For much of last year's referendum, the world watched Scotland through London eyes.

 

Even as the long independence debate dragged on, many international journalists - unsurprisingly - took most of their cues from Fleet Street.

Why? Because Britain - and not Scotland - was their story. And because London - not Glasgow or Edinburgh - was their patch.

That's still true. The world media is still far more interested in the UK, the planet's tenth biggest economy in real terms, than they are in what many still think of as its northernmost region.

But now it is Britain, increasingly, that is viewed through Scottish eyes, not the other way round.

"A new political order in Scotland," declared the Washington Post last month under a huge picture of protestors at Faslane....on its front page. "Scots poised to shake up British election," said New York Times on the same day. Its front page dateline: Paisley, Scotland.

International journalists have flocked to Scotland again for the general election.

True, the Post's words won't have warmed the hearts of the surging SNP.

"Nationalist and fringe ideological movements increasingly occupy ground once reserved for the two parties - one centre-right, the other centre-left - that have together dominated British political life for the past century," said reporter Griff Witte.

"The phenomenon has echoes across Europe, with radical leftists winning votes in Greece and surging in Spain while the extreme right vies for the presidency in France."

Elsewhere notion of the SNP as a "fringe or nationalist" party has waned.

Inquisitive journalists are starting to get to grips with the synthesis of nationalism with Scotland's social democrat mainstream.

It helps, that in one woman, Nicola Sturgeon, they have a politician who embodies this trend.

France TV profiled the "independantiste" who would "dynamite" the British elections.

"Her entire career has gone hand in hand with with the transition of the SNP from a folkloric party to a powerful formation," said writer Vincent Daniel before highlighting the first minister's progressive rhetoric on immigration in TV debates.

With comparisons to fictional Birgitte Nyborg of Danish series Borgen, he added: "The British are captivated by Sturgeon's poise."

The TV station went on to cite Sarah Pickhard at the Sorbonne. She said: "Even those who reject Sturgeon's Scottish nationalism or left program admire her as a political animal and her repartee."

The big vote of 2014 still looms over world reports of the general election. "British elections: the Revenge of the Scots," ran the headline this week in Paris news magazine L'Obs. Its big story: the resurrection of Scottish separatism.

"They were thought to be dead, but they have come back to life," wrote Sarah Halifa-Legrand. "The failure of last September's referendum should have closed the debate on the dream of independence. On the contrary, the nationalists are back and they are stronger than ever."

Why are the SNP and their "rising star" Ms Sturgeon back? "Why the sudden craze," she adds referring to the rising star of Ms Sturgeon. Because Scots feel "betrayed" by promises of more powers that never materialised and because they could not "stomach" the alliance of Tories and Labour against independence.

This is a familiar theme in international reports: that the "Scottish question" - despite the referendum - has not been answered.

"Something smells of break-up in the UK," headlined La Marea, a Madrid news magazine.

Spanish newspaper commentators, especially unionist ones, have adopted a tone of schadenfreude over Scotland.

Catalan nationalists are losing ground: the No's have a narrow lead, according to the most recent poll this week. Is this a sign that Madrid was right to block a referendum and David Cameron wrong not to?

"Cameron's strategy is failing," declared Cronica Global, a staunchly unionist news site in Barcelona, last month. "The independence referendum has not pacified Scottish nationalists."

Canada's highly partisan press is seeing the British election very much through the prism of their own politics - and their own independence issues with Quebec.

The staunchly federalist National Post said "separatists" could have a "pivotal say in the uncertain future" of Britain after in Thursday's general election.

A bamboozled correspondent, from what he called the "fishing village of Arbroath", said he could not understand why the SNP was on the rise.

Matthew Fisher said: "Trying to figure out why Scots are so disaffected can be difficult for outsiders.

"Seven British prime ministers were born in Scotland and six prime ministers have represented Scottish ridings.

Scots have played a prominent role in British politics, sport and the military for many generations, too."

Mr Fisher - he was in Arbroath because of the town's declaration - looked to history for an explanation.

He wrote: "Grievances against England go back as far as the time of Robert the Bruce, whose highland army was massacred on the battlefield in the 14th century.

"Among the more recent beefs was Labour's inability to keep Margaret Thatcher from closing the coal mines and shipyards in the 1980s."

This used to a theme of reports on Scotland: Arbroath and Braveheart references. Not so much any more.

Italy's Repubblica, true, titled a film on the first minister as "Miss Nicola Sturgeon: Braveheart's revenge." But the daily was more interested - like many - in the SNP leader's "authenticity" and her love of the "selfie".

It has taken a while. But after several years of cliches about bagpipes, the international media has started to twig that Scots aren't just eccentric Anglo-Saxons in skirts.

They have started to get that Britain can be one nation for some, and a family of nations for others; that it can - somehow - be both for many. So having posed and failed to get an answer to the Scottish question, they ask: is Britain a country?

One or two are beginning to notice what many English people haven't: that the different parts of the UK don't know or understand each other very well.

Czech radio correspondent Jiri Hosek watched Czechoslovakia drift in to two, the gradual disconnect before and after independence between people from two countries who still don't see each other as "foreigners".

Mr Hosek said: "Talking to my London friends there is just a lack of knowledge and experience of Scotland and it reminds me of what happened at home in the early 1990s," he said.

"I really think that the only thing a rich pensioner in Surrey and a Glasgow shipyard worker have in common is their passport.

"Otherwise they live on completely different planets."