nationalism | ukwatch.net

Wales After Britain?

Ellie Keen — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Politics in Wales has changed dramatically in the last decade. From winning the yes vote in the referendum to set up the Assembly in 1997 by just 6,721 votes, it’s difficult to imagine now how devolution could be rolled back.

Tom Nairn has been arguing for more than 30 years that the break-up of Britain is inevitable. More recently he points to the devolution referendums in the two and a half of the four countries which make up the British Isles to show that he was right. He argues that devolution will gather its own momentum, and that the future of Britain is over. The unanswerable question is how long has it got left?

In response, Gordon Brown and his New Labour mates are playing the “Rule Brittania” card in a desperate attempt to shore up a British identity which is on its way out. “British Jobs for British People”, wrapping himself up in the Union Jack, suggestions of a British day and a British motto runs alongside anti-immigrant and asylum rhetoric and demands that everyone speaks English. In a country where more than 20 per cent and growing of the people speak Welsh, and our citizens who were born or who have relatives in other countries speak a wide variety of languages form all over the world, this sort of talk doesn’t go down too well. I’d guess it’s irrelevant, if not offensive to many people in all four countries.

Meanwhile, there are a group of “progressive English patriots” who agree with Nairn’s break-up theory. They see Scotland and Wales wanting to free themselves form Westminster rule, perhaps also eventually a free and united Ireland. They want to make sure that England is not confused with Britain, and that their nation isn’t left behind. At the same time they are acutely aware of the need to couple their patriotism/nationalism with an anti racist stance and they are keen to distance themselves from the New Labour response to devolution as well as the fascist parties. It’s an interesting development which deserves attention and support from Welsh, Scots and Irish left nationalists. If the call for an English Parliament grows, the progress towards independence for the nations of Britain will accelerate.

So what are we doing in Wales? A year ago, Plaid Cymru entered into government for the first time in our history as part of a centre-left coalition with Labour. A key plank of that agreement was a commitment from Labour to deliver and campaign for a successful outcome in a referendum for a law making parliament within this Assembly term. If we get that yes vote, we’ll still have only a fraction of the powers currently enjoyed by the Scottish Parliament. We will be able to legislate freely on matters currently devolved, which would be an improvement on the current situation where Westminster can veto Welsh laws. But we’d still have no powers over criminal justice or any real macro-economic muscle. We’ll also still have no means to raise our own revenue.

Wales is at the bottom of the UK’s economic performance table. While the city of London continues to skew its economic policy to benefit the areas its immediate vicinity, the periphery loses out. With a history of significant industrial production, Wales should now be rich. But the areas which produced the wealth for Britain are today among some of the most economically disadvantaged in the whole of the European Union. These are the areas which were targeted by Thatcher in her obsession to crush union power, then forgotten. And these are the areas that now face further decline from New Labour’s regional pay plans and sickness benefits purge. It doesn’t have to be this way. An autonomous government responsible for two and a quarter million people could do a much better job of gearing macro -economic policy to meet the needs of people in the former industrial areas of Wales. It’s clear those needs have not been considered by successive Westminster governments.

If scientists are right about peak oil, and we can now be confident of a united scientific position on climate change, then the way economies work will have to change. Energy, food and water will become increasingly important and the economy is bound to reflect that. If oil prices continue to rise as they have of late, we’ll be forced to rethink how we use and obtain our energy. When Cuba’s energy supply was cut off at the end of the USSR, Cuban’s lost 30 per cent of their body weight in a year. Can we afford not to plan for a dramatic reduction in the availability of energy and potential implications?

Wales is in a fantastic position to become energy self sufficient. We have a large coastline with opportunities to harness the tides. We have lots of wind, rain, peat bogs and open countryside. A long-term plan to expand research and development, invest in new skills and training and government support for small Welsh businesses to produce microgenerators could put the infrastructure in place. This could be coupled with a national awareness raising programme, incentives for reducing consumption and growing and buying local food. Food and energy self-sufficiency could provide the key to self-government. According to the WWF, Cuba is the only sustainable country in the world. We could learn a lot from the Cubans.

While there may not be a consensus among political parties for Welsh self-government, there is for more devolution. There is also a growing awareness and consensus around climate change. Oil prices are forcing people to think about alternatives, while there is a strong anti-nuclear tendency in the Welsh government. To put the building blocks in place for food and energy self-sufficiency, there has to be more devolution. These challenges have reminded some of us in Plaid that we need to argue the case for self-government more clearly than ever before. Support for the idea won’t build until the debate takes place.

Left-wing Plaid MP Adam Price has recently called for a new “movement within a movement” to reaffirm the party’s long-term goals. He correctly claims that the younger members, those under 45, are strong believers in independence. It’s encouraging to note that we have a healthy-sized and growing youth membership and activist base. For a quarter of a century our opponents in the unionist parties have been allowed to define what Welsh independence means, which has resulted in smaller levels of support than we would like.

Vision is what is missing in politics today. A vision of a Wales without fossil fuels and nuclear is one which shouldn’t be difficult to sell. Armed with the arguments for self-government, Plaid Cymru offers a vision of a different, more equal, sustainable Wales, one that can inspire a younger generation. With the independence debate raging ahead in Scotland, Plaid cannot allow Wales to be left behind. The thinking and the campaigning for a better Wales after Britain has to start now.

Leanne Wood was elected to the National Assembly in 2003 to represent the South Wales Central region. She is now Plaid Cymru’s spokesperson for Sustainability and the Environment.

England and the 'National-Popular' (Part 2)

eddie — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 17:36:49 +0000

Click here for Part 1 of this article

Where is England?

Well, I think I live in it. So, for me, it’s the earth beneath my feet and the landscape I walk through with my dog. Green and pleasant, temperate and mild, most of the time anyway. It’s the slightly scruffy streets of the fine city I live in; the cafes and theatres, the galleries and libraries and museums, the gyms and jogging routes that give me culinary, aesthetic, intellectual and athletic sustenance. It’s the semi-darkness of the urban evening, the encounters with the familiar unknown and the safely dangerous, which as a man I feel securely entitled to. Then, venturing further afield for work and research, it’s the overheated, creaking railway line that takes me to London and Essex, where I make my living as an expert of sorts in the social care of people with HIV/AIDS. As I speed past the fields and woods, back yards and warehouses of East Anglia, I often wonder what kinds of lives are led there and whether they are anything like mine. Then, at the end of a working day, I speed back to Norwich and Norfolk and a decent night’s sleep in this ‘city of silence’. This was the poet D’Annunzio’s term for ancient, pre-industrial cities, cited respectfully in the Selections from Prison Notebooks: ‘all had glorious pasts but are now of secondary importance, some little more than villages with magnificent monumental centres as a relic of their bygone splendour’. So this, in rough summary, is my England. Of course this is my personal corner of the country, but the interesting question is how to link this into a wider narrative.

