Scotland is receding into international irrelevance. Will ideas and movements emerge, ask Sophie Johnson and Jonathon Shafi, that can reverse this trend?

The long postwar period of American-led globalisation is drawing to a close. The United States, with its sprawling military, remains dominant in the world system. But the strategic calculations around how the declining superpower situates itself are radically shifting. This is a protracted, contradictory and sometimes chaotic process. Yet it is mediated. The emerging multipolar period is as disorienting as it is seismic. But it is not a revolutionary, or even democratic, development in and of itself. Rather, it is being led by the interests of transnational capitalism, and hardwired by new global commerce arrangements, in which spheres of influence are replacing the unipolar world in which the United States served as hegemon. 

The overarching strategic dynamic at play is the need for Washington to consolidate its orientation around long-term competition with China. As part of this process, and to ensure dominance in the Western hemisphere, America is disciplining its traditional Western allies—through tariffs, export controls, and heightened demands for military rearmament. The Middle East is going through its biggest change in modern history, given the genocide in Gaza, the erosion of Israel’s regional position as it turns from imperial asset to liability, and the rise of the Gulf states. This, of course, has global consequences.

Yet amidst these tectonic shifts, Scotland—once a potential site of rupture within the old imperial core—has quietly receded into irrelevance. Once a geopolitical flashpoint, a site of contestation with the British state, it is no longer an arena for meaningful discontent. In the immediate term, the independence cause has not only exhausted its activist energy, but is a busted flush intellectually as far as the official case for it is concerned. Any work on the prospectus via the Growth Commission was widely discredited, as well as being repudiated by independence campaigners themselves. Disastrously, even the crucial questions like currency have been run into a cul-de-sac. Even now the official position is for sterlingisation, which effectively leaves monetary control with the Bank of England for an indefinite period. In the meantime, the Scottish Government has been busily selling off key assets and parts of Scotland’s future industrial base to the lowest – yes, the lowest – bidder.

The SNP, the party political custodian of that project, has long since captured and denuded the energies of the erstwhile movement, and decommissioned its base. Independence could never be secured by courting the favour of Washington, Brussels or the IMF, no matter how “responsible” a global actor the SNP promised to be. Instead, this orientation has abetted two processes. First, it has accelerated the collapse of meaningful internationalist discourse within Scottish public life.  Even the SNP’s opposition to nuclear weapons — once an important political cleavage — has been eroded by technocratic caution. Where once the Parliament — however inconsistently — could be a platform for dissent against British foreign policy, most notably through widespread opposition to Trident and the Iraq War, today it feels like a backwater to major world events. Humza Yousaf’s principled position on Gaza was an exception to the general trend, replaced by John Swinney’s studied quietude on the issue. The UK’s rearmament agenda receives scant criticism, as arms budgets pass without contention.

Second, the deepening embrace of market orthodoxy has clarified Scotland’s material position as an asset-stripped periphery denuded of the ability to assert its sovereignty. Its natural endowments are sold off to global capital with minimal oversight and no return. The so-called green transition has been a process of expropriation: vast offshore wind reserves are leased to multinationals; revenues flow out, while local economies remain stagnant. Freeports, marketed as tools of regional regeneration, function as enclaves for capital, not engines of development. The Scottish Government operates as an interface for corporate lobbying and outsourcing, its ambitions constrained by fiscal dependency and ideological conformity.

The backdrop to this is one of visible intellectual stagnation. The Scottish commentariat, with one or two notable exceptions, barley even touch on international affairs and Scotland’s position within them. They are happy to retreat into domestic comfort zones, usually taking up combat on one of a variety of culture war topics. But there is nothing of any weight here, adding to the sense that Scotland’s retreat from world politics and the potential dismantlement of the British state relegates its general political culture to that of a sideshow, buffeted and blown by the winds of change, without ever intervening into them. The calibre of MSPs is almost universally acknowledged to be at its lowest ebb in the devolution era. Politicians see themselves, and certainly act, as functionaries and administrators, not as independent and critical thinkers willing to break consensus and disrupt party lines. Scottish politics is stagnant, with only Reform threatening to temporarily upset the apple cart. Scotland has withdrawn into a narrow bandwidth of permissible concern: education reform, health targets, local service delivery. These are not unimportant in themselves, but they are presented as if divorced from the global dynamics that shape them.

All of this raises challenges for the socialist and anti-imperialist left. It has a duty to revive lost and irreverent ideological debates and to create avenues through which to shift public life in this direction. This requires theoretical clarity and discussion. It is true that genuine political struggle cannot be wished into action. But in such a volatile period, there is the need for forms of organisation that can make an impact. That means the careful and thoughtful reconstruction of extra-parliamentary movements, zoned in to confronting the Scottish establishment. The political scene in this country is small, and therefore open to intrusions. Without these and other developments on the left, Scotland will continue to stagnate and it will be at the mercy of global forces more than it already is. To start this process, we have to first honestly and directly register the reality of the current circumstances, and from there ensure that we set about changing in directly measurable ways for both the working class in this country, and those oppressed by imperialism abroad. The world system is in transition, and this will open opportunities as well as threats. We must be ready to seize them.

Sophie Johnson is the Secretary of Stop the War Coalition Scotland and a columnist at Conter. Jonathon Shafi is a columnist for The National and co-editor of Conter.