IFF LINKS BLOG

2003-08-02T07:08:00.000-07:00

Against Liberal Intervention: "The problem with symbolic military gestures is that they kill innocent bystanders as surely as do acts of naked aggression that are devoid of good intentions. Total the many thousands of civilian dead (or just dead women and children) in the first Gulf War, Somalia, Kosovo/Serbia and Gulf War II, and you already have a pretty good argument against liberal intervention."

2003-08-02T00:57:00.000-07:00

Cost of War: "War affects everyone, not just those directly involved in the fighting. This webpage is a simple attempt to demonstrate one of the more quantifiable effects of war: the financial burden it places on our tax dollars."

2003-07-04T17:23:00.000-07:00

Virtual protest Peace activists spontaneously amass on a new 3D online virtual community:

"Two guys and a girl wearing a T-shirt with a peace symbol on it were sitting beneath a virtual gazebo," [says student Nigel Jett] They invited him to join, and since then, he has helped arrange the peace rally. Today he starts and polices antiwar discussions. You could argue that these people would be better off organising a protest in the real world. But Jett says that is missing the point. "We had some really great discussions, we had lots of really diverse opinions," explains Jett. "It was very decentralised. No one was making speeches. Some people tried to coordinate things and made sure that discussions were actually productive and didn't turn into name calling."

2003-06-25T17:19:00.000-07:00

ECONOMICS: Mideast Leaders Eager to Greet World Economic Elite

2002-11-14T11:54:00.000-08:00

Welcome

2002-10-28T01:01:00.000-08:00

Technologies that are Reshaping the World

2002-10-13T16:34:00.001-07:00

washingtonpost.com: All in Our Heads another pinker review

2002-10-13T16:34:00.000-07:00

'The Blank Slate': The Evolutionary War Review of Pinker book has this crucial phrase:

With the triumph of evolutionary theory, Pinker sees a new scientific, cultural and political alignment near, one that accepts a more constrained conception of human nature and adopts corresponding social and economic policies, but does not neglect the genetically less endowed -- in short, a compassionate conservatism.

no thanks...

2002-10-10T14:37:00.000-07:00

From Chaucer to Channel Four Michael Portillo ALBION By Peter Ackroyd

2002-10-10T14:25:00.000-07:00

What is Heterarchy? Just when you think you've figured out Holarchy...

2002-10-10T14:22:00.000-07:00

Towards a Sociology of Worth - a critique of Parsons VERY timely critique of Parsons that says stuff like, "Entrepenuership is the ability to keep multiple orders of worth
in play and to exploit the resulting ambiguity..."

2002-10-10T14:17:00.000-07:00

Permanently Beta - the consequences for organisations of Open Source technology

2002-10-10T14:14:00.000-07:00

spiked-politics | Article | Taking on America Another eye popping piece from Slavoj Zizek

2002-10-10T14:11:00.000-07:00

BBC - Radio 3 Arts and Drama - Night Waves - Undercurrents - Human Nature radio show with Pinker, John gray, Oliver James, Hilary Rose

2002-10-10T14:06:00.000-07:00

System error, reboot mind | csmonitor.com Latest pop version of memetic theory

2002-10-10T14:04:00.000-07:00

Scotland on Sunday - Week in Review - JOHN McTERNAN: Power to the people not the town hall

2002-10-10T13:47:00.000-07:00

SCOTLAND Germany is in better shape than British commentators admit pIece from Scottish historian (based in germany) Chris Harvie on the german elections

2002-10-10T13:42:00.000-07:00

SCOTLAND Brown and Blair may be writing story with a twist Interesting piece fromAlf Young about narrative and politics:" In post-modern political debate, the n-word plays a hugely important, if little understood role. "

2002-10-10T13:35:00.000-07:00

SCOTLAND Democracy’s forest fire A;ex Bell, Herald columnist

2002-10-10T13:30:00.000-07:00

Scientific American: Real Time interesting article about our changing attitudes to time

2002-10-10T13:29:00.000-07:00

Scientific American: Rules for a Complex Quantum World new fusion of information theory and quantum theory

2002-10-10T13:20:00.001-07:00

WALDEN BELLO - PACIFIC PANOPTICON Philipino anti-globaliser

2002-10-10T13:20:00.000-07:00

GEISA MARIA ROCHA - NEO-DEPENDENCY IN BRAZIL A piece which explains the rise of Lola in Brazil

2002-10-10T13:18:00.000-07:00

Granta: Ian Jack on Celebrity

2002-10-10T13:17:00.000-07:00

The Chronicle: 10/11/2002: Navigating the Ethics of Globalization - by Peter Singer

2002-10-10T13:16:00.000-07:00

Creating a Life:Professional Women and the Quest for Children by Sylvia Ann Hewlett
Reviewed by Ellen Willis

