Stateless Nations
in the 21st Century:
the Case of Scotland
by David McCrone
Henry Duncan Prize Lecture
given at the Royal Society of Edinburgh
29 October 2001
Institute of Governance > Online Articles & Papers, by Author > Online Articles & Papers, by Date Published Online > Article: Stateless Nations in the 21st Century: the Case of Scotland by David McCrone |
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Stateless Nations
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It is one of the enduring puzzles of the social sciences that that while Scotland had a claim to have played a major intellectual role in founding the discipline of sociology - at least what we might call its proto-sociology - it has taken until the 21st century for it to come to terms with the Scottish case. My aim in this lecture is to explore this apparent conundrum, and to ask:
The general tenor of my lecture is to use the Scottish case as an arena, a test-bed, for shifts in the modern world, and to set it up as a case of a stateless nation which illuminates processes which require the social sciences, and sociology in particular, to refocus how it sees the world in quite a fundamental way (McCrone, 2001). Hence, looking at Scotland is not some kind of parochial endeavour, but has much wider implications for how we do social science in the modern world. You may of course be sceptical of such claims. Usually such scepticism takes two forms: that the social sciences are concerned with the universal not the particular, that our aim is to look for instances of the general, of bell-weathers of social change. Certainly, this is an important point, but too often it seems to me an excuse for lazy thinking. It is also prone to its own forms of error. Thus, in the 1950s and early 1960s, modernisation theory assumed that social change was a linear process which all 'industrial' societies had to go through. That left of course a myriad of cases that did not fit the general theory, and inordinate effort went into to showing that they were 'backward', unwilling to follow future pathways, or simply charmingly deviant cases which proved the rule. The second set of objections to constructing a sociology of Scotland is that in essence sociology is concerned with generic social processes, not what happens in and to particular places. You can't then have a sociology of Scotland anymore than you can have a sociology of Aberdeen, Auchtermuchty, or even to be utterly parochial, 22-26 George Street. Over 30 years ago the first professor of sociology at Edinburgh, Tom Burns, made a statement that has, in many ways, been the grit in my intellectual oyster for much of my career. In his inaugural lecture in 1966, he commented: 'One cannot speak of a sociology of Scotland as one can of the Scottish economy' (Burns, 1995:161). As someone who has spent much of my career trying to do such a thing, and acknowledging Tom as a major influence on my thinking, that puzzled me. Tom Burns was actually making a general point about how sociology took over knowledge areas from other disciplines and aspects of institutional life. Thus, that same sentence goes on: '… there is no sociology of children, but a child psychology'. Of course, these days, a sociology of childhood at least is a vibrant area of the discipline, but Tom's point was that sociology has an institutional focus often inherited from other disciplines. For myself, I take the view that social processes which may be very specific to 'place' may actually illuminate important processes that we are likely to miss. That will be my focus here. In other words, you can have a sociology of Scotland which has much wider implications than this small territory. In passing, we might note that one could have a sociology of 22-26 George Street if it illuminated processes we are likely to miss for more standard units of analysis. You could even have a one-person sociology, admittedly in unusual settings. Defoe's Robinson Crusoe is a remarkable sociological phenomenon because he carried around 'society' in his head and through his practices, and in his long sojourn on this island (over 30 years as I recall), he was indeed a social creature. This view of the sociological arena may, in this case, be reductio ad hominem, but it is not ad absurdum. The more conventional objection to a sociology of Scotland is that it is not a conventional 'society', and anyway is not different enough from the rest of the UK which is a 'society' because it is a state, in the parlance, a nation-state. In other words, you can have a sociology of places if they are societies, where society = state = nation. That seems to me not only to be empirically dubious, but conceptually flawed, but very much part of my discipline's furniture. It seems to me that we are wishing away many of the really interesting questions if we align these concepts, and anyway the world we inhabit no longer conforms to this crude model. Let us however examine where we got this idea from in the first place. Alain Touraine once observed:
