Things Written Randomly in Doubt

by Allan Cameron

  One of Gellner’s constant themes is that nations must be large enough to be economically viable in the industrial age. Nineteenth-century thinkers, such as Mazzini, John Stuart Mill and Friedrich List, dismissed small-nation nationalism as ridiculous just as vehemently as they supported great-nation nationalism, although they were not in complete agreement about borderline cases like Ireland.25 There was some logic to this at a time when small nations would have had difficulty defending themselves militarily (ultimately that is why the Italian republics died in the sixteenth century and the Venetian Republic was annexed by Napoleon en passant in 1797), but there was and still is a considerable amount of rank prejudice. Unfortunately that prejudice is to be found amongst thinkers of the left as well as the usual band of racists, Great-nation nationalists and bigots.

  It is often assumed that small nations with distinctive languages cannot produce great literature and art. Why then did such small nations as Athens and late-medieval Florence produce so much art and literature, while other similar contemporary and even larger states did not? How did the embattled Dutch Republic produce so much great art? Why did an almost completely illiterate country like Russia produce the greatest literature of the nineteenth century? The reason why the literatures of small nations are not well-known or appreciated is probably because not many people know them, and not because they are intrinsically inferior. Where the standard great-nation language is used, small countries and regions appear to kick well above their weight. The Irish and the Scots have contributed enormously to English literature, the Sicilians have spectacularly outwritten all other regions of Italy and many great Spanish writers of the twentieth century appear to come from small nations of Latin America. In art and literature, the metropolis is the most powerful place but not always the most productive. But it is the language of the metropolis that often has to be used in order to get a hearing.

  But what was ignorance then, seems foolishness now. Two factors appear to determine economic success in early twenty-first-century Europe: centrality and size. If you put a compass point into a central point in Europe and draw a circle of about five hundred miles, you will find the areas within the circle are generally richer than those outside. The circle includes south-east England, Benelux, most of France, Catalonia, northern Italy and western Germany. Europe’s centre of gravity will shift eastwards in the enlarged Union, and this will benefit Germany greatly. If you then look at the small countries, you will find that they are performing considerably better than their larger counterparts. This is partly because Italy, Britain and Spain have large areas outside our golden circle that bring the national average down, but it does not explain why Norway, Sweden, distant Finland, Denmark, Holland, the Czech Republic, Austria and Slovenia are doing so well. Ireland, a republic of three million inhabitants and not even the whole Ireland that John Stuart Mill thought could just about make it, has gone from being one of the poorest regions of Europe to one of its wealthiest, in spite of dropping a few points after the financial crisis. It may not be up with Holland or Denmark yet, but its achievements are remarkable no less.26 Small countries have many advantages as well as disadvantages. In the context of economic unions and possible super-states such as the European Union, small states may be able to have the best of both worlds. Even if neither independence nor autonomy are granted to minority cultures, they should still receive proper protection and rights within the existing national structures, rather than being treated as if they didn’t exist.

  The second distinction is between ethnic and cultural nationalisms. It is agreed that nationalism is built on myth. Myths are often quite innocuous, as with Winstanley’s myth of good liberty-seeking Anglo-Saxons and greedy and oppressive Normans, because the Normans were no longer about and the word came to mean the landowning class. Some myths are dangerous however. Ethnicity is always about dangerous myths, if by ethnicity we mean some kind of genetic affiliation. All nations have undergone various degrees of migration. At the height of the Roman Empire one third of the population was made up of slaves mostly imported from abroad. As those slaves were manumitted, more were brought in. Italy must be the oldest melting pot in the world. I consider that to be a plus. Germans very probably are a purer race than the Italians, but not as pure as they would like to think. Nietzsche said in his provocative manner that “Germans had entered the line of gifted nations only through a strong mixture with Slavic blood”.27 A language is a reality, a religion is a reality, and set a of legal traditions is a reality. Ethnicity is not.