2002-10-10T13:01:00.000-07:00

The New York Review of Books: A Farewell to Politics - Vaclav Havel

2002-10-10T12:56:00.000-07:00

Fighting Terrorism With Democracy- Richard Rorty

2002-10-01T02:46:00.000-07:00

PSYCHOANALYSIS, TERRORISM AND FUNDAMENTALISM

2002-10-01T02:44:00.000-07:00

Forbes.com - Welcome to feedback universe

2002-09-28T03:55:00.000-07:00

The Word Spy Index - Subjects great utility - tracks new words

2002-09-28T03:53:00.000-07:00

Scotland on the essential science indicator index rates how many papers produced and citations - apparently doing quite well in
1 CLINICAL MEDICINE
2 BIOLOGY & BIOCHEMISTRY
3 MOLECULAR BIOLOGY & GENETICS
4 PLANT & ANIMAL SCIENCE
5 PHYSICS

2002-09-28T03:24:00.000-07:00

Louis Menand on 9.11 analysis books V. urbane intelligent commentator

2002-09-24T14:03:00.000-07:00

Sequel to NoLogo | Preface to Fences and Windows Naomi Klein's followup

2002-09-24T00:29:00.000-07:00

Judith Eve Lipton reviews The Tao of Equus: A Woman’s Journey of Healing and Transformation through the Way of the Horse by Linda Kohanov

2002-09-24T00:28:00.000-07:00

Thomas E. Dickins reviews The Imagined World Made Real: Towards a Natural Science of Culture by Henry Plotkin

2002-09-24T00:27:00.000-07:00

Roy Sugarman reviews Why Therapy Doesn't Work and What We Should Do About It andThe Nature of Unhappiness by David Smail

2002-09-24T00:26:00.000-07:00

Neil Levy reviews The Biology and Psychology of Moral Agency by William A. Rottschaefer

2002-09-23T02:32:00.000-07:00

Guardian Unlimited Observer | Comment | David Blunkett on Britishness, race and identity

2002-09-23T02:28:00.000-07:00

Observer on creativity inspiration - Ballard, Izzard, Savile

2002-09-23T02:22:00.000-07:00

Scotland on Sunday Scotland in 2012:A nation reborn? Futurist predictions on scotland's in a decade

2002-09-23T02:21:00.000-07:00

Blunkett strange patriotism - Sherald

2002-09-23T02:19:00.000-07:00

Holloway debates drugs expert on drugs

2002-09-17T01:40:00.000-07:00

A Real War on Terrorism By Robert Wright Wright's definitive game-theoretic solution to the terrorist threat to America

2002-09-17T01:36:00.000-07:00

The New Yorker: The Critics: The Theatre - Lahr on Stoppard play about russion revolution - link with Amis on KOba

2002-09-17T01:32:00.000-07:00

Barbara Ehrenreich | Low-Fat Capitalism | September 2002

2002-09-17T01:30:00.000-07:00

Westward the course of Empire - on the new neo-Roman American imperialism

2002-09-17T01:28:00.000-07:00

Philadelphia Inquirer | 09/08/2002 | Roger scruton on how globalisaton challenges 1E

2002-09-17T01:27:00.000-07:00

The Left and 9/11

2002-09-17T01:25:00.000-07:00

PARAMETERS, US Army War College Quarterly - Autumn 2002 - Fascinating, respectful military piece on rolling back Islam

2002-09-15T14:41:00.000-07:00

GLOBAL VISION : THE TRANSFORMATIVE FUNCTION OF ART

2002-09-15T13:46:00.000-07:00

Thomas W. Clark reviews The Problem of the Soul: Two Visions of the Mind and How to Reconcile Them By Owen Flanagan follower of Varela

2002-09-15T13:44:00.000-07:00

powerful new book on networks

2002-09-15T13:40:00.000-07:00

Tonkin on 9/11 books

2002-09-15T13:39:00.000-07:00

Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Felipe Fernandez-Armesto: Meals make us human

2002-09-15T13:37:00.000-07:00

Is obesity that much of a problem?? - sunday herald

2002-09-15T13:36:00.001-07:00

Mcwhirter on Ascherson's Stone voices

2002-09-15T13:36:00.000-07:00

review of Harvies book on Historic Scotland

2002-09-15T13:34:00.000-07:00

Scotland on Sunday - Week in Review - We’re all doomed... ? Why Scotland teeters on the brink

2002-09-15T13:33:00.000-07:00

Physics Today September 2002Physics is in crisis. We have lost our ideals and focus as a unified field.

2002-09-14T00:36:00.000-07:00

Economist.com on the digby jones story - scots hating english

2002-09-14T00:28:00.000-07:00

Thomas W. Clark reviews The Problem of the Soul: Two Visions of the Mind and How to Reconcile Them By Owen Flanagan different vision of what a scientifically grounded human nature might be from Pinker

2002-09-14T00:16:00.001-07:00

review of Pinker

2002-09-14T00:16:00.000-07:00

todd gitlin on anti-americanism

2002-09-06T10:52:00.000-07:00

Should kids get taught citizenship in Schools from prospect mag

2002-09-06T10:30:00.000-07:00

LRB | Hugh Pennington : Smallpox Scares. University of Aberdeen's Hugh Pennington writes definitively on small pox

2002-09-06T10:27:00.000-07:00

Iain Banks review Actually, an amazing think piece based on his book - Scottish author, so worth putting in Scottish Agenda.

