Scottish national socialism and its red prince - Part III
Britain and the nature of history
Jack Conrad continues his reply to Allan Armstrong of the Scottish Socialist Party
Amongst all Scottish nationalists, Allan Armstrong included, Scotland as a nation is assumed as a given. The mental cage is never analysed or questioned. Thanks to state generosity they had an official Scottish history drummed into their skulls at school by teacher as a matter of routine. Countless popular volumes and learned tomes that fill the shelves of bookshops and libraries take for granted exactly the same framework. There are few exceptions to the national paradigm. Scotland's unbroken journey is thus told from the arrival of the aboriginal 'Cruithni', through the medieval wars of independence against 'England' all the way to unity of the crowns and the 'challenges' of devolution in the Blairite present day. Common sense therefore dictates that Scotland is and has been throughout historic time and will be from here to eternity.
Such a national approach to history, it should be stressed, is not confined to Scotland alone. Since the 1789 French Revolution the nation has become the main ideology of the ruling class (or would-be governing elite) and bourgeois society in general. Nationalism is now the paramount means of mass mobilisation. Both crusade and jihad have been nationalised. Millions of ordinary people have willingly sacrificed their lives for the motherland, fatherland, homeland (ie, what is imagined as the common national interest). In his influential book Benedict Anderson evocatively testifies to this extraordinary power of the modern national ideal: "Dying for one's country, which usually one does not choose, assumes a political grandeur which dying for the Labour Party, the American Medical Association, or perhaps even Amnesty International cannot rival, for these are all bodies one can join and leave at easy will" (B Anderson Imagined communities London 1991, p132).
Almost every country nowadays has its academies, paid persuaders and learned literature devoted to creating and propagating a national history. Lagging behind in terms of the actual material reality of the nation state, in many respects 19th century German idealist philosophy led the way in the mind. Hegel was typical. "Every nation," he wrote in an early work, "has its own imagery, its gods, angels, devils or saints who live in the nation's traditions, whose stories and deeds the nurse tells her charges and so wins them over by impressing their imagination" (quoted in S Avineri Hegel's theory of the modern state Cambridge 1974, p21). Nations are, according to this account, the divinely created agents of history and each nation has its own unique memory, customs, character and destiny.
Late Victorian Britain introduced a modified version of the idealist model. Royal history has fused with the history of Britain as an imperial state and is projected backwards onto the distant past. The constitutional monarchy system dictated a trinity: England, Scotland and Wales (for the sake of simplicity we leave aside the thorny issue of Ireland). Religion and religious history, ethnic, clan and family lineage has to all intents and purposes been subsumed or totally marginalised. The destruction of traditional bonds, the subordination of the state to capital, the needs of imperialism and the widening franchise in good part explain this phenomenon. Certainly the nation as the universal frame of all history has been particularly pronounced since the advent of mass literacy, mass conscript armies and mass parliamentary democracy. Those above have sought to educate their 'masters' and inculcate a sense of patriotism and the community of all classes. Junior and secondary schools duly teach history along strict national lines. England, Scotland and Wales. These 'nations' are the subject matter of history and history is viewed as teleological. Every past event is interpreted as an inevitable, almost predetermined, step towards the glorious second Elizabethan age.
There are, of course, left nationalist elements militantly opposed to the establishment. In the 17th and 18th centuries English radicals took over the folk myth of a golden age of Anglo-Saxon liberty before William the Bastard's 1066 invasion and the Norman yoke. The governing aristocratic class was portrayed as essentially foreign and non-English. There was more than a grain of truth here. The Hanoverian royal family was unmistakably German. The British aristocracy thought in English, but separated themselves off from the lower orders by peppering their speech with French and parading their high European manners and culture. Only under the impact of the American Revolution of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789 did the aristocracy fully nationalise itself (royalty did not finally make the break from cosmopolitanism till World War I when the Saxe-Coburg-Gothas metamorphosed into the House of Windsor). The American and Napoleonic wars turned the tables on the radicals who initially supported their American and French fellow-thinkers. They were branded non-national. Counterrevolutionary wars abroad helped to forge a counterrevolutionary regime at home.
