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