  There has recently been some debate about the Celts and whether they ever existed. Both sides appear to take up extreme positions because they confuse culture with ethnicity. The Celts were reported by Greeks and Romans to be tall and blond, and they belonged to an Indo-European warrior race similar to the Germans. As they gradually moved across Europe, assimilating peoples as they went, they became the darker people we generally associate them with today. We know almost nothing about this history, but DNA evidence now shows that both the English and the Scots predominately belong to some pre-Celtic people (apparently the English are 80% and the Scots 90%, although these statistics are always being refined. There is no great ethnic difference between us, but there is a cultural difference and a linguistic difference, although the latter is diminishing. It was not a Celtic race that came to Britain and Ireland, but a Celtic culture or, if you like, a Celticised people. In other words, the Celts were already a mixed people when they got to Western Europe and started to mix with whoever was there. It has some sense then to say that Ireland, Scotland and Wales are Celtic countries, because at least part of their peoples still speak a language from the Celtic group (although only in Wales does a substantial part of the population speak such a language). The Celtic languages are a reality and the affinities are there for all to see. On the other hand, Bossi, a dangerous proponent of xenophobic nationalism of the worst kind, claims that northern Italians are Celts. It is true that northern dialects with the exception of Venetian have a typically Celtic phonetic substratum, but clearly that does not make them Celts. They are neo-Latins, whose history has been influenced by the Celts, the Lombards (a Germanic race), the French, the Spanish and the Austrians (in chronological order). If Bossi could convince enough people that they are a Celtic race, then in a sense they become one, or rather the behaviour that flows from this belief becomes a reality and a dangerous one at that. Why is it dangerous? Primarily because when your Celtic-ness is only your race or your supposed race, because the Celtic culture has long disappeared, then the only thing to do is to maintain your imagined purity by keeping the foreigner out.

  Abram Leon, the left-wing Zionist and later Trotskyist, wrote that “the Palestinian Jews were not dispersed to the four corners of the earth by the Romans”.28 Their descendants were mainly converted to Islam during the Muslim invasions, and therefore became the Palestinian Arabs. The Diaspora already existed in the large Jewish communities that had built up around the Mediterranean over many centuries before the destruction of the temple. History was written by the literate, the intellectual class of scribes, Pharisees, lawyers and merchants, and therefore with a view to their vicissitudes. The great ignored mass of Jewish peasants and shepherds stayed where they were, but now lacked a political leadership. However, Leon claims that Jewish battalions of Tiberiad, Nazareth and Galilee assisted the Persian king in taking Jerusalem as late as 614 ad, demonstrating some kind of cohesive presence. Whatever the case, the myth of a Jewish race can be easily disproved by looking at a Kurdish Jew, an Ethiopian Jew and a European Jew. They all look like the peoples they live amongst or used to live amongst until recently. Both anti-Semites and extreme Zionists conspired to keep alive this absurd myth, but the reality of the Jewish religion and culture cannot be denied. The Jewish poet writing in Hebrew in eighth-century Muslim Spain, the Yiddish playwright in Soviet Russia and the Israeli journalist who tries to wake up his or her countrymen to the situation in the West Bank are all part of a cultural contin
uum, albeit a rather fragile one and one that crosses many other cultural and linguistic identities. Judaism is one of the great transcultural cultures, like the Rom, the Bedu, the Arab traders and the Chinese in south-east Asia. Judaism started the early Middle Ages as the most privileged of these cultures. The fact that they could practise their religion at Charlemagne’s palace in Aachen demonstrates the esteem in which they were once held in both Christian and Arab society. Unfortunately the history of Europe in the second millennium has been the history of increasing intolerance until the eighteenth century, when the continent seems to have moved in two directions at the same time: towards greater tolerance and greater intolerance. The twentieth century has seen terrible events (the most terrible events) and also many forms of liberation.29 Racial myth has destroyed cultures and endangered peoples. Ethnicity can therefore be associated with the dangerous aspects of nationalism and cultural identity with its more positive values. Both are a direct result of democratic involvement, but racial myth is a form of false consciousness.

