I know, far too much has been said and written already about ‘globalization’, mondialisation, Globalisierung, and also about their opposite numbers, anti-globalization, ‘glocalism’ and so on. No-one should propose adding to this untidy heap, without doubts and reservations. Yet I would like to try my hand again and ask your forgiveness in advance. The only excuse possible is that of approaching the Zeitgeist from a different angle. Rather than adding one more interpretation, I will try to decipher something that is in course of being said, and said not (or not only) by intellectuals, academics and ‘intéllos’, the shamans of our age. The emerging message I’m after is the one that may be coming from below, from the electorate of Scotland.

Part of that message was delivered last May. It was a message favorable to fuller self-government, or possibly formal Independence, and it seems certain to carry us forward to one or more referenda on the matter fairly soon. But I suspect that a great deal more than this was already being said, or half-said, in such a striking shift. At least part of that may have come from deeper sources, which surely relate to the current way of the world as well as to party struggles, the plight of the Labour Party, and the weird dilemmas of Westminster’s archaic constitution. Political leaders naturally hope people are voting for policies on this and that, after canny calculations of gains and losses; but of course voters are also concerned with ‘directions’: general inclinations of society, affected by passions or longings that may well be in the background of debate.

There is perhaps a feature of the Scottish electorate that may help us towards such a diagnosis. It’s the one indicated by Professor Tom Devine in his recent history The Scottish Nation 1700-2000 (1999), where he argues that the Scots have been the leaders in modern emigration. Comparatively viewed, they appear to have outdone the Greeks, the Irish, Jews, Italians and Norwegians from the 18th to the 20th centuries, and deposited a very extensive global diaspora whose size remains difficult to estimate. Most guesses put it at eight or nine times the size of our present-day population. But my point is less the migrants than as what they left behind, a population unusually affected by so much departure, over such a prolonged period of time. In Scotland Romany or Gypsy nomads are usually called simply ‘travelling people’: an appropriate label from residents who, if not travelling themselves, invariably have well-travelled relatives in Calgary, Cape Town, Nova Scotia, Auckland, Chicago or Perth (Western Australia) and who either go there, or receive fairly irregular visits from them and their descendants.

Michael Russell has some amusing phrases about this in his book The Next Big Thing (2007). Wherever you go, he points out, you find that ‘Insecurity is part of the Scottish condition. We come from somewhere else, and settle where we feel least uncomfortable. We belong to places that we only visit, yet we are visitors in the place where we live…’. In his book Devine diagnoses what he calls ‘Highlandism’ as one byproduct of this sustained communal haemorrhage: a projection of imagined origins, the famously synthetic folklore of ‘Auld Lang Syne’, an identity deploying the most colorful items from successive wardrobes and cabin-trunks, with appropriate music and displays.

This outstanding hemorrhage from such a small population may have fostered an unusually exposed and outward-looking mentality, a mind-set forcibly attuned to a wider view, and to contrasts of culture and custom. More than most other nations, Scots have been so to speak ‘pre-globalized’ by such mundane circumstances. This matter-of-fact Weltanschauung has little to do with the new intéllo fad of ‘cosmopolitanism’, the aloofness deemed ethically appropriate for the globalizing times. When Scots explorer Charles Macdouall Stuart reached the centre of the Australian continent in 1860, during his famed South-North expedition, the flag he proudly planted there had to be the Union Jack. Such was the old 1707 deal, the enchantment of that age. And what one might call the ‘self-colonization’ implicit in such triumphs has proved much harder to recover from than other, cruder forms of imperial hegemony.

Returning to the enchantment of today: in spite of my earlier reservations about ‘globaloney’, some theory of what global circumstances means is of course needed. And here, one way forward in the morass may be to look back more carefully at certain neglected views of nationhood. What I have in mind is the curious question of the scale of modern countries and states. This tends to be taken for granted in most commentary and policy-formation; but should not be. It relates quite directly to what the last century’s main theorist of nationalism, Ernest Gellner, always posed as the crucial problem in his field.

