Tom Nairn | ukwatch.net

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

Union on the Rocks?

Alex Doherty — Sat, 10 Feb 2007 16:07:31 +0000

‘The next necessary thing’, wrote Clifford Geertz in The Anthropologist as Author, ‘is to enlarge the possibility of intelligible discourse between people quite different from one another in interest, outlook, wealth and power, and yet contained in a world where, tumbled as they are into endless connection, it is increasingly difficult to get out of each other’s way.’ New nationalisms are part of that connection, and part of the resultant structures of evasion, or ‘identity’. Mongrels need new rules. And all nations are becoming mongrels, hybrids or foundlings, in the circumstances of globalization.

This is the overall impression left by Michael Fry’s definitive new book, The Union: England, Scotland and the Treaty of 1707 —both a careful history of the Treaty of Union, detailing in particular the years from 1698, and a polemical argument for its repeal, and for the resumption of Scottish independence. Note, ‘resumption’ rather than ‘claiming’. Its appearance could hardly be more timely. May 1st, 2007 will mark the 300th anniversary of the ‘United Kingdom of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland’. This elderly piece of multiculturalism has endured alternative titles, ‘Britain’ and ‘Great Britain’ for example, all intended to make it sound more united than it ever was. People appear to be getting used to the idea of Iraq disappearing, divided between Kurdistan and one or more Muslim-Arab states. But an analogous fate may overtake Britain’s faltering Union, if Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland opt for new directions at the May 2007 elections to their ‘devolved’ assemblies. In that case a new acronym may soon come into play, the ‘ruk’ (‘Rest of the uk’). This would be mainly England of course, though now with the curious sense of ‘Little England’ plus London—a cosmopolis with nothing little about it, outside of Westminster and Buckingham Palace.

About twenty years ago Eric Hobsbawm, annoyed by my own connections with what then seemed the hopeless cause of Scottish nationalism, reminded me sharply that it was the Scots who really made the British Union in the 18th and 19th centuries. He was implying that to withdraw from the uk would be a retrograde move, and that to try and reform it made more sense. Whatever is now thought of that political recipe, Hobsbawm’s historical judgement was surely right. Though the British Kingdom unites a surprising number of countries and cultures, ranging from Wales to the micro-nations of the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands, its backbone remains the link with Scotland. That rapport, in turn, rests formally upon one thing. This is not an idea, or a sacred code or emblem, or even what sociologists call a ‘habitus’. It is a sheaf of papers.

I recall vividly the first time I set eyes on the Treaty, at a court hearing in the 1980s on Scottish protests over Mrs Thatcher’s Poll Tax. Some Scottish lawyers maintained that a head-count tax might be incompatible with the 1707 Treaty of Union, and hence illegal under Scots Law. The presiding judge testily decided that a copy of the Treaty was required, and dispatched a clerk to make a photocopy from the Signet Library archives. Some hours passed before he returned with a handful of folded sheets—the nearest thing to a written constitution that British statehood has ever attained. A few days later the verdict came. There were no grounds for thinking the Poll Tax incompatible with any clauses of the Treaty, and Scots would have to put up with it. The Treaty hadn’t saved them. The same miserable old sheets would be included, unchanged, in Blair’s 1998 legislation on devolution. So the restored Scottish parliament was to go on being hamstrung by them, exactly like its ancestor of 292 years before.

This and many other absurdities can be made more sense of in the broader perspectives of The Union. Fry’s close scrutiny of the motives for the 1707 Treaty underlines its unique character. It involved neither colonization nor forced assimilation—of the sort displayed earlier in Wales and Ireland—but an international agreement between two frequently battling kingdoms. They had been united under the same monarchy since 1603, but even this had grown precarious. Scottish in origin, the Stuart dynasty constantly threatened an armed come-back after twice being evicted, during the civil wars of mid-century and again in 1688. (The question would not be finally resolved until forty years after the parliamentary Union, at the Battle of Culloden in 1746.) In 1707, Queen Anne’s English parliament was demanding more serious political reform, a single assembly located (naturally) in London and supporting the new Protestant monarchy, forerunner of today’s Windsors. Their hope was for a more united Anglo-Scots ruling class, which would be easily dominated by the English aristocracy. At that time, poor and thinly-populated Scotland represented only a small part of the main island’s population, and even less of its resources.

London’s new urgency was fueled by international problems. An expanding colonial empire could no longer tolerate home-island dissent, least of all from a regime that was showing alarming signs of wanting its own colonies and foreign policy. Scotland had often been allied with France, the dominant great power of the time and England’s chief competitor. The Stuarts were in exile in France, and counting on diplomatic and military support from Louis xiv. At the same time, the condition of the Scottish economy had become pitiable. No-one will ever be sure what percentage of the population starved to death during the terrible 1690s, a period to which Fry pays great and deserved attention. In these circumstances, the Edinburgh political elite sought an over-ambitious remedy: launching a colonial enterprise of its own, by occupying the Isthmus of Darien (today’s Panama).

A joint counter-attack by England and Spain defeated this venture in 1698–99 but, as Fry recounts, simultaneously emphasized the need for London to close the northern ‘back door’. After the assimilation of Wales and Ireland, a different solution had to be found for the Scots. In contemporary terms, ‘security’ called for a political deal, rather than the dangers of occupation and repression. The English knew they could defeat Scotland’s formidable clannic armies. They had done so already in Cromwell’s time, but at huge cost; in today’s world, comparable perhaps to recent assaults on Afghanistan. A much better solution was to buy off the northern aristocracy and warlords (including some compensation for their humiliation over Darien).

The Union is an updated retelling of the whole story, enlivened by the historian’s own passionate and political involvement with the country that emerged. (Fry has described in a December 2006 Prospect essay his transition from pro-devolution Conservative parliamentary candidate—he joined the Tory party in 1966—to Scottish nationalist.) Such emotions aren’t concealed by his conclusion, where the recent phase of devolution is dismissed as ‘a flawed outcome’ that has ignored ‘deeper problems of the nation, of redefining its character and purpose’. He goes on to suggest that ‘there may indeed be no satisfactory halfway house between the state of the nation as it was before 1603 and . . . as it was after 1707’, so that today ‘we are travelling back from the destination reached at the Union, if along a less bumpy route.’ The question, then, is ‘whether we should not make greater haste to the place where we started, as an independent nation’.

The Union deal was brokered before democracy and nationalism assumed anything like their modern forms. In the early-modern era, popular approval was not required—fortunately for the upper classes favouring the changes. Fry enjoys recounting the episodes of lower-class indignation and near-insurrection that accompanied the parliamentary debates of 1706–07, and makes extensive use of the reports compiled by an English journalist and spy, Daniel Defoe, better known today for later writings like Robinson Crusoe. Arriving in Edinburgh, Defoe was surprised

to find a nation flying in the face of their masters, and upbraiding the gentlemen, who managed it, with selling and betraying their country, and surrendering their constitution, sovereignty and independency to the English.

Edinburgh was at that time poorly paved, with streets and alleyways that provided ample ammunition for the traditional form of protest: ‘pebbling them wi’ stanes’. Had the contents of the Treaty been better known, Defoe observed, few parliamentarians ‘would have dared go home without a guard to protect them’.

Yet the pre-democratic, feudal-estates assembly of 1706–07 was by no means a contemptible body, as Fry several times underlines. Some did sell their votes, but many refused. Among the pro-Union ranks, some genuinely believed in their cause, and argued that short-term sacrifices would be justified by longer-term gains, more enduring peace and stability. In addition, he argues: ‘The vigour of the Scots’ existing traditions and institutions let them shape the Union too, for good or ill: it was a genuine choice in 1707, not just a factitious product of English expansionism.’ All over Europe, small countries and city-states were coming under similar pressures to amalgamate and form larger units—a good example is Catalonia, whose assimilation to all-Spanish rule was in part forced (ironically) by a Scottish army under the Duke of Berwick. By contrast, the Scots were able to retain or even reinforce important native institutions, including the legal and educational systems. Surrender of the state did not entail that of their ‘civil society’ (to use a later term coined in Scotland). And it is of course the latter that has survived into the present, and reacted to Iraq and other failures of New Labour.

