Two-faced: Tom Nairn’s Faces of Nationalism Revisited

Faces of Nationalism: Janus Revisited, Tom Nairn, Verso Books

Reviewed by David McCrone

In an essay on Thomas Carlyle in London Review of Books (14th Dec 2023), the writer Stefan Collini commented on Tom Nairn’s ‘caustic Scottish sarcasm’. Certainly, Tom took no prisoners in his writing, while in person he was a gentle soul, always good company. Tom and I introduced a Masters degree in Nationalism Studies at Edinburgh University in 1994. Students could hardly believe that this was same Tom Nairn who excoriated in print. We had the advantage of having the Tory MP for Ayr, Phil Gallie, asking a question in the House of Commons as to why the university was indoctrinating students into nationalism, thus proving once more that there is no such thing as bad publicity. 

Tom’s writing needs no introduction here. He is best known for The Break-Up of Britain (1977, 1981, 2003, and 2021), The Enchanted Glass: Britain and its Monarchy (1994, 2011), After Britain: New Labour and the Return of Scotland (2001), and the book discussed here, Faces of Nationalism: Janus Revisited (1997, and 2005). I recall the review of The Enchanted Glass, by the political writer RW Johnson who observed: ‘Nairn writes with a bitterness that is truly wonderful and has a line in highly literate, off-hand abuse which is extremely funny’. Pace Johnson, it’s not bitterness which was Tom’s forte, but scorn. 

Faces is probably Tom’s most ‘academic’ book, although it consists of essays published, above all, in London Review of Books during the early 1990s, as well as lectures he gave in Edinburgh and elsewhere. Tom observed of Ernest Gellner with whom he taught at the European University in Prague after 1989 that ‘the true subject of all modern philosophy is industrialisation’ was the kind of remark which Gellner loved most, ‘an acrid mixture of surprise, denigration and humour’: that sounds like Tom too. And yet he thought that Gellner missed the point in his ‘astringent aperçu’, because it didn’t go far enough. The true subject of modern philosophy was not industrialisation but ‘its immensely complex and variegated aftershock – nationalism’ (p.1). 

Tom’s (and Ernest’s) key point was that the ‘common man’ (and woman) was a nationalist because ‘industrialisation required a general culture and language to make it work, and the effective culture was usually the popular-national one’. Far from nationalism being some exotic cultural outgrowth, it became the default position. It was, however, taken-for-granted and implicit in large part because it could not speak its name following its close association with Nazism and Fascism. It was fine to talk about ‘the national interest’, and to assume the naturalness of states – usually as ‘nation-states’, as if the cultural (nation) and the political (state) were in simple correspondence. There developed what Gellner called the dark gods theory of nationalism, that it needed to be kept locked up, in a Pandora’s box, lest the virus escape and infect the body politic. Since 1945, that metaphor proved longstanding, and following George Orwell’s essay, it was okay to be ‘patriotic’ but not ‘nationalistic’. The problem however was, and is, that the distinction is inoperable, except as claim and accusation. It doesn’t hold analytical water.

The problem too is that nationalism is protean; it takes many shapes and forms, and in Tom’s word ‘faces’. It is a chameleon. The rise and rise of right-wing populism across the world elicits the response: ‘See? I told you so.’ Dark gods again. The Scottish variety drew various responses: that it was hiding its true values based on social and cultural divisions, or that it wasn’t really ‘nationalism’ at all, but simply a way of doing territorial politics. Tom had no truck with any of this. He bought into Gellner’s account of nationalism that it was ‘the true subject of modern philosophy of industrialisation; the nation, not the steam engine and the computer’ (p.17). Tom was not entirely convinced by Gellner’s functionalist account of nationalism as a necessary form of civic politics, required by modernity. That was too neat. Nairn thought that the way to understand nationalism lay in a complex assortment of genetics, archaeology, linguistics, psychology, anthropology, religion and peasant studies. Thus, ‘far from dissipating the enchantments of antiquity, the nationalist world has amplified them into the vast cacophony of the late second millennium’ (p.17). 