2002-09-06T09:28:00.000-07:00

In pursuit of the trivial An name but anonymous Scottish journalist complains about the triviality of national media in reporting about the parliament

2002-09-06T09:27:00.000-07:00

Ali Smith on Scottish arts and Scottish futures Scottish Left Review

2002-09-06T09:24:00.000-07:00

The mental well-being of young people is to be targeted as part of wide-ranging and ambitious plans to tackle mental health. times educational supplement Scotland

2002-09-06T09:21:00.000-07:00

The Case of the Postmodernist's Sore Thumb, or the Moral Sentiments of John Rebus

by Christopher Harvie, Professor of British Studies, University of Tubingen.

I Cheshire Cat Federalism

In the early 1850s the Pre-Raphaelites set out to decorate the walls and roof of the Oxford Union with Arthurian scenes. This was more than a symbolic act of dissent from the material world of the Crystal Palace and the Northcote-Trevelyan Report; it was a calculated bid by a Ruskinian, arts-and-crafts, religious and proto-socialist group to influence the politics of the élite of Young England. It also produced a fine Max Beerbohm joke:

What were they going to do with the Grail
when they found it, Mr Rossetti?

Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his Circle (1913) imagined Rossetti banging up against Benjamin Jowett of Balliol, wheeler-dealer in chief to the University and architect of competitive examination in the Civil Service. The encounter of the idealistic and the mundane, viewed by a sharp, knowing, metropolitan dandy, has a certain relevance to post-devolution Scotland. The Scottish political élite, or 'chattering classes' (depending on your position) had magicked the grail of constitutional change out of a diffused political discontent and the downfall of the Tories, while an otherwise manically-centralist New Labour government, which hadn't given the matter much thought, played along.

But what was it going to do with the Grail? And what did the whole devolution business do for political theory?

Did devolution signal the end of the self-confidence of the British Union State? Coming after half a decade of pretty spectacular moral collapse, its enactment in 1997-9 appeared to some - Tom Nairn, David Marquand, Anthony Barnett, Will Hutton, Bernard Crick, Colin Crouch - to reflect the limitations of British academic empiricism of the 'British homogeneity thesis/behaviourist' school. David Butler, Jean Blondel and Robert McKenzie departed for the shades only slightly behind their Oxford doppelgänger 'logical positivism'. Also scorched was a Westminster whose custom was to define and dominate the agenda of subordinate bodies. Decentralist euphoria, however, wasn't shared by government. After the referenda were over, it was evident that Tony Blair had been persuaded to act in 1997 because he saw devolution as an event dominated by the 'international' question of the future of Northern Ireland, after which the Scots would be satisfied with a body he unwisely compared to a parish council, and the Welsh with enough autonomy to keep some notion of semi-federalism in being, and nationalism under restraint. This reading was borne out by such political theory as emanated from 'sources close to Downing Street' whose valuation of parliamentary democracy was not high. (Mulgan)

Blair's shadow Scottish Secretary, George Robertson, believed that such measures would deliver 'the death blow' to the Scottish National Party, by removing independence from the agenda. Yet Robertson's successor and First Minister Donald Dewar defined devolution as 'a journey that has no end', a somewhat risky phrase which not only echoed Charles Stewart Parnell's 'No man can set a boundary to the march of a nation', but seconded Ron Davies' view of the Welsh experience: devolution was a process whose goal was somewhere else.

The outcome was thus in principle fairly unpredictable. For a time in early 1999 a substantial SNP success looked possible, until it was countered by the consequences of a foreign policy démarche by the party leader Alex Salmond, who criticised the bombing of Serbia. This stance (which ironically accorded with the traditional Foreign Office line on the Balkans) gave the current Foreign Secretary Robin Cook and Chancellor Gordon Brown, with the tabloid press behind them, the chance to ‘take a baseball bat to the SNP’. In the 6 June election it ended up with only 35 seats against Labour's 56. Still, it polled about 70% better for the Scottish parliament than for Westminster. Lord Robertson, who foretold its demise, went on to become Secretary-General of the world's most powerful military alliance. It is, to say the least, difficult to feed this string of fact into any theory and get a satisfactory outcome!

There was, moreover, no political theory of federalism on hand to replace the parliamentary sovereignty broadcast by A.V. Dicey in The Law of the Constitution (1885) and finessed in a thoroughly ‘modernist’ way – with due regard to sociology and psychology - by Graham Wallas in his Human Nature in Politics (1912), the first great text of the behaviourist tradition. John Major in 1992-97 still wholeheartedly believed in Dicey. So too did the SNP. Much of its programme, predicated on oil revenues, inhibited any conventional political challenge: its approach couldn't be 'Turn the rascals out!' as so many of its policies depended on an independence which only a quarter of the Scots seemed to care much about. Yet the dissolving effect of devolution on the institutions of the Union State in Scotland has meant that the party remains in contention; and while a new state is a possibility the notion of a market-driven post-modern equilibrium is deferred.

