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Janus faces of an intellectual life: Tom Nairn, nationalism and globalisation

2023; Wiley; Volume: 29; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/nana.12967

1354-5078

Paul James,

Political Systems and Governance

does nationalism stand over the passage to modernity, for human society. As human kind is forced through its strait doorway, it must look desperately back into the past, to gather strength wherever it can be found for the ordeal of ‘development’ … this is a rite de passage so terrible, so enforced by outside power, so fiercely destructive of all custom and tradition that there could never in the nature of things be any guarantee it would succeed. (Nairn, 1981 [1977], pp. 348–349) In that image, a series of elements were already in place for completely remaking the theory of nationalism: the ambiguous appropriation (and reconstitution) of traditional and customary content by processes of modern identity formation, the ambivalent association of nationalism with ideologies and practices of capitalist development, the double-edged creative and destructive consequences of the power of nationalism, the importance of questions of temporality and the moral ambiguity of an ideology that brought some people together while cleaving others. However, Tom's passion was not directed towards hammering out theoretical clarity. He submitted a never-to-be published manuscript on such issues to New Left Books (Verso), but it was lost in editorial refinement, and he moved on (Barnett, 2022). His life's work was rather devoted to understanding the place of Scotland in the British Empire and then the world. Without knowing it, and without directly entering into any of the theoretical debates that followed, Tom contributed to the 1980s' renaissance in nationalism studies. Up until the 1980s, the field had been trundling along, characterised by sociological studies of particular national histories, comparative descriptions and flat attempts to generalise the meaning of nationalism. Then, a quartet of liminal figures changed everything: Ernest Gellner (1925–1995), Tom Nairn (1932–2023), Benedict Anderson (1936–2015) and Anthony Smith (1939–2016). Tom's death this year brings the strangely interconnected lives of that interwar-born cohort to a close. The parallels between the four are worth reflecting upon. Their common coordinates have consequences for thinking about the development of nationalism studies, even to the present. In many ways, it is their different liminal positions, culturally and intellectually, that help us to understand how these scholars could make such pivotal and innovative contributions to the field. Echoing Tom's use of the Janus-faced metaphor, I use the term ‘liminal’ here to mean being ambivalently placed, simultaneously located on alternate sides of social boundaries and temporal thresholds. They were all intuitively driven and theoretically informed writers and, with the exception of Ernest Gellner, not excited by systematic theory, but they changed how others wrote about nationalist theory. They were all, in a sense, displaced culturally, even as they variously found provisional homes in the world. They all eventually became academic insiders, but they long continued to experience life as if their outsider beginnings were more important to who they were as persons. Tom Nairn was a Scottish-born critic, largely living in Amsterdam when he wrote The Break-Up of Britain (1977). In other words, he wrote his most important work on Scotland in self-chosen exile. In his later life he spent a decade in Australia, which again shifted his perspective—globalising Scotland beyond the old Empire. Ernest Gellner was a Parisian-born, Jewish, Czech philosopher living in London when he wrote Nations and Nationalism (1983). He died in Prague, ambivalently ‘at home’. Benedict Anderson was born in China, chose Irish citizenship in his youth and was working in the United States when he wrote Imagined Communities (1983). Ben's memoir, tellingly called A Life Beyond Boundaries (2016), suggests that Imagined Communities was inspired by fieldwork in Siam and Indonesia. He died in a hill town in Indonesia. London-born Anthony Smith (1981) was working in London when he wrote The Ethnic Revival in the Modern World, and his more conventional territorial biography appears to go against the Janus-faced identities of the other three. He died in the same city he was born. But his Jewish background, and in particular, his mother's German–Polish origins, together with a difficult boarding-school upbringing, meant that his Jewishness prevailed over any possible singular Englishness (Smith, 2016). Despite their profound differences, Anthony Smith's work followed the same trajectory as Tom Nairn's, focusing on the nation rather than the nation-state, and later coming to examine the disembedding effects of globalisation on national identity (Nairn & James, 2005; Smith, 1995). In Tom's case, as I will argue, this became basic to his approach; in Anthony Smith's case, it remained marginal. Nairn, Smith, Gellner and Anderson were certainly not a quartet that sang the same song. Though London was the vortex of their occasional encounters—with Tom as the most shadowy of these figures, the ghost spotted hovering in the back-stalls of others' public addresses—their mutual directions were based on the place of liminal souls, navigating cross-currents at a common time in global history. Anthony Smith was a student of Ernest Gellner's (though they could barely maintain a conversation in social situations) while Tom Nairn was a one-time colleague of Ernest's, teaching with him for a brief period in Prague (Tom was not a great conversationalist either). Benedict Anderson knew Tom briefly and wrote of his affection and respect (Anderson, 2016). And, it should be added, Tom at one stage shared a house with Ben's brother, Perry Anderson. But Ben had no overt relation to any of the other two scholars. The inherited memes of gigantism persist, and indeed still demand that humankind acknowledge the dominance of the one ‘-ism’ that remains—as if, deprived of Colossi, the species might indeed turn into the scared, fleeing rabble in Goya's picture. In fact … this is a Giant with no clothes, dependent upon a mixture of craven self-subjection by inherited satrapies, grossly exaggerated military threats, and an almost equally exaggerated economic credo—the secular religion of neo-liberalism. The truth, or rather our political hope, is that ‘globalization’ must lead in the overall direction of a Giant-less world. (Nairn & James, 2005, pp. 2–3) In this process of an unfolding intellectual life, Benedict Anderson's later work was the most revealing of all four writers. He had completely rewritten the theory of nationalism through his understanding of plural difference across the globe, directing our attention to the creole pioneers of Latin America. (This upended Tom's earlier Eurocentrism, though Ernest Gellner appeared to miss the implicit challenge completely.) More than that, the formation of nations, Anderson (1983, p. 40) argues in Imagined Communities, required the break-up of certain prior traditional epistemologies. In particular, it required the partial dissolution of ‘a conception of temporality in which cosmology and history were indistinguishable’. This, he suggests, occurred through the coming to dominance of conceptions of ‘homogenous empty time’—using Walter Benjamin's phrase for modern calendrical time. This theoretical breakthrough in nationalism studies was as relevant to reading an Indonesian novelist as to how one reads the consequences of big-city nationalising newspapers. It was almost entirely missed by that field with the exception of a few writers such as Cheah and Culler (2003) who understood that a society's conception of time has ontological consequences. Even more inexplicably, the significance of this insight also seems to have been largely missed by Ben himself. Just as Tom was barely aware of the influence of his work on nationalism studies, Ben was unaware of the consequences of his own intuitive theorising. Reading Benedict Anderson's post-Imagined Communities writing, it becomes clear that he did not really take in the wider import of his own analytical breakthrough. His earlier claim about the disjunctures between residual, continuing and emerging dominant forms of temporality is only referred to gesturally in later works. Anderson (1998) presents his study The Spectre of Comparisons as responding to the vertigo of comparing such utterly different but connected worlds. However, this comparative analysis never turns to questions of ontological disjuncture and what happens to time and space. In Anderson's (2005) book, Under Three Flags, republished as The Age of Globalization, he explores the various manifestations of the anticolonial imagination across different settings. However, the concept of ‘homogenous empty time’—the time of modernity in relation to other forms of time—is only ever mentioned in passing. Formerly a left half-back (reserves) with Team Modern's one-world economania, Tom Nairn switched sides in the 1990s and tentatively join the neo-primordialists, at least for the after-match discussions. His former stance is correctly described in Anthony Smith's Nationalism: Theory, Ideology, History (2001) but was abandoned some years ago. (Nairn & James, 2005, p. 7) In the end, Tom never really fitted in anywhere. If I can add personal note, when I first met the famed ‘Tom Nairn’ at the turn of the century, he was still marginally employed at the University of Edinburgh. He was supported by scholars such as David McCrone, but despite a series of books and television documentaries, Tom still lived in the relative poverty of the academic precariat. His home then was a prefab built soon after a series of old villages in West Lothian were designated as an integrated spill-over ‘New Town’ called Livingston. Tom described Livingston as located ‘in the black hole between Glasgow and Edinburgh’. Yes, he did eventually get a professorship, crossing to the other side of that magical liminal line of academic status. In 2000, he was invited to come to Monash University in Australia as Professor of Nationalism Studies, but even this was precarious. Less than a year after taking up that position—because he was deemed not to fit in to the fast-corporatising university demands of Monash—I was told by the head of school that Tom's 2-year contract would not be renewed. In response, Tom and I decided to jointly apply for a professorship in globalisation that had just been advertised—perhaps the first such chair in the world. We were appointed to that position, Tom at 0.5 and me at 0.7. His formal title became Professor of Nationalism and Cultural Diversity in the Globalism Institute at RMIT University—the ‘Royal’ part of RMIT amusing Tom greatly. Even then, when negotiating his position and being asked ‘Would you like tenure?’, Tom replied ‘Ooh, nae, I don't think I need that’. In this disjunctural world of galloping globalisation and reasserted national borders (and for an administratively challenged person like Tom), this meant living in civic limbo. Every 2 years, it meant having a health check to make sure that his body was not a burden on the Australian state. It meant that upon retiring from RMIT nearly a decade later, Tom was forced by immigration laws to exit Australia within 3 months. He returned to Scotland without fanfare. Globalisation and global warming provide a new theatre for the old brutes, who continue to hog the centre stage as of right, shouting the old slogans louder than those quieter, smaller actors who have increasingly come out from the wings to occupy United Nations space: minorities, dwarf-nations and states like Singapore and East Timor, no-hope out-backs like Tibet, edge-lands like West Papua, reanimated fossils like Scotland and the Basque country. (Nairn, 2008, p. 16) Third, the global reach of the United States post-2001 rather than the fading Ukanian empire became his point of reference for the ‘Third Coming’ of nationalism (Nairn, 2002; Nairn & James, 2005). Day and night, Black Pluto's door stands open. But to retrace your steps and get back to upper air, This is the real task and the real understanding … Open access publishing facilitated by Western Sydney University, as part of the Wiley - Western Sydney University agreement via the Council of Australian University Librarians.