Tom Nairn

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Tom Nairn (born June 2, 1932 in Freuchie, Fife) is a Scottish theorist of nationalism.

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[edit] Life and outline of his arguments

He attended High School in Dunfermline and Edinburgh College of Art before graduating from the University of Edinburgh with an MA in Philosophy in 1956. During the 1960s he taught at various institutions including the University of Birmingham (1965-6), coming to prominence in the occupation movement at Hornsey College of Art(1967-70), after which he was dismissed. He was at the Transnational Institute, Amsterdam from 1972-76, and then worked as a journalist and TV researcher (mainly for Channel 4 and Scottish Television, Glasgow) before a year at the Central European University (1994-95) and then setting up and running a Masters course on Nationalism at Edinburgh University (1995-1999).

He is considered one of the key thinkers of the (British) New Left. From 1962, with Perry Anderson in New Left Review, he developed a thesis (the "Nairn-Anderson thesis") to explain why Britain did not develop in a 'normal' way, which was defined as the continental European movement to anti-clericalism and Republicanism since the 1789 French Revolution.

Nairn has long been an advocate of European integration, an argument he put forward in The Left Against Europe (1973), when leftist opinion in the UK was very much against the idea.

He has been an advocate of the devolution of power to the Scottish parliament and the Welsh assembly, and has criticised the Labour government for not giving those bodies enough power. An anthology of NLR articles The Break-Up of Britain (1977, revised 1982) is the best known of Nairn's books on the nationalism theme. It is a Marxist critique of the emergence of worldwide nationalism. Essentially, Nairn contends that imperialism from the core countries (Western Europe) amongst the peripheral nations (Africa, Asia, Australia, etc.) motivated the peripheral elites to mobilize their exploited masses. As such, they created powerful myths and stories based on local artefacts and local happenings. The peripheral intelligentsia, as he denotes them, were inspired by both Romanticism and Populism. In a chapter devoted to him, Enoch Powell is placed in both traditions.

His republican inclinations meant that his The Enchanted Glass (1988) was one of the earliest serious modern investigations in to the British Monarchy from an abolitionist perspective. Here and elsewhere Nairn uses the term 'Ukania' to suggest the irrational and Ruritanian nature of the British constitutional monarchy. His original source for the term is the nickname 'Kakania' that Robert Musil uses for the dual Austro-Hungarian monarchy in The Man Without Qualities.

[edit] Criticisms

One of the most powerful critiques comes from ethno-symbolist Anthony D. Smith, from the London School of Economics, who contends that Nairn never defines the term "nationalism." What Smith says, however, is that Nairn characterizes it as a "militant movement by the community vis-a-vis the imperialists, and this movement supplied the notion of a shared destiny." How does that shared destiny arrive? Nairn does not answer.

As of 2005 he is Professor of Nationalism and Cultural Diversity at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. He is also Visiting Professor at the University of Strathclyde.

[edit] Major works

He has written many articles for the London Review of Books and other publications.

  • Nairn, T. (1973) The Left against Europe, Penguin
  • Nairn, T. (1975) "The Modern Janus". New Left Review. i/94, November-December [also reprinted in Break-up]
  • Nairn, T. (1977) The Break-up of Britain : crisis and neonationalism, London: NLB (2nd ed. 1981 Verso; 3rd 2003 Common Ground Pub)
  • Nairn, T (1988) The Enchanted Glass: Britain and Its Monarchy, London: Radius (2nd ed 1994, Vintage)
  • Nairn, T (1992) Auld enemies: essays from the "Nairn on Monday" column, The Scotsman, Glasgow : Common Cause.
  • Nairn, T (1997) Faces of Nationalism: Janus Revisited Verso. (2nd ed. 2005).
  • Quattrocchi A and Nairn, T (1998) The Beginning of the End: France, May 1968, Verso.
  • Nairn, T (2001) After Britain: New Labour and the Return of Scotland, Granta.
  • Nairn, T (2002) Pariah: Misfortunes of the British Kingdom, Verso.
  • James, P and Nairn, T (eds.) (2005) Global Matrix: Nationalism, Globalism and State-terrorism, Pluto
  • Nairn, T (2006) Global Nations, Verso
  • James, P and Nairn, T (eds.) (2006) Globalization and Violence, London: Sage.
  • Nairn, T (2006) Gordon Brown: 'bard of Britishness', Cardiff: Institute of Welsh Affairs
  • Nairn, T (2008) "Globalisation and nationalism: the new deal", The Edinburgh lecture, 2008
  • Articles on OpenDemocracy.net

[edit] References