It is thus perhaps a pity that the subtitle of David McCrone's Understanding Scotland has so effortlessly made the transition from The Sociology of a Stateless Nation (1992) to The Sociology of a Nation (2001). The saga of Robertson, Cook and Brown indicates the instability of the neo-nationalism which is McCrone’s terminus. Mature nation-states operate in a diplomacy-driven constellation quite different from the ambiguity of a formerly ‘stateless’ entity whose culture had to become its politics. Scotland might be hovering on the verge of nation-status, but the (unique?) irony was that in British politics leading Scots MPs exerted a power quite disproportionate to their numbers. This was perhaps less attributable to their talents than to the migration of many of the metropolitan political class to the far lusher fields of the City. The dominance of this élite contradicted the propositions of neo-nationalism advanced in Holyrood and academia, but depended on its British policies holding up. If they fell to bits, they could again trigger a Scots drive to independence.

This was the ‘old politics’ whose number had been chalked up by the post-modern cash-nexus lauded by Geoff Mulgan, Martin Jacques, Charlie Leadbeater, etc. The politics/state nexus of modernism would be supplanted, not by the old Carlyleian monster feeding on wage-slavery but a new technology-enabled pluralism whereby the citizen, individually equipped with the necessary technology, disposed of choices within the producer-consumer continuum which is the service-industry society. The problems however ramified, and the downside both of globalisation and New Labour’s post-modernism, which boiled down to a series of unheralded and unadvertised compacts with the metropolitan business élite, was visible by 11 September 2001, when the instability of post-modernism became palpably apparent. Scottish opinion – or at least civic opinion - hadn’t thought in terms of this sort of ball-park, and didn't seem at all keen to go there.

II Statelessness and Theory

Speaking very broadly, social theory comes in two varieties. There is an overreaching Staatstheorie - what Walter Lippmann called ‘the public philosophy’ - embodied in a constitution and governing the relationship of state bodies to subordinate authorities and individual rights. This is surrounded by an 'official' sociology empirically derived from the classical economics canon and its critics, which links the constitution via its political culture to economic and social institutions. In Lippmann's case this chain of being would stretch back through Bryce’s American Commonwealth and Tocqueville’s De la Democratie en Amerique to the Federalist Papers. This enables political actors to predict (within limits) the reactions of other parts of the social system to changes in any one part. The public philosophy in a mixed economy with an effective governmental system is a self-trimming mechanism: one of formal commentary in a ‘rigid’ constitution. It can be much more cultural and enterprising when surrounding a ‘flexible’ constitution. I tried to describe this myself in a study of the political novel in Britain interpreted as a treasury of political conventions, from Disraeli on, in The Centre of Things in 1991.

Secondly, there is theory in the service of a 'profession', something whose social function goes much further back: to guilds and priesthoods, in which the 'composure' of the larger society is upheld by a corpus of theory which patrols the institutional bounds of the corporations which compose it and inducts its younger members. Theory in this context is a book of rules by which entry to the professions or 'Estates' is regulated: whether Beckmesser versus Sachs in Meistersinger, the tribalism of the English public schools, the Wanderjahre of the apprentice, or the micropolitics of Emanuel Todd’s ‘authoritarian family’.

Anyone who has taught in the German or Germano-American academic world will be aware of the moat – procedural rather than theoretical – which guards the core of any academic thesis: that obligation to catalogue every approach to a subject that has ever been made, in most cases, alas, without any critical faculty being brought into play. Homage to Wissenschaft matters more than understanding the subject itself - this in the land of Heisenberg! ‘Theory as ritual’ is often a means towards professional 'composure' at best (or at worst subservience to the Research Assessment Exercise) rather than than dynamic comprehension, though the fragments of it that make their way into public ideology can, given the right market conditions, have considerable effect.

In a pure post-modern context the professional sort of model extends itself into interdisciplinary theory (often itself derived from precise political/intellectual structures) and less confidently into social fact: preserving a sort of intra-professional devolution, whereby an élite can run its own affairs without troubling the central state too much. This has a radical aspect, in that members of a school or persuasion come together to seek a sort of autonomy; but it’s also conservative in that the outcome is often an abstention from uncomfortable political intervention, or contact with unpleasant public reality. In a ‘stateless nation’ this academic élite can continue undisturbed, fairly autonomous in its choice of research concerns.

