Photograph by Islay McLeod
Ron Ferguson raised the hope (27 November) that the philosopher Michael Sandel may be persuaded to moderate ‘a more reasonable debate’ on the independence question. Let us hope this comes off. Certainly the tone could do with a bit of raising.
While we await developments, can I offer some preliminary ideas? I am not a public philosopher and certainly not the ‘independent person from outwith these shores’ that Ron Ferguson asks for. I can’t claim to be neutral: I will almost certainly vote ‘Yes’ in 2014. But I did spend 25 years editing the National Library’s Bibliography of Scotland where my daily work included dividing the world into sheep and goats, Scots and non-Scots. No doubt I sometimes got things wrong but it did make me think hard about Scotland and its metaphysical status.
Given this background, there is one sense in which I see myself as an existentially committed nationalist. I believe that, whatever else it may be, Scotland is a nation. This is why it has a national library and a whole range of other national institutions, not least a fitba team. If Scotland is not a nation, what was I doing all those years? I face an existential crisis.
There is not – or should not be – anything politically controversial about the thesis that Scotland is a nation. Historically, many unionists have taken pride in this. Ian Lang, Conservative secretary of state for Scotland under John Major, chose the Battle of Bannockburn as the historical event he would most like to have witnessed. His reasoning was that, by ensuring Scottish independence, Bannockburn allowed Scotland to enter the union in 1707 as a (relatively) equal partner and thus enjoy the fruits of development and empire. Scottish nationhood, for Lang, was quite compatible with unionism: it implied no commitment to independence or even devolution.
This position – unionist nationalism – is now in disarray, partly because of the chaotic blunderings of Mrs Thatcher. Indeed it has become incomprehensible to some current unionists who think that the union can only be defended by denying that Scotland is a nation. Despite this the logic of unionist nationalism remains inherently sound but it does face a problem of nomenclature. If Scotland and England are nations, where does that leave Britain or the UK? As long as Britain had (or was) an empire, this question hardly mattered. The UK can now be described as a multinational state but is statehood sufficient? Perhaps unionists need to find a new status for the UK.
Nationalism in this minimal sense is a matter of fact and terminology: people have to agree on the criteria which define nationhood and then decide whether a given candidate meets those criteria (which still leaves plenty of scope for dispute). But there is another sense in which nationalism becomes heavily value-laden. Its initial value is positive: the nation is presented as something to be protected, developed, admired and sometimes even worshipped (think of the American attitude to the ‘Stars and Stripes’). This often provokes a negative counter-reaction which brands nationalism as an evil to be avoided at all costs.
Nations can be valued and promoted, or attacked, on many grounds including material wealth, power and cultural prestige. This leads us into difficult territory. Are human propensities like pride and the pursuit of self-interest good, bad or morally neutral? Are they more dangerous in nations than in individuals? Perhaps humans are more dangerous en masse because they are prone to irrational group-think or mass hysteria; perhaps they are less law-abiding because international law is vague and hard to enforce.
Certainly national self-interest can lead in dangerous directions. Even without war or the threat of war international competition can easily descend into a damaging game of beggar your neighbour. The strong can always find excuses for oppressing the weak. Think of how the 19th-century opium trade led to wars against China (with Scots in the forefront). But is the pursuit of self-interest always damaging? What about the argument that competition stimulates creativity, growth and progress in general?
Similarly with pride: it can easily slide into a sense of superiority, and the inferiority of others. From here it is a short step to imperialist aggression. On the other hand, pride in past achievements may be understandable, even justified, and may provide grounds for future progress. Low self-esteem can be equally damaging. (We have heard plenty about the Scottish ‘cultural cringe’, linked to our marginal political status and culture.)
In short, nationalism in this sense is slippery: it can be harmless or even commendable in some contexts, malignant in others. Perhaps the answer lies in interpreting it as a virtue of a specific kind. For Aristotle, every virtue is a mean between two vices (eg bravery is a mean between cowardice and recklessness). Whatever the truth of this as a general theory, it fits well enough here. Self-neglect and low self-esteem are just as damaging as their opposites. As Kevin MacNeil puts it in ‘Unstated’, ‘nationalism is a poison that heals when taken mindfully and in appropriate measure but destroys utterly when taken to excess’.
Finally (for present purposes) we need to distinguish a third sense where nationalism involves an attempt to vindicate the right to self-determination as enshrined in the United Nations Charter and widely acknowledged in international law. This sense is familiar from the 1950s and 1960s when nationalist movements across Asia and Africa struggled for independence from colonial rule, and it still influences current Scottish rhetoric. The issue of self-determination is clearly central to the debate, but analogies with earlier anti-colonial movements are more problematic. Scotland as a whole was never colonised in any straightforward sense (though the Gaidhealtachd arguably was and Ireland certainly was).
A more plausible line of argument views Scotland’s cultural cringe as a form of colonial inferiorisation of the kind explored by Frantz Fanon. But this runs the risk of treating all cultural hegemony as a form of colonisation, on which basis the UK in recent decades presumably counts as a colony of the USA. This surely stretches the concept to breaking point.
Nationalism in this sense looks less like an Aristotelian virtue than a principle of law or morality, universal in theory but hard to apply in practice. There are no established mechanisms (short of violence) for settling disputes, no agreed criteria for deciding what groups, peoples or nations are entitled to self-determination.
Ideally the principle implies a perfect alignment of state and national boundaries – one state for every nation which wants it, one nationality inhabiting each state. In the world we actually inhabit this seems utopian. Some nations are geographically dispersed while others are intermingled and overlapping. Emigration and immigration are commonplace. In these circumstances the goal of perfect boundaries raises the awful spectre of conflict and ethnic cleansing.
