The Origins of Scottish Nationhood

Neil Davidson

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2000
• eBook ISBN: 9781783715695
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

The traditional view of the Scottish nation holds that it first arose during the Wars of Independence from England in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Although Scotland was absorbed into Britain in 1707 with the Treaty of Union, Scottish identity is supposed to have remained alive in the new state through separate institutions of religion (the Church of Scotland), education, and the legal system. Neil Davidson argues otherwise. The Scottish nation did not exist before 1707. The Scottish national consciousness we know today was not preserved by institutions carried over from the pre-Union period, but arose after and as a result of the Union, for only then were the material obstacles to nationhood – most importantly the Highland/Lowland divide – overcome. This Scottish nation was constructed simultaneously with and as part of the British nation, and the eighteenth century Scottish bourgeoisie were at the forefront of constructing both. The majority of Scots entered the Industrial Revolution with a dual national consciousness, but only one nationalism, which was British. The Scottish nationalism which arose in Scotland during the twentieth century is therefore not a revival of a pre-Union nationalism after 300 years, but an entirely new formation. Davidson provides a revisionist history of the origins of Scottish and British national consciousness that sheds light on many of the contemporary debates about nationalism.

1

What Is National Consciousness?

The purpose of this chapter is to produce a conceptual framework within which the Scottish experience can be discussed. Where I use the terms ‘nation’, ‘national consciousness’ and ‘nationalism’ in what follows, I am not, however, using concepts to which the Scottish experience is external, but concepts into which the Scottish experience has been incorporated, as subsequent chapters will demonstrate. The reader should bear three points in mind during what follows. First, although the theoretical basis of this chapter is the classical Marxist tradition, that has not prevented my drawing from the literature of ‘nation theory’ where it is compatible with historical materialism, however unwelcome that affinity may be for the writers concerned. Second, that literature is now extensive and continues to grow, but rather than provide yet more commentary on the major contributors or, worse still, commentary on their commentators, I have referred to their work only where it usefully illustrates positions that I want to accept or reject: this chapter is a framework; it is not intended to be a comprehensive survey. Third, for the purposes of clarity many of these positions are posed in starkly antithetical terms which will require subsequent qualification. The first concerns the definition of nationhood.

Defining a Nation

Definitions of nationhood tend to fall into one of two categories, which rely on either objective or subjective criteria. There is no agreed Marxist position and little help to be gained from Marx or Engels themselves since, as Michael Lowy noted, ‘a precise definition of the concept of “a nation”’ is absent from their writings on the national question.¹ Consequently, their successors have tended to take one of the existing sides in the debate.

On the objective side the most famous definition was given by Stalin in an article of 1913 called ‘Marxism and the National Question’, which unfortunately has exerted an influence over the Left far in excess of its theoretical merits, which are slight. Stalin writes: ‘A nation is a historically evolved, stable community of language, territory, economic life and psychological make-up manifested in a community of culture.’ Furthermore, we learn that ‘it is sufficient for a single one of these characteristics to be absent and the nation ceases to be a nation.’² These positions have been accepted by many who would otherwise have nothing to do with Stalinist politics. In an article discussing the Scottish national question Bob Mulholland quotes part of the above passage then writes of Stalin that ‘his succinct definition makes sense and undoubtedly applies to the national characteristics of the Scottish people.’³ In fact, ‘his succinct definition’ is merely an extensive checklist of criteria, against which can be matched the attributes of those peoples seeking the status of ‘nation’. Eric Hobsbawm has noted the ‘shifting and ambiguous’ quality of all objective criteria, which ‘makes them unusually convenient for propagandist and programmatic, as distinct from descriptive purposes’, and these characteristics are clearly present here.⁴ Perhaps the most obvious deficiency of these specific criteria, however, is that many nations which are currently recognised as such would be denied the title, and contrary to what Mulholland says, one of these would be Scotland. Many nations which have successfully attained statehood would also have to admit that they had attained their position through false pretences. Take Switzerland as an example.

