New Left

Surely, this strange archipelago kingdom we know as Britain would remain a mystery without the pioneering work of Tom Nairn.

Born in Freuchie, in Fife, Scotland, in 1932, Nairn studied philosophy at Edinburgh University before spending time at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, learning Italian and discovering Antonio Gramsci. In 1962, with Perry Anderson among others, he cofounded the New Left Review (NLR), which would introduce an entire generation of Anglophone socialists to the growing corpus of international Marxism. A radical republican, he would spend the following decades using the pages of NLR to develop what would become one of the most compelling Marxist theories of the development of the modern phenomenon of nationalism, publishing many books and articles on the subject throughout his life.

This January 21, his family announced the death, at the age of ninety, of this great Scottish historian and social critic. He will remain one of British Marxism’s most brilliant and idiosyncratic thinkers.

Like many, Nairn provided me with the first satisfactory explanation for what “Britain” actually was. The polity we call the United Kingdom, ruling over England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, is an unusual place. It is a monarchy without monarchical power; a democracy without popular sovereignty; a modern capitalist country with archaic political institutions; a state with no nation; and a nation containing different nationalisms.

In a series of articles in NLR written during the 1960s, the journal’s cofounders develop the so called “Nairn-Anderson” theses on the “abnormal” development of British modernization. According to the two, what distinguished Britain from other comparable modern nations was a peculiar historical development that had seen — following an (abortive) revolution and restoration in the seventeenth century — a powerful landowning class supported by mercantile capital establish control of a state fashioned in its own image, and gain the largest empire in the world, all before the emergence of industrial capitalism.

When an industrial bourgeoisie finally appeared, it found itself politically subordinate without being economically constrained. Instead of mobilizing the popular classes in a hegemonic struggle against the landed gentry, it accommodated itself into the existing order, leaving the framework of the state untouched. The mechanism of imperial expansion during two centuries functioned as a pressure valve for the social conflicts present within the metropole. Conflicts that would, in other countries, mature into revolutions.

Through the lens of the longue durée of the development of the British state and its class composition, the authors mounted a devastating critique of the particularities of Britain’s elites, its parties, and its intelligentsia. British socialism was not spared. In his essay, The Peculiarities of the English, E. P. Thompson was excoriating against the two young Turks, accusing them of misrepresenting British history, romanticizing other national experiences, and even calling Nairn the “least inspired of the two.” The ensuing polemic cemented NLR‘s rupture with the dominant Marxist approach to history writing at the time — the “history from below” approach championed by Thompson — and would provide a third generation of British Marxism, embodied by the journal, with its distinctive stamp.

Most criticism of the Nairn-Anderson theses tends to focus on the authors’ reliance on foreign models of modernization or on their Marxist theoretical apparatus; they see declinism, or stagism in Nairn’s case, because of his later emphasis on the importance of republicanism in the process of modernization.

But what many critics neglect is the militant objective which underlaid the authors’ intentions: to theorize why social revolution in Britain had not taken place, precisely from the perspective of the specific constraints of the national context itself, its model of modernization, and its openings onto the possibility of anti-capitalist transformation in general.

The Breakup of Britain

From the beginning, Nairn’s critical procedure has remained the same: to analyze the constraints and possibilities of political change and social transformation, and specifically, to map alternative strategic points of pressure and vulnerability in the armature of the British state to those so far explored.

However, Nairn’s encounter with Stephen Maxwell and the Scottish independence movement after 1968, confronted him with “the uncomfortable realization,” as his friend and collaborator Anthony Barnett recounts,“that for all his unequaled grasp of Marx and Gramsci, and modern political thought, he could not deny or explain the centrality of the nation in political change.” Indeed, the historical role of nationalism in determining the horizons of modern political and social transformations, for Nairn, remained “Marxism’s great historical failure.”

It was an oversight that he would seek to correct in a series of articles that would become his seminal work, The Break-Up of Britain, published in 1977. In the book, nationalism is analyzed as the fundamental form through which modern state formation and capitalist modernization take place: a “pathology of modern developmental history,” as he puts it. If nationalism is “always the joint product of external pressures and internal balance of class forces,” cohering divergent class interests around a project of capitalist development, how is one to understand the diversity and dynamic of its emergence as a modern, global phenomenon?

In a magisterial comparative analysis of the different British nationalisms with other international cases, Nairn demonstrates how diverse patterns of national modernization are inscribed into the contradictions of the “combined and uneven development” of world capitalism. Through the prism of the dialectic between center and periphery in the competition of capitalist development, Nairn explains the general and specific dynamics of the emergence of different types of nationalism as vehicles of modernization. In his view, the “story of uneven development” and nationalism is one of an “unheralded contradiction” in the capitalist system, which “has enveloped and repressed the other antagonism upon which Marxism laid such stress: the class struggle.”

With a backdrop at the time of post-imperial decline and rising left (and right) nationalist movements in Britain, Nairn’s claim was that the tensions of uneven development within that country, and which had been historically left deferred by the mechanism of imperial expansion, made national independence movements “forces capable of unhinging” Westminster and producing new openings for political change. They were gravediggers — if not of capitalism as such — of a fundamental obstacle to the possibility of anti-capitalist transformation: the oppressive structure of the “old State in Britain.”

Nairn’s strategic insights profoundly influenced the development of an authentically new political force in British society: civic left-nationalism in Scotland. Despite his consistent criticism of the Scottish National Party itself (for its managerialism, crypto-monarchism, and more), the author was still considered by Nicola Sturgeon to be “one of the greatest thinkers Scotland has ever produced.”

