Adrian Davies joins Richard to discuss the enduring nature of British political institution—their ability to assimilate and mask radical change—as well as the potential for European identity in the 21st century. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radixjournal.substack.com/subscribe
The Prime Minister personally has come out of the Scottish referendum very badly, although I must say that the unionist side won that referendum by a convincing majority, and a significantly bigger majority than had been expected.
The Scottish nationalists have got themselves into a state of great excitement.
In the end, there are 32 electoral districts in Scotland, 28 of which voted no.
That is a pretty resounding victory.
It really is.
Strictly speaking about percentages, when you think about almost half of the country wants to form a new nation, that is very high.
It is, but another way of looking at it is that more than half didn't.
It's a strange view.
There are many strange things about this referendum.
For example, the pro-independence side took the view that if they won by one vote, and that was good enough, that was a conclusive indication that the Scottish people wanted independence.
There could, of course, be no question of any rerun at any future point of this referendum.
If they won, they won, and that was that.
It's a much bigger margin than anyone had anticipated.
But from their point of view, apparently it's not the end of the process.
So it's a very, very strange approach.
You press for a referendum, you lose it.
You lose it by far more votes than you were expecting to lose it.
But somehow that isn't final and definitive.
Whereas if you had won, even by a solitary vote...
That would have been a clear mandate to implement radical constitutional change.
That is a very, very strange view.
Well, I think, Adrian, I think you're touching on something called human nature.
We like to have it both ways very often.
Yes.
I certainly think so.
I think that...
The outcome of the referendum has plainly been a big disappointment to the advocates of independence.
And they're going to find it extremely difficult to come to terms with that.
Well, do you think that this would launch new independent movements?
Or do you think that this will actually be seen as a definitive loss?
Because I think it could...
Go both ways.
Granted, the Scottish independence people, they simply lost this referendum.
But you could say this is a moral victory.
The fact that this vote is even taking place is a major victory.
The idea of a vote like this occurring in the United States or plenty of other places, it's really unthinkable.
I don't think the political class would allow it.
It is a moral victory to a certain extent.
That's one way of looking at it.
Another way of looking at it is that it shows the stability of British political institutions, that our government was prepared to allow this to happen.
There's a very, very good comparison floating about in Europe at the moment.
The regional government of Catalonia is going to hold a referendum on Catalan independence from Spain in a few weeks' time.
The Spanish central government has forbidden them to do so, declared that the referendum is illegal and is going to get the Spanish Constitutional Court to issue some kind of injunction of forbidding it.
So that is perhaps an indication of the relative stability of British and Spanish political institutions.
Spanish political institutions in their present form only date back to 1975.
Ours date back to 1689, more or less.
And it tells you something about the difference between England or the United Kingdom and many other countries, that no one had any concerns that this was all going to end up in bloodshed or anything of the kind.
The worst that's happened, and this is regarded as shocking, It's a punch-up between pro- and anti-independence supporters in Glasgow, in which a few punches were thrown.
Compared to, say, the war between the states or the Spanish civil war, this is not serious stuff, compared even to what's going on in the Ukraine at the moment.
It's not serious stuff.
The last country that broke up peacefully without a drop of blood being shed was, of course, the former Czechoslovakia, which separates into the Czech and Slovak republics.
But that was very much against the trend in Eastern Europe where dissolution, for example, of the former Yugoslavia was very bloody.
And now, although the Ukraine separated peacefully, relatively peacefully, from the former Soviet Union, now it is steeped in inter...
Well, I won't call it ethnic because there's not really very much ethnic difference between the two peoples, disputes between the two nationalities that are being resolved by armed force.
So, yeah, I think that the perspective which people have upon the Scottish referendum broad is very different from the perspective here.
I read Greg Johnson's article on his website about this subject, and indeed I must post up some comments about that, because I think, for example...
That really, in some respects, had the wrong end of the stick badly.
The view, for example, that the English have some desire to lord it over the Scots or rule Scotland as some kind of colonial empire is a preposterous American perspective that shows no understanding of the political realities of the United Kingdom.
On the contrary, rather as you may recall the Canadians, or rather the Quebecois, had a referendum for independence from Canada.
And it was said only half-humorously at the time, and by some people perhaps in all seriousness, that if there had been a referendum in the other Canadian provinces to expel Quebec, they would have voted to do it, because they were sick of the Québécois, who were a constant drain on the finances of the Canadian Federation.
And constantly bitching about it.