England has more often defined itself by what it is not: black, Jewish, Scottish, Irish, Welsh, Asian, African, Spanish, French, German, European of any sort really. This ‘negative identity’ is characteristic of national-popular cultures shaped by militaristic adventure and imperial dominion. So maybe I should also say what the England I live in is not. First off, it is no longer ‘British’, at any rate since Scottish and Welsh devolution, which had the (surely unintended but wholly predictable) effect of making some of the English feel as if these other people of the British land mass really didn’t want to live with us any more. (Northern Ireland is a more complex question which I don’t have the space to go into here.) One of my own recent weekend breaks was to Edinburgh, the beautiful, sensibly vibrant, deeply cultured and obviously prosperous capital city of Scotland, where it really does feel like the separate country it plainly aspires to be.

Secondly, the England I live in is not (for all its best intentions) multi-cultural, in the sense of a diverse but essentially unitary community. Let’s be clear: the ethnic groups of England (where they have to) live and work politely alongside each other, but there is precious little real, voluntary inter-connection. And what there is often takes the form of slightly broader ‘exclusive alliances’, based on new ‘negative identities’, such as underclass white and black youth united in ‘chav/gangsta’ culture against both Asian youth and the wider ‘respectable’ society. Paul Gilroy wrote in the 1980s that ‘there ain’t no black in the union jack’. Well, there’s plenty of black in the St George Cross in 2008, but very little brown (and certainly no tartan or taff).

I am conscious that in this last paragraph I have finally introduced some real live people into my account of the English, even if only to argue that many of them don’t seem to want to have much to do with anyone else. And this, it seems to me, is another currently defining ‘negative identity’ of the English, coming ever closer to home: that, as I and others have argued in the pamphlet Feelbad Britain, ‘we are a society of people who don’t appear to like themselves and each other very much’. The white people I commute with once or twice a week to Essex and London, on crowded, uncomfortable, often malfunctioning and surprisingly slow trains, barely exchange a glance let alone a word. For much of the year they are yellow and grey with fatigue and ill health. Unless they’ve just been on their holidays, when they briefly turn a lightly toasted colour. The comfortably unhappy.

Two other of our current social categories deserve a mention, because of what they represent in English society: the ‘grumpy old’, and then back to ‘chav’. We are well used to being told that our aging population is a problem, primarily because of the burden it will place on the welfare state and on the working-age people whose taxes pay for it. This is real enough – leaving aside the question of whether increased longevity is actually a problem – but like so much of our current political discourse, it casts the issue within a narrowly economistic framework. Far more immediate and apparent is what Gramsci would have called the ‘moral crisis’ of longer lives: a general loss of purpose, often amounting to a sense of utter futility, amongst this growing sector of the population. Faced with redundancy from jobs and industries that no longer exist, early retirement on questionable ill health grounds, or even statutory retirement decades before they can expect to die – and deprived of (or excused from) any sustained involvement in childcare by the dispersal of family networks – older people now have loads of time and (mostly) money, with little idea what to do with it all.

There are two general options for this growing segment of the population. The first is the positive ‘active elderly’ route, keeping physically fit and mentally engaged and flexible, and living happily and well – a historically unprecedented experience that requires a degree of personal resourcefulness, family and social support, and simple good luck in avoiding chronic illness and disability. The second, in many ways easier but obviously far more problematic for the individual and for society, is the negative ‘grumpy old’ option, ossifying into your grievances and prejudices, bathing in outrage and disgust. In an English context, this pretty much sums up the hard-core Daily Mail readership and the people who still bother to vote in local elections; and it casts a wider, ever darker pall over our public life.

As for chav – the Burberry cap and sportswear-clad, shaved or scraped-scalp, gold-bedecked look and lifestyle that has overrun much of what’s left of the English working class – well, it’s a genuine social phenomenon deserving far more serious scrutiny than the kind of for/against discourse of tabloid press and TV, or than I have space for here. Basically, chav is what happens when a working class is left culturally defenceless, exposed to a low-grade diet of American cultural imperialism, especially the gangsta-rap and porno-R&B that passes for pop culture in the age of MTV, the shopping mall, fast food and freely available strong lager and C-class drugs. Is chav a new way of being English? Or just a weird hybrid of commercial/‘globalisation’-era cultural styles, that will fade away as quickly as it arose, and make way for some new garb and patois for the lumpen proletariat, the white trash made not so poor in the lower reaches of the neo-liberal informal economy? We shall see…

Finally, one other thing England is not: London. Our supposedly capital city is now a quite separate entity, a member of the international network of mega-cities, which has turned its back wilfully and consciously on the country of England. As Doreen Massey has recently established in her book World City, London has its own wholly distinctive patterns of interaction and division, engagement and exploitation, quite different from the rest of England, while having distinct (and often damaging) repercussions for it. I regularly commute between the two, and spend time in both, and they are now in reality wholly separate places. To be specific, the concerns and perspectives of the metropolitan liberal left (in that lovely term, ‘the chattering classes’) are shared by very, very few people outside London. I know it comes as an occasional, very nasty surprise to be reminded of this by such phenomena as the Countryside Alliance, periodic fuel protests, or the recurring rumble of irritation about ‘political correctness’, but the middle and upper class liberal intelligentsia who
staff the political and media and cultural industries of London have really very little idea of what’s going on in the separate country of England. They might occasionally venture out into it, for the purposes of rest and recreation (more weekend breaks), but this is little more than internal tourism. Especially when it’s to weekend and summer holiday villages consisting almost wholly of second homes, dead in the week and the winter.

London’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence is a key element in the failure of the traditional English national-popular settlement. It has been gathering pace for decades, if not centuries, and its effect is now evident in the attitudes of non-Londoners towards our notional national capital. Popular reactions in the rest of England to exclusively London phenomena – from the Millennium Dome to the 7/7 bombings and the 2012 Olympics – are at best ambivalent and at worst downright contemptuous.

So, this England is not London, it is not Scotland or Wales or Europe, and large parts of it subsist on an emotional diet of aggravation and disquiet which could, if we’re not very careful, turn seriously nasty. Even parts of the Southeast, London’s own hinterland, are getting seriously pissed off. If I were a displaced white East Ender, living in the modern post-industrial slums of the ‘Thames Gateway’ towns of Dagenham, Thurrock or Basildon, with an extended family in inter-generational multiple deprivation, I would be seriously tempted to vote BNP, just for the sheer two-fingered hell of it. And if you find that shocking, I would respectfully suggest that you are lacking in political imagination, and offer to accompany you there on my next fortnightly visit.

So what might a national-popular England be like?

I am well aware that mine is not the first attempt to flesh out a ‘progressive patriotism’. E.P. Thompson harked back somewhat sentimentally to ‘the freeborn Englishman’, and the Communist Party in its immediate post-war heyday had a stab at a patriotic national ‘story’, taking in the various waves of peasant and proletarian rebellion and martyrdom. It seems to have consisted mostly of pageants and paeans, a kind of misty-eyed romanticism, and it didn’t survive the onset of Cold War. Most famously, the old Cold Warrior George Orwell attempted it in some of his rightly celebrated essays, especially ‘England your England’, written in late 1940, as ‘highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me’. Orwell was a vastly overrated writer, a much better essayist than novelist. As for his politics, I’ve always thought Isaac Deutscher pinned him down as ‘a simple-minded anarchist’, which explains why Orwell lends himself so readily to reactionary purposes, like so many self-styled ‘libertarians’. But in his wartime essays, Orwell came close to identifying the quality of defiant reserve in the English that thumbed its nose at ’itler and the Jerries and pretty much everyone else too, and might just yet make the kernel of a national-popular ‘positive identity’. Orwell called it ‘national loyalty… as a positive force’. But his observation that ‘in moments of supreme crisis, the whole nation can suddenly draw together and act upon a species of instinct, really a code of conduct which is understood by almost everyone though never formulated’ is deeply if unconsciously Gramscian in its grasp of the political and ideological function of national-popular ‘common sense’.

