Reflections on Scotland's Political Culture(2/4)

Why nations matter, and what it means to be culturally British and politically Scottish.

When Nicola Sturgeon resigned I began writing about Scottish politics for the first time since 2014 and I was pleasantly surprised by who was paying attention. The First Minister’s resignation felt like a watershed moment after years of momentum toward independence. Huge gains have been made and the idea of independence has been normalised, but there is no obvious next move for any new leader. Surprises are possible, and there might be an unexpected quickening, but it seems more likely that after years of extraordinary unity, there might now be a period of relative division; after years of amazing electoral success, there might now be period of relative failure.

It would be foolish to see such developments in linear terms, as if all that is happening is backward motion. Sometimes we take a step back to take two forward, and consolidation and reorientation is par for the course. The story and the energy of the build-up to the referendum and all that followed has exhausted itself. Like many thousands of people, I suspect, I have lost my bearings. I feel a strange need to plug myself back into my home country as if for a software update; to download the paragraphs that help to make sense of where we are.

Initially, I shared a reflective 2000-word piece with Bella Caledonia that wondered aloud: If Kate Forbes is the answer, what is the question? I suggested the main question was: How can the independence movement get over itself? I’ll get back to that idea in part four, but I withdrew the piece quite quickly, feeling that it wasn’t ripe, and doubting my motivations. What did I think I was doing? The word ‘progressive’ looms large in Scotland and I had some thoughts about the progressive shadow and what it might mean to be post-progressive that have been brewing for a while. These thoughts have some relevance for Scotland, but mostly I was meeting an emotional need to respond to the end of an era by saying something. I still believe in Scottish independence in principle, but the UK context - not least Brexit and the Supreme Court ruling - and the world context - not least the Russian invasion of Ukraine and incipient ecological colllapse - means my operating system runs on an outdated story.

What I need to do personally is rediscover my curiosity about Scotland, to reestablish my feelings about the whole predicament, and then see if there is anything worthwhile left to say about political leadership before the polls close on March 27th.

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My ideal for these islands seems almost impossible at the moment, but it’s good to befriend your desires because healthy cognition runs on honest volition. I would like the UK to rejoin the single market and later the EU, ideally soon enough to be in place before Scotland negotiates secession from the UK (it would make it so much easier). And it’s not really my business, but I would like to see a united Ireland, with all due care of course. I don’t know about Wales, I never know about Wales, but in principle they could be independent too, given that independence is always some kind of interdependence in diguise. I would like to see England rediscover itself not just as a country that comes alive in sporting contexts, but as a powerful European nation with its own healthy political identity. And then I imagine these islands with their own vibrant polities that care about the truth, very close economic cooperation, and sharing a cultural affinity similar to the nordic countries, but without the need for Stockholm, for instance, to continually broadcast to everyone just how Scandinavian they all are, as Westminster now does with British propaganda. Britishness (and Irishness) would discover its optimal form, expressing the shared history and fraternal cultural affinity of independent nation states who feel more fully themselves. I don’t see it happening, but this desire informs the inquiry that follows.

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Most Ukrainians appear to believe that their national identity is worth dying for. They would prefer not to die, of course, but the very idea of Ukraine - the beauty and dignity of political freedom, the fragility of open societies, and the courage and sacrifice required to resist oppression and protect them - has become the meaning of their lives; and if anything is meaningful, it’s whatever we would die for. I have spent many mornings over the last year welling up with tears while listening to BBC’s Ukrainecast.

In the UK the situation is clearly different. I begin with the contrast with Ukraine to temper the seriousness of everything that follows, and appreciate the luxury of having time to reflect. But I do believe the finer details of our identity are worth attending to and, playfully, fighting for. While I am aware of ‘the narcissism of small differences’ I also believe our uniqueness is what makes our lives sacred and it’s up to all of us to find a way to live from that place. The quality of any collective process of reckoning depends on inviduals finding their voice and their place. If it’s true that we see the world, not as it is, but as we are, then it helps to know and inhabit our distinctiveness and peculiarity, to understand that it’s not the only way to be but it’s our way to be, and then reach outwards from there. That applies to nationality too.

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Nationalism is legion, and manifest in millions of ways over thousands of years, but it is ultimately two main ideas: there are such things as nations, and nations should govern themselves. There are many nationalisms because people disagree about what exactly makes a nation real, and people vary on the extent to which the moral force of ‘should govern themselves’ moves them to action.

