Anthony Barnett is one of Britain’s finest contemporary essayists – a genre which no longer seems fashionable. With Twitter shortening our attention spans, essays which stray beyond the 5,000 word mark get designated “Long Read”. Apart from the "New Left Review", about the only journal which will, occasionally, publish such lengthy pieces is the London Review of Books – eg the series journalist James Meek ran on privatisation in Britain and Perry Anderson’s on the European Union. But 20 years ago Barnett helped set up the Open Democracy site which offers critical global analyses and he was kind enough to send me yesterday a typical (10,000 word) essay of his - “Deciding Britain’s Future:Tom Nairn, Gordon Brown, Marxism and Nationalism” - which throws a fascinating light on the debate about nationalism which was waging particularly in left circles in the early 1970s. The essay was published a year ago so I must have seen it (an article of Barnett's is always an event) but didn't give it the attention it warranted and now needs in the light of Nairn’s death last weekend
Young English readers may not be aware of Nairn’s standing in these arguments, now coming back to life. A recent survey records his impact within Scotland and therefore Britain: John Lloyd’s ‘Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot: The Great Mistake Of Scottish Independence’. A long-time reporter for the Financial Times, Lloyd’s purpose is to preserve Britain by inquiring into the threat posed by Scottish independence. In a chapter on the growth of a self-conscious Scottish political culture, he says of Tom Nairn,
“This one Scots writer has been more influential in the nationalist cause than any other: one who has achieved what many intellectuals desire; that is, to have a marked influence on a movement or a period… He is the one who has laid down the battle lines of attack, on the Union and on England”.
What is it that makes for Nairn’s success when, since Tom Paine and Percy Shelley hurled themselves fruitlessly against the monstrosities of British power, generation upon generation of radicals have until now failed to make any lasting impression, with the sole exception of the suffragettes and despite the success of the anticolonial movements? I set out my initial answer to this question in my introduction to the new Verso edition of ‘The Break-up of Britain’. Briefly, the answer is four-fold.
First: commitment. Nairn demands a new politics of democratic, national independence from the Union state. Lloyd is right to see his argument as a call to battle against the incubus of Whitehall, Westminster and Windsor. But not against England. On the contrary, Nairn is positively in favour of England. His arguments are a starting point for English liberation.
Second: real-time analysis. Nairn’s commitment is not underwritten by dogmatism but by an ongoing, open-minded and self-reflective engagement. The book itself gathers essays published across a seven-year period, and the new edition includes reassessments from 1981 and 2003. In 1999, ‘Break-Up’ was reworked in ‘After Britain’. In 2002, he set out his contempt for Tony Blair’s pseudo-modernisation in ‘Pariah: Misfortunes of the British Kingdom’. Nairn’s motivation is always to work out how to move forward in a profoundly changing world. This is the beating heart of his method. He expressed it strongly in 1972 in ‘The Left Against Europe?’, a dissection of the futility of left-wing opposition to EU membership. Integral to it is a moral quality perhaps best described as determined modesty – a recognition that we do not know what this reality will deliver. You can hear it for yourself in an interview he gave in 2020, to open Democracy editor Adam Ramsay.
Third: a theory of nationalism. At the centre of Nairn’s originality is his insistence on nationalism as an inescapable necessity that has a dual-nature – captured in his image of it as a two-faced Janus, the Roman god of doorways, that looks towards both past and future. It is a conception that repudiates the idea that there are intrinsically progressive or ‘good’ nationalisms. Nationalism, Nairn argues, is always both good and bad. …..Rory Scothorne put it succinctly in a recent New Statesman profile. Nairn seeks a nationalism that is a “transforming… ongoing self-determination… that opens up collective identity to the creative involvement of as many participants and experiences as possible”.
The fourth reason for Nairn’s continued relevance is his role in the emergence of modern Scotland. For nearly half a century, two towering political intellectuals have wrestled over and shaped the Left’s view of the United Kingdom, while one of them had directly shaped the Kingdom itself. The joint story of Tom Nairn and Gordon Brown has never been told as such. It starts with their 1975 collaboration in Edinburgh on ‘"The Red Paper on Scotland’, which Brown edited and in which Nairn was the lead contributor. Today, both have retired to their Scottish homeland having failed to save it from the insurgency of Anglo-British reaction. Yet the difference between them remains the defining one for those living in the archipelago of Ireland, Scotland, England and Wales. For the vortex of reaction currently sucking us all into the jaws of Brexit will eventually consume itself. After which, and however long it takes, a left-of-centre government will emerge in Westminster to shape all the four nations of the Kingdom with a framework that will be either Brownite or Nairnite. An account of the contested birth of Nairn’s arguments may help illuminate the still unresolved issues now posed anew in this ongoing contest.
What Barnett’s essay then does is offer a rare insight into the creative process which occurred almost 50 years ago as Nairn worked out his ideas about nationalism – initially with a full-length text which was subjected to critiques from the likes of Barnett, Perry Anderson, EP Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm (the latter in particular being hostile to its arguments). The result was that the text never saw the light of day – its thinking being absorbed into Nairn’s “The Break-up of Britain” (1977), the opening chapter of which was published in 1975 in NLR as “The Modern Janus”. Hobsbawm was not impressed with the book – as he demonstrated in a subsequent article in NLR.
There is lots more to say about Tom Nairn – but tomorrow sees the 90th anniversary of Hitler’s accession to power in Germany and requires a special post
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