What Scotland's 'no' means: European idea of nation past its sell-by date

The Scottish ‘no’ vote to independence is historic. While one can’t assume the Scots will not bring up the topic again – a ‘yes’ vote is always decisive for separation, but a ‘no’ is never final – the fact that a majority voted ‘no’ is yet another nail in the widely-accepted European concept of nationhood. There is no doubt that ethnic Scots are a nation in the unique European sense of the term, as defined by 19th century French historian Ernest Renan. Renan defined a nation as comprising a people with a long, shared past of “endeavours, sacrifice and devotion". His ideal of a nation was this: “To have common glories in the past, and to have common will in the present, to have performed great deeds together, to wish to perform more - these are the essential conditions for the constitution of a people”. Europe thus effectively defined a nation as people of a similar ethnicity (based on race, religion, etc) confined within a geography. This definition was a product of their history, their geography. But in a globalised world where people move across borders and settle in places that serve their interests best, this concept of nation is outdated. Both history and geography will be contested. A nation with lots of immigrants and ethnicities sloshing about within its borders cannot be a nation as defined by Renan. [caption id=“attachment_1720187” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Supporters of the ‘No’ camp celebrating the verdict: AP[/caption] Even in Scotland, which has been more welcoming than England of immigrants who are not ethnic whites, the racial mix is changing. As this AP report in The Huffington Post notes, “Across Scotland, there are some 140,000 people who class themselves as Asian Scots, along with around 30,000 Africans, 7,000 from the Caribbean, 55,000 Poles and over 160,000 other non-British EU Citizens eligible to vote in the landmark referendum. These “New Scots” represent more than 4 percent of the population…”. In the final results, the ‘no’ voters won 55:45 against the 'yes' voters ,  indicating that immigrants, among others, would have played a key role in the referendum. Earlier polls seemed to indicate that most of them may vote ‘yes’, but this seems unlikely. Immigrants are more likely to remain part of larger states than smaller ethnicities – though I could be wrong on this in the specific Scotland case. In any case, when immigrants start rocking the vote, the old concept of nationhood based on shared history and memories starts falling apart. What we have left is not nation, but state. A state is a politico-administrative unit, while the nation is an ethnic-religious-cultural collective of people. A nation has one people; a state can have several peoples living together under one common administration and law. The ‘no’ vote can thus be an assertion that Scotland is not just a nation, but a state with growing diversity among its peoples. As I noted earlier , European ideas have dominated the world for the last 400 years. It was thus their definition of nation that was adopted by all the new post-colonial “nations” that got created. For all that, the European masters left the natives within non-national boundaries where arbitrary lines were drawn in the sand without reference to ethnic and tribal realities. Hence we have wars all over Africa and large parts of Asia. The Indian experience with difference and diversity led us to not try and define what a nation is – we left the definition aside, and bought into it only after the British left. What evolved here was an agglomeration of communities with some sense of the “other”, but where the “other” was not someone who needed to be annihilated or forced to become “one of us.” All our current problems with Jihadis and Hindutvavadis relate to our trying to adopt European ideas of similarity and nationhood and secularism. We were a plural people earlier, who did not need these definitions. It is also worth pointing out that the Renan definition of nation offers a perfect reason to rewrite history to create a false and synthetic unity. This is why the Left tried to create a synthetic history, and which the Saffronistas now was to rewrite. In Scotland, as The Economist notes, the idea of independence did not have much traction till the Scottish nationalists decided to distort the truth and reposition their fight for independence as a fight against conservative economic policies. The ‘yes’ voters were told that Tory-run Britain wanted to whittle down the welfare state, and especially the much-ballyhooed National Health Service. Says the magazine: “Forget the beauty of self-determination: ridding Scotland of the Tories is the mantra of the independence campaign. In a country with only one Tory MP, yet ruled by a Tory-led government, that might sound reasonable. But its application is insidious. By Tories, the separatists increasingly mean all unionists; they mean the political establishment that Scots resent as much as any other Briton. Thus have they connected the British zeitgeist with the age-old pulse of Scottish chauvinism.” The ‘no’ vote means that many Scots have seen through this game of the chauvinists of independence. The Scotland of today is a state, not a nation. The Renan definition is the perfect path to creating uniformity and every autocrat in the world has the same dream. Despots are not always neurotic demons created by a flawed birthing process or bad ideas imbibed during infancy, but the culmination of an ideal of uniformity that draws on the Renan idea of nationhood. As Rajiv Malhotra writes in his book Being Different, difference causes anxiety to humans and human groups. The western antidote to this anxiety was to try and erase difference by elimination, absorption or digestion (breaking up the different entity into its parts and using the bits that are relevant to it, and discarding the rest). Indic religions and cultures dealt with difference anxieties not by elimination or absorption, but by learning to reduce anxieties by culturally accepting difference as legitimate. The Renan idea of nation went unchallenged in the past for that was how the west resolved its identity and difference anxieties. But today, with cross-border immigration, globalisation and the creation of virtual communities on the internet, elimination and suppression of difference is no longer possible. Not only that, the old differences of creed, community, race, language, religion and ethnicity are now being amplified by the creation of entire communities of interest defined by ideology and common interests. Are America’s Red states (those who almost always vote Republican) seeking to build the same kind of nation as those living in Blue states (Democratic)? The jury is out. From a melting pot of communities and a common White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) past, today’s America is a mix of ethnicities and no longer a nation as defined by Renan. Can ISIS create a new nation under a new Caliph? No, for its version is about Sunni Islam, which itself has divisions – leave alone not being compatible with Shia Islam. Is India a nation? Not in Renan’s sense, but in the sense of there being a loose, and broad consensus that we are an agglomeration of communities and peoples. Can we create around the idea of Hindutva. Absolutely not. There is no one idea of what it means to be Hindu – it is even less that defining what it means to be Christian or Muslim. Even assuming we have a “nation” fully peopled by citizens of the same ethnicity, will it still remain a nation? Again, probably not. For within this nation there will be several differences generated by communities of interest, gender and ideology. There will be men and women, there will be gays and straights, there will be people who believe in marriage, there will be people who believe in the opposite, there will be people who believe in living nude, and other against. In short, Renan’s definition will fail once more as a nation gets richer; as other differences come to the fore as immigration and globalisation widen our differences of perspective. So what are we really left with? We have to define “nation” not through the kinds of people who live in it, but as an administrative or governance entity that creates and administers a common law that most people think are reasonable. There is no such thing as a nation as defined by the west. But there can be administrative units called a nation, united only by ensuring the right of every citizen to be different. By this definition, India is more nation than any in the west and east. The Scottish no vote is a further reaffirmation that today the world has many states, but few nations. The Scots can remain a nation with the state called Great Britain. No one is going to ruin their sense of nation.