IT'S not clear that you can censor a work of art before it has been conceived, far less created.

It isn't obvious, meanwhile, that you have made a useful contribution to arguments over censorship by telling an arts festival director about the work he must, as an obligation, commission.

If that person decides to use the word neutrality, however, and then decides to apply it selectively, and then decrees an issue out of bounds, silence becomes something worth talking about. He might be asserting his artistic autonomy. He might also be indulging in the kind of self-censorship that turns a private decision into a public matter.

Personally, I have not often lived in hope that the Edinburgh International Festival would ever have much to say about or to the town and country in which it makes its home. The event's middle name is its get-out-of-jail card in these discussions. It is in Scotland, year upon year, but not of Scotland. That's not necessarily a bad thing.

Jonathan Mills, lately knighted, is not censoring anyone, of course, as he plans the 2014 EIF, his swansong on the eve of a certain referendum. He has been very clear about that. Artists who have anything to say about independence, for or against, will not be hindered by him. But since his chosen themes for his last programme are the Commonwealth and the Great War centenary, those seeking commissions might require crowbars and ingenuity if they want to talk about the vote.

Perhaps someone will want to ask if a progressive, independent Scotland should be seeking membership of a club involving some very nasty regimes. Perhaps the issues of sovereignty and the use of Scottish troops in successive imperial wars would be apt topics for the commemoration of 1914-18. Whether neutrality could then be managed would be another matter, of course.

Censorship by omission is a tricky area. In theory, Sir Jonathan can programme anything he likes, for any theme he cares to select. Given those criteria, each and every one of his festivals could have been called into question. If it's an argument over an event that fails to give much attention to the affairs of Scotland, however, the real question is simple: what's new?

Edinburgh was no sooner chosen ahead of Bath for a post-war festival - the absence of bomb damage was the main criterion - than unease had set in. Its source was partly socialist and communist, partly nationalist. The belief was that Scotland, its culture and its society, were mere kitsch backdrops for a private elite party. So the People's Festival was born.

It had for its slogan "By Working People for Working People" and for a few years it was a great success. Hamish Henderson described it, as only he could, as "Gramsci in action". Many in Edinburgh probably wondered who that one played for, but the event itself required no complicated explanations. The EIF was, in every sense, exclusive. Here was the riposte.

In its brief life between 1951 and 1954, the People's Festival combined the Barrhead Co-op Junior Choir with Beethoven, performances of Joe Corrie's In Time of Strife with ceilidhs. De Sica's Bicycle Thieves and Aleksander Ford's That Others May Live were shown. Hugh MacDiarmid lectured on David Lindsay and the radical tradition; Desmond Greaves talked about James Connolly. Some of the poetry readings - Sydney Goodsir-Smith, Alexander Trocchi, Norman McCaig, Sorley MacLean - would fill a hall today.

Until Scottish Labour decreed that association with the event was "incompatible" with membership of the party - no censorship there, then - the People's Festival asserted that the EIF, made by and for the rootless world of "international art", spurned Scotland and the mass of its people. The complaint has persisted down the years. To say that it misses the point of the EIF does not make the objection untrue. Sir Jonathan's programming decision thus brings the issue into relief as never before.

Yet what's a director if he cannot direct? Why should any artistic choice be shaped by political pressures? If topics are dictated, what are they worth to begin with? Given the temper of debate, albeit one misrepresented recently by Andrew Marr and numerous others, what would prevent the 2014 festival descending into a dogfight as this or that event was tested for truth and purity by Unionists and Nationalists alike?

These are decent, if rhetorical, questions. The last of the them might just have been on the mind of the EIF's director when he sought refuge in what he takes to be neutrality. But what kind of art event is it that ignores consuming passions, the world around it, and the life of the people whose attention it seeks? How does a festival ignore the concerns of its home town? How high is the ivory tower supposed to be?

I have yet to come across an arts festival that didn't welcome a bit of controversy. Even high culture has to sell tickets. Plainly, however, those twin spectres, politics and history, have intruded upon "the world's greatest festival". They happen to be local history and local politics. The EIF has never been comfortable with either. But there is a sense, despite every protestation from Sir Jonathan, that these local affairs might have big consequences.

So the EIF adopts a position akin to that of the BBC. Censorship can never be contemplated, but judicious silence is tolerable. Works involving the Commonwealth and the First World War will no doubt generate a couple of controversies next year, but nothing that might call the festival itself into question. No problems there, then. If the referendum vote is Yes, on the other hand, the 2015 event should be fascinating.

The complaint against Sir Jonathan has nothing to do with his autonomy and everything to do with his judgment. It's not good enough to say that a referendum theme would be complicated or divisive. Those facts - and facts they are - ought to make the vote ideal material for an arts event. Instead, we are left with the feeling that the EIF is sticking with the status quo in every particular. Anything else, any alternative, is deemed "politics".

At best, it counts as timidity. Given some of the barrages directed at Alasdair Gray, it might be risky to say so, but it seems that Sir Jonathan isn't familiar enough with Scotland to venture into referendum territory. Like Andrew Marr taking egregious Nigel Farage at his word over a student demo, that might be one explanation for the director's caution. He avoids the debate for fear the debate will overwhelm him.

The EIF is the perfect metaphor, then. It is Scotland's premier arts festival, but it is not Scotland's property. That's one definition of independence, of course. Equally, the corporate types who help to fund high culture in the country's capital are hardly putting their weight behind a Yes vote. Unionists are meanwhile delighted with the decision taken by Sir Jonathan.

He has become part of the argument, ironically enough, whether he likes it or not. Simply deciding that an issue is, in Marr's foolish word, "toxic" does not render it irrelevant. Are there many other topics, I wonder, over which the EIF would like to declare its neutrality in advance? To embrace the world while ignoring what's under your nose is not the way of art.