Comrade Armstrong has a similar outlook, except with less justification. He not only assumes the Scottish 'nation' as a given, but the kingdom of Scotland is portrayed as if it was oppressed by a foreign ruling class. The nation is Scottish; the state and the capitalists are British. Very convenient. Britain established a world empire, traded in slaves and raped India. But not Scotland. Whether it be under the leadership of Charles Stewart or John Maclean, gallant Scotland fought back against the horrible British state.
The problem with comrade Armstrong's theory is twofold. Firstly, there is no Scottish nation, but a British nation. Secondly, there is not only a British ruling class, but a historically united and cohesive working class in Britain. So in the name of freeing the Scottish nation comrade Armstrong would split the working class and condemn the workers in Scotland to a nationalist prison.
Let us take a closer look at nations. Comrade Armstrong is prepared to admit that Jack Conrad is right when he says that our current "arrangement of 'England', 'Scotland', 'Wales' and 'Ireland' are accidental results of feudal marriage-bed deals, the fortunes of war and the continuation of the monarchical system" (February 18 1999). However, to limit the impact of his concession to historical materialism - ie, the necessity of seeing every phenomenon as having a cause and being transient, comrade Armstrong adds as a 'caveat' this obvious statement: "But then the present-day arrangements of most other nations or states in most of Europe have similar pasts, even if some have later become republics."
Despite that our comrade insists on classifying Scotland as a nation in modern times; though nowhere does he supply anything approaching a definition of exactly what a nation is in terms of science. Throughout his 10,000-word anti-CPGB polemic all his 'proofs' of Scotland as a nation are negatives. Stalin was a "social democrat". From the Marx-Engels theory of non-historic peoples "it follows" that the "best solution is genocide". There is no "single integrated global capitalist production system". Etc, etc. In truth comrade Armstrong is simply a more devious nationalist than the usual SNP or SSP sort.
Evidently to be a Scottish nationalist requires an insistence on Scotland as an oppressed nation and a flat denial of the existence of a British nation. Again on the basis of negative 'reasoning' comrade Armstrong is adamant that there is no such thing. The idea of 'Britishness' is "a barrier to the creation of an Australian republic"; the notion of Britain is "counterrevolutionary"; Jack Conrad's theory of a British nation is "racist" (November 5 1998). Such are his 'proofs'.
Comrade Armstrong's unwillingness to supply a definition is hardly surprising. Take Scotland before the union of the crowns. The Stewart kings (of Norman French origin) ruled a definite territory called Scotland. However, there was no common economy. In the highlands things were extremely backward and parochial. Raiding and cattle rustling were common and the mark of a military society. Agriculture produced a meagre surplus and was still bound up with a fragmentary and conflictive clan system. In the south and east, especially in Edinburgh, the economy was increasingly dynamic and commercial and locked in with the huge market represented by England. Between 1603 and 1707 the Scottish currency was pegged Emu-like to the English pound - the 12:1 ratio was maintained throughout.
What of language and culture? Besides the residual Scandinavian survivals in Orkney and the Shetland Islands the kingdom was split between Gaelic speakers in the highlands and the majority whose mother tongue was a dialect of English (Scots or Lallans). The Gaelic-speaking highlands was oral and culturally far closer to Ulster than the English-speaking lowlands. It was non-historic and effectively still medieval. In the lowlands the reformation was powered by the translation of the bible into English and produced a puritan ascendancy. Knox was initially backed by England and nearly succeeded in making Scotland a theocracy. So the lowlands was commercial, literate, Sabbath-observing and English-speaking. The highlands were another country. Therefore there was not a single but at least a double Scottish nationality. The divide manifested itself politically. Scotland was plagued with civil wars in the 17th century. Not surprisingly the last attempt by the Stewarts to regain their dynastic hold over the United Kingdom in 1745 had as much the character of a Scottish civil war between the highlands and lowlands.
What of Britain? The island of Great Britain is obviously a common territory for the people who live on it. There is also, as I have explained elsewhere, a common - though not necessarily uniform - historical experience. Before the Romans the tribal communities spoke a variety of Celtic languages and dialects. They were called Britons by their conquerors. The Roman empire might not have incorporated the highlands of Scotland - as comrade Armstrong triumphantly announces in an attempt to deny the need for a Britannic approach. Nevertheless Roman influence was felt even beyond the legionary forts of Inchtuthil and Ardoch. The Caledonian tribes were border peoples and traded, fought and negotiated with the Romans.