Switzerland fails the Stalinist criteria on at least two counts: those of language (there are five official languages – German, French, Italian and two dialects of Romanish) and religion (there are two major religions – Roman Catholicism and Calvinist Protestantism). Yet the territory of Switzerland did not change from 1515 to 1803 and, during those three centuries the vast majority spoke dialects of German, only at the latter date incorporating Italian speakers. Only in 1815 did it acquire territories with significant French speaking populations in Valais, Geneva and Neuchatel, courtesy of the Holy Alliance. The state itself was only established in 1815 and as late as 1848 it was still enforcing religious divisions within the cantons: Protestantism being unlawful in Catholic areas and Catholicism being illegal in Protestant ones. After the revolutions of that year (which actually began in Switzerland), these restrictions were lifted and the territory of the state divided on a linguistic basis instead. In was only in 1891 that the state decided that the 600th anniversary of the founding of the original Confederation of Schwyz, Obwaldemn and Nidwalden in 1291 constituted the origin of the Swiss nation.⁵ It should be clear even from this brief account that the Swiss nation exists in the absence of the elements which are supposed to constitute nationhood, not because of them. It might be protested that Switzerland is an exceptional case, but as we shall see in Chapter 3, Scotland faced similar (and in some respects even more extreme) difficulties, yet also succeeded in becoming a nation.⁶

The specific reasons why the Swiss, the Scots or any other people originally came to feel themselves a nation have to be separately discovered in each case, but this subjective feeling of identification is the only attribute which all have in common. In the words of the Zionist Ahad Ha’am:

If I feel the spirit of Jewish nationality in my heart so that it stamps all my inward life with its seal, then the spirit of Jewish nationality exists in me; and its existence is not at an end even if all my Jewish contemporaries should cease to feel it in their hearts.

As Elie Kedurie, who quotes this passage, adds: ‘Here are no superfluous appeals to philology or biology, no laborious attempts to prove that because a group speaks the same language, or has the same religion, or lives in the same territory, it is therefore a nation.’⁷ As Hugh Seton-Watson writes: ‘a nation exists when a significant number of people in a community consider themselves to form a nation, or behave as if they form one.’⁸

Do we need to make such a stark choice between objective and subjective definitions? Might not the notion of ‘ethnicity’ provide a way of transcending their opposition? Anthony Smith has argued that an ethnic community – that is, a community whose members have not had their ‘ethnicity’ imposed on them from outside, but distinguish themselves in this way – has six main attributes: ‘a collective proper name, a myth of common ancestry, shared historical memories, one or more differentiating elements of common culture, an association with a specific “homeland”, and a sense of solidarity for significant sectors of the population’.⁹ Smith sees ethnicity as being the basis of national consciousness (or ‘national identity’, as he and most other writers call it) in most cases. ‘Ethnicity’ can be defined in three ways.

First, where members of a group have a common line of descent and consequently a shared kinship. Social groups who share a common line of descent are usually referred to in anthropology as endogamous groups, or groups whose members interbreed exclusively with each other, thus maintaining the same genetic inheritance. Such groups would have been universal at the origins of human evolution but are, however, virtually impossible to find today and have been since before the rise of capitalism. Second, where they have a common position within the international division of labour and consequently a shared occupation. Existing occupational patterns in pre-capitalist societies were used by European colonists to classify the population as supposedly endogamous groups. In other circumstances the migrations set in train by colonialism had led groups to define themselves as either endogamous, or in possession of some quality or characteristic which distinguished them from the native populations around them. Third, where they have one or more cultural attributes in common and consequently a shared identity. This could be national identity, or it could be religious, linguistic, regional or indeed virtually any other sort of identity. Ethnicity in this sense is simply a way of labelling people through the use of an ideological super-category that includes virtually any characteristic they might conceivably possess and is consequently quite useless for analytic purposes.¹⁰

In the context of this discussion, the first and second definitions are irrelevant. There are no longer any endogamous groups and have not been for centuries, or possibly even millennia (although there are, of course, groups which believe that they share the same genetic inheritance). There are certainly occupational groups, but these are by no means all ‘national’, and even those which are can never be the basis of nations, precisely because their definition as such is only possible in relation to a pre-existing external national homeland: Chinese traders in Indonesia can only be defined as Chinese because ‘Chinese’ is already a recognised national category. The third definition is the only relevant one and, as Smith’s own checklist makes clear, it is entirely subjective. Assuming therefore that there is no third way between objective and subjective definitions, therefore, two difficulties are commonly raised in relation to the latter.