Survival of the nation was one thing; tolerable survival and popular acceptance quite another. Fry also enjoys retelling the astonishing tales of bribery that punctuated the Scottish parliamentary debates and vote, finally made on January 16th, 2007 (though not formally celebrated until May 1st). On that day the Duke of Hamilton, himself one of the most dubious figures in the aristocracy, commented: ‘And so the darkest day in Scotland’s history has finally arrived. The point of no return has been reached, and nothing is left to us of Scotland’s sovereignty, nor her honour or dignity or name’. Buying the elite was one thing, but convincing the rising middle classes and stane-pebblers took far longer—well over half a century on most accounts, punctuated by both political and military revolts until 1746.

What made the real difference was not the Union Treaty, but the empire. Scots of all classes discovered that overseas expansion in the later part of the century, first to North America and then to many other countries, furnished opportunities greater than their own abortive colonization of 1698 could ever have done. To a great and sustained movement of population was added a striking cultural expansion, the Scottish Enlightenment. As Fry concedes, this first successful phase of Union (from David Hume’s time up to 1832) ‘saw glorious intellectual achievement, the one thing that gives Scottish history any universal significance, and it ill behoves us now to complain about it.’ The intelligentsia that had renounced its own statehood compensated by imagining a universal realm of progress, liberated from borders and inherited constraints. One of the most telling parts of Fry’s Chapter 7, ‘Fair Words—After the Union’ is an account of Adam Smith’s father, the ‘Comptroller of Kirkcaldy’, in Fife, for whom ‘the Union proved a bit of a disaster’. But of course his son, Adam Smith Junior, would react to the miseries of the Customs Inspectorate with a theory about a tariff-free world: The Wealth of Nations (1776).

Contrary to some conventional views, it was almost certainly the Scots who headed the European emigration tables for the 19th and 20th centuries—a phenomenon Fry touches on, having produced a comprehensive account in his 2002 The Scottish Empire. Emigrants came from the rural lowlands and the towns and cities, not from the most traditional areas of clannic culture and less developed agriculture, as happened in Norway, and in Ireland after the 19th-century potato famine. The massive outflow came from all regions and classes, and continued for two centuries. The overall effect of such wide and enduring emigration was to constitute something like a ‘haemorrhage society’ at home—a nationality reconfigured by emigration, rather than just affected by it. The advantages for innumerable individuals had to be set against a mounting and decisive loss for the community, mourned by later writers like Edwin Muir, who complained in 1935 of seeing a country ‘gradually being emptied of its population, its spirit, its wealth, industry, art, intellect and innate character’. The mythologies of nationalism are well known; but they should more often be set against those of migration and internationalism, still headier concoctions that rarely pause to measure this darker side of the process they extol.

It is, after all, that other side that partly explains the lateness of Scottish political nationalism, at which Fry’s new history is directed. For all too long, the enterprising spirit of post-Union society was enthralled by the outward-bound impulse, which had plenty of time to itself become a tradition, and seem part of Scotland’s ‘innate character’. It was not just the absence of military occupation or police repression that distinguished post-1707 Scotland. Important as this was—when compared to Ireland, for example—there was also the positive sense of large-scale contribution and achievement made possible by imperialism. The Union describes the national shames accompanying the Treaty; but these were to be eclipsed by the greater, more structured opportunities that favoured one generation after another, until quite recently. The predominantly successful saga of emigration in turn encouraged a deeply conservative mind-set. Investment by all classes in the process made it practically ‘unthinkable’ to alter course against the 1707 Union bargain.

True, the empire finally shrank and converted itself into a relatively meaningless Commonwealth, nowadays a venue for sport rather than politics. However, the phasing out of imperial attitudes and ‘Greatness’ was a lengthy business which, after pulling out of India in 1948, took the form of many relatively minor disgraces and humiliations. These generated cumulative depression rather than wishes for a break—that English mixture of melancholia and ironic resignation, perhaps best conveyed in the postwar poetry of Philip Larkin. The defeats were not big or meaningful enough to force revolt: everyone put up with decline, Scots included. ‘Decline’ was nothing like the fate inflicted on France in 1940, or on the losers of World War ii, or upon the Soviet domains of the 1980s. To an indurate general conservatism, such retreat could always be presented as something other than terminal. And it was compensated for by second-rung material prosperity, as well as by vaguer hopes of redemption. Union cohabitation obviously grew less appealing as a social option, and following World War I a growth of nationalism in Scotland and Wales reflected that. But surely nothing too disastrous or final could overtake it?

And indeed it did not—until now. For the order at which Fry’s book is aimed is one currently undergoing collapse. Each day brings the crash of another wall or roof beam. On 12 January 2007, the Daily Mail (rumoured to be Prime Minister Blair’s preferred breakfast reading) appeared with the banner headline: ‘Union In Jeopardy: Majority of Scots See Independence as Inevitable’. More astonishing still was the second heading, pointing out that most English opinion apparently agrees with them: ‘more than half’, according to the opinion survey used. And the United Kingdom’s life-expectancy? Five years or so, with luck and some prevarication. The doleful prognosis is if anything supported by the paper’s editorial page, a compilation of half-dead clichés about ‘losing clout’, as well as the Security Council Seat, the throwing away of proud inheritances and ‘constitutional vandalism’. One can almost hear them toiling away down in the Middle England boiler room, striving to raise some steam.

But there is no longer anything there. Defeat in the Middle East is the trigger, but it should be remembered that it is happening at a moment when all other recourses have proved disappointing, or failed. Thatcherism has been followed by Blairism; that is, over twenty-five years neither the Right nor the Left of Britain’s political spectrum has managed to restore anything like the previous age of global distinction and domination, or redeem the old sense of meaning and self-confidence that ‘Britishness’ used to depend upon. Bizarrely, Gordon Brown—currently preparing for prime-ministerial takeover—launched an unprecedented campaign to boost not just New Labour but British identity as such at a Fabian conference in January 2006. Should he become Prime Minister, the ‘Save Britain’ movement threatens to raise us-style flagpoles in Ukanian front gardens for the restored Union flag; ‘Britain Day’ could soon succeed the former ‘Empire Day’. But if Brown believes that old-style Britishness can be conjured up from the dead, he is mistaken.

From 1979 to the present, foreign policy has grown ever more crucial for London—the era of the South Atlantic War, a protracted (and unresolved) debate over European Union, and nato’s Balkans crisis, as well as of the advance of globalization. Status and a global presence have shown themselves to be more important to the all-British identity than the postwar welfare state, or the conventions of liberal legalism. In the end, it is foreign-policy fixations and delusions that have dragged the state into the present abyss. A feared subordination to Europe has turned into actual subservience to George W. Bush’s American neo-conservatism, and condemned the uk army (with its large Scottish contingent) to the Iraqi charnel-house, and the hopelessness of Afghanistan.

But over exactly the same period, globalization has been changing everything in quite different ways. A profound shift of outlook has encouraged aspirations for change and new starts—‘tumbled as they are into endless connection’, in Geertz’s phrase, great powers and poor devils alike. For all its pitfalls, the one world thrown up remains an authentically wider and expanding one; and bound, therefore, to resonate particularly strongly in a culture like Scotland’s. In some ways Scottish society may have become over-committed to outflow and identity-switches—pathologically outward-looking, as it were. However, this same inclination may have attuned it to the new totalizing perspective, and to both the secular and religious belief-systems that have accompanied it. Globality is a disconcerting successor to foundering imperialism. But however much the former must distance itself from the latter, the line of descent should not be occluded.

