By @ant_x_ince
An unexpected outcome of the narrow defeat of the Scottish independence referendum is that some form decentralisation of the UK, specifically with a devolution of powers to its constituent nations, seems inevitable. Government ministers, media, and political commentators across the spectrum all talk of the process as a done deal. Much like the now-hegemonic austerity agenda, it is less a question of “if” than one of “how”.
Devolution, they say, is essential for the future wellbeing and democratic functioning of the UK state, where the democratic legitimacy of the state’s existence is now supposedly unquestionable, post-referendum. Yet, in this gushing of politico-legal jargon and constitutional wrangling around the mechanics of devolution, a silent predator slips in almost unnoticed.
The nation itself is a strange beast. It is a largely intangible and illogical cultural affinity, caused by an accident of birth, that invokes simultaneously unquestioning obedience to identifiable authority and distinctly horizontal solidarity with unknown others. In the face of an era of globalisation, characterised by an intensification of connections and flows between distant places, nationalism and national identity have become stronger and more defensive. Just look at the rise of proto-fascist ‘Little Englanders’ like UKIP and you will see this reaction in its most visible form. This defensiveness is perhaps the most distinctive local or national scale cultural product of globalisation.
But now, as the dust settles over Holyrood, an eclectic array of nationalisms have emerged; the Little Englanders, yes, but they are certainly not the most prominent at the current time. In any case, the varieties are not as important as their presence itself, as the various parties, and the various factions within them, battle it out to champion the cause of devolution in their own ways.
Back in 2006 in a rather quiet corner of the discipline of academic geography, Branden Born and Mark Purcell published an article about urban food systems. They wanted to study the growing phenomenon whereby certain urban dwellers are buying more and more local foods as an ethical consumption choice. What they found, among other things, was that principles such as justice, sustainability and democracy were routinely violated at the local scale, just as at larger scales. Workers were exploited in small, local enterprises, just as they were exploited in multinational corporations; decision-making practices could be exclusionary and undemocratic in community gardens, just as they may be in large-scale organisations.
In all this talk of devolution, then, there is a common assumption: that shifting governance ‘downward’ towards the scale of the nation is inherently positive. Indeed, during the run-up to the referendum, entire swathes of the left were caught up in this ‘local trap’, making the dangerous assumption that small is more just, more responsive, more resilient, more democratic. It is a dangerous assumption because it is based on the idea that certain scales have certain moral values inherently attached to them.
The important question for Born and Purcell was how food production and distribution was organised, rather than the scale at which it took place. It may seem like a strange example to use, but it sheds light on the dangers that lie in store in these days of incessant devolution-chatter. Without vast changes to the structure of society itself, devolution will simply mean locally-sourced racist police forces, locally-butchered unions, locally-grown capitalists.
The contradictory nature of nationalism weighs heavily on these questions, since the nation is an amorphous cultural affinity that exists beyond the moral issues of hierarchy, justice and ‘other’ futures, making it hard to directly undermine or deflect. As Benedict Anderson suggested, nations are “imagined communities”, creating bonds and divisions in intangible, banal ways that can’t be fought in the same sense as policies can be. Yet nationalism – or, perhaps, ‘nation-ness’ – underpins these same tangible policies in a very real and material way.
So we now have a ripple of national identity emerging in response not only to “the Scottish question” but also “the English question” too. (Wales and Northern Ireland are tagged on, almost as an afterthought; theirs are positioned as nationalisms of yesteryear, somehow no longer as important in the power struggles between (the ruling elites of) England and Scotland.)
What the main parties forget, of course, is that there has been a group of people who have solidly and consistently argued for English devolution and “English votes for English laws” for years. The English Democrats are a ragtag bunch of oddballs and pub racists whose party never really took off. It may have seemed that their time had come, but no, since whatever minor politics are residual within a state, when those politics emerge in popular debate, the bland parasitism of the centre-left/centre-right spectrum kicks into force and reinvents it as an acceptable toy for their power games.
Not that we should have any sympathy for the English Democrats. However, could their story not also be paralleled by the strategic adoption of socialist rhetoric and policies by the populist SNP north of the border?
The nation is all too often evoked as a ‘natural’ community, set at the right scale for a truly democratic body politic to emerge, to serve ‘its own’ people in ‘its own’ way – and now, even more so than ever. While the fight for Scottish independence was clearly much more nuanced than this, the panicked devolution plans now being cranked up across this fragmented set of islands appears to be making the most of the imagined communities that both unite and divide its citizens. In the coming weeks, a space could well emerge for a radical alternative that pushes back against this dubious logic of the nation as the natural scale of organisation, but only time will tell. The only take-home message of the last few days is that the establishment understands the power of nationalism, and knows how to deploy it with expert precision. The trick for the rest of us (for the time being at least) is to find ways of disentangling our notions of justice from specific scales of action and organisation – the most elusive and powerful one of all being the scale of the nation.
