As Others See Us: The View From Canada (2)

Multi-national, multi-ethnic states such as the UK, Belgium or Spain, the theory goes, are just as vulnerable to break-up as their equivalents in the east, the USSR, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. All they need is a push.

Barcelona's La Vanguardia, when it first became clear there would be a vote here, summed up the worries of Madrid's ultra-unionist ruling Partido Popular in a single word: "Contagion."

But are the Spanish and Belgians - and other states with minority regions - right to be worried? Not according to Steve Saideman.

This professor of international relations is based at Carleton University, Ottawa, right on Canada's French-English cultural and linguistic faultline. But he isn't buying into any domino theory.

"There is a lot of concern about precedent setting," he told a conference on defence and security at Glasgow University this month. "But whatever happens in Scotland, stays in Scotland."

We can vote how we like, he told a room full of global policy wonks and old soldiers, it won't make much of a difference anywhere else. "What will the Basques do? Or the Catalans?" he asked, waving his hand dismissively. "Don't worry about it. Be self-centered. Everybody else is."

I should probably stop here. Because this blog is about the global impact of the indyref and Saideman, more or less, is saying there won't be one. But, please bear with me: Saideman has three basic points to back his case and I think they are worth spelling out.

The first is that domestic issues, not global ones, decide the fate of independence movements. "Nearly all politics is local," Saideman declared at his speech to this month's conference.

Secessions, therefore, rarely domino. The break-up of the Soviet Union didn't spark that of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, he argued. "What happened in eastern and central Europe in the 1990s was not a spread of secessions from country to country.

"It was a different thing: the end of Communism and the rise of political competition.

"In some place that caused secession. In other places it did not."

Take Yugoslavia. Provincial elections were the first to take place as the former state's brand of Communism petered out, explained Saideman. The result? Local politicians played parochial cards.

His second point: that there IS a contagious variety of separatism. But not in Scotland. The SNP and wider Yes Scotland movement doesn't have what Saideman calls "separatist kin" in other states.

"When Kosovo became independent that had ramifications for Albanians in Macedonia," he said. "What happens to the Kurds in Iraq affects those in Turkey or Syria. If the Kurds in Syria become independent that will have ramifications for the region."

"'So where are the Scottish separatists elsewhere?'"

The last line provoked a joke. "Canada," came a reply from the university audience.

Saideman is an American but he has worked in Ottawa for years. And Canada's big and astonishingly bitter division - it strikes me at least - plays heavily on his thinking. It seems to have inspired his third and, in my view, most interesting point: that the result of next year's referendum, whatever it is, will be spun.

"People will learn what they want to learn from any example of separatism," he said. "This limits how much any event can shape learning elsewhere."

Canadians are an excellent example of this. The country's highly partisan press and politicians, as I have previously blogged, have already firmly taken different sides on the Scottish referendum. But they have also taken quite different positions on, for example, Yugoslavia and its final domino to fall, Montenegro in 2006.

"When Montenegro declared independence after its referendum," explained Saideman, "we had two conversations in Canada.

"Quebec separatists said: 'Hey this is great, they had a vote and got independence'.

"They ignored the fact that a threshold of 55% had been set for a Yes vote. That did not form part of the separatist conversation.

"The federalists said: 'Wow you had outsiders set the rules and they set a 55% threshold? This sounds pretty darned good!'."

"If Scotland does not become independent, the potential separatists out there will say 'Scotland is a special case. It does not apply to us'.

"'The Scots,' they'll say, 'speak the same language as the Brits. They are not oppressed. They don't face the same circumstances we do'.

"If you are Canada and you look at the Scottish failed separatist event, you go: 'See Scotland, Quebec; Britain, us: same thing'.

"'Scots learned the right lessons. Independence is costly and pain in the butt.'

"If Scotland does secede, the Quebeckers will go 'This is great. We will learn from them.'

"Canada would go: 'This doesn't really apply to us. It just doesn't'."

Me? I have some sympathy with Saideman's view. Yes, domestic politics trumps foreign. Yes, Scots lack immediate "separatist kin". Yes, we are already seeing overseas equivalents of our unionists and nationalists ready their spin, from Spain to Azerbaijan.

But I reckon the very fact foreign politicians have to come up with PR lines for our indyref suggests that Scotland - a slow-burning but huge international news story - does count abroad.

I don't think we should underestimate the sheer symbolic power of a democratic vote to consider the break-up of a state as old and influential as the United Kingdom. And I don't think we should underestimate the practical reverberations of a potential Yes vote on international institutions, not least the European Union.

The SNP are wise to this: and the potential their own vote could be cross-contaminated from abroad.

Saideman - with glee - described how First Minister Alex Salmond early this year snubbed Quebec premier Pauline Marois of the independence-supporting Parti Québécois.

"When the Quebec separatists came to talk to folks in Scotland, the Scottish separatists were kinda 'We don't wanna talk to you guys'," he said. "Which was quite fascinating. Given what I know about Quebec separatists, I completely agree about them with the Scots."

Saideman saw this as an example of why Scotland's big vote was irrelevant. I think it could equally spun as evidence of the exact opposite. Let me know what you think - there's plenty of space to comment below.

But what about the those dominos? Is Saideman right about them? Some Russian experts - perhaps seeing our politics through the prism of their own imperial demise, perhaps worried by unfinished separatist business of their own - are fretting about the future of the UK and Spain. "The domino effect forecast for western Europe could have catastrophic consequences for Russia and its neighbours," said Vladimir Babkin in a recent edition of Moscow's foreign policy journal, Mir i Politika. "Hotheads may decide they shouldn't fall behind Europe."