THE FALL AND RISE OF NATIONALISM
Here, we are on familiar, if somewhat boggy, terrain in the social sciences. Are nations 'real', or are they simply terms of discourse which are caught up in political and social practice? Do we focus on historical events and processes in which the ideology of nationalism and nations operate, or do we stand outside and deconstruct them? We might follow Brubaker who argued that it is important to decouple the study of nationhood and 'nation-ness' from the study of nations as substantial entities, collectivities and communities. He comments: 'We should not ask "what is a nation?", but rather: how is nationhood as a political and cultural form institutionalised within and among states?' (ibid.: 16). This may seem to be sound advice, but if we think about it, it can be applied to almost any other social category we care to mention-social class, gender, ethnicity and so on—and can too often lead to an obsession with deconstruction which never actually gets down to analysing what happens 'on the ground'.
The question 'what is a nation?' has, of course, a particular resonance in nationalism studies. It is the title of a famous lecture by Ernest Renan in 1882 which has subsequently become an obligatory reference for all scholars of the subject. Taking as his starting-point nations with 'full national existence' such as France, England, Italy and Spain (but not Germany, for reasons we will come to), Renan was more interested in the problematic cases. For example, why is Holland a nation, and Hannover not? How did France continue as a nation when the dynastic principle which created it was swept away? Why is Switzerland, with three languages, three religions and three or four 'races', a nation when Tuscany is not? Why, he asked, is Austria a state but not a nation?
Renan examined in turn the 'objective' bases of nations. As regards 'race', it is plain that in modern nations blood is mixed whereas in the tribes and cities of antiquity it was not (or far less so). In a comment unwittingly loaded with the weight of future twentieth-century history, he ridiculed the blood definition: One does not have the right to go through the world fingering people's skulls and taking them by the throat saying: 'You are of our blood; you belong to us!' (Eley and Suny, 1996:49). Renan died a decade after delivering his lecture, and did not live to see precisely such fingering and measuring in the first half of the twentieth century culminating in fascism. Just as race cannot define nations, neither can the usual suspects of language, religion, physical or material interests. For example, language 'invites people to write, but it does not force them to do so' (ibid.: 50). There are nations which speak the same language as their oppressors. Liberation movements in Latin America had, for instance, little difficulty in using Spanish as a linguistic means of mobilising their populations (Williamson, 1992), and English was the main language of nationalism in India and Ireland, despite the misgivings of some indigenous nationalists. Max Weber pointed out that in reality many states have more than one language group, and a common language is often insufficient to sustain a sense of national identity (Weber, 1978:395-6). Neither can religion supply a sufficient basis for nationalism despite its ideological power and the powerful ways in which modern nationalism appeals to what Hayes called
4
7
IN AND OUT OF THE STATE
The rise and rise of neo-nationalism
In the second half of the twentieth century there has arisen one of the most paradoxical forms of nationalism of all; 'neo-nationalism', a new territorial politics in Western states. There are few in which it has not occurred: Scotland and Wales in the UK; Catalunya and Euskadi in Spain; Flanders in Belgium; Brittany and Occitanie in France; Quebec in Canada, and so on. 'Neo', that is 'new', forms of nationalism are paradoxical because they were largely unpredicted, and conventional theories of nationalism have found them difficult to accommodate. After all, was not nationalism in the West well and truly over? Had it not served its purpose in ushering in the modern state during the nineteenth century?
Neo-nationalism as 'nationalism'
The unexpected and untheorised nature of neo-nationalism can be gauged by the way it is treated in the literature. If we examine the key writers on nationalism, we find that their explanations are contingent and ad hoc, on the one hand, and neutral to hostile in tone on the other. Ernest Gellner, as seen in chapter 4, had little to say about it beyond, in his own words, a 'feeble' suggestion that nationalism in late twentieth-century Scotland is contingent and instrumental. The discovery of North Sea oil, coupled with historical and cultural means for expressing identity, has allowed Scotland to try to renegotiate its relationship with the UK state which it joined in 1707. Like Gellner, Anderson is more interested in the failure of nationalism to 'take' in Scotland in the nineteenth century. Anderson's explanation is that 'already in the early 17th century large parts of what would one day be imagined as Scotland were English-speaking and had immediate access to print-English, provided a minimum degree of literacy existed' (B.Anderson, 1996a:90). The migration of Scottish intellectuals to England after 1707, together with open access to English markets, meant that a rising bourgeoisie had little need to mobilise nationalism for its political or economic ends. Catalunya and Quebec figure not at all in Anderson's account, and the latter warrants only
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a passing mention in Gellner (1983:70) as an instance of voluntary incorporation into a federal state.
Anthony Smith sees what he calls the 'third wave of demotic ethnic nationalisms' since the 1950s as specific to the political-cultural conditions of the well-established industrial states to which they belong. They are to be judged as 'autonomist' rather than 'separatist', with particular emphasis on maintaining or developing cultural, social and economic autonomy, but remaining within the political framework of the state into which they were incorporated. They are persuaded of this by the economic benefits to be had, by which means Smith seeks to explain the devolution debate in Scotland in the 1970s: the triumph of economic self-interest over cultural sentiment. It also suits him to be able to show, in his desire to establish the pre-modern character of nationalism, that many of the recent movements after the 1960s have been built on older ideals and identities. He comments: 'In all these cases [Wales, Scotland, Catalunya, Euskadi, Brittany] a cultural renaissance, literary, linguistic, and historical, preceded the formation of political movements demanding ethnic autonomy' (Smith, 1991:141).
Eric Hobsbawm, who is undoubtedly the most hostile to neo-nationalism, commented that 'the characteristic nationalist movements of the late 20th century are essentially negative, or rather divisive' (1990:164). Most of this hostility is directed at ethnic-linguistic forms of neo-nationalism such as is found in Wales and Quebec, where, he asserts: 'the stance of Quebec nationalism is that of a people in headlong retreat before historical forces which threaten to overwhelm it; a movement whose very advances are viewed in terms of potential weakness rather than as success' (ibid.: 165). Scottish nationalism, on the other hand, is, according to Hobsbawm, the outcome of adverse political processes. It is, he comments, 'plainly a reaction to an all-British government supported by only a modest minority of Scots, and a politically impotent all-British opposition party' (ibid.: 179), such a state of affairs no doubt to be redressed by the election of a Labour government, when support for nationalism will, he assumes, ebb away.
This touches on a favourite explanation for the rise of neo-nationalism, that it is not actually 'nationalism' at all, but something akin to 'regionalism', the mobilisation for instrumental ends of territorial identity, but stopping well short of separatism. Peter Alter, for example, comments that 'regionalism', 'resistance to the state's centre from peripheral areas' (1991:135) results from inadequate political incorporation. The 'political nations' of France, Spain and the UK, he argues, were never completely unified or homogeneous, and failed to develop the requisite conditions for a successful political system: a common political-cultural identity, a high degree of allegiance to the centre, and shared political aims. Parties like Plaid Cymru in Wales and the Scottish National Party (SNP) are mere 'regionalist organisations' 'not serious about complete political separation' (ibid.: 138), and 'regional economic differentiation as a generator of regionalism can also be fruitfully offered as a thesis to explain the situation in Catalonia and the Basque country' (ibid.: 141).