Towards the end of my own last bout of ‘democratic left’ activism, in the mid-1980s, people associated with Marxism Today attempted to ‘reclaim the union jack’ for the left. This reached its ultimate absurdity, I recall, in a version of that tawdry, blood-stained rag in Rastafarian colours. More recently another old acquaintance, Mark Perryman, has been heavily involved in what he calls ‘football activism’, with the aim of turning the England football team into a Gramscian ‘national-popular’ cause. A bit of a lost one, I would say, given the abject performances of that bunch of overpaid, over-hyped, overgrown infants. Billy Bragg and Tessa Jowell have argued that the football-related mass sproutings of the St George’s Cross can be seen as, variously, an expression of national pride or ‘just a bit of fun’. Well…

It may be because I am so bloody English, and defiantly anti-postmodern, but I’m getting increasingly impatient with the symbolism of it all: the various flags, principles and abstract values and causes we are supposed to espouse as our ‘national identity’. It’s all just too easily switched on and off, manipulated and repackaged, usually for the commercial interests of various media and leisure corporations (to be unfashionably anti-postmarxist about it) and sometimes for blatantly manipulative political purposes. As such, it sums up neatly our bourgeoisie’s failure (back to Nairn-Anderson) to construct a national-popular consensus that goes beyond commerce, recreation and showbiz: fan-dom and spectating, which is pretty much all it requires of our masses. And it has no relationship with the real place of England, the land of fields and woods, towns and cities that we all of us actually if reluctantly spend our lives in. As Orwell put it in 1940, and I would love to think it still holds, ‘In England all the boasting and flag-wagging, the “Rule Britannia stuff”, is done by small minorities. The patriotism of the common people is not vocal or even conscious’.

So let’s shove all that to one side, and dig a bit deeper into our past and present for a democratic (possibly left) English national-popular. To begin with, we can just about discern some sparks of resistance, and embryonic Gramscian popular hegemony, within what Gareth Stedman Jones called the English proletarian ‘culture of consolation’. It’s there in elements of the music hall and folk tradition: the mocking and the cheeky, rather than the maudlin and sentimental. It’s there among the 1950s ‘angry young men’ (and women), especially the ‘social-realist’ wing of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning or A Taste of Honey. It’s there in 1960s mod culture, that extraordinary appropriation by white working class youth of black American and Caribbean music and ‘cool’, of European elegance and fashion, and avant-garde pop-art stylings. It’s there in the consciously popular-democratic ‘folk-rock’ of early Fairport Convention, whose recently re-issued, magnificent Liege and Lief was hailed at the time as an English masterpiece. It’s there in the DIY, democratic wing of punk, especially in the Northwest, which was much more explicitly cultural-political than the showy, bin-liner and safety pin London variety. It’s there now in the TV show Shameless, which at its best assembles story-lines and characters from the writer Paul Abbot’s own childhood on a council estate into a prototype for new, reconstituted proletarian living. Joyful as well as shameless; resiliently female as well as fecklessly male; sexy and polysexual; and yes, naturally if wishfully multicultural.

There is something in all of this that is enduringly ‘down to earth’; what Orwell called our ‘horror of abstract thought’. This seems to me the central feature of the English national-popular identity, and happily resonates with my earlier call ‘back to the land’ of this real, mucky place. It locates us firmly where we need to be, in our material existence rather than a fog of tacky symbols. And let’s be honest: it exposes the complete dead-end we on the left have allowed ourselves to be shunted into, of ‘political correctness’. How on earth (that word again) did we allow otherwise progressive demands, about equality and freedom and fairness, to be turned into a new moral code for language and behaviour that the majority of the population finds utterly bewildering and alienating? What we have done with ‘political correctness’ is set about imposing upon the national discourse a new form of the traditional middle-class sensibility of politeness and nice-ness and ‘good manners’, which itself arose as a trusty guide for social climbers through the otherwise hazardous,
tumultuous social landscape of the nineteenth century. This was where Gramsci’s ‘separate entity’, the English bourgeoisie, found its moral purpose, keeping the silly, licentious aristocracy in check, and policing the rude manners of the unruly masses. But instead of not eating off your knife or saying ‘bloody’, only doing the washing on Monday and never discussing personal feelings, we now censure the white, generally powerless lower orders for using terms of ethnic or sexual designation that are in everyday, colloquial use among minority ethnic (nigger and paki) and sexual communities (queer and dyke) themselves! Whatever possessed us? Probably the same malign spirit that made us think we could construct a progressive – even socialist! – politics around every other aspect of ‘individual identity’ than nation and class, the central categories within Gramsci’s thinking.

But then, as Stedman Jones reminds us, there are plenty of historical antecedents for this kind of thing within the social relations of our country. Sometimes they have played a key role in the adaptation of bourgeois hegemony, as in the ‘affinity of outlook between the “top and bottom drawer” against the “killjoys in between”’ during middle-class attempts to impose a restrictive moral order on pleasure-taking in the late nineteenth century (after a loosening of moral restraints that had generated new commercial possibilities within the consumption of leisure). This was a time when Conservatism put down its deep roots amongst the English working class, because you could drink alcohol freely in the ‘Conny club’, sing along with gusto at the Conservative-protected music hall, and cheer on the boxers and football teams sponsored by your Conservative employer. Conservatism was fun, well out of reach of the finger-wagging zealots of non-conformism, Liberalism and Labourism. For the nineteenth-century temperance movements, Humanitarian League or anti-Gambling League of Stedman Jones’s account, ‘all acting on the same principle, trying to interfere with the enjoyments and pleasures of the people’, read twenty-first century ‘political correctness gone mad’ or moral panic over drugs and binge-drinking.

Much of the theorising about culture and identity of the last twenty years has followed a trajectory from ‘communities of identity’ (people drawn together by a common ethnicity or sexuality), through ‘communities of interest’ (people with shared hobbies or pastimes) to ‘communities of affect’ (people united by taste or sensation in music, art, sport or other spectacle). What we have ended up with is a society of ‘virtual enclaves’ or self-selecting ghettoes, mutually exclusive sets of PLUs (People Like Us) living alongside but not with each other, the reductio ad absurdum of a process of social retreat first identified in the late-1980s by Michael Rustin and others. I propose, in pursuit of the English national-popular – the Scottish and Welsh are welcome to join in too, by the way, but it seems to me that they’re a fair way down their own road already – that we seek to rediscover ‘communities of place’.