This statement made 20 years ago is still a commonplace in the social sciences, when another commonplace is not in operation, society with a capital 'S'. Norbert Elias (1978) once observed that in talking about society, sociologists often refer to the diluted image of the nation-state, and possibly are less likely to refer to 'human society' or 'bourgeois society, for example, than their predecessors did. Either way, when speaking of upper case 'Society' or lower case 'society' - that is, the state, Scotland seems ill-suited to conventional sociological endeavour. That, it seems to me, is an assumption too far. In fact, if we wish to use the term 'society' in a more meaningful way, we cannot simply (a) treat all societies the same (a temptation too easily succumbed to by theorists of globalisation, in my view); or (b) treat them like so many pieces in a jigsaw in which all fit together because they are labelled nation-states. In other words, I think we have to recover the term society precisely because it is not coterminous with the state, still less a synonym for 'nation'. It seems to me that society, state and nation belong to quite different aspects of social reality. The state is in essence a political concept, referring to a political apparatus of governing institutions - legislature, civil service, courts, ruling a given territory by means of a legal system, and with the capacity for force to back up its policies. A 'nation' is a cultural concept and usefully exemplified by Benedict Anderson's notion of 'imagined community' (not, note, imaginary): imagined as a community of people, with finite territorial boundaries (usually, but not necessarily), implying self-determination, and community - deep and horizontal comradeship (Anderson, 1983). Society - civil society, to give it its full and helpful title - refers to those areas of social life, the domestic, economic, cultural and even lower-case political, which are organised by private and voluntary arrangements between individuals and groups outwith the direct control of the state. Put simply, state refers to the political realm; nation to the cultural, and society to the social sphere. At this point, I want to address what I think of as an important but dangerous development in my own discipline of sociology - a tendency to give up on the concept of 'society' altogether. In a recent challenging book called Sociology beyond Societies, John Urry (2000) accepts that it has been too easy to elide state and society - certainly in these islands, and comes, remarkably for a sociologist, to the aid of Mrs Thatcher and her famous statement: 'there is no such thing as society, only individuals and their families'. Well, Urry says, she may have been oddly right, but not in way she meant. He argues that sociology must abandon its original practice of studying society as a set of bounded institutions - the study of structures, and instead focus on mobility, on movements. At a time of global change, process and networks, sociology seems to be cast adrift once it leaves the relatively safe boundaries of functionally integrated and bounded societies bequeathed to it by its founders, notably Durkheim. He commends:
In other words, we must seek a sociology of mobilities which disrupts a 'sociology of the social as societies' (p.4). This seems to me to resonate an old issue of studying structure and change, and while I have no objection to focusing on change, on mobility, it does seem to me to be throwing the baby out not only with the bath water, even the bath, in a fairly spectacular way. Unless one really wants to hold on to the jigsaw puzzle of free-standing societies, then why not treat societies as semi-bounded, partial, overlapping systems and networks? I wonder if the susceptibility of some sociologists in these islands to be enamoured of globalisation is designed to let them off the hook of studying the complex and layered societies, and nations, which make up these islands, and indeed, this state. There is an issue of legacy here. Sociology came into its own in the post-war period as a sociology of the welfare state, assumed to be homogeneous, and with social class its only meaningful stratifier. Recognising, as we do now, that 'Britain' (or the UK if you prefer) is not, and never has been a nation-state in the strict sense of the term, but some kind of post-imperial state-nation, does not absolve us from puzzling out how its inhabitants make sense of the territories and social systems they inhabit. Our own work on national identities indicates that people have quite complex and sophisticated understandings which don't seem to be interesting to many in the political classes and intellectual elites in these islands. Either, they say, the bits fit or they don't; either you're in or you're out. Well, no - that's not how it works, nor how people make sense of it. It is as if we have given up studying society because it no longer