The sense that regions are playing the nationalist card for political reasons but without being true believers also fits into the general approach that territorial politics
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are at work. John Breuilly, for example, concludes that 'what has developed [in Quebec] as in the Basque and Scottish cases, is a rather tough-minded, frequently radical nationalism which is very different from the anti-modernist, rather romantic nationalist movements of "peripheral" regions in many 19th century European countries' (1993:333). In other words, Breuilly sees these late twentieth-century movements as quite different from their nineteenth-century counterparts insofar as they have a much more 'political' orientation driven by largely economic concerns on the part of key social groups, especially upwardly mobile managerial and technical workers in these territories. Their emergence fits in with Breuilly's overall thesis on nationalism that 'there is no valid explanatory theory of nationalism, only a number of ways of describing and comparing various forms of nationalist politics' (ibid.: 338).
What this brief review of perspectives on neo-nationalism shows is that it is usually subordinated to the overall framework of the authors, and that by and large it is not central to that framework. Hence, we find a preference for contingent explanations, and for 'political' accounts of territorial relationships between core and periphery. The centre of interest is usually in another place (the Third World, for example), or at another time (the nineteenth century).
Where the analysis of core-periphery relations is applied, as for example, in the work of Michael Hechter (1975) and his 'internal colonialism' thesis, there is strain on the historical and empirical evidence to hand. Internal colonialism was a framework which Hechter borrowed from Latin America by way of analysis of race relations in the US and applied to what he calls the Celtic periphery in the UK. Drawing on the sociology of development, Hechter rejected the assumption that all territories are equally incorporated into the culture and economy of the core, and argued that an exploitative and unequal relationship develops between peripheries and core in such a way that the internal colony produces wealth for the benefit of areas closer both geographically and economically to the core-state. The internal colonies are differentiated by particular cultural variables such as religion, language or ethnicity which exclude them from superior social and cultural positions. Hechter argues that for internal colonialisation to exist there must be a 'cultural' division of labour so that the colony contains low-status occupations and positions, and the core gets the high-status ones. Nationalism is generated as a form of territorial 'class' reaction to this concentration of power and resources at the centre.
The obvious problem with Hechter's account is that it does not fit historical facts. In particular, territories such as Scotland, Catalunya and Quebec all developed relatively high degrees of institutional and cultural autonomy and, if anything, the spur to neo-nationalism lay in their relatively privileged rather than their relatively disadvantaged relationship to the central states in question. Peripheral regions of this sort are prosperous and enjoy a large degree of autonomy. Neo-nationalism seems to occur in regions with a relatively strong economic base, whose relationship with the central state has undergone significant economic or political readjustment. Similarly, it is difficult to speak of the primacy of'ethnic' factors in these instances. Rather, 'civic' identity in terms of membership of a territory seems to be preferred. In Linz's words:
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Ethnic peripheral nationalism will move from an emphasis on primordial elements to a definition based on territoriality. That is, definition would change from an emphasis on common descent, race, language, distinctive cultural tradition, in some cases religion, to one based on 'living and working' in an area, on a willingness to identify with that community.
(Linz, 1985:205)
In ideal-typical terms, these new civic nationalisms forefront their national identity over those of the state identities to which they belong. In so doing, they mobilise their history and culture by calling up the flags, hymns and icons which are available to them. This, of course, they share with other forms of nationalism. In Tom Nairn's words, 'A new political movement.. .it is in a number of ways analogous to historical or mainstream nationalism. But a more careful consideration shows its different place in history and its different character and potential. It deserves to be called "neo-nationalism" rather than nationalism' (1977:127).
Neo-nationalism in stateless nations
This, then, is the starting-point for our examination of late-twentieth-century forms of neo-nationalism which have emerged in Western industrial states. This chapter focuses on three examples in which neo-nationalism is reckoned to be most advanced (Keating, 1996): Scotland, Catalunya and Quebec. These cases have similarities as well as differences. They are all what we might call 'stateless nations', territories in which identification with the nation is greater than that with the state of which they are currently a part. The differences are obvious, but the comparative leverage we get is positive. For example, both Scotland and Catalunya are nested within states which are members of the European Union, which has an embryonic political project Europe de Patries to which these nations aspire. On the other hand, Quebec operates within Canada which participates in the North American Free Trade Association (NAFTA), which is more of an economic than a political project. Catalunya and Quebec appear to have stronger cultural politics than Scotland, notably regarding language, and with a capacity to mobilise Catholic religious identity. Both Catalunya and Quebec also have formally autonomous assemblies to manage domestic affairs, whereas Scotland has, as we write, none, although one is planned for the year 2000. Finally, Scotland and Quebec share a common British imperial legacy, and while they have different relationships to it as coloniser and colonised respectively, they have in common the general context of progressive economic liberalism since the eighteenth century.
The argument of this chapter is that there are a number of key characteristics of neo-nationalism, which are outlined first and then developed around case studies. These are as follows:
Neo-nationalism occurs in coherent civil societies which are not independent states, but with ostensible but varying degrees of political autonomy.
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In each there is a complex relationship between cultural nationalism and political nationalism, and these have converged in recent years. 'Civic' rather than 'ethnic' nationalism is emphasised; a stress for political purposes on territorial residence rather than lineage and blood.
Multiple national identities are a feature of political identity, rather than a mono-cultural one. Hence, Scots are also British, Catalans are also Spanish, and Quebecois are also Canadian, when it suits them. This plurality is a political resource which can be played in appropriate circumstances rather than a fixed characteristic.
It tends to occur in relatively rich regions rather than the poorest. LRelative
gratification' is more important than relative 'deprivation'.
Progressive political and economic aspects outweigh reactionary ones. Movements appear
as social-democratic or as neo-liberal, reflecting 'niche nationalism'. Attempts
are made to align leftist and rightist elements (learning to love—or live with—
the global market in a social-democratic or liberal way).
Different ideological elements are mixed and mobilised: right/left; ethnic/civic; past/
future; local/global; corporatist/neo-liberal; separatist/autonomist.
These shifts in ideological messages relate to changing and diverse social
constituencies. Unlike 'bourgeois' nationalist movements of the nineteenth
century, the social base is more free-floating and unpredictable.
The 'movement for sef-government is not simply aligned with supportfor the party. The
voters are adept at giving only contingent support at certain elections, and
voting in ostensibly 'unionist' ways in others.
Politicalmovements/parties are of relatively recent origin, that is, mainly in the second half of the twentieth century. The Scottish National Party, Convergence i Unio, and Parti Quebecois are in essence modern creations. There is ambiguity about their aims. Are they seeking independence or autonomy? Ambivalent terms are used in political debate, such as 'HomeRule', 'Autonomisme', Souverainete-Association or Consociation.
This ambivalence is reflected in terms used by analysts to describe the movements: such as 'regionalism', or 'regionalnationalism'or 'neo-nationalism'. The variable geometry of power: political debates take place within three dimensions not simply two dimensions: the nation, state and supra-state such as the European Union and NAFTA.
Civil society
In chapter 5 we explored what is meant by 'civil society', and how it relates to the concepts 'state' and 'nation'. Plainly, Scotland, Catalunya and Quebec are not states in the conventional sense that they do not have independent legislatures. Can we refer to Scotland, Catalunya and Quebec as 'civil societies'? Scotland did not cease to be a civil society in 1707, nor was it incorporated into greater England. Instead, the political settlement which was the Treaty of Union (note the word Treaty) was, in Tom Nairn's
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phrase, a settlement between two patrician classes for economic and political gains. On Scotland's side, it gave its merchants access to English markets at home and abroad. For England, it healed the running sore of Scotland's historic and troublesome alliance with the old enemy, France, by closing the backdoor to Gallic intrigue.