This inevitably raises the question: what is a nation? What features justify a claim to nationhood and self-determination? Nations are not the same as states – that is why the question of alignment arises in the first place. But they cannot simply be defined in terms of ethnicity or culture either. I want to argue that ‘nation’ is a classic example of what Wittgenstein called a family resemblance concept. The members of a family resemble one another in indefinably different ways: there is no list of features shared by all (and only) members of that family.
‘Nation’ has a complex and shifting web of meanings. There is no one ideal type or norm of nationhood. Different people prioritise different features at different times and for different purposes. Family resemblance terms are difficult to handle, elusive and open to deliberate misuse. But this does not make them useless. On the contrary, their flexibility is well suited to tangled and disputed realities. With patience and goodwill distinctions can be drawn, threads of continuity teased out.
This sense of self-identity is reflected in Benedict Anderson’s idea of nations as ‘imagined communities’. Every member of a nation feels a sense of solidarity with some – but not all – strangers. These are fellow-countrymen, the rest are aliens. For Anderson, nationhood in this sense is a distinctively modern phenomenon dependent on the existence of mass media and all their technological infrastructure.
Throughout history different nations have based their identities on different features, highlighting those best suited to local conditions and local disputes. Nations whose languages differ sharply from their neighbours’ (eg Finland, Hungary) often take language as their primary marker. Sometimes this may be counterproductive. Nationalists in Wales, for example, have placed the Welsh language at the heart of Welsh identity and culture. Given that less than 25% of the population currently speak Welsh this may highlight internal faultlines (as well as limiting the political appeal of Plaid Cymru).
Language is closely linked to ideas of race or ethnicity. If language is a direct inheritance from our ancestors, loss of our mother tongue may strike at our core (genetic) identity. This is dubious.
The idea of ‘one nation one language’ is a relatively recent invention, partly deriving from the writings of Herder in the late 18th century. In traditional pastoral or agricultural societies language was both geographically localised and socially stratified. Peasants in one valley spoke a different dialect from those in the next, while their better educated and more mobile superiors could communicate across a wider social and geographical range. Bilingualism and multilingualism were commonplace, in the great cities where traders, craftsmen and scholars mingled but also in rural areas where different tribes met and traded.
The development of uniform national languages is a modern phenomenon. It owes much to the spread of mass education, promoted by governments keen to develop national consciousness and transform local peasants into an adaptable industrial workforce. From the perspective of contemporary globalisation the idea of a uniform national language (like a uniform national culture) begins to look like a passing historical phase.
The same may be said of religion as a marker of national identity. Religion can provide a powerful rallying ground for a nation occupied or oppressed by a stronger neighbour practising a different religion: consider the cases of Ireland/England and Poland/Russia. In both these cases the chosen ‘national’ religion was Roman Catholicism – a religion international in scope and universal in aspiration. By contrast, other nations (including Scotland) grounded their identity in a specific national (established) church.
In the absence of a Scottish state and national politics, it might be argued that Presbyterianism was the main carrier of Scottish identity from the 18th century well into the 20th. It maintained a visible difference with England while also giving Scots a sense of missionary purpose on the world stage.
Judaism offers yet another model, with its unique blend of religion (including Hebrew as its sacred language), ethnicity and national culture. Unlike its Abrahamic offspring, Christianity and Islam, Judaism is particular rather than universal in scope: it is the religion of Israel, God’s chosen people. (This claim has subsequently been imitated by many others, not least Scots of the Covenanting era.)
If nations can be constructed in all these different ways, where does contemporary Scotland fit in? How is it defined? Not by language. Gaelic and Scots make a huge contribution to Scottish culture but they are peripheral to the issue of nationhood. Not by religion – not now, whatever may have happened in the past. Not by ethnicity.
I have previously argued that the familiar image of Scotland (clanship, bagpipes and all that jazz) has very little to do with ethnicity in any clear sense: it is a myth or dreamscape which once played a sociological role that is now becoming obsolete. This myth appeals most strongly to Scottish-Americans and other hyphenated diaspora Scots, sometimes generations removed, who suffer from a kind of identity deficiency in their own lands. Tartanry meets their needs in a way that contemporary Scottish reality cannot. Scottish ethnicity, if it exists, has little to do with Scottish nationhood.
There is plenty of survey evidence for a shared sense of Scottish identity. Results vary slightly from poll to poll, possibly influenced by the questions asked. But British and Scottish social attitudes surveys regularly show Scots prioritising Scottish over British identities by a factor of about three to one. This does not mean that the respondents agree on what it means to be Scottish, far less that they all favour independence. But it does indicate common ground on which they can debate the future.
What conclusions follow from all this? If Scotland is a nation (and I argue that it is) then it has a right to self-determination. It does not follow that Scotland ought (in any sense of ‘ought’) to exercise that right by voting for independence. That requires at least one more step in the argument.
Readers may have noticed an apparent anomaly in this article: I try to distinguish different senses of nationalism while retaining nation as a single (though complex) concept. This is not an oversight. I want to argue that in a modern democracy it does not matter how a nation originated or what markers it chooses to highlight. The continuing existence of a nation is confirmed, in Ernest Renan’s phrase, by ‘daily plebiscite’. Democracy and nationhood are inextricably intertwined. How democracy is possible – even whether democracy is possible – under conditions of late capitalist globalisation is a large question, too large for a single article. Watch this space.
Dennis Smith was formerly curator of modern Scottish collections at the National Library of Scotland
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