Some of those fears are legitimate. But they didn’t quite explain the startling contradiction between the hopefulness of public events and the wariness at that Alerdinck meeting.
Outside, the great Rubicon of a treaty reducing nuclear weapons is slowly being crossed, leading probably to further reductions in strategic and chemical weapons. Two Warsaw Pact states, Hungary and Poland, are opening socialist economies to market forces and offering more democracy in political life at the same time. In the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachov is attempting the biggest transformation of his land since 1917. And yet the Western guests in Budapest could not, with odd exceptions, find words of optimism.
I remembered the utterly different climate of such East-West meetings 10 or 15 years ago, when we would talk merrily of the coming dissolution of the military pacts and of how Western trade and money would help to bring about pluralism in Eastern Europe. Why this change now, which puzzled the Eastern side?
We live in the aftermath of Afghanistan and of Jaruzelski’s coup, in the reigns of Reagan and Thatcher. During that ‘little Cold War’ which began in 1979, after the detente years, a grimly mistrustful climate was fostered in the West. To disperse it again, when East-West relations have so suddenly turned back to negotiation and movement, will take time.
That new awareness of threat has its sense as well as its rubber-fleet nonsense. Women dream of being followed because women are followed – and raped, and murdered. Visitors from Moscow ask rhetorically what more they can possibly do to convince the West of their good intentions. But there is an answer to that.
During the conference, I went to a small meeting to commemorate what began in Budapest just 31 years ago that day. The lights were cut off, and candles were lit among Hungarian flags with a hole cut out of their centre. Men now old talked to the young of what was hoped and done in 1956. One said: ‘It was love – joy without guilt, for the first time.’
So far, we do not know what glasnost and perestroika in the Soviet Union will mean for Eastern Europe. So far this movement has begun to transform the USSR itself and East-West relations, but not yet East-East relations. One waits to see if these changes will lead to a liberating and peaceful revolution in the relationship of Soviet power to Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland and the others.
If that were to change, the West too would begin to escape its nightmares. And all things would become possible.
[1987
V
Consolations And Discontents
Picts
Three years ago, at the time of the Falklands war, there was a television chat show which featured Mr Enoch Powell and Mr Roy Hattersley. I have forgotten everything about it except for two sentences.
Mr Powell was chuntering on about the imperial mission. Mr Hattersley, growing impatient, interrupted: ‘Oh, come on, Enoch, we aren’t living in the nineteenth century!’ Mr Powell turned slowly towards him and said, with frightful emphasis: ‘But we are living in the nineteenth century!’
His words came back to me the other day in an improbable place. Readers in the south of England may have missed the 1,300th anniversary of the battle of Nechtansmere, when King Brudei of the Picts overwhelmed the Anglian host led by Ecgfrith of Northumbria. But the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland did not miss that day. We assembled at Dunnichen, near Forfar, to inspect the battlefield and witness the unveiling of a monument. We had brought sandwiches, and some of us wore green wellies and tweed fore-and-aft hats. The minister of Dunnichen church was there, and the Provost of Forfar with his chain, and the pipe band of the local British Legion, and several dozen inhabitants with expectant looks on their faces.
It soon became clear that another element was also present. From the back of a van, leaflets and stickers were being distributed. The speakers proclaimed a Pictish free state. The leaflets announced that ‘Dunnichen Day’ was a new holiday. ‘Up to now it has been celebrated almost privately by dedicated Pictophiles and folk who happen to be sitting near them…. The Pictish Cultural Society ask you to be courteous to the folk living in the neighbourhood and give them no cause for complaint.’
The Pictish Cultural Society! Here was the nineteenth century indeed, for nothing was more characteristic of that century in Europe than the revival of buried nations and the emergence of new ones. That was the time when cultural societies dug up and redecorated the identity of the Czechs and the Irish, the Flemings and the Germans and the Italians, the Serbs and the Scots, the Croats and the Welsh. Here at Dunnichen was a latecomer to that great movement. It turned out that several hundred people had attended Pictish ceilidhs and discos over the past few evenings.
The Pictish revival can be safely wished good luck. Its brand of nationalism is hardly aggressive: ‘The New Picts should be an example of gentle nobility/says a leaflet. And luck is what it needs, for the Picts are the lost tribe of the British Isles. They inhabited the whole of what is now Scotland 2,000 years ago, but vanished almost without trace in the ninth century after their conquest by Scottish invaders from the west.
One version speaks of genocidal slaughter. More probably, Pictish culture – already weakened by Viking raids – was dissolved by the Scots who imposed their own Gaelic language and the religious forms of their Columban Church.
All that remains of the Picts that can be identified is their mysterious sculpture in stone, decorated with symbols that still defy the historian, with Celtic interlacing and sometimes with the figures of men and creatures. The Romans, who fought them, said that the Picts either painted or tattooed themselves. A Norwegian chronicle, written not long after the battle of Nechtansmere, says: ‘They little exceed pigmies in stature: they did marvels in the morning and in the evening in building walled towns, but at midday they entirely lost all their strength and lurked through fear in little underground houses.’