There is certainly a strand of thought in England, with which I don't agree, because I'm a unionist myself, but which I understand, that took the point of view that not only, as Jefferson Davis once put it, let the Ehring sisters go, but in this case, give them a boot to encourage them on their way.
And it is certainly not the case, I think, that most people in England.
We're passionately anxious to hold on to Scotland.
The circumstances in which the Union was created in 1707 are very different from those in the modern world.
There were times where there were constant threats of French invasion.
France was leading power in Europe.
It was felt that it was necessary to keep a firm hold of both Scotland and Ireland.
Not, as I say, for the purpose of exercising some kind of hegemony over those countries, but for fear that they'd be used as the base of the French invasion of England.
This sort of thing, obviously, belongs to a very distant past now.
And we live in a very different world in which, had Scotland separated?
I think it would have become an independent country, much on the model of the Irish Republic.
That's to say, it would have been a relative backwater, which would have suffered from all the problems that Ireland has suffered from since independence.
Above all, a brain drain of the youngest, most talented, most ambitious people who all leave the country and go abroad.
Famously, New York City, as well as London, and these days, Sydney and Melbourne in Australia are full of young Irish people who've gone there because they can't find work at decent wages in Ireland.
The island has the misfortunate way of having an excellent educational system which produces highly qualified young people for who they know jobs in their native countries, so they all go abroad.
Scotland would have suffered from exactly the same problem.
It has first-class universities and a very well-educated population.
Scots have always come to England in large numbers.
They're very, very famous.
Anecdote about Dr Johnson and his friend Boswell.
Boswell was a Scotsman.
Boswell had been trying to persuade Johnson to go to Scotland.
Johnson feigned reluctance to do it.
In the end, he famously went and loved it and wrote his famous chronicle of his visits to the Western Isles.
But Johnson liked to wind Boswell up as Anglo-Scottish rivalry.
And Johnson said he couldn't think of any reason why he would go to Scotland, to which Boswell said, why, sir, there are many noble prospects in Scotland.
Prospect in this sense, meaning a view.
And Johnson took it the other way and said, Sir, the noblest prospect that any Scotsman ever saw was the broad road that leads south to England.
And that was a deliberately provocative comment of Johnson's.
But there was a great deal of truth in it.
In fact, as I say, coming back to Greg's observation about that, the English wanting to exercise some sort of colonial hegemony of Scotland.
On the contrary, the Scots have had a disproportionate role in British political life.
And the last Labour government was dominated by a leftist Scottish clique whose political opinions were way to the left of the majority opinion in England, beginning with Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister, and working his way down through the Chancellor of the Exchequer, say the Finance Minister, Alistair Darling, who actually led the campaign against independence in Scotland, the Better Together campaign, did it very well.
The government was top-heavy with Scottish Labour Party apparatchiks.
In the past, we have had several, I think in the 20th century, thinking of Scottish Prime Minister, Campbell Bannerman, who was a liberal.
We have certainly had Sir Alec Douglas Hume, who's a Conservative Prime Minister and might be a very good one.
Tony Blair was partly a Scottish background, and Gordon Brown entirely said it's a very much a product of the Scottish Labour Party machine.
So the Scots, who form about 10% of the population of the United Kingdom, Have given far more political leaders to the United Kingdom than would be expected by reference only to their numbers.
That's very interesting.
And also, there seems to be an actual double standard where one could argue, maybe with tongue-in-cheek, that the Scottish have imperial rule over the English.
Because, you know, in terms of spending matters, Scotland has a large degree of autonomy where English parliamentarians cannot vote on spending matters in Scotland.
But vice versa, that's not true.
This is no longer sustainable.
I absolutely agree with you.
When Scotland gave up its own parliament in 1707...
Part of the price for that was a certain skewing, shall we say, of the scales in favour of Scotland.
Scotland, for example, had far greater representation in the British House of Commons than its numbers would have justified.
Scotland returned 70 members of Parliament, whereas on a pro rata to the population base, we only returned 56, until it got its devolved Parliament.
The number of members of Parliament which those parts of the country returned to the Westminster Parliament was reduced when each of them got its local Parliament as a quid pro quo.
Both had been over-represented in proportion to their numbers.
The group of people who are going to be most disappointed about the outcome of the Scottish referendum, next to Alex Samet, who's had to resign as leader of the Scottish National Party in his immediate circle of friends, are what we call English nationalists, the people who would like to see, who'd like to have seen Scotland go.
And in fact, there's quite a radical cleavage in the British, if they would call themselves English right, between those who are unionists.