The uk posture under both Thatcher and Blair has been as a vocal leader of an unreformed global imperium, one that bases itself on the Cold War’s conclusion. The descent upon Iraq should have been a victory for that would-be new, us-led world order. It has turned into an infamous and gory failure of the old, in which Great Britain’s role has lapsed into a despicable mixture of bleating apologist and camp guard. Could any contrast be greater, or less controllable in its repercussions? In the old-Brit two-party system, both Tories and Labour supported the American neo-imperial adventure; but neither imagined that failure might impose intolerable strains, not simply on those in office, but on the grander system whose axis remains the 1707 Treaty of Union.

Fry’s history crowns an ongoing debate about British identity and inheritance that includes Linda Colley’s Britons, Forging the Nation, Thomas Smout’s History of the Scottish People, Neal Ascherson’s Stone Voices and Christopher Harvie’s Mending Scotland. In Scotland at least, it looks as if popular instinct and response are now overtaking such ‘history wars’. I cited above the question Fry concludes with, of ‘making greater haste’ to return to independence; and answers are already being given, by one opinion poll after another. In November 2006 the Scotsman published a survey,

showing a clear majority of Scots favour independence, and illustrating a significant swing from Labour to the snp. The Scotsmanicm poll found 51 per cent now favoured full independence with only 39 per cent against—the biggest level of support for separatism for eight years. The poll also forecasts major gains for the snp at next year’s Holyrood elections with the party on course to win enough seats to form Britain’s first nationalist-led government.

In the run-up to the May 2007 elections for the devolved parliaments in Scotland and Wales—two days after the 300th commemoration of the Union, for the Scots—and with the worst of the Iraqi tail-end still to come, a majority is looking forward to independence. As in all similar surveys, only a section of the emergent majority can be regular voters for the Scottish National Party, though their support is now steadily rising from its normal 25 per cent. In other words, a broader movement including Liberal-Democrats, Greens, Socialists and many Labour rank-and-file supporters is already in existence, and likely to be allies of the Nationalists next year. Fry’s book is in effect an argument for a reformed Scottish Conservatism to join them, and secure an independent platform for separate democratic advance.

Stranger still, this Tercentenary election will itself be a byproduct of New Labour’s half-hearted constitutional reforms after its 1997 return to office. Then, the rising autonomist pressures within Labour’s ranks in Scotland and Wales made it necessary to experiment cautiously with ‘home rule’. It was taken for granted that a semi-proportional electoral system would be the best form for the devolved assemblies. Britannic mythology remained unshakably convinced that proportionality and fair shares are recipes for democratic anarchy and incompetence—the opposite of ‘sovereignty’, the stable and supposedly omnipotent authority cherished by the 1688 system. Thus a carefully delineated ‘fair go’ might help keep the discontented marginals harmlessly busy, and lessen the prospect of nationalism winning real power.

In fact what it provided was some breathing-space for new ideas to fight their way into Welsh and Scottish public opinion, and eventually into regional office. These powers are cramped, naturally, and counterbalanced by a gross reinforcement of central and increasingly authoritarian rule. But there’s no mystery about this: such reinforcement had been one aim of the devolution strategy itself, from the start—‘a regime of provincial subordination’, as Fry calls it. In that sense, ‘devolution’ can also be interpreted as another version of older historical models like the Soviet imperium of 1946–89: folk-dance as inoculation against serious political independence (and capacity for dissent).

On the constitutional reform front, the radical horizons of 1998 have taken on the dimensions of a disintegrating dog-kennel. In 2005, the ancient Westminster magic returned New Labour to office with a large majority based upon less than 22 per cent of the electoral vote. New Labour then returned the favour by making clear it had no serious plans whatever to farther alter the system that has ‘served us so well’. In 1997, for instance, the preposterous House of Lords was to have been transformed into an at least semi-democratic, electable second chamber. But a decade on, this affront to democracy still awaits its nemesis—the only substantial difference being that by now nobody expects anything better, or indeed takes much interest in the farce. Blair’s collapse has involved his interrogation by the police about an ongoing peerages-for-cash scandal. ‘Modernization’ of this kind has generated a uk climate recognizable enough in many other parts of the neoliberal world: generalized scorn and despair of politics and politicians, and mounting anguish about what the country now means, in a shrinking world-web that somehow renders identity more, rather than less, important.

This is of course the background against which more and more Scots (of all shapes and grades) perceive ‘no alternative’ to resuming independence. Not ‘claiming’ it like an ex-colony, but (as Fry describes the situation) merely returning to a long-postponed normality, via renunciation of the Treaty of Union. At the opening session of the devolved Scottish Parliament in 1998, its first Chairperson, Winifred Ewing, simply declared that an assembly abrogated sine die in 1707 was back, and about to resume business. In spite of everything, against all the odds, the day had come. And found the nation still there. Her statement of presence was widely ridiculed at the time for its remote romanticism, and flight from practical reality. Nine years later, we can see that Ewing was merely slightly ahead of the times.

A bell was actually being rung, and not just for the media, or the attendant elite. Whatever the spores that coursed out from that day (other historians will trace them), they seem in the end to have reached and disturbed every obscure, puzzled, tongueless corner of this odd, relatively well-off and relatively deprived society: ‘developed’, and yet seriously lacking in communal will and self-confidence. That will-less void was of course the Union’s achievement. And as Fry argues, the process of recovering and peopling it is now unlikely to cease. In other words, Scottish independence is about more than a ‘democratic deficit’ in general terms. A more specific history and discontent has brought acknowledgment that some democratic nationalism is the only way to carry it forward.

But The Union also omits, or skates over, several important themes. For all its merits, it remains the work of a thoroughly disgruntled conservative. More precisely, it expresses an unusual anarcho-conservatism: that is, a radicalism of the Right rather than the Left, but with quite similar shortcomings. Fry’s forte is caustic impatience with compromises, half-measures, correctness and institutional stuffed shirts. Funny and liberating as this is, it leads him to underestimate the important part that equivocation and piecemeal changes have played in the formation of today’s Scottish nationalism.

After the rise of the snp in the 1970s, an initial referendum was staged on ‘Home Rule’ in 1979, under James Callaghan’s Labour government. It failed, and was succeeded by eighteen years of Thatcherite Conservatism. But throughout these years, movements quietly continued to keep the issue alive, and a left-of-centre Constitutional Convention was set up that planned a better kind of self-government, supposedly distinct from both the Unionist regime and straightforward separation. This won increasing support and respect, and naturally provided much of the content for Blair’s Scotland Act in 1997–98. Scots themselves did most of the work for their devolution; and insufficient as it has proved to be, this process nonetheless created real foundations for today’s parliament. It is not the case that it has just been a ‘flawed outcome . . . all dressed up in tartan with nowhere to go’, as Fry puts it, ‘wasting its time and money on trivialities, on efforts at micro-management of personal lives’.

The author maintains that there can be ‘no satisfactory halfway house’ between region and true nationhood. Possibly; but an unsatisfactory halfway house may also have prepared the way for something better. Its emergent political class are no more all ‘mediocrities’ than were the parliamentarians of 1706–07 whom Fry describes. And its very existence has injected some confidence into a nation confined for three centuries to the most limited ‘low politics’ of town and county councils. Here, Fry’s radicalism of the right seems almost as astigmatic as that of the left-wing enthusiasts he has so often (and with reason) criticized. He has confidence that a more distinctive Scottish conservatism will emerge, and be another plus for independence. But its formation too is bound to depend on gradual development, involving both alliances and contrasts with other movements of a new Scottish left and centre.

There is another absence from The Union’s police-station line-up: ‘ethnicity’. The term has become inescapable, and at a time of recently revived nationalism and conflict is especially important. In spite of its novelty (the 1960s), ‘ethnic’ is today routinely applied to both separatist and minority situations: being ‘ethnic Albanian’ or an ‘ethnic Kurd’ has become indispensable for deciphering respective problems, while multiculturalism has come to haunt every metropolitan language. For Scots it is even more significant: as I said earlier, they have become a nation of emigrants inhabiting a world configured by such stereotypes. And one response has been the general adoption of what Tom Devine, author of The Scottish Nation (1999), calls ‘Highlandism’: an exceptionally visible mixture of tartan plaid, bagpipe music, folk-dance and the cult of Robert Burns. Like many others, Fry may despise this ethnic mythomania, but in a work so focused on the meaning of 1707 for the present (and immediate future), more should have been said about it.

