{"id":3803,"date":"2011-05-08T19:14:12","date_gmt":"2011-05-08T18:14:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.widmann.org.uk\/?p=3803"},"modified":"2011-05-08T19:14:12","modified_gmt":"2011-05-08T18:14:12","slug":"not-too-small","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/not-too-small\/","title":{"rendered":"Not too small"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/scotlandsize.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/scotlandsize-300x226.png\" alt=\"\" title=\"Size of Scotland\" width=\"300\" height=\"226\" class=\"alignleft size-medium wp-image-3815\" \/><\/a>When ordinary Scottish voters are asked whether they&#8217;d vote yes or no to Scottish independence, one frequent response is that Scotland is too small to be independent.<\/p>\n<p>I really don&#8217;t understand how anybody can believe this.  Surely it must be a consequence of living in a big country and being used to comparing yourself with Germany and France.<\/p>\n<p>In reality, Scotland has a very average size for an independent country in northern Europe.  Have a look at the graph on the left, which shows the population sizes of various northern European contries (it&#8217;s Scotland in blue).<\/p>\n<p>Of course Scotland won&#8217;t have the same influence as England, but similar countries such as Denmark, Norway and Ireland typically feel they have plenty of influence.<\/p>\n<p>I definitely don&#8217;t know of a popular movement in any country the size of Scotland that advocates joining a bigger neighbour because their country is too small to remain independent.  Even very similar countries with a long shared history, such as Denmark and Norway, never seriously discuss becoming one country again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When ordinary Scottish voters are asked whether they&#8217;d vote yes or no to Scottish independence, one frequent response is that Scotland is too small to be independent. I really don&#8217;t understand how anybody can believe this. Surely it must be a consequence of living in a big country and being used to comparing yourself with Germany and France. In reality, Scotland has a very average size for an independent country in northern Europe. Have a look at the graph on the left, which shows the population sizes [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[159,110,130,139],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3803","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-en","category-geography","category-politics","category-scotland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3803","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3803"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3803\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3803"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3803"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3803"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}