Often people from an older generation or people whose background is Anglo-Scottish or Anglo-Welsh.
My own, as you can probably tell from the name, is Anglo-Welsh.
So those people who have families originating in other parts of the United Kingdom, England, tend to be more enthusiastic about the concept of the union.
Those who have purely English descent are often very doubtful about it, or some of them are very doubtful, particularly in the younger generation.
And that's so across the country.
In Scotland, younger people voted predominantly for independence, old people for the union, the status quo.
And I think you'd get a very similar vote.
Were such a thing permitted in England?
That younger people have much more of an English rather than a British identity.
That is, as I say, a result of all kinds of things.
The passing of the British Empire, which is now just a distant memory.
The passing of the shared historical experience of the two world wars.
The first world war long ago faded into myth.
Now the second has.
People born in 1945 are now old age pensioners pretty well.
Well, they certainly are old age pensioners.
But to remember anything about that period, of course, you have to...
We've been born a lot earlier than 1945.
If you were, say, 18 in 1945, well, do the math as the saying goes.
You are now a very, very old person indeed.
So those who have lived experience of that period are fading away.
And the younger generation has grown up that no longer has that view.
And yes, for some people, an English identity is now more important than a British identity, just as you pointed out that for about 45% of Scots, a Scottish identity is more important than a British identity.
To my mind, the best solution to this problem, which has been advocated by some people in mainstream politics, one who's put this forward in a very articulate way, and I absolutely agree with his formulation, is Mark Field, the Member of Parliament for the City of London.
Who has said that the only solution to this problem is to devolve everything except foreign policy and defence to national governments for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
That is not a new idea.
Joseph Chamberlain, who is perhaps the most original political thinker for a very long period in British political life, a man who began on the far left in British politics and ended on the far right, opposed Irish home rule in, I think, 1886.
But he didn't oppose it on principle.
He opposed the idea that only Ireland should be treated in this way.
He put forward exactly the idea that's now been revived 125 years and more later, that we should have home rule all round.
This is the basis in the study on which Australia was federated.
The Australian states, there was considerable rivalry, particularly between New South Wales and Victoria.
Western Australia was a very long way from the other states and felt little common identity with them.
And it was difficult to persuade the Australian states to federate.
As you may know, both Canada and Australia were not originally federal states at all.
They were separate colonies, just as the 13 colonies of North America were separate colonies and had their own governments.
And only formed the Union Government after 1776.
Well, likewise, both Canada and Australia were only federated.
In fact, in the early part, I believe, the 20th century.
I think it was 1905 for Australia.
The federation was more or less on terms that the federal government would deal with foreign policy, defence, interstate trade, and other matters that had to be regulated at the federal level, and everything else would be left with these states.
And there is absolutely no reason why England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland shouldn't be governed in that way.
They seem to me to be very good...
There is no reason why England and Scotland should have the same rate of income tax any more than there is any reason why your own state of Montana and Florida, thousands of miles away in the opposite corner of the country, should have the same rate of local sales tax.
But we live in a country where at the moment that is so.
The central government fixes almost all taxes at a national, that's the United Kingdom level.
And I, for my part, can't think of any reason why this should be.
It's very interesting.
I spoke with Colin Liddell actually just yesterday about these matters.
And when I asked him how would you have voted, because he is a Scotsman, but he's a wandering Scot who lives in Japan, so he couldn't have voted.
He said yes, and it was interesting because the first thing that he noted was this will be great because it will really throw a wrench into this Washington-led NATO global order.
That this will undermine the notion of the UK and it will undermine that notion of Britain as the bridge between Washington and Europe and so on and so forth.
And this will kind of lead to maybe a multipolar world or something like that.
But what I'm hearing from you is really a little bit of the opposite, that there's not any kind of...
Even if the yes had won...
There's really not an imminent crisis in store.
There might be some devolution, but there's not going to be dissolution.
Actually, this political system is quite stable.
For better and for worse, the world that Colin imagined is very unlikely.
I'm not sure the political system is stable.
I simply think that...
The system is considerably more stable than that in many other European countries as a comparator.
I always like to give people the example of our nearest neighbour.
England and France are in many ways very comparable countries.
They're the first nation-states to have emerged in Europe, long before any others.
The next incident were the countries of the Iberian Peninsula, where, as the reconquest proceeded, first Portugal, but then only later, because it was originally several different kingdoms, Spain emerged as nation-states.
England and France have emerged as nation-states.
