What of England if Britain is broken up?
David Coen reviews After Britain: New Labour and the Return of Scotland, by Tom Nairn (Granta Books 2000)
"No surrender to the IRA" was the rallying cry of patriotic England fans, assailed on all sides by foreigners and particularly the Belgian police at Euro 2000.
Under the banners of the Union Jack and the Cross of St. George they fought and fell, often dead drunk, in the bars and squares of Brussels. The country for which they made a last desperate stand was hard to figure out. For them 'English' meant British. The battle cries on the streets outside were matched inside the stadiums as "true" football supporters roared out Rule Britannia alongside God Save the Queen. The weighty burden of preserving Britain fell apparently to the England football team.
Tom Nairn, who in 1977 published "The Break-up of Britain", returns to this theme in "After Britain". He sets his critique of Blair's tepid fake radicalism in the context of the end of the Cold War and the growing momentum towards western European Union.
Now living in Roscommon in the west of Ireland, Nairn sees the 1998 Stormont Agreement as "a managed breakdown of the former United Kingdom.." He doubts the durability of the "Peace Process".
Blair's constitutional radicalism was just rhetoric: he never seriously challenged the "undefeated anachronistic (British) state" but instead capitulated to the backward looking Britishness espoused by the Unionists and their kith and kin in Britain.
Accordingly, England, Scotland and Wales need to be "liberated from Britain", freed from the dead hand of Britishness and its "backward looking core- Monarchy, imperial Sovereignty and a kind of spiritual racism".
In spite of the near 30-year war in Ireland Nairn claims "the decisive step ... in unmaking the United Kingdom must lie in establishing a different relationship with the Scots".
Incorporated
The Scottish state was incorporated rather than destroyed by the 1707 Act of Union. The Treaty of Union was an agreement between equal states rather than the elimination of the Scottish state, and a "statified people could not forget itself". Thus devolution/independence is not an episode of anti-colonial struggle but "the recovery of collective will by an already constituted nation...."
The new "civic nationalism" which will emerge from the re-joining of the Scottish state and nation will apparently offer a model for the resolution of other regional and national differences within the European Union.
Nairn has long since abandoned Marxism, and is critical of the British Labour Party both for its attempts to bind the crumbling state together and its more recent failure to modernise it. Citing its failure to reform the House of Lords and its cringing populist royalism around the death of Diana Spencer, he argues New Labour's grand rhetorical claims are merely an attempt to disguise its spineless failure to act.
Its fake solution is "corporate populism" in which "its apparatus of consumers and 'stakeholders' mimics democracy, substituting brand loyalty and ordinariness for hope and glory". From this flows its authoritarian and centralising instincts; the more Britain appears to fragment and disintegrate, the more desperately do the Blairites demand conformity, discipline and centralisation within New Labour and without.
Nairn considers that this ultimately doomed attempt to hang on to the British ancien regime represses the voice of the country "which has not spoken yet" - England.
Devolution poses the question of England. For Nairn "there is no available formula for post-British England" and here we get a glimpse of the beastie that haunts the edges of his nightmares for it is none other than the "uncertain and uncontrollable ... English nationalism" expressed as Euro-scepticism: "the conjunction of neo-liberalism and Britain's great power past".
The possibility that "popular heartland resentment at decline and loss further aggravated by failure or marginalisation" could lead to unthinkable political developments must be headed off by timely constitutional reform.
Modern national identity
The reason for Scotland's importance in unmaking Britain is that it apparently offers a vision of a modern national identity "within the prevailing temper of a European polity in formation".
This new-found national identity however is not one 'tainted' by the anti-colonial struggles - "it has been civic demands and action which have brought about the return of the Scottish parliament - not ethnic assertiveness associated with violence exclusion or discrimination".
While there are dangers of an upsurge in anti-English ethnic nationalism, Scottish nationalism is more "modern" and outward looking.
Nairn has great faith in a written constitution to provide legitimation for the new state instead of the "pre-democratic" 1998 Scotland Act or the unwritten, monarchical constitution of Britain. He quotes a declaration by Vaclav Havel: "Union must turn to the written word".
This belief in the written Word has parallels in the fundamentalist Christianity which surely also forms part of the Scottish "identity". The Havel quote identifies Nairn with those East European writers who felt that their literary assaults on Stalinism were vindicated by its collapse in 1989. In the end this is idealism: the Word or the Constitution are always subject to interpretation, and their meanings reflect the prevailing relations of power.
Nairn's preference for civic action and his not well concealed anti-statism place him more in the tradition of liberal thinkers such as his Scottish antecedent Adam Smith, who created classical political economy from his observation of simple commodity production.
He is therefore closer to the neo-liberals he criticises (and indeed to Tony Blair) than perhaps he imagines. True free marketers are not opposed to European Union per se: they oppose state intervention against the interests of capital. Nairn's "European polity" with its written legal codes and appearance of openness is being created, like the nation states which he believes it is replacing, by the concentration of west European capital as a more useful weapon in the battle for global markets.
Well-meaning explanations of the EU as an attempt to avoid a repeat of the two ruinous wars or as the production of a process of modernisation brought about by greater travel and communication between countries obscure this basic fact.
For all its faults, After Britain raises several key questions for socialists.
The British left is very suspicious (rightly) of Union Jack-waving British nationalism. At the same time, this has led it to concede patriotism to the right, even if their efforts to mobilise around it have been laughable: John Major's nostalgia for an England of "elderly maidens cycling to matins" and "warm beer" certainly wouldn't ring a bell with Brixton Tories - if the species still exists.
Blair's "re-branded" modern, post imperial Cool Britannia flopped with the Millennium Dome. And then there are the football fans who seem to have no language to support their team other than the symbols and anthems of empire.
Divisions and false unity
The left variant of all embracing Britishness is to deny autonomy to national formations within the British state on the grounds that these divide the working class.
Thus, having British-based unions organise in Ireland was defended on the basis that they represented a degree of working class unity, which only sectarians would seek to break, when on the contrary, they represented not an equal and voluntary alliance of workers but a subordination of workers of different nations within the British state.
To return to Nairn's enthusiasm for the redefinition of Britishness in the Stormont Agreement and the proposal to set up a Council of the Isles, this is something which while we might agree on the principle, the fact is that the Council of the Isles is not based on the freely given democratic consent of the nations within the British State (and outside) but is imposed by the British as part of the attempt to stabilise the undemocratic Six County State which it imposed on Ireland by force in 1921.
Related to this is the question of whether the left favours the break-up of the British State. Clearly, imperialism and the British ruling class in particular would be weakened by such a development, even if in the short run it sowed illusions in national capital among the working class.
The danger of this could be exaggerated: is it the case that working class Scots are voting for the SNP because they have any illusions in them? More likely it is because of Blair's openly Thatcherite policies.
Liberal transnationals?
And then there is the EU. Some on the left think the EU is the only practical option for progressive politics if the choice is between the narrow bigotry of domestic capital and the apparently more liberal transnational variety.
Nairn himself is in this category, as are many trade union leaders. The problem with this argument is that big European capitalism feels no need to make concessions - and the outcome will be a trade union bureaucracy further tied in to the Euro ruling class.
Calling for a united socialist Europe while building links with workers organisations in Europe would be much preferable to neo-liberalism in its localist or pan European versions.
Finally, Nairn is wrong in believing that Scotland will be the catalyst for change in the British state. "Civic nationalism" is far too compromised to challenge the oldest imperialist state in the world.
Only the mass action which has occasionally occurred in Ireland over the past 30 years can accomplish the task. To quote Bernadette McAliskey - who borrowed the phrase from somewhere: "Freedom only comes if you take it".