What I like about Pictish studies is that they have made so little headway. Here is a large, artistically gifted nation that was famous in Europe for 800 years, and yet we know less about it than eighteenth-century cockneys knew about Central Africa. The historian Isobel Henderson confesses that ‘the Pictish personality is utterly lost to us.’ In spite of the mass of classical and Dark Age references, archaeologists have failed to identify a single settlement or fort as beyond question Pictish.
No complete sentence in the Pictish language has survived. They left a number of inscriptions, elegantly described as ‘perfectly legible yet … utterly unintelligible.’ One of them reads as follows: ETTOCUHETTS AHEHHTTANN HCCWEVU NEHHTONS. The last word may be the name of King Nechtan, who gave his name to the battlefield. The other words suggest that there is some mistake here, surely, and make archaeologists cry.
So relating to the Picts is going to be hard. On the battlefield, the minister of Dunnichen did his best. He called solemnly for forgiveness and reconciliation, for respect to the memory of the dead and their widows and orphans, citing the ceremonies for the fortieth anniversary of victory in the last world war. I thought he was wrong about the moral debacle which was the VE Day commemoration, and probably wrong about the Picts as well. Their Christianity, when they acquired it, did not put much emphasis on the bits about brotherly love.
A few miles away from Dunnichen stand the Pictish sculptured stones of Aberlemno. One of them bears what seems to be a scene from the battle of Nechtansmere, in which a bird can be seen devouring the face of an Anglian prince in a helmet. The carving has been shown to illustrate a text from Revelations: ‘And I saw an angel standing in the sun, and he cried with a loud voice, saying to all the fowls that fly in the midst of Heaven: Come and gather yourself unto the supper of the great God, that ye may eat the flesh of kings and the flesh of captains.’ Gentle nobility?
I am always fascinated when people talk about ‘the forging of a nation.’ Most nations are forgeries, perpetrated in the last century or so. Some nationalism relied on literal forgery: the epics of Ossian in Scotland, the phoney ‘Libuse’ manuscripts supposed to date from the Czech past, the ancien
t Welsh literature which was actually written by Iolo Morganwg in the King Lud pub at the bottom of Fleet Street. ‘Great Britain’ itself is an arrant forgery, invented by John Dee to flatter Queen Elizabeth with the notion that the Welsh Tudors were heirs to the pre-Saxon empire of King Arthur.
But millions of Saxons, and a fair number of Scots and Welsh, now happily consider themselves British. Fakes last longer than antiques, and are more versatile. If a Pictish delegate ever rises to address the United Nations, it won’t be because he has proved himself to be the successor of King Brudei.
And the historic Picts, I suspect, will soon become more visible. No nation vanishes as completely as that; we are staring at their relics without recognising them. Ruins, tombs, jewellery, now attributed to others, will turn out to be theirs. The glorious Lindisfarne Gospels, it’s being whispered, may not be Northumbrian at all, but the masterpiece of an unknown monastery in Pictland. And the people of Forfar district, today a stronghold of the Scottish National Party, are in reality the descendants of the Vacomagi, one of the great tribes of the Pictish federation.
Meanwhile, anyone interested in nationalism, still the most powerful source of political magic on earth, will watch this small test case of the Pictish renaissance. And those who feel they belong can apply to the Pictish High Commission, at 53 St Leonard’s Street, Edinburgh. Tel. 031 667 4222, open Mondays to Saturdays.
[1985
Brothers
I was in Italy when the English crowd brought about the death of 31 Italians at a football game in Brussels. In the cities, there were attacks on British cars; they wrote on walls: ‘Inglesi, Assassini, Bastardi!’ But in the village where I was, although everyone had watched the horror on television, they tried to be consoling. ‘There are mad people who want war in every nation.’
The villagers were trying to find something universal in what, we now recognise, has become a British speciality of savagery. Edward Vulliamy, describing the Brussels scene in the New Statesman, threw out such generous ‘rotten apple’ excuses. He wrote that the Italians ‘did not understand that the red and yellow crowds to their left harboured a lunatic code of selfesteem; that it was a matter for their drunken, bloodthirsty and racist English ‘honour’ that the terraces be cleared of “spiks” …’
He saw there the blatant influence of the Falklands War; English fans now attack any Latin foreigner as an ‘Argie.’ But Vulliamy added: ‘It is hypocritical to belabour them for besmirching British values when in so many other areas of national life violence is made heroic, narrow chauvinism is appealed to.’
As I brooded on this, two propositions came to my mind. The first: football, especially in this country, remains overwhelmingly a working-class game. The second: for over a century, it has been an article of faith on the Left that internationalism is the special destiny of the working class.
Was the massacre in the Heysel Stadium a sign – one among many – that the whole theory of ‘socialist internationalism’ is a fraud? Is it true that, instead, the workers have turned out to be the class in which old-fashioned chauvinism is most deeply rooted?
It isn’t that bad. If the sense of common humanity across state frontiers had perished, the human race would now be dead as well. But ‘internationalism’ as an idea has been almost suffocated by those who have wrapped it up in political dogma, who have debased it into an illusion.
