Here is a brief excerpt from an article co-authored by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge for the Wall Street Journal. They believe tumultuous days in the world’s democracies present an opening for conservative ideas to flourish. To read the complete article, check out others, and obtain subscription information, please click here.

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This is turning into an age of the unthinkable, not just in the chaos of the Middle East and the former Soviet Union, but also in the world’s big democracies.

In May, India elected Narendra Modi, who was at the time prohibited from visiting the United States, in a landslide; today, Marina de Silva, who only a month ago was the running mate on a losing ticket, is leading the race for the Brazilian presidency. In May’s election for the European Parliament, millions of people voted for what would have once been considered fringe candidates; now the anti-European Alternative for Germany party has won 10% of the vote in Saxony, while a new French poll shows Marine Le Pen, who also wants to leave the European Union, ahead of President François Hollande.

But perhaps the most unthinkable event is unfolding in the mother of democracies. On Sept. 18, the people of Scotland might well vote for independence: Having trailed by as much as 20 points a month ago, the separatist Yes campaign is now level or ahead in the polls. If a union that has lasted for 307 years and once ruled a third of the Earth’s people perishes, so might David Cameron’s leadership of the Conservative and Unionist Party. The pound will plunge and the London Stock Exchange will dive.

And that is just the beginning of the troubles for what would remain of the United Kingdom. In foreign policy, the diminished U.K. may well lose its seat on the U.N. Security Council. Its Treasury and the Bank of England would be entangled by arguments about the national debt and oil revenues with Alex Salmond, Scotland’s first minister and most vociferous proponent of independence. Politics in the rest of the U.K. would soon be overtaken by wrangling over the 2017 referendum on whether to leave the European Union—a departure that would be made significantly more likely if pro-European Scotland leaves.

A Scottish “yes” vote would also give a jolt to unthinkable ideas far beyond the U.K. Spain would find it much harder to deny an independence vote to the Catalans, while other separatist movements—in Northern Italy, in Belgium, in Quebec—would surely revive.

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Here is a direct link to the complete article.

Messrs. Micklethwait and Wooldridge, respectively the editor in chief and management editor of the Economist, are the authors of The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State (Penguin, 2014). To read my review of The Fourth Revolution, please click here.