Equally the armed Saxon migrations of the 5th century flung not only a shrinking Romano-British society, but the whole of Britain into a dark age (though woefully primitive Ireland was a relative beacon of civilisation). The same can be said of the Scandinavian invasions and settlements. They were neither an English, Scottish, Welsh nor Irish experience. The 'Vikings' founded kingdoms and settlements throughout the British Isles. Dublin, Jarrow, York, Waterford, etc. "None of the Scandinavian kingdoms cover the whole of the British Isles," whines a desperate comrade Armstrong - irrelevantly (February 18 1999).
The same applies to the Normans. True, in the fringes marcher lords were absorbed into the Gaelic-speaking clan society. Nevertheless, in subjugating England and then slowly expanding their feudal domains, the Normans coloured the culture of every part of the British Isles.
Comrade Armstrong still objects to my description of the peoples of the British Isles as having "a common experience". He cites Edward I's conquest of Wales, "the Scottish wars of independence", the "ruthless Tudor wars to conquer Ireland". Our comrade innocently tells us that wars may well be a "common experience" to "both sides", but they do not "promote brotherhood and unity" (February 18 1999). He is trapped in the national paradigm. The image he has fixed deep in his consciousness is England as aggressor nation and Scotland, Wales and Ireland as victim nations. This model is entirely modern and entirely false. As a nationality the English were created negatively as a result of Norman conquest of the Saxon and Scandinavian peoples and the decapitation of the old ruling classes. It was not 'the English' who conquered Wales; nor did 'the English' invade Scotland and Ireland. The wars comrade Armstrong refers to were feudal and dynastic, not national.
We can also cite the experience of reformation and counterreformation and the triumph of protestantism throughout Britain. Here we begin to see the emergence of a new common culture. People no longer relied on the priest, but studied the bible themselves in English - their common written as well as spoken language. Comrade Armstrong is no doubt morally right when he damns the outrageous practices of some Victorian teachers punishing pupils for speaking Welsh or Gaelic. But he misses the plot. The growth of English was not due to compulsion. Parents desperately wanted their children to use what was viewed by enlightenment thought as the civilised language. English was certainly a huge advantage. Print made available not only the word of god, but an expanding world culture. Edinburgh was one of its glittering centres. To be educated was to speak and read English. There was also the motive of base commerce. English was profitable.
The industrial revolution saw the objective creation of a British working class. Manchester, Glasgow, Birmingham, Sheffield and Cardiff formed the core of a unified economy and sucked in labourers from throughout the British Isles. We do not romanticise the process. Exploitation was brutal. There were debilitating conflicts between native protestant workers and incoming Irish catholics. Craft unions defended not the mass of workers, but a select labour aristocracy. Nevertheless through active struggle in the workplaces, Chartism and Labourism the workers in Britain formed themselves into a class. General unions, cooperative societies, political movements and parties took Britain as their field of operations.
Identity is always complex and invariably multiple. We have no need to deny Scottishness when asserting the economic, territorial, linguistic and cultural fact of the British nation. I will leave such childishness to comrade Armstrong. Within Britain there are many identities. So there are in Scotland. Leave aside gender, age, colour and class. There still remains religion. A latent division continues to fester between protestant and catholic workers (manifested in football, but also Orange Order lodges). Then there is language. There are still Gaelic speakers in the highlands, albeit no longer monolingual. In other words Scottishness is not simple. Nor is Britishness.
Either way the role of communists is not to promote the nationalism of Britain or Scotland. We in the CPGB are not British unionists, but working class unionists. Allan Armstrong seeks the break-up of the British state and a splitting the working class into 'natural' English, Scottish and Welsh fragments. Misguidedly he does so in the name of human liberation. That is the programme of national socialism. As international socialists the CPGB has a programme for a united working class to overthrow the British state.
Part I - In defence of definition
Part II - Origin myths and the dialectic of progress