This settlement took place in 1707, long before what we now know as 'modern' processes began, and well in advance of the French and American Revolutions in the last quarter of the eighteenth century which were to give political change a democratic impetus. As Linda Colley (1992) pointed out, the 1707 Union did create something new. Greater England it was not. Instead, Scots took full advantage of the opportunity which England and the Empire provided, and were in no way confined to the subaltern tasks.
A genuine sense of Britishness was created with reference to two related aspects: war with France, and Protestantism. The invention of Britishness was forged in the long period of virtual or actual warfare with France from 1707 until 1837. As Colley points out, Britain:
was an invention forged above all by war. Time and time again, war with France brought Britons, whether they hailed from Wales or Scotland or England, into confrontation with an obvious hostile Other and encouraged them to define themselves collectively against it. They defined themselves as Protestants struggling for survival against the world's foremost Catholic power. They defined themselves against the French as they imagined them to be, superstitious, militarist, decadent and unfree.
(Colley, 1992:5)
Britishness sat lightly on top of the constituent nations as a kind of state-identity which is the key to understanding state-society relations in the UK and elsewhere. The British state was quite unlike later state formations which sought to integrate political, cultural and economic structures in the classical 'nation-state'. These formations demanded the alignment of state, nation and society, and even economy and culture in such a way that 'national identity' ran through all of these institutions as a connecting thread. Being a citizen in these modern states formed in the nineteenth century demanded allegiance, and in return the state was made accountable, and its sovereignty limited, often by means of the doctrine of popular rather than Crown/Parliamentary sovereignty as in Britain.
All in all, the Anglo-Saxon state, especially in its British form, was viewed, as Poggi points out, as a 'convenience', a gesellschaftlich reality. In contrast, the continental European state was seen as an 'entity', as The State. Comments Poggi: 'There is little gesellschaftlich about that' (1978:100). The point here is that the British state sat lightly upon civil society, whereas continental European states were thoroughly interwoven with theirs.
It is this relationship between state and civil society which is touched upon by commentators like Tom Nairn and Neal Ascherson when they speak of the British
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state as an anden regime. In Ascherson's words: 'It is closer in spirit to the monarchy overthrown in 1789 than to the republican constitutions which followed in France and elsewhere in Europe' (1988:148). The doctrine of the Crown-in-Parliament underpinned the British state at that crucial period in its formation in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries—between the self-styled Glorious Revolution of 1689 and the Treaty of Union in 1707. On paper, from the vantage point of the late twentieth century, it looked authoritarian, although in the context of the early eighteenth century, Britain was counted among the most liberal of the age.
This, then, is the context in which the Union took place between Scotland and England (and, to all intents and purposes, Wales and Ireland), well before the period now characterised as 'modern'. With hindsight, we might argue that the only kind of state which allowed the Scots to retain a high degree of civil autonomy was a 'pre-modern' one in which the links between high and low politics were tenuous indeed. It is doubtful if the Scots would have agreed to submerge their institutional autonomy into the British state if it had been a thoroughly modern formation. A 'modern' state formation would have required the integration of the 'nation' into the state, and with it the formation of a unitary-British— civil society. There were attempts especially in the nineteenth century to fashion a British imperial identity, and while this met with some success, especially at the popular level, by the second half of the century the Scottish agenda had begun to assert itself (R.D.Anderson, 1995; Morton, 1996).
What effect did the Union have on Scottish civil society? The short answer is probably not much. The lives of ordinary people were untouched and, crucially, the middle classes continued to run Scottish institutions which were largely in the hands of the lawyers, ministers and teachers who have done so much to shape modern Scotland and its values. When Scotland negotiated away its formal statehood in 1707, it retained much of the institutional apparatus of self-government. At the core was the 'holy trinity' of institutional autonomy—the law, the church and the education system. Scotland remains that legal anomaly—a society with its own law-making system and no parliament of its own. (There remains a debate in Scotland about whether one can consider semi-state bodies such as these as constituting 'civil society' or whether they are actually state institutions—see Paterson, 1994; Morton, 1996,1998b). At the core of civil society was the Kirk, which essentially constituted the local state, closely linked to the education system through 'parish' schools—the legacy of Scotland's Protestant revolution in the sixteenth century (Paterson, 1994:39). In Paterson's words:
The Union had left intact all that really mattered to daily life in
Scotland in the eighteenth century____The Union was, in Angus
Calder's words, 'a rational solution to very dangerous economic and political problems', involving the abandonment of an already highly constrained foreign policy in the interests of maintaining independent control over domestic policy.
(Paterson, 1991:105)
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The efflorescence of Scottish intellectual development, the Enlightenment, can also be traced to the relative autonomy of Scottish civil society. The removal of its aristocratic elite to the London court left Scottish cultural life very much in the hands of its professional classes who gave their imprint to this rich intellectual development at the end of the eighteenth century.
Day-to-day life remained in the hands of Scots, and this was consolidated in the 1832 Scottish Reform Act and in the settingup of ad Aocboards to administer prisons, poor law, healthcare, schools and crofting counties. The history of Scotland in the Union is one in which control over its civil society remained firmly in Scottish hands. By 1885, the diverse boards were consolidated under the control of the Scottish Office. That was to mark an important development in Scottish affairs because it saw the beginning of an explicitly political solution to the issues of Scottish autonomy. In Paterson's words:
If Scotland had had a fully separate state, the only significant extra it would have had would have been an extremely circumscribed foreign policy, which no doubt might have provided an alternative for those who emigrated to positions of power in the Empire, but which would hardly have made much difference to the way that Scottish society evolved.
(Paterson, 1991:107)
The irony, of course, is that the British state used the devolving of administrative power to the Scottish Office as a way of deflecting the demand for greater direct democracy in Scotland, and that this policy in turn has helped to reinforce the sense of grievance. The more a Scottish semi-state was created with devolved bureaucratic powers, the more obvious the democratic deficit became.
The shifting relationships between state and civil society were, of course, not unique to Scotland and Britain. As Poggi pointed out, the last century or so has seen an increasing fudging of the boundary between state and society. Notably, the extension of the franchise has brought new political and social pressures to bear on the state, and increasingly the state is constituted to exercise rule over society. He comments: 'the state tends to increase its power by widening the scope of its activities, but extending the range of societal interests on which rule is brought to bear' (Poggi, 1978:135). The state is required to address the concerns of its citizens more directly, and this presents the task of societal management for modern governments. In the post-war period, the state became the appropriate instrument for guaranteeing the life chances of its citizens, and ironing out social inequalities. Governments became major actors in economic competition between states in the quest for economic growth 'in the national interest'. Nationalism became more, not less, necessary in this process of international competition. This involvement had direct implications for the relationship between Scottish civil society and the British state.
By the 1990s, the delicate balance between Scottish civil society and the British state had been transformed. It had begun on the implicit understanding that
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Scotland would retain a high degree of self-governance of its social institutions. Parliamentary politics was a fairly unimportant side-show for much of the history of the Union. However, the pre-modern and largely unreconstructed British state had retained the doctrinal incubus of parliamentary sovereignty which became a central element in politics in the second half of the twentieth century. The ushering in of the welfare state after 1945 was an attempt to modernise British state structures in the light of demands for reform from civil society. This project, which represented the high-point of Labour power in Britain, required state-led social change but without major reforms of the British state itself. The state was required to do more, but did not have the legitimating mechanisms to carry out these reforms.