  It must be made clear that by making this distinction and showing a marked preference for cultural identity, I am not equating potential cultural nationalism solely with linguistic difference as Gellner does. He makes such a surprising claim about Scotland that you have to question whether our leading expert on nationalism really understood what a nation is: “The linguistic distinctiveness of the Scottish Highlands within Scotland is, of course, incomparably greater than the cultural distinctiveness of Scotland within the UK; but there is no Highland nationalism.”30 Marx himself made exactly the same point about the Gaels (Highlanders) and the Welsh, and despondently remarked on the irrationality of it all: “no state boundary coincides with the natural boundary of nationality, that of language.”31 He also observed that perfidiously “the Germans in Switzerland and Alsace do not desire to be reunited with Germany, any more than the French in Belgium and Switzerland wish to become politically attached to France.”32 If Marx could partially understand this reality in the nineteenth century, in spite of his considerable perplexity, surely Gellner must be able to understand that language is only one factor and not the decisive one in the Scottish situation. Both Highlander and Lowlander, often hostile to each other in the past, have always considered themselves Scottish, and that Scottishness is expressed through a religion, an education system and a legal system, which are all part of the state without a government left behind by the Union of the Parliaments (and partly rectified by the reintroduction of the parliament in 1999). The diversity within Scotland’s borders in no way detracts from its status as a nation, any more than the diversity within England’s borders detracts from its, or indeed the extreme linguistic diversity in Switzerland which has already been mentioned.The totally homogeneous nation exists almost nowhere, which is disappointing for Gellner, but for me very heartening. The problem is not that nations have complex layered identities; the problem is that some modern nations do not want to accept that this complexity exists.

  The third distinction is between inclusive and exclusive nationalisms. Ethnically based nationalism has to be exclusive, but a cultural one may or may not be so. For instance an exclusive nationalism may claim that only speakers of a certain language or followers of a certain religion can aspire to belong to its ranks. Inclusive nationalism ultimately makes no requirements of its citizens at all (it goes without saying that there are many grey areas between these two types; indeed nearly all actual nationalisms take up a position somewhere along a spectrum between them).

  It may be felt that I am hardly entitled to attack Gellner so fiercely, as he was a university professor and an expert in his field. So let me quote another university professor, one who is of moderate or centrist views but who lives in a country where a sense of great-nation superiority does not come so easily. Indeed, as an Italian his main concern seems to be with the completion of the national and democratic revolution to create a modern state: “… the civic virtues of loyalty and solidarity, which have the role of legitimising democratic state power, are not in some way inborn, they have to be generated. This educative process is based on the recognition of both one’s common historical roots of a shared ethno-cultural nature, and the current good reasons for keeping our democracy alive. The fusion between the acknowledgement of historical roots and the reasons for democratic coexistence give substance to the ‘nation of citizens’ in the fullest sense of the term.”33 Here we have someone who understands much more fully the complex equation that makes nationalism a modern phenomenon.

  Let me first clarify a few points that are fundamental to understanding this difference between Gellner and Gian Enrico Rusconi. Gellner quite correctly identifies state education as one of the prime causes of national homogenisation, although he incorrectly believes this to be connected primarily to industrialisation. In fact, universal education was not introduced in England and Wales until 1871, long after the commencement of industrialisation and later than other European nations where Calvinist and Lutheran emphasis on personal knowledge of the scriptures had led to higher literacy rates. The reason why the British establishment hurried through the Education Act was that they had just witnessed the crushing defeat of the old European power, France, which had a remarkably low literacy rate,34 by Prussia which had a remarkably high literacy rate and was in the process of unifying Germany. It was the flexibility required of the soldier and not the worker (whose duties were becoming increasingly repetitive) that awoke the European states to the need for education. In other words, the destructive force of war brought the change and not the wonderful bounties of economic progress whose praises Gellner sings. Lord Shaftesbury, the paternalistic conservative politician, opposed the bill because he understood, quite rightly, that universal education even of a fairly restricted kind would accelerate the process of political involvement by the “masses”, which had been building up pressure for nearly a century (Chartism, after all, had been and gone).

