My Gaelic teacher, a native of the Isles, went to Lake Hallstatt in Austria on a skiing holiday once. He marveled at how the ancient houses that are famously preserved there so closely resembled the old Scottish black houses, at least one of which was in use on his island when he was a boy.
Yeah, it's quite interesting how similar some traces of ancient culture are all over the continent. In that sense I think we can speak of a Pan-European ancient heritage. We have hill forts here similar to ones you'd find on the Isles, and megaliths from a culture that's even older than the Indo-Europeans.
Identities can be complex and multi-faceted.
Yes. On the other hand they can also all be deconstructed, so I think such an identity is always partially a choice, based on some kind of gut feeling.
Did you know that Germans actually wrote Highland Cathedral, one of the candidates for the Scottish national anthem?
Really? Sounds very Scottish to me (not just because of the bagpipes).
Continental people may have been far more mobile, I am unsure.
Some weren't at all it seems, some were because of the usual necessities, like military service or finding work, increasingly so after the Industrial Revolution. Then of course there were plenty of wars that displaced huge parts of the population, especially the 30 years war and the world wars.
Thank you, I'm still trying to iron it out though. I don't always get it right. Maybe I need to make a point of thinking this through and writing it down or something.
Well, I do think your approach works better if you're talking about Scotland, but with other areas your enthusiasm can lead you too far into traditionally nationalist territory.
Crimea would be such an example, where history has moved on in a way that it becomes difficult to combine civic nationalism with the historical Crimean Tartar heritage and the current demographics / Russian nationalism. I don't know whether that is too much idealism or lack of regional expertise or both on your part, but this is a thing where I'd say your ideas become somewhat inconsistent. The continent is full of similar regions, where any approach that emphasizes historical traditions too much would fail. Then I'm sceptical about civic nationalism working out in general yet, I see it more as a work in progress than a really established thing in most countries.
In Scotland all that might be less of a problem, you have strong traditions and a clearly definable cultural heritage, that has been able to absorb a lot of influences, helped by very clear cut geographical borders. For many generations people would rather migrate away from Scotland than to it, so there are no such problems as majority English areas there.