JOST A MON

Just the other day, two million residents of Scotland decided to stick with the union. For a bit there it appeared that secession was on the cards. It was a briefly thrilling moment - how many people can say they've lived through that? Independence is a stirring word. But the dissolution of centuries of union felt like a manifest tragedy. As a more-or-less unbiased bystander, I had mixed feelings about the referendum.

The idealogical contradictions on both sides were apparent to me, as I'm sure they were to many others. On the conservative side, for the people who believe in nationalism and pride in one's country, in self-rule and distance from that other union, the EU, the idea of Scotland removing itself from the UK was horrifying. How dare they, went the cry. For the leftists who clamoured for Scottish independence it was no less a contradiction: for them nationalism is anathema and the universal brotherhood of peoples is a more unifying force than political division, and yet they wanted liberal Scotland to overthrow the 'establishment' politics of Westminster. In the end, neither of them have received quite what they wanted - no independence but a further federalism of the UK, and who knows how many more fissiparous tendencies engendered.

There's talk now of London and the other big cities getting more control of revenues and spending. The Cornish would no doubt love a bit of a parliament of their own. The Welsh, for so long a forgotten appendage to the English, perhaps would want to govern themselves. As for the English - do they want yet another burdensome government and bureaucracy on which to spend their taxes?

The journalist Mark Grigorian used the Scottish referendum as a touchpoint of civility and political sophistication. He pointed out that the ruling government did not try to use the media to stamp out secessionary talk, or send the police to suppress the dissidents, or snatch the ballot, or indeed indulge in any of the actions that scared governments across the rest of the world indulge in when faced with a popular uprising. He pondered how the secessionary movement in Nagorno-Karabakh might have played out had the Azerbaijani and Armenian nations stuck to a civilised modus operandi. But while for the rest of the world the Scottish referendum may appear as a high mark in politics, for those who went through it, the psychological wounds would perhaps take longer to heal.