SCOTLAND WANTS YOU OR DOES SHE? EMPIRE SCOTS

Our new Parliament is imminent. Yet what about those Scots that the Union scattered across the border, and the world - exiled by history, yet patriotic in their hearts and minds. Will we welcome them home? Novelist JAMES BUCHAN, grandson of John Buchan, asks us to open our doors to the Imperial Scot.

THE reconvening of a parliament in Edinburgh in 2000, for the first time in almost 300 years, is history even before it has happened.

Ignorant though we are of both past and future, many Scots (and I imagine many English) believe that something valuable went out of Scotland with the Union of the Parliaments; and that April 30, 1707 was not just the last session of the Scottish parliament but, as the Jacobite historian Lockhart of Carnwarth lamented, ''the last day Scotland was Scotland.'' In disinterring that solemn day, many people expect the new parliament (this time in Prince Charles Edward Stuart's words) ''to make Scotland once more a free and happy people.''

The new parliament will thus consign the 300 years of Union at best to a parenthesis - in which the energies of the Scots were inexplicably diverted from their proper goals - and at worst to the dustbin of colonial history. In so doing, it throws down a challenge to a group of Scots whose chief loyalty is to that now discredited piece of history.

For those three centuries have left, draped about the earth but above all in England, a scattering of people who think themselves Scottish. Those Scots are not forced exiles, like the Scots exiles of the eighteenth century, such as the financier John Law or the Jacobite philosopher Sir James Steuart. Nor are they Canadians or Chileans who go by the names of Fraser or Ross. They are British men and women left stranded across the world by the receding tide of the British Empire, and held in place by material ties or simply by their own gravity.

Those men and women are what you might call Empire Scots, and they must now start to consider their position. For at the moment the Parliament sits down, the Empire Scot is transformed in the eyes of the world. He or she ceases to be a Kurd or Armenian, that is an involuntary exile of a sovereignty that does not exist; and becomes instead a deliberate absentee from one that does exist, like a modern non-Israeli Jew.

I have found already, on the Continent and in North America, that my self-description as Scottish is puzzling people. It is not that I do not possess a kilt, but that I do not display the manners and mental attitudes that such people now think of as properly Scots. The passports of the old regime are not being renewed. Arriving at Gretna, we will be streamed into a special queue and asked to fill a questionnaire. The first of its two questions might be: How can you be a Scot and not live in Scotland? The second is: What is that element in your personality, in that desert or suburbs or wherever it is you live, that allows you to claim Scottishness?

Only the twentieth century, said Raymond Aron, insists that ''no-one can have two countries.'' It is in the nature of modern nationalism to demand that people come home: not just because it can thus control them, but it can then control the very idea of nationality. At one extreme is Hitler's order to the Germans in central Europe, Russia and the Americas in the 1930s: Heim ins Reich!, Come Home to the Reich! At the other is that scepticism I encounter about my nationality. It is a repatriation that is social as well as spatial, for it orders that the middle class cease to be cosmopolitan, vigorous and liberal: cease, in short, to be middle class.

History, as everybody now knows, is bad. It is cruel, unhygienic, gross, conducted in funny languages, misdirected, plain wrong. Imperial history is the pits. Best is not to think about the past, or rather to follow the example of film and television: to enjoy the past as simply the gestures and occupations of the present dressed up in weird or flattering costume. The past is about knowledge and the future about desire. If you consent to know nothing about the past, it becomes indistinguishable from the future, just a place of wants (which is why, of course, history on film and videotape is bosoms and tight breeks and bannock-cakes and foaming ales.)

Yet the period 1707-1997 was not an interregnum in which the true course of Scots history mysteriously went walkabout: it was the period of Scotland's commercial prosperity, of its masterpieces of thought and literature, of its feats of arms, even of its happiness. In 1707, Scotland was bust. Failed harvests, a collapse of the fishery, a run on the only bank, a murderous tariff

war and a botched colonial scheme in the Americas had closed down every entry into a cartel-ised world economy. In the end there was no commercial alternative to Union. Two half-baked rebellions failed, leaving just an impotent nostalgia - in Scott, Carlyle and Stevenson - for the auld times.

The British Empire was not merely an arena for Scots soldiers to risk their lives, administrators their health and merchants their property - but a whole new space for the Scots mind to expand into. Edward Gibbon wrote in a sort of awe in 1788 of ''a strong ray of philosophic light [that] has broke from Scotland in our own times.'' Whatever Scotland was in that period, it wasn't an English colony.

AS much to the point, it is the empire that made the Scots: very few of us can trace our origins to the other side of that watershed in 1707. If I may speak of my family, it emerged from the darkness of time, drink and illiteracy in or around Stirling at the time of the Union. As Scotland slowly gained in prosperity and polish, so did my family. It got itself an education and a little bit of property.

On October 2, 1878, my family, along with much of small-town southern Scotland, was pauperised by the failure of the City of Glasgow Bank. That my grandfather's grandfather was not an investor in that crooked enterprise, merely the trustee of a widow's estate in Peebles that owned some City Bank stock, did him no good at all. The Lords' Dickensian delight in throwing out ''Buchan's Case'', and the smug little leaders in The Economist, taught me that the contempt for Scots that we associate with Mrs Thatcher's London has a long history.

The collapse of the City Bank sent my family off in two directions. They were driven into a romantic Scotland of day dreams, poetry and the supernatural; and into an obsessional requirement to show the English it could do what they did. Those impulses, apparently so contradictory, were partly resolved in the personality and career of my grandfather, the writer John Buchan. My heroes as a child were such Scots of Empire, for whom no ground was too stony, no market too protected, no position too perilous, no language too abstruse but that they submitted to the force of their concentration.

