TOM NAIRN The Maladies of Development

'[N]ationalism' in its most general sense is determined by certain features of the world political economy, in the era between the French and Industrial Revolutions and the present day. We are still living in this era. However, we enjoy the modest advantage of having lived in it longer than the earlier theorists who wrestled with the problem. From our present vantage-point we may be a little more able than they were to discern some overall characteristics of the process and its by-products. Indeed it would not say much for us if we were not able to do this.
Next, we must inquire what are those features of general historical develop¬ment which give us some clue about nationalism. At this point it may help to dip briefly into the mythology of the subject. If someone were producing an up-dated version of Gustave Flaubert's Dictionnaire des idiees recues for the use of politics and social-science students, I think the entry 'Nationalism' might read as follows: 'Nationalism: infrequently used before the later nineteenth century, the term can nonetheless be traced back in approximately its contemporary meaning to the 1790s (Abbe Baruel, 1798). It denotes the new and heightened significance accorded to factors of nationality, ethnic inheritance, customs and speech from the early nineteenth century onwards. The concept of national¬ism as a generally necessary stage of development for all societies is common to both materialist and idealist philosophies. These later theoretical formula¬tions agree that society must pass through this phase (see e.g. texts of F. Engels, L. von Ranker, V. I. Lenin, F. Meinecke). These theories also agree in attribut¬ing the causes of this phase to specific forces or impulses resident within the social formations concerned. Nationalism is therefore an internally-determined necessity, associated by Marxists with, for example, the creation of a national market economy and a viable national bourgeois class; by Idealists with the indwelling spirit of the community, a common personality which must find expression in historical development. Both views concur that this stage of societal evolution is the necessary precondition of a subsequent, more satisfactory state of affairs, known as "internationalism" ("proletarian" or "so¬cialist" internationalism in one case, the higher harmony of the World Spirit in the other). This condition is only attainable for societies and individuals who have developed a healthy nationalism previously. While moderate, reasonable nationalism is in this sense praised, an immoderate or excessive nationalism exceeding these historical limits is viewed as unhealthy and dangerous (see entry "Chauvinism", above).' The gist of this piece of global folklore (which unfortunately embraces much of what passes for 'theory' on nationalism) is that nationalism is an inwardly-determined social necessity, a 'growth-stage', located somewhere in between traditional or 'feudal' societies and a future where the factors of nationality will become less prominent (or anyway less troublesome in human history). Regrettably, it is a growth-stage which can sometimes go wrong and run amok. This is mysterious. How can adolescence become a deadly disease?
Whatever the doctors say about this, they agree on the double inwardness attaching to nationalism. It corresponds to certain internal needs of the society in question, and to certain individual, psychological needs as well. It supplies peoples and persons with an important commodity, 'identity'. There is a distinctive, easily recognizable subjectivity linked to all this. Whenever we talk about nationalism, we normally find ourselves talking before too long about 'feelings', 'instincts', supposed desires and hankerings to 'belong', and so on. This psychology is obviously an important fact about nationalism.
The universal folklore of nationalism is not entirely wrong. If it were, it would be unable to function as myth. On the other hand, it would be equally unable to function in this way if it were true—that is, true in the sense that concerns us in this place. It is ideology. This means it is the generally acceptable 'false consciousness' of a social world still in the grip of 'nationalism'. It is a mechan¬ism of adjustment and compensation, a way of living with the reality of those forms historical development we label 'nationalism'. As such, it is perhaps best regarded as a set of important clues towards whatever these forms are really about.
The principal such due is the powerful connection that common sense suggests between nationalism and the concept of development or social and economic 'growth'. It is true that the distinctively modern fact of nationalism (as opposed to nationality, national states and other precursors) is somehow related to this. For it is only within the context of the general acceleration of change since about 1800, only in the context of 'development' in this new sense, that nationhood acquired this systemic and abstract meaning.
However, it is not true that the systemic connotation derives from the fact of development as such. This is the sensitive juncture at which truth evaporates into useful ideology. It is simply not the case (although humanity has always had plenty of reasons for wishing it were the case) that national-ism, the compuls¬ive necessity for a certain socio-political form, arises naturally from these new developmental conditions. It is not nature. The point of the folklore is of course to suggest this: to award it a natural status, and hence a 'health' label, as if it were indeed a sort of adolescence of all societies, the road we have to trudge along between rural idiocy and 'modernity', industrialization (or what¬ever).