The underlying puzzle has always been not why there are so many nation states and distinct ethnic cultures but why are there so few? In his classic Nations and Nationalism (1983) the social anthropologist Gellner observes that there can’t be less than somewhere between six and eight thousand identifiable ethno-linguistic populations scattered round the globe. Why, then, are there less than 200 or so national states? Gellner’s characteristic explanation of this disparity was in terms of overall social and cultural development. The culprit had been first-round industrialization and urbanization. These were not processes planned by some celestial council from a suitably all-powerful centre. No, industrialization evolved chaotically out of the unlikely fringe location of the North Atlantic seaboard, and was marked throughout by chronic unevenness and widespread antagonism. It was impossible for industries, larger-scale commerce, greater market-places and banks to develop at a small-town or region scale. Nor were they ever likely to be set up by the sprawling dynastic and military empires of antiquity, whose essential concern remained expansion, hierarchy and secure military dominance of an inherited rural world. By contrast, Capitalism was able to evolve only at an intermediate level, within societies smaller than the antique dynasties but much bigger than most ethno-linguistic groups. It demanded the formation of relatively large socio-economic spaces, to be viable. Viability in that sense may never have been a fixed or unalterable condition. However, in retrospect we perceive that for over two centuries it did come to mean something like France’ or like England: not something like Brittany, Provence, Monaco, Wales or Ireland. The Scots had already situated themselves within the bigger-is-better expansion, via the 1707 Treaty of Union. Their fate was to be the unusual one of successful ‘self-colonization’ in that world. That is, they avoided conquest or assimilation, and conserved a distinct civil society but only by accepting the broader rules of the new age, as laid down by France, England and other more viable polities.

As Gellner points out, such rules required a sufficiently common culture and language, and the cultivation of popular assent. This should not be confused with present-day ‘nationalism’. Nationhood and nationality culture and politics may have been primordial; but the ‘-ism’ is a different and far more peculiar story. Nationalism didn’t enter common parlance until the last third of the 19th century, after Abraham Lincoln’s victory over the American secessionists, and the Franco-Prussian War. Gellner always emphasized the general point, and newer historical analyses have confirmed it. In all languages, nationalism became commonsense in conjunction with ‘imperialism’, as part of the climate leading into the world wars, and finally the Cold War of 1947-1989.

‘Nationalism is not the awakening and assertion of mythical, supposedly natural and given units…’ is how he sums it up, ‘It is, on the contrary, the crystallization of new units, suitable for the conditions now prevailing’. The conditions then prevailing were the emergent ones of primarily capitalist socio-economic development, at first in the North Atlantic area and then more globally. It was those conditions that favoured the norm, the typical scale and standards for the political entities of (approximately) 1789 to 1989. British nationalism was of course just one chapter in that story, a value-parade both enforced and widely exported — and defended down to the present with mounting desperation by New Labour governments. But what I want to suggest is that it is precisely ‘those conditions’ that are changing. Gellner was thinking in the 1980s, when the old identikit ‘nation-state’ rules remained in place, albeit shakily. But one aspect of globalization has been the collapse of at least some of them. When commentators declare so confidently that it ‘undermines’ borders and flags, as well as customs posts, they usually fail to make a vital distinction. Yes, possibly blood is draining out of an ‘-ism’; but there’s very little sign of it deserting nationalities, identities, cultural contrasts, and the wish to have, or to win, different forms of collective ‘say’ in the brave new globe.

Speculation in this zone has been limited by a curious monotheism of out-look: the child, doubtless, of Christianity, Islam, and their kind, as well as of the odd theatre of the Cold War’s Iron Curtain. Globality is decreed in advance to possess one overall or commanding meaning: either Neo-liberal progress or some new universal oppression, choose your side. It’s treated as if it had come out of a grand blueprint, when most people accept there was no such design — or any conceivable way of finding out, should Deities be invoked. But in fact, may not globality simply be true to its more discernible origins? That is, a range of conflicts, ‘thrown up’ rather than devised for any numinous cosmic purpose? it may be too much to say ‘battlefields’ — but certainly terrains of decision, alternative directions and possibilities. Umberto Eco has identified one of these alternatives clearly, and amusingly, in his Putting the Clock Back.

Look at the world since the First Gulf War, he asks: just who is so plainly clinging to past patterns and habits? We see the explosion and spread of what he labels ‘neo-war’, the curse of US-led globalization. That is, of threatened and actual incursions against largely phantasmagoric enemies like ‘Terrorism’ and Islam or ‘the West’ and crusade-style Christianity or Evangelism. The aim of these is to maintain and mobilize the mass public opinion upon which capital-letter Great power élites still depend, against the individualism, privatization and indifference that accompany so many transnational blessings and successes. Societies have mutated far more than states. And this is why the latter find themselves tempted into another version of the 19th century Restoration that tried to impose stability, values (etc.) between Napoleon 1st and the ‘Springtime of Nations’ in 1848. Brown and Bush can’t literally put the clock back; but at least they can try to slow it down a bit, with plausible aggression and of course the new forms of persuasion provided by the revolution in communications.