Naturally, when I learned that the British Empire was wicked, and that those men and women were the servants or parasites of a historical no-no, the submerged contradiction forced itself upon my consciousness. Driven, like some pathetic mental refugee, into a second exile, the Empire Scot withdraws into himself. My Scottishness become a private matter, secret and stimulating, like the toast of a Jacobite. It permitted me, as no doubt many other Empire Scots, to be a stranger in whatever land I happened to be in, and thus preserve my personality intact; and that is the best condition for a writer, or indeed for a chemical engineer. When I hear other Scottish writers lamenting their exclusion from society before large international audiences, I think (and would say if there were but a pause in the lament): At least you come from an actual place and can visit that place.

Once, in the winter of 1974-75, in a roadside tea-shop at the Salang Pass in Afghanistan, I attempted with great effort but small success to explain to the men snowed up with me that the United Kingdom (englestan in Persian) was geographically distinct from the Republic of India (hendustan). In such circumstances, it was hopeless to insist on Scotland, let alone that country of the mind I mentioned.

Yet, of course, it is pre-eminently from the English that this psychological distance - what the Germans call Abgrenzung or delimitation - must be observed. Without my sense of Scottishness, I'm not sure I could have got through my long residences in England in the last 40 years. It kept me safe from the deceit and unscrupulousness of English policy of my childhood, from the poisonous social battles of my teens and now, to cut a long story short, from the hedonism, ignorance and incorrigible silliness of modern London.

One evening in London, probably in 1761, Adam Smith was talking about the beauty of Glasgow, and Dr Johnson cut him short: ''Pray, Sir, have you ever seen Brentford?'' Boswell was disgusted at his hero. For capital cities believe nothing is real but their own pettifogging and tyrannical topography: everywhere else is Brentford. I, like Smith and even Boswell, am proud to come from Brentford. Ian Fleming made a slightly different point in The Man with the Golden Gun, when he has Bond turn down a knighthood by cable: EYE AM A SCOTTISH PEASANT AND WILL

ALWAYS FEEL AT HOME BEING A SCOTTISH

PEASANT. In return for that blessing, Fleming offered up on the psychological altar of his homeland a portion of his achievements; as I do, at a greatly reduced scale.

SUCH thoughts may seem to you premature. The resurrection of the Parliament seeks to abolish two anomalies, one constitutional, the other political. The first arises in the polo-mint or doughnut character of Scots government since the end of the nineteenth century: Scotland has had its own judiciary and executive (if that is the word for the Scottish Office) but no legislature in the middle.

The second and more important is the sense in Scotland that the Tory governments of 1979 to 1997 betrayed the Anglo-Scots settlements of the eighteenth century by imposing policies that were repugnant to the Scots (and, indeed, to all western European nations). That the Scots had been so brilliantly successful under English Toryism, creating a prosperity unthinkable in the stygian days of the first of the Tory recessions of 1980-82, reminds us that money isn't everything.

It is possible, as the Unionists hope, that the parliament will be the parliament and that will be that; or rather Scotland will become the British Bavaria, which has been known to pursue its own foreign policy. In reality, of course, political change is like a corset or a strong medicine: change in one part of the political body forces change elsewhere. We need only look to the continent - where the introduction of the euro will cause the federalists in western Germany and the Benelux to cry: Look, we have a European central bank but no European central government! How odd, how historically unprecedented, how embarrassing! We demand, in the name of order and hygiene, a European central government!

The Edinburgh parliament creates an anomaly in the government of the United Kingdom, that is known by the harmless shorthand of the West Lothian Question, and is merely a symptom of a bastard or incomplete federation. To resolve it, England itself must be federalised. That was long ago grasped by the nationalists in Scotland. Alex Salmond, twinkling with sincerity, has talked of England's ''attractive national identity'' and ''proud history'': a witticism that, alas, has so far quite gone over the English head.

The British Unionists are being squeezed from two directions: by Mr Salmond and the Ulster Republicans on one side and by the euro on the other. Unionists hate them all with a passion, for they still believe that British history, but for Amritsar and some other unfortunate episodes, is essentially something good. They can understand why the Germans might want to submerge their national history in a bland Europeanness, but cannot understand why they must do the same. I expect that over the next 5-10 years, by means of commercial terror and a thorough and comradely indoctrination in the politically correct school of history, they will be brought to see their mistake.

And there is no economical reason why Scotland not be fully independent or rather a state in a rather close European federation. In terms of output per person, and thanks to the heroics of the last 15 years, Scotland is already as prosperous as the lower groups of countries in the European Union. Throw in the revenues and output from oil production that at present accure to the United Kingdom, and Scotland climbs into the middle group. Add payments from the European structural funds, which, for example, make up 5% of Ireland's GNP, and you have a robust economy; and Scotland, because of the poverty of her land north of the Highland line and in the Isles, has a greater claim to such subsidies than Ireland or Crete. An independent Scotland would no doubt be glad to substitute for the English taxpayer the German, who has the advantage of not being an auld enemy.

Scots independence or provincial euro-autonomy seem to me by far the likeliest outcomes of the present upheaval. What then happens to the Empire Scot will depend on the date at which it comes about. We may continue for a while in the position of the Jews of Brooklyn in their relations with Israel: progressively disillusioned by chauvinistic governments in the homeland but supporting the place come thick or thin, or else we have no personality: and receiving from the metropolis only rare expressions of a fathomless contempt. Or we will settle in this actual Scotland, but too old to be of any service to that state, merely a burden. Or we will be dead, and with us a mental country that will astonish any future Scot who chances on this

article.