The Narcissism of National Solipsism: Civic Nationalism and Sub-State Formation Processes in Scotland, Part 3: (a) Changing power balances, (b) Tensions of group fusion and group survival and (c) Sub-state nationalism and British state-society

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The Narcissism of National Solipsism: Civic Nationalism and Sub-State Formation Processes in Scotland

1: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/h/humfig/11217607.0006.206/--narcissism-of-national-solipsism-civic-nationalism-and-sub?rgn=main%3Bview=fulltext

2: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/h/humfig/11217607.0006.206/--narcissism-of-national-solipsism-civic-nationalism-and-sub?rgn=main%3Bview=fulltext

3: https://narcissismresearch.miraheze.org/wiki/AIReactiveCodependencyRageDisclaimer

4: https://narcissismresearch.miraheze.org/wiki/AIReactiveCodependencyRageDisclaimer

Changing power balances

1. On becoming the ruling elites of the state, the middle class subordinated the humanist we-image in their dealings with rival states. As ruling elites, they came under the pressure of mutual fears and suspicions and adopted the expediencies, deceptions, hypocrisy, diplomacy and violence of the Machiavellian tradition of unrestrained self-interest that characterized dynastic regimes.

1. Yet the Machiavellian tradition depended on an aristocratic code of conduct that transcended state boundaries, stronger than any ‘we-feeling’ of social solidarity with the lower classes of their own country. For dynastic elites, as Elias put it, ‘attachment to their own state did not yet have the character of an attachment to their own nation’ (2013: 157).

1. In contrast to narcissistic nationalism, as Kidd (1996: 374) argues, the Scottish Enlightenment induced a revolt against the vulgar errors of national solipsism: at this level it is particularly inappropriate to classify North Britishness as a manifestation of a national identity. The sociologists of the Scottish Enlightenment deconstructed at an abstract level the whole phenomenon of patriotism.

1. Fuelled by imperialism, racism and social Darwinism, that orientation [patriotic militarism] celebrated the “pleasures of war” while reinventing notions of chivalry in defense of the thesis that force was indefensible unless it promoted a just and honorable national cause (Linklater 2016: 327).

1. Indeed, the term ‘Great Britain’ was minted to refer less to the inherent value of a unified nation than to the new sense of the enlarged state formed by the Union of Crowns in 1603 under James VI of Scotland on becoming James I of Great Britain (Levack 1987).

1. For Elias (2008c: 234) the bourgeois habitus was shaped increasingly by the easing of external threats to a specifically ‘British way of life’, characterised as a tacit, practical and moral ‘ritual of social friendliness’ and polite manners, in contrast to the more formalised, impersonal objects of serious collective self-worship in more insecure national we-ideals such as Germany. Indirect, coded and evasive turns of phrase and an ironic, self-deprecating sense of humour, learned across generations, appear to British people as well-mannered and decent, but may be viewed by other nations as superficial, duplicitous or dishonest.

Tensions of group fusion and group survival

1. For if two groups become more, or more reciprocally, interdependent than they were before, each of them has reason to fear that it may be dominated, or even annihilated, by the other. The struggle may result after many tests of strength in a fusion. It may result in the complete disappearance of one of them in the new unit emerging from their struggles (Elias 2008a: 111–2).

1. Sovereignty in the UK is similarly argued to rest with the ‘unitary’ character of the state, that is, as a centralised apparatus that rules through uniform controls. In this approach, the Union is understood not as a union state but as an ‘incorporating state’ where the Scottish parliament was discontinued and incorporated into an extended but essentially English parliament.

1. While the English Act of Union was concerned to establish the rule of a single monarch in both realms, the Scottish Act of Union preserved Scotland’s separate Presbyterian establishment within the union state. In practice, the new parliament inherited the prevailing balance of majority English governance from the 1688 Revolution while preserving Scots law and religion and opening up the offices of the imperial British state to Scots, not least for service in the merged British army, with Scots over-represented in the officer corps as well as the ordinary ranks of ‘privates’. As well as a merged military force, among the common relations of state were also a cohesive customs union, a single system of taxation, a common currency, shared symbols of statehood, the monarchy, and the bicameral Parliament.