To what extent do Quebec and Catalunya share Scotland's characteristic as civil societies? In general terms, their histories suggest that they are weaker in this respect although they have formal political autonomy within their respective states whereas Scotland does not. Scotland's negotiated compromise in 1707 established it as a distinct civil society without a parliament. Catalunya's geographical position between the French and Spanish kingdoms gave it a degree of cultural and political distinctiveness, and by the sixteenth century it had a high degree of institutional autonomy reflected in its parliament, the Corts, and its government, the Generalitat which was responsible for the management of taxes raised for the Crown (Balcells, 1996:9). Catalunya developed a complex system of negotiated compromises which came to be known as padisme. In Keating's words: 'There was little space here for absolutism, or the unilateral imposition of authority. Monarchical prerogatives were strictly limited by custom and countervailing powers. Sovereignty was divided. Public life was dominated by a civic and commercial spirit' (Keating, 1996:116).
This system of political autonomy largely came to an end in 1714 following the War of the Spanish Succession, reinforced by the so-called decree of Nueva Planta issued by the king two years later. Royal authority and rule by the king's appointees replaced local autonomy, and the fiscal privileges were abolished. While Catalunya never regained its previous character as a distinctive civil society, the process of indigenous industrialisation in the nineteenth century helped to reinforce the power of the Catalan bourgeoisie, which was socially conservative and Catholic. Nevertheless, the fact that Catalunya was developing ahead of Spain 'inspired the Catalans with a feeling of superiority which prompted them to rebel against their political subservience and cultural dependence on Castilian, or Castilianized, Spain' (Balcells, 1996:21).
This was the foundation on which the Renaixenga, the mid-nineteenth-century cultural revival was built. Drawing upon the Romantic movement, it injected a new interest in arts and language, notably the Joes Florals (Floral Games), the revival of an ancient literary contest. This gave a cultural basis to Catalan civil society, but it had its limitations. In Balcells' words:
While a Catalan literature had been created, a Catalan culture was still required, and that meant Catalanizing education and securing
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official-language status for Catalan. In order to achieve this, it was necessary to bring about the political autonomy without which cultural autonomy was impossible.
(Balcells, 1996:27)
While political autonomy was briefly restored in 1932 under the Republican government in Madrid, its abolition under Franco in 1939 and the suppression of the language in public places including schools meant that it was not until the restoration of democracy in Spain in the 1970s that the Generalität was reintroduced.
Today, Catalunya has a strong civil society fostered by its political autonomy, and built around its language base. Keating points out that the Generalität lists more than 25,000 associations legally constituted to pursue public interest affairs; there are nearly 500 private foundations, and a strong co-operative movement. He concludes: 'Catalan civil society remains a bastion of Catalan values and identity and an important arena for nation-building' (Keating, 1996:150). In many ways the Catalan political project is seen as a means of protecting and developing language and culture, and giving them political expression. By 1997, a controversy had opened up concerning further legislation (Ley Catalan) which would give priority to Catalan over Castilian and, at the time of writing, it is not clear whether this legislation will go ahead.
What of Quebec? Its foundation as Nouvelle France gave it an obvious identity, which was reinforced by the social, cultural, economic and political organisation of the colony. As a result, following the Conquest of 1763, the British were confronted by an established civil society. As Jean-Guy Lacroix points out:
French-Canadian civil society had already been organised and structured by a set of specific institutions (among others, the family, religion and schools) providing it with a self-sufficient, internal socio-cultural force. Having already taken root, its cultural hegemony was strong enough to resist assimilation and impose and reproduce its specificity in the political field.
(Lacroix, 1996:65)
However, as a conquered territory, Quebec was forced by the Royal Proclamation of 1763 to surrender its seigneurial system of land holding, to accept English laws, the submission of the Catholic church to British royalty and the state, and English as the official language of state. Following social unrest, the Quebec Act of 1774 did reinstate the French civil code and the seigneurial system, lifted the restrictions on the church, and helped to reinforce the homogeneity and social cohesion of the colony, and to reproduce its civil society over time. Over the next 200 years the tension between this politically integrated territory yet distinctive civil society has been the dominant theme of relations between Quebec and Canada. This has been aggravated by the development of the state and territory of Canada,
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from a distinction between Upper and Lower Canada, to a thoroughgoing federal state in which Quebec's demand to be acknowledged as a 'distinct society', one of the two co-founders of the Canadian state, is overridden by its status as simply one province among many.
Language is not only a cultural marker for Quebecois society, but is also a key institution of civil society through which most other things are translated and given meaning. The role of the Catholic church was not only a distinctive aspect of this society, but a means for helping to integrate Quebec into Canada, as the state recognised its special privileges and concerns. In a social and political context, the church underpinned the rural, conservative society— 'la survivance' —which was largely swept away in the 1960s by la revolution tranquille. This process of social and political modernisation ended the church's special status as well as the system of patronage politics under the control of right-wing parties, and ushered in a new kind of politics which was more leftist and secular. This process has also had economic implications as business has become indigenised, developing close links of a corporatist kind with government often referred to as 'Quebec Inc.'
Much of Quebec society is self-contained, with a high density of local associations and organisations, much like Scotland and Catalunya. As Keating observes: 'Quebec has a dense network of non-governmental institutions and voluntary organisations, which take as their reference point the province rather than the federal level' (1996:97). It is the tension between this civil society and its development on the one hand, and the governance of the state on the other which is reflected in political demands for greater autonomy to the point of formal independence. Indeed, in all three societies, we can observe the tensions between civil society and the state, between social and economic developments on the one hand, and the political framework on the other. It is the survival and development of civil societies that have confronted the states in question with the problem of how to accommodate their demands.
Cultural and political nationalism
The second aspect of neo-nationalism which is worth noting is the relationship between cultural and political nationalism. We have grown used to the notion that these are closely connected, that one leads to the other, yet it has been a feature of nationalism in the countries we are dealing with that the relationship is complex. Simply put, it seems that until recently culture was an alternative, an antidote, to political nationalism in these stateless nations, rather than an integral part of it. If people could realise their cultural aspirations, then what need did they have of political nationalism? Cultural nationalism could be seen as a safety valve which let off the steam of nationalism lest it take a more challenging political form. That was the sentiment behind the comment by the Scottish nationalistjim Sillars that the Scots were 'ninety-minute nationalists', happy to cheer on their sporting team, but unwilling to translate that identification into voting for the nationalist party.
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The relationship between cultural and political nationalism has been one of the key defining themes of the debate on Scotland's future in recent years. The distorted or deformed nature of Scottish culture—its tartanry and kailyard imagery—is blamed for ingraining in Scots a sense of their inferiority and dependency (Nairn, 1977; Beveridge and Turnbull, 1989), and is reflected in what is referred to as the 'Scottish cringe', a lack of personal and political confidence in people's capacity to take charge of their lives. The critics of tartanry/kailyardism saw Scotland as suffering from 'sub-national deformation', or neurosis, a divided consciousness in which the cultural and the political were destined to remain apart. In Nairn's words:
It was cultural because of course it could not be political; on the other hand, this culture could not be straightforwardly nationalist either— a direct substitute for political action like, for example, so much Polish literature of the 19th century. It could only be 'sub-nationalist' in the sense of venting its national content in various crooked ways— neurotically, so to speak, rather than directly.
(Nairn, 1977:156)
The debate, then, about 'real' Scottish culture is almost always going to be about historical excavation of the 'golden age', or attempts to construct a pure national character free from alien and inferiorist influences. The search for a truly Scottish culture is inevitably retrospective and romantic, a celebration of the past. There is a growing amount of Scottish historiography which argues that history took a funny turn after the Union of 1707. As Scotland lost its formal statehood, so it appropriated that which had flourished in the currency of the Romantic movement, the Gaelic vision, for example (Chapman, 1978). More recently, Colin Kidd (1993) has argued in similar vein that Scottish Whig historians of the late eighteenth century looked to the Anglo-British state to offer a more progressive and liberating vision of society. This was not another example of the Scottish 'cringe' but a rational assessment of the opportunities for liberty and progress set against those offered by Scotland alone.
