Europe’s Last Colonial Secret: Scotland’s Subalternity and the Legal Duty of Decolonisation. Professor Alf Baird’s Postcolonial Analysis of Scotland at the United Nations in Geneva, 18 September 2025.

Professor Alf Baird, author of Doun-Hauden: The Socio-Political Determinants of Scottish Independence, a major contribution to understanding the colonial condition in which Scots are emprisonned, presented an intervention at the United Nations in Geneva that challenges not only Westminster’s narrative concerning Scotland, but also the intellectual complacency of the world regarding the persistence of colonial structures in Europe and around the world. His presence at the Palais des Nations placed Scotland firmly within the field of postcolonial theory and international law, alongside peoples across the Global South who have fought for liberation from external domination. The argument developed through his intervention demonstrates that colonial domination has continued on the northern half of the island of Great Britain. A nation long assumed to belong to a stable constitutional order; an assumption sustained notably by English propaganda and a tightly managed academic discourse; reveals itself instead as a community maintained in subordination, structured dependency, and gradual erasure.

The conceptual foundation of Baird’s intervention derives from a rich canon of postcolonial scholarship. Frantz Fanon analysed colonisation as a structure that disfigures both the dominated subject and the dominant power. Aimé Césaire exposed the civilisational pathology of an empire that destroyed the humanity of those placed beneath it while degrading the humanity of those exercising control. Albert Memmi documented the construction of a social hierarchy that defines a colonised people as inferior by nature and the coloniser as superior by right. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o described the seizure of mental and cultural autonomy through the imposition of the coloniser’s language, effectively colonising the imagination. Paulo Freire emphasised the internalisation of domination through pedagogy that trains the oppressed to distrust themselves. Michael Hechter revealed the existence of “internal colonialism” within multi-national states, characterised by a dominant ethno-cultural group imposing its values, laws and economic priorities on a subordinate nation. (I am not personally persuaded by the term “internal colonialism,” as it tends to euphemise the colonial reality; and I therefore remain wary of it, mindful of the enduring habits of Perfidious Albion. Nonetheless, the underlying concept retains analytical validity.)

Baird’s analysis shows Scotland as a paradigmatic example of these theories. A sovereign state with a legal system rooted in Roman law, a parliament representing a distinct constitutional tradition, and full diplomatic agency vanished from international recognition in 1707. The removal of Scotland as a subject of international law did not yield a new, equal state. English state continuity remained unbroken. England’s institutions, court hierarchy, foreign representation, and standing international treaties carried forward seamlessly under the newly adopted label “Great Britain”. A separate Scottish state ceased to be recognised. The renamed state continued to operate precisely as before, but with authority extended northwards. This historical transformation reflects what Césaire identified as a central mechanism of empire: the masking of domination through legitimising narratives; what may be understood here as annexation presented as union.

Coercion saturated the circumstances of this constitutional takeover. For centuries Scotland enjoyed peaceful commercial engagement across Europe, building maritime networks with France, the Low Countries and Scandinavia rather than pursuing territorial domination overseas. A nation with a merchant identity rather than an imperial one never imposed foreign rule on others. Against that backdrop, the Darien venture must be correctly interpreted: not as a project of colonisation but as an attempt to re-establish independent access to world markets when England’s mercantilist restrictions had strangled Scottish trade. Extensive scholarship in economic history confirms that the failure of the Darien colony arose less from commercial misjudgement than from English obstruction, including instructions to English colonies not to assist Scottish settlers. The resulting financial crisis left Scotland structurally exposed at precisely the moment English power wished to force constitutional absorption. Having read several works or papers on Darien, it does not qualify as colonialism. It was a commercial venture of a "desperate" people under English threat. I would add that it did not bankrupt Scotland at all, especially since only a small percentage of the subscribed capital was actually released. Another English colonial narrative to justify its colonialism in Scotland.