That is, real geographical material places you can put your finger and foot on, like Norwich and Norfolk or anywhere else that takes your English fancy. A quaint notion, I know, but the fact is that while we’ve been busily setting up communities of identity/interest/affect, most real people have continued living in such real geographical material places. We need to re-establish political contact with them, as is already happening, in small, localized, sometimes contradictory ways, in the ‘greening’ of municipal politics. My own local Green Party group of Norwich city councillors is now in double figures, with a realistic chance of an MP and an MEP in the next few years. They have still to extend their electoral reach much beyond the disaffected urban intelligentsia, and to develop a fully modern, urban progressive politics, but at its best greenery connects to people’s real, troubled experience of their land and lives: a crucial ingredient in any emergent democratic left England.

Maybe, once we’ve embraced our core-Englishness, we can begin happily and comfortably being other things too – men, women, black, white, brown, gay, straight, young, old, whatever constitutes our own unique personalities – and articulating our nationality with all our other identities. Maybe as a nation we could start to like each other again, and just maybe start to creep out from under the shadow of failed, partial bourgeois hegemony and its contemporary ideological twists of Thatcherism and its neo-liberal, New Labour adaptation. As the socialist visionary Edward Carpenter wrote in his eponymous ‘national-popular’ hymn of the 1900s, ‘England Arise!’ Or, as one of the foremost English visionaries of our own time, Ian Dury, put it, ‘There ain’t half been some clever bastards…’

England and the 'National-Popular' (Part 1)

eddie — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 14:33:57 +0000

What does it mean to be English? Let’s start with the fashionably confessional/genealogical. I am about the most English person I know. As far back as I can go – admittedly, like most ordinary English people, not very far – my forebears were unquestionably English. My mother’s family came from the old market town of Ashby-de-la-Zouch in Leicestershire, and my father’s from rural Cambridgeshire. I have never traced either branch back beyond my great-grandparents, who were tradesmen and clerks. But, given the relatively fixed family and community patterns of the southern English midlands, with relatively little outward or inward migration until recently, and my family’s decidedly non-exalted social status, I can safely assume that they all came from the solid, steady heart of England. Nothing Celtic, continental or colonial in there, though a bit of TV celebrity-style digging or a DNA test might unearth some surprises.

So, if I’m so bloody English, why do I find myself so generally embarrassed and often downright ashamed of it? Why have I, throughout my adult life, felt drawn to other countries and cultures, and carried inside me an elaborate (almost wholly unrealistic) ‘escape-plan’ for when life here becomes finally unbearable? Why, whenever I find myself amongst the English abroad – the tattooed, bloated, around-the-clock pissed, football shirt-wearing variety, or their complacent, condescending, wine-quaffing, socks-and-sandals superiors – do I insist on marching my family a further half-mile down the beach? Why do I start thinking in O-level French, German or Italian to convince myself I’m not one of them? Why do the English towns and cities where most of us live seem so mean and dull by comparison to the vibrant, civilized places in continental Europe Easyjet and Ryanair are so eager and ready to whisk us away to? Is it only a matter of lousy weather? And why do we persist, in our petty fog of regional rivalries, in thinking that everywhere else in England is even worse? Is there some general tendency in the English towards self-loathing, and if so, what are its specific contemporary triggers?

Blimey; a whole paragraph of questions. I’d better start providing some answers. In this essay, I want to begin thinking a way out of this distinctively English mess. I’m particularly interested in what I might call a ‘democratic left’ Englishness, as opposed to the boorish, braying, occasionally terrifying and essentially terrified Englishness we see all around (and, if we’re honest, inside) us. I plan to use the thinking of the great twentieth century libertarian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (an Italian with a recurring, somewhat puzzled fascination with England), and specifically his concept of the ‘national-popular’, to illuminate elements of our English ‘national identity’. That’s in both its negative connotations, what we have to feel ashamed of; and the more positive, what we might incorporate into a more intelligent, expansive and generous outlook on our own country and the rest of the world.

I’ve spent much of the last few years ruminating on this stuff, often while out walking with my dog in the real, physical English places I live in: the urban pockets, green wildernesses, long beaches and more managed rural landscapes of northern East Anglia, mainly Norfolk and Suffolk. This most English of the English regions, or at least those further parts that remain outside daily commuting reach of London, seems to me to represent the best and the worst of our country. Its largest and most important settlement, the ‘fine city’ of Norwich where I reside, really is closer in ‘feel’ and layout to the vibrant, civilized, manageable and easily walkable places explored on short breaks to Europe than to other comparable English cities. It is also closer, as both the proverbial crow and its contemporary low-cost airline equivalent fly, to Amsterdam than London. At the same time, it was once famously (and accurately still) referred to by the National Front as ‘the last white city in England’.

Gramsci and the national-popular

I have no idea whether Antonio Gramsci did much walking as an adult. For the last ten years of his life, during which he produced his extraordinary Prison Notebooks, he was only ever able to walk around his cell, prison yard and hospital ward. As a child, however, he spent much of his time roaming the Sardinian hills and fields, and recalls it regularly in his letters from prison as an obvious highlight in a troubled, poverty-stricken childhood. What shines through all his writings, in freedom or incarceration, is a deep appreciation for the feelings, traditions and perspectives of ordinary people, both in his native Sardinia and recently unified, mainland Italy. But his affection was fiercely realistic and wholly unsentimental. He was acutely aware of the contradictory impulses at work among the nascent Italian masses: from women like his mother holding together fractured families and communities, and the self-taught, determined and heroic activists of the 1919/20 Turin factory occupations, to ‘the scum of society’ he remembered hanging around the squares and bars of Cagliari and the ‘monkey people’ who embraced fascism.

Gramsci was always preoccupied with the social, cultural and regional tensions amongst the Italian people, from a ‘Sardist’ schoolboy composition calling for ‘the mainlanders to be thrown into the sea’ to his final essay as a free man, ‘The Southern Question’. This scrutinized the supposedly ‘scientific basis for regional prejudice’ propagated by the Italian Socialist Party among the northern industrial proletariat, as against the ‘backward south’. The Prison Notebooks make repeated reference to the processes whereby the Italian people are brought together and pulled apart. For Gramsci, the national-popular is a key element within the process of hegemony, whereby a particular social group represents its own interests as those of the whole nation. The success of this hegemonic project is measured by the extent to which other subordinate or ‘subaltern’ social groups accept this new ‘settlement’, more or less voluntarily, and are drawn into a ‘historic bloc’ around the dominant elite. We might call this, a little cheekily, ‘a coalition of the willing’, but note that in Gramsci it is a wholly real rather than rhetorical device. Together, these new social allies forge a national-popular identity and purpose, which becomes the new ‘common sense’ of the epoch, a ‘collective will as operative awareness of-historical necessity, as protagonist of a real and effective historical drama’. A further condition of the continued hegemony of the national-popular historic bloc is that it is constantly refreshed with new personnel, energies and insights, especially from subaltern groups’ own elites and intellectuals.