corresponds with the state and/or the nation (if they ever did), and study instead 'the world', as, of course, true cosmopolitans. I'd welcome that if it didn't seem to me to be absolution from doing the hard and interesting work of making sense of partial, multiple and overlapping societies in all their complexities, and actually making better sense of what is general and what is particular. I often wonder why so few sociologists south of the border find 'England' an interesting concept, in sociological and not simply in cultural and literary terms, and I am concerned that saying there is no such thing as society leads us on to say that there is no such thing as sociology. After all, political science can do the 'state', and social anthropology the 'nation'. Are we talking ourselves out of a job? That, however, is for others to do. Let me now return to my main argument. Why is 'society' interesting? Once we have disposed of the powerful but confounding simplicity that societies are nation-states - and Robin Cohen has pointed out in his book Global Diasporas that there are around 200 states, but at least 2000 'nation-peoples', as he calls them,and so there is a lot of dislocation and ambiguous locations around - then we can get down to exploring society properly. It does implied a bounded social system, an overlapping network of social interaction expressed often in institutional and associational terms. 'Society' then is a unit within whose boundaries social interactions are relatively stable and reasonably dense, and while social interaction takes place across the boundaries, those occurring within it are frequently some of the most significant and consistent. When Adam Ferguson spoke of civil society, he distinguished it from 'political' society precisely to avoid the confusion of society and state. I think that Ferguson had a much more sophisticated and nuanced understanding of society precisely because he was a Scot. His Essay on the History of Civil Society is not about Scotland overtly, but it seems to me manifestly framed by the Scottish condition, and Ferguson's own marginal status as someone born in Logierait, on the Highland/Lowland border. The Scottish Enlightenment, in my view, turned out to be a necessary but not sufficient condition for the emergence of sociology as a discipline, a way of analysing the world. It was, if you like, a proto-sociology which emerged directly out of ambiguous social, political and cultural conditions which framed Scotland in the 18th century, the most significant in my view being the following:
Scottish Enlightenment thinkers did not set themselves the task of understanding Scotland as such, but of understanding society, and what made it possible and able to progress, but inevitably they drew on the conditions they knew best. Indeed, their epistemologies drew on Scotland, and informed their tools for analysing society. I think that Hume's 'experimental method of reasoning' with its three principles of associational resemblance, contiguity and causation form the basis of what we now call the scientific method, inferring causality by reasoning rather than knowing causes directly. Alexander Broadie has argued in his excellent book Why Scottish Philosophy matters that Scottish philosophy is overwhelmingly against a sceptical view of the world. The Scottish perspective is engaged with the real world, and doesn't assume as it is sometimes fashionable to do, that it doesn't really exist. It is above all realist and based on 'common sense'. It is dependent, in Broadie's words on 'assents of faith':
I do not wish to belabour the point, merely to say that Scottish moral philosophy was inextricably concerned with the 'problem of society', how society is possible, pursued and developed by the more immediate forerunners of sociology such as Kant, Comte, Marx, and later Durkheim. What seems to have happened is, to employ a geological metaphor, that this intellectual stratum of social thought disappeared from view and headed down to the bedrock of social science, folded under the intellectual world we have inherited, where it has provided a lasting if unrecognised base. (The metaphor I have in mind here comes from Aubrey Manning's splendid series on the geology of the world, and its enduring image of molten rock diving down only to re-appear periodically and unexpectedly in volcanic form.) The fracturing of the human and natural sciences in the 19th century meant that the Scottish philosophers were partitioned out to newer disciplines: Smith to economics, Hume and Ferguson to philosophy, others to 'history', and so on. When the label 'sociology' was invented by Auguste Comte in the 1830s, the discourse had been around for much longer. All that may seem interesting and no more; an argument of intellectual history, that the Scottish roots have been ignored. My argument is more than that. In short, it is that
Those in possession of statehood, of course, set about 'making' citizens in their image.
