MISUNIFICATION Tom Nairn Union and Unionisms: Political Thought in Scotland, 1500–2000, by Colin Kidd, Cambridge University Press, 2008, (ISBN 978-0-521-70680-3) ———— ’We’ve got a constitutional crisis on our hands, and football, says the Sunday Herald, has been the catalyst. ‘‘Everything British, everything English and everything Scottish is on the political dissecting table’’, declares its leader on the day of the match. Aidan Smith, in Union Jock: Sleeping with the Auld Enemy, Yellow Jersey Press, 2008 Professor Kidd’s study of Scottish Unionism goes (as he himself insists) sternly against the prevailing ideological current, which is naturally more focused on the emergence of political nationalism in both Scotland and Wales. His conclusion is that the book will serve its purpose if it unsettles this debate, and brings about a revision of ‘the basic categories of political analysis’ (p.304). Understood properly, these categories should henceforth recognize a long and specific history to the wish for some kind of union with England, long before the formation of the Scottish National Party, or indeed the 1707 Treaty of Union itself. In Chapter 2, ‘Unionisms before Union, 15001707’, he shows how varying notions of union came and went – mainly but never exclusively ecclesiastical in nature. Aidan Smith looks at the dilemma through football-addict eyes, while Kidd stresses academic political science, and blames practically everyone. Nor has this ‘taxonomy of unionisms’ (as he puts it) come to a halt in today’s more nationalistinclined age. We still find unionists supporting forms of devolution or autonomy – not too surprising, since he points out how
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‘administrative devolution to Edinburgh was a shibboleth of Unionism throughout its history’ (p.20). On the other side, we find nationalists often over-anxious about maintaining links, ‘association’ and independence as equality, rather than mere difference. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, this more confusing landscape often assumed a frankly racialist form, the contrived ethnology of an underlying ‘Saxondom’. ‘Teutonism’ of that kind perceived ‘Lowland Scotland and Northumbria as the true ethnic heartland of Great Britain, the home of the most purely Anglian stock within the island’ (p.158), and dismissed its Celtic strains as alien or spurious. Professor Kidd isn’t reverting to such lunacy. But he insists the story is far more mixed-up and inconstant than ordinary nationalist narratives now assume. In the period between 1707 and the mid-20th century, what prevailed was ‘banal unionism’ – a useful conception that catches very well the practical, largely unquestioning nature of so many Scottish (and Welsh) attitudes. His Introduction summarizes these as ‘inarticulate acceptance of Union as part of the barely noticed but enduring backdrop of British politics’ (p.27). The
backdrop was of course reinforced by common or joint Protestant beliefs, as indicated in Linda Colley’s study Britons: Forging the Nation 1707– 1837 (1992, new paperback edition due out) as well as by imperialism and British state warfare. Only when the former grew less salient and the latter came to be questioned and denounced, could one argue that, by the nineteen-eighties, ‘banal unionism was dead’ (p.35). His book is the most important addition to the pro-Union bookshelf since John Robertson’s A Union for Empire: Political Thought and the Union of 1707, back in 1995. I think historians will find his Chapter 5 particularly useful: ’ Assimilationist Jurisprudence to Legal Nationalism’, an account of the long interaction between two legal systems. The arguments here interconnect in suggestive ways with Philip Roeder’s Where Nation-States Come From (Princeton, 2007) – a thesis finding national foundations primarily in jurisdictions and partial legislation. This reviewer was raised in a banal-unionist environment that corresponded closely to Kidd’s account, and I am grateful to him for describing it so well. We were always made to feel that Scottishness mattered, and indeed shaped family and immediate community in some way, but always within a more important framework that prevailed and would take over at vital moments. The outward-looking dimension of Britishness was ‘banal’ mainly in
the sense of seeming inevitable, a structure that defined the comfortable if more limited Gemeinschaft of the Scots, dialect, locality, and so on. In contrast, the British – or even ‘AngloSaxon’ – Gesellschaft stood for a wider reality, and of course appealed more to intellectuals, as well as to those inclined towards emigration, military or uniformed service, or politics. It was the way to a wider world, continuous with what the Scottish Enlightenment had so successfully aimed for in the 18th and early 19th centuries. Without entailing ‘Anglicization’ in a vulgar imitative sense, these courses did mean strategies of adaptation, and the relegation or confinement of nativism to prescribed situations and encounters. The assumption was of the superiority of that wider reality, and also of its optional character: the banality lay partly in its not being imposed by conquest. It seemed as inevitable as nature, if one wanted to get anywhere, or do anything important. But behind banality lay something else, to which I believe Professor Kidd’s analysis pays insufficient attention: one might call it English incompletion, or non-formality. In her classic account of modern nationalism, Liah Greenfeld has awarded a priority to the English nation as ‘God’s First-born’ – the model for most subsequent nation-state formation.1 However, she failed to note this Model-T’s limitations: being first also meant that Anglonationality could never be typical or exemplary.