The guilty parties here are unmistakable: they are the old lags of Gellner’s bigger-and-better epoch, plus new members and applicants to join the Body-builders Club — countries endowed with that favourite attribute of British Leaders, ‘clout’. America First, naturally, but with Great Spain, Great Russia, Great Serbia alongside cheer-leader Great Britain, plus rising muscle-flexers like India, Indonesia, Iran and China. The latter is currently bidding to take over the clout market, as Americans and Brits move towards retreat from Mesopotamia, and (soon) from Afghanistan. In Tibet the clock is being put back with a Great-nationalist vengeance: a menu of colonial repression once believed anachronistic, where no feeble alibis about ‘democracy’ required.

I suppose pidgin Chinese will very soon dominate Club soirées, or at least share them with pidgin English and Russian. But right now the loudest voice defending values is now that of John Bolton, President Bush’s Ambassador to the UN. He has published his political memoirs as Surrender is Not an Option (2006). However, the great-at-all-costs Club is busy acquiring its own academic credentials as well. That is, Professors who seriously believe that the globe is safer with well-padded, first-round veterans in control. An astonishing volume entitled No More States? appeared last year from the stables of University College, Los Angeles, arguing not only that there should be no more of these small nuisances, but that possibly a reversal of thrust may be possible, in the sense of ‘agglomerationism’ — returns to one or other metropolitan fold by populations tempted astray by romantic delusion or bad verse. In case anyone fears I’m making this up, let me quote from Professor Richard Rosecrance’s summing up:

‘Potentially dissident Scotland, the Basques, Quebec and other provincial populations have gradually come to see the federation-metropole as a less hostile environment, and their independence movements have declined in proportion…(hence) few new states are likely to be created…It is possible, even, that the number of fully independent states may decline as political units begin to merge with each other…’

This conclusion had the good luck to be published not long before the 2007 elections in the U.K., and in that sense comment may be superfluous. But the general sense is unmistakable: global history must be frozen in its tracks, for the convenience of existing agglomerations, including the US and loyal fan-club Great Britain. Only the consolidation of a retrospective blueprint will allow stability and reasonable global order prevail. ‘Bigger is Better’ was therefore not just a phase social evolution had to go through, to improve the general lot. No, it has to be made per-manent, virtually eternalized, in the imagined interest of a species whose values have become indistinguishable from the established interest of the Big Lads Club.

And on the other side, what about all the no-hopers? Here the list could hardly be more different, but in newly surprising ways. The best approach to it remains Foreign Policy magazine’s ‘Globalization Index’, a now long-running attempt to estimate and compare national successes and failures of the global times. I only have the 2006 ‘Top 20’ list with me, and have only just received 2007. But so far its overall aspect has changed little from year to year: ‘Singapore, Switzerland, Ireland, Denmark, Canada, Netherlands, Sweden, New Zealand, Finland, Norway, Israel, the Czech Republic and so on, and on, down to Slovenia, currently at No. 20. True, there have also been some exceptional entries. The USA appears in the Top 20 because in spite of manufacturing decline and job exports, it can’t avoid showing up because most of the new globe’s spare cash has been washing irresistibly through it, at least down to the regrettable ‘sub-prime’ property hitches of 2007. However, the broader picture remains unmistakable: a springtime of victorious dwarves, one might say. ‘Small is beautiful’?

Sooner or later, one or more formal referenda will be of course be required for such entrants, but a kind of referendum movement, or direction, is already under way in Scotland, a gathering mixture of questioning and hardening conviction. Among Scots this takes the form of a firming ‘self-confidence’, a kind of matter-of-factness I mentioned earlier.

As we have seen, the old question used to be: ‘Are you big enough to survive and develop in an industrializing world?’ The advent of globalization is replacing this with another, something close to: ‘Are you small and smart enough to survive?’ ‘Smart’ in the new circumstances refers of course to education, or to ‘consciousness-raising’ as feminists used to put it. And not too surprisingly, the most common answer coming up from the bowels and steerage accommodation of the common ship is: ‘You bet we are…nor do we mean to be deprived of the chance.’ I think some sense of this may have been part of the election groundswell last May, in Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland — and maybe most notably in Scotland. On the emerging global vessel, it’s presence or nothing: speak up and act up, or the already existing officer and first-class passengers will not only stay there, but reinforce their grip over the lower-deck rabble of dependents, servants and migrating stowaways.