The novelist Walter Scott is often taken to task for inflicting on Scots this cultural divide between head and heart, being British versus being Scottish. Scott was a central figure in romanticising Scotland, and is held responsible by many opposed to the 'deformation' of Scottish culture. He is credited (or blamed) with creating a Scotland divided between the heart (its romantic Scottish past) and the head (its rational British future). This Caledonian antisyzygy, the battle between unrestrained fantasy and dour realism, is judged to be at the heart of the Scottish psychiatric-political condition (Nairn, 1977:150).
Because Scottish identity could not take a 'state' form of expression, it was judged to have been subverted into a cultural backwater of a deformed nationalism. The key to this critique lies in the relationship between culture and politics. 'Normal' societies are deemed to be those in which national culture and politics are fused.
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In recent years, the discourse which sees Scotland as locked into a choice between reason and emotion, being British or Scottish, between political and cultural nationalism, has been fast eroding. It has become clear that the cultural renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s which produced new works of art in literature (Craig, 1987) was not independent of the stirrings of modern political nationalism, most obviously the creation of the modern Scottish National Party, and the broad movement for Home Rule. Both cultural and political developments reflected the decline of the English impérium. The second twentieth-century revival in the late 1960s and 1970s saw cultural and political nationalism developing apace so that it is now much more difficult to argue that being culturally Scottish but politically British is consistent. By the 1990s the connections between culture and politics are plain and powerful, but still not entirely straightforward.
In both Catalunya and Quebec, a similar re-connection has occurred, although the paths have been different, reflecting the historical trajectories of these societies. In the former, Catalanisme took its early expression in a cultural form in the Renaixenga, which was the prelude to its political expression (Balcells, 1996). Catalan culture was both religious and linguistic, features which did not alienate a developing bourgeoisie in the middle of the nineteenth century. It was, however, obvious by the end of the century that without political autonomy there could be no long-term cultural independence. This was given special force following the victory of Franco's Spanish nationalists in 1939 when the defeat of the republicans pushed Catalan cultural expression into the undergrowth or into exile. Between 1939 and 1975, nearly 200 periodicals and 650 books in Catalan were published abroad (Balcells, 1996). From the 1950s a complex network of social and cultural organisations grew up in Catalunya itself, ostensibly non-political but able to give expression to being Catalan. Survival gave way to recovery and regeneration in the 1960s, and there was an explosion in literature, song, folklore, film and cultural studies. The stage was set for the assertion of political rights in the early 1970s, which developed into the Assembled de Catalunya in 1971 under the auspices of the always-Catalan Catholic church. Based as it was on the Catalan principle of poetisme— co-operation—its task was not to overthrow Francoism but to effect its peaceful democratic transition when its end came.
In Quebec, la survivance, the survival of cultural identity, was an expression of conservative nationalism dominated by the Catholic church which was to the Right as its Catalan counterpart was to the Left. This clerical conservatism had underpinned the petit bourgeois politics ofDuplessis andhis Union Natixmale which governed Quebec from 1936 until 1959. The church and business groups supported Duplessis, and nationalism was kept as a means of expressing this rural, small-town conservative ethos. This world which had channelled cultural nationalism into a narrow political mould was blown open in the 1960s by la revolution tranquille. This involved modernising not simply the economy but a whole range of social and political attitudes. A new Francophone middle class was emerging with strong public-sector and technocratic interests, whose political aspirations found their way into new political formations, notably the Parti
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Quebecois which appeared in 1968. A few short years later, it won control of the provincial assembly in 1976, and so began a programme of politicising the language issue, most notably in Bill 101 which prioritised French over English as the public language of state. Nothing spelled out more obviously the re-connection of culture and politics than this. 'Language politics' became the essence of nationalism in Quebec. The language was not merely a means of expression and communication, but the public assertion of political identity, a connecting of the personal and the public around 'possessive individualism' (Handler, 1988).
Multiple identities
If a single and homogeneous national identity is a key feature of classical nationalism, then plural and shifting identities characterise neo-nationalism. Built into the classical model is the assumption that cultural identity is constructed in terms of a single, shared culture, in Stuart Hall's words, a 'sort of collective, one true self reflecting 'common historical experiences and shared cultural codes which provide us as "one people" with stable, unchanging and continuous frames of reference and meaning beneath the shifting divisions and vicissitudes of our actual history' (S.Hall, 1990:223).
Identity in the late twentieth century is obviously far less clear-cut than this. It is not something which is achieved and constantly reinforced. We should think of cultural identity less as an accomplished fact and more as a 'production', never complete, always in process, and closely linked with how it is (re)presented. Further, there is no single representation, but a variety of ways of constituting 'who we are', and 'what we have become'. In essence, it is a matter of'becoming' not 'being'. Hall comments:
It belongs to the future as much as to the past. It is not something which already exists, transcending place, time, history and culture. Cultural identities come from somewhere, have histories. But like everything which is historical, they undergo constant transformation. Far from being eternally fixed in some essentialised past, they are subject to the continuous 'play' of history, culture and power.
(S.Hall, 1990:224)
The task, then, is not to recover the past, as if it—a unified essence—is waiting simply to be found, a sort of touchstone of national identity, but it is necessary instead to have a debate with the past about who we are now and who we want to become. National culture is a discourse, a way of constructing meanings which influences and organises our actions and our conceptions of ourselves. The idea of the nation is a 'narrative' (Bhabha, 1990) whose origin is obscure, but whose symbolic power to mobilise the sense of identity and allegiance is strong. By looking at national identity in this way, as multifaceted and plural, we begin to see that it cannot be taken for granted, that it will reflect social power, and that competing identities will emerge and challenge each other. We are better able to
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recognise that national cultures and identities are not fixed and immutable. They are subject to processes of translation and change. Hall's term 'cultures of hybridity' refers to the ways in which identities are subject to the play of history, political representation and difference, and are very unlikely to be pure or unitary.
In the Scottish case we find that people consider themselves many things in terms of political identity. The resolution of'national identities' was, for much of the twentieth century, relatively straightforward. To be Scottish (or English, or Welsh) was a complementary aspect of being British, which in turn had two aspects—a UK one, and an overseas one—both reflected in rule from a Westminster 'imperial' parliament. These were nested identities in the main, to be seen as a set of concentric circles moving outward from the local to the (Scottish) national to the British to the imperial and so on.
The late twentieth century has seen new challenges of a more overtly nationalistic kind. 'Britishness' in these islands has waned as older 'national' identities have grown. Hence, the contest between 'state' and 'national' identities in these islands seems particularly fertile ground in which to examine identity politics.
It takes little to persuade us that people living in Scotland think of themselves these days as Scottish (their national identity) rather than British (state identity). For example, in the 1997 Scottish Election Survey 86 per cent of respondents opted for 'Scottish' and 46 per cent 'British', with 12 per cent 'European' (multi-choice was possible). These forced-choice responses of course are crude, and in the last decade they have been refined in scalar terms by the Moreno question, which provides the consistent findings given in Table 7.1.