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It remained initially religious, and was consolidated in 17th century wars of faith, by which time the English were already (and prematurely) ultra-expansive – borne outwards on a long wave of overseas settlement, and then Empire. At a deep level, their self-identity came to mean more than just English in a 20th century or ‘ethnic’ sense.2 ‘Britishness’ is an important feature of the resultant (and still prevalent) alibi-identity – not being like others, above that sort of thing, etc. In the archipelago itself, only the Irish resisted on that level, for pre-existing religious reasons – and this, we must recall, did provoke something like a typical, later nationstate response, employing force and assimilation.
‘foreign relations’ has been ably resumed in Kees van der Pijl’s important study Nomads, Empires, States: Modes of Foreign Relations and Political Economy (Pluto Press 2007). Van der Pijl suggests that many historians have neglected the factor, so that much revision needs to be undertaken. Kidd’s study is surely a good example of such rewriting. But one implication of Pijl’s ‘modes’ perspective is that there was nothing so exceptional about the outwardlooking initiatives and quest for alternatives that he describes. An outer-fringe population was condemned to such resorts, faced with its much larger and wealthier neighbour, and dependent also to some degree on that neighbour’s own communal identity – or the lack of it.
But the other peripheral populations were either apparently absorbed, as in Wales, or in search of partnership like the Scots – via one or other ‘unionism’, as Kidd shows. He makes a great deal of the willingness and variety displayed in that quest, stressing the richness and originality of unionist tradition. Only in the nineteenseventies would it harden down into Thatcher’s and Brown’s caricatures of Britishness. However, he tends to ascribe these traits to Scottish reasonableness, a willingness to compromise that preceded the rise of the tougher political nationalism of today’s SNP. This may endear his book to defenders of Brownite or Cameronian Union, but remains doubtful in a broader perspective.
The conventional or ‘banal’ accord of earlier unionisms rested naturally on acceptance of the resultant wider framework – ‘safety within a more viable, stable and enduring union state’, as the author puts it (p.302). However, such reasonableness is exactly what has been placed in doubt by the decades following the nineteen-sixties. Not only did the empire disappear, as an outlet for so many Scots, but the United Kingdom state itself has lost prestige, influence and economic importance. Long before the 2008 de´bacle it had ceased to be the ‘wider reality’ that all earlier versions of unionism had counted upon. That’s why it has had to be more passionately defended, and secured by an overplaying of foreign relations – the Special Relationship with the USA, wrongly perceived as still another grand framework that the British could, in turn, count on and exploit. The Scots, the Welsh, and now even the Northern Irish Unionists, came to smell rats busily at work, notably around Westminster. ‘Banality’ was gone with the wind, and Union in that sense soon came to be damned along with it. Interpreting the Union may have become ‘a topic of immense richness and subtlety’, in Kidd’s words: laid out in the morgue, the cadaver does lend itself better to dissection and taxonomy. But as ideology, even the
Twelve years ago Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza described the probable spread and interconnection of human populations, a continuous movement of migration and mythic descent from prehistoric Africa down to the present.3 Clannic, tribal or (later) national human societies have been essentially (not accidentally) ‘outward-looking’, and necessarily aware of others. Long before globalization, cultural cross-fertilization has been the rule of human ‘species-being’ (in Feuerbach and Karl Marx’s sense).Very recently, this history of
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admiring anatomist has to concede that it has at the same time become ‘more overt, yet also shriller and less tolerant of ambiguity and complexity’ (p.303). The British Labour Party above all has felt impelled to prop it up, as in the works of the present Prime Minister. His Red Paper on Scotland (1975) has ended up in the last ditch mud of a finance-capital Britain on the skids. However, the 1975 Red Paper ‘Introduction’ can be reinterpreted as having invited the fall: it demanded a Scottish socialist contribution to a suitably (ie. radically) reformed United Kingdom. In the meantime, Socialism has slid off the agenda – and now Unionism looks like joining it. As for reforms, the publication of Union and Unionisms coincides with a sequence of