In the end, it came down to flags. It always does. |
In the final days of the campaign, it became all about nationhood.
Arguments about sterling and the NHS and oil revenues faded into the
background as both sides appealed to their supporters’ patriotism. True,
there were two competing patriotisms, one British and the other
exclusively Scottish. But both campaigns grasped that, in the last
analysis, national feeling would trump other considerations, and voters
duly went to the polls surrounded by saltires and Union flags.
It was a salutary reminder in an age that tends to dismiss
nationalism as ugly, atavistic and dangerous. Consider, after all, what
has just happened. While some harsh words were exchanged, and a few
signs defaced, there was no violence. The people of Scotland voted
cheerfully, and on a record turnout, to determine their national
identity.
A 55/45 result tells us that a measure of joint identity
predominates: most Scots have a sense of patriotism large enough to
encompass both Scottishness and Britishness. A new constitutional
settlement, providing for an autonomous Scotland within a looser UK,
will reflect that balance of identity.
This aspect of the referendum is worth stressing, because our public
intellectuals have fallen into the habit of judging nationalism by its
most extreme and pathological manifestations. No one fired a shot in
anger over the question of whether Scotland should remain in the United
Kingdom. Had Scots voted the other way, all sides would have accepted
the outcome and tried to make it work. There are plenty of instances of
amicable divorces, from Czechs and Slovaks to Serbs and Montenegrins. As
G.K. Chesterton once wrote, condemning nationalism because it can lead
to war is like condemning love because it can lead to murder.
Patriotism, as this blog never ceases to argue, is what makes us
behave unselfishly. It is why we pay taxes to support strangers, why we
accept election results when we voted for the loser, why we obey laws
with which we disagree. A functioning state requires broad consensus on
what constitutes the first-person plural. Take that sense away and you
get Syria or Iraq or Ukraine or – well, pretty much any war-zone you can
name.
In his new book, How to be a Conservative, the
planet-brained Roger Scruton dilates at length on how the first-person
plural must be constructed. He explains why, in successful states, it is
legal, territorial and secular rather than being sectarian or racial.
As usual, Scruton’s case is elegant and true. But how curious that it
should need to me made at all. Most ordinary people – that is, people
who are not literati or politicians – take feelings of national
belonging for granted, and see patriotism as an unalloyed virtue, like
honesty or courage. Yet the prevailing intellectual fashion is that
patriotism is artificial. The Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawn
popularised the idea that nations depend on “invented traditions”. A.C.
Grayling held that they were synthetic creations, “their boundaries
drawn in the blood of past wars”.
What was once Marxist critique is now academic orthodoxy. Virtually
every political science postgraduate who passes through my office has
been taught the same bilge about nations being “imagined communities”.
And so, technically, they are, in the sense that they exist largely in
people’s minds. But this is true of lots of perfectly real things. Why
is a £20 note worth £20? Because we agree that it should be. Why is
David Cameron prime minister? Because we agree to treat him as such.
Those who disparage or detest nationhood are guilty of an old Marxist
conceit: the notion that people can be reconstructed, purged of the
“wrong” ideas, cured of “false consciousness”.
They can’t; and the notion that they can has led to some of the worst
evils in history, from Soviet Communism to Islamic fundamentalism. Any
ideology that claims to be bigger than the nation-state denies human
nature. God knows we have seen often enough where that can lead.
Daniel Hannan is the author of 'How we Invented Freedom' (published in the US and Canada as 'Inventing Freedom: how the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World').
He speaks French and Spanish and loves Europe, but believes the EU is
making its peoples poorer, less democratic and less free.
No comments:
Post a Comment