The language centre at the University of Utrecht rejoices under the name of the James Boswell Institute. Most of the students who pass through its corridors have never heard of the Scottish biographer of Dr Johnson, scribbler and highland flâneur whose name sits over the institution.
Boswell seems an appropriate spirit to choose to preside over this most international of settings, abuzz with the clacking of many tongues, new friendships and the fizz of fresh understandings brewing.
As a callow young visiting student, finding myself in the muted civility of this Dutch city, this familiar, unexpected detail tickled me. Boswell proclaimed himself “completely a citizen of the world”. “In my travels through Holland, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Corsica, France,” he said, “I never felt myself from home.” It was touching, in a strange land, to see the world repaying the compliment.
In the 1760s, at the urging of his douce, rather soor-faced father, the 23-year-old abandoned his usual pursuits of blether, loafing and dissipation and frogmarched himself to the Netherlands to complete his legal education. I’ve always been dumb as a brick as a language student, but Boswell was no squish. In Holland, Boswell wooed in French but struggled to master the glottal language of his new neighbours. With characteristic good heart, he did his best to master the roaring “g”s and toothy vowels of his hosts.
Boswell was following in the footsteps of generations who took the opportunities of youth to rummage through antiquities of a wider Europe before work, family and duty robbed life of these opportunities. Generations of Boswell’s family had become learned in law at the foot of Dutch masters.
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So, two and a bit centuries later, and only moderately self-consciously, I made my own pilgrimage across the North Sea for the low skies of the Netherlands for study. At first, the geography strikes you. Scotland is all elbows and spines. City and wilderness, town and heath, you toil over the humps and bumps of this country. Architecturally, Edinburgh is a bed of nails. The spikes and spires and monuments pin up the sky, far off.
In Holland, the consuming flatness confronts you immediately with big, bare heavens. When clouds gather, they smudge across the entire vista, from one corner of your eye, to the other. The sky and horizon have an intimacy that is at first unsettling. It has the disorientating quality of an ear infection, which leaves your hammer, stirrup and anvil all a-jingle, your balance shot.
The itinerant Scotsman’s heart comes to skip a beat at every modest incline — the joy of a slope in a slopeless land. Then the social disorientations strike. At once participating and apart, you learn from the encounter and think about foreignness differently.
This idea of a Scotland rooted in a wider world always struck me as profoundly attractive. It said something about Scottish distinctiveness; but it was also a vision of Scotland in Europe; a vision of Scots as familiar and welcome faces in the wider world. These aren’t the values of a thick-set John Bull, bumptious and proudly ignorant of the rest of the world, but cherishing urbane ideals, inquisitive and cosmopolitan. The days of Voltaire may be long behind us. While Boswell was toiling in Utrecht, the great heathen of Ferney pronounced that “we look to Scotland for all our ideas of civilisation”.
But the idea that anyone would look to Scotland for illumination at all? That we are part of some larger, grander dialogue? That always seemed to me essential.
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The journey and my experiences render the heartlessness of the Brexit stramash a little strange. In the first flush of a joyless campaign, we are caught between John of Gaunt impersonators on one hand, and the greedy public management automatons on the other.
The first ragtag band of players want to spit epithets about the horrors of immigration, or to sing hymns to the squandered destiny of this sceptred isle. Unironically paraphrasing Donald Trump, they “want to make Britain great again”. And as for the latter? The manikins of Project Fact seem to regard the European Union as a necessary evil. Nicola Sturgeon demands a positive campaign, but hasn’t yet found authentic language to lend substance to that aspiration.
Some see the Scottish Nationalists’ Europhilia as a canny marketing position, designed to maximise the likelihood of constitutional mayhem in the UK. This cynicism seems misplaced. Cantankerous outriders like Jim Sillars may be willing to line up behind the Brexiteers. We should take the first minister’s defence of our participation in the EU at face value.
For most mature Scottish Nationalists, Scotland in Europe is existential. Our participation in the European Union cannot and should not be reduced to a spreadsheet calculation — a cold-hearted enterprise based on comparative economic advantage — or delirious fantasies of a disconnected Westminster sovereignty upon which nothing else gains any purchase.
Alan Johnston has suggested that friends of Europe in the United Kingdom “got the best lyrics, but we’re still struggling to put them to a tune”. As another great European once said, for the soldier, “You must speak to the soul in order to electrify him”. North and south of the border, the fight for Europe desperately needs the same electricity.