In like manner, those without states, 'nationalists' in conventional terms, though none are more fervently nationalist than those already in possession of states, set about constructing linear history with the aim that statehood was not simply desirable but, according to the laws of history, inevitable, a basic human right. (The problem is, of course, that one state's right to exist may well be the denial of another as the cases of Israel and Palestine, and to an extent, though perhaps more hopefully, Northern Ireland, make plain. In extremis, it becomes a zero-sum game). Why should this matter? - because we may have inherited a theoretical tool-bag of concepts which serve us ill in the modern world. 'Societies' may not be states, and in turn, states are rarely nations tout court. These are concepts which require rethinking, or, at the very least, need to be disengaged from each other. What happens in this island archipelago of ours on the fringes of NW Europe should sensitise us to this task. There are two states (in terms the UN would recognise), at least four, maybe five, nations, and we haven't even begun to unscramble how many 'societies' there are. One nation, one society, one state no longer seems possible or desirable. The conventional model of the 'nation-state' as a self-contained bounded social system is losing its raison d'etre in the modern world. As Yael Tamir has observed:
Daniel Bell's comment that the nation-state in its classical format is too small for the major problems of life, and yet too large to handle the small problems of life, is another version of that sentiment. The nation-state cedes power above and below itself, and while its raison d'etat may not have ended, it has certainly been transformed. Those who would draw a cultural and legal line around states, and impose uniformity within are having a tough time of it. Similarly, ideas of 'sovereignty' in terms of absolute 'Crown in Parliament' notions have also had their day. Constitutional lawyers may hold fast to theories of legal sovereignty, but in sociological terms, people don't call it that anymore. Insofar as one can get at such theoretical notions of sovereignty via social surveys, that's not, for example, how people in Scotland at any rate view the Scottish parliament. They articulate much more a sense of layered and shared sovereignty, that the Scottish parliament may be subordinate in constitutional terms to Westminster, but political theorists' ideas of first and second orders of subsidiarity do not cut the ice. Let me stress that I am not arguing that 'the state' has had its day, still less that the whole world has become one, big commercial 'society' - the McDonaldisation of the universe, let us call it McWorld. The other side of globalisation coin is the emergence of 'local' identities, as people make sense of these forces through the cultural and political apparatuses available to them. Indeed, similar processes and values may well be interpreted differently because the cultural prism is different. Let me give an example. We know from a welter of surveys that over the past decade or two that people in Scotland are on the left-liberal end of the political-social spectrum, regardless of which government is in power. We also know that they mobilise these values and attitudes to express what it means to be Scottish. To complicate matters, we find that people elsewhere in Britain also have somewhat similar social democratic and liberal views. Does that make them Scottish too? Patently not. What happens is that such values are deemed by Scots today to express their social and political identities. In a previous generation, post-war, they would probably have construed these and themselves as 'British', but now they define them as 'Scottish'. There's nothing essential nor illegitimate about that, and indeed, it might change in the future, just as in the 19th century what we probably think of today as 'conservative' values were 'Scottish'. The point is that they function as a prism through which identities are constructed. The kaleidescope of social, political and cultural change in the world then has been shaken; our theories of the world need re-examining in a very basic way. The world is not some uniform system, still less a jigsaw of nation-states whose pieces are made to fit together with time and patience, if it ever was so. That was the world, though, that made invisible 'stateless nations' like Scotland because they did not fit conventional models of the world. This, in hindsight, was remarkable, given the Scottish bedrock to sociology and the social sciences more generally. Scotland, far from being some kind of sociological anomaly best left to one side, or treated as a part of a homogeneous state of Britain, seems to me to become a particularly useful example of the fissiparous tendencies in the modern world, a world in which the correspondence of states, societies and nations is far less clear-cut. Let me use a simply metaphor. Perhaps just as a small boat is the first to sense changing tides and currents, so small societies confront social change most immediately, and have to react quickly or go under. Larger societies can hold out for longer but ultimately have to change, often with bad grace. Instead of being an odd, ill-fitting case, Scotland moves to the centre of the social science dilemma about the autonomy and boundaries of societies. We owe it to our Enlightenment predecessors as well as ourselves to make proper sense of it.
ReferencesAnderson, B. Imagined Communities: reflections on the origins and spread of nationalism, (London: Verso, 1983) Broadie, A. Why Scottish Philosophy Matters, (Edinburgh: Saltire Society, 2000) Burns, T. 'Sociological Explanation', in Description, Explanation and Understanding (Edinburgh University Press, 1995) Cohen, R. Global Diasporas (London: UCL Press, 1997) Elias, N. The Civilising Process, (Oxford: Blackwell 1978). Ferguson, A. Essay on the History of Civil Society, (Edinburgh University Press, 1966) McCrone, D. Understanding Scotland; the sociology of a nation, (London: Routledge, 2001) Tamir, Y. Liberal Nationalism, (Princeton University Press, 1933) Touraine, A. 'Une sociologie sans société', in Revue Française de Sociologie, 1981, 22(1). Urry, J. Sociology Beyond Societies: mobilities for the twenty-first century (London: Routledge, 2000)
(Published Online: 10 January 2002)
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