But, given sweeping constitutional change, this equilibrium will give way to something quite different: the transactions of cabinets, parties and individual politicians. For almost three hundred years the British ‘who-whom’ question has been recorded and analysed by historians, journalists and working lawyers rather than political theorists. Contrast the persuasive elegance of Walter Bagehot on the 'dignified and efficient parts of the constitution' with John Stuart Mill's quite eccentric ideas about the function of the mid-Victorian parliament in which he briefly sat. This existentialism has two broad effects: firstly, transactional politics establishes its own priorities, often near-impenetrable to the outside view because they depend on secrecy, personal ambition, the technicalities of parliamentary procedure, or downright tedium. Secondly, such theoretical constructs as ‘policy communities’ are disrupted by this. In place of a broadly predictable bureaucracy-advisor approach we have a minister who has to be a cabinet actor, living off competence and charisma, which may make him/her alarmingly flexible in terms of policy. Maybe in due course imaginative categories will evolve to give reality and purpose to the transactions: only then will a political culture of autonomous government have emerged.

Some Staatstheorien are no more and no less than an anticipation that practice in one political system will (all other factors being equal) replicate itself when the main elements of that system are introduced elsewhere. This was termed by Bryce's generation the 'comparative method' and seems tautologous, although the underlying notion remains lively in our present mania for ‘benchmarking’. Real learning takes time, and Scotland's politicians have been less than prescient in such matters.

To take one example. The mixed 'modified d'Hondt' system of proportional representation chosen for Holyrood, comes closest in general structure to that of federal Germany. There, parties which are dependent on winning constituencies will organise themselves in a decentralised fashion, and those dependent on a list will be centralised. The Scottish Labour Party in 1999 adopted a centralised appraisal of candidates, despite its strength in constituency contests. This narrowed its social base (Holyrood MSPs are said to be six times more middle-class than Westminster MPs) and exposed it to the successful counterattack of ‘Dennis the Deselected’ Canavan. The result has been to exposed itself to continual erosion through the activities of the Scottish Socialist Party. The SNP was no more skilful. Famed for slit-eyed opportunism, it required a (genuinely) democratic-centralist constitution, but out of inertia or whatever preserved its old and hitherto highly-nominal confederal structure. This meant that it lurched to the other extreme and allowed local oligarchies to marginalise such key front-benchers as Andrew Wilson and Mike Russell.

By now, in the run-up to the 2003 elections, the Scottish party landscape has come to look particularly dysfunctional. Small groups of activists and office-bearers have exercised disproportionate influence in selecting candidates; on the other hand, they have increased the possibity of an electoral rebellion, a breakout into a far-more-variegated political system. Nothing of this could have been predicted from the conditions appertaining prior to September 1997.

III Marching Backwards?

Post-1989, we were informed by the likes of Fukuyama, Mulgan, Jacques, Leadbeater, etc., that the institutions of politics and the state were ebbing, and deserved to do so. The attempt to transform Scotland into a nation-state thus stood out in this post-modern context like a sore thumb. Was this wilful swimming-against-the-tide the cause of the recurrent problems of the first Holyrood years? The absurdities of Westminster-type spin marked the Dewar days. The Section 28 affair saw the confrontation of Executive with the Catholic Hierarchy and the tabloid press – Carlyle’s 'old and new priests' in alliance. Even when the Parliament proved effective at unearthing the breakdowns of the ancien régime – in school exams, in health care, in the world’s worst recycling record, in menacing drug and alcohol consumption - action on them could rarely be slotted into the timetable. Matters were made worse by a gerrymandered local government system whose reform ought to have had the same priority as the Whigs gave it in 1832 (they abolished the old burgh councils in 1833, two years ahead of the English reform). Local authorities, properly organised, could have expanded the parliament's capability. Unreformed, they became a centre of opposition to those councillors who had made it to Holyrood. Others, particularly in the media, could not conceal their delight at having a designer Aunt Sally to hand.

Presented in sprightly and constructive form by the likes of Jeremy Rifkind, the postmodern notion assumed that the grand perspectives and great traditions of the nation-state were at an end, and with it the ideological confrontation of the Cold War, and its grim predecessors: Marxism versus liberal constitutionalism, the French Revolution versus the organicism of Burke, and so on. Postmodernism is a concept of which the Leavis-Marx-created world of Raymond Williams was innocent. But a Williams could never have written in the Bundesrepublik, and for someone of Japanese background, like Fukuyama, the notion of the end of history has a lot going for it.

The post-war German Bundesrepublik - whose Länder are in some respects the model for a devolved Scotland - was the first post-modern state, rather than the explicitly ahistorical USA. German history was sidelined as the class and economic confrontations which destroyed the institutions of Weimar, and projected the Nazis into power, were dissolved in favour of decentralised nexi of power governed by the free market, the Grundgesetz and the internal politics and hierarchy of such institutions as the judiciary, universities, muncipal councils, etc. Along with an industrial establishment which was, for the first time, competitive rather than cartelised, this meant a radical break with the German past. So while the Bundesrepublik produced a state, it was one which proved almost alarmingly plastic: able to be expanded and, simultaneously, merged into Europe. Nationalism was, for obvious reasons, only thinly present, in Jürgen Habermas' 'constitutional patriotism'. With only a few exceptions, ‘professional’ theory in the universities adapted itself to this; which may account for the limited social impact of German academia.

