Europe breathes sigh of relief
Europe breathed a sigh of relief yesterday after Scotland voted to reject independence from Britain, easing fears of a separatist domino effect on the continent and the risk of a British exit from the EU.
Many European capitals had the jitters before the vote, worrying how they would deal with an independent Scotland's place in the EU and Nato, and about the effect on nationalist movements like in Spain's Catalonia.
While the European Union had stayed officially neutral before the vote, there was clear relief in Brussels after the result that the first ever break-up of a member state was off the cards.
European Commission head Jose Manuel Barroso -- who had angered separatists earlier this year by saying an independent Scotland would find it hard to rejoin the EU -- welcomed the result as a boost for a "united, open and stronger Europe".
And while there was no explicit reference to the 2017 'In-Out' referendum on EU membership promised by British Premier David Cameron that Brussels has been watching carefully, the Scottish vote was clearly seen as reducing the risk.
"I think it reduces the risk in some ways," Simon Hix, Professor of European and Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics, told AFP.
"The next couple of years are not going to be taken up with Britain in Europe for this government, but with what to do inside Britain", he said, referring to likely political wrangling over the granting of more autonomy to both Scotland and England.
An independent Scotland would have given succour to separatist movements across the continent, ranging from the Basque region straddling the border between Spain and France, to Flanders, Corsica, Venice and Bavaria.
The Spanish government yesterday welcomed Scotland's "No" vote, but Catalans set on breaking away from Spain pushed ahead defiantly for their own ballot on self-rule. The region's president Artur Mas said his bid to hold a vote on independence from Spain had been "strengthened" by Scotland's referendum regardless of the result and despite Madrid's fierce resistance.
"There is a wave of relief in European governments, because they had feared a European domino effect," Jeremy Dodeigne, a political scientist at the Louvain Catholic University in Belgium, told AFP.
BALUCHISTAN DEMAND SCOTS-STYLE VOTE
Baluch separatist leaders yesterday called on Pakistan to follow in Britain's footsteps by holding a referendum similar to Scotland's on granting independence to the insurgency-wracked province.
Resource-rich Baluchistan is the largest of Pakistan's four provinces, but its roughly seven million inhabitants have long complained they do not receive a fair share of its gas and mineral wealth.
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