WITHIN many people’s living memories, the debate on Scottish national autonomy pivoted on the external ownership and control of national assets. Rising foreign dominance of our economy was the problem; the question was whether a parliament, devolved or independent, might alter that sad fate.

For critics of nationalism, the drain of domestic industrial ownership made Scotland a dependency — even a “colony” — of global capital. Independence, they argued, would accelerate this underlying problem.

North Sea oil, with its voracious multinationals, was emblematic of this corporate capture. It was marked by what might be called, following David Harvey, a regime of “accumulation by dispossession.”

For all the giddy optimism, Scotland’s moment of petroleum enthusiasm was thus always marked by darker fears of a new Highland Clearances. The resulting national angst was central to such moments in Scottish culture as John McGrath’s play The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil.

Others argued that independence — propelled by oil — would give Scotland powers to boost domestic ownership and control. Left nationalists saw a glimmer of hope for elevating the agency of embattled workers and communities; the nationalist petty bourgeoisie smelled oil-fuelled opportunities for building a Scottish enterprise culture modelled on competitive small European economies.

Questions of ownership and control were, in any case, the yardstick against which competing nationalist, unionist and devolutionist projects would be measured. The survival, far less thriving, of whatever passed for a Scottish state would reflect its resilience against increasingly rapacious multinationals and transnational capitalist forces.

In the intervening time, Thatcherism happened, followed by devolution, and after a spell, Scottish Labour hegemony degenerated. Amid multiplying crises of British politics ranging from austerity to Brexit, Scotland’s national question dominated a decade of devolved politics.

To critics, nationalism supplanted the “day job” of service delivery, and the critics had a point. An increasingly mobilised nationalist base, putatively of the left, was narrowly defensive of the SNP’s record on a host of national scandals ranging from school attainment to drug deaths.

Equally, much of Scottish Labourist, Conservative and Liberal discourse was dominated by a correspondingly one-sided criticism of the SNP that largely exonerated the chaos issuing from Westminster. The sheer din of national(ist) “debate” — or what passed for it — drowned out everything else.

Yet the super-politicisation of everything Scottish, that apparent legacy of the Salmond-Sturgeon era, was something of a myth. A myth, at least, to anyone conscious of the old debates on external control.

All the post-2014 posturing, all the flags and pompous declarations of progressive identity, disguised the sheer absence of debate about the economic foundations of sovereignty.

From the ScotWind auction to “green” freeports, outsourcing, privatisation and asset-stripping, largely to the benefit of overseas corporations, were all features of nationalist dominance.

Unionists had little to say about this, and little wonder. After all, what emerged from Westminster was a cross-party consensus for austerity, followed by the chaotic implementation of Brexit.

Moreover, the SNP had inherited a legacy of failed PFI schemes and shoddy privatisations from their Scottish Labour predecessors. In the polarised climate of 2014, if everyone was implicated, then the issue ceased to exist: it was depoliticised.

Notably, under the SNP, there were nationalisations too, some of them much bemoaned in Scotland’s mainstream media. But symptomatically, these were always emergency measures, with the state acting as a backstop when corporate governance had proved too acutely dysfunctional to continue.

The story of privatisation, offshoring and suchlike is not just about companies profiting at the expense of states. It’s rather about a generation of state managers and political leaders anxious to divest themselves of strategic responsibility for economic renewal.

Certainly, little has been learned from the generational tragedy of the oil boom, a gift from nature whose sad legacy was Thatcher’s cowboy economic experiment and deindustrialisation. Back then, it was at least possible to imagine the creative use of sovereign states to serve democratic and collectivist ends.

Scotland’s progressive political elite inherited the mantle of divestment, including perverse incentives where power flows from limiting accountability.

For all mainstream purposes, the old dilemmas of ownership and control thus shifted to the intellectual margins. Sell-offs barely register as scandals.

Scotland, according to CommonWeal, is today one of the world’s most foreign-owned economies, with only offshore tax havens ranking worse. But it’s harder than ever to involve or even interest anyone in that fact.

Indeed, our political class continues to uncritically celebrate foreign direct investment as the best measure of Holyrood’s success. And few parliamentarians would quibble.

What went wrong? Why, despite the surrounding high drama of competing flags, have we proceeded to dismantle our national economic foundations with so little debate? How did a national community with such pronounced progressive pretensions become so habituated to what once would have been called national self-harm?

The answer lies in how the rise and degeneration of neoliberal globalisation — a political project to stamp back against working-class advances — interacted with domestic ideologies. This is a system-wide problem, but with a peculiar Scottish dimension, insofar as the governing SNP aspires to create a new sovereign state from the wreckage of the old order.

When Holyrood was formed in 1999, competitive adaptation to globalisation was how we imagined national success. It was what optimism looked like. Inheriting the mantle of Thatcherism, progressives reimagined their projects in these terms. Scottish nationalism thus centred on corporate tax cuts in imitation of booming Ireland. Labourist agendas centred on building an enterprise culture in imitation of booming London.

That era was a systematic and comprehensive failure. But its aftermath has not brought intellectual, moral and collective renewal. Instead, we have an acceleration of atomisation and legitimacy crises.

Politicians who shun accountability; voters who wouldn’t trust them with it anyway. Rightwingers who point to easy targets; leftists who panic and retreat to the defence of neoliberal globalisation as the very purpose of progressive politics.

The Scottish national debate since 2014 was a project of those conditions. The collapse of the Sturgeon-Murrell leadership brought it to an official end. What happens next is unclear, but, without wishing to deny the challenges in rolling back globalisation, creative answers might lie in asking old questions in new contexts.

These themes will be discussed and debated in Glasgow on Saturday September 27. The Scotland’s Not For Sale conference will take place in the National Piping Centre — register at buff.ly/OOVlMN2.