Getting Scotland: Re-Reading Eric Hobsbawm

Abstract

Reading Eric Hobsbawm on nationalism and Scotland is like discovering that your favourite uncle harboured some strange proclivities. Unlike the likes of Ernest Gellner and Ladislav Hroch, whose book Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe Hobsbawm helped to get translated into English, he never 'got' nationalism, or Scotland for that matter. That requires a qualification. Hobsbawm 'got' nationalism, but it was the variety which amalgamated territories into states, and not their decomposition. Talking of the 'nation-state' of the 19 t h century, he observed that they were 'the main building blocks of world capitalism, during a lengthy period of its development, and with it much of bourgeois society in the 'developed' world.' He wrote this in his review of Tom Nairn's Break-Up of Britain in New Left Review, 1977. That essay reveals much of his thinking on nationalism, followed up in his book Nations and Nationalism since 1780: programme, myth and reality, which he gave as a collection of lectures at Queens University, Belfast in 1985. Writing in The Times Higher Education Supplement (19/10/90), the political scientist Brendon O'Leary noted that Hobsbawm's writings on nationalism 'lack the control, grandeur and detachment that characterise his best scholarship and political interventions' (p.30). O'Leary goes on to say that Hobsbawm loathes nationalism and in particular his 'dislike of neo-nationalisms in the UK and elsewhere in western Europe is rooted in his belief that they are not serving any grand historical function which socialist cosmopolitans can approve.' (ibid.)