We may argue about what these labels mean—can we be sure, for example, that the same terms 'Scottish' and 'British' evoke the same thing? —but there is little doubt that the results are consistent. In all the surveys to date between 59 and 69 per cent of people living in Scotland give greater emphasis to being Scottish over being British (categories 1 and 2), whereas the percentage prioritising their Britishness (categories 4 and 5) is 10 per cent or less. At the same time, most Scots—
Table 7.1 National identity in Scotland
	July 1986	Sept 1991	April 1992	SES*1992	SES*1997
Scottish not British	39%	40%	32%	19%	23%
More Scottish than	30%	29%	29%	40%	38%
British					
Equally Scottish and	19%	21%	29%	33%	27%
British					
More British than	4%	3%	3%	3%	4%
Scottish					
British not Scottish	6%	4%	6%	3%	4%
None of these	2%	3%	1%	2%	4%
Sampk size	1021	1042	1056	957	882
Source: Brown et al. (1996:198), and preliminary data analysis for 1997 general election (*Scottish Election Study).
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between half and three-quarters—claim dual identity, as Scottish and British (categories 2, 3 and 4). These responses are broadly consistent with social characteristics—age, gender, class. For example, young people, and manual workers opt for the 'Scottish' end of the spectrum, with older people, women and the middle classes being more 'centrist' in their identities, while no social group opts for identities at the 'British' end.
In Catalunya, given the history of recent dictatorship from the centre, and the fact that an autonomous government has existed for nearly twenty years, we might expect that Catalanisme would be stronger. In fact, using the same scales as for the Scottish data above, fewer people in Catalunya feel Catalan and more feel Spanish than we might expect.
Comparing these data with their Scottish equivalents, we can see that whereas the ratio of Scots prioritising their Scottishness over their Britishness is of the order of 6 to 1, among Catalans the balance is about equal as regards national (Catalan) and state (Spanish) identity. The number of Catalans claiming dual identity is also high (over 60 per cent), but in this regard they are comparable with their Scottish counterparts. The modal responses are, however, different. Whereas among Scots the mode lies in the category 'More Scottish than British', among Catalans the norm is to claim to be 'equally Catalan and Spanish' (ranging from 36 per cent in 1990 to 44 per cent in 1995). Given rates of in-migration from the rest of Spain since the 1950s, it is not surprising that place of birth is an important determinant of national identity. People born in Catalunya are more likely to claim to be only Catalan (18 per cent) or to have dual identity (42 per cent), and while around one-third of those born outside Catalunya say they are Spanish only, a degree of Catalan-ness is claimed by the rest.
Surveys of this sort are indicative only, but they do suggest a complex relationship between state (British or Spanish) and national (Scottish or Catalan) identities. It could be that having established autonomy over their own domestic affairs, the Catalans can afford to be more relaxed about their national and state identities, and are more likely to see them as nested within each other, or at least not in
Table 7.2 Self-identification in Catalunya, 1990-5
	1990	1991	1992	1993	1994	1995
Only Catalan	6%	15%	17%	12%	11%	10%
More Catalan	23%	21%	17%	18%	21%	17%
than Spanish						
Equally Catalan	36%	37%	37%	42%	42%	44%
and Spanish						
More Spanish	10%	7%	6%	9%	15%	16%
than Catalan						
Only Spanish	22%	18%	21%	19%	11%	12%
Don't know	3%	2%	1%	1%	1%	1%
Sample size	557	2191	1684	1695	1704	1297
Source:Moreno and Arriba (1996:85).
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current competition in the political marketplace. The Scots on the other hand have not, at the time of writing, achieved an autonomous parliament, and asserting Scottishness over Britishness is an important weapon in a political struggle. It is interesting that the survey results we have referred to above for Scotland are on a par with those for Euskadi where the ratio of Basque to Spanish is also of the order of six to one.
In Quebec, we do not have data comparable to those for Scotland and Catalunya, but those we have suggest that over the last few decades there has been an assertion of being Quebecois over being (French-) Canadian. This is reflected in data showing that the percentage of francophones calling themselves 'Canadiens' has fallen from 34 per cent in 1970 to a mere 9 per cent in 1990, whereas the description 'Quebecois' has risen from 21 to 59 per cent over the same period. As Keating observes: 'Between 1980 and 1991, the percentage feeling profoundly attached to Canada fell from 56 to 30°/o, and this correlates with support for sovereignty' (1996:83). Nevertheless, we can surmise from these figures and from the political debate that some identification with Canada has not atrophied entirely, and that mobilising national and state identities in each case is part of the weaponry in the struggle for greater autonomy. In all three nations, there undoubtedly has been a move to assert national identity, but it seems that there is a degree of manipulation and instrumentality about it, reflecting the negotiated and attenuated character of territorial politics in the Western world.
The politics of economic opportunity
One of the key features of territories in which neo-nationalism has emerged is that they broadly belong to the world of the economically privileged rather than the disadvantaged. In recent years, one of the most obvious and explicit examples of this in the Western world has been the LegaNord'm northern Italy which has made much of its opposition to what it sees as a poor and parasitical South. Such explicit examples of 'beggar my neighbour' have been rare, and are less strong in the political agendas of Scotland, Catalunya and Quebec, though no doubt present. Nevertheless, we cannot ignore the fact that the politics of relative deprivation have played a part in their relationship to the centre, and that in recent years they have perceived that this relationship has altered so that the old one has to be renegotiated. This is the sense in which we encounter what Tom Nairn (1975) has called the nationalism of the elect rather than nationalism of the damned.
In the case of Scotland, it is important to remember that the Union of 1707 which joined it to England was in essence a marriage of convenience. As Clive Lee observes: 'While the short-term economic effects of the Union were disappointing to some Scots, historians have generally agreed that in the longer term Scotland gained substantially from it' (1995:13). For the Scots, access to English markets at home and abroad was in many ways the raison d'etre of the Union, and for much of the subsequent 260 years the economic balance sheet produced a positive effect for Scotland. It was of course the discovery of oil in
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the North Sea which altered the political calculus in Scotland's favour, and this almost immediately coincided with the rise of the SNP as a strong force in Scottish politics. Much of the subsequent thirty years has seen the constitutional debate focus on the balance of trade and payments between Scotland and London rather than on the classically romantic themes of nineteenth-century nationalism. The fact that the SNP is currently led by a bank economist is perhaps testament to the instrumental and economistic character of nationalism in modern Scotland. It is more a battle about the pocket-book than it is about the prayer-book or the song-sheet. The transformation of the Scottish economy away from its heavy industrial base, selling to imperial or British markets, to an international one based on hi-tech and services in a European market is a reflection of both the political and the economic transformation of Scotland's relationship with the British state, and the possible end of the negotiated compromise begun almost 300 years ago.
It has longbeen recognised that Catalunya is one of the economically advanced parts of Spain, and from the middle of the nineteenth century it, along with Euskadi, represented the vanguard of industrialisation. Catalunya had developed early trading links with much of the Mediterranean for much of its history, but it was excluded from establishing colonies in Spanish America by Madrid. However, it seems that the reasons for early industrialisation vis-a-vis Spain as a whole rested on certain social structural features. In the eighteenth century the possession of land (through long-term leases rather than outright ownership) was widespread, and Catalan law encouraged primogeniture (Balcells, 1996:20). Specialised agriculture, wine exports and the development of textiles, coupled with the key role of an indigenous Catalan bourgeoisie, all helped to give Catalunya an early and continuing economic advantage.
Since the fall of the Francoist dictatorship, the role of this native bourgeoisie in both economy and politics (via the ruling coalition of Christian Democrats (Unio) and the smaller Liberal party (Convergengia)) has been extended. Big business is well-represented at the Spanish level and Spain represents Catalunya's biggest market (helping to explain the reluctance of nationalists in the Convergengia i Unio coalition to head for an independent Catalunya), while smaller business groups such as those affiliated to PIMEC (Patronal de la Petita iMitjana Empresa de Catalunya) are more reliant on local Catalan markets.