We have much in common in many ways with the French in that respect.
Both were powerful centralized states that exerted power beyond their apparent population economic basis.
And indeed one of the things we're going to be talking about next week at Chez's conference in London about how German nationalism emerged is one of the reasons why it emerged.
Was that firstly, the 14th, and later the Emperor Napoleon, were able to crush the Germans with relative ease, despite having a population of about two-fifths of theirs, because of the strongly organized, centralized French state, sufficient military forces, and its ability to project force.
Now, we have very similar experiences to the French in many ways.
We both had great colonial empires that we've lost.
We both had massive immigration of populations from the former colonial empires.
We're destabilizing and changing the entire faith of the mother countries as a result.
But in other respects, our experiences have been very different.
The last time that there was a change of government by anything approaching force in England was in 1689, the so-called Glorious Revolution, when William of Orange came over.
But in effect, at the request of the English, as it was in those days, Parliament, and deposed his father-in-law, James II.
And while that led to very bloody fighting, first in Scotland and later in Ireland, where James' supporters were willing to take up arms on his behalf, in England no one would.
The king, for various reasons, had lost support.
And the revolution, in fact, passed without a drop of blood being shed, which was a big...
Big difference compared to the previous revolution under Oliver Cromwell, which was a very, very bloody affair indeed, and as bad in its own way as your war between the states relative to the levels of military, if you like, technology existing at the time.
Now, France's experience has been very different.
Since 1789, the French have had five republics, two restoration of the Bourbon, The Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte twice, first the First Empire and then the Hundred Days, the July Monarchy, the so-called Third Empire, Napoleon III, and the Vichy State.
Each of those changes of government has been marked by considerable violence, execution of political opponents.
Fighting in the streets of Paris and so on.
The amazing thing about French political institutions at the moment is the Fifth Republic has proved so stable for so very long.
That is absolutely against the trend of French political history since 1789.
On the other hand, in England, that has not happened, nor indeed in Scotland has it happened.
For a very long time indeed.
Although Scotland was more affected in the 18th century by uprisings in favour of the exiled Stuart Kings in 1715 and 1745, and those were bloody and hard fought.
But there hasn't really been, as I say, violent revolution in England.
Since Oliver Cromwell's time.
There hasn't been any revolution at all since King William III's time and not in Scotland since the last Highland Rising of 1745 in favour of Charles Edward Stuart.
That is a very, very long time ago.
And that is a very, very different thing from the experience of most other European countries.
And indeed, we can see violent political change taking place in Eastern Europe and Ukraine even as we speak.
Right.
Do you think there's somewhat of a deceptive nature to that history where oftentimes the outward form will remain the same while there really is a major revolution going on, whether in terms of society or culture or in terms of race and demographics?
I think it's one of the strengths of the current British political establishment, which is a very bad thing for the British people.
That the forms of government which we have in England give the illusion of continuity that covers up the reality of radical change.
Our capital city now has a population, more than half of which is not British.
This is a change that is much more important to my mind than how the economy is organised or what form of government that you have.
Large parts of our capital city are no longer part of Europe.
Populations, not European populations, they don't live in a European fashion.
They live according to their own cultures which they've brought with them.
For one particular group, several hundred have now gone off to the Middle East to get jihad training from Islamic State and other delightful groups of similar nature and will no doubt come back to England infused with this ideology with consequences that are completely predictable.
To anyone at any rate except our political class, which somehow thought that they would be able to assimilate these huge foreign populations without too much trouble.
But all this time, the outward forms of British political life have continued unchanged.
The monarchy, the two major parties, the established search, etc., etc., giving a veneer of continuity to a country which is no longer recognising the country was even when I was a child, back in the 1970s.
London has changed out of, in many areas, out of all recognition.
Do you think also the idea of proportional representation based on geography is in a way becoming outmoded in the sense that there are people, there are Scotsmen who lived abroad who have generations and generations of history within that country, yet someone from Pakistan or something who immigrated to Edinburgh could vote on this referendum.
Well, indeed, one of the most striking scenes was Nicola Sturgeon, the deputy leader of the Scottish National Party, unlikely to become its leader, and Alexander resigned, campaigning at the Glasgow Central Mosque.
Amongst people who, shall we say, did not have any obvious clan affiliations, the dispute between the Camerons and the McDonalds was unlikely to be high on the list.
They were wearing different kinds of kilts.
They were wearing different kinds of garb altogether, yes.
Now, obviously, there has to be some limit to this.
