Tom Gallagher

Lowering the tartan curtain

Part I: The compliant Scots

Occasionally, the Scottish Review has explored the exercise of cultural power in Scotland. I am going to share with its readers my thoughts on how members of the cultural establishment have reacted to the ideas contained in my book 'The Illusion of Freedom: Scotland Under Nationalism' (Hurst and Co, London). I try not to come over as a self-pitying author but it's up to the reader if I succeed or not. Certainly, I would hope the experiences set out below might provoke some thought, or even discussion, about whether Scotland is a political and intellectual community which welcomes debate on pressing issues of the day and knows how to handle the process.
     From no quarter was I expecting the red-carpet treatment. I thought the book would be overlooked by review editors of the Scottish press even though it is a survey of political nationalism meant for a broad readership.
     But I was surprised when a group of commentators in the Sunday Times, the Herald and the Scotsman argued that I had cast myself into the Scottish intellectual equivalent of Hell, one suggesting that I would censor classic novels and another baldly stating that I had a screw loose.
     My sin was to argue against Alex Salmond's wish to base the 2014 Homecoming around the battle of Bannockburn and to lavish a large amount of public money around trips for schoolchildren to this battle-site and others. Such initiatives are bound to strengthen Anglophobia at the level of popular culture. I pointed out that, when such manipulations of the past occurred in the destructive phase of European nationalism, they greatly added to the ensuing havoc (I might also have added that when state officials deployed a kind of history that might be described as 'politics projected onto the past', it contributed in no small measure to the conflagration in Yugoslavia, a subject Alex Salmond kept silent about except on one memorable occasion in 1999).
     I don't think such a fate awaits Scotland: instead it will be the sterile nationalist conformity seen in both parts of 20th century Ireland that is likely to prevail if public intellectuals use nationalism to enhance their own status.
     My book coincided with a collection of essays mainly by Gerry Hassan who has been a tireless exponent of the need for bold innovation in Scottish politics. 'The SNP: From Protest to Power' is published by Edinburgh University Press. It praises the progressive character of Scottish nationalism and the competence of its ministers, and is sanguine about how the arrival of a post-British world can improve the quality of governance.
     My own book is hardly a unionist tract. A reviewer in the blog 'Open Unionism' summed up its approach quite well:
     Tom Gallagher is not by temperament or inclination a unionist. His book...questions the effectiveness of the SNP's leadership of Scottish nationalism, but does not reject, explicitly, the legitimacy of the party's aim of independence.
     The author is critical of the personality cult surrounding Alex Salmond, his party's cronyism and clientelism, its confused economic policies, the Anglophobia associated with its chauvinist doctrines, but Gallagher treats as axiomatic the assumption that Scotland as a nation must enjoy a high degree of political self-expression in order to flourish.
     If he eventually rejects Salmond's separatism, it is because he believes it leads to an inward-looking, socially conservative, centralist state, not because he subscribes to integrationist unionism.
    
So I'm up for change, but if Scotland is to embrace genuine freedoms rather than just experience a symbolic makeover and exchange one union for another (the EU), then the grip of the interest groups and remote institutions which exercise enormous control in all political seasons is going to have to be weakened. A more participatory era will need to be inaugurated. Although independence is the SNP's mantra, there's too much evidence that it prefers compliant rather than independent-minded Scots.
     Since the SNP came to office, I've been critical of its manipulation of ethnic nationalist identity, especially those of Scotland's Catholics and Muslims. I'm prepared to argue that a calculated effort to stack up votes lies behind Salmond's attempt to woo outspoken and influential figures in these communities. I even believe that this is a disquieting sign that the old Scotland, where powerful figures manipulated religious feelings often for ignoble ends, is far from dead and buried.
     The decision to lavish public money on the Bannockburn phenomenon can be seen as a crude attempt by a political contender to monopolise the 1314 event for its own ends; the Ulster Unionists did much the same with the battle of the Boyne and much good did it ultimately bring them.
     Going in this direction is hard to square up with the breezy view of culture minister Michael Russell expressed at a conference in Aberdeen that 'time and time again the nationalist movement has proved that it is addicted to civic nationalism'. The film 'Braveheart' warped the views of many young Scottish men towards the English and a 365-day-long Bannockburn fest will be far worse. As an analyst of nationalism from Ireland to the Balkans who has often sprung to the defence of the SNP, it was such concerns that led me to speak out about the SNP sliding towards fanaticism.
     Gerry Hassan anathemised such a view, arguing that warning of the dangers of imitating some of the propaganda tools of fascism is 'a place you don't go to'. My fear that the strategic choices made by Salmond could lead to Scottish nationalism becoming an illiberal force was 'a further degeneration of language and thought in a part of what passes these days for liberal, elite opinion in Britain'.
     He doesn't think that lessons can be learned from the aberrant path taken by other nationalist movements. Irish and even German nationalism did not start out as aggressive and intolerant movements. Arguably, Scotland's political culture is not strong on participation and representation but instead emphasises conformity and orthodoxy. If politics and public life did not have an authoritarian texture, then the contents of the Scottish Review would have been very different in recent years. The fact that politics is increasingly dominated by people who have turned it into a full-time career (or else have professions that go by the name 'reputational management') is not reassuring especially when major change appears unavoidable, and it fills me with foreboding. Accordingly, I think it is necessary to point out occasionally the need for the SNP to heed these excesses of nationalism elsewhere. I would even go so far as to say that I am doing more of a service to the SNP than Hassan by metaphorically whispering into Alex Salmond’s ear that he cannot walk on water and is capable of making disastrous moves.

Tom Gallagher is professor of peace studies at the University
of Bradford

Part II will follow tomorrow