‘National’ isn’t the embarrassing word some SNP figures seem to think

You’ll remember his predecessor and mentor, Nicola Sturgeon, made the same kind of distancing in 2017, at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.

“If I could turn the clock back, what 90 years, to the establishment of my party, and choose its name all over again, I wouldn’t choose the name it has got just now”, Sturgeon said at the time. “I would call it something other than the Scottish National Party.”

In both instances, they were being asked about the association of nationalism with ethnic purism and intolerance. Yousaf in the context of his Pakistani background and India; Sturgeon challenged by Turkish writer Elif Shafak on her sense of nationalism’s “ugliness”, in her own country and the Middle East.

Both of their extended replies are at pains to emphasize how different Scottish nationalism is. It’s “civic, open and inclusive”, it’s “left or left-of-centre”, it “doesn’t matter really where you come from but where we are going together”.

Yet their embarrassment – two “progressive” figures put under the media spotlight, about the connotations of the “national” dimension in their politics, and squirming visibly – fascinates me, even perplexes me.

Maybe it’s all that reading of Tom Nairn I’ve done over the years – our home-grown colossus of political philosophy. Nairn urged us to understand the forming of nations, and the nationalism that drove it, as “modernity on our own terms”.Faced with marauding industrialised societies like Holland, Britain or France in the 19th century, what defences and mechanisms could peoples set up by which they could steer their futures, faced with the tidal wave of “progress”?

READ MORE: Scottish independence: How activists feel about the SNP election strategy

Nairn often talked of the “Janus-face” of nationalism. One face looks to the future, concerned with strengthening the populace, ensuring its growth and prosperity. The other face seeks justification for a’ that in the materials of its history (language, traditions, physical territory – this heritage actively curated by intellectuals and political actors).

So nationalism has a function: it’s a way to collectively handle the storm of development.

In his recently unearthed essay on the Palestinian thinker Edward Said, Nairn expresses its function with full eloquence.

Writes Nairn: “The development of industrial modernity could not avoid gross unevenness; the antagonisms created from such disparity were bound to be registered; those observing and reacting to them sought another language for the new facts; that language had to be at once vernacular (accessible to the less educated) and universal (translatable into rights and principles).”

“The parochial and ethnic had to be transcended (rather than disappeared)”, continues Nairn. “It had to establish a new connection with the universal and only the paradox of ‘nation-ism’ (as it might also have been called) could do this.”

This perspective on the functions of the “national”, if dwelt upon, might reduce the embarrassment factor for super-modern leaders of the Scottish independence movement. To be “national” is to try to ring your own changes on the great forces of the day, by amassing enough law, culture and resources to do so – usually in the form of a nation-state, or increments towards that end.

But as Nairn says, the aim of the nationalism propelling this state can also be to “transcend the parochial”. For example, by upholding international law and human rights; by innovating new institutions within your jurisdiction; by consciously taking the global lead on issues, watched by an audience of other sovereignties.

“Stop the world, Scotland wants to get on”, in the words of Winnie Ewing from 1967, is still the SNP’s best-ever one-liner.

Keeping the “national” at the heart of the main independence vehicle also maintains what, for many of us, is still the electrified “third rail” of the cause. Namely, that national sovereignty is the only tool that can remove Trident missiles from our territory – and place Scotland on the ultimate moral arc of history.

(Incidentally, we Scots can hardly escape into Hollywood fantasy to avoid our responsibility to non-proliferation: see Oppenheimer’s scores of movie award nominations so far).

This isn’t a whitewash job on “nationalism” or the “national”, and its malfunctions. Nazis were undeniably “national socialists”. Brexitry is its own British nationalism – one which both rips us out of neighbourly arrangements, and tries to homogenise (make more “functional”?) its idea of the nation, actively degrading whatever sovereignty Scotland’s constitutional activism has wrested out of the UK.

The “nationalist” claims (and territorial status) of the Palestinian, Ukrainian and Taiwanese peoples are rejected by their overbearing, aggressive neighbours, themselves often consumed by their own great-nation fervour.

So is the tide of history running for or against greater self-determination? It’s worth noting that the UN Charter opens not with “We the States” or “We the Allies” but with “We the Peoples.” Talk to the scores of post-war nation-states across the world, who loosened themselves from the racist grip of various persistent Western empires.

But how do we attain the right balance between national self-determination, and the global action needed to address looming planetary crises – environmental collapse, radical automation and massive migration?

The Los Angeles-based Noema magazine ran an essay earlier this month titled Who Gets a Nation? And from its lofty overview, it just happens to land on answers shared by the pro-EU vision of “independence in Europe”, currently held by the leading indy parties.

UCLA’s Kal Raustiala writes that “true security in the 21st century will require deep collaboration among myriad sovereigns — but the more of them there are, the harder that is. And so arguments in favour of ‘minilateralism’ and so-called club approaches to common problems have arisen. These ideas are not new, but they have taken on greater urgency in recent years, most notably as Earth’s temperature racks up record upon record.

“Nearly 30 nations in Europe, the ancestral home of the sovereign state, are now joined together in the EU”, continues Raustiala. “This experiment, ongoing now for several decades, points to an alternative geometry, one where differing levels of governance address differing topics. Though not perfect, the EU system allows a more cohesive approach to policy on those matters that are most international, and more national control on those issues most local.”

A somewhat rosy picture? What of the Russian leadership’s deeper thoughts on “mother Russia’s” expansions into European territories? Nevertheless, Raustiala’s analysis matches closely the context in which the majority of independence supporters want their project to land. This is backed up by this week’s poll on how generally attractive voters find the prospect of an “indy Scotland in the EU”.

An idle speculation: what could the party have been named, if “national” had been excluded from its title?

Personally, I imagine a course of history where the noted Scottish socialist magazine of the early twentieth century, Forward, transmuted itself into the name of a left-wing independence movement. John Maclean, James Connolly and Robert Cunninghame Graham (the co-founder of the SNP in 1936) all wrote for it.

Forward (for Scotland). Does that have a nice ring to it? One face of the Janus is visible, at least. But let’s be honest, we may need more democratic innovation on behalf of independence than a re-labelling of the main party could achieve.

In addition, there’s maybe more to fix about the SNP than a mild (and maybe misinformed) cringe at the “national” in its title.