It is crucially important to stress the drastic variance of both history and contemporary politics in Scotland from nearly all of what that mythology implies. There is no single or even majority ‘ethnos’ among the Scots: the nation is irretrievably composite in origin, and to a striking extent unified more by institutions and past statehood than by either language, customs or culture. In the conclusion to his Scottish Nationality (2001), Murray Pittock stresses that deciphering complexity is the difficult central task of anyone working in the field, frequently against pressures from the London-based media. In November 2006, the Economist carried a cartoon depicting Gordon Brown, of all people, dancing about in a kilt with a discarded claymore at his feet. As Pittock observes,

Cartoons in The Times and the Guardian . . . continue to show the exponents of Scottish nationality in the claymore-wielding, poverty-stricken garb of the Jacobites thus caricatured 250 years ago. Both elements feed each other: the self-congratulation of elements in a local elite are identified as provincial braggadocio by the metropolitan eye, which as a result sees no reason to alter its own perspective.

Everyone in Scotland knows in advance that each move towards a resumption of independence will be treated to this kind of abuse: parochialism, call of the blood, instinct taking over from reason, ‘ethnicity’ for its own sake—and so on, and on. Only the previous week Lisa Vickers, the United States Consul in Scotland, contributed to the knee-jerking when she announced that Americans will always stick by England-Britain. The same hostility is quite normally voiced as fear of a North Sea Bosnia, or as misguided opposition to the healthy style of globalization represented by President Bush and Blair’s New Labour. That is what the ‘Greatness’ business is about—whether in Washington dc, or among its bedraggled camp-followers in Whitehall and elsewhere. And ‘ethnicity’ is by contrast inherently narrow, a betrayal of greatness-defined progress: a mortal menace to the present, therefore, or a hopeless retreat into the past—or preferably both. Globalization is meant for Greats, not tomfool left-overs and ethnic nostalgics. It’s G8 stuff, nothing to do with West Papuans, Kurds, Chechens, Scots, Burmese Karens, Tibetans, Welsh, Québecois, left-out Muslims, Basques, Montenegrins, and all the rest.

It is quite true that a widespread and often unpleasant attitude surfaces among Scots: ‘anti-Englishness’. This bears little relation to textbook ethnicity or blood-line inheritance. It is, in truth, anti-Britishness: something like latter-day anti-Americanism, a resentment of overweening state power and assumed superiority. Though Fry provides many examples of the mentality at work in 1706–07, and is good at situating the strange story of the Union in the broader framework of European history, he says little directly about England in this sense. The absence is all the more noticeable because of the book’s urgently contemporary bearing. He reveals his own conversion to Scottish independence, but says next to nothing about the English nationalism this is bound to confront. However, The Union exposes how a placid assumption of England’s ingrained universality (‘ancient’ even then) dominated the negotiations three centuries ago. Even before it assumed formal existence, ‘Britain’ was taken to mean Anglo-Britain, an imperially open society which all others should naturally accept, and indeed welcome. Such leadership was not to rest upon brute force, but ‘hegemony’.

What harm can there be, after all, in a Great Power shepherding the way towards civilization, along roads that all must, in the end, imitate and follow? The United Kingdom’s hegemonic role (or ‘burden’) may have been merged into that of the United States, as Consul Vickers now reminds impatient Scots. But England’s essence will remain true to the outgoing mission—as if the Protestantism of earlier Britons had now mutated into the neoliberalism of post-1989 victory. New times, however, call for a quite different style of outreach, beginning with emancipation from the paleo-imperialism of the Bush–Blair North Atlantic. Just as free trade was impossible without assorted forms of protection and barriers, so globalization will only work via renewed forms of nationalism and identity conservation. I think the Scots know as much, if not more, about the outward-bound mentality. And they may be more aware of its pitfalls and temptations. Why else is the contemporary scene dominated by an ever-growing list of battling nationalist and irredentist claims, and ‘rediscovered’ identity concerns? Neoliberal correctness put these all down as fossils. But since consciousness-raising too is part of globalization, the relics can’t help growing more aware of their plight. And a self-conscious ‘relic’ is a nationalist dilemma. So far the burning-glass of Iraq has generated or concentrated three of them. Mobilized nationalities would not submit to high-command imperatives in the 20th century; they are surely even less likely to do so in the 21st. Seen in this way, Scotland’s situation is typical rather than exceptional; and England’s turn will surely come—‘turning inward’ is only a part of doing this, necessary for any remedy.

Even so, outside observers are bound to ask: isn’t some intermediate or compromise arrangement possible, among nationalities so long conjoined, and sharing so much—even with all the shortcomings of the Union? For example, a federal or confederal British polity where England, Scotland, Wales, one part of Ireland, and the micro-states, obtain equality of status and agree on common rules and norms, and shared representation where this is appropriate? As things stand right now, the answer has to be: ‘no’. While such formulae are easy to imagine, they are difficult to sustain for long in practice because of one factor: ‘England’—at once the largest component of any such state, yet without any separate political identity or institutions whatever and still so merged into a discredited Britain that few will even contemplate de-merger; or if they do, only via the shudder of a deprived, somehow shrunken ‘little England’. New Labour’s ‘Council of the Isles’ disappeared within months, when it became obvious that it could never function without more serious reform of the central power-apparatus, including its electoral system. In practice, therefore, the current turning away from Britishness has no alternative except straightforward independence, or separation—or (for the Scots) reversion to nation-state business as usual.

The move is depicted by Anglo-American leaders and Consuls as ‘radical’, extremist, and so on, but such phrases are self-serving rhetoric. To anyone like myself, following events from far away and returning only now and then for re-immersion, something else is far more noticeable. This is what I can only describe as mounting matter-of-factness. From the sixties through into the nineties of last century, most debate on nationalism was conducted in a furnace of mutual loathing and recrimination. Passions could hardly have been more intense—especially on the side of threatened Britishness. In Scotland, this led to institutional hatreds and vendetta-like feuds between snp nationalists and British-Labour loyalists. Now, however, the returning native finds relative composure, and even a degree of resignation. ‘Pros’ and ‘cons’ are today—which now does mean almost every single day—listed and contrasted quite equably, in an atmosphere occasionally testy or bitter, but quite free from the explosive incriminations and lifetime sentences of a decade ago.

The passion of ‘Britishness’ has lost all weight and gravitas, except in Gordon Brown’s sermons, or in strained liberal attempts to promote a civic patriotism supposedly inseparable from Britishness. As a consequence, a real openness has appeared, much more favourable to independence. This is why the Scottish Catholic electorate (about 17–18 per cent, Scotland’s biggest cultural minority) has been drawn to vote for nationalism—and, of course, why Cardinal O’Brien appears so reconciled to independence ‘before too long’, as the Scotsman reported in October 2006. It is also why (as Fry’s book and Prospect piece suggest) Conservatives are finding themselves in an analogous situation. Few now expect Great Britain to make a phoenix-like reappearance at the next uk general election; but nobody at all expects Cameron’s neo-Toryism not to win in England.

Fry’s book brings to mind a particularly revealing incident in recent Scottish history. In December 1992, when the European Council heads of government were meeting in Edinburgh, a big demonstration was organized in the heart of the city, the Meadows Park. Its aim was to remind delegates that a nation was missing from the assembly, one that wanted to be heard again. An open-top double-decker bus was used as a platform among the trees, and novelist William McIlvanney gave from there what became the most memorable address of the day. Neal Ascherson has provided an equally memorable account of it in Stone Voices:

And then, in a tone of tremendous pride, he said this: ‘We gather here like refugees in the capital of our own country. We are almost seven hundred years old, and we are still wondering what we want to be when we grow up. Scotland is in an intolerable position. We must never acclimatize to it, never! Scottishness is not some pedigree lineage. This is a mongrel tradition!’ At those words, for reasons which perhaps neither he nor they ever quite understood, the crowd broke into cheers and applause which lasted on and on. What survives from those moments on the Meadows are his proclamation of Scotland the mongrel, and the joy these words released.

