Alex Salmond, a Nationalist in the Age of Globalization
Former Scottish first minister Alex Salmond, who died last week, made Scottish nationalism mainstream. His independence promise was caught in a key contradiction, seeking to make Scotland a model social democracy within globalized capitalism.
Scottish National Party leader Alex Salmond poses for photographs by the Forth Bridge on the final day of his election campaign tour of Scotland in May 1999. (David Cheskin / PA Images via Getty Images)
The leader of the dominant Scottish National Party (SNP) for two decades, Scotland’s first minister for seven years, and leader of the campaign for independence in 2014, Alex Salmond was the distinguished political figure of his generation.
The longtime SNP leader was despised in his own lifetime by some in Westminster circles, and even more in Scotland’s own decaying Unionist establishment. After his death this Saturday, aged sixty-nine, it is telling of the bitter final chapters of Salmond’s career that the most heated arguments over his legacy are now fought out within the nationalist movement that he did so much to create.
Even that claim — that Alex Salmond was the peerless architect of modern Scottish nationalism and, therefore, devolution-era Scotland — could stoke controversy. But it is hard to refute by the record.
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