 At the height of the ultra-globalisation movement, large sections of the left rejected national politics. The ideas of this movement were most famously articulated by Hart and Negri who claimed that the world of nation-states was being replaced by one of a super-national empire which could only be resisted internationally. Yet the decline of the nation-state was not forthcoming. Since the financial crisis, we've seen the weakening of the international order which prevailed at the turn of the 21st century. Nationalist movements and politicians are seemingly on the rise everywhere. Trump, Modi and Viktor Orban have come to power by stoking religious and ethnic resentment. On the more progressive side of the equation, movements in Kurdistan, Scotland and Catalonia have increased their demands for independence. At the same time, across Europe and North America, leftists who once rejected national politics have joined political parties and have engaged in struggles for state power. It's in this context I'm delighted to introduce a fixed debate on nationalism, nation-states and the left. And I'm delighted to be joined by Jonathan Shafi from the radical independence campaign. Michael Chesson, national organiser of another Europe is possible. Aaron Bostani, co-founder of Navarra Media. And Dalia Gabriel, who is an editor at Navarra Media. We're going to go straight into it with the same question for all of you. You'll have about a minute to answer. Oh, a minute. Yeah, you've got to make it good. The question is, should nationalism always be resisted by the left? Jonathan. Okay, well, that's obviously a broad question. It was designed as such. Nationalism is a broad concept. But the roots of nationalism, of course, in the development of capitalism, which requires in order to organise production, in order to organise a cohesive enough society, there to be a capitalist state. And from that, you get nation-states and nationalism. So that's the kind of roots of it. But of course, how this expresses itself will change in different ways and will be impacted by different forces. So you can't just say that nationalism and how you relate to it is always to relate to it in a negative way. So for example, the Scottish independence referendum, I was in favour of a yes vote. You can raise the question of national liberation struggles, for example, in Palestine. You can look at the situation in Catalonia just now, where there's a kind of concrete choice between democracy prevailing or Spanish right-wing nationalism and authoritarianism prevailing. So nationalism is not, you can approach the question of nationalism without understanding that there are specific coordinates that relate to specific conditions and questions that arise from that. Thank you, Michael. Firstly, I don't think that nationalism is the same as separatism. I think it's important that we make that distinction early on in the debate. And basically, I think, ultimately, yes, I think it is something that the left should resist in almost every circumstance. That's not to say that all nationalisms are the same, or that nationalism and socialism can, in some senses, socialists might work with the national liberation movement or work within it, but they should always have an independent sense of identity and programme from that nationalist movement. And revolutions like Castro's Cuba, the Cuban revolution, began as a nationalist revolution, or not led by people who describe themselves necessarily as Marxist or socialist, later developed to be something different, not that I'm a huge fan of the Castro regime. You could equally argue that national liberation movements in, say, Catalonia create space in which the left can move and can orientate itself towards talking to a new layer of people, etc. etc. But ultimately, what nationalism is about is saying that there is something essential to nations, something essential to people living within borders, and it divides the working class, which I think the left should regard as the people who can liberate humanity along national lines, and that creates huge problems for you if you accept it or regard it as anything other than ultimately your enemy. I think you can work with it. I think that in certain circumstances, it can be part of an anti-colonial struggle, but I think the idea that you can ever accept nationalism or accept national identity as a political ideology, I think creates problems, not just in terms of your broad program, but also in terms of dividing workers in workplaces along national lines and all the rest of it. I would make the distinction between nation-states and nations. Nations, and I've sent to fatherland and duty and patriotism, that goes all the way back to the Roman Republic. Nationalism, which is co-terminates with the modern nation-state, yes, goes alongside an emergent industrial capitalism over the last 200, 250 years. So these are distinct things. And I'd want to break the question down into three parts. If you want to affect political change, do you need to engage with the nation-state, because the nation-state is the primary actor within international relations, both internally with domestic populations and vis other nation-states, you have to engage with that reality. Secondly, do nations exist as imagined communities, both in the global south and the global north? Yes, they do. Thirdly, does that therefore mean that nationalism needs to be subordinated almost as an ideological grease by which you can advance a certain set of political possessions? Absolutely not. But these are three different things. And I think, for instance, at a particular moment where the left is embarking on a journey towards electoralism, potentially even taking power in very powerful nation-states, you do have to break those elements down. Labour in power will be in control of a state apparatus that is different from saying, oh, I believe there's such a thing as a progressive English nationalism. I'm very full of the first one. I'm very ambivalent about the second one. Yeah, so I mean, I would agree with those distinctions. I think they're very important. I think the concept of a nation-state apparatus is different, and I think we should relate to it differently. But I would agree that nationalism is something that should always be resisted. And for me, the argument is twofold. It's ideological and it's strategic. And I think for me, integrally, these things are very connected. So the ideological argument is that in order to have the nation, you have to define those who are not of the nation, you have to have borders, and therefore you have to create a taxonomy and order of bodies that can and cannot cross that. And historically, race has been the organising principle of that. And anyone on this panel who has come up with a way to decouple borders from racialisation, I'd love to hear that. But also, I think, you know, the nation is not just exclusionary to those outside of its geography, but also to those inside. So for example, historically, queer people in this country have been oppressed on the basis that they can't serve in a productive and reproductive way, or the idea is that they can't form the nuclear family that can serve the productive and reproductive needs of the nation. Women as well have been seen as a particular kind of domestic femininity has historically been positioned as, again, serving the nation. So that's the kind of ideological argument. And the strategic argument for me is I just don't think it's the recipe for a victory. The nature of global capital today is, again, as it is, global. And secondly, those who have been historically excluded from the nation, queers, migrants, undocumented and documented have historically been our strongest fighters, and we simply can't win without them. So leaving intact an entity that inherently excludes them, I think is strategically completely the wrong way to go. That, of course, is part of the argument for supporting Scottish independence in 2014, because what that process was about was about dismantling the British state and all that that kind of entails. It does raise the question of the state, though. I'm not sure that Labour coming to power, which by the way I support completely, but I'm not sure that means that they're in control of the state apparatus. I mean, are they in control of the army, are they in control of the civil service and so on? These are big questions. And probably when we talk about nationalism, we talk about nation states, really the question is how does the left orientate on the state? How is it building class power? In 2014 in Scotland, one of the things that I thought was quite similar to one of the elements of the Corbyn campaign were these big meetings that you saw take place, big mass rallies, and in lieu of there being a militant and confident trade union movement in comparison to the 1970s, this, I think, was starting to draw together the forces that are building serious class power from below. And it's those that I think that we have to focus on. But you can't focus on them without having a strategic orientation on how you're confronting the question of the state itself. I want to focus on the relationship of the left or the people in this room to nation states. Are they only a necessary evil that we may have to engage with if we want to achieve some sort of socialist politics? Or, I mean, is the best world we can imagine one which is divided into a bunch of different nation states? Is that better than a huge global empire? Or what's the alternative if we're saying, I feel like you said, engaging with national movements might be a necessary evil. You said it's not good and also not necessary. It's strategically a mistake. What's your alternative if we're not working in relation to national politics? What are we working in relation to how is society going? I'm going to go to Adia then, Aaron. Well, I definitely think that we can't ignore the fact that the nation state obviously exists. It's a primary site of how power operates globally. The question is, for me, my anxiety, particularly around the Corbyn project, is what happens, again, like you said, when we seize power, what happens? Because that's not the end of the story. There's these huge institutions that exist far beyond the nation that very much control and sort of have an influence on what goes on inside the nation. And so, for me, I want to see a really cohesive argument. And as far as I can see, the only way we can overcome that is through a kind of internationalist, a building of an internationalist power. Because that's, you know, and I think what we saw with Greece and what we saw with Syriza is that nationalism was a really effective way to get to power. But once you got there, it didn't keep them in power in any kind of meaningful sense. So, we also have to engage not just with the fact that the nation state exists, but the fact that the primary way that people conceive of politics and people understand politics is through their national politicians. So, we have to engage with that and we have to understand that as a reality. But we also have to acknowledge that there's a whole other reality out there as well. But I think because none of us have concrete answers to it, we've sort of just avoided. And now more than ever with the Corbyn project, I think we really have to confront it. And then, Michael? Yeah. So, I think that the primary tradition that precedes the socialist on Marxist left, which you could identify as progressive historically was republicanism. And republicanism and civic nationalism to an extent are coterminous with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, arguably with Machiavelli. So, what is that republican tradition? It says in Chiquiro, first century BC, the public good is the people's thing, the public thing is the people's thing, which is to say that you have a quality of the law, you have the same rights, you have the same access to a certain set of resources. That's then repeated with Machiavelli in the 16th century. He says, I owe my city, i.e., the nation of Florence, the Republic of Florence, my soul, it's repeated then. With Rousseau, you see something quite similar. So, this idea of a quality of the law, women, and we obviously have the American Revolution, we have the Corsican Constitution written by Rousseau, French Revolution, it's built on civic republican ideals. This thing about trans rights, they want a quality of the law fundamentally. We want gay marriage, we want people with their white, brown, black, treated the same, grows out of a republican tradition, which actually the ultra left might not like it, but historically it's very intertwined with civic ideals of nationalism. Michael, sure. I kind of think we're in danger of going down a whole if we start talking about, we've got to engage in the nation-state in some sense because we're talking about state power, therefore how does that relate to nationalism? Well, I think in many ways they do separate questions for me and the strategic question about whether or not you engage with the nation-state, the politics of the nation-state, well, obviously that's a terrain of struggle, you're going to run candidates there. So, I kind of think if we're going to talk about nationalism, we need to talk about something, the specific ideologies that underpin nationalism, though you're absolutely right to say that we shouldn't be naive or ahistorical about where a lot of seemingly progressive stuff does come from in terms of the republican tradition. I think for me one of the basic problems when we talk about, when people talk about sort of national liberation or sort of a kind of left nationalism is, yeah, absolutely, you're miseducating people. You know, you're miseducating people to say that in, with an independent Scotland socialism is more doable with a left reformist government. We're miseducating people if we say if Catalonia splits away from Spain, all of a sudden a left reformist government is going to have more prospects there because the prospects that tie, that hold people back, and I think the left has forgotten this because it's been so far away from power for so long, yes, there are a lot of reactionary people living in England, yes, the Spanish state is deeply reactionary and those people will outvote you sometimes, but really the stuff that will stop a left-wing government or a socialist from attaining power are big international powers, the big international powers of capital, those massive institutions, those big networks of power that capitalism consists of, so to seek a way out of that from a national perspective I think is miseducated. I think that's really ambiguous and mystifying. 2008 crisis is a lot bigger, the world economy collapses, if the US Federal Reserve, the White House and a few important people in, yes, private banks in the US don't make a certain set of decisions, but if the Federal Reserve is somebody different, if there's a Tory government instead of a Labour government in 2008, crisis is 20 times bigger. And so national institutions with elected politicians, it's not about, you know, I think that's really, you know, you need to be clearer what institutions, where's power is hiding, you can't say it's a morpher's network because then we don't know where it is, it's just this mystification. The question is what's our reaction to it, what's our, what's our solution to that? Yes, but it's about your strategic orientation, your strategic orientation towards internationalism about building your own networks of power from the bottom up, you know, amongst organised ordinary people, workers, whatever, that has to be independent, has to be an independent working class internationalism, that can stand up to these institutions, dissolve them, take them over, etc. I think we miseducate people when we see national self-determination as the building block of resisting global capital. I think we also, we also miss a trick in the sense that, you know, you end up tying your socialist, your left project to a nationalist project, which is often conducted in the same terms, in the same language, and in the same ideological frame as the Scottish ruling class, as the Catalonian ruling class, because it splits, it splits workers on national lines and it splits the class divides all the way up the middle. So, okay, so there's a few things to consider there. First is that the argument that Scottish independence leads to an easier route towards some kind of left-reformist government. I mean, that's the most shallow argument that you could make in favour of Scottish independence, and certainly for the serious remarks that's left in Scotland, it's a much, much more profound argument than that. It is about the dynamics of the British state. It is also about the dynamics of British nationalism and the hold that that has in our society. In fact, British nationalism and the British state, I think are probably the two primary barriers to a successful common government, and they have to be challenged and looked at in different ways. So that's the first point. The second point is that none of this is a new debate, and you go back to 1917, the Russian Revolution, of which we're celebrating a 100-year anniversary. Now, if you look at the debates in Scotland at that time, you know, when there's a huge, much, much more advanced industrial working class, much, much more militant and better organised, there's still a huge debate. Key figures like John McLean, for example, don't join the British Communist Party, but argue instead for Scottish self-determination as part of dismantling the British state. So none of this is new. And lastly, the antidote to nationalism, which in the end will oppose because we're socialists, is internationalism. But internationalism has to take on a particular form of organisation. That form of organisation is not, for example, European Union, which actually comes from a post-World War II settlement agreed by American imperialism. It's tightly connected to the question of NATO. It's basically based on the core nationalisms that exist in Europe and their exploitation of not just the periphery, but wider than that as a result of the neoliberal dynamic that the EU takes. So what this means is that we do need a new internationalism. We need an internationalism from below. And I'll just end on this by going back in history. If you look at World War I, really a key moment which splits the socialist international because one of the arguments that's put, the argument which overridingly came out on top, including from many of the trade union leaders in the labour movement in this country was that you had to get behind the national government. You had to get behind the national government in order that you supported workers that were going off to fight. And in doing so, what they did was to undermine the very essence of what a socialist international approach actually is. Of course, John McLean opposed this as did Lenin, as did Rosa Luxembourg. These are not just something which is sort of from a bag on Europe. These questions come up time and time again. And therefore, to have a strategic orientation on nationalism means that you must also have one on internationalism, but that has to come very, very specifically from below. It has to be about working class internationalism, and it has to be about solidarity, and not solidarity between nation states. I want to pose, oh, that's interesting that last point, I want to pose two questions. One of them is, I think we've heard a lot, nationalism counterposed to internationalism. And I want to see if we can potentially challenge that because, for me at least, it seems like the most obvious way that you can change the international order is via nation states, which don't have to be in competition with each other. And when it comes to the question of do nation states have to be in competition with one another, we might want to look at, are there different kinds of nationalism? So are we calling all nationalism some sort of national chauvinism where you think your country is the best and has rights to oppress other ones? Are we merging ethnic nationalism with civic nationalism and republicanism? So do we need, if we want to change the international order to pose it as a question, do we need to relate to the nation state in a more thoughtful way than to assume that the nation is a barrier to some sort of better international order, an international order we want to fight for, darling? So yeah, I wanted to come back on Aaron's point about how, you know, having, for example, a court, like Corbyn in power at the moment of the 2008 crisis, having, you know, one of our people in the Federal Reserve, like, of course that would make a huge difference, you know, having Corbyn in power in 2003 would have, you know, the Iraq war wouldn't have happened. That's really important. That was a consolidation of a particular kind of, you know, economic geopolitical power. So it does, it certainly matters and is a worthy strategy to try and get our people in key institutions. However, firstly, these institutions are multiple. There's so many of them. They're so, they're so sort of gate kept that that can't be our only strategy because it is so difficult. And secondly, even if we did get everyone in there, we still need to have a kind of power that is built up from below in order to sustain and pressure that to continue in a very particular way, which obviously you definitely agree with. But in that set, which is why I think this kind of focus, like it is important, it is, it does matter to get people that wouldn't, for example, beat us in the street, wouldn't shoot, you know, like wouldn't kind of oppress us or repress us in a violent way is very important. But it doesn't have any clout unless it is, you know, held accountable to a transnational internationalist sort of working class power to hold accountable and also to kind of fundamentally move towards the dismantling of those kinds of institutions. Michael, can we achieve national, can we achieve internationalism through national politics? And if not, how, how do we achieve the international order we want if it's not via sort of a national politics which wins elections on national terms and sort of builds up a national politics? Well, to a great extent we've got to start to, to, to fight for the new world we want to see in the structures of the old one. You know, we've got no alternative. I mean, can we is not the question. You know, we, to some extent or another, we have got to struggle for state power and for various stuff inside the nation states as they currently exist. You know, what's the new international world about states? How does it function? Is it not worse than the world we've got at the moment, or in what way is it better? Where there's no particularity between different states and there's no borders and there's no distinct different governments? That's a very, very big complex question about global governance and how it would operate, sure. I mean, you would certainly need local sets of governments. You would need local government. But the point is, whether or not that is distinctly linked to this idea of nations, nations are by definition exclusive. If you take the exclusivity out of nationhood, it sort of begins to cease to be a nation. I think there's a difference between, yeah, obviously we need local governance structures that need to be local things. But yes, this idea of nationalism, I think ultimately we're always going to find ourselves opposed to. But I think there's, you know, to a great extent, yes, we're going to have to build projects through the nation states as they currently exist. What happened to Greece and what happened in the European Union isn't necessarily a failure of the utopian wing of United States across borders. And for all these failings, there are many, many, many, it has the sort of erosion of national borders that has happened in a limited way inside the EU has been historically progressive when it comes to free movement, when it comes to building identities that are broader than your own nation state. Now, of course, that's itself exclusive and European and all the rest of it. But yes, the reason why the EU has done such terrible things isn't because of the European Union itself as an institution necessarily, though it is also partly that, it is because the national building blocks that make up that infrastructure are themselves, have been dominated by racist governments, by neoliberal governments, etc, etc, all the way through. So, can we achieve it through nations where we've got to sort of begin that process within the structures that we currently have? So, very quickly, just to build on the whole point of civic republicanism, we were saying, well, anything which is, you know, a nation, it has an inside, it has an outside, if you actually look at some of the older empires, the Roman Empire, had a number of emperors who weren't even Italian. Diocletian was from the Balkans. So, there are forms of polity historically, which are far more inclusive actually of multi, sort of ethnic kind of, sort of groups, bringing them all together than the nation state historically, right? So, presumably when people talk about the EU, I think that's probably the nearest analogue in their head is like a woke version of the Roman Empire. Secondly, secondly, in 2008, nobody likes to say this, but states saved capitalism and we were told this was not possible. We were told that globalization meant the system was too complex, the nation state was obsolete, therefore politics shouldn't be contested at that level and they didn't even have the competence to actually change the system. Well, guess what? They