Scotland's situation was far from post-modern, and decidedly unpropitious. Germany had in 1945 the advantage of an influx of skilled manpower from the east. It could re-equip its manufacturing with up-to-date equipment. It settled for, and indeed devoted itself to, a hard currency which mattered more than the nation-state, and indeed bought absence from it: the Deutschmark won its greatest victories on the beaches of Spain or Italy. Its social structure remained conservative; indeed became more so with the excision of the Communist East and the religious conservatism of Christian Democracy, which cleverly retained old institutions - village life, religious establishment, the Hausfrau mystique - as propellants of industrial growth.

In Scotland the industrial deluge - particularly unavoidable in the 1960s - was more serious because not explicitly war-induced. There was no Stunde Null with the whole place cratered, but neither was there a foundation for gradual change. The marvel is that the resilience of local capitalists and artisans (were they ever an élite, as some have contended? Élites mould economic situations in their favour, and there was little evidence of such collectivity) lasted so long after the disablement of their 'world' of heavy industries. Following the downward plunge of the 1950s, it had to adapt to so many new régimes: incoming American light engineering in the 1940s and 1950s, the motor industry in the 1960s, North Sea oil in the 1970s, Silicon Glen in the 1980s. By the 1990s, however, this resilience was beginning to wear out. Financial services followed manufacturing industry in coming under takeover pressure by 2000; only at the low-tech or call-centre end of cybercommerce did Scotland do well.

Scotland wasn't a model European region so much as a hybrid composed of marginal Western European/North American (industrial ownership, financial services) practice and ex-collective Eastern European practice (housing, local government). The dominance of superfirms (Finlays, Tennants, Coats and Clark, North British Locomotive, Colvilles, Lithgows, Scottish Brewers, Distillers) and their economics and an historically early entry into international finance, made them behave as global actors, something evident in the personal returns to its industrial/financial leaders, which influenced the country's equally long-lived 'rest and recreation economy' - deer forests and grouse moors, fishing and golf, yachting, spas, etc. Such returns were only available legally in the Western context (though they are now more than paralleled by the exploits of the 'New Russians'). They are reflected in certain aspects of Scots servitor capitalism: the developments recorded above have become the 'Skibo Castle syndrome'.

IV Postmodernism Unbound

This stimulating but overdriven complexity, however, has developed at the cost of Weber's 'ascetic capitalism', or the Calvinist values which underwrote the German Mittelstand. The weakness of the smaller employers ought to make Scotland's politics resemble East Europe, where the governmental superstructure has become the area of contest. Yet in Poland or Slovakia the shallowness of party hinterlands expresses itself in policy and electoral instability. In Scotland it doesn't. Labour remains seemingly unbudgeably in power: oiling its authority with the use of patronage. The Conservatives, having no mittelstand agenda, are losing out to the Nationalists, yet the Nationalists, only able to collect votes on Labour's left, have been split by the exertions involved in this process.

Scotland's political problem seems a reflex of a deeper economic opacity: something resident in the metatheory it thinks it has in common with the west. It is actually very difficult to find, in contemporary 'classical' economic theory, any approximation to the 'economic nation' whose sources of wealth Adam Smith explored so graphically in 1776. Triumphalist neo-liberal discourse, in the gaps between showering Nobel prizes on its devotees for micro-research, has - if the contents of Economica or The Economic Journal are anything to go by - little energy left to engage with the economics of mass-tourism, organised crime, or even the influence of financial centres. This despite the fact that the first two now overshadow the operations of classical economics' building blocks, the entrepreneur and the firm.

One post-modern claim is thus endorsed – by the malfunction of the motor that’s supposed to power this particular bus. This makes more-than-slightly-suspect the response of developing opportunities for multi-modal or 'hybrid' action. Attempts to bring the moral agnosticism of postmodernism to heel can be observed in the recent separate critiques of such as Jeremy Rifkin in The Age of Access (2000), Colin Crouch in Coping with Post-Democracy (2001), and Scotland's own Pat Kane in his 'play-ethic' website . Rifkin and Crouch concentrate on the appropriation of the 'national' public space by market-oriented enterprise culture, and on the migration of the voluntaristic 'third sector' of the democratic/participatory ideal to the culture-nation or region. Kane goes back to Enlightenment discourse to resume the idea of Spieltrieb (the enthusiasm/compulsion of the game) advanced by Adam Ferguson and Friedrich Schiller, as a means of providing cultural depth to the 'third sector': being those activities centred on friendship, enthusiasm and trust which expand 'civil society' and provide ways of rearticulating community to cope with the stresses and negotiations of market economics.

There are several problems about the Rifkind/Kane play ethic. What happens if the political determinant of the rules of the game is so remote as to be inaccessible? What if the cash-flow on which the game depends has rules which are continually altered by privileged performers? What if the ‘play’ in question takes on, in default of any explicit political targets, the rigid lineaments usually associated with work or religion? And what if its liturgical elements don't work, even as placebos?

