Bring Furrit the Tartan-Necks! Nationalist Intellectuals and Scottish Popular Culture

Abstract

... yes, we welcome the diversity and the legitimacy which nationality brings, but we should also recognise the down side - not just the wars, the massacres, the intolerance, but the every-day nastiness of much nationalism, its petty-mindedness, its meanspiritedness, the endless selfserving arguments, the vast culture of moaning, whingeing, kvetching, self-pity, special pleading, that narcissism of small differences' that Freud rightly denounced. (Halliday 2000, pp. 158-59). Advancing a position unpopular in contemporary Scotland, the above passage is a volcanic eruption of the author's feelings about nationalism in an otherwise sober essay (based on his Ernest Gellner Memorial Lecture) in which he probes the implicitly and explicitly normative claims of nationalism on a number of fronts: national self-determination, the national in relation to the supranational, nationalism's moral agenda, and its uses of history. In all these areas Halliday poses substantial questions: whether national selfdetermination is always worth the cost in terms of social upheaval (Kosovo is his most recent example); whether it always delivers more humane state formations (Chechnya being a case in point); whether the national, as a given, should invariably trump the supranational (the routine flouting of the United Nations' charter and aims by national interests, nuclear proliferation argued on