Scotland has voted decisively against breaking from the United Kingdom and becoming an independent country. The key thing to grasp is that there is no precedent for a modern, highly integrated country breaking into two pieces in peacetime. True, Czechoslovakia divided into the Czech Republic and Slovakia back in 1992. But both new countries were emerging from communism. Both had to bring in huge numbers of new laws, rules and regulations to create modern, market-based democracies almost from scratch. 

Why should a sober, respectable and hard-headed people like the Scots choose for their national poet a romantic rebel who thumbed his nose at all authority and was as free with liquor as he was with women? Instead of Burns Night suppers, asks Morton, shouldn’t we expect the practical-minded Scots to have founded Macadam Societies, to honor the pioneer of improved roads? Or Mackintosh Societies, to honor the inventor of the waterproof? 

The domestic employment outlook remains just as frustrating as close to six million Spaniards are unemployed, with a startling 56.1 percent youth unemployment rate. The youth unemployment rate in Spain is twice what it is in the rest of the Eurozone, and with such little prospects in their home country, most are choosing to leave. In the first few years of the Spanish crisis most of the unemployed had chosen to remain in Spain and relied on two-year redundancy packages to survive. 

The latest Bond film Skyfall fills viewer’s heads with delectable, admirable views of what it means to be British. There are plenty of other explanations as to why Bond films are adored by American audiences. But some of that success must be credited to the long tradition of Anglophilia in America. The American expansionist impulse has a connection to the love of Englishness, as the United States inherited, more or less, the role of the great imperial power from Britain.