You've got, for example, Countries, Canada is one, New Zealand is another, where very, very large proportions of the population are of Scottish descent.
But one can't credibly say that somebody living in Nova Scotia...
Whose family emigrated there at the end of the 18th or beginning of the 19th century and has lived in Canada for well over two centuries can be voting on the affairs of Scotland today, however attached they may be to their clan lineage or certain aspects of Scottish heritage and culture.
They're Canadians.
I'll be Canadians of Scots descent.
You could find plenty of people in your own Appalachians who have some Scottish blood.
So the people of Kentucky should be asked to vote on the future of Scotland.
Any more of the people of Scotland could be asked to vote on the future of Kentucky.
So there must be some limit to the principle that you put forward.
Yes, obviously, I would entirely agree that blood dissent is far more important.
from where somebody happens to be in determining their nationality but equally it can't be the only principle otherwise we would not have any of the modern states For people whose heritage is largely European, but who left the old continent a very long time ago in many cases.
Oh, right.
No, I certainly acknowledge this.
I don't think one should throw the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak, where you get rid of geographically based democracy.
But I think actually, I think this is one interesting thing about the modern world, is that it really does bring that into a question.
And I think we might need to start thinking about a new form of government, the geographically bound nation-state and these kind of smaller ones, and all the kind of ethno-nationalism that goes along with it.
I mean, Scottish independence or ethno-nationalism, that we should break up Czechoslovakia, all this, this is not a new idea.
This is a kind of romantic 19th century idea.
You know, each people should have its democracy.
I actually had a very enjoyable dinner when I was in...
Montreal with some Quebec nationalists.
And they're saying, we're the one people who hasn't had a democracy yet.
It's just all...
Again, I really enjoyed their company, but it struck me as extremely nostalgic and wispy.
It's just, this is not the modern world we live in, where there are little peoples that need sovereignty.
We might need a much bigger form of government, a European form of government, to be frank.
Well, the two are not actually incompatible.
In fact, the only way in which you can allow each of these smaller nationalities to have its own national state would be under some kind of overarching European dispensation.
This creates problems of its own.
Rather critical, very critical, candidly, of one part of Greg's article on the Scottish referendum, where I think, as I say, he seriously misunderstood English attitudes to Scotland.
On the other hand...
He made some very good and interesting points which require careful consideration.
He, for example, made a lively critique of Guillaume Fay's enthusiasm for a greater Europe stretching from the Atlantic to the Ural, saying that for many of the peoples of Eastern Europe, this would resemble nothing more than the Russian-dominated prison of the nationalities from which they'd only emerged a couple of decades ago.
Now, he takes a very negative view of Russia.
I take a much more positive one, as I think you do.
But it's an understandable position.
It's a position that can't simply be dismissed.
It requires very, very careful thought.
What I would say is that this idea of small nations having their own states is by no means unviable or untenable.
It can only happen under an overarching European dispensation that keeps the peace between them.
The sad fact that has to be recognized is that narrow nationalism or Perhaps even worse, the nationalism of the bigger European states has been a largely negative phenomenon.
And this year we marked the centenary of a kind of auto-genocide committed by the major European peoples.
Anyone who can assess nationalism positively in the light of that period is simply in denial about obvious realities, which is that it was calamitous.
To be frank, I don't know how anyone could conceivably think that Ukrainian nationalism is advancing our civilization or people.
It seems to be a...
That, dare I say, is just as extreme a position as the kind of position that one hears from Ukrainians about the Russians who they regard as primitive murderous barbarians, etc.
Unfortunately, the fact that two people are very closely related and share much of their culture and the same religion doesn't stop them We're hating one another over small differences.
That is a long lesson of history and has happened again and again.
There is no...
One needs to be very careful about how one uses words here, too.
People talk about ethno-nationalism.
There is nothing ethno-nationalist about Scottish nationalism.
So far as Alex Salmon and the Scottish National Party are concerned...
Anyone who happens to be present on the soil of Scotland is a Scot, except perhaps an Englishman.
They, for some reason, don't become Scots.
The only group is permissible to hate.
They would welcome any number of third-world immigrants into Scotland, but they don't welcome English people.
I'm not joking.
That is their position.
That's not a humorous remark.
That is actually pretty well their position.
No, I actually have a friend who's Scottish who actually has a very similar viewpoint to us.
And indeed, you can find plenty in Quebec who would rather have Haitians in Quebec than English speakers.
Oh, well, that is their policy.
I mean, let's bring in French speakers.