Gramsci sought to understand the attempts made over centuries to awaken this national-popular ‘collective will’, and the struggles to form a distinctive national-popular culture, alongside the mythology and iconography required to construct a national ‘story’. He was always especially sensitive to the question of language within a national-popular project: a common language is one of the primary sites wherein a nation coheres, and literally learns to talk and listen to itself. In our own time, this perhaps explains the extraordinary sensitivity over the uses and abuses of English, especially amongst certain sectors (Radio 4 listeners spring to mind) who rush to its defence at the slightest provocation, especially over suspected Americanisms. (This linguistic protectionism is even more evident in France, which Gramsci felt displayed a more pronounced ‘national-popular culture’ than any other nation, largely because of its thorough-going bourgeois revolution and because its intellectuals ‘tend to guide the population ideologically and keep it linked with the
leading group’.)

Gramsci attributes the relative historic failure of some countries’ attempts to forge a national-popular primarily to limitations within the ‘leading’ class of the society – in particular to an inability or unwillingness to represent its own sectional interests as the interests of the nation. The examples he cites are mostly drawn from Italian history, but he was also intrigued by the similarly untypical and conditional English ‘bourgeois revolution’. He suggests that the English bourgeoisie were never especially interested in forging a national-popular consensus: ‘instead of the bourgeoisie leading the people and winning their support to abolish feudal privileges, the nobility (or a fraction of it) formed the national-popular bloc against the industrial bourgeoisie’. (An elaboration of this idea formed one of the famous ‘Nairn-Anderson theses’ of the early 1960s, which basically issued a vote of no-confidence in the British ruling class.) It seems to me that the ramifications of this analysis for the formation of our society are immense, not least (as Gramsci goes on to note) in explaining the English tradition of popular Toryism, and the predominance of financial over industrial capitalism. Not to mention a divide between north and south, which is hardly less marked in England than it is in Italy.

British Labourism offers an equally resonant case study. When Gramsci says of the Italian Risorgimento ‘an effective Jacobin force was always missing’, he might just as well be indicating the recurrent failures of political leadership within the British labour movement. In particular, the lack of a ‘Modern Prince’ – by which Gramsci meant a coherent, consciously revolutionary party with a wide, deep mass base, such as only his own PCI ever came close to, certainly in Europe – points to the utter historic failure of the ‘militant’ wing of Labourism, the Communist Party of Great Britain. And the ‘British problem’ is not simply one of leadership, but equally to do with those who allow themselves to be led. As labour historians such as Eric Hobsbawm and Gareth Stedman Jones have established, the class-consciousness of the oldest and proportionately largest proletariat in the world was formed and expressed primarily through lifestyle, recreational pursuits and appearance, manners and ethos, rather than political action, intellectual formation or deep-seated ideological affiliation. As Stedman Jones puts it: ‘Its dominant cultural institutions were not the school, the evening class, the library, the friendly society, the church or the chapel, but the pub, the sporting paper, the racecourse and the music hall … both impermeable to outsiders and yet predominantly conservative’. What political agencies have emerged from the British working class, in the various forms of the labour and trade union movement, have tended to be shallow and ineffectual, imbued with a quasi-religious mythology and iconography and a narrowly electoral or sectional approach. There has been little sense of a class that seeks to represent itself as the leading actor in a new national story.

Gramsci insists that what is required of a political party is a conscious and systematic programme of ‘intellectual and moral reform’ conducted by ‘intellectuals who are conscious of being organically linked to a national-popular mass’. While this notion of party leadership is not as vanguardist as some notable twentieth-century models, it still seems far enough from populism, in our own deep-dyed ‘anti-elitist’ time and culture, to make me at least feel deeply uncomfortable, and apprehensive at the prospect of such a programme of reform. Geoffrey Nowell Smith and Quintin Hoare, the editors of the Selections from the Prison Notebooks published in 1971, plainly also feel uncomfortable with ‘the national popular’ and add a note of their own on the concept, which they describe as ‘one of the most interesting and also widely criticized ideas in Gramsci’s thought’. They argue that it is important to stress that it is a ‘cultural concept, relating to the position of the masses within the culture of the nation, and radically alien to any form of populism or national socialism’.

Hoare and Nowell Smith’s clear unease with the term betrays their underlying allegiance to the New Left Review end of British Gramscianism, which, amongst other things, was severely critical of PCI leader Togliatti’s application of the Gramscian legacy to post-war Italian politics. But it also serves the useful purpose of demonstrating much of the British left’s traditional discomfort with the ‘nation’ and pretty much any aspect of the ‘national’, especially when applied to the geographical and social entity of England. There are some good reasons for this. We are still haunted by fascism and Nazism, embarrassed by their socialist origins; and during the twentieth century socialism was linked to nationalism in dangerous ways in many countries. Furthermore, the history of the English nation-state is generally one of military aggression, conquest and violent dominion over other peoples. From the Holy Land of the Crusades to Cromwell in Ireland and the clearance of the Scottish Highlands; the colonization of the New World and Australasia; the enslavement, imperial occupation and exploitation of large parts of Africa and Asia; to more recent military adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, we English lefties have much to feel deeply uncomfortable about. Even Tony Blair, our furthest outrider, recently felt moved to apologize for some of it. The anti-nationalist, anti-imperialist, ‘internationalist’ and solidaristic currents of the British left run deep and close. And, while many other of our traditional stances have been jettisoned in the last twenty or thirty years, this one has if anything been re-invigorated by its coupling with anti-racism and more recently anti-globalisation.

A contemporary variant on this latter theme – what we might call a social-democratic anti-globalisation – argues that the nation-state is redundant in an era of unchecked global capitalism and that we must shift our attention and efforts to supra-national institutions and their requirements of our population. This could be seen as a generous interpretation of the ‘Third Way’, especially in its Brownite version. But it seems to me to be an approach based on an economism of just the kind Gramsci railed against in early twentieth-century social democracy, and in the ‘orthodox’ positivism of pre first world war marxism. Both are fixated on the economy and the state, with no sense for the separate, ‘relatively autonomous’ arenas of society; not to mention the cultural or ideological or the politically contingent. Yet the national-popular has become, if anything, more important in this latest phase of globalisation, not least as a form of cultural and ideological protectionism for groups who feel threatened and marginalised.

This is surely why the rhetoric and symbolism of national identity has become so evident across the globe – sometimes to murderous effect – as an expression of popular grievance and resentment at the effects of the neo-liberal agenda. Like all subaltern cultural forms, it ultimately serves the purposes of consolation and adjustment to new hegemonic realities, but it is still a major part of daily material reality. Thus, within the still vigorous ideological corpus of Thatcherism, the patriotic heart of Englishness still strongly beats, even as the world status of the English nation-state continues to decline. This is one of the ramifications of the ideology of Thatcherism that the British left has found it difficult to understand, not least because our latest political ‘project’ (New Labour) is turning out to be an embarrassing ‘transformist’ adaptation and deepening of it. Nevertheless, any politics that seeks – as Thatcher and Blair did – to create a hegemonic sense of what a country means to its inhabitants must grapple with this question.

