New Left Review I/75, September-October 1972

Tom Nairn

The Left against Europe?

‘I imagine that by about the turn of the century something like a United States of Socialist Europe will exist. A timid and conservative prefiguration of these United States is naturally the Common Market, for even conservative, bourgeois politicians are beginning to sense that the nation state, at least in Europe . . . has become an anachronism.’

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By the same author:

• Union on the Rocks? Tom Nairn on Michael Fry, The Union. Revisiting the circumstances of the UK’s founding pact, amid non-celebrations of the 1707 Treaty of Union and a groundswell of support for Scottish independence.
• The New Furies Tom Nairn on Tariq Ali, Rough Music. Britain’s subservient foreign policy and fawning political culture as indices of decline. Terror bombings and the returning furies of Blair’s war.
• A Myriad Byzantiums After ethnic definitions of collective identity, is a new scenery—hybrid cultures intertwined with a universal genome—becoming visible? Could St John Perse’s cosmopolis on the Bosphorus furnish a template for a world beyond national and multicultural imaginings?
• Mario and the Magician British politics under the wand of Redemption, as the new leitmotif of the party system. Similarities and contrasts between the ex-imperial states of UK and France, as New Labour shuffles towards listless re-election.
• Farewell Britannia: Break-Up or New Union? Has the Northern Ireland Agreement injected a fatal shot of constitutionalism into the archaic Ukanian state? Responding to Pocock and Mulhern, Tom Nairn looks forward to a rearrangement of islander relations, but warns that without its own reconstitution England could become a fatally regressive anomaly in the archipelago.
• Ukania Under Blair Great Britain has finally yielded a parliament to Scotland. But the Labour regime in London still clings convulsively to the totems of Ukania, in Tom Nairn’s savage updating of Robert Musil. New Labour’s eupeptic rhetoric of youth as a sure sign of a system being wheeled into the terminal ward.
• Reflections on Nationalist Disasters
• Breakwaters of 2000: From Ethnic to Civic Nationalism
• Sovereignty After the Election
• The Sole Survivor
• The Crisis of the British State