shameful influence-for-cash scandals in the House of Lords. The epitome of everything archaic about Britain’s old regime not only remains in being thirty-four years after the Red Paper: its scorn for democracy is now being administered by that book’s Editor. Worse may follow: in the Guardian of February 4th, Toby Helm’s ‘Politics Blog’ concluded that the entire new-British agenda once prominently advertised by Brown ‘has been thrown into the extremely long grass’ for future attention, along perfectly familiar Old-Unionist lines. Whatever the political fate of Kidd’s book, no extrapolation from long-grass Union now looks like recomposing a tolerable ‘-ism’. The saviours of Union have turned into its executioners. Kidd’s cumulative over-praise for Unionism tends to obscure the price of sustaining such a system. Scots may have liked it, and striven ingeniously to adapt; but they did so partly by downplaying – or even colluding in – the grim costs of the show. That is, in the maintenance of an increasingly preposterous and anachronistic multinational state and monarchy. 1688-style Union has not persisted just to suit the Scots. The latter have merely been a convenience, with their support for a majority stalemate founded on archaism in both state and civil society: for example, the grotesque social-class rigidities evolved in England to compensate for the slowing-down and paralysis of democratic nationality. Imperialism overseas and pseudofeudalism at home – such was the obverse of the Unionism so agreeable to successive generations of the Scots, Welsh and NorthernIrish. As the intolerable structure has broken down since World War II, peripheral discontent has grown, and taken nationalist form; alas, not yet enough to finally demolish it. This is partly because an odd, belated style of Liberation
movement has been countered by a mounting panic among the inte´llos of the outer archipelago: that is, by over-zealous intellectual and political elites determined to save the minority bacon. English democracy is of no account to these pious souls: all they can bear to perceive is the stability and continuity of Union-Britain, an inherited Grandeur that has also provided so many jobs for outwardly-mobile fringe intellectuals and politicians, and saved them from small-nation obscurity and powerlessness. Kidd goes on to examine the interesting side of Scottish nationalism that has always tacitly, sometimes openly, supported a continuation of Union. But he fails to acknowledge the bizarre contradiction to which this has led. Because of the peculiarities of the majority English identity mentioned earlier, there seems at present very little chance of creating any new wider reality. The latter would have to be some sort of confederation, based upon the devolved authorities now in place, and certain to remain and assert themselves. ‘Federalism’ of Lincoln’s 19th century brand is a non-starter in a society so overwhelmingly dominated by one single component, the English. And this component is still reluctant to accept relegation to ‘little England’, the more confining identity which eluded it before, during the prolonged rapids of colonial spread and diversification. Yet without that, no Swiss-style confederal entity appears possible. Hence independence has become the sole answer.4 As well as rejecting old-regime absurdity and reach-me-down ‘Greatness’, separation is the only available route towards anything like a replacement for Kidd’s 57 varieties of Unionism. That is, Confederation. The ‘con’ modifies everything, by relocating sovereignty in the parts. This isn’t because ethnicity is sacrosanct, but because history in Cavalli-Sforza’s long run offers no other origin. The universal has always been constructed through and out of the particular, humankind’s cultural diversity. Such variation is at bottom fate, however elaborated by choice and culture. Kidd has reiterated the richness and flexibility of Unionist traditions, rightly reminding the reader of their many colours and values. He provides an important new context for understanding the archipelago story, and guessing at its future. But neither hymns nor prayers nor academic theses will now provide a formula of redemption. Some questions simply can’t be answered by the categories Unionism has bequeathed. He says he wants to ‘unsettle’ existing categories of Scottish political thought;