Tom Nairn’s approach to the analytical study of nationalism is rooted. He wrote ‘I have never hidden the fact that my own dilemmas and oddities emanate from those of my country, Scotland. These undoubtedly explain a good deal of my intellectual passions and concerns. It is easier for others to sense, interpret and make fun of this, but I have not tried to evade it’ (p.180). Above all, he is intrigued by the accidental nature of nationalism in Scotland, that ‘the fate of a population which had conserved institutional nationality without statehood, and therefore never had to have a state for its own national identity to survive’ (ibid.) and as a result does not tie it into blood-and-soil ideology; that it is, in the truism, civic not ethnic. 

What emerged, in his view, was a ‘unique castrate form’ of nationalism, devoted to low politics but uncomfortable with high politics. Thus, it is replete with dualities: ‘firewater Hyde’ vis-à-vis ‘feartie Jekyll’, a process of ‘self-colonisation, a distinguished sort of soul malady’. Those familiar with Tom’s writings will recognise his explanation, notably in The Break-Up of Britain, for the cultural deformities associated with the ‘tartan monster’. Furthermore, ‘a famously educated culture produced no intelligentsia’ (204), which seems a bit harsh, or rather draws attention to the kind that Tom would be happy to endorse. He has no truck with notions of ‘civil society’ either, observing that ‘… if we have to speak about “civil societies” in the plural, might we not as well speak about nations, nationalities or countries, and so be more widely understood?’ (p88). He finds ‘civil society’ a ‘deeply mysterious term’ (p.203). He shouldn’t do, because there is no simple correspondence between ‘culture’ and ‘politics’. We require focus on the social carriers of these dimensions lest we stray into a sort of Hegelian idealism in which ideas have their own prior force. 

Those of us involved in Scotland’s intellectual conversations such as myself and Lindsay Paterson think there is considerable mileage in this notion to help account for Scotland having crossed the great divide before nationalism was the main political vehicle. In short, modernity in Scotland, and its social class cadres, did not require nationalism to bring it to power and influence, especially in the context of British empire. You do not have to buy into the Tom Nairn account of Scotland, and ‘the more celebrated Kitschland which stand in for Scotland in the world’s consciousness’ (p.207) to appreciate how stimulating his writings are, even – especially – when we disagreed with him. We are required by the sheer force of his argument to improve upon our own.

Tom also put his finger on one of the key aspects of nationalism in Scotland; that there is what he calls an orthographic battle between upper and lower case, Nationalism and nationalism, which remains at the core of Scottish politics. Or, as Tom observes, somewhere in between, ‘a position corresponding perhaps to “small caps” in font design’ (p. 196). 

The final essay in Faces of Nationalism is based on a talk Tom gave at Birkbeck College following the 1997 Blair election. The last sentence of this essay, and the book, observes, perceptively: ‘The 1997 election result opens the door to (at least) begin an escape from it [that is, the British state]. I hope we can get some way through that door before it closes again’ (p.224). Did we? Twenty-seven years later, and in a similar political context (I write at a moment when a Labour government has just been elected), we have a devolved parliament, we had a referendum on independence almost a decade ago, we were forced out of the European Union against our will. The keepers of the British state – Conservatives and Labour- have let it be known that a ScIndyRef2 is not on offer, underpinned by the black letter lawyers of the UK Supreme Court who say that it is none of our legal business. We have no obvious escape route from the British state, short of serious social and political upheaval, or a major revolution in the economic, social and constitutional apparatus of the UK, which looks the less likely of the two options. The UK state itself has locked itself into its tight little island on the fringe of Europe, with little inclination or likelihood to get back in, clutching Scotland to its bosom lest it is diminished in consequence. Tom would have enjoyed those ironies, and would have been tempted to say: There: I told you so.