In a remarkable recent essay called simply ‘Presence’, the Dutch social historian Eelco Runia has made the point with a humorous metaphor. Globalization can’t help meaning that we’re all ‘in the same boat’; but on this noble vessel, most of the occupants can’t help being virtual ‘stowaways’, travelling either on fake documents and overdrawn credit-cards, or just secretly, smuggled or bribed aboard at night or in disguise. However, as the global process continue its erratic course, this rabble has begun appearing on deck, in broad daylight. No, they want their tickets. It’s time they were released from the dank lower levels of ballast, coiled ropes and awful stairwells. ‘Equality’ is the demand: demands for use of the cafeteria and TV lounges, new cabins and beds, ideally with fresh bedding, as well as some formal presence by representation on the bridge. There used to be bigger-is-better techniques for avoiding this kind of nuisance. Allow them enough folk-dancing and local government down in the bilges, that’ll keep them out of trouble.

But of course presence in Runia’s sense represents something more than these palliatives. The spirit of Gertrude Stein is turning out to be quite strong up on deck: something to do with the democratic air. On this bigger, final boat everyone now cannot help finding themselves aboard, ‘self-government’ is self-government is self-government. What Charles Stewart Parnell meant in the famous remark about nobody having ‘a right to fix the boundary of the march of a nation’, in the sense of its will and sovereignty. The motto prefixes the recent Scottish Government’s ‘National Conversation’ on Scotland’s future. In the new context, does that mean ‘six or eight thousand’ states corresponding to Gellner’s original sources of human diversity? Nobody can know this, but what it already does imply is that no court of fixers and blueprint-fiddlers should decide who is in or out, or what their relationships with one another should be. To an increasing degree these are likely to relate to one another via formulae of confederation, quite different from federalism, subsidiarity, devolved regionalism and other dodges of the bygone era.

And it’s worth emphasizing something else too, at this point — something fundamental that globalization is bringing home, everywhere and to everybody. While the threats of globalizing uniformity are often exaggerated, they do remain real enough to have brought something else, something really new, into recognizable perspective. One might call this, the threat to Babel. Globalization can’t help a degree of sameness; but, more strongly than empires of the past, the new mode may be forcing something more profound into existence. The counter to ‘all-the-same-ism’ can only be cross-fertilization, the societal equivalent of Darwin’s new species and forms. That’s what ‘the universal’ has always been, the capacity to transcend, to fuse, to breed hybrid novelty rather than merely ‘agglomerate’ in Professor Rosecrance’s sense.

However, the power to do this rests at bottom upon more than the maintenance of diversity — it demands that differentiation be favoured, that it be positively fostered by globalization. The basic problem that Globalization confronts is having to perpetuate ‘Babel’, as well as confronting all its difficulties and contradictions. The reason is that human universals arise only via contrasts, by the transcendence of borders rather than their suppression — via cross-fertilization, through hybrids and surprises, from the unheard-of, in communities not just ‘imagined’ in Ben Anderson’s celebrated phrase, but previously unimaginable, from presences whose spell makes the past into a bearable future. And how on earth can anything like that be achieved without ‘independence’? In this context independence surely isn’t backward-looking or inward-looking me-first, chip on the shoulder time, and so on. It’s more like seizing the chance as the clock-hands move so decisively forward, the chance to contribute and to endure with an emerging purpose not yet wholly known, because societies must retain, or rediscover the power and confidence to surprise themselves.

With all its daft twists and turns, and hopeless exaggerations, globalization may be undermining the older, late 19th century nationalism and simultaneously providing new stimuli for 21st century nationalism, or at least nationality-politics. In the most widely read popularization of globalization theory, the Oxford Very Short Introduction to the subject, my Austrian colleague, Manfred Steger, puts it at the end of his account, ‘there’s nothing wrong with greater manifestations of social interdependence as a result of globalization’; but what matters above all are ‘the transformative social processes that arise to challenge ‘the current oppressive structure of global apartheid’, new societal vehicles capable of ‘ushering in a truly democratic and egalitarian global order’. The emergence of new communities of will and purpose may be right in the main-stream of globalization, rather than futile attempts to stave the latter off.