Breaking Free

As the years went on and the kind of political change he hoped for did not come – but rather a Thatcherite capture of reactionary English nationalism, the defeat of the labor movement in Britain, and the conversion of postimperial decline into global financial power — Nairn matured in his suspicion that an important part of the problem was the British political imaginary itself.

Indeed, much of Nairn’s work can be read as a prolonged political and intellectual, even psychological attempt, to break free of Britain as such, producing great stylistic and analytical creativity in the process.

The Enchanted Glass, Britain and Its Monarchy (1989), is a case in point. Mixing historiography, anthropology, psychoanalysis and polemic, furious wit, and incisive theorization, the book still represents perhaps one of the deepest dives into the murky recesses of the British imaginary yet attempted. In its labyrinthine manner, it explores some of the ways in which the “whole range of social codes” that make up Britishness as such, are fundamentally structured by the “national-royalism,” which constitutes Britain as an actual “pseudonational” entity. For the author, the institution of the monarchy is no benign curiosity, it is one, if not the key, binding agent in both the symbolic and concrete unity of Britain as a society and polity.

Nairn’s well-known Ruritanian sobriquet for Britain: “Ukania,” identifies the social world of custom and codes that compose a “recognizably British identity,” signposted as it is by notions like “fairness,” “decency,” “compromise,” plural “liberties,” “having one’s say,” and other “Ukanian mysteries”; rather than, for example, “the humorless abstractions of 1776, 1789, and after.” Beyond the hilarious polemical power that this notion often delivers, it is also an important instrument of critical distance for the author and the reader. For Nairn, it a contemptuous othering of the presuppositions of his own national culture, to analyze it more clearly. For the reader, it provides a lens through which to observe Britishness in different anthropological light.

In particular, Ukanian political anthropology is structured by an “arcane mystique” of state power; a lack of appropriative correspondence between the national state and a national popular subject; and a juridical blurring of the conditions of political change itself.

The typically British depoliticized norms of public debate (“civility in politics,” etc.) — a corollary of the depoliticization of the apex of state authority: the monarchy and its icons: the royal family — endorsed by all but every political party in the country, are an expression of the constraints imposed upon them by the national-royalism of the British political sphere itself. For Nairn, Britishness and its “fetishism of the crown” has produced a unique variant in the typology of nationalist attitudes, one that is “neither democratic nor ethno-populist in nature.”

The supranational quality of the British state, a heritage of empire conserved in the monarchy, has been able to suppress and substitute the “national-popular” with the “national-royal.” Indeed, this is the condition of a modern polity that does not recognize a notion of popular sovereignty in its constitution. This lack of appropriative correspondence in the representation of political power, between popular subject and national state, has meant that in Ukanian political anthropology, “class” becomes a figure of social rank, a “pathology” of the acceptance of social stratification as such, rather than a hegemonic political horizon.

Unlike republics, for whom power formally emanates from a “sovereign people,” British “parliamentary sovereignty” emanates formally from the Crown. It is for this reason that Nairn insists that “British democracy is in a real and not only nominal sense, the servant of the Crown; the opposite is not true.” In such a context, the figure of the republican comes to occupy a particularly strange position: “defined as (at best) a well-intentioned crank,” they could also be “the sort of thoroughly bad apple who’s against everything.” That “everything” being the “national-royalism” which constitutes Britain as such.

If the British constitution can be resumed, according to Vernon Bogdanor, a leading British constitutional theorist, in only eight words: “acts of the monarch in parliament are law,” the possibility of engaging directly with the literal constitution of the British political system are far less simple. For Nairn, the “whole trade of commentary on the constitution is in any case a realm of quasi-legal necromancy in Britain . . . performed on a mist-shrouded plateau by a specially evolved breed of lawyer-philosophers . . . an ancient goat track connects it with Westminster, and ends there.” Its uncodified and labyrinthine form functions for the most part as “an alibi for not bothering to think farther about it.” Where should one start? The Magna Carta? The Bill of Rights? The statutes? The 450-page book of parliamentary procedures, Erskine May? A stultifying prospect indeed. Blurring our view of the path ahead, this dense fog in whose shadow we search, is Ukania.

Nairn would continue to be its indefatigable and merciless critic into the twenty-first century, publishing piercing articles in NLR on New Labour, devolution, and many other topics. His legacy will always be the iconoclastic claim: that for the British to be free, they must first free themselves of the idea of Britain altogether.

Beyond Miserabilism

More than half a century ago, in Thompson’s original critique of the young Turks at NLR, he insisted that modern national histories do not function according to the matrix set by a once-and-for-all primordial revolution, which then determines the rest of its political development (1688, 1776, 1789, etc.). True enough.

What Nairn showed, however, is that national history and the political traditions inherited from its course, then conserved in the formation of state institutions, are nonetheless important factors in structuring a populace’s capacity to conceive of the possibilities of political and social transformation. National traditions provide the historical and social resources for how actors construct and communicate expectations of their own, and others’, capacity for collective agency: what we can collectively imagine and build expectations of, is rationally persuadable, plan-able, organizable, and actionable.

In the joke with which we began this article, the British imagination is depicted as stunted, parochial, and pathetically piecemeal. It is funny because it is a stereotype we all love to hate (about ourselves: even better), but the perpetuation of these kinds of collective self-images always risks falling into a trap. Vulgarized, the Britain-hating dimension of Nairn’s thought — what Isaac Deutscher called “national nihilism” — can induce resignation, self-marginalization, and a kind of political miserabilism. In other words, the very same limited horizon of political expectation that it rages against.

Nairn’s militant ethos was to refuse to allow himself to be constrained by such traditional British expectations. As should we.