But just to go back quickly to the joke, I have a good friend who's Scottish who has a similar viewpoint to the two of us, and he said, Oh, London, it's...
Oh, I can't do a Scottish accent.
Oh, London, it's all crap.
I hate it.
It's all multicultural.
And even worse, it's English.
Yes, yes, indeed.
It's the second that really bothers me much more than the first.
But actually, as I say, coming back to this idea, there is nothing as no nationalist about Scottish nationalism.
Not only do Scottish nationalists, by and large, welcome, or at least not oppose, the influx of enormous numbers of third world people in Scotland.
But secondly, the difference between the Scottish and the English cannot be defined in ethnic terms anyway.
The lowlands of Scotland have a very, very large admixture of Anglo-Saxon blood and are not ethnically distinguishable from Northern England.
There is far more, if one wants to use that word, which I don't necessarily even think is always a very helpful word, at least not between the different populations of Europe which are so closely related by blood, there's far more difference between a highlander and a lowlander than there is between someone from the lowlands of Scotland and someone from Northumberland in England, in ethnic terms.
And indeed, one of the things, Scottish nationalists in some respects are lucky they haven't got their independence day, because if they did, it would immediately begin showing all kinds of fissures that exist in Scotland, which are multiple and complex, between Lowlander and Highlander, between East Coast and West Coast.
If there's one group of people who the average Glaswegian hates, these are the English people.
It isn't even Irish immigrants, though many of them hate those.
It's people from Edinburgh who they loathe and detest with a passion, a snobby, stuck-up East Coast financial and social establishment, etc.
The dislike between the citizens of the two cities is extreme.
Historically, there are very, very bitter religious differences between Catholic and Protestant in Scotland.
While they are not so pronounced today as they were even 50 years ago, they're still there.
So there are many, many different tensions in Scottish society.
It can be split north and south, east and west, Catholic and Protestant, rich and poor and so on.
It's certainly not an ethnic difference between Scotland and England.
Just as in the even more polarised and fragmented society of Northern Ireland, there is minimal ethnic difference between the two communities.
And it's really a perception of their own nationality.
One group perceives itself as British and another as Irish.
But it's largely religiously and culturally defined and has very little race and ethnicity about it.
And my mother comes from Eastern Europe.
There's a little real ethnic difference between Serbs and Croats who have fought one another in the most vicious wars, or between Bosnians and Serbs.
The point is that Croats are Catholic, Serbs are Orthodox, and Bosnians are Muslims, and the three groups define themselves in part upon a nationality that's really little more than a religious difference and a cultural difference.
It's not a racial difference.
It's not like the kind of difference that exists between a Nigerian.
And the European, or between a European and a Japanese, or between a Japanese and a Nigerian.
These are people from clearly different ethnic groups.
But there is no real ethnic difference between the different warring nationalities, either in Southeast Europe in the 80s and 90s in the break of Yugoslavia, or between Scotland and England today in the kind of peaceful debate that's taken place about independence, or between Russia and the Ukraine, the very violent struggle over political control of Eastern Ukraine.
This, I think, sometimes happens among so-called white nationalists in America, where an identity has evolved which is called European-American.
It's very understandable how that identity has evolved in the United States.
Because they have people from many, many different European nations who have come together in a new identity.
And I think the defining feature of which is people abandoning the languages they brought to America with them and becoming English speakers, which happened at different speeds with different communities.
German was very persistent, as you probably know, in Pennsylvania and in many other parts of the country.
Italian-Americans retained a strongly Italian cultural and linguistic identity for longer than most other groups because they tended to settle in relatively homogenous areas.
But by and large, most people today, most what you might call white ethnics in the United States are and long have been American rather than anything else, whatever their origins were 100 or 150 years ago.
Now, in Europe, things are very different.
People retain those national identities, not least because they retain their linguistic identities.
I agree, but I also see the arrow pointing in the same direction.
And I think in a way, many people in America, because we have this washed out...
Vague, white identity that almost has no meaning.
You could be a white person and be a rancher in Montana, or I guess a white person who's a banker in New York City.
It doesn't seem to have that rootedness and that historical quality to it that you do see in Europe, where you say, I'm Irish, I'm not just Irish, I'm from this town.
And I get that.
And I think that's also something that's very real.
I actually live, I would say, I live in a...
Yes.
Although I'm a bit of an outsider, I have a sense of that, you could say, parochial rootedness where you distrust the person who is a 15-minute drive away, which I find a little bit odd.