Imagine an email to the cosmos from Edinburgh, notifying whoever is listening of events recent and soon to come. It could read something like: “Back in state-political presence after three centuries, on different footing following lessons at once painful and positive; no deaths, comparatively little resentment, modest ambitions to make a difference.” No heaven-shattering utterance, I concede. Yet there would have to be an attachment going with this message too, about which I have so far deliberately said nothing: I sometimes think of it as ‘Adam Smith’, a connotation that renders boasting unnecessary, and which is also quite peculiar, in the sense that the family of myself and my brother happens to come from Kirkcaldy, the same small East coast port as the author of An Inquiry into the Wealth of Nations (1776), the foundation of modern economics.

In Scotland, this kind of allusion can be fatal. It’s guaranteed to arouse a deep-source genetic sarcasm that long preceded Social Darwinist nonsense: ‘So…they think their faithers must have kent some o’their faithers…Hm-m-m-m!’ It may be recalled that Smith’s actual father was the Kirkcaldy ‘Comptroller of Customs’, preoccupied with doubling his official wages by extorting harbour fees and tariffs from the coal and salt trades, as well as from Baltic, Russian and Dutch sea-captains. The birth-pangs of Neo-liberal Economism were every bit as dishonorable as those of other faiths. While they might have been suffered in Bremen, Tallin, or any number of other places, it so happened that Kirkcaldy was the decisive venue, and something of that took up permanent lodgings in modernity. And it can’t be denied, this does add a certain weight to endeavours at demolishing ‘the authority of the old system’, and a distinct edge to the ‘more daring, but often dangerous spirit of innovation’ now in charge across the River Forth from the old seaport.

A few years back, Arthur Herman published How the Scots Invented the Modern World (2002). Mistaken theorists of an earlier moment — myself among them — used to complain about Scotland having missed or neglected its national opportunities, by failing to participate in earlier waves of anti-colonial liberation. But of course, the Scots never belonged there. Not having been colonized they ‘did it themselves’ via self-colonization, the subordinate affirmation of a kind of flightless or contained nationality, which implied exemption from many rules of the former imperial world.

Today that time is ended. I have suggested that resuming the power of flight simply means participation in the new forms and rules, alongside many others. It’s a matter-of-fact need, neither too late nor too soon, and I suspect that something of this has already sunk into popular sensibility — the nascent ‘common sense’ of a different, dawning moment in history, the moment when Eelco Runia’s ‘presence’ is possible for us, as well as for ‘them’. I have drawn a general contrast between Old Lags laboring away on restoring the grandfather clock, and new, smaller arriving vehicles impatient with tradition, and anxious to move faster. In the British-Irish archipelago, this contrast has become in effect a ‘front line’ between Anglo-Westminster and former peripheral accomplices. Most clearly, the clash will be manifested in the battle over nuclear weapons, and the decision to replace the Trident weapons system with something better. This is of course partly Great-Power pantomine; but it happens to be located in western Scotland at the Faslane naval base. More than pacifism and general nuclear disarmament is involved: and it’s hard to imagine any ‘compromise’ over such an issue.

So there will be endless problems and pitfalls, sure; but they are taking place at a great border crossing, as the world gets used to a different landscape. I suspect that one of the few useful tourist guides here may be Roberto Mangabeira Unger’s Free Trade Reimagined (Princeton, 2007). Unger’s argument is that the victory of ‘managed capitalism’ was unavoidable, but not necessarily linked to a tide of socio-political reaction derived from the 1960s. The rising waters of resurrected conservatism naturally appropriated a re-emergent capitalism — but did not succeed in making the free-trade world into its own. The lunacy of Neo-liberalism has been disproved by globalized reality, as well as that of centralized or State-Socialism. Hence managed capitalism is in desperate need of new management — the ‘reimagination’ of his title. There’s no chance of turning clock-hands back; yet the the new chronology signalled by their advance is quite different from what prevailed before 1989 — on both Right and Left.

What happened in the 2007 elections was part of ‘everything else’. It did not betray but expressed the grander shift, the avalanche under way. Only a small bit of Globalization’s drawing-board, but definitely on it, contributing to the designs of a new and still mostly hidden hand.

This article has been adapted from a lecture delivered on March 4th 2008 and is part of a project, ‘Edgelands’, sponsored by the Australian Research Council for 2008-09. Tom Nairn is one of Scotland’s leading writers and political theorists