To define ‘nation’ is to commit a political act. The etymology relates to birth and that permeates many of the attempts at definitions, though it also feels like the idea of nation gradully outgrows them all. In the history of political thought, we have nation-as-language, nation-as-geology, nation-as-ethnicity, nation-as-folk rituals, nation-as-historical event, nation-as-territory, and nation-as-constitution. All these definitions (and more) are part of the context of nationhood, and you need that context, but each of them alone is easily refuted by examples of nations that don’t fit a tight conceptual straightjacket. Taken together, however, these social and material assemblages are part of the setting in the play of nationhood. But they are not the plot; they are not what the nation is about. The setting makes the plot possible, but it’s the plot where the nation finds and creates itself. A nation is a true fiction in which we can be ourselves in its setting and become ourselves through its plot. I think that line passes the bullshit test, but I could be wrong.

This shift of emphasis makes the nation a kind of political incubator (Indra Adnan’s term) because the national polity is an expression of both of our cultural belonging and our connection with the world beyond, and is therefore the arena in which our agency is most clearly felt and known. In recent years the emphasis has therefore been on nation-as-soul, nation-as-social construction, and nation-as-practice.

In 1882 Ernest Renan said: “A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. Two things which, properly speaking, are really one and the same constitute this soul, this spiritual principle. One is the past, the other is the present.” Also well-known is Benedict Anderson’s idea of ‘imagined communities’ which suggests that we either receive or seek out collective identity for ourselves; and we can feel a kind of solidarity and fraternity with people in our imagined community that we don’t actually know. In Honey from the Lion, Doug Gay extends on this idea to say that nationalism is ‘a claim to identity on behalf of a population’ and quotes Oliver Donovan, “to see ourselves as a people is an act of moral imagination”. For these reasons, Rogers Brubaker’s contention “Nation is a category of practice, not (in the first instance) of analysis”, is a critical thing to grasp. Brubaker goes on: “To understand nationalism, we have to understand the practical uses of the category ‘nation’, the ways in which it can come to structure perception, to inform thought and experience, to organise discourse and political action.”

These thoughts on nation suggest that it’s no wonder that a sense of Scottish nationhood has been heightened by its new political institutions, and this was particularly noteworthy duing the referendum in 2014 but also in the pandemic in 2020-2021. It also noteworthy that the lack of distinctively English political institutions is a problem for any healthy expression of English nationalism, which otherwise gets misdirected onto confected enemies like the EU. While there has been a significant inquiry into English culture in recent years, it might well be that England cannot know itself as a nation without its own political institutions. While a country is about a land and its people, becoming a nation is about being able to politically express your culture, especially if that culture is diverse and ever-changing.

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There is no intelligent doubt that nations exist, nor that Scotland is a nation, and most Scots, regardless of their views on independence, feel this to be true and important. What is legitimately doubted and contested, however, is how clear the idea of nation is, and how much nations matter - morally, culturally, educationally, politically, and legally. One of the living questions on these islands is whether Scotland in particular should govern itself, given that it already has some degree of self-government and that it sits within another nation to which the people also apparently belong, typically known as ‘Britain’.

Great Britain is now a kind of supra-nation compromised of three nations - England, Scotland, and Wales. Together, we share the political entity known as The United Kingdom with Northern Ireland which is a bi-national region of the UK on the island of Ireland, with some tailor-made state-like apparatus and special status in the EU. Please note that the UK doesn’t mean United Kingdoms plural. The idea is not that different nation-states are united in a general sense, it’s that different nations remain differentiated but are united because they share a state.

A full history of Scotland is well beyond our scope, but if we are going to allow ourselves to feel the reality of nations and their attendant political claims it helps to appreciate there really is a full history that serves to highlight both where borders and national distinctions come from, and why they can be at once real and yet also contingent and contested. I beg the forgiveness of proper historians for what follows.

The history of Scotland would ideally start with the big bang (our genesis) followed by the formation of the solar system (our celestial inheritance) the geology of planet earth’s surface (our islands), the effects of its periodic glaciations (our highlands and lowlands), and the evolution of life forms leading eventually to humans (our people). We’d need some archeology about nomadic lifestyles and early tool use, some anthropology about kinship and human group formation, early religious rituals, and tribal customs; then we’d want something very carefully evidenced about neolithic, bronze, and Iron age ethnicities, migration patterns, and - in modern parlance - hostile takeover bids and merger and acquisition stories relating to Gaels, Picts, Celts, Saxons, Britons, Angles, Romans, Vikings, and Normans. Then, just as you were running out of steam because it all seems too far removed from the present-day news cycle about the election of Scotland’s First Minister, you’d learn of places that came to be known as Britannia and Caledonia about two thousand years ago when the first contours of our modern-day England and Scotland distinction appear. There are many embattled lands at this point, mostly around Northumberland, Carlisle, and Berwick, and plenty of division, but there’s some unity and periodic stability too, including the establishment of The Kingdom of Scotland in AD 843 which predates the Kingdom of England in 927AD. Then there was something like a four-hundred-year stooshie (argument) followed by a decisive Battle of Bannockburn in 1314 (you may remember the line from the film Braveheart: “They fought like Scotsmen, and won their freedom”). The Declaration of Arbroath in 1320 followed, and that was an important moment in the Scottish national psyche because it effectively says to the international community (not least the Pope) - we are a distinct and independent nation, and by 1328 Scotland had its own parliament. Then there were the Stuart monarchs, and The Protestant Reformation which is perhaps relevant for the latter (contested) claim that Scots have been encultured into being more egalitarian than the English; but the active encouragement to read the Bible did lead to the educational impetus for everyone to learn more generally. Then another big moment, the Union of the Crowns in 1603 when a Scottish King, James VI, inherits the English throne and the prefigurative contours of the UK appeared. There follows some more religious tension, the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (including Ireland) and Cromwell vanquishing Scotland. King Charles II, who was the precursor of present-day King Charles III(!) restored Scotland as fully independent in 1660. Then, after a few decades of James VII, Catholicism tried but mostly failed to reestablish itself, and there were Jacobite rebellions. Amidst all this religion, monarchy, and war it feels like narrative relief to encounter… economics. The Bank of Scotland was created in 1695 yet the notorious Darien Scheme in which Scottish nobility sought to create Scotland’s own colony in Panama needed and did not receive the requested investment from England, so capital was raised from within the Scottish population; but this proved to be a ruinous venture, leaving Scotland bankrupt and dependent on trade with England. Then, the biggest moment of all, The Union of Parliaments in 1707 was agreed upon by the Scottish parliament but with possible bribery and without popular consent. The Act of Union is therefore often viewed as a betrayal - a famous Burns-inspired song of lamentation includes the line “We're bought and sold for English gold-Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!”. However, some saw it as the necessary political solution to a deep economic problem (sounds familiar!) and in that sense, you could say it worked. Scotland kept its own legal system and church and the union arguably created the socio-economic and institutional conditions that paved the way for the Scottish Enlightenment of the 1750s. And the union was really strong for a long time, held together through a common purpose and identity beginning with the British empire (Scots were British colonisers) and the industrial revolution (Scots were British capitalists) and then latterly the two world wars (Scots were British soldiers). In the post-war aftermath the UK was still a global power and the national story was told through institutions of the NHS and the BBC, while the nationalisation of industries and services created a sense of pan-UK enterprise.

I share this potted history to highlight that the competing claims of Scotland being a distinct nation and Scotland being an integral part of the UK are both legitimate, but there are two inferences from all that has happened that influence my own desire for Scotland to be independent.

First, the Act of Union may have been economically coerced in some way, but it was a politically voluntary union of parliaments rather than a fusion of nations. That suggests that at least in the spirit of the law, the distinctiveness of the nations and their voluntary union remains today. Insofar as a British nation was created through the sharing of institutions and pooling of resources, its roots relate to a judgment about economic expedience by a political elite and its fruits are about the perception of shared success in the years that followed in ‘the land of hope and glory’. There is definitely a British nation distinct from the English one, and I noticed the full force of the British nation as practice in September of 2014 after a Sunday Times poll indicated Yes was in the lead with a few days to go. The onslaught of threats, warnings, and diatribes from the political, monarchial, financial, media, and military classes were worthy of the name ‘project fear’ but they also included ‘the vow’ to give Scotland greater autonomy in a kind of good cop/bad cop manoeuvre. Nonetheless, I think it is cogent to argue that the British nation is becoming inexorably weaker because it is almost entirely backward-looking and depends on the contingent successes of the last 300 years or so, with nostalgia fuelled with abundant insignia and pageantry. British nationalism has no forward-looking vision that genuinely feels like it could inspire a partnership between its main constituent nations of Scotland and England. The Scottish people could choose to continue to breathe life into the idea of the British nation, but given the rise of Scottish nationalism and the demographic data of young people feeling much more Scottish than British, this looks highly unlikely.

Second, the recognition of common interest and purpose for the constituent nations of the UK, particularly Scotland, and England, has been unclear now for several decades, but arguably broke decisively over Brexit. Historian Sir Tom Devine makes this point eloquently in several places. What you have from a historical vantage point is two distinct nations that never really fused into one, but acted as one to influence world history, grow economically, and provide social welfare. That British story began to run out of steam when Margaret Thatcher was in power, but it has almost completely exhausted itself now, which is why Scottish independence still feels like a matter of time.

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For decades many Scots were politically unionist and culturally nationalist, exemplified by historical figures like Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson, and also the Scottish Blairites who dominated the UK political scene around the turn of the century. The reverse is now closer to my experience. I feel politically Scottish because I see myself in the possibilities of national self-creation through the radical reinvention of what a nation state can be and do in response to the challenges of our times, in a way that doesn’t apply to the UK. And I think while Britishness ‘worked’ politically for centuries, it is now better appreciated as a cultural category.

I lived for eighteen months in Whitton, Middlesex, just outside London when I was about eleven, so I had an early formative experience of life elsewhere in the UK that felt only slightly different from back home. Moreover, London and its surrounding area lend itself better to ‘British’ than ‘English’ because it is so cosmopolitan and awash with international influences. The norms of etiquette relating to politeness and queuing are a cliche, but when I was part of international groupings at chess tournaments or during my master’s degree in the USA, I did notice that I shared them with other Brits in a way that set us apart, and therefore together. Then there’s the class-informed humour which is quintessentially British but also applies in Scotland, and sporting contests between ‘the home nations’ are peculiar to these islands. Then there are formative institutions like the NHS and BBC as mentioned, and my grandfathers fighting for the British army in the second world war. For all those reasons and more, I feel culturally British.

I don’t feel English except in the sense that I am European, because I see England along with Scotland, and Ukraine, and France and Sweden and so on, primarily as part of that family. I think England is a wonderful country, full of cherised people and places. I particularly love the Keble chapel in Oxford, St Giles House in Dorset, St Michael’s Mount and St Ives in Cornwall, Canterbury and its Cathedral, and the city of York. I’ve shared my life with English colleagues and friends and England is in a meaningful sense a people. However, I believe England’s fulfillment as a European nation is currently thwarted by the UK’s hubristic and nostalgic political imaginary. The lack of political expression for healthy English cultural nationalism was another primary driver of Brexit, as argued brilliantly by Anthony Barnett, and it’s another reason why Scottish independence can legitimately be viewed as a prospectus for English renewal too.

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Here’s why I think the UK is beyond repair: The UK is already culturally and to some extent politically a multinational state, but legally and constitutionally it is a unitary state with sovereignty ultimately lying in the UK parliament, a principle tested but upheld in various ways by the Supreme Court. In that hybrid context, the UK has worked partly due to Scotland’s political class playing an active part in British institutions and partly due to English respect for the unique nature of the UK, manifest as majoritarian restraint.

The SNP’s political dominance in Scotland has undermined the first part of that modus operandi because almost all the Scottish MPs at Westminster were elected on a mandate to try to remove Scotland from the UK, and English restraint has been much less evident in recent years. ‘Dragging Scotland out of the EU against its will’ is political rhetoric, but that moment did feel like a betrayal of my sense of what the UK is supposed to be. Historically speaking, Scotland predates England, and Scotland was European before it was British. While Scotland remains European after Brexit, the idea that English voters especially could sever the institutional expression of that identity is shocking. That feeling was compounded by ignoring Scottish proposals for a different relationship to the single market to reflect their different national preference and the particularly harmful version of Brexit that was forced upon Scotland. Then the UK government refusing to give a section 30 order allowing for a new legal referendum despite a majority voting for it in the Scottish parliament heightened this sense that the UK as a family of nations, an equal partnership, has ended.

I don’t doubt that the break-up of a 300-year-old union could be traumatic and harmful in the short term. However, I believe creating a healthier connection between culture and politics is essential for the kinds of spiritual renewal this historical moment requires, and the UK cannot offer that. We need a healthier political culture to feel the vitality, reality and relevance of the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.

In the next post I’ll be reflecting on the limitations of the idea of being progressive, and what being post-progressive might look and feel like in Scotland and beyond.

Jonathan Rowson is author of The Moves that Matter: A Chess Grandmaster on the Game of Life and can be found on Twitter @Jonathan_Rowson