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BRUSSELS: If Scots vote for independence, it will be in part because they believe assurances that their small Atlantic peninsula can quit the United Kingdom without ever leaving the secure embrace of the European Union.

That, however, is not how the EU's top executive sees it. European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso expressed the view early this year that Scotland would be automatically excluded on becoming independent and would find readmission to the 28-member bloc "extremely difficult, if not impossible".

Between these two poles lie uncharted legal waters, and campaigners on both sides are already engaged in the kind of debate once confined to classes in constitutional theory. That debate could rage in pubs, cafes and parliaments across Europe if, against the odds, Thursday's referendum breaks up Britain.

Partial legal precedents cited for and against the Scottish case include Algeria, which kept some access to European markets for a time after it broke from France, Danish-ruled Greenland's exit from the EU and Kosovo's disputed statehood, as well as the EU's absorption of 16 million East Germans with minimal fuss.

Ultimately, however, it may be less lawyerly argument and more messy but flexible EU politics that win the day.

A compromise could prevent five million EU citizens being cast out against their will while easing fears in Spain and beyond that it opens a Pandora's Box of centrifugal spirits - Catalan, Basque, Flemish, Breton, Lombard and many besides.

"Whatever the lawyers say, this will come down to politics," said an official in Brussels who, like diplomats and bureaucrats across the bloc, would not be drawn into the campaign by talking publicly on what most of them hope remains a hypothetical issue.

"It's the EU way," the official said. "Whatever politicians eventually negotiate can be made to fit the texts."

Whether it can be done in 18 months to coincide with a formal independence declaration, as Scots nationalists assert, is another matter. They face a huge task of unravelling the UK in that time, while Britons elect a new London parliament in May that could then, if Prime Minister David Cameron is re-elected, call a referendum on the UK itself quitting the EU.

"It would all take longer than you think," John Kerr, a pro-union Scot who was Britain's EU envoy and headed its diplomatic service, wrote in a paper for the Centre for European Reform.

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European Union legal fog lets Scots bank on politics to keep them in

BRUSSELS, Belgium If Scottish voters this week say Yes to independence, not only will they tear up the map of Great Britain, theyll shake the twin pillars of Western Europes postwar prosperity and security the European Union and the U.S.-led NATO defence alliance.

In breaking away from the rest of the United Kingdom, Scotland would automatically find itself outside both the EU and NATO, and have to reapply to join both, officials from those Brussels-based organizations have stressed.

For the EU especially, Scottish re-entry could be a long and arduous process, with other countries dead set against letting the Scots retain the privileges awarded Britain: the so-called opt-outs from being required to use the euro single currency and to join the multination Schengen zone where internal border controls have been scrapped.

For NATOs admirals and generals, the current Scottish governments insistence on a sovereign Scotland becoming free of nuclear weapons would pose enormous strategic and operational headaches, even if a transitional grace period were agreed on. A new home port would have to be found for the Royal Navys four Trident missile-carrying submarines and their thermonuclear warheads, currently based on the Clyde.

This risks undermining the collective defence and deterrence of NATO allies, Britains Ministry of Defence has said. In what might be read as a warning to the Scots, the ministry has said a nuclear-free stance could constitute a significant hurdle to Scotland being allowed back into NATO.

Until Scotland rejoined the alliance, to which its belonged with the rest of Britain for 65 years, new arrangements would also need to be found to patrol vital shipping routes in the North Atlantic and North Sea. If Scotland were to choose not to rejoin, it would pose a conundrum for NATO for which there is no real precedent: what to do following the loss of a developed, democratically governed part of alliance territory that has opted for neutrality, said Daniel Troup, research analyst at the NATO Council of Canada.

Emergence of a new Western European country of 5 million inhabitants with roughly the land area of the Czech Republic or the U.S. state of Maine or would also set in motion political and social forces whose effects are impossible to predict. Because of British voting patterns, the political groups in England, Wales and Northern Ireland that are seeking Britains exit from the European Union would become proportionately stronger in Parliament.

Meanwhile, on the continent, from Catalonia in Spain to the Dutch-speaking Flemish areas of Belgium, other European peoples that do not have their own states would likely be emboldened to follow the Scots example.

Loss of Scotland would also weaken the influence of Britain inside the 28-nation European Union. For the moment, the British, along with the Germans and French, constitute the trade blocs Big Three. Without Scotlands population, Britain would drop to No. 4, behind Italy.

That would mean fewer British members of the European Parliament, as well as a reduced say in population-weighted decision-making in the EUs executive.

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A Scottish Yes to independence will mean an exit, at least for now, from the EU and NATO

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By: Ukraine Crisis Media Center

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(English) Failures of the European Union. Ukraine Crisis Media Center, 12th of September 2014 - Video

Sanctions Against Russia: What #39;s Different This Time?
Sept. 12 (Bloomberg) -- Russia threatened retaliation against a U.S. and European Union decision to stiffen sanctions against Moscow because of Ukraine and may ban some imports including clothing...

By: Bloomberg News

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