A second significant clue is that pointing towards social and personal subject¬ivity. It is true that nationalism is connected with typical internal movements, personnel and persons. These behave in similar ways and entertain quite similar feelings. So it is tempting to say (e.g.) that the Italian nationalism of the 1850s or the Kurdish or Eritrean nationalism of the 1970s rest upon and are generated by these specific internal mechanisms. They express the native peculiarities of their peoples, in a broadly similar way—presumably because the people's soul (or at least its bourgeoisie) needs to.
However, it is not true that nationalism of any kind is really the product of these internal motions as such. This is the core of the empirical country-by¬country fallacy which the ideology of nationalism itself wishes upon us. Welsh nationalism, of course, has much to do with the specifics of the Welsh people, their history, their particular forms of oppression and all the rest of it. But Welsh nationalism—that generic, universal necessity recorded in the very term we are interested in—has nothing to do with Wales. It is not a Welsh fact, but a fact of general developmental history, that at a specific time the Welsh land and people are forced into the historical process in this fashion. The '-ism' they are then compelled to follow is in reality imposed upon them from without; although of course to make this adaptation, it is necessary that the usual kinds of national cadres, myths, sentiments, etc., well up from within. All national¬isms work through a characteristic repertoire of social and personal mechan¬isms, many of them highly subjective. But the causation of the drama is not within the bosom of the Volk: this way lie the myths of blood and Geist. The subjectivity of nationalism is an important objective fact about it; but it is a fact which, in itself, merely reposes the question of origins.
The real origins are elsewhere. They are located not in the folk, nor in the individual's repressed passion for some sort of wholeness or identity, but in the machinery of world political economy. Not, however, in the process of that economy's development as such—not simply as an inevitable concomitant of industrialization and urbanization. They are associated with more specific features of that process. The best way of categorizing these traits is to say they represent the uneven development of history since the eighteenth cen¬tury. This unevenness is a material fact; one could argue that it is the most grossly material fact about modern history.. This statement allows us to reach a satisfying and near-paradoxical conclusion: the most notoriously subjective and ideal of historical phenomena is in fact a by-product of the most brutally and hopelessly material side of the history of the last two centuries. [ ... ]
The unforeseeable, antagonistic reality of capitalism's growth into the world is what the general title 'uneven development' refers to. It indicates the shambling, fighting, lop-sided, illogical, head-over-heels fact, so to speak, as distinct from the noble uplift and phased amelioration of the ideal. Modern capitalist development was launched by a number of West-European states which had accumulated the potential for doing so over a long period of history. The even-development notion was that this advance could be straightforwardly followed, and the institutions responsible for it copied—hence the periphery, the world's countryside, would catch up with the leaders in due time. This evening-up would proceed through the formation of a basically homogeneous enlightened class throughout the periphery: the international or 'cosmopol¬itan' elite in charge of the diffusion process. But no such steady diffusion or copying was in fact possible, and neither was the formation of this universal class (though there have been and are caricatural versions of it, in the shape of comprador bourgeoisies allying themselves to metropolitan capital instead of to their own people).
Instead, the impact of those leading countries was normally experienced as domination and invasion. The spirit of commerce was supposed to take over from the traditional forms of rapine and swindle. But in reality it could not. The gap was too great, and the new developmental forces were not in the hands of a beneficent, disinterested elite concerned with Humanity's advance. Rather, it was the 'sordid material interests' (as Marx and Engels relished saying) of the English and French bourgeois classes which were employing the concepts of the Enlightenment and classical political economy as a smoke¬screen. Even with the best will in the world (which they did not have), Progress could not help identifying herself to some degree with these particu¬lar places, classes and interests. And in this way she could not help fomenting a new sort of 'imperialism'.
On the periphery itself, outside the core-areas of the new industrial-capitalist world economy, people soon needed little persuasion of this. They learned quickly enough that Progress in the abstract meant domination in the con¬crete, by powers which they could not help apprehending as foreign or alien. In practice as distinct from the theory, the acculturation process turned out to be more like a 'tidal wave' (in Ernest Gellner's phrase) of outside interference and control. Humanity's forward march signified in the first instance Anglici-zation or Frenchification, for as long ahead as the people most conscious, of the change could see. As was said later on, more globally: 'Westernization' or 'Americanization'.
There was never either time or the sociological space for even development. The new forces of production, and the new state and military powers associ¬ated with them, were too dynamic and uncontrolled, and the resultant social upheavals were far too rapid and devastating for any such gradual civilization-process to take place. There was to be no 'due time' in modern history. All time was undue once the great shock-wave had begun its course. For those outside the metropolis (where in unique and unrepeatable circumstances things had matured slowly) the problem was not to assimilate culture at a reasonable rate: it was to avoid being drowned.
