ON October 5 we will welcome campaigners from 14 different parts of Europe who, like us, are working for their independence or greater self-government.
There is a network organisation, the International Commission of European Citizens (ICEC) which is a registered EU civic organisation promoting the right of self-determination – and we have Scottish participation in this through the Scottish Independence Convention, as well as Welsh participation.
Events have taken place in Catalonia, Flanders, Basque Country, Veneto, and South Tyrol among others, so we thought it was Scotland's turn to welcome delegates here. We have some new participants taking part with Greenland, Faroes, Sardinia, Galicia and Sicily coming to Edinburgh. We'll hear from Ireland and the North of England too.
The aim is to expand and strengthen this network and to learn from each other. We can all benefit from this. While we may have different domestic agendas, we share a commitment to building a path to non-violent, democratic self-determination.
Why hasn't more of this happened over the past 50 years of the modern Scottish independence movement? Obviously, Europe was a very different place for much of this time but there were other reasons.
A little story. After the death of Franco, the release of Catalan and Basque activists from prison and the prospect of new devolved assemblies, some of us on the SNP National Executive in the late 1970s proposed that we should invite Jordi Pujol to speak at the Bannockburn rally.
He was the leader of the Catalan national party, he became the first Catalan president two years later and won five further elections. (Yes there was a scandal in 2003 – when isn't there?). After a long argument, we narrowly won the vote and Pujol spoke at Bannockburn.
The arguments against the invitation were well-meaning and you will still hear them today, but now very much a minority. The reasons can be summarised as "these people may have done and said things that we don't agree with, this will be used by our opponents to discredit us, it is not worth the risk and we should just focus on Scotland".
Of course, we have to be careful with violence and humanitarian values, but the same people who were negative about building links with other national movements were often enthusiastic about the Scottish diaspora without questioning some of their background.
There was hope in that earlier period that the very substantial diaspora would offer the independence movement some support. The 1950s and 60s were peak years for overseas migration loss – few families did not have someone in North America, Australia or New Zealand. In practice, that diaspora, unlike the Irish equivalent, offered little support (an interesting question there to be explored). There was real interest and identification with the Quebec 1980 referendum and its failure reflected our own 1979 depression.
We have moved on. There is now a greater understanding and empathy with developments in other parts of Europe, but only among core activists, not among even the politically aware public. Yet the issues of political, cultural and economic over-centralisation and accompanying inequality are ones that underlie much of the public anger and disengagement throughout Europe.
We need to represent a fresh vision. You can have co-operation among different societies without denying democratic self-government. Respecting peoples with different histories and cultures and languages not as a curiosity for tourists but as distinct evolving communities makes sense as social policy. If people feel they are citizens making decisions for their future in a place with which they can identify, then the big issues like the environment, like providing an economic safety net, like creating a better life for the new generation, make sense.
This certainly doesn't mean ethnic exclusion. The archaeologists and historians keep supplying us with yet more information about the complexity of our origins and we will continue to absorb new people and change. But we are social animals and our tribes are real and vital for the transmission and development of civilisations.
Which is why we have to assert our right to self-determination if that is the choice of our societies. When we come together in Edinburgh, from Greenland to Sicily, we will sign a declaration of that right, one of the founding principles of the United Nations. We will do that in Holyrood.
You are then invited to join us at our Owning Our Futures conference at Greyfriars Kirk. This a fitting location as the place where the National Covenant was signed in 1638. Yes that was about religion, but at its core was a claim to the people of Scotland's right to make our own choices. Let us share that claim with our guests and hear their stories.
