Are we the next nation of surrender monkeys?

Could these hairy-legged, whisky-sipping hard men of the Highlands really be surrender monkeys in disguise?

For all their haggis-eating and Sean Connery myths, is it possible that when it comes to standing up to terrorists the Scots are no better than the French?

As a Brit living in the US, the case has provided the first, and I hope last, opportunity to raise the subject of devolution.

The Scots, I point out, demanded and received their own government. It's complicated, but they're not the English.

They have their own view of when it's compassionate to release a man convicted of murdering 270 people aboard a jumbo jet.

Had al-Megrahi been tried in England, I assure the sceptics, he would have ended his days moaning in agony in the damp bowels of some medieval dungeon. Or perhaps been dispatched to some CIA detention facility in Poland or Egypt.

I was living in Paris when America turned on the French for being "cheese-eating surrender monkeys".

Because they opposed the invasion of Iraq, an entire nation was written off as fops and terrorist sympathisers.

If all you listened to was American talk radio, you would have expected to find Osama bin Laden with a regular table at the Café de Flore and flocks of devotees lined up along the Boulevard Saint-Germain.

French exporters bore the brunt of the propaganda war. Wine and cheese sales to America collapsed. Diners in New York restaurants avoided the French section of the wine list.

Fortunately, the kinds of Americans who succumbed to "surrender monkey" hysteria were not those who went on bicycle tours of the Loire or rented villas in the Luberon.

But enough rejected French products to cause real pain to portions of the French economy.

It would be ludicrous if the same fate befell Scotland's export and tourism industry as a consequence of al-Megrahi's release.

But the boycott websites are starting up and the language of contempt sounds worryingly familiar.

And if it turns out al-Megrahi's release was stage-managed from Number 10 in return for some oil deal, how long will it be before the anti-Scottish sentiment turns anti-British?

Before the animal rights protesters who already stalk Anna Wintour, Vogue's fur-wearing British editor, are joined by anti-British radicals?

Before Tina Brown, Simon Schama and Hugh Dancy have to scurry through Manhattan in fear?

After the British were thought heroic for so long for standing by America in its post 9/11 hour of need, it will be a jolt to be dumped. But then, even the French have come back into favour.

Their objections to the invasion of Iraq have many more admirers today than they had back in 2003.

When the choice came down to being friends with Donald Rumsfeld or drinking French wine and eating French food, Americans eventually voted with their taste buds.

Perhaps one day al-Megrahi's release will be seen as an example of an enlightened British legal system or even foreign policy.

The British are often torn, politically, culturally and spiritually, between their allegiance to the United States and to Europe. Ideally, one shouldn't have to take sides.

But I remember a French politician expressing his horror at America's reaction to French opposition to the war.

It was so personal and vicious. "We Europeans are lovers, not haters," he told me. Put like that, it's not hard to choose.