In the 18 months or so that have elapsed since Scotland’s independence referendum, two competing views have emerged about what the country experienced during that long campaign. For those on the Yes side of the constitutional debate, it seemed Scotland had undergone a cultural renaissance that travelled well beyond the actual politics of the event. On 18 September, the Yes side fell a few percentage points short of the magic number required to make Scotland an independent country, yet it didn’t feel like a defeat.

Instead, they exhibited all the signs of victory: euphoria, achievement and a sense that they had been part of something life-changing and life-affirming. I observed this phenomenon up and down the country during the campaign and in places where I hadn’t expected to find it. In the side-room of a civic hall in Govan, it was present in a group of 20 or so women debating the idea of independence and how it might affect their lives.

These women had all encountered an assortment of challenges in their lives, ranging from food and fuel poverty to domestic abuse and health inequality. Yet they had a solid grasp of the big events unfolding around them and felt that there was a spirit abroad in the land off which they might feed. In this place more than any other I visited during that febrile and chaotic time I felt privileged to be witnessing part of the process of women feeling empowered and it was a very humbling experience. Like many others across Scotland, on either side of the debate, they had found a voice and with it the realisation that it was as eloquent and meaningful as anyone else’s.

Another view, though, formed among several influential voices on the No side of the campaign. This was a collection of attitudes that coalesced under the Project Fear strategy, which underpinned the approach of the official Better Together campaign. This dictated that only in manipulating and exaggerating natural fear of the unknown lay the No side’s best chance of victory. In the current EU campaign, some of the same themes can be seen in the Leave side.

Scottish Labour insisted that the independence campaign was a phoney war that was detracting from the real and unglamorous business of running the country on a day-to-day basis. The rightwing commentariat, Scottish Labour’s new allies in the campaign, waded in with their own prognosis. This held that Scotland was becoming a dangerously divided country through the process of the referendum. They seized on every example of nastiness, fed to them by the Better Together campaign, and dressed it up as yet more reason to bring in UN peacekeepers.

Nothing good would ever come of the independence referendum and the scars would take generations to heal. If there had indeed been a feelgood factor then it had been a shallow and wretched one and it would soon evaporate once we had all come to our senses and got back to letting the usual power elite run the country’s affairs. “You don’t really know about these things,” they seemed to be saying, “so just finish up your drinks, get to your bed and let us get on with our highly paid jobs of telling you what we think you need to know.” Well, 19 months later the feeling hasn’t gone away.

Last week, the Hansard Society, the independent charity that promotes democratic engagement, revealed what many of us had sensed: that something positive and special did happen in Scotland at that time and that it is still happening.

The research in the society’s annual audit revealed that Scots are significantly more knowledgeable about and interested in politics than anywhere else in the UK. It also shows that Scottish voters are the least convinced that Westminster works best for them and that Britain’s political system needs to be improved.

The review recalled last year’s audit, which showed that, in the wake of the independence referendum, Scots were “considerably more interested in and knowledgeable about politics than in previous years and significantly more engaged than the British population overall. This situation has not just been maintained but has improved still further this year; knowledge levels in Scotland have grown a further nine points and interest levels have increased by 14 points.”

During the referendum campaign, I had also taken the opportunity to travel down through the spine of England to collect the views of those whom the Scottish historian Tom Devine describes as “our great southern neighbours”. Everyone I spoke to during that journey south spoke admiringly and with a degree of affection of the Scots and all acknowledged that something rare and special was happening. “No matter what you decide, we wish you well,” was the common refrain. In this was a degree of respect often missing in the sentiments of their political leaders.

In the New York Times last week, that very fine author and political commentator Roger Cohen wrote gloomily of the death of liberalism in the world today. Cohen wrote: “Nationalism and authoritarianism, reinforced by technology, have come together to exercise new forms of control and manipulation over human beings whose susceptibility to greed, prejudice, ignorance, domination, subservience and fear was not, after all, swept away by the fall of the Berlin Wall.”

He went on: “Such anti-rational forces are everywhere these days – in Donald Trump’s America, in Marine Le Pen’s France, in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, throughout much of the Middle East, in North Korea.” He might well have included the ancient instruments of control wielded by small collections of the elite and privileged everywhere and of which we were given a rare glimpse in the Panama Papers. Indeed, it’s doubtful that there has ever been a triumph of liberalism in any age and that whatever liberalism we encountered was that which we were allowed to.

I would suggest Cohen gets himself over to Scotland at some point in the very near future, if even just to revive his drooping spirits. There, he may find that all is not lost and that a spirit of democratic engagement, innocent and naive though some of it may be, is shaking the barley.