The first tends to be raised on the Left. Does granting national status to any group (Zionists like Ha’am, South African white supremacists, Ulster Loyalists and other groups whose goals socialists oppose) automatically imply support? This objection is based on a misunderstanding. Recognising that the aforementioned groups consider themselves to be nations does not in any way imply support for them. Whether or not one supports a national group surely depends on an assessment of the role it plays in world politics, not the mere fact of its existence. The distinction between oppressor and oppressed nations, first drawn by Marx and later refined by Lenin, is obviously a helpful guide in making such an assessment, although it is clear that many nations in dispute – of which Scotland is one – fall into neither of these categories.¹¹ The point is perhaps made clearer if considered in relation to existing imperial powers: I am, generally speaking, opposed to the activities of the French state; I do not for that reason seek to deny the existence of the French nation.

The second is less concerned with the theoretical than the political implications of subjectivism. According to Hobsbawm, subjective definitions are ‘open to the objection that defining a nation by its members’ consciousness of belonging to it is tautological and provides only an a posteriori guide to what a nation is.’¹² Such definitions would, however, be tautological only if group members did not already know what a nation was. Since they do, a group which decides it is a nation is saying, in effect, ‘we are the same kind of group as these other groups which have declared themselves nations’. The only group of which this could not have been true would have been the first to declare itself a nation, since it would have had nothing to measure itself against. Once a group decides that it is a nation then it usually also discovers that it has always been one, or at least that it has been one since 1291, or perhaps 1320.

In the discussion that follows the word ‘nation’ will therefore be used to describe a human community that has acquired national consciousness. Benedict Anderson famously wrote of the nation which exists in this consciousness that: ‘It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.’ According to Anderson all communities beyond the original tribal groupings (and perhaps even they) have faced this problem of numbers and consequently have had to ‘imagine’ themselves as a collective, although in different ways depending on the nature of the community. Consequently, he argues, ‘imagining’ in this sense is neutral and does not involve ‘falsity’ or ‘fabrication’.¹³ Leave aside whatever value judgements we may wish to make for the moment; it is nevertheless clear that national consciousness is different from other forms of collective consciousness. In what way? It is first necessary to identify what they all have in common.

The Russian Marxist Valentin Voloshinov wrote that: ‘The only possible objective definition of consciousness is a sociological one.’ By this Voloshinov means that consciousness is not an individual but a collective attribute. It is produced by people internalising the meaning of the ideological signs that their social group has produced and used over time in the process of interaction. As a result: ‘Individual consciousness is not the architect of the ideological superstructure, but only a tenant lodging in the social edifice of ideological signs.’¹⁴ We distinguish between specific forms of consciousness not by the way that they come into being or the way that the community is ‘imagined’, which are the same in each case, but by the relationships they bear to external social reality, which are different. These distinctions can be seen most readily if we compare national consciousness to another form of consciousness: class.

National Consciousness and Class Consciousness

All the analytic concepts that we use to describe certain types of social relationship – class, nation, state – are abstractions. What is crucial is their underlying relationship to the reality from which they are abstracted. For Marxists, ‘class’ is an objective condition independent of what a person perceives their condition to be. In the classic statement of this position, Geoffrey de Ste. Croix writes:

A class (a particular class) is a group of persons in a community identified by their position in the whole system of social production, defined above all according to their relationship (primarily in terms of the degree of ownership or control) to the conditions of production (that is to say, the means and labour of production) and to the other classes.’¹⁵

For a class in a subordinate position within ‘the whole system of social...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface Acknowledgements Dedication
• Introduction
• 1. What Is National Consciousness?
• 2. From National Consciousness to Nation States
• 3. Was There a Scottish Nation Before 1707?
• 4. Highland versus Lowland, Scotland versus England
• 5. Scotland After 1707: Oppressed or Oppressor Nation?
• 6. British Imperialism and National Consciousness in Scotland
• 7. Scottish History and Highland Mythology
• 8. The Reality of the Highlands: Social Assimilation and the Onslaught on Gaelic Culture
• 9. Burns and Scott: Radical and Conservative Nations
• 10. Class Consciousness and National Consciousness in the Age of Revolution
• Conclusion
• Afterword
• Notes
• Index