  Nationalism is therefore part of the demand for active citizenship, as can be most clearly demonstrated in the anti-colonial wars and movements. Nationalism is not just about territorial division; it is also about a shift in power within society.

  Just as cultural nationalism is preferable to ethnic nationalism, inclusive nationalism is preferable to cultural nationalism of an exclusive nature. Inclusive nationalism, by definition, is a rejection of ethnic nationalism, but it goes much further. At the risk of slightly misleading metaphors, I would say there is something maternal about inclusive nationalism, in that the state values all her citizens equally and is concerned for their health and education. She is the maligned “nanny state”, rather than that wonderful creation, the paternal state that is concerned with control, surveillance, discipline and displaying virility through endless warfare. She is less concerned with how they grow up than that they should grow up. She accepts their failures as her own and commiserates with them. The paternal state is moralistic. He demands that his children act exactly as he does and share his values, which are eternal. He punishes failure severely and will not look his failed children in the face.35 Suggesting a parental relationship between the state and citizen is perhaps unwise, but what we mean is all of us taking responsibility for all of us.

  Inclusive nationalism is not, however, an entirely new invention. Like so many other aspects of our modern world, it goes back to the prophetic qualities of the English Revolution. In his argument with Cromwell at the Putney Debates, Rainsborough announced that he wanted to live in a nation that affords full rights and dignities to all those who live within its boundaries, irrespective of their origins. In over three centuries, we have not been able to turn that generous imagination into reality.

  On Friendship

  Friendship, which many have written about, covers a wide variety of relationships, most of which provide us with a helping hand through life, as long as we understand in each case which kind of friendship we’re dealing with.

  Loyalty to our friends, including those
who are disloyal, is important, but there must clearly be a limit to that loyalty. Surely we should remember who they are and try to reconcile differences where possible, and though even here there must be a limit, it should stretch tolerance as far as is possible for our own natures.

  Friendships can be associative, and therefore based on joint interests or similar backgrounds. You enjoy each other’s company because you can take so much for granted, having shared experiences and come to similar opinions on the fundamentals of life. You argue pleasantly over minutiae that have little importance beyond analytical precision. Such relationships are relaxed and fall into two categories. The first is of those who look outwards to a world that is to some degree hostile – varying from very mildly to oppressively. This is the collaborative world of those who join in a cause, which may vary from some minor community project to high politics. These are friendships that do not require a great deal of dialogue; these are collaborative friendships that deal with problems and ideally solve them with the minimum fuss. The second is of those who look inwards to those minutiae and discuss them endlessly. These are relationships that can produce an enormous intellectual stimulus, and may become essential to our creative activities (as, in a different, more practical way, can the relationships in the first category). These relationships are extremely garrulous, and some might consider them unproductive, particularly in these utilitarian times, but they are some of the most important relationships in our lives.

  Friendships can be complementary, and therefore bring together people of different backgrounds, skills and knowledge. Some of these relationships are very important, because they’re instructive, and they bring us out of our comfortable shell. They introduce us to other people’s obsessions, and require an ability to listen and to try to understand. That “try to” is important, because we can never quite understand as they do, because we haven’t put in the hours that they have. They talk of things that are familiar to them. They may be good at coming down to our level, or they may not, in which case we have to listen harder and ask questions. They enjoy proselytising their own heartfelt beliefs and profound experiences, and we enjoy peering into this other world and sensing its wonder, even though we have no intention of immersing ourselves in it completely. Some of these relationships are simply very enjoyable, because our friend is wittier than we are or more skilled in his or her ability to tell a fine story or even conjure up an anecdote of doubtful veracity.