THERE'S A bit of a dichotomy when it comes to the UK’s membership of the European Union, it’s either over or under analysed. The Conservative Party, for example, thinks rather too much about the Continent, seeing all sorts of horrors – real and imagined – and convincing itself that voters share its rather curious obsession with the minutia emanating from Brussels.

According to the Observer’s Andrew Rawnsley there are currently eight different Euro factions jostling for position, and the Prime Minister’s control over any of them is limited. Nevertheless his position – renegotiated terms but continued membership – remains the most sensible one, and has the benefit of most closely reflecting public opinion.

But in other quarters the EU is too little examined, not least in the SNP, which adopted a slogan (rather than a policy) – ‘independence in Europe’ – 25 years ago this year and hasn’t really thought too deeply about it since. Jousting with some Nationalists on twitter over the past few days (I know, I need to get a life), I think I’ve gauged a sense of how they perceive the European project.

Basically they see it – rather as Mrs Thatcher did post-Bruges – as little more than a group of sovereign states loosely co-operating, primarily for economic reasons; each member state’s ‘sovereignty’ is, in Nationalist eyes, not at all compromised by Brussels. When I posited that Ireland and Greece might not see it that way, the point was dismissed. Even Ireland and Greece, they argued, did not (ultimately) have to do what the EU wanted.

There is some truth in this analysis, but as is so often the case with constitutional politics, the reality rarely matches the theory. And, more to the point, it betrays a rather unquestioning approach to the EU that is rather odd given its recent travails. All too often Scottish politicians (not just Nationalists) and commentators depict EU membership as an absolute good, almost beyond criticism.

Yet all the SNP’s standard critiques of the UK – that it is ‘broken’, unequal, undemocratic and so on – apply equally, if not more so, to the EU. Furthermore, the direction of travel in the UK and EU is quite clear: the former is devolving more and more power to its component parts, while the latter continues to pursue ‘ever closer union’, particularly in fiscal terms. Yet the pro-independence argument continues to posit that one is bad and the other good.

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Only nothing is that simple. Even before the 2008 economic crash and subsequent Eurozone crisis there was a sense the SNP’s stance on European had been overtaken by events. The policy adopted in 1988 – that an independent Scotland would be a member of the European Union (EU) – remained unaltered despite Maastricht, Eastern enlargement and a host of other changes.

It also papered over certain contradictions. Why, precisely, was it wrong to have a central bank in London making major decisions about the Scottish economy, but right for another central bank based in Brussels (eventually to be Frankfurt) to do precisely that? And how, exactly, would an independent Scotland exert more influence within the EU than the much larger United Kingdom?

It was, of course, possible to construct arguments that squared those particular circles. An independent Scotland, claimed Alex Salmond, would control 95 per cent of fiscal levers rather than none (although such a high proportion hardly stacks up today); it would also gain “a seat at the top table”, its own Commissioner and more MEPs, thus increased clout in the centres of EU power and influence.

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Substitute “London” for “Brussels” and it could be any modern Scottish Nationalist politician making the same argument. Likewise, the logic of the recent Independence Declaration – that it is better “if decisions about Scotland’s future are taken by…the people of Scotland” – is that Scotland would be better off out of the European Union as well as the British one.

Thus the Eurosceptic Tory position of being anti-EU but pro-UK is just as inconsistent as the SNP’s pro-UK but anti-UK stance. Both also fail to reflect (current) public opinion. The Liberal Democrats, meanwhile, argue that the UK ought to be reformed (along federal lines) within an EU with a “reformed” budget. Quixotic, no doubt, but it’s at least intellectually coherent.