I was present at the event, and can recall the sensation vividly. It is true that nobody quite understood the thrill that made every nerve in the Meadows tingle. But that was because McIlvanney had touched something far deeper than the terms and conscious aspirations that had brought the crowd together, and still formed the official discourse of the day. He had broken through onto some unclaimed terrain, and given provisional voice to a pack of mongrels by rejecting the very idea of a pedigree ‘lineage’ (or ethnicity). He was speaking for people in a field or on a hillside, from nowhere or anywhere, with mud on their shoes and rain in their faces—yet some kind of different covenant in their hearts.

That was only three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and globalization was still in its infancy. But in retrospect, wasn’t it already fostering something different, far beneath the official chorus-lines of free trade and deregulation? Mongrelhood is also the asymmetric obverse of the older, uniformed identities of state and nationhood. In the Scottish context, it is also curiously like the positive assertion of what had been lacking since 1707: ‘self-confidence’, whose desolating absence was somehow converted into a virtue, even a sort of strength. The joy came from that acknowledgment of something real, the sudden awakening of a feeling that Scottish half-life was no longer fate—plus the obscure sense that altering circumstances might yet favour this change, rescuing it from the confines of pedigree and repetition. In Emma Rothschild’s very apt phrase, a world of ‘foundlings’ was already on the rise, to which even a disabled country might hope to belong. Globalization does not make all nations disappear, or become equally small. But it does make some permanently and irreversibly ‘smaller’, in the sense of rendering older styles of imperium and domination impossible. At bottom, the reason may be quite simple: in the new global dimension, not only are there vastly more mongrels than pedigree hounds—this was of course always the case—but the former cannot help acquiring voice and presence. Hence a process of democratic warming is going on, alongside global warming. And on that foundation, ‘anti-globalism’ is less an opposite than a modification of globality, and of the distinct yet open societies that will alone make the global tolerable. The ‘-ism’ was the trouble, not the opening-up.

And new foundlings may be particularly useful in formulating these. In his account of the origins of modern Scotland, Fry several times makes the interesting point that Scottish anti-Union parliamentarians were not arguing for pedigree-preservation and protection, or the erection of new barriers, in 1706–07. On the contrary, some were demanding free trade, equal treatment and openness, and others a solution like the Netherlands United Provinces—with both perceiving the retention of national identity as necessary for such answers. The Union, on the other hand, stood for something simpler: ‘incorporation’ (the unvarying watchword of its devotees). That is, cementing troublesome diversity into one increasingly successful but quasi-mercantilist system: the armed imposition of laws convenient to its leadership, prosperity and empire.

The Union describes the process, and ends by arguing that it is time for our little country to de-incorporate itself. All genuine mongrels will agree with Fry on this. There is also a case for the more general and theoretical redefinition of what could be called the scale of nationhood. After a long period during which bigger was in some ways better, with the initial rise of industrialization and the diffusion of global commerce, globalization may have inaugurated another, in which smaller is, if not better, then at least just as good (and occasionally with the advantage over the erstwhile great, the muscle- and hidebound). The age of the body-builders has ended, as that of dinosaurs once did; that of smaller mammalian fitness is still being worked out. Is it really surprising that the United Kingdom should be one prime site for this to happen?

The New Furies

Alex Doherty — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 13:21:26 +0000

Review of Tariq Ali’s ‘Rough Music.’

Rough Music is a series of reflections on a watershed in British political culture, provoked by the war in Iraq and then, even more acutely, by the bomb attacks on London of July 7th 2005. Though written quickly under the impetus of events, I think few readers will be deterred; and they shouldnt be, for this instant book makes many points going beyond British culture, and invites wider speculation on the world of contemporary nationalism and ideologically motivated violence. It documents recent events too thoroughly to be journalistic, as well as voicing shifts in the authors own political attitude. The title comes from Edward Thompsons Customs in Common (1993) and is not chosen only for effect. Rough music was a cacophony directed from those outside and below, to annoy insiders on high, against individuals who offended against certain community norms. It was also meant to suggest how democratic retribution might come. Interestingly, Tariq Alis conclusions move him into partial alignment with the much older positions of Thompsonone of the founders of New Left Review over forty years ago, and (indirectly) of Verso Books, publishers of Rough Music.

The five items in Alis subtitleBlair, bombs, Baghdad, London, terrorare naturally centred on the Iraq War, and reactions to it. But both his diagnosis and his prescriptions for the future return the reader constantly to one causative factor: the futile archaism and contradictions of the British constitutional order, so easily abused by Blair and New Labour that they simply must be reformed, as a precondition of any tolerable post-Blairite future. Left-wing policies and reassertions of traditional radical values are no longer enough. Neoliberalisms global offensive may have generated hollowing out and autocratic trends everywhere, from Iceland to Australia. But these have been worse in the uk thanks to the grotesque nature of its constitutional arrangementsits unrepresentative first-past-the-post electoral system, tv monarchy and unelected second chamber. Westminster used to consider itself a world model. It has become a dry-rot infested ruin, where one shame succeeds another. In 2005 (for example) New Labour won its convincing majority in the House of Commons with just 21.8 per cent of electoral votes. Should this go on, and the abstention rate rise again, it is quite conceivable that in 2009 Blairs (or Browns) fourth term in office will be supported by well under one fifth of the electorate. Thin democracy may have become a general trait of capitalist polities; but even in this dark realm distinctions survive between the more and less abject. And the uk is ceasing to be a democracy in any acceptable sense.

It has become an autocracy by ill-concealed stealth. Alis Chapter 3, The Media Cycle, shows how Blair got away with it over 200105, and why some of his coterie think it can go on indefinitely. Like other flotsam on the no-alternative wave of the nineties, they think that the essence of modernization is adjusting society to fit economic and technological advances. Which means serving such changes, via a machinery of collusion between government public relations, a compliant legal system and a servile press. In Britain the bbc was the only serious obstacle, above all at the difficult turning point of the Iraq War. For a Great-British nationalist like Blairin decline but still a semi-world powerparticipation in the war was essential, if clearly unpopular. Hence dissent had to be stifled by legal means, the low point of which was Lord Huttons odious Inquiry into the suicide of scientist David Kelly. Kelly had been deeply troubled by the Weapons of Mass Destruction farce, and evidence of official deceit. Dont worry, we appointed the right judge, said Blairs key public-relations man, Philip Gould.

Since Rough Music appeared there has been a further illustration of media cycle functioning. Blair is reported as having met with Rupert Murdoch in New York, and agreed with him on the deplorably negative (i.e. anti-American) coverage of Hurricane Katrina and the destruction of New Orleans, notably from the bbc. The positive mission of laws and media alike is, by contrast, steady as she goes: that is, the maintenance of Britains status, and her contribution to neoliberalisms ongoing revolution. Where can that contribution come from, but the uks chosen position in the new firmament?Up the arse of the White House, as Blairs Chief of Staff is reputed to have instructed his Ambassador in Washington.

The mission is radical in character: that is, it arises from manifested truths and allows no compromise, a quasi-religious destiny whose attainment justifies any means, and must by definition pass through traps, traitors and travails. Ali condemns Tony Blair for having no radical streak in his political make-up, but this isnt quite accurate. New Labour naturally despises traditional Old-Labour, Marxist and other versions of the radical, but has made up for that with its owna now perfectly familiar capitalist-based intransigence and intolerance, appealing powerfully to the same psychology and inherited emotions. Later on he does admit how recognition of capitalism as the only game in town has been successful in remobilizing for itself the same dogma that had once characterized Trotskyism or other isms, but without drawing the possible conclusion.