We might argue that it’s all right for Gramsci and the Italians to talk about the ‘national popular’. They don’t have quite so much, by way of imperial conquest and dominion, to feel ashamed of. And what they have had, in North and East Africa, can easily be blamed on Mussolini and the fascists, who were no less rapacious in their treatment of parts of Italy itself. Gramsci himself was amongst the first to identify, in his writing on ‘the Southern Question’ and elsewhere, the colonial relationship between the industrial/ financial capitalism of the Italian north and the peasant, agrarian south. But then hang on a minute. What about the relationship between the wealthy South east of England and large parts of the rest of the country, especially the industrial north of England where I was born? Wasn’t that, and isn’t it still in some ways, oppressive and exploitative? (It is even more so, according to a recent IPPR report, after ten years of New Labour government.) And Italian fascism was not outside Italian culture: it was, and still is, deeply rooted in the oppressed, ‘subaltern’ south, and is still a vigorous current in the rest of its ‘modern advanced democracy’, just as conservatism, xenophobia and racism are deeply rooted in the British proletariat and most of its post-industrial fragments.

So, as Gramsci might ask us, is there something specific and peculiar in the British left’s discomfort and occasional loathing of the national, and in particular the English? And might it go some way towards explaining, or at least illustrating, the almost total disappearance of the communist, socialist or even social-democratic currents from our country’s political system and culture? Perhaps we should start by asking exactly what is ‘our country’?

Follow the links on the right for Part 2…

What is Britishness?

Ellie Keen — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Citizenship, values and identity

One of Gordon Brown’s first acts after becoming prime minister in 2007 was to publish a green paper with Jack Straw, The Governance of Britain (CM7170), outlining a ‘new constitutional settlement’ that would ‘forge a new relationship between government and citizen’. Part 4 of this paper, entitled ‘Britain’s future: the citizen and the state’, was focused on a set of concerns about what it means to be British, what are the distinctive British values, and what rights and responsibilities people should have as citizens, all of which were argued to be unclear or confused and in need of greater clarification.

So, for example, we read: ‘The government believes that a clearer definition of citizenship would give people a better sense of their British identity in a globalised world.’ (sec. 185). ‘A clearer understanding of the common core of rights and responsibilities that go with British citizenship will help build our sense of shared identity and social cohesion.’ (193). ‘It is important to be clearer about what it means to be British, what it means to be part of British society and, crucially, to be resolute in making the point that what comes with that is a set of values which have not just to be shared but also accepted.’ (195).

To this end the green paper promised a series of discussion documents – on citizenship, on British values, on a British bill of rights – as part of a wide-ranging national debate on the country’s future. The first of these was Lord Goldsmith’s Citizenship Review, Citizenship: Our Common Bond, complete with a host of accompanying research documents; others are promised shortly.

The first reaction of anyone reading this mass of material has to be astonishment that so much effort is felt to be necessary chasing a will of the wisp called Britishness, or even to defining a distinctive set of rights and responsibilities which are specific to British citizens as opposed, say, to long-term residents settled here from other EU countries, from Commonwealth countries or the Republic of Ireland. A second reaction is how prescriptive, even hortatory, so much of the language is in which this whole enterprise is couched, as the above quotations from the green paper demonstrate. What exactly is going on here, and why is it felt to be so urgent at this historical juncture?

It may be that Gordon Brown’s longstanding preoccupation with Britishness has something to do with a certain vulnerability he has felt as a Scottish premier-in-waiting and now prime minister of a predominantly English country, with other Scots holding leading positions in his cabinet. There are, however, more general concerns which have coincided to drive this agenda:

· Following devolution of government to Scotland and Wales, increasing numbers of residents there declare that they think of themselves as more Scottish or Welsh than British, and the English are now following suit. A British identity seems to be losing its attraction, and the Union to be correspondingly at risk.

· The growing number of black and Asian Britons in our cities, many of them with their own distinct languages and cultures, and maybe identifying with their country of family origin, is felt to require the assertion of some overarching or unifying identity as a necessary counterweight to the centrifugal tendencies of ‘multiculturalism’. The discovery that the suicide bombers of 7/7 and 21/7 were British born and bred has been particularly shocking.

· There is widespread concern in government about the public’s alienation from the formal political process, and especially that of young people, whose participation in the elections of 2001 and 2005 showed a massive decline from 1997. Among the measures outlined to combat this in last July’s green paper was the idea of a Youth Citizenship Commission, which would ‘examine ways to invigorate young people’s understanding of the historical narrative of our country and what it means to be a British citizen, and to increase their participation in the political sphere.’ (190)
A historical narrative of Britain

A good place to start if we want to understand what is problematic about the government’s attempt to revive Britishness as a response to the concerns listed above is precisely with ‘the historical narrative of our country’. Of course there is no single narrative but many diverse, even competing, ones. However, one historical account which any discussion of this issue has to come to terms with is that by Linda Colley in her widely regarded book, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707 to 1837 (Yale UP, 1992). Great Britain (as distinct form the United Kingdom), she argues, came into being with the Act of Union of 1707, and the British nation was subsequently ‘forged’ out of a number of components: through the project of Empire and the trading opportunities that went with it; from a common commitment to Protestantism; and by a monarchy at the apex of an increasingly interconnected landed ruling class. All these elements were reinforced by wars against Continental Europe and especially Catholic France, which served as the ‘other’ against which British distinctiveness came to be most clearly defined.

A number of points are worth noting from Colley’s account:

1. British nationhood came to be ‘added on’ to other identities, Scots, Welsh, English, or more purely local ones, rather than replacing them, or merging with them. Great Britain was ‘an invented nation superimposed, if only for a while, onto much older alignments and loyalties.’ In this respect being British has always allowed for multiple identities, though the English as the numerically and politically dominant element have always more readily regarded ‘English’ and British’ as interchangeable, rather than distinguishing between the two.

2. British nationhood was always more civic than ethnic, to use a common distinction from nationality studies. That is, it was a matter of commitment to, and identification with, certain common institutions, including of course the Westminster Parliament, rather than depending on ‘blood and soil’. There were certain exclusions of an ethnic kind, it should be said, such as Catholics and Jews, and the English language provided a significant unifying base. But it was the common institutions of political and civic life that defined what was distinctively ‘British’. And commitment to them, Colley insists, was always as much a matter of self-interest as of emotionally based allegiance or ideology.

3. The British nation was essentially an elite project, though identification with it spread downwards in the latter half of Colley’s period through a combination of military service in successful wars and popular mobilisations at royal events and anniversaries.

Not everyone agrees with Colley that the story of Britain began only in 1707, but nearly everyone who has commented on her work, including Colley herself, accepts that the defining elements of Britishness which she identifies all came to an end or were substantially eroded during the second half of the twentieth century, and can no longer form the basis of a distinctively British identity or nationhood. Here is how Colley herself puts it:

‘As an invented nation heavily dependent for its ‘raison d’etre’ on a broadly Protestant culture, on the threat and tonic of recurrent war, particularly war with France, and on the triumphs, profits and Otherness represented by a massive overseas empire, Britain is bound now to be under immense pressure…..We can understand the nature of present debates and controversies only if we recognise that the factors that provided for the forging of a British nation in the past have largely ceased to operate.’