Take sport: it's a huge quotient of household expenditure and attracts roughly a third of media coverage, yet in Scotland this particular spieltrieb can only go so far, in a situation that defines itself by competitiveness. The Tartan Army introduced a ludic note of self-mockery into the World Cup, an intriguing reworking of patriotism in which the example of Mel Gibson anachronistically coated in woad in Braveheart (1996) was made over into an innocuous 'Jimmy Hat' regression to infantilism. This was valuable at the time – World Cups are nicer because of the Tartan Army - but where would spieltrieb go when Scotland in 2002 didn't even manage to qualify? And when the country's two most successful clubs were anxious to compete in a bigger pond?

Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, scientists announced that they had detected a 'laziness' gene which predisposed people to loll around in front of the television, watching football. The Daily Record duly made a connection between this and television's Scottish slob, Rab C. Nesbitt, only a few weeks after Francis Fukuyama, growing more pessimistic by the month, had forecast a new and ominously permanent class-division based on genetic endowment.

V The Plutonic Economy

In the Scotland of semi-achieved nationality the cultural space of the play-ethic is contested territory. The country has done spectacularly well in some hypertext areas – computer-games, comics – and nurtured a world-beater in Harry Potter, a hybrid (again) between net-culture and the good old book. But who cleaned up on the Boy Wizard? Round up the usual metropolitan Voldemorts. This is aggravated because of the absence of a Mittelstand and the dominance of a few large and highly-political concerns - the banks, post-firm, public utility concerns like First Group, Scottish and Southern Electricity and media with Scottish Media Group and the elusive Barclay Brothers. These run businesses which depend on governments far removed from Scotland, something that poses problems of formal political theory. Where does sovereignty reside in an organisation like Stagecoach or Scottish Power, whose goose could be well and truly cooked by any one of several governments? And where does sovereignty in Scotland reside, when devolution to the Scottish parliament is paralleled by committments to many Public-Private-Partnerships? The state sector (local government, the health service, education) is conscious both of being fought over, and of providing the foot-soldiery of debate, the bulk of the Scottish political class.

Post-modernity was supposed to dump the political historian or historian-politician on the dustheap. Instead he/she finds that this is exhilarating territory, not least because its practitioners have taken a process essentially political, and by treating it as something historyless, come horribly unstuck. It is in the nature of theory to assume continuity: the expectation that relationships will broadly follow patterns which fairly predictable. History, inevitably, is messier, with lots of occasions where the patterns break down and the rule-book simply fails to explain what the major variables are up to. If the political morphology of the international firm is complex, no less so is the evolving social structure – from ‘stateless’ to 'state-lite'? - of Scotland, whose wayward development has permitted internal social gradients so steep as to set the concept of civil society at risk.

In 1996 the Scottish Council Foundation divided Scots society into thirds. 'Settled Scotland', 'insecure Scotland' and 'excluded Scotland' were sketchy but recognisable categories. The first was made up of baby-boomers who were on solid salaries with pension-plans, and had invested in houses when they were cheap. The second, raised in the service-industry economy, might enjoy higher incomes but lacked job security and reliable pensions, and were beset by high mortgage payments. The third group had lost any foothold on affluence, were ill and/or old, depended on one sort of public subsidy or another, and at the most insecure level, had drifted into illegality as agents or victims. The problem is that a society penetrated to this degree by insecurity, and weak in any civic morality, can move into a much more questionable stadium. Crime figures but once in McCrone’s index – and the reference is to a 1975 study of a Glasgow problem estate. To the techno-eupeptics of Mulgan, Rifkin and co, the ‘fourth sector’ of crime (quite a few index entries) provides a looming and ominous counterpoint.

In 1996 the Commons' Scottish Affairs Select Committee costed the drug problem in Glasgow alone at £ 633 million annually. This sum was about 2% of Scottish GNP in that year. Since then the number of problem drug users has gone up at least by a third, and involves perhaps 60,000 people. Since drugs spawn a complex shadow economy embracing not just the obvious crime and prostitution, but security firms, loan sharks, mini-cabs, tanning studios, gambling and money-laundering, restaurants and even art patronage, we are dealing here with an economic nexus far bigger than some respectable but ailing pensioner like shipbuilding.

What the Plutonic economy shows is the limit of civic republicanism. The decay of socialisation - family, church, education – is probably only to be expected in a secular and individuated society. If we add to this the problems of social exclusion, or a ghettoised immobility, and the destruction of the once-existing spieltrieb of the heavy industries and their hypermacho skilled hierarchies, we get something much more disturbing. The internationalised nature of the plutonic economy depends on plane- or container-borne imports from Afghanistan, Colombia, etc. Domestically, it’s under the violently-imposed hegemony of criminal bosses, something derived, perhaps, from the 'ghetto justice' of 'pacified' Belfast, diversifying into other operations.

This raises the question anent the play-ethic: granted its ethical/sociological acceptability, how compatible is it with the other imperatives crowding in on us - old-fashioned concerns like economic equality, freedom from being socially threatened, and so on? As these ventures into Scotland's Plutonic economy show, because our metatheories are in trouble, we don't register the problems generated as they decay.