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getting rid of most of them would be more to the point. The banal matter-of-factness of moribund Great-Britishness continues to hinge on the absence of an English polity. English nationalism remains a funny kind of nonnationalism: the immovable notion of not being institutionally like other folk, and so not having to accept ordinariness and mere ethnicity. Unfortunately, Kidd’s study is all too likely to be conscripted into this mind-set. His overemphasis on the splendours and variety of past Unionism will be read as encouragement of a fossilized ancien regime outlook. In truth, a different wind is blowing at last. Unions and Unionism will make a difference to future history and identity-stories. However, it’s also the portrait of a splendid graveyard, managed by ghouls and zombies determined to keep the rusty old gates open and working as long as they can. In a recent New York Review of Books article Andrew O’Hagan argued that ‘The population of Scotland will never get a better deal than the one the Union has afforded them for over three hundred years’.5 Possibly, and Kidd’s description of the old deal is a very telling one. A parochial cemetery stench hangs over it too, however, because one motive for its existence is that the funeral is under way, and the mourners will soon be on their way home – many of them grumbling tearfully, and still unwilling to speak ill of the dead. But from this ground Minerva’s Owl has flown. No songs of longing will bring her back. The long grass is growing over everything, and Gordon Brown’s revenants can’t keep elegies going forever. Soon
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these ancient gates will creak shut for good, and no amount of exorcism will unlock them for the future new-Unionist generations Kidd would like to see. (A Version of this article first appeared in London Review of Books)
Notes 1
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Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Harvard 1993), Ch.1 ‘God’s Firstborn: England’, pp.27–89. On this subject, a valuable source remains Edwin Jones’s The English Nation: the Great Myth’, Sutton Publishing, 2000. Scotland is mentioned three times in the book, purely en passant. What may appear to some readers as Kidd’s over-emphasis on Scottish contributions to Unionism should be set against this quite normal bias. Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, The Great Human Diasporas: the History of Diversity and Evolution (Basic Books, 1996) Last year The Independence Book: Scotland in Today’s World (Luath Press, edited by Harry Reid and Paul Henderson Scott) put this case at length; my own contribution was ‘Scotland and Globalization’, pp. 76-90, arguing that far from discrediting nationalitypolitics, the new globality makes independence more meaningful than before. NYRB November 20th, 2008, Vol.55, No.18, ‘What is Scotland’
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Nairn in Darkness Colin Kidd I am flattered that Tom Nairn has taken the trouble to read my book and to offer what purports to be an extended commentary on its matter. However, I do wonder if we find ourselves at cross purposes. What Tom Nairn has produced is a penetrating account of where the Union stands today, but it does not really engage with the substance of my argument, which is historical. I had no intention of writing a tract for the times, and I imagine that the implications of my study – such as they are – would be equally unwelcome both to committed nationalists and diehard unionists. Yet Nairn assumes that Union and Unionisms is a presentminded defence of the unionist political tradition, possibly even a defence of the Union itself. This is to make a serious category error. The ultimate aim of the book was to construct a descriptive taxonomy of the varieties of unionist political argument in early modern and modern Scotland. Of course, this intention necessarily involved a repudiation of the reductive caricatures of unionism advanced by some nationalists. I do, indeed, plead guilty to the charge of attempting to show that unionism contained many more mansions than nationalists generally imagine. But I do not believe that this makes my book a work of partisanship. Similarly, John Robertson’s collection of essays, A Union for Empire (Cambridge University Press, 1995), to which I contributed an essay, was not intended to defend the case for Union in 1707, but rather to demonstrate that the Scottish political debate around 1707 was considerably more sophisticated than a previous generation of historians, fixated on the politics of faction, interest and petty corruption, had believed to be the case. A corollary of Robertson’s collection was, of course, to suggest that