In general, Catalunya has a higher level of economic development, reflected in the in-migration of unskilled and semi-skilled workers from the rest of Spain over the last forty years. This helps to explain why, especially in the growing context of the European Community/Union since 1986, Catalan capitalists are ambivalent about the political project. On the one hand, Catalunya is relatively 'over-developed' vis-a-vis Spain and does more business with the European Union, while on the other hand there is reliance on Spanish markets which full independence would threaten.
Just as the relative economic situations of both Scotland and Catalunya vis-avis their respective states helps to account for the rise of neo-nationalism, so the modernisation of Quebec's economy is a key aspect in its political development.
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The political economy of Quebec has moved from having an indigenous agricultural economy and an industrial and financial sector dominated by anglophone interests, to one in which local ownership has grown, especially in manufacturing and finance (Keating, 1996:93). This transformation has been aided by local state leverage via quangos and agencies to encourage indigenous development. The crossover from public to private sectors is actively encouraged, and large state projects such as Hydro-Quebec have helped to open up the northern parts of the province.
The effect of this economic transformation is to generate a Quebecois business class, and a growing confidence that the wider North American market, notably through NAFTA, will help to lessen dependence on the Canadian one. As Michael Keating points out: 'Deregulation, neo-liberalism and free trade have not destroyed the Quebec model of development but they have transformed it. It is geared now to the interests of large corporations, based in Quebec but increasingly continental or global in their scale of operations' (1996:6). The social tensions deriving from this project of 'market nationalism' have impacted on the capacity of the Parti Quebecois government to pursue social democratic and welfarist policies, a feature which is shared in Scotland and Catalunya. In all three cases, however, the changing relationship of the political economy to the nationalist project is a key defining feature of neo-nationalism.
Changing political ideologies
Are neo-nationalist movements on the Right or the Left of the political spectrum? The inherited conventional wisdom is that nationalism is petit bourgeois in its politics and ideology, at odds with labourist or social democratic forces. This, however, tends to be more a matter of contingency and history rather than ideology, reflecting the fact that the industrial working class were brought into the industrial and political process by trades unions and 'socialist' parties at particular conjunctures. Hence, later political formations like neo-nationalism have had to fight for political space in a crowded field in which 'class' politics defines the agenda.
This is certainly the case in Scotland, where Labour took longer to establish itself as the working-class party than it did in England. For ethnic and religious reasons it was not until after 1918 that Labour became the party of the Scottish working class, and even then, large sections of the Protestant working class did not lose their adherence to the Conservative Party until after 1945 (Brown et al., 1996). By the late 1960s the Scottish National Party found itself accused of being 'tartan Tories', an accusation based on the seeming fact that it did best in Conservative seats, a feature which reflected its capacity to mobilise the anti-Tory vote in these constituencies rather than its political conservatism. In the post-war years, the SNP positioned itself in the centre of Scottish politics, and it was not until the 1980s that it set out an overtly social-democratic agenda in large part to combat Labour as Scotland's majority party (in terms of seats but not in terms of
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votes). This was in part tactical as the SNP stood in second place to Labour in many seats, and saw its chance of political breakthrough in challenging Labour for a working-class vote. Hence, while in the October 1974 election (its best performance to date in a general election) the SNP did well across all social classes— especially among skilled manual and intermediate professional workers—by 1992 its change of tactics and ideology produced a better electoral performance among manual workers generally. In this way, the party recognises that it has a capacity to tailor its appeal according to political contingencies, and to naturalise itself as the party of 'all the nation', a category which can be redefined as the moment allows.
This ability to occupy 'niche' nationalism can also be seen in the cases of Catalunya and Quebec. Of course, in the case of Convergengia i Unio (CiU), its historical origins are on the centre-right, but we should not forget other nationalist groupings such as the older Esquerra Republkana de Catalunya (ERC) which is much more to the Left, but is far less electorally successful. However, ERC does provide a leftist nationalist challenge to CiU which it cannot ignore. Hence, neo-nationalism in Catalunya also has to play across the ideological range, challenged as it is on the Right by the Spanish Partido Popular, and on the Left both by ERC, and by the Socialists and Communists. The latter parties, while they have local Catalan forms (Partits dels Socialists de Catalunya—PSC; and Iniciativaper Catalunya— IC), find themselves pulled between their Spanish and their Catalan electorates, in much the same way that the Scottish Labour Party is likely to find when it establishes a Scottish parliament in Edinburgh.
The nationalist groupings have no such problems, but have to counter the argument that local parliaments have less power than the Cortes centred in Madrid. Much then depends on the tactical skill of nationalist politicians, and none is as consummate as the Catalan leader Jordi Pujol, whose longevity and ubiquity in Catalan politics is reflected in the fact that he is known simply as Jordi'. (The son of the Dutch manager of Barcelona football club—as 'Barga', itself a carrier of considerable nationalist identity—was referred to in the Catalan press as Taltre Jordi', the other Jordi). The fact that the CiU along with moderate Basque nationalists is in defacto alliance with the Partido Popular in Madrid, just as Pujol's CiU kept Gonzales' Socialists in power for much of the 1990s, gives Pujol and his fellow nationalists considerable leverage. It also indicates their capacity to work with both Right and Left, and to adopt appropriate political ideology as and when the need arises.
In the case of Quebec, we can see there too the capacity of the Parti Quebecois (PQ) to mobilise along the political spectrum. The PQ^came to power after the petit bourgeois party, Union Nationale, had been discredited in the early 1960s, and was a vital part of the social and cultural 'revolution tranquilk'. This process of modernisation had both a liberal and a social democratic strand, and the PQ^ fought the Liberal Party at provincial level for this constituency. As Keating (1996) points out, nationalism in Quebec has ranged at various times from extreme Right to revolutionary Left. The problem for the PQ^in recent years is that while its modern social base is urban and working class, it has been forced to adopt
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programmes of fiscal austerity and pro-capital policies. Being able to range across the ideological spectrum has its disadvantages as well as its advantages.
In general, then, what characterises the main political forms of neo-nationalism, at least in Scotland, Catalunya and Quebec, is that while they have different social and political histories, they all confront the opportunities and constraints of 'niche' nationalism. As appropriate, they can present themselves on the Left as well as the Right, as in favour of neo-liberalism as social democracy, as civic as well as ethnic, depending on the circumstances. In these regards, they have to be understood as quite different kinds of animals from those nationalist movements and parties which ushered in the modern Western state in the nineteenth century.
What is neo-nationalism for?
At the beginning of this chapter, we saw that much of the conventional wisdom as regards neo-nationalism is to see it merely as a way of exerting political pressure on the centre: 'voice' in lieu of'exit', to use Hirschman's metaphors (1970). This focus on parties as pressure groups rather than part of a broader movement is also reflected in the terms used to describe it. As Lynch points out: A plethora of terms has developed to define the phenomenon of minority nationalism. Substate nationalism, regionalism, ethnonationalism...new nationalisms...ethnic separatism...and stateless nationalism...have all been used to define minority nationalism' (Lynch, 1996:4).