VI Rebus is Right?

The premises of much postmodern theorising have been disproven by events. Globalisation didn't mean a rebirth of Smithian economic rationality and 'sympathy' as forecast in Trust, Fukuyama's second book, or Robert Putnam's description of the foundations of successful economic regionalism. The multinational firm has turned out more likely to acquire its financial morality from the lower 'Plutonic' end of the scale, notably the behaviour of the élites it co-opts in third-world countries, than from the upper or academic end: something which was enhanced by the long practice that a diffused and complex criminal class had in organising itself on an international level, while being almost wholly relieved from academic inquiry into this.

Nevertheless the strain on Scotland's body politic of trying to restore a type of state which ran so determinedly against the prevailing tendency looked by 2002 as if it had led to stasis rather than the imaginative development that Nairn and others, the present writer included, had seen as embryonic within 'civic nationalism'. In the absence of a worked-out internationalist ethic and a theory of political organisation and delivery, a negative ethos of party egoism exerted itself, in which the priority became the defence of existing power-bases. Labour has not extended the constitutional radicalism it had shown in the Constitutional Convention to reform an inferior local government system. The Liberal Democrats didn't insist on this, because their backing was local rather than disseminated. Civil Service and quango expansion seemed to have little to do with strategy.

One post-Marxist political analysis which might be helpful here is that of the American leftist literary theorist Frederic Jameson. Jameson argues that the deliberately elliptical 'spun' complexes of post-modernist, 'conspiracy theory' - that old refuge of the paranoid - conserves a peculiar ‘modernist’ value. In this (to revert to a theory stated at the beginning) the investigation of the dysfunctional and corrupt is more illuminating than attempts to establish general theories, because it exposes the paths and channels of power.

Proceeding from this there there seems to be the structure of an interpretation of Scottish Unheil in the ramifications of crime fiction, from Eddie Boyd’s thrillers of the 1960s to Frederic Lindsay, Val MacDermid, William MacIlvanney and Christopher Brookmyre. Ian Rankin's Inspector Rebus novels have become a cult for good reasons, in the attention justifiably paid to them for their consistency of moral view and a cohesive, if less than optimistic, view of society. There is a plausible parallel between them and another microcosm reflecting metatheory, the Circus of John Le Carré’s spy fiction. Rankin himself has likened Rebus's Edinburgh, a community conveyed almost wholly by dialogue, to the nexus of relationships in Anthony Powell’s far-different Dance to the Music of Time: the longue durée of the sequence allows us to see how identity and relationships change. This may parallel shifts within Scottish society, particularly in that middle ground of 'insecure Scotland' whose ambitions and fears have enveloped Holyrood.

The ‘procedural’ crime novel evokes Georges Simenon. But while Superintendent Jules Maigret reflected the bourgeois solidity of Paris, albeit with a creepy echo of the years 1941-44, Rebus’s environment is much more unstable, in spirit a regression to the gothic origins of the detective genre in ‘the novel of horror’ of Edgar Allan Poe, or in Balzac’s ultimately corrupt detective Vidocq in La Comedie Humaine. While Maigret seems ageless, we know Rebus is past his career peak: the younger generation is knocking on the door, and she’s smart. His marriage has ended and other relationships don’t last; his child, now a young adult, is crippled. His diet is life-threatening, he drinks too much, he moons around in his own bubble-wrap of Saab and (somewhat anachronistic) pop. He is, like Vidocq, a guide to his society, and like Vidocq in mid-career, he compacts with the worse to try to stop the worst.

John Rebus takes every case as it comes, and they’re getting harder. Edinburgh, with its art galleries and posh restaurants and law firms, is an official world which awkwardly combines a newly-fledged polis with ambiguous loyalties (do not attempt to prove to me that Britain doesn’t matter to Gordon Brown). With classical economics gone global and enigmatic, a sophisticated multi-level state requiring complex social theory and a well-educated élite is required, but a minimal ‘policeman’ state is all that’s paid for. Rebus is that policeman, and he’s being overwhelmed.

To end on this note might be melodramatic. At the beginning of Christopher Brookmyre’s The Country of the Blind his lawyer heroine is confronted by a prize clutch of dysfunctional Scots: the tenant who lets his flat collapse ‘Cause it’s no ma job tae dae things, it’s the cooncil’s.’ The schemie populist out to get ‘they pervertit homos’. It’s when you key in the Daily Record’s ‘Voice of Scotland’ section that you realise this isn’t far from the real thing, as presented by a popular press which is surely one of Europe’s worst. In the case of Scotland, when one approaches the issues involved in transforming the simplest sorts of social theory into recipes for practical action, this primitivism – the work of the newspaper culture more than that of the actual readers of the Record and Sun - Scots don’t even get started. In his next book Boiling a Frog, Brookmyre contrived to get the last priest strangled in the guts of the last tabloid editor: satirists and parodists at least know where the hollow teeth are. Beerbohm it wasn’t, but at least a start.

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