1. As an island state-society, British military power derived from its naval establishment, a relatively porous figuration that allowed middle-class and aristocratic codes to come into contact with each other in ways that proved impossible for the rigid social segregation of the officer corps of Germany’s standing army or the officer castes of absolutist Spain and France (Elias 2007). British monarchs found themselves more dependent on social inferiors than European dynasties and felt pressure from below to comply with bourgeois morality: ‘From being rulers of the state [monarchs] became symbols of the nation’ (Elias 2008a: 181).

1. Manners and morals were gradually reconciled by the greater social interdependencies and political stability among ruling elites. Elias places particular stress on the intermediary role of the untitled gentry between the aristocracy and the middle classes as ‘a unique social formation’ not found in absolutist regimes (Elias and Dunning 2008: 13–5). United by a ‘gentlemanly’ code, different factions of the landed classes felt sufficiently confident that their own survival was not in danger to adopt non-violent political methods in their political dealings with each other.

Sub-state nationalism and British state-society

1. Indeed, many British state nationalists supported Scottish devolution in the 1997 referendum, with the expectation that it would act as a permanent barrier to the formation of an independent Scottish state.

1. In the 1850s, an initial spurt of sub-state nationalism, the National Association for the Vindication of Scottish Rights, was led by romantic Tories, but harboured disparate party affiliations concerned with a more equitable redistribution of state revenue, decentralization of certain state functions and, more derisorily, respect for Scotland’s heraldic traditions (Morton 1996).

1. The Scottish Home Rule Association was formed by radical Liberals to demand ‘the right of the Scottish people to manage their own affairs’ through ‘a Federal not an Incorporating Union’ (SHRA 1888: 3, 14). Modern Scottish nationalism emerged out of this tension. A state compromise established the Scottish Office, an administrative concession to sub-state sentiment that profoundly shaped the apparatus of both the Edwardian liberal-welfare state and the Keynesian welfare state (Cameron 2012).

As predicted, a sense of failed self-government was palpable but the alternative did not also seem comparatively more competent.

1. Between the wars, sub-state nationalism was simultaneously a response to, and was hindered by, industrial decline and cultural dejection. Discourses on ‘the end of Scotland’ bewailed a perceived loss of distinctive national qualities and a fear of becoming an administrative province of England (Finlay 1994). Even middle-class Unionists felt a debilitating loss of ‘national spirit’. This was fostered by a growing sense of economic dependency on the Union and despondency about the national capability for self-government. Unionists responded with further administrative devolution, in the late 1930s relocating the main functions of the Scottish Office from London to Edinburgh, token reforms that left the centralized nature of the British state largely unaffected.

1. In such a context, the fifth spurt of sub-state nationalism began to shed its social movement character and acquire its modern form as a political party, albeit one shrouded in ethnic essentialism (Mitchell 1996: 180–6).

1. Galvanised by the Scots National League and its splinter group, the Scottish National Movement, the founding of the National Party of Scotland in 1928 was a peculiar brew of moderate devolutionism, ‘spiritual values’ and hardline Celtic racial mysticism, including calls from the poet Hugh McDiarmid for a form of ‘Scottish fascism’ (Finlay 1994: 83). The NPS’s brand of radical Celtic nationalism was itself challenged by the founding in 1932 of a right-wing, home rule party of Empire, the Scottish Party. This led ultimately to a new merged party in 1934, the Scottish National Party. The new party was immediately plunged into internal disarray, unable to unify incompatible left–right ideologies, strategies and personalities.

1. The irrelevance of sub-state nationalism in 1950s Scotland was further illustrated by derisory middle-class symbolic stunts like seizing the Stone of Destiny (used in coronations of Scottish monarchs until taken to London in 1296 by Edward I) from Westminster Abbey and blowing up a mail box in Edinburgh embossed with the insignia of the new Queen Elizabeth II (on the basis that there had been no Queen Elizabeth I of Scotland).

1. However, as the post-war Scottish economy began to flag the electoral fortunes of sub-state nationalism revived, heralded most spectacularly by the SNP’s Hamilton by-election victory in 1967. Yet again, however, the expected nationalist breakthrough did not materialise. Electoral prospects faltered until the twin crises of economy and state in the mid-1970s created new stresses and strains for the UK that nationalist grievance eagerly seized upon. Moreover, the discovery of oil within the territorial waters of Scotland appeared to reverse the relations of fiscal dependency on the British state. The high watermark for the SNP came in the General Election of October 1974 when it achieved an unprecedented eleven MPs.

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