The Enlightenment was borne into wider reality by bourgeois revolutions which shook the older social world around them to pieces. In these less-developed lands the elites soon discovered that tranquil incorporation into the cosmopolitan technocracy was possible for only a few of them at a time. The others, the majority, saw themselves excluded from the action, rather than invited politely to join in; trampled over rather than taught the rules of the game; exploited rather than made partners. It was no consolation to be told that patience was in order, that things would even up in the next generation, or the one after that. Was this true at all? Would not the actual configuration of the new forces of change merely put the English even more firmly in charge of an even more unIndian India; the Germans even more in control of second-class, Slav lands? True or not, the point came to seem academic. Given the violence and rapidity of the changes in act, patience and time were no longer human possibilities anyway.

The Necessary Resort to Populism

Huge expectations raced ahead of material progress itself. The peripheric elites had no option but to try and satisfy such demands by taking things into their own hands. 'Taking things into one's own hands' denotes a good deal of the substance of nationalism, of course. It meant that these classes—and later on sometimes the masses beneath them, whom they felt responsible for—had to mobilize against 'progress' at the same time as they sought to improve their position in accordance with the new canons. They had to contest the concrete form in which (so to speak) progress had taken them by the throat, even as they set out to progress themselves. Since they wanted factories, parliaments, schools and so on, they had to copy the leaders somehow; but in a way which rejected the mere implantation of these things by direct foreign intervention or control. This gave rise to a profound ambiguity, an ambivalence which marks most forms of nationalism.
Unable to literally 'copy' the advanced lands (which would have entailed repeating the stages of slow growth that had led to the breakthrough), the backward regions were forced to take what they wanted and cobble it on to their own native inheritance of social forms. In the annals of this kind of theorizing the procedure is called 'uneven and combined development. To defend themselves, the periphery countries were compelled to try and advance 'in their own way', to 'do it for themselves'. Their rulers—or at least the newly-awakened elites who now came to power—had to mobilize their so¬cieties for this historical short-cut. This meant the conscious formation of a militant, inter-class community rendered strongly (if mythically) aware of its own separate identity vis-a-vis the outside forces of domination. There was no other way of doing it. Mobilization had to be in terms of what was there; and the whole point of the dilemma was that there was nothing there—none of the economic and political institutions of modernity now so needed.
All that there was was the people and peculiarities of the region: its inherited ethnos, speech, folklore, skin-colour, and so on. Nationalism works through differentiae like those because it has to. It is not necessarily democratic in outlook, but it is invariably populist. People are what it has to go on: in the archetypal situation of the really poor or 'under-developed' territory, it may be more or less all that nationalists have going for them. For kindred reasons, it had to function through highly rhetorical forms, through a sentimental culture sufficiently accessible to the lower strata now being called to battle. This is why a romantic culture quite remote from Enlight¬enment rationalism always went hand-in-hand with the spread of national¬ism. The new middle-class intelligentsia of nationalism had to invite the masses into history; and the invitation-card had to be written in a language they understood.
It is unnecessary here to explore the process in detail. Everyone is familiar with its outline, and with much of its content. We all know how it spread out from its West-European source, in concentric circles of upheaval and reaction: through Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America, and then across the other continents. Uniformed imperialism of the 1880-1945 variety was one episode in this larger history, as were its derivatives, anti-colonial wars and 'de¬colonization'. We have all studied the phenomena so consistently accompa¬nying it: the 'rediscovery' or invention of national history, urban intellectuals invoking peasant virtues which they have experienced only through train windows on their summer holidays, schoolmasters painfully acquiring `national' tongues spoken only in remote valleys, the infinity of forms assumed by the battle between scathing cosmopolitan modernists and emotional defen¬ders of the Folk ... and so on.
But [... ] let me try to sum up this part of the argument. Real, uneven development has invariably generated an imperialism of the centre over the periphery; one after another, these peripheric areas have been forced into a profoundly ambivalent reaction against this dominance, seeking at once to resist it and to somehow take over its vital forces for their own use. This could only be done by a kind of highly 'idealist' political and ideological mobiliza¬tion, by a painful forced march based on their own resources: that is, em¬ploying their 'nationality' as a basis. The metropolitan fantasy of even development had predicted a swelling, single forward march that would in¬duct backward lands into its course; in reality, these lands found themselves compelled to attempt radical, competitive short-cuts in order to avoid being trampled over or left behind. The logistics of these short-cuts brought in factors quite absent from the universalizing philosophy of Progress. And since the greater part of the globe was to be forced into detours of this kind, these factors became dominant in the history of the world for a long period, one still not concluded.
[The Break-up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism, 2nd edn. (New Left Books: London, 1977), 332-6, 337-41.)