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Scotland was not simply bought and sold for English gold in 1707, which had become something of a nationalist shibboleth, though one supported by some very serious historical research, including work by one historian in particular who was neither Scottish nor nationalist. But, again, Robertson and his diverse team, several of whom were not Scots and had no stake in current Scottish politics, were not committed to the Union; rather they were attempting to capture some of the hidden complexities of the Scottish scene around 1707. Their primary goal, as with most historians, was to flesh out a bygone context. So, when Nairn writes that Kidd’s book ‘is the most important addition to the pro-Union bookshelf since John Robertson’s A Union for Empire’, I shudder that a towering intellectual giant such as Nairn could so badly misconstrue the real motivations behind two dispassionately historical works. Hopefully, the common reader will have more common sense. As it happens, in the course of my investigations, I did arrive at the conclusion that unionist political thought was richer and more variegated than its nationalist detractors had supposed. Moreover, I also showed that – contrary to nationalist distortion and misrepresentation – unionism was not in any sense un-Scottish. Unionism, I explained, was not a pale reflection of English ideology. Rather, it was a political creed first minted in Scotland, and what is more – long before either the Union of 1707, or the so-called Union of the Crowns of 1603. Scottish unionism – which can be traced back at least as far as the 1520s – has just as good a boast that it is an indigenous political position as Scottish nationalism. Nor, indeed, is Scottish unionism the opposite of nationalism. The real opposite of Scottish
unionism, it emerges, is not nationalism, but English imperialism. A strong sense of Scottish national consciousness and an outright antipathy to English imperial pretensions lurk at the core of Scottish unionism. I also showed that the main axes of political debate in the years leading up to the Union of 1707 were not between unionists and supporters of independence, but between different kinds of unionist – between proponents of a confederal union of England and Scotland, with separate parliaments for England and Scotland, and those who preferred an incorporating union. At the heart of this dispute were ecclesiastical interests. It was Scots Presbyterians who worried most about what incorporating union would mean for their distinctive brand of Protestantism. How secure would the Kirk be when its security depended – in practical terms if not in theory – on the votes of an overwhelmingly Anglican parliament at Westminster? The primacy of ecclesiastical – rather than political – interests in the history of early modern and even – until the 1920s – modern unionism is one of the central planks of my argument, and one which does not map comfortably onto current political concerns. Unionism should appear in an altogether different light, I would hope, to readers of Union and Unionisms; and, of course, Nairn is correct up to a point. I’m not a nationalist, though like many other non-nationalist Scots I have, on the odd occasion, registered a protest against one or other of the UK parties by voting for the SNP. Indeed, I think it would have been very difficult for a committed nationalist to write such a book as Union and Unionisms, which breaks free from the spell of the dominant nationalist grand narrative of Scottish history. Nevertheless, Union and Unionisms was not written on behalf of the Union or any one of the political parties which uphold the Union. I am afraid that since Tom Nairn has failed to offer a critique, nationalist or otherwise, of the substance of my book, I shall have to do the job for him. The author should – of all people – be able to locate where the bodies are buried. What are the main flaws in Union and Unionisms? I think there are problems in distinguishing between the different uses of unionism. While the book distinguishes very clearly between Unionism as party creed of the Unionist Party between 1912 and 1965 and unionism as allegiance to the United Kingdom, it grapples less successfully with the distinction between unionism as ideology and the more
detached political, juridical, constitutional, historical analyses of the Union which I have described as ‘analytic unionism’. Most ‘analytic unionists’ were also supporters of Union, not least because prior to the 1970s this was the overwhelming background norm in Scottish culture. However, it is also clear that one of the leading analysts of Union – or, more problematically, ‘analytic unionists’ – was the late Sir Neil MacCormick, a leading statesman of the SNP. I also mentioned in the book that, precisely because unionism was so overwhelmingly dominant in Scottish culture between the late 1740s and the 1970s, unionists tended to ignore the Union, which was an unproblematic and unchallenged given of British political life. Curiously, therefore, most unionists were banal unionists, meaning that they tended to ignore the origins and workings of a constitution which they took for granted, while, on the other hand, nationalists so-called – many of whom did not want to separate entirely from England – who probed the anomalies and contradictions at the heart of the Union