eurocrats. It showed me the size and scope of our commitment to accountability. I discovered that having no public funding whatsoever for alternative media is not the only option and that others consider it central to their democracy.

And I learned that the Italian and Scottish attitude to public corruption is much the same, even though the rates of public corruption are markedly different. I understand Scotland better because of this, not because of something I read, not because of information I gathered, but because there is no substitution for seeing someone shrug, say 'what can you do?' and truly understanding the nature of the challenges they face.

Of course this has brought a good number of foreign visits (mainly when someone else was paying...) and those helped me to learn a lot about the nature and history of the places I went to. I've discovered that political types like to tell you about their country and its history. I understand Europe in a handful of foreign trips more than in a lifetime of budget airline minibreaks.

It is incredibly important to be reminded again and again and again that our society is not a product of physical laws or immutable truths. It's just this thing we created, one version of many, many things we could have created. It makes you see that you are clinging to a past for a reason you can't really explain.

I mean, Black Rod? Why? The answer is always 'tradition'. Except so what? What has tradition got to do with the contemporary process of governing? Why does what is effectively tourism thinking embed itself so deeply in our democracy? We keep telling ourselves that this is just a quirk of government. It's not, it's a deeply ideological commitment to a hierarchical past imposing itself on our parliament. From outside it looks even more 'know your place plebs' than it does to us. 

It makes us challenge our own assumptions and outlooks. I'm pro-immigration, right? Well, talk to someone in Sweden about the impact of 'open borders' on them subsequent to taking an enormous number of Syrian refugees and you'll quickly find out that dumping lots of desperate people in derelict housing estates to satisfy your liberal morals isn't actually good for anyone.

We are a tribal, insular species. That's what it is – it's hard-wired into us so there is little point in getting hung up on it. Which makes it so much healthier for us to get out of that bubble and start to understand what is truly inevitable and what is just us making a mess of things.

Next weekend in Edinburgh is a particularly good opportunity for anyone that supports independence to find out the true state of play of independence movements across Europe and if you're experience is anything like mine, you'll learn a lot and it will be valuable.

But this is a reality we should take more seriously. I'm ambivalent about Erasmus which was something that, when I was young, was for the rich kids. But I'm evangelical about structuring ways into our society of exposing us to political cultures and ideas and norms and social assumptions which are not our own.

O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us. To see oursels as ithers see us! For certain, but no-one is going to give us that gift. We're going to have to do it ourselves. As usual.