George Kerevan: The reason size doesn’t matter

Czechs celebrate their new nationhood, an example of the global move towards self-determinism. Picture: Getty

First a fascinating question: why are there so few independent nation states? There are, after all, around 8,000 identifiable ethno-linguistic groups on planet Earth, but only a couple of hundred actual political states. Even if Scotland votes Yes, most experts say the total number of countries is unlikely to get beyond 230 by the end of the 21st century. But one eminent political philosopher says they are wrong. His name is Tom Nairn.

On Monday night, along with a large audience, I was at the launch in Edinburgh of Nairn’s latest collection of political essays on nations, nationalism and globalisation. This consists of 420 fat pages of analysis, crafted in a glorious prose that signals Nairn as one of the most gifted non-fiction writers produced by Scotland in the past half century. Not bad for an 82-year old.

Tom Nairn is probably the greatest living political philosopher of the phenomenon of nations and national identity. His seminal The Break-Up of Britain, published in 1977, famously predicted that nationality politics – specifically the demand for Scottish independence – would come to dominate political debate in the UK. Whatever the outcome of tomorrow’s referendum, Nairn saw the constitutional crisis brewing nearly 40 years ago. David Cameron only woke up to it last week.

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Outside the pages of his books, Tom Nairn is rarely seen or heard. He shuns the faux celebrity and instant punditry of contemporary academic historians. Not necessarily because he is shy. I can attest from knowing him for more than 30 years that he is a warm, hospitable human being, with a wicked sense of humour when it comes to the foibles and errors of the British ruling elite.

Rather, Tom Nairn is a philosopher in the mould of Adam Smith or David Hume. He needs time and quiet to read, to cogitate and above all to write. With the result that Nairn’s ideas have become the intellectual dynamite of the modern Scottish independence movement. His books – stimulating, polemical, and brimming with dozens of new insights – are worth any number of television interviews.

Nairn has paid a career price for his intellectual precocity and political independence. Despite being one of the most gifted thinkers Scotland has produced, Nairn has never been given a professorship at a Scottish university. But as his old friend, the journalist Neal Ascherson, noted at Monday’s event, the great Enlightenment philosopher David Hume was also denied a university chair. Academia’s loss was the world’s gain, in both cases.

Tom Nairn’s gift for discerning global political trends has not withered. He predicts that Scottish independence is not some belated, romantic attempt to join a bandwagon that left in the 19th century. Rather, he makes the revolutionary suggestion that globalisation has eroded the economic and cultural rationale for older “super states” like the UK, France and Spain, perhaps even of the USA and China. Nairn predicts that smaller nation states (e.g. Switzerland or Scotland) and city states (e.g. Singapore and a future London) are better suited to survival in a truly interconnected global economy.

If Nairn is correct, we could see another 50 or 100 new nations seek independence before 2100. He dubs this the politics of nationality – forming new nation states as entities for economic and cultural advance. This he counter-poses to old-fashioned nationalism, which is about identity. An independent Scotland would be at the head of this chain, serving as a peaceful, democratic model for the nations that follow. Far from Balkanising the world and unleashing ethnic conflict, Nairn argues that dismantling the larger, bellicose nation states removes a prime source of rivalry and instability from the world. The emergence of lots of small nations in their place will also lead to new trans-national institutions. These will be better at managing global conflict or economic crises than the near-moribund WTO and UN.

• What date would Scotland become independent?

What makes Nairn think this likely? His premise is that the original wave of industrialisation required significant geographical scale to develop efficient markets – a scale larger than most ethno-linguistic groups. On the other hand, to incubate, capitalism needed a political stability it could not find in the sprawling dynastic empires of Asia, even though these were the richest parts of the globe in the 16th and 17th centuries. So, by accident, capitalism first emerged in (then) peripheral Europe.

That initial European experience set a pattern for what we think nation states should look like – large-ish in territory and monochrome in culture. This Euro-centric template was adopted unthinkingly as the norm for new nation states emerging from colonialism in the 20th century (think of the European-style borders imposed on the Iraq). Small states were deemed too inefficient. Worse, unstitching bigger historic nations like the UK was deemed not only uneconomic but retrogressive. Until, that is, the arrival of the internet, containerisation, jet transport and an integrated global market place.

With globalisation (argues Nairn) the scale on which successful nation states can operate has changed dramatically. Actually, he says the European-model fixed scale has given way to a “sliding” one. The old question used to be: “Is your state big enough to survive and develop in an industrialising world?” Globalisation has replaced this with another: “Is your nation small, nimble and smart enough to survive and claim a niche in the common global culture?” Where does Scotland fit?

According to Tom Nairn, Scotland is an historic anomaly because it “hitched” a ride to modernity with capitalist England after the Union of 1707, yet preserving its distinct civil society and identity. Which leaves the Scotland of 2014 in a position to seek the newfound advantages of being a small independent nation in a globalised world. Meanwhile – apart from the semi-detached global village that is London – English society is struggling to adjust itself to the new era.

Nairn thinks Scotland can (and should) answer Yes to that question about being nimble and smart enough to exploit globalisation. Conversely, David Cameron is bent on asking the wrong question. Tomorrow will reveal which way the Scottish electorate decide.