London intensified the pressure. The Alien Act of 1705 threatened to classify Scots as foreigners in their nearest markets while shutting access to English ports and legal channels of commerce. Naval vessels appeared in the Forth. Troops massed along the Border with orders to fire if necessary. Petitions against union spread through almost every burgh; riots revealed overwhelming public opposition. The English government meanwhile deployed bribes, pensions and titles to purchase the compliance of a narrow elite. Such conditions preclude the possibility of free consent. Colonial sovereignty originates in violence, even when later stabilised and obscured through legal and institutional forms. Contemporary international-law standards, affirmed repeatedly within the United Nations system, hold that agreements extracted under economic duress, threat of force, and elite corruption cannot constitute a lawful foundation for sovereign union. A treaty born from coercion and structured to extinguish one party’s international personality belongs not to the genre of partnership but to the history of annexation.

Colonial domination rarely relies on violence alone. Economic dependence, once constructed, maintains the hierarchy without overt coercion. Baird’s intervention drew attention to a persistent structure of extraction. Abundant Scottish energy, fisheries, agriculture, timber, minerals, and maritime resources enrich a state headquartered elsewhere while communities in the resource-producing territory are left in poverty or declining health. Infrastructure that would support direct global trade from Scotland remains restricted or underdeveloped. Major ports, transport corridors, and industrial nodes exist primarily to serve interests centred in the southern state that absorbed sovereignty. In practice, Scottish ports, transport links, and logistical capacities have undergone significant decline and restructuring under the priorities of the English state, to support trade interception and diminish Scotland’s autonomous trade capacity. Notably, Alf Baird’s advisory work with ports across the world, including in former colonies of the Global South, has informed his comparative understanding and awareness of Scotland’s colonial condition. The economic system described by Baird echoes Memmi’s analysis that colonial prosperity rests on the systematic appropriation of value from the colonised territory. A wealthy state cannot rationally justify poverty in a resource-rich land unless that poverty is required for dominance.

Culture forms the next layer of subjugation. Fanon demonstrates that colonialism operates through the disruption of language, memory, and identity, reshaping the consciousness of the colonised. Ngũgĩ, in turn, shows that the imposition of the coloniser’s language in education and public life fractures the continuity of a people’s sense of self. Baird’s intervention exposed this linguistic domination in Scotland. Scots and Gaelic, once the primary languages of civic life, were defined as inferior dialects, discouraged in schools, removed from the legal sphere, and associated with shame. Scottish children learned to speak in a tongue other than their cultural inheritance, while those who persisted in using Scottish languages were treated as socially and intellectually subordinate. The deliberate destruction of a linguistic ecosystem impedes collective memory, corrodes national consciousness, and privileges those aligned with the coloniser’s culture. In Freire’s terms, the internalisation of oppression allows domination to persist without the constant application of force.

A further dimension of Baird’s analysis concerns demographic transformation. Dominant powers alter the population composition of a subordinate nation by incentivising emigration of the indigenous population and importing settlers aligned with the dominant culture. Scotland experienced mass population loss through forced displacement, colonial labour export, clearance of communities, and structural underdevelopment of rural and urban economies. Meanwhile, managerial and authority roles within Scottish institutions are dominated by English settlers and Anglophile, self-hating individuals connected to the colonising state and its affiliated networks, particularly those embedded within English and Anglophone structures. Dominant cultural norms travel with these elites, reproducing a hierarchy in which local identity is treated as provincial and subordinate. Fanon described this phenomenon as the creation of a “compartmentalised society” in which the colonised inhabit the lower psychological and socio-economic spaces of their own homeland.

