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Comment by carnitine | Hacker News Reader

Because fracturing your country and making it poorer and smaller probably isn’t desirable?

A non Yugoslavian, I regret the breakup of Yugoslavia immensely but I do wonder if any of the former constituent states would agree with you regarding Scotland or me regarding Yugoslavia?

Note that it's an open question if the Scots economy would remain worse per capita, not disagreeing there is/was pain ahead in transition.

From former Czechoslovakia, our disintegration was a mixed parcel.

The best thing is that Slovaks had to stand on their own feet and their nationalists slowly had stop blaming everything on Prague. This kind of whiny nationalism embodied by then-prime minister of Slovakia Vladimir Meciar is somewhat disgusting and I can see its softer version in Scotland right now.

The worst thing is that yes, our international weight has gone down significantly.

But there was customs union between CZ and SK even after the split. I cannot imagine the economic pain if the former federation was suddenly divided by a hard border, as Scotland and England would be.

> I cannot imagine the economic pain if the former federation was suddenly divided by a hard border, as Scotland and England would be.

It doesn't have to be, even if Scotland was part of EU and not England.

UK and Spain/EU negociated maintaining some of the Schengen rules for the Gibraltar/Spain border despite its status still being disputed by Spain and a bumpy history. There is no reason Scotland and rest of UK cannot have a treaty allowing soft border.

Looking at the Irish situation right now, I am skeptical about any such treaty with regard to Scotland.

IMO the collapse of Yugoslavia has mostly made the newly-independent states doomed to be forever at the periphery of capital.

> "Note that it's an open question if the Scots economy would remain worse per capita, not disagreeing there is/was pain ahead in transition"

"Remain" is doing a lot of work here. Scotland runs a sizeable deficit with the rest of the union and with the decline of North Sea oil revenues that will only increase. Of course that might not "remain", but leaving the UK and then joining the EU is going to create a 5-10 year period of turbulence as well.

Still, there's more important things than GDP.

Smaller is desireable (leaner government, and fairer representation). Poorer is a matter of opinion -- Scotland has a healthy economy.

I’m talking from the perspective of a non-Scottish citizen. The UK - a healthy economy = poorer.

Smaller vs larger has arguments on either side. I think when you’re talking about major world powers there’s an appeal to not downsizing.

Decentralization is a key to robustness. I can't speak for this particular case. But generally I think it is desirable to have. Real sustainable progress often happens in the small and builds bottom up. People in different regions have different needs and ways of doing things. Distributed power leads to less exploitation.

You obviously haven't been to Belgium, which has 6 governments (and prime ministers) for a country that has the size of 1/10th of Italy. Decentralization has benefits, yes, but as for everything there are limits to it.

So what's the negatives Belgium is suffering from, because of their 6 governments? Comparing them to the rest of the EU, Belgium seems quite successful at whatever they are doing.

There's a cost, and it is often annoying and widely discussed, even joked about in highly federal countries. But there's benefits that are quite apparent I think.

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