Tom Nairn is a researcher at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, concerned with nationalism and the political and cultural effects of globalisation.
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Vol. 16 No. 17 · 8 September 1994
pages 7-8 | 4064 words
What nations are for
Tom Nairn
- The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian Self-Determination, 1969-1994 by Edward Said
Chatto, 400 pp, £20.00, July 1994, ISBN 0 7011 6135 3
- Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures by Edward Said
Vintage, 90 pp, £4.99, July 1994, ISBN 0 09 942451 7
The politics of dispossession is nationalism – an over-generalisation which at once calls for precise qualification. It is quite true that not all nationalists are dispossessed: possessors have their own (often strident) variations on the theme. It is also true that nationality politics did not originate among the crushed and uprooted: indeed its primary source was the nouveaux riches or upwardly mobile of Early Modern times, in Holland, England and France.
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Letters
Vol. 16 No. 19 · 6 October 1994
From Phil Edwards
I wondered what Tom Nairn (LRB, 8 September) understood by ‘Jewish nationalism minus the Zionist component’. Although presentday Zionism tends to wear the garb of divinely-guaranteed irredentism, Theodor Herzl for one envisaged a Jewish state in which religious institutions would occupy a strictly subordinate place, and would have been happy to build it in Cyprus or East Africa. Secular, ‘small-nation’ Zionism is not a contradiction in terms – which is not to deny that it is itself open to severe criticism.
I also wondered what led Stefan Collini in the same issue to include in his approving list of radical writers ‘with strong local roots and some pride in ancestry’ the name of the British Left’s greatest liability this century – a deracinated upper-middle-class blowhard, unencumbered by loyalty either to his (former) friends or to his own (former) beliefs, whose legacy to the Left was a political worldview populated by a spineless intelligentsia and a virile but mindless working class. I refer, of course, to George Orwell.
Phil Edwards
Manchester
