Understanding Scotland as a Stateless Nation: Thirty Years On

Review of David McCrone, Understanding Scotland: The Sociology of a Stateless Nation, Routledge, 1992, by Alex Law

Thirty years ago, David McCrone’s landmark book Understanding Scotland: The Sociology of a Stateless Nation hunted down some of the then most prevalent myths about Scottish society, politics and culture. In fine grain empirical detail McCrone demonstrated that the social and economic structures of Scotland were, after all, not so different from the general pattern for Britain. Scotland was not more working class, more democratic in spirit or more egalitarian in its social mobility. Neither was it being held down by an external power as an oppressed nation or as an underdeveloped colony. Yet populist myths about Scottish distinctiveness had become so embedded in the collective self-images of the nation that they would not be shaken off simply by the production of factual evidence to the contrary. 

 

If Scotland was so similar in its social structure to England, then why did such diverging national myths and political beliefs take hold? It is a fallacy of misplaced concreteness to view ideological myths as the automatic expression of material interests. As McCrone amply demonstrated national we-images can differ radically from very similar material conditions. Dispelling national populist fantasies while attempting to account for them, the book advanced its alternative prospectus: Scotland had long been consigned to the margins of political concerns but thanks to long-run sociological processes it now found itself at the centre of global processes. Of course, it is gratifying to imagine that your own wee mundane part of the universe is actually at the leading edge of world-historical developments. 

By the early 1990s the twin forces of globalisation and postmodernism appeared to be sundering all the old assumptions about a neat correspondence of state, nation, culture and society. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1992 everything seemed to be falling apart, with the ‘end of history’ portending the extinction of large, multinational states. A neoliberal consensus held that nation-states were becoming historical anomalies, their power chances curtailed by constraints on two-fronts: externally, from the threat of nuclear arms, supra-national agencies like the IMF and the European Community (as was), and transnational capitalism, and internally, from the pressure generated by the separatist political movements of small nations. Even the idea of ‘society’ itself was being called into question, most notoriously by Thatcher but also by sociologists who refused to treat state boundaries as the last word in how people come to recognise themselves.

Thatcherism in a cold climate

Understanding Scotland both expressed and gave analytical coherence to the place of Scotland as a small nation within these changing power ratios. The unravelling of centralised states appeared to be particularly acute in the case of the British state. Thatcherism dominated British politics throughout the 1980s and left a lasting legacy for everything that followed, including the divergence of party politics north and south of the border. Thatcherism famously combined an authoritarian state, British national chauvinism and free market individualism. As such Thatcherism intensified the disenchantment with Anglo-Conservativism in Scotland, threatening, as McCrone put it, to consign the unitary British state to ‘the dustbin of history’. Paternalistic Conservatives as well as the corporatist labour movement took this as an affront to the non-democratic policy elites who decided what was in the ‘national interest’ of Scotland.

By the 1980s electoral support for the Conservative party in Scotland was already in long-term decline as its traditional social base in Protestantism, militarism and empire was eroded. By the early 1990s the SNP’s electoral fortunes were also on the wane, even if the party had established a fairly stable social base among socially mobile groups with privatised lifestyles. Meantime, Labour in Scotland looked unassailable as it haughtily clothed itself in the beige tartanry of protecting ‘Scotland’s interests’ within the UK against a governing regime hostile to ‘Scottish values’. Yet, despite clear signs of decay the British state has thus far proven to be more tenacious and flexible than the unilinear model of globalisation and the hollowing-out of the neoliberal state assumed three decades ago. Even so, the anti-democratic malaise of the current Ukanian regime shows just how brittle the union state has become.

Thinking about Scotland as a ‘stateless nation’

A strength of the book was that McCrone rejected the short-term horizons of so much contemporary commentary, including that of sociology. While he was clearly responding to the conjunctural situation of the early 1990s this was located within long run historical processes. McCrone probed the failings of post-war British sociology as one dominated by ideas of society defined as a more or less closed ‘system’ that corresponded to the state that ruled over it. It was assumed that industrialisation and ‘modernisation’ processes would lead inexorably to a more ‘even development’ of state societies across the world, including regions of the UK outside of south-east England. In fact, the best that could be said is that things did not get any worse, although in many respects they did. Economic decline and political insignificance in Scotland were embedded in distinctively national schemas of perception that gave social processes a different ideological colouration than was possible for people in the regions of England.

Because it lacks a state of its own Scotland represents a peculiar kind of nation, what the subtitle of the book called a ‘stateless nation’. The concept refers broadly to the political status of a minority nation within a multinational state. As such the adjective ‘stateless’ suggests that the nation is suffering from a lack of something – a sovereign state – considered essential to fully-formed nationhood, what we might call a ‘state-nation’. The characterisation of small nations as ‘stateless’ shares the nationalist assumption that nations ought to acquire a sovereign state of their own. It also assumes an unequal relation of political power.

By the time that the second edition of the book appeared in 2001, the term ‘stateless nation’ in the subtitle had been shelved on the basis that Scotland was ‘no longer stateless’. To add to the confusion, a few pages later McCrone contended that, on the contrary, Scotland was ‘still best described as a stateless nation’ to the extent that it had not (yet) become a formally sovereign state, even if an increasingly interdependent world prevented sovereignty from being conceived in terms of a zero-sum unit of state power.

Different Scotlands

McCrone considered ‘Scotland’ from three vantage-points, as a country, as a society, and as a nation. Country fulfils a territorial sense of place, society as networks of interaction and association, and nation as a collective identity. While the three components of Scotland are always bound up with each other it is the ideological glue of national identity that lends Scotland its distinctive sense of itself. Nations are not primordial givens but depend upon the symbolic identification of complete strangers with each other, and their relative disidentification from others, as famously delineated by Benedict Anderson’s model of the nation as an ‘imagined community’.