To be sure, Colley’s own narrative ends with 1837, and there have been attempts by others to identify nation-wide institutions developed during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries which have provided alternative bases for a distinctively British identity, and served as integrating elements. These include the Royal Mail and the Post Office, the BBC, the political parties, the trade union movement, and the various institutions of the welfare state created by the 1945 Labour government, from the NHS to a range of nationalised utilities and other bodies with ‘British’ in their name, serving the whole of the country. Whether these institutions could ever have provided the same resonance as the ones identified by Linda Colley is now irrelevant, since most of them have been decimated, if not eliminated, by the privatisations initiated by Mrs. Thatcher and continued under New Labour. Even the ‘Unionist’ Conservative Party ended Mrs. Thatcher’s period of rule as almost exclusively English, having lost virtually all Parliamentary representation in Scotland and Wales. And there is no doubt that her period of rule exacerbated if not started a trend towards the individualisation of economic and social life, which provides infertile ground for any wider social or political loyalty or commitment.

Two simple conclusions can be drawn from this history. The first is that to look to ‘the historical narrative of our country’ to find any basis for a contemporary restatement of what it means to be British, is to build on very shifting sand. The second is that a sense of nationhood cannot be forged from flags, from ceremonials, from statements of values or even from definitions of citizenship, but only from shared institutions of civic and public life which command wide respect.

But does it really matter if the constitutive elements of a distinctively British identity have worn thin? Is it any longer relevant in a globalising age, when many of the public values we subscribe to are ones we share with other western democracies, when our justiciable rights as citizens are drawn from the European Convention on Human Rights, and when the causes many of our young people are attracted to are international rather than national ones – the environment, fair trade, global poverty, and so on? Is a concentration on trying to define what it means to be British anything other than a rather parochial sideshow?

It is tempting simply to answer ‘no’ to all these questions, and to end this paper here. To do so, however, would be to miss the opportunity provided by the government’s initiatives, and the publicity surrounding them, to articulate a more progressive alternative to those contained in the recent documents. Sketching out what this alternative might look like, and what the obstacles are to realising it, will form the second part of the paper.
A progressive alternative

I shall begin again with Linda Colley, this time with a millennium lecture she gave to Tony Blair and other dignitaries in Downing Street in December 1999, speaking as she herself says more as a citizen than as a historian. The lecture was entitled Britishness in the Twenty-first Century. Here she exhorts her listeners to stop ‘persistently asking agonised questions about the viability of Britishness’, since it would be difficult to identify core national values ‘in a way that commands broad assent, unless you descend to uttering platitudes … Instead of being so mesmerised by debates over British identity,’ she goes on, ‘it would be far more productive to concentrate on renovating British citizenship, and in convincing all of the inhabitants of these islands that they are equal and valued citizens irrespective of whatever identity they may individually select to prioritise.’ She then sketches out a conception of a revivified ‘Citizen Nation’ based on equality of rights and sovereignty of the people, shorn of rank and ‘antiquated elements’, dedicated to tackling racial and sexual discrimination, and involving a wider diffusion and decentralisation of power.

The contrast between this conception of citizenship and that offered by Lord Goldsmith in his Citizenship Review could not be starker. Where Colley seeks a more genuinely inclusive and democratic citizenship, Goldsmith is preoccupied with finding what distinguishes those who possess British citizenship from those who don’t; with using this citizenship to define a British identity; with rituals, ceremonies and other antiquated remnants; and with an extremely narrow definition of ‘active citizenship’ which is limited to voting and ‘volunteering’, rather than the range of activities in which citizens can and do engage to defend and promote their interests, improve their lives, influence public policy or challenge injustice. In sum, it is just what one might expect from a patriarchal Lord rather than a democratically minded commoner.

Linda Colley’s millennium lecture provides a good starting point for a more progressive conception of citizenship, and I would recommend people to read it. What it does not address, however, are what the obstacles might be to realising the more progressive conception that she outlines. It is surely no accident that many of these obstacles are to be found in precisely those foundational components of British nationhood which everyone assumes have now disappeared or lost their significance. Far from having disappeared, however, their inheritance remains deeply ingrained and persistently reproduced in the British state and public life, where they work to frustrate the realisation of a more democratic Citizen Nation based upon equality. Let me consider each of these components in turn.
Empire

The most obvious legacy of Empire is of course the multi-racial and multi-ethnic composition of Britain’s population itself. But the integration of these peoples as equal citizens continues to be hampered, not only by linguistic and educational disadvantage, but also by the attitudinal legacy of white superiority that was inherent in the British imperial project. This legacy is powerfully reinforced by latter-day versions of liberal imperialism, in which Britain seeks to bring ‘freedom’ or ‘democracy’ to benighted countries of the developing world, albeit now on the coat-tails of US military power. Far from being an aberration of Tony Blair, this mentality is continually reproduced within the British state, as witnessed most recently by David Miliband, who in a recent Oxford lecture outlined a ‘great progressive project’ of spreading democracy around the world, if necessary by ‘hard’ as well as ‘soft’ power.

What has this to do with the different progressive project of creating a more inclusive and equal citizenship at home? Colley’s history shows repeatedly how national identities come to be defined externally, through opposition to a foreign ‘other’, especially in war. In the contemporary world of multi-ethnic societies, however, this process of opposition can turn out to be as internally divisive as unifying. The invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan have caused deep alienation among the Muslim communities of Britain, and the characterisation of these conflicts as part of a ‘global war on terrorism’ has reinforced the conception of a threatening ‘other’ in our midst which echoes the position of British Catholics in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century wars against Catholic Europe.

If the persistence of the imperial mentality within society and state is one legacy of empire that works to hinder a more inclusive and equal citizenship, a second is the institution of the public schools. Although some of these predate the Empire, it was the 19th century that saw their greatest expansion and consolidation as a training ground for imperial rule. They now survive as a highly effective vehicle for reproducing social and economic privilege across generations, through the preferential access of their pupils to the most prestigious universities and into the leading professions. Yet the most fundamental requirement for equal citizenship is a common system of public education, which is shared by all, and through which they learn to recognise all sorts and diversities of future citizens as potential equals. Tinkering at the margin with the charity law for private schools only shows how far we remain from realising such a basic condition for citizenship.
Trade

The trading supremacy which came with the British Empire is of course long since at an end, but its legacy persists in one of the world’s most open economies, in which finance capital through the City of London holds the dominant position, nurtured by successive governments. The enormous and ever-increasing inequalities generated by this ‘Anglo-Saxon’ model of capitalism have been well documented and commented on by others. Two consequences have followed, however, for the ‘rights and duties of citizenship’ that are the direct responsibility of government, one at either end of the economic scale.

At the top end is the enormous system of tax avoidances and evasions which enable wealthy corporations and individuals to escape their citizenship obligations. On the very day the Goldsmith review of citizenship was published we were reminded of the tax rules that have allowed British citizens to spend up to 270 days a year working in Britain, while avoiding paying tax by claiming residence in tax havens such as Monaco. This is only the tip of a very large iceberg. For example, Goldsmith’s account of ‘recent changes in citizenship’ mentions an exotic-sounding list of places, from Anguilla and Bermuda to the Turks and Caico Islands, whose citizens now qualify for British citizenship under the British Overseas Territories Act of 2002. What he does not mention, of course, is that these remnants of Empire include a roll-call of tax havens under British jurisdiction, where international companies and billionaires can escape their citizenship responsibilities, and deprive governments around the world, including our own, of vitally needed revenue. And this list does not include the Isle of Man or Jersey, the latter of whose citizens, we recently learn, have now to be charged a food tax to pay for the reduction of corporation tax to zero.