settlement, were, in some measure, the most acute ‘analytic unionists’ (though outnumbered by that small minority of unionists who were not anaesthetised into ‘banal unionism’). The quizzical ‘analytic unionism’ of nationalist intellectuals also overlaps with their strict constructions of the Articles of Union, deployed to berate the English political elite for failing to uphold the terms of the agreement reached and ratified in 1706-7. It is very hard to separate these strands of nationalist (if indeed truly nationalist) commentary on the Union of 1707. Just how should one parse a nationalist who employs a narrow reading of the Treaty of Union to defend Scottish interests within the Union? Is this a form of nationalism or a form of unionism or a hybrid unionist-nationalism or best described by some other term entirely? Historians are temperamentally inclined to exhibit the messiness of the past wherever it appears, not to tidy it up or sweep it away. As a result, definitions are far from watertight, and some seepage occurs between different lines of interpretation, as is the case in Union and Unionisms. This general problem of defining unionism and the categories of unionism bedevils Union and Unionisms. When is a unionist not a unionist? As I demonstrated in my book the polar categories of unionism and nationalism do not take account of those Scots who favoured some form of association with England which, arguably, fell short of union, strictly defined.
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How are we to account for nationalist-minded Scots who wanted a British Empire run jointly by its English and Scottish mother nations? How should we understand an aspiration towards self-governing dominion status for Scotland within Britain’s Empire-cumCommonwealth? How should we describe those Scots who aimed at a restoration of the Union of the Crowns, which was, arguably, not a union at all? On the other hand, a commitment to the British Empire or the Union of the Crowns bears some kind of affinity to unionist politics. Should unionism be reserved only for those who support the Union of 1707 (and as amended by the devolution settlement) rather than those who support other forms of AngloScottish political association? Yet interdependence between nations, including Anglo-Scottish cooperation, would be a fact of life for an independent Scotland. Therefore, how fair is it to describe as unionist those who favour some looser form of association between England and Scotland? This is not an easy matter to resolve. I confess that I am guilty of lumping together in my study of the varieties of Scottish unionism anomalous positions on the constitutional relationship which are not congruent with the basic descriptors of political and historical analysis. Nevertheless, I did feel that a desire for some sort of association with England, at whatever level, was comprehended as well by the label unionism as by the term nationalism. My ulterior purpose was to show that a serious attempt to construct a taxonomy of unionist discourses led inevitably to the questioning of the foundational categories of unionism and nationalism which have played such an
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influential – and distorting – role in Scottish history and politics. Union and Unionisms was not written to serve the politics of the present. However, there might well be lessons for the politicians implicit in the book’s findings. Scottish unionist politicians of various stripes might learn to be more confident about the long, indigenous pedigree of their cause. There are few things more authentically Scottish than the unionist tradition. Nevertheless, the more cravenly anglicizing of unionists must recognise the vital caveat that there has always been a large element of Scottish national consciousness and defensiveness – anglophobia even – within unionism. Conversely, nationalists might learn that there is a world of difference between supporting a nationalist party and endorsing outright independence from England and from the crown. While some nationalists do aspire to a Scottish republic totally independent from England, the route between that position and defence of the Union of 1707 runs across some heavily populated terrain, though perhaps a landscape less variegated than in the days seventy or so years ago when the British Empire multiplied the range of political options open to Scots. But as an historian I do not see my function as supplying usable matter for the politicians of any party or any position. My goal is merely to understand the past on its own terms, which usually turn out, as in this case, to have been much more complicated than the present understands. If Tom Nairn has been playing baseball, I’ve been trying to report the events of a rather subtle and far from predictable game of cricket.