Apologies for finishing on a half finished thought. There's other (RL) stuff I should be doing, but I want to discuss this because it's exactly what's been missing from this debate, or at least skirted over because nobody wants to open the box.
Yes, I agree. The small u unionism of very many people is not the Unionism of Cameron et al. (And I firmly and centrally want to place Miliband in the heart of that latter
national conservatism I describe, which is why I chose his Union-flag draped podia and his "strong position on immigration" to try to illustrate my point to
coley).
What we in danger of missing is that people live
somewhere. The place they live is not a nowhere. When Marx and Engels said "The working men have no country. We cannot take away from them what they have not got", they weren't just using their unconscious sexism to embrace humanity in the word "men", they were also at risk of confusing the 19th century reader, for whom
country and
nation-state were not easily distinguishable. For the same reasons - the terminology in use is not precise enough. It either embraces too much or too little, and sometimes does both at once as "men" did for the 19th century reader.
What Marx and Engels were talking about was not
nationality – which is about your language, your culture, the facts surrounding where we, social animals that we are, were born or live. They were talking about allegiance to nation-state. Because of the structures and structure-sustaining ideology we've become used to, it's hard to separate out the more fluid and organic
nationality from the manufactured and hierarchy-bound
nation, (or more correctly,
nation-state).
Culture is part of what it is to be human. Indeed, the rudiments of culture have been found in other social animals. We humans cannot exist outside of culture. It is nonsense therefore to feel proud to belong to a particular culture – if you didn't belong to one culture, you’d belong to another. It enriches our lives and binds our communities. What it does not do is neatly coincide with national boundaries. That’s because national boundaries are arbitrary; they are administrative boundaries, they demark polities. They are bureaucratic divisions.
So, we live within a pre-existing polity, not of our making. To say, "if we now break up this polity, we run the risk of disrupting working class solidarity" is not in itself a nationalist statement. (That a nationalist might seek to make use of the sentiment is a different matter).
But people in Scotland
also live within a pre-existing polity not of our making: a sub-division of the UK, which had a weakly vestigial state apparatus, left behind when the Union was enacted in order to protect property. And those vestigial state apparati both left behind and later caused their own issues. It is not necessarily nationalist to say that the working class who happen to live within
that polity (Scotland), or sub-polity, wish to disengage from the encompassing state formation, or amalgamation of sub-polities, the Union.
So, just as assuming that all Unionism is the same is an insulting and flabby misuse of fuzzy terminology, so calling all pro-independence sentiment "nationalism" is a mistake, an insult and frankly likely to harden it into just the sort of nationalism the appellant is decrying.
I have huge problems with the ideology and politics of great swathes of the "45". Many of them are cultural nationalists, and some are even ethnic nationalists. Most from very naive and raw positions. I have, in that sense, less problem with the leadership of the SNP, which is a civic nationalism, less problematic (in my view) than the nationalism of the Unionist vanguard of the UK political party leadership and the press.
That said, I have no truck with the SNP. I read Salmond's book recently; he is far more blind to class that I had imagined. Although he grew up in a working class environment, class is for him something cultural and a subdivision of what's more important (to him), a romantic ideal of Scottishness. (He recounts in his book romantic nationalist stories his grandad - a Labour voter - told him as he accompanied him as a youth on plumbing jobs). Thus, for Salmond, Scottish business leaders have an identity of interests with Scottish working class people. It's bollocks, and not something I could support. But to assume that all those voting SNP
do support it is a simplistic and insulting assumption, as much a mistake as calling all pro-independence sentiment "nationalism". We need to distinguish between the Party and those who vote for it, and to recognise that their motives are not all the same. (While acknowledging that even in the voters, their motives are not homogeneous).
There's more to say, but I'm going to have to get on with real life now.