That is, without concluding that the transition must have been more than prestidigitation. Nemesis played her part. Certain aspects of the former Left and Liberal dogmas invited the neo-conservatives in; and it is these that todays democrats must distrust the most. On the Left, the real sinner was historical materialism, not Lenin, Stalin or any of their progeny (whether dutiful or critical). It was this philosophical conviction of last-instance economic determinism that made it relatively easy to switch sides from the eighties onwards, for Eastern and Chinese ruling elites, as well as for so many Western intéllos. Destinarians lurked on both sides of the Cold War. This is why the state-socialist avalanche of the eighties deposited so many troubled souls so briefly on the valley floor. They found a chair-lift waiting (padded, modernized) to bear them once more on high. There, the terminus provided more secure heights of inevitability and superiority, as well as better-paid media realism.

In Graeco-Roman mythology the Furies were the three deadly sisters born from the blood of God falling back to the earth (after he suffered castration by Kronos). Virgil depicts these hair-raising siblings in his Underworld: the descendants of the God-King Uranus and Gaia (the earth), scary enough to make Cerberus run for his life. They are human nature (as it were) casting off its chains, following upon recent unfortunate events in the upper spheres, and determined on a new deal for itself at all costs. The latter now includes a higher premium on meaningful death.

On 7 July 2005, a deadly quartet of three young Yorkshire Muslims and a Jamaican-born co-religionist from Aylesbury . . . blew themselves up more or less simultaneously in the London Underground and on a bus near the British Museum, killing themselves and fifty-two others and injuring hundreds more. Ali explains their motivation with reference to Robert Papes admirable analysis Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (2005). It is often thought that Islamic ultra-fundamentalism is the root of this phenomenons growth. Pape denies this emphatically. In his own words, in an interview in the American Conservative of July 2005:

One may question an uncritical use of democratic here, but the main point is not affected. Suicidal terrorism is driven by rankling nationalist resentment on the part of populations lacking the normal means of political-military violence, and with small chance of obtaining these. As for the illegitimate occupying power, this has to be not democratic in some ideal sense, but possibly influenceable by such tactics, via popular fear, weariness, alternative scenarios and international representations. In the same interview, Pape looks back at Ireland, arguing that there ordinary violencenon-suicidal explosions and shootingswas enough to bring about the strategic objective of partial British withdrawal, and the iras recent shift onto the terrain of peaceful politics. He also maintains that the formula for effective suicidal terrorism was established by the Tamil insurrection in Sri Lanka in the eighties, a combination of nationalism and Marxism aimed at Singhalese (and Buddhist) majority rule. Neither side had any connection with Muslim fanaticism.

Ali stresses the point repeatedly: since the Fury at work here is nationalism rather than prostration before Allah, stopping the military occupation of Iraq is the only plausible answer. But I suspect that a wider-angled view of the change is also in order. Meaningful death (martyrdom, as its supporters say) has assumed such prominence in a global situation where nationalism has been generally despised and denigrated. The two things are, surely, intimately related. They derive jointly from the one truism that sober-sense economists of all persuasions agreed about: the nation-state was done for, and with it that corny old -ism. Last-instance determinism could now prevail only out there, in the realm of global market forces. Innumerable books and articles rammed home the message, all expounding the profound wisdom of political abnegation and laisser aller. The most entertaining account of this globalizing spasm is John Ralston Sauls two short chapters in his The Collapse of Globalism (2005): A Summary of the Promised Future and What Somebody Forgot to Mention.

Not forgotten so much as deliberately ignored were certain psychological costs, some deriving from socio-economic reality and others from the ideological onslaught itself. The lowering of borders and its accompanying surrender of collective initiative and will-power was a world shock as profound as market forces themselves. In retrospect, it seems astounding that such claims could have been so blandly made and more than half-believed. In fact, it was as if something of the ancient myth was being re-enactedwith mad economists, vulgar columnists, paltry politicos and wealthy donors standing in for Kronos. Quite insouciantly, they were setting off the biggest earthquake since the mid-Cold War period, when much of the world still cowered in dread of all-out nuclear warfare. Indeed it may be worse: the menace of Armageddon proved transient, but the disappearance of national states and politics was now projected as eternal necessitya non-negotiable route onward to Paradise, consecrated by Reason and refused only by incorrigible lunatics or fanatics.

This is of course the conviction behind the War on Terror: the fruits of crucifixion economics, as Saul puts it, bestowing justification on true believers and sanctioning pre-emptively radical treatment for deviants and resisters. Like Osama bin Ladens 2001 atrocities, the London bombings were crimes, calling for legal punishment. But the response of Atlantic-led globalism has been away beyond that. It perceives a threat from cosmic unreason, perpetrated by zealots determined not on equality but on their own exclusive heaven and eartha war launched by (as it were) the super-nationalists of Islamicism.

That such a cause stands no chance of success should (as Ali counsels) take us back to Robert Papes less enchanted analysis. Ideological exorcism of nationalism implied dismissal of alternative will-power, and of the concrete terms and struggles that had constituted most modern historyabove all between 1870 and the end of the Cold War. As Martin Jacques observed in the Guardian on 17 September 2005, the defeat of colonial rule was the defining event of the 20th centurynot 1917, or 1949, or 1989. What militant globalist mania suggests is that national liberation was limited at the time, and has now become largely meaningless. A general belittlement of national identities has made the -ism of nationality, or indeed of discrete peoplehood, perfectly futile. All those who didnt get there earlier should now give up. Indeed its their duty to do so. There may be one or two grudging exceptions to the rule, like Palestine, where conflicts have become so entrenched that no other answer seems possible. But on the whole, nationhood is now presented the other way round from how Jacques has itnot as the way into modernity, but as a wilful rejection of it.

That complacent verdict has been the real agent of transformation. It is what turned nationalism into the Furies, the global rough music that Ali analyses and rightly reproaches: that is, the exaggerated version of a former self, driven to wilder shores by the equally exaggerated (but armed) onslaught of a globalism that, after 2001, resorted to post-colonial colonialism. Quite possibly there was no other way for the globe to become one. Its also possible that, had Soviet-Socialist oneness triumphed instead, this might have been worse. However, the price of any such non-democratic triumph was an equally global barb to the heart of things: a universal wound, in fact, to which humanitys immune system has replied by intensifying the quest for meaning and status. Dismissal of meaning on a global scale was bound to have the worst effects in already dire situations, and to generate a compensatory fury. In his 1898 analysis Suicide, Emile Durkheim traced the modern importance of his subject to __anomie__lost-ness or meaning-rejection. He saw how this condition worked in France, and also how it was kept at bay among Australian native peoples, in Elementary Forms of Religious Life. But no one could imagine then how anomie would one day itself be globalized as the underside of Free Trade triumphalism.

Such loss of bearings is of course not confined to the non-self-governing, or the totally dispossessed. It is for example prominent in the United States, and undoubtedly played a part in Bushs mobilization of American nationalism, and in the poor imitations by Blair and by John Howard in Australia. However, the most extreme forms emerged among the outcast and left behind, the dependent or the still-colonized (formally or informally). In other words, among the great majority of conflicts leading most tv news programmes and newspaper front-pages, most days, across most of the emerging global village. The strategy for reasserting such causes has come to include the explosive intensification of meaning, in the absence of recognition, and of normal means of warfare.

Enlightened complacency perceives the unfortunates undertaking suicide terrorism as doing so because they believe fanatical religious ideas, notably in the Middle East. But zealotic excess is itself simply another compensation. The characters depicted in Hany Abu-Assads film Paradise Now may or may not think their death is a guaranteed shortcut to paradise. But as the story and background suggest, what is guaranteed is exaltation in and of their marginalized community. In his contribution to Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity (1990), Johann Arnason pointed out that religions particular significance arises from an ideological edge, or supplement:

because it favours a welding of universalism with ethnic particularity, in a way that justifies the latter. Zealotry may support the ecstasy of meaning-in-death, up to the instant of oblivion; the meaning itself comes not from Holy Scriptures, however, but from the particular national or ethnic background. It is the rage of a denied imagined community (in Benedict Andersons sense) that represents Gods blood fallen to earthnot the pious aspirations of Islamic or other clerics.