Memmi captures the essence of colonial psychology in showing how domination endures when the colonised internalise doubt, coming to view liberation as risky or destabilising. Assertions that Scotland is too poor, too small/wee, too incompetent to govern itself reflect this psychological structure. Such narratives reinforce a collective sense of inadequacy while obscuring the fact that those conditions arose from extractive domination. Colonial domination penetrates the psyche, producing a subaltern consciousness that doubts its own worth. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o later crystallised the necessary remedy in his call to “decolonise the mind”. A people must recover belief in its own agency, capacity, dignity and cultural voice before political sovereignty can be fully reclaimed. Scots must put an end to the “Scottish cultural cringe” and their inferiority complex.

The legal dimension of Baird’s argument raises the stakes for the international system. The right to self-determination appears as the first article of both the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. The United Nations General Assembly described the abolition of colonialism as a moral and legal imperative in Resolution 1514, with recognition of the legal category of Non-Self-Governing Territories articulated in Resolution 1541. A territory qualifies when three criteria apply: distinct geography, distinct peoplehood, and absence of full self-government. Scotland satisfies every criterion. The Scottish Parliament does not derive its authority from the Scottish sovereign people, but from legislation imposed by a parliament dominated by the colonising nation. That parliament in London claims legal power to dissolve all Scottish democratic institutions. Such a structure does not represent voluntary union (a colonial lie), but continued external control.

Erga omnes obligations require that all states uphold the right of peoples to self-determination. Decolonisation, once recognised as owed, must proceed unconditionally. Any refusal by the British state to facilitate Scotland’s decolonisation represents a violation of obligations owed to the entire international community. In such a situation, recognition of Scotland’s claim becomes a test of whether international law remains genuinely universal. To deny this case would reveal that colonialism survives through geographic prejudice: ending where European power interests begin.

Baird’s intervention forces the world to confront a persistent form of imperial continuity. Scotland, often imagined as a co-architect of empire given English colonial propaganda, appears instead as one of its earliest victims. The British state has long claimed that annexation created an equal partnership, a proposition challenged by historical fact, constitutional analysis and economic reality. Narratives of partnership obscure the existence of colonial domination. The colonised rarely receive the vocabulary necessary to describe their status until a new interpretive lens reveals what had been naturalised.

Domination adapts to new languages and new institutions. The oppressed require international solidarity when domestic structures remain under the control of the oppressor. Baird’s intervention aligns Scotland with a global movement that has transformed world order since 1945. Peoples in Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, the Arab world and the Pacific faced claims that their submission reflected nature rather than force. Scotland experiences the same rhetorical patterns, grounded in the same hierarchy of value.

Liberation in this context is not an act of aggression but an act of restoration. Decolonisation is the recovery of dignity from beneath centuries of imposed inferiority. It demands no hostility, only justice. A nation subjected to erasure yet still preserving its memory, culture, language, and soul embodies the ultimate defiance of empire. For Fanon, the struggle of the oppressed must ultimately move beyond replacing the oppressor to dismantling the hierarchy that sustains domination. The colonised seek neither vengeance nor dominion; they seek equilibrium. Scotland’s reclamation of statehood would not diminish others. It would reassert a truth long denied: that equality among nations means no people remains owned, spoken for, or managed by another.

Professor Baird’s presence at the United Nations signals a new chapter. A truth long buried has now been spoken in the centre of the global legal system. International law cannot maintain credibility if colonial subjugation is allowed to endure in Europe under the guise of constitutional union. The Scottish people remain doun-hauden, held down, not by weakness but by a structure designed to suppress their sovereignty. A sovereign people does not require permission to exist. Recognition follows from the fact of peoplehood itself. The whole world knows Scotland as a unique nation.

A nation that was a state remains a nation capable of statehood once again. The obligation to assist that return lies not merely with Scotland, but with all states committed to a world where colonial subjugation and territorial alienation have no legitimacy. Decolonisation remains unfinished business. The world must now decide whether its principles are geographically selective or genuinely universal. A future United Nations worthy of the name will recognise that Scotland’s liberation strengthens the global order rather than threatening it.

A people held doun-hauden retain the right to rise.

Watch Professor Alf Baird's intervention at the United Nations in Geneva: