The Break-Up of Tom Nairn?

REVIEW ARTICLE The Break-Up of Tom Nairn? Tom Nairn, Pariah: Misfortunes of the British Kingdom, Verso, 2002. Hardback, 186pp, £13.00. Reviewed by Andrew Coates OR SEVERAL decades Tom Nairn has been socialist internationalists. In pursuit of the neo- F the Ben Nevis of The Nation. Peering down- nationalist cause he has entered the creaking wards on the Isles, glimpsing Europe on the House of Commons to speak to the Scottish Affairs horizon, he has cast a long shadow over the UK’s Select Committee.1 On the Observer-reading centre- imperial yet insular “ancien régime”, the Glamour left, Nairn has had an enduring impact on of the British Crown, and the “feudal socialism” campaigns for constitutional reform (notably of the Labour Movement. His main refrain, Nick through Anthony Barnett, the founding director Cohen echoes, is that “Britain was a pre-modern of Charter 88). His influence can be seen in Will state, closer to the multi-national Austro- Hutton’s once fashionable attempt to infuse Hungarian Empire than a ‘proper’ nation. Its republican virtue into Blair’s premiership, and, component parts were held together not by a through stakeholding (resonating through John written constitution but by a fading loyalty to the Monks’ TUC, and its puffing of “social partner- archaic and undemocratic institution of the Crown ship”), to reverse the economy’s descending spiral. in Parliament. With the arrival of the European At the same time, as an original editor, under the Union there was no reason why Scotland in Second New Left of Perry Anderson, Nairn has a particular shouldn’t split off and join the ranks of regular outlet in New Left Review, and has shaped small European nation states” (Observer, 7 Sep- the common sense ideology of many once marxisant tember 2003). Emerging from Nairn’s summit, a radicals. steady flow of books and articles, studded with The principal quarry of Pariah, as increasingly literary embellishments, and transparent scorn, of the liberal constituency as a whole, is “Blair- have lashed the Royal State’s ageing, undemocratic land”. New Labour’s last-ditch redemptive efforts fabric, and explored the renovation of Scottish self- to resist the ordinariness of middle-ranking rule. Lampoons on Marxism’s failure to appreciate Europeanisation, and preserve a world-wide the beneficial role of civic nationalism reinforce the commercial-financial base, are increasingly futile appearance of rocky Caledonian independence. attempts to stave off an eclipse of British antiquated Pariah is the product of an “outsider” public greatness. The result is a “degenerate parody” of intellectual, still largely identified as a man of the Britain, and its “shrinkage and partial collapse” left, of unique weight. As befits a mountain of into a simulacrum. Having tapped this profitable Theory, Nairn’s silhouette looms large in many polemical vein, the assault on political “archaism” fields. His hinterland is broad, with degrees in Art, is stretched to the global arena. Nairn now asserts Mental Philosophy and Philosophical Aesthetics. that, despite modernist exteriors, the earth is Described as Scotland’s foremost political phil- strewn with ancient and obsolescent polities that osopher, he has addressed the 30th Anniversary buttress neo-liberalism. Not restricting himself to celebrations of the Scottish National Party, with a aggressively free-market Anglo-Saxon govern- tenderness that contrasts with his acerbity towards ments, he extends his range by a quick trot 38 through the latest products of France’s still vibrant (with full separation of powers), the unlimited market in political invective. From having been sovereignty of Parliamentary autocracy. Deeply used as a foil to British backwardness, the heritage sceptical about the prospects for success through of 1789 is now regarded as equally decaying. Nairn the vehicle of New Labour, Nairn was nonetheless incorporates many of the – anti-Marxist – Deuxième broadly sympathetic to these goals. For a while Gauche’s criticisms of the Jacobin Republican much of the British intelligentsia was over- tradition, and the French élite’s intoxication with whelmed not – as elsewhere – by the fall-out from “world-power delusions and vanity”(p.127). the collapse of Official Communism, or the in- What is gained in breadth is lost in coherence. By roads of post-modernism, but by the apparent extending condemnation of the pre-modern strength of support for this politically liberal United Kingdom to such “proper nations”, Pariah venture. Only a minority questioned the role of has begun the break-up of Nairn’s apparently judge-law in codified Constitutions, and its con- resilient theoretical edifice. servative potential. Pariah was begun during the General Election Tony Blair’s government, it is asserted by his of June 2001, and is threaded around Nairn’s well- party supporters, has enacted “the biggest and worn sarcasms against the Westminster political most rapid programme of constitutional reform class, and the British protracted struggle against in the UK’s history”.3 Some of the most significant “normal statehood”. But too heavy a parochial acts have led to a Parliament in Scotland, an focus has become untenable in the small audience Assembly in Wales, and in Northern Ireland, the for political pamphleteering. The furore around replacement of hereditary peers in the House of the anti-globalisation demonstrations against the Lords by appointees, and the legal incorporation World Trade Organisation meeting in Seattle in of European human rights legislation. To no-one’s 1999 had brought to a wide audience abundant surprise Nairn’s hostility to the British State has evidence of a global movement, and reinforced not diminished. In 2000 he denounced Constit- academic interest (already mushrooming) in the utional “virtual” reforms, built upon Thatcherite phenomenon of globalisation. The “war on terror- deregulated liberalism, “mummified economics”. ism” has bludgeoned states inside the organs of With the liquidation of British socialism, we are Global Governance to confront the overweening left with an élite whose principal aim is “a last- ambitions of American hegemony. Pariah bears ditch attempt at maintaining the United Kingdom ample witness to the power of these incoming by the formation of a pot-noodle ruling class”. In tides.2 The Foreword asks, “Has ‘globalisation’ the end the “nations of the composite state” will (inexorable if chastening March of Progress etc.) end by “throwing it off”.4 However, he now con- somehow rebounded upon its own forgers in the cedes that, if the UK’s “break-up [is] no longer a West?” (p.ix). We may reframe this: has bouncing- theory but a fact” (p.111), its progress is untidy back globalisation implications for Nairn’s claims and for the moment “cheap cunning” has won about the “exceptionality” of the British State the day for “boundless central complacency” Constitution? Have, in a globalised framework, (p.87). Nairn admits, belatedly, that the British Nairn’s reflections on the primordial reality of the “house is taking some time to collapse” (p.87) – as Nation (particularity is a “universal condition”), a certain “Marxism” would no doubt say of world and progress through a Constitutionalised capitalism. dissolution of the United Kingdom, outperformed Many would agree that the effort being made the Marxist perspective on capital and class form- to strengthen and overhaul legal and state ation? What are the political implications of institutions rests on the concentration of real globalisation for Nairn’s preferred democratic power at the apex of government. Much of the nationalism? The (partial) answers that emerge in Constitutional iconography is intact, a fragile the pages of Pariah are profoundly ambiguous. construction, resting on a popular indifference and the midden of royalist sentimentality. Beneath Whatever Happened to Constitutional the specious sheen of Cool Constitutionalism, the Reform? Leader retains Thatcher’s “pro-business” creed Before, and at the dawn of, the 1997 Labour (“the lasting achievements of the 1980s” – election victory, the centre-left forces were united Mandelson and Liddle), dosed with an ancient in the conviction that the time has come to enact Christian socialist “Anglican compromise” of a democratic “second revolution”. This would hierarchical British communitarianism (p.29). The bury the “battering ram” strategy of the old left left, however, has not simply criticised “Labourite that sought to capture central authority intact. moderation” for “its wish to appease capitalism”, The objective was to modernise the land, devolve or “believed socialism to be mostly quite unrelated power (regionally and to the different “nations” to constitutional matters” (p.56). Many have of the Isles), and tame, by a written constitution indeed come to realise that the rules that run the 39 state are of great significance. The problem is that and gigantic Weltstädte are mushrooming in every these are changing in domains Nairn barely continent.5 The implication is that globalised fluxes touches on: the division between a democratic sap the supports of the existing nation-states. But public sphere and private interest is being Nairn has a twist: this is not the creation of a entrenched in favour of the latter. Having spent borderless world, but the terrain for a new form most of his career pouring icy water over the of smaller civic nation-states. “warm glow” of the past, Nairn has difficulty Nairn believes that in these conditions the coping with the thoroughly up-to-date “secular absence of an economic rival to capitalism frees faith” of globalisation, as its entrepreneurial heroes people to fashion creative political projects. He swarm throughout the finery of the British Polity. then adds to his repertoire the collective awareness It is evident to all that the architecture of the of the anti-globalisation movement, which is, he British State is being rebuilt. The mechanisms claims, “inherently democratic” and “inherently involved are complex, international and local, nationalist”, ultimately founded on “communities, from the capital-flow driven hegemony of the or ‘nations’” (p.161).

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