The Marxist phrase ‘proletarian internationalism’ was once a useful piece of theory. But today, after 60 years of misuse by Lenin and Stalin, all it means for their heirs is the alacrity with which a Communist Party obeys the Moscow line.
This emerges from a fascinating, painful post-mortem which the British Communists held recently on their own behaviour in 1939. When the war began, they declared that it was a ‘war on two fronts,’ against Fascism abroad and the Tory Government at home. But Stalin and the Comintern, loyal to the new Nazi-Soviet Pact, swiftly stamped on the British comrades. A month later, the British Party performed a U-turn: the war between Britain and Hitler was now merely a clash between ‘two imperialisms,’ and all good progressives should demand an immediate peace.
Eagerly supporting the new line, the fellow-traveller D. N. Pritt dashed into print. ‘Is it not clear,’ he asked, ‘that Hitler and the ruling class of Germany would be unable to persuade their workers to carry on the war against a British Government which … was offering an immediate and just peace?’ If a peace-loving People’s Government were formed in Britain, he predicted, the workers of Germany would rise and throw off their oppressors.
Blindness on that scale about Nazi Germany and its grip on the German people was not uncommon on the Left. Many remembered how, a few years before, workers from all over the world had gone to join the International Brigades in Spain -German exiles among them.
That was no illusion. But neither was the fact that when revolutionary Russia invaded Poland in 1920, the Polish workers marched in their hundreds of thousands to throw the Russians out again. In our own time, there was no illusion about Mr Arthur Scargill’s scathing contempt for the workers’ movement called Solidarity. And no illusion about the reluctance of Polish coal miners to do anything for Mr Scargill’s men four years later, when his own strike was being weakened by coal imports from Poland.
Nobody is saying that modern workers have lost the sense of international brotherhood entirely. Workers at the Ford plants in Europe, to take one example, often refuse to take work from a striking Ford factory in another country. But the dogma that ‘class-conscious proletarians’ will always put class solidarity above nation contains a massive fallacy.
At its crudest, this dogma says that internationalism is the normal, healthy condition of working people, while nationalism is an aberration. To be equally crude, this is history inside out. Nationality is the force which dominates our world. Internationalism is still the noble exception.
Tom Nairn, that shrewd political judge, put it like this: ‘The overwhelmingly dominant political by-product of modern internationality is nationalism. Not the logically prescribed commonsense of internationalism, but the non-logical, untidy, refractory, disintegrative, particularistic truth of nation-states. Not swelling “higher unity” but “Balkanisation,” a world of spiky exceptions to what should have been the rule.’
Where did the muddle begin? Pardy in confusion over what Marx meant when he wrote that ‘the working men have no country,’ and that the industrial proletariat was a ‘universal class.’ Partly in the frightful trauma of 1914, when almost all the ‘internationalist’ socialist parties of Europe voted for war.
After that, ‘internationalism’ was twisted into grotesque shapes. Worst of all, it came to be used as a mask to make greedy nationalism look ‘progressive.’ The Nazis claimed that they were transcending petty national divisions by creating a ‘New European Order.’ For Communists, internationalism became a disguise for the defence of the Soviet Union’s national interests. ‘Nationalism equals Fascism’ was the instinct of many English members of the Labour Left – who could never imagine themselves as English nationalists – when faced with the question of Welsh and Scottish devolution.
And yet, if internationalism based on class is in a bad way, the idea of social and political justice ‘sans frontières’ is stronger than it has ever been. The world is smaller; its survival is threatened by nuclear weapons and effluent.
The millions who fork out for famines, earthquakes and cyclones now do so out of solidarity as much as charity. In Europe, dissidents of East and West try to agree on an ‘anti-politics’ through which nations can evade and resist the grip of their own governments. The ‘higher unity’ of multinational corporations and military power blocs strikes people increasingly as false fraternity, and encourages them to look for a brother-and-sisterhood of the human race which is based on human beings rather than on contracts and treaties.
But the first condition for this journey towards fraternity is that we stop trying to argue the nation away before its time. Inter
nationalism means helping other societies to survive physically, but also to develop in their own way and defend their diversity – which implies their freedom. Somewhere in the future, the nation-state will perish. But to assume that it has already perished can lead only to delusion, then to impotence, then to disaster.
‘There are mad people who want war in every nation.’ But especially in nations which remember war as victories rather than miseries, which fancy they are still islands. An Italian villager can imagine another nation as a liberator. An English football crowd, it seems, sees nations as game-cocks – bred only to fight.
[1985
Nations on Parade
Perhaps the French know something we do not. Last week’s Fourteenth of July parade was the biggest rumble-past of military hardware seen in Paris since the war.
‘Stone, bronze, stone, steel, stone, oak-leaves, horses’ heels Over the paving.’ I think of Le Monde as a loosely leftish paper, forgetting – as the British usually do – that no contradiction between socialism and militarism is seen in France. But its report of the parade reminded me of Eliot’s lines: ‘Apart from the detachments of the higher military academies and the sapeur-pompiers of Paris, of the Foreign Legion and state security and the national gendarmerie, the march included 636 vehicles of which 382 were armour of every model from the 3rd Army Corps at Lille …’
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