Approaches to Nationalism

In historical terms, the modernism of nations has been well outlined by the likes of Renan (1990) or Hobsbawm (1990). Modern nation-states, it is claimed, are historically recent inventions, rising out of the old empires in the new capitalist economies, and more specifically through the occurrences of mass symbolic organisation evident in ‘print capitalism’ (Anderson 1983; and for an under-cited earlier example of this thesis McLuhan 1962). The symbolic qualities of national identities cannot be overlooked, as it is the means by which identities are projected, maintained and passed on, and by which nations are portrayed as ancient and perennial, even if they are not. The scholarly debate contains a mix of attitudes towards the symbols of Scottish identity, varying from describing them as symptomatic of a pathological malformation (Nairn 1977), parochial, atavistic and creatively empty signs (Craig 1982), being inconsequential to mass political behaviour (McCrone 2001) or defined as an essential othering from Anglo-Britishness (Ichijo 2004). There is an identifiable sense in much of this work that Scotland and its national identity are somehow unsatisfactory as a form of cultural life or even insubstantial to the business of politics. As Pittock has put it, ‘One of the features of the creation of a Scottish cultural agenda after 1979 was a determination to rid the country of the historical cliché s, inferiorism and misunderstandings which it was believed by some had held Scotland back from devolution’ (2008: 123).