The other side to this open and deregulated economy is the determination of successive British governments to demand opt-outs from the EU treaties from Maastricht to Lisbon, which would guarantee workers the same rights in employment that are enjoyed by the citizens of other member states. Given this record, it comes as no surprise to find that the one item that the July green paper explicitly excludes from a future British Bill of Rights and Duties is any incorporation of economic and social rights into British law. Labour’s ‘common bond of citizenship’, in short, will continue to allow the evasion of responsibilities by the wealthy, while limiting rights to economic security for other citizens.
The monarchy

Of all the components contributing to the forging of Britain since 1707, the monarchy is the one that has remained relatively unchanged, despite various vicissitudes. In doing so it has not only consolidated the remnants of an aristocratic social order, complete with titles, ermine and ceremonial, but perpetuated the self-definition of the people as subjects rather than citizens. The first action of those acquiring British citizenship through naturalisation is to swear an oath that they ‘will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, her Heirs and Successors’. Lord Goldsmith now proposes that this feudal relic, which has no intelligible meaning in the modern world, should be extended to all young people in public citizenship ceremonies to be attended at the end of their schooling. His reasoning seems to be that, since those holding public office have to swear the oath, it is ‘evidence of the duty of allegiance owed by all British nationals’, and should therefore be publicly acknowledged by all.

Not surprisingly, this proposal aroused the strongest opposition in the consultation process commissioned as part of the Citizenship Review. However, the fact that it could be entertained at all shows how deeply ingrained in the British state is the idea that the monarch, not the people, is sovereign, albeit in practice the government through Parliament now exercises that sovereignty on her behalf. And the attitude of deferential subordination to those representing that sovereignty which the whole idea conveys is deeply corrosive of any democratic conception of a Citizen Nation, confident in itself as the only source of legitimate political authority, and ready to challenge and hold accountable those who temporarily exercise it on their behalf.
Protestantism

Unlike the monarchy, Protestantism has long since ceased to be a defining marker of being British, since the Catholic emancipation of the nineteenth century and the removal of lesser civil disabilities from members of other religious minorities. However, what it has left as its legacy is a wholly disproportionate place for religion in the formal public sphere, given that we have one of the most secularised societies in the world in terms of religious observance. The point where this most impinges on citizenship, again, is in the school system, and in the continuing proliferation of ‘faith’ schools paid for from public funds. I should say here that I myself come from a deeply religious family, and I am no militant secularist. But I believe that religion belongs in the sphere of civil society, where it has an important role and an honourable tradition, but not in the formal public sphere, whether this be through guaranteed places in an upper chamber of Parliament, or in segregated schools paid for from taxation, whose curriculum, ethos and selection of both pupils and staff is subject to religious criteria and influence. The necessary educational basis of a common citizenship does not rule out diversity between different schools and their curricula within a common system, but it is inconsistent with exclusivities of access and membership based either on wealth or parental religious belief or occasional practice.
Wars against continental Europe

The most powerful element in forging the British nation, according to Colley, were the wars against continental Europe, first against France in the 18th and early 19th centuries, and then against Germany and its allies in the 20th. Thankfully, these have now ceased, but they have left perhaps the most persistent legacy of all, in a population that is readily influenced by the caricatures of a Europhobic press and a government that is scared of making an honest case for the European Union and our role within it. This is particularly relevant to the issue of citizenship, since arguably the most progressive feature of the EU lies in the common rights it offers all citizens of its member countries. If we leave aside the rights enjoyed under the European Convention of Human Rights through membership of the Council of Europe, these rights include the right to reside and work in another member country of the EU, to stand for election and vote in European, local and devolved elections in another member country, to enjoy a range of social benefits there linked to work, incapacity or retirement, and so on. In addition is the range of rights in employment guaranteed by the social chapters of EU treaties that the UK has opted out of.

Given the background of Europhobia, it is perhaps not surprising that the Goldsmith documents do nothing to emphasise the positive aspects of European citizenship, but rather try to find the increasingly diminishing content exclusive to British citizenship in distinction to it. In the context of our existing membership of the Union, however, this conveys an extraordinarily parochial impression, and suggests a major lost opportunity to offer an outward- rather than inward-looking account of citizenship, and one that is appropriate to the realities of the contemporary world. The democratic conception of a Citizen Nation outlined by Linda Colley could best be anchored in a wider European citizenship, including its economic and social rights.

Conclusion

The argument of this article, then, is that the key elements that went into the forging of the British nation after 1707, far from disappearing, as is widely assumed, have left a distorting legacy that continually militates against the realisation of a fully democratic conception of citizenship. This is one where we are truly citizens rather than subjects, enjoying a common system of education without privileges or exclusiveness, divested of imperial pretensions and superiorities, fairly sharing rights and responsibilities in economic life, and outward looking towards a common rights-based European citizenship. Any discussion of the citizenship agenda, or of Britishness, which fails to address this distorting legacy will necessarily be incomplete.

There is naturally no mention of these issues in the mass of Goldsmith’s documents on citizenship. Consideration of them might give a more realistic dimension to the citizenship education on which the government sets such store for instructing future citizens in their rights and responsibilities, and encouraging political participation among the young. Goldsmith’s own commissioned research reveals that many pupils lack enthusiasm or respect for the subject, perceive their teachers as disengaged, and consider citizenship classes as a ‘doss lesson’. The government’s preachifying approach is hardly likely to alter this perception. So, for example, the July green paper lays the blame for the massive decline in voting by young people on ‘their lack of appreciation of the democratic process and of the need for active citizenship’. There is no recognition that people will not vote if they cannot see any difference between the main parties, or any chance of representation for those that might more closely reflect their views and interests.

The lack of any self-critical element in these documents is striking. No one would guess from them that Parliament and its membership stands at an all time low in public esteem. This is not just a matter of Parliamentary expenses or cash for honours. As any parent will know, ‘do as I say not as I do’ is quickly seen through by the young. I recall the massive outburst of civic activism by young people, including many Muslims, leading up to the invasion of Iraq, when they participated in protest meetings, marches, demonstrations and school walk-outs. This was the first generation of students that had been exposed to David Blunkett’s new civics curriculum. In the classroom they may have learnt about the importance of the United Nations, the need to resolve disputes by peaceful means, and the values of representative democracy. What they learnt in practice was that Parliament and government can defy the UN and invade another country when they choose, and that they give more weight to the views of a foreign president than they do to the voices of their own people. A frank acknowledgement by government of the failings of our own democratic process would seem to be a precondition for any credibility in encouraging the young to participate more fully in it.

Globalisation's New Deal

Ellie Keen — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 23:29:48 +0000

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