Scotland c/o The United Kingdom: the invisible country

One of the main reasons why Ireland can attract investment is because people know it is there. Scotland, on just about any map printed outside the UK is labelled as Great Britain, the United Kingdom, or worse: England. Ireland, however, having attained statehood in 1921, shows up as a nation: it is there to be noticed.

The simple fact is that the vast majority of people throughut the world view Scotland as being nothing more than a part of England. Indeed, there are even people actually living in Scotland who are not even aware that it exists. True stories such as Nigerian women overheard on a train talking about their new life living in England when they were in fact living in Scotland. Or, of a Swiss traveller telling a fellow guest in a Scottish hostel that it was the furthest north he’d ever been in England. Or how historian Norman Davies recounted in the Sunday Times of how a fellow traveller spoke of his "English passport" when no such document exists and how a Polish friend received a letter addressed "…Edinburgh, Scotland, England".

Of course the Polish are by no means alone in this confusion. A simple search on the internet revealed numerous sites that have no apparent knowledge of Scotland being anything other than a region of England. There are countless examples, of which here are just a few:

The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), a service of the U.S. Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health, who list the Department of Cardiology at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh as being in "Scotland, England": http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1693201

Language-Programmes.net, a German website who list Glasgow as being in England:

http://www.language-programs.de/sprachschule/89/446/ableenglish_school_glasgow.htm

BRICS, an international PhD school, hosted by the Universities of Aarhus and Aalborg in Denmark, who list the address of Edinburgh university as: University of Edinburgh, Scotland, England". http://www.bric.ku.dk/seminars_and_symposia/seminars/seminars_2008/

And is it really any wonder when Scotland simply looks the same as England. Drive from England to Scotland and nothing really changes. Yes, there’s a sign that says Welcome to Scotland, yet it might as well have said Welcome to Rutland for all the difference it makes. The road signs remain the same, the car number plates are the same - it simply looks the same.