It's a bit different in Europe, though.
It's not just distrusting or whatever.
It's a very, very funny story.
Many, many years ago in Belgium, I met a leading member of what was then called the Flemish Bloc, the Rams Bloc, which is another, much more genuinely than the Scottish National Party.
It's an ethno-nationalist party and a separatist party.
And I was discussing with him in a bar the politics of his party, and I said to him, does your party stand for an independent Flanders?
Or do you believe in the reunification of all people of Dutch mother tongue?
Because the Belgian state was in fact created by the British in, I think, 1830, taking away land from Holland and the unity of various provinces at one spot at a time being French, and Napoleon then being French, to create the modern Belgian state.
And he sort of beckoned me with his finger and said, don't speak...
I've got many of my comrades sitting around me, but I'm going to tell you, you said, first of all, what our party's official policy is, and then what I really think.
So our party's official policy is that we believe in the reunification of all people of Dutch mother tongue.
But when I go to Holland and see those degenerate Black-loving, he actually used a different word.
Then pro-Israeli, he actually used a different word.
Then he went on to say drug-sodden, paedophile, degenerate, porn-addicted Dutch.
I feel utterly disgusted.
When I go to the Walloon province, which is the French-speaking part of Belgium, I meet people who are just like me, except they speak French.
So I'm all confused about my Flemish nationalism and begin to think the Belgian state isn't such a bad thing after all.
Exactly.
Now, that is quite a funny story.
And I think, in fairness to the Dutch, it's much more reflective of 1125 years ago than now.
there'd be much more of a reaction against multiracialism and the general extreme liberalism that prevailed in the holidays now, at least to some extent that has but the peculiarity in Belgium is that you could go from one town to the other you can certainly do this in the Brussels area and you'll move from a Dutch speaking community to a French speaking community where none of the French speakers can be bothered to learn Dutch they just won't do it
That region was once Dutch-speaking and has become very, very Francophone now.
But you can get that to a lesser extent in other parts of Europe, that you literally don't speak the same language.
And that naturally causes the national differences to persist.
And that is the big difference in the United States.
If communities in the United States had remained German-speaking, Italian-speaking, or whatever, generation after generation after generation...
Then there would not be an American identity.
Supposing the state of Pennsylvania was entirely German-speaking, it was the official language of the state, and that most people in Pennsylvania couldn't speak German.
Its relations with other states would be rather difficult, to say the least.
There were serious religious differences in the United States in the beginning.
I mean, now we have this generic Christianity that seems to...
I could not imagine bloodshed occurring between evangelical Christians or atheists or Catholics in the United States.
But in the beginning, it was quite different.
That was another feature of Europe.
That one, I think, was imported rather more into the US.
But, I mean, the United States as a country would not have evolved.
Had different states had different languages.
It could have happened.
There was a time when there were so many German immigrants in some states that German might have become the official language of that state.
In other states, there may have been so many people of Italian descent.
It was conceivable the Italian language would just be spoken generation after generation.
And the people would not assimilate to an English-speaking...
To some extent, you can see that with the huge immigration of Mexicans into the southwest.
You can now get areas where everyone speaks Spanish.
Nobody speaks English.
It's quite a striking phenomenon for a foreigner to see this.
It's a place where the entire daily business is conducted in Spanish, and you would think that you're in Mexico.
And not in the United States.
Of course, I know it's complicated by the fact that once those places were Mexico and not the United States.
It has an effect upon how those who have come to live there perceive their place in that society.
I'm not going to enter into that debate, which is a debate for Americans.
But it shows you the difference between countries which have a single overarching identity and the continent of Europe, which in geographical terms is not so very much bigger than the continental United States, but has dozens of different identities.
Yes, I totally agree, and I think this is a very complex question.
But I just would also reiterate, I think the arrow is pointing in the same direction in Europe.
I think it's happening more slowly, but we are seeing the creation of a kind of European man, a homogenous European man, someone who they have a lot more in common.
A lot more common ground than they have divisions between them.
And certainly, in a way, the multiracialism that has occurred in the continent due to mass immigration and in a way due to colonialism as well, that that heightens it.
That when you face a...
What's called an Asian in Britain or someone from the Middle East or someone from Africa, you become whiter.
In the eyes of an African, Salmond is not a Scot.
He's a white person.
And in a way, America had that kind of encounter earlier due to just the nature of the continent.
And quite frankly, some conflicts that were race wars.
And again, I'm not saying that to say these were great.
I actually have a certain romantic attachment to...
American Indians, who I think deserve to have a homeland and a culture all their own.
But nevertheless, there was an encounter that created a certain kind of whiteness.
And I think maybe that is now happening in Europe.
And also just there's so many things that push us together.
English as a lingua franca.
And I'm not saying that as, oh, I'm an American.
You know, I'm one of these tourists, you know, can you put some more ice in my water and speak English?
I'm not trying to be that way.
But we can now communicate with Russians.
We can communicate with French people.
Don't overestimate that.
Anyone who believes that English is a universal language should try to buy a railway ticket at a provincial station in France and see how far they get.
Now, while the French are the second worst people in Europe after the English at learning foreign languages, you would not get terribly far in provincial Germany or provincial Spain either.
It is not just the case of the English and the French having been colonial peoples and used to others speaking their languages.
Believe me, that is an exaggerated phenomenon.
A small elite, particularly a business and political elite, speaking English so well, you would think it was their first language to a remarkable standard in most European countries, particularly in Scandinavian countries, in Netherlands, to a slightly lesser extent in Germany.
In Southern Europe, it is certainly not so.
And it will be interesting to see whether this phenomenon of English as a lingua franca actually continues.
For example, it will be interesting to see whether German undergoes any kind of revival as a commercial language in Eastern Europe.
Up to 1945, it was the language of business in Eastern Europe across the board.
That passed with the changes that happened.
There, the extension of Russian domination over the whole of Eastern Europe.
But with the end of the Soviet Empire, English became the new preferred language of international trade and of politics.
I say whether that will necessarily continue or whether German economic dominance, which is very significant now in some of these countries, get.
Will lead to a revival of interest in Germany remains to be seen.
It wouldn't necessarily surprise me if that happened at least to some extent, particularly if, for example, our British government joins the Americans in a kind of new Cold War with Russia in which we engage in perpetual political and economic, if not thankfully military, confrontations with Russia.
I don't know.
That remains to be seen.
It's one of the things that will play out over the next ten years as British and American policy, confronted by a more assertive and self-confident and wealthier Russia, creates a new frontier of tension within Europe.
Well, yes.
In a way, there would be some benefits.
If Washington continues down the course that it's going and trying to create a neo-Cold War and people react, they start speaking German, we could all become more philosophical.
Well, that would be very amusing.
It could certainly lead to a situation in which, as I say, we could see some possible...
I do think that's terribly likely.
I think it's now too well established in business, in science, in many other areas as the language that everybody shares for that to happen.
But I don't rule anything out.
If, as I say, we see a situation in which the Anglosphere It is engaged in some kind of new Cold War that goes on for a long time with Russia, whereas continental European countries are much more reluctant to become involved in that.
I agree.
Well, Adrian, this has really been a fascinating discussion, and although I would like to continue it, why don't we just put a bookmark in it and...
It's been an hour, which is quite long enough for a podcast, and we shall have another in due course.
I think we should, because we didn't even...
Get to a lot of the other issues that I wanted to talk about.
I think it actually would be good to talk about the legacy of the First World War, which I know you've spoken on.
I'm going to speak on next week with Mark Webber and Greg Johnson and others.
It's going to be a very interesting meeting.
We'll continue this discussion on another occasion.
It's been most interesting.
I hope that you have a very successful conference in Budapest.
I look forward to hearing all about it.
I hope this is the first of many and this becomes an annual or at least a biennial fixture.
I think it could be a very considerable success.
I certainly wish you every success with it.
It would be a very good thing if you create a forum in which some of the more interesting and original thinkers in Europe and America can mix together, which is very, very important.
I leave you with this thought that many people in England are very impressed with the intellectual quality of some of the younger people who are coming up in the movement in America.
We have here, I think, far more, frankly, electoral success than any nationalist movement has ever had in America and far more ability to organize politically successfully.
On the other hand, you have a much, much livelier More intellectual nationalist scene in the United States than we do in England.
There are other countries in Europe, France obviously is one, where this tradition is very well developed.
In England, since the Second World War, it has tended to be rather sterile, rather backward-looking, imperialistic, chauvinistic and so on, with very, very little originality or creativity of thought.
So we have much to learn from people in the United States.
As in other respects, I think there are things also that we can teach.
And with all European countries, everybody has had a somewhat different experience.
The interaction between the two and the ability to learn from one another and exchange ideas is immensely valuable.
I think your Budapest conference will be very important in this respect.
I sincerely hope, as I say, it will be the first of many.