This raises a basic question about neo-nationalism: is its aim independence or something less than that? The short answer is that we find a variety of goals, some short-term, others long-term, and this is expressed through the declared aims. In Scotland, for example, the term 'Home Rule', coined initially by the Liberal Party at the end of the nineteenth century to refer to devolved assemblies throughout the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland as it then was, took on an ambiguity in the twentieth century and is used both as a generic term for any form of self-government and in the narrower sense of devolved government. Those who prefer the term 'Home Rule' to 'devolution' are often making a nationalist point. The former term implies Scottish sovereignty, while the latter acknowledges that sovereignty resides with the British state. In Catalunya, and Spain more generally since 1975, 'Autonomisme' is the achieved goal of the CiU, who are coy about outright independence at least in the short term. In Quebec, the political debate of the last twenty years is indicative of this ambiguity: 'sovereignty-association' and 'consociation' implying that something less than full-or old-style independence is called for. Part of this is tactical, but the parallels are clear. Jordi Pujol, for instance, commented to a Quebec journalist: 'Nous aspirons a un statut simihire a celui de Quebec actuellement, c'est-d-dire une reconnaissance de personalite difference.. Je ne suispasfederaliste parce que lefederalisme recouvre un critere homogeneisateur. Cependant, nouspourrions essayer la voie du federalisme asymetrique tel qu 'il existe au Canada' (Jordi Pujol, 'vice-roi d'Espagne'). To muddy the waters further, he has spoken
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positively of the shift to a 'Europe of the Regions', while pointing out that 'this term was chosen to serve as a common, generic name that would be acceptable to nations such as Catalonia where the word "region" is not acceptable' (Jordi Pujol, 'Regional Power in the New Europe', lecture given at Complutense University of Madrid, El Escorial, 18 July 1991). In his manifesto 'Construir Catalunya', published in 1980, Pujol is careful to define being Catalan as someone 'who lives and works in Catalonia and wants to be Catalan' (quoted in Guibernau, 1997:91). The 'will to be' (voluntat de ser) is what defines nationalism for him rather than pre-ordained ethnic factors.
In like manner, the relationship between devolved government and independence is complex. In neo-nationalist parties there is a debate about whether or not devolution leads to independence ('the thin end of the wedge' to supporters and opponents alike), or is a barrier to it, buying off separatist support. This debate is especially important in the context of supra-national governmental bodies like the European Union where old-style nineteenth-century independence as 'sovereignty' is no longer possible. Hence, the SNP can campaign for 'Independence in Europe' (the models being Ireland, Denmark and so on), albeit that a significant minority of its support in opinion polls (around a quarter) wishes for Independence outwith Europe. In the 1992 election survey, for example, while 43 per cent of SNP supporters favoured Independence within the European Union, 14 per cent supported Independence outwith the EU (Brown etal., 1996: table 7.11).
Nevertheless, there is a good case for saying that the development of European integration has facilitated regionalist and nationalist movements in part because they recognise that full economic independence is no longer feasible in the late twentieth century, and also because it seems easier to persuade the electorate that what is envisaged is a difference of degree not of kind. Peter Lynch puts it this way:
In the late twentieth century party goals now favour independence in Europe, a Europe of the regions and the creation of a decentralized and federal European Union. Autonomy and European integration have therefore become intertwined, and this process has occurred over the long term and looks set to continue
(Lynch, 1996:197)
While it is true that Quebec does not have the advantage in these respects of being within the European Union, and that NAFTA is essentially an economic and not a political concept as such, it too has the capacity to operate within the new variable geometry of power between nation, state and supra-state. Hence, it can operate defacto within its wider continental trading area (with regard to the selling of hydro-power to the US, for example), as well as using the wider framework for rhetorical purposes, that is, to show its electorate that it is behaving as an 'as if government. Quebec's relationship with the US is already important: the US takes 75 per cent of its foreign exports and provides 46 per cent of its imports (Keating, 1996:104). Keating cites opinion poll data which suggest that
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a majority of Quebecois think that sovereignty and separatism are not the same thing (ibid.: 82-3), and while most people want Quebec to have full control over education and cultural affairs, few are willing to shoulder the burden for defence and foreign affairs. Keating observes: 'it is unlikely that Quebec would be excluded from NAFTA, pace some commentaries in the rest of Canada. NAFTA, however, is not a unitary regime, to which a state can simply adhere. It is a complex system of bilateral, trilateral and sectoral agreements, and Quebec's place within this would have to be negotiated' (ibid.: 110).
Further evidence that neo-nationalism is different from its more orthodox predecessor comes from the fact, it seems, that the electorate is quite prepared to play the political system, and if this means voting for the nationalist party without committing oneself to its central tenet of independence, then so be it. Hence, in Scotland it is now well established in election surveys and opinion polls that around one-third of SNP voters prefer devolution to independence, while a significant minority of Labour voters (whose policy devolution is) are in favour of independence. For example, in 1997,31 per cent of SNP voters favoured devolution, and 22 per cent of Labour voters independence (Scottish Election Study).
A similar capacity to play the system is reflected in Catalunya where it has become established that voters often behave differently in elections for the Spanish Cortes (where the socialists got 40 per cent of the vote in the 1996 general election, and the CiU 30 per cent), and in the autonomous elections for the Catalan parliament (in 1995 the CiU took 41 per cent of the vote, and the socialists 25 per cent). When a Scottish Home Rule parliament is created in Edinburgh, we are likely to see similar strategic voting behaviour. For example, in an opinion poll during the 1997 general election campaign, 47 per cent said they would vote Labour, and 28 per cent SNP, but that in an election of a domestic parliament, these figures would narrow considerably to 39 and 38 per cent respectively. Most of these transfers were from Labour supporters, and some from the smaller Liberal Democrat party (Scottish Affairs, 20,1997).
As regards Quebec, the PQ^does not even stand in federal elections. In 1996 this allowed a loose coalition of nationalists operating as Bloc Quebecois to win so many seats that they became for a time the official Canadian opposition in the federal parliament, while the Progressive Conservative government of Brian Mulroney was only elected because nationalists opted for him as 'favourite son' and against the Liberal party, the PQJs main opposition in the province. In other words, 'nationalist' voting is likely to be greater in Home Rule/autonomous/ provincial elections where 'domestic' issues are especially salient.
Conclusion
This chapter has explored the emergence of 'neo-nationalist' movements in advanced industrial countries in the West. By and large, they adopt a civic rather than an ethnic focus—'demos' not 'ethnos'. We can, of course, find instances of
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THE RISE OF NEO-NATIONALISM
the latter in all three societies where communal solidarity verges on the racist, focusing on the politics of exclusion rather than inclusion, born of being a minority in a larger state territory. Anti-English sentiment in Scotland, hostility in Quebec to anglophones or allophones (those whose first language is neither French nor English), and overly discriminating in favour of Catalan speakers in Catalunya would be instances of this.
Nevertheless, I have argued that conventional accounts of nationalism either treat these examples as a throwback to atavistic or ethnic forms of nationalism, or reduce them to mere forms of pressure group politics simply aimed at wresting more resources from the centre—in other words, that they are not 'real' forms of nationalism at all. In this respect, they are mistaken. It is a feature of nationalism in general that it is a multifaceted and adaptable ideology, and that it reflects not simply the historic memory of separate identities in certain territories—what we might call its 'vertical' significance—but connects with key current issues of economic, political and cultural power in societies of the late twentieth century —its 'horizontal' significance. We cannot dismiss neo-nationalism as simply an historical ethnic memory-trace, nor as something 'epiphenomenal' which ought to be explained in terms of other social forces such as social class. It is the confluence of both vertical and horizontal sets of processes which gives neo-nationalism its power and significance in the territorial politics of Western states. In like manner, nationalism has generic as well as specific meaning in post-communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe, as the next chapter will demonstrate.
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