It may be surprising to recall that in the 1970s Scotland was seen by some academics and febrile nationalists as a ‘colony’ on the basis that it was over-dependent on the external power of the centralised UK state and foreign capital. McCrone rightly gave this special pleading short shrift. By the late eighteenth-century the Scottish bourgeoisie were not simply dancing to the tune of an external power but were actively engaged in shaping the position of Britain at ‘the core’ of ‘the world system’. Far from being ransacked for raw materials Scotland was, after England, the earliest industrial capitalist economy, as Tom Nairn had already pointed out in the 1970s. If Scotland was in any sense a ‘colony’ then account would need to be given of its transition from the ‘periphery’ to ‘the core’ as an advanced capitalist economy by the nineteenth century and how it developed within the international division of labour in the century that followed. 

A century of economic decline, mass poverty, regional unemployment and social deprivation could seem like a later punishment for Scotland’s early developmental primacy. In this process Scotland was far from unique. Indeed, in a detailed examination of historical data McCrone convincingly demonstrated that material changes in Scotland’s industrial and occupational structure corresponded closely to the general pattern of the British economy. If anything, the catastrophic problems that beset the Scottish economy after 1918 were rooted, as McCrone argued, in a ‘surfeit of imperialism’ rather than from some kind of vassal relationship with England or foreign capital. 

By the time of McCrone’s book it was believed in some quarters that, despite the feeble grounds for asserting national difference on the basis of language or religion, cultural nationalism functioned as a salve for the weakness of political nationalism. Cultural identity appeared to offer a more promising terrain for ideological struggle than a political field dominated by Unionist parties and the accelerating roll-out of neoliberalism. Particularly prominent in McCrone’s account was the literary-cultural symbolism of tight-knit, small-scale rural communities. Both the romantic constructions of ‘the Highlander’ and the couthy world of the ‘kailyard’ resonated flexibly enough to satisfy the we-images of both conservative and radical nationalists. A strong sense of communalism was largely transmitted by the autonomous institutions of civil society, the church and the school. Its legacy continued to shape how Scots were represented in apparently ‘regressive’ popular culture images of tartanry and dour, pawky Scots dealing with adversity. 

As a reaction to the distorted nature of ‘Scotch myths’ some critics demanded more realistic representations of ‘the people’ – urban, industrial working class and male – at the very point when the industrial socio-economic order was being thoroughly overhauled. In line with the zeitgeist of the time, McCrone preferred a postmodern ‘pick n’ mix’ approach to cultural identity, closer in some ways to often vapid notions of intersectionality of the present: ‘being black, Glaswegian and female can all characterise one person’s culture and social inheritance without one aspect of that identity being paramount (except in terms of self-identification)’. This anticipated the argument advanced by the social psychologist Michael Billig in his celebrated book Banal Nationalism (1995) that national identity is reproduced not only or mainly by the formal institutions of civil society but also and perhaps more deeply by the ‘cool nationalism’ that inheres in the unremarkable routines of everyday life. In any case, with the global promiscuity of media and cultural forms and migration patterns no nation outside of perhaps North Korea can subsist exclusively on a mono-cultural diet.

By the twenty-first century a distinctive sense of small nation Scottish identity diverged increasingly from big state British imperial identity, not only culturally but also, more perilously for the British state, politically. As the post-imperial British state and its cultural accoutrements like the BBC were hollowed-out any popular sense of Britishness in Scotland beyond football-related ritualism largely lost its cheap appeal. McCrone broached some of the problems of the democratisation process in Scotland. Unelected Scottish elites needed to be made more accountable to the people they govern, a demand that has resurfaced for the elite networks that assemble today around the Scottish parliament. At that time for McCrone new forms of self-determination were necessary within the constraints imposed by an interdependent world on the absolute primacy of state sovereignty.

A preoccupation of the book was the shifting bases of occupational class and social mobility and the relationship between class restructuring and national identity. It is easy to forget just how far-reaching (and traumatic) the sociological and political consequences of the de-industrialisation of Scotland were.

As McCrone argued: ‘changes in occupational structure, patterns of female employment, and social mobility right through to household structure, demographic behaviour and political orientations can be traced back to this single transformation’.

Considerably less was said about current preoccupations around race or sexuality. Ethnicity was dealt with in the context of how best to characterise the bases of national identity. And despite McCrone’s shredding of loose talk about Scotland as a colony little was said about the leading role of Scottish capitalism in the colonies and slave labour. Gender had a more significant presence in the book, drawing attention to the greatly increased participation of married women in the labour force owing largely to the growth of the service sector. 

When the second edition of the book appeared in 2001 the sense of Scotland as a distinct nation had become firmly entrenched as a legitimate field of study rather than the obscure concern of maverick sociologists. Much water has passed under the bridge in the intervening decades, not least the founding of a democratically elected devolved parliament and the 2014 referendum. Today Scots feel even more intensely Scottish than British, mainly for political reasons, even if the narcissism of cultural essentialism, to paraphrase Freud, is still indulged in some quarters. McCrone’s achievement thirty years ago provided a staging post for getting to grips with national identity and the unfinished business of the state formation process in Scotland. As McCrone perceptively argued back when later developments could only be glimpsed though a glass darkly, nationalism, an invention of the state, may yet play the role of the gravedigger of British state power.

Illustration: Daniel Seex