At the Fairground

Tom Nairn

• Republics, Nations and Tribes by Martin Thom
  Verso, 359 pp, £45.00, July 1995, ISBN 1 85984 020 5

If this new year was a precedent, there will be serious prophetic constipation till around 2001. The Independent on Sunday of 22 December last weighed in with a mere forty crystal-gazers, from Ian Angell, ‘darling of the doom-and-gloom conference circuit’, down to Theodore Zeldin’s ‘persuasively touchy-feely manifesto’, An Intimate History of Humanity. Yet quite a few gloomsters were not checked in, notably éminence noire Conor Cruise O’Brien. Was the Indie trying to cheer us up? Or perhaps it was offering a little consolation to those already suffering from the fin-de-siècle drowning sensation. More serious victims might also try turning to Martin Thom’s careful and deep fathoming of a similar great transition two hundred years ago: the birth of modern nationalism. There is more to be learned on that particular subject here than from most contemporary fulminations, not excluding my own. Then, too, in the decades following 1776 and 1789, the world passed through post-revolutionary rapids which permanently altered the shape and direction of the human river. Then, also, society (in particular the upper stratum) was suffering from manifestly lost bearings and complaining loudly about it. And then, as now, pundits of all lands found themselves blessed by the Zeitgeist, and redoubled their efforts until no open space was without its fairground tent and its impatient queues eager for lessons in portent-reading. As Martin Thom patiently points out over and over again, the trouble was not that the hucksters were mistaken. They were often quite right about what was going wrong. But that was unimportant, or at least ceasing to matter. As regards what was actually coming into being, on the other hand – the future pressing its way into the present through a myriad of unsuspected channels – they were mistaken, or at best accidentally half-right. In one sense that didn’t matter: they had spent the money long before anyone could sue them.