Abstract
There is always argument about the meaning of Scotland. Is it a nation? a sort of state? a region? or what? No one argues about the meaning of England, although exactly the same difficulties of definition occur there too. This is because Englishmen seem equally happy to use England in place of Britain or the United Kingdom when they are talking about a state, as they are to confine the term to England of the atlases when dealing with a nation. In most cases, they are unaware of any difference between these ‘two Englands’.94
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Notes
James G. Kellas, Modem Scotland: The Nation since 1870 (London: Pall Mall Press, 1968), p.3.
See, for example, Andrew Marr The Day Britain Died, (London: Profile Books, 2000).
Michael Hechter, Containing Nationalism, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p.5.
E.J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth and Reality (Cambridge: Canto, 1997), (p.191).
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflection on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), (p.3).
Tom Nairn, The Break-up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism (London: NLB, 1977), (p.359). 101 Joyce McMillan, ‘Scotland’s Shame’, Guardian, 10 August 1999, (p.15).
Benedict Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the World (London: Verso. 1998).(n.59).
See, for example, David McCrone, Angela Morris and Richard Kiely’s Scotland — The Brand: The Making of Scottish Heritage (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995).
Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences (Oxford: Polity Press, 1998), (p.56).
In his earlier article, ‘The Three Dreams of Scottish Nationalism’ Nairn writes that ‘The romantic consciousness… could only be an absolute dream to the Scots. Unable to function as ideology, as a moving spirit of history, it too was bound to become a possessing demon. Elsewhere, the revelation of the romantic past and the soul of the people informed some real future — in the Scottish limbo, they were the nation’s reality. Romanticism provided — as the Enlightenment could not, for all its brilliance — a surrogate identity… Perhaps this function as substitute consciousness has something to do with the peculiar intensity of Romanticism in Scotland, and with the great significance of the country as a locale of the European romantic fallacy. It had the right sort of unreality. Such unreality — in effect, the substitution of nostalgia for real experience — has remained at the centre of the characteristically Scottish structure of feeling.’ Reprinted in Karl Miller’s Memoirs of a Modern Scotland (London: Faber and Faber, 1970), pp.34–54, (p.39).
‘Nationalism as a mode of political development may indeed have advanced enough for its nature to be approximately visible. It does not follow that it’s on the way out. Doubt on this score must be reinforced by the fact that metropolitan pundits have been wishing it away (or imagining the worst was over) for most of the time since 1780. But the tree has grown in spite of them. Minerva’s owl should be left sleeping in its branches for a while longer yet — at least until the last great empire has been Balkanized, and a new constitution for Europe been worked out.’ (FoN, 48).
See Robert Crawford Devolving English Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 1992 rp 2000), p.329.
He continues: ‘I know talk of this kind is liable to evoke Freud, or even Jung and W.B. Yeats: the mythology of a national unconscious. But actually no great excursions into that cloudy realm are required: we have all endured this familiar all our lives and know him only too well. He is none other than the Scots’ most famous and unshakeable drinking companion: “lack of self-confidence”.’ (AB, 101). This provides another example of Nairn’s urge to challenge national essentialism while simultaneously upholding it in order to ‘justify’ his own argument. This stereotypical formulation is perhaps not too dissimilar to that of the ‘average Scot’ described by Bold in Chapter 1.
John Gray, ‘Little Scotlander’, New Statesman, January 24 2000, (p.54).
For a discussion of the invention of tartanry see Hugh Trevor-Roper ‘The Invention of Tradition: the Highland Tradition of Scotland’, in The Invention of Tradition ed. by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp.15–41.
Mike Featherstone ‘Global and Local Cultures’ in Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change ed. by Jon Bird, Barry Curtis, Tim Putnam, George Robertson and Lisa Tickner (London: Routledge, 1993), (p.173).
See also Featherstone’s Consumer Culture and Postmodernism (London: Sage, 1991).
Robert Young White Mythologies (London: Routledge, 1990), (p.12).
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© 2004 Eleanor Bell
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Bell, E. (2004). (Multi)National Identity: Old and New Histories. In: Questioning Scotland. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230508248_3
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