As Ali goes on to underline, most uk public opinion understood perfectly well the earthly connection between the July atrocities and the continuing war in Iraq. Only government tools and columnar megaphones insisted there was no relation whatever, and hence no question of surrendering to fanatics in Baghdad. They were voicing the nationalism of the majoritythe Great-British identity crucial to Tony Blairs project, and to the maintenance of quasi-world-power pretences. Rough Music doesnt say enough about this directly. However, another essay that appeared almost simultaneously has some devastating observations on the subject: Charles Glasss The Last of England, in Harpers Magazine, November 2005. This is a straightforward account of how Londoners actually reacted to the July outrages. The author found that the city which defied Hitlers air force in 194041 had vanished. In spite of Blairs pompous address and headlines about standing unitedafter dark on July 7th 2005, Londoners hid at home. Two Thursdays later, on July 21st, when four more bombers made failed attempts to blow up the Tube and a bus, London went quiet again. Glass had been in Madrid at the time of the March 11th 2004 bombings, and noticed the difference. For the madrileños had in truth stood united or (as Winston Churchill once put it) carried on buggering on as usualand of course, were soon to elect a new government that withdrew the Spanish troops from Iraq.

What had happened? Had the lions become mice? asks Glasswas the bulldog tethered so tightly to the American leash that it no longer barked? In May 1941 the German air force dropped more than 100,000 incendiary bombs on London, and destroyed the House of Commons, yet Londoners still got on with it, as the Telegraph reported the next day. I myself remember lurid descriptions of that raid by an old London friend who worked in the London Underground, and was part of the fire-fighting team struggling to keep the system in operation. The city at that moment was actually close to collapse, and he evoked incidents illustrating this, vividly recalling individuals who despaired and gave up, declaring they couldnt take any more. Yet of course most didnt, because sustained by a communal and national identity.

By contrast, what were Londoners afraid of in July 2005, compared to these hugely greater threats of half a century previously? The most likely answer is themselves: that is, the fear lay in peoples expectations and assumptions about Britain, rather than dread of Wahhabite Islam. In 1940, Glass continues, Londoners believed they would forge a fairer and better world after the war, while in 2005 no one believes the world will be better than before the war on terror began. Indeed, descendants of the Left that tried to build the better world of post-1945 are actually in office and refusing to be deflected from their warlike pursuit of Greatnessleast of all by recollections of the Welfare State. Britain now means so little that nobody even thinks of looking forward to the popping corks of Victory over Terror Day, or to social rewards that may emerge from buggering on in the right spirit. But living nationalism demands a past and a future. If the latter boils down to a cheaper washing-machine imported from China one day soon and getting still farther up the arse of the White House, why bother?

Chapter 5 of Rough Music looks at the scarifying episode that summed up much of Blair-style nationalism, the execution of Jean Charles de Menezes at Stockwell Underground station on July 22nd 2005 (the day after the second, failed wave of bombings). As the whole world now knows, this Brazilian lad took the Underground on his way to work, and ended up with a brain full of lead. He had been mistakenly identified as a bomber or accomplice, and was given no chance to clear himself. Twenty-four hours later Scotland Yard admitted he was quite unconnected to the bombers. But at the same time, nobody was responsible. In the country of proudly unarmed policemen, no one resigned for the mistake of blasting eleven bullets into the head of an innocent man. Six months later an inquiry is still dragging on, but with very little belief that its verdict (any more than Huttons) will make much difference. It was an accident brought about by panic and confusionamong those giving orders, as well as those carrying them out. Somehow, no ones honour was involved.

And thats the heart of the matter. Within living memory, a kind of honour had been the life-blood of national-imperial grandeur: the unbending, aristocratic Geist of Churchill and 1940, diffused by a successful identity machinery to most of the population. What Glasss report registers is its disappearance, or (at best) its reliquary statussomething like the present-day Windsor monarchy. A once indwelling spirit has turned into something to be weighed on public-relations scales; and, as on this occasion, found superfluous to requirements. With all its faults, patrician rule had seen privilege as tied to an unavoidableeven unfairresponsibility; todays cut-price authoritarianism sees it merely as whatever modernization will let rulers get away with, preferably on the sly.

Almost nobody wants 1940 and all that back; but the point is, nothing has taken its place. Thatcherism and Blairism have been primarily tales of its decay, shoring up bits of nostalgia against its ruin, andeven before globalizationcounting on external alliances and powers to keep both economy and identity going. No wonder that dark silence prevailed in July. The dilemma was utterly different from New Yorks 9/11. Britain had been attacked from within, by young Muslims seeing themselves primarily as British, and punishing fellow-countrymen for their political shame and failure. They had just been through what Iain Macwhirter of Scotlands Sunday Herald described as the most grotesquely unfair election in British history, a farce that allowed New Labour to prosecute its war in Iraq against majority public opinion. The fact that there was no democratic alternative doesnt justify their actions; but it does, surely, indicate something puzzling (and potentially damning) about the political constitution, and the British identity to which the system is so organically connected. On the latter theme, new terrorism laws are essentially new ways of not recognizing there is anything to be said, or changed.

Rough Music goes on to look again at the legal and judicial order which slaughtered de Menezes. Ali again returns to E. P. Thompson, and the longer struggle for civil rights and freedoms Thompson wrote so much about. Helena Kennedys Just Law (2004) is rightly taken as the outstanding recent expression of dismay and anger at Blairs retreat from both social justice and legal rectitude. Kennedy writes:

And we can only do so by reforming the political constitution. Human rights is where the law becomes poetry, observes Kennedy, enabling new stories to be told and a different identity to make its way forward. Such ways find themselves below the surface of official declarations and press conferences, through obscure passages and echo chambers, in the recesses of thousands if not millions of individual minds. More important than its moments of professed publicity, identity hides its own unrelenting Furies, which tend to be worst entre chien et loup, as sleep once more fails to come, unable to bypass a returning dread. Going back to Australia shortly after the de Menezes killing, on the interminable long haul, and into a routine of long commuting tram trips and suburban solitude in my adoptive city, I found that nothing would get it out of my mind. It was as if an inner horizon had disappeared, with dark enigma in its wake. In the terms suggested by both Ali and Glass, this was of course part of a meaning-structure, the supportive wall of a national culture inherited by the majority, and naturally strongest among those with direct memory of the finest hour. The hour was truly endedand not so much by the bombers as by the hail of Special Forces gunfire and lies that came later.

Both the defence of inherited principles and the voicing of new opinions have democracy as their necessary condition. Fairer voting and an elected second chamber wont of themselves furnish answers and visions; but they can remove the existing obstacles to change, allowing citizens to break ranks on critical issues and foster new movements and alternatives. Only via such changes can revolutionary shifts emerge. As Kennedy says, its time to stopand then to enable democracy more effectively, so that breaking ranks will amount to more than occasional mass demonstrations, a paralysed parliamentarism, and little-read pamphlets from the political wilderness. Just as soldiers can be stripped of rank and medals, its time radical was stripped of its deceptive, appropriated -ismnow mainly camouflage for the living dead, whether revisiting the defeats of the past, or serving the debased needs of the present.

This is even plainer when set in a comparative, global perspective. Rough Music ends with a plea for Britain to quit its role as automated adjutant to Washingtons neo-imperialism and develop a rational, independent foreign policy. Which also implies that it is time to stop being one of the real sources of insecurity in the new, more globalized world order. All neoliberal Establishments now think of insecurity as emanating from rogue states, potential havens for terrorists or scoundrel governments trying secretly to build nuclear weapons. In fact, the principal source of insecurity lies in the archaic, dangerously defective pretences of democracy surviving among the North Atlantic leaders and their allies. Rough Music gives us a picture of one such farce, and argues it has to be reformed for the sake of its own citizens. And Glasss report shows how little real life is left inside the UKs ancien régime. Tony Blair found a way of postponing the changes such accounts entail, by drumming up the Greatness business once more, in association with an even more bedraggled farce in the usa: a state incapable, in the Year 2000, of even electing a president. George W. Bush had to be smuggled onto the bridge of state by a combination of family-based corruption and Supreme Court judgesuntil a fortunately timed war let him gain enough support to be elected four years late. And this was democratic leadershipthe diffusion not of Market blessings alone, but of a consecrated Western universality, devoted to suppressing backward nationalisms and hopeless alternatives.

The new rough music is international, in fact, and it will be played out loudly everywhere in the wake of the Iraq War. Retired imperialists like Britain and France want to go on being examples: their meaning must be made to survive their loss of power, as compensation and continuity. The United Kingdoms sole hope of remaining any kind of example in the 21st century will be to heed the sounds of mounting rough music, and choose an alternative and more modest course. By quitting the Special Relationship, and attempting to build a different constitution, with an alternative confederal identity, Britain can start to put Iraq, Blairism and moth-eaten greatness behind it at last. The process has already begun. On November 9th, New Labour found itself defeated in the House of Commons by 322 votes to 291 on a move to extend the duration of detention without trial to 90 days, as part of its anti-terrorism legislation. Forty-nine Labour members rebelled, a clear augury of Blairs demise; and with it, rejection of the foreign policy that enticed him into support for the Middle Eastern expedition. The Furies are at last in retreatlike the fanatical globalism and crucifixion economics that gave them their opportunity for re-entry.

Tipping Point Election

Tue, 28 Jun 2005 09:51:50 +0000

In the aftermath of the British general election of 5 May 2005, something quite unexpected is happening. Everyone knows that Tony Blairs New Labour Party won. But its becoming clearer that something else won too not a set of candidates or policy ideas, but something arguably more significant than anything people directly voted for. Beneath the familiar showtime of Westminster politics, a tipping-point may have been reached. And if thats the case, everything will soon be changed.

There has been a deep shift of attitude within the British electorate. Commentators recognise it, but most dismiss it as a transient mood or fashion. Now, however, stronger evidence for its seriousness is emerging and indeed, showing itself inside the victorious party itself. Far from revelling in complacency, a growing number of New Labour representatives and party workers are joining frustrated voters and the less party-biased commentators in a troubled surmise. Just how and why did they win on 5 May? Can such a farce ever be repeated? For sound reasons, people are worried about whether such a system can continue at all without serious reforms.

Tony Blairs party won a solid, 63-seat majority in a House of Commons of 646 members, on the basis of 35.3% of the votes cast on a turnout of 61.3% little over 20% of the registered British electorate. New Labour was delivered five more years of near-absolute power by an even smaller percentage of votes than at the previous election in 2001. If this trend continues, 2009 or 2010 could witness a third triumph of what has become the dominant force in British politics, the non-voting party (39.7% in this election), and a government resting upon less than a fifth of the publics support.

Moreover and this is what really worries the more alert Blairites, and those older disciples of the ideology who recall what happened to Margaret Thatchers Conservative régime after eighteen years in office that government will not necessarily be New Labour. On 1 May 1997, a resentful public unceremoniously cast what had been the dominant governing party for over a century Britains era of global hegemony into the dustbin of history. 5 May 2005 showed that (even with help from Australian political strategist guru Lynton Crosby) the Conservatives still havent climbed out of it. But … could a similar fate await New Labour in turn? Whether or not Tony Blair follows Thatcher, in the sense of being personally dumped by his party, couldnt the New Labour tendency itself fall victim to another such tide of popular nausea and rejection?

It is this dread thats turning responsible establishment chaps to thoughts of fairness and proportional representation (PR), and even to an elected senate replacing the House of Dead Lordship. Their last such flirtation, in the mid-1990s, came at a time when they still feared permanent marginalisation. New Labour briefly took out insurance with the reformers: even PR seemed better than oblivion. Then they won big in 1997, and it all went from the backburner to the icebox. Now, its being quietly brought out again, just in case

There are cold reasons of political logic. The party that made the most significant progress on 5 May was the one which had made constitutional reform its main priority, Charles Kennedys Liberal Democrats. They gained 62 seats, eleven more than in 2001, with 22.1% of votes (as Kennedy bitterly remarked, one of the minor miracles of first-past-the-post voting is that it took 96,378 votes to elect a LibDem MP, and merely 26,877 to instal a Labourite).
Even more important, the devolved Welsh and Scottish parliaments created since 1998 have used PR, and coalition governments of New Labour and Lib Dems have been working quite well there. Fairness there did not prove fatal; Scots and Welsh voters are not hankering for the good old days. More astonishing still, in Scotland the fair-share system is about to be extended to local and regional government as well, so that by 2007 the entire northern electoral system will be far more democratic than the southern one.

It can happen here

All this reflects the altered context around United Kingdom state politics. The Iraq war also played its part in the change. Popular anti-war feeling and fear of the continuing consequences were bound to feed the non-voting party, amplified by doubts about such blatant subjection to United States power. Then, four weeks after the May vote, European events administered another electric shock. The British political class saw the electorates of France and the Netherlands in outright rebellion against their political élites. The message it transmitted could no longer be: Thank God were so different. Yes, it could happen here as Blair immediately acknowledged, by abandoning his own plans for a British referendum, in an attempt to shore up the dyke against the incoming tide.

He may be too late. The election showed that a deep-level shift is already well underway. Scotlands leading political correspondent, Iain Macwhirter of the (Glasgow) Sunday Herald, wrote on 8 May:

‘This was the most grotesquely unfair election in British history. Labour won a lower share of the vote than any government in history … How long can we continue with this profoundly undemocratic system? It is assumed that Labour will reject calls for reform because it has won another clear majority. But that may not be so certain …’

Macwhirter has been proved right. In the weeks after the election, a vigorous campaign has sprung up for electoral and (more broadly) constitutional reform. This movement is championed and led by the Independent newspaper, the long-established reform group Charter 88, and the Electoral Reform Society, in association with the Liberal Democrats, the Green Party and the nationalist parties in Wales and Scotland. It has already forced the formation of a new all-party group to discuss reform of the House of Commons itself. Labour MP Austin Mitchell comments that:

‘electoral reform has come back from the dead with this election … I think the whole issue will revive. Each party has its own electoral reform group and were looking for a consensus.’

Britains early-modern version of democracy has lasted since 1688. It is, surely, one of globalisations lesser surprises that big changes are overdue. If the new course proceeds past the 2005 tipping-point, one thing its banal to point out is certain to lead to another. No British politician can hope to reform just one part of such a creaking palace; each opened door will shed light on neglected areas in need of air, modernisation, or demolition.

Reform, taken seriously, is bound to acquire its own logic and impetus and this is unlikely to cease until some new overall constitution is in place. An extensive survey of public opinion by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust in 2004 showed in its review of The State of British Democracy that (contrary to received wisdom) more than 80% of people were either mildly or quite strongly in favour of a written constitution spelling out both citizens rights and the limits of the powerful.

It will impact there

Such a development would reverberate far beyond Britain itself. It would transform relations with the rest of the European Union, and have a profound impact on Australia. It is no longer inconceivable that, for the first time since the founding of the 1901 Australian Commonwealth, democratic reforms of the homeland may outpace those of its offspring.

The Australian system has always prided itself on representing what was worthwhile from Old Albion, but with democratic improvements. If a New Albion shows up, more modern and democratic than the federation rules of the late 19th century, it would frontally challenge the position of Australian loyalists like John Howard, reliant as they are upon doses of comfort from the monarchy and other unchanging symbols of origin.

How long might this all take? Well, Id guess two more London elections and three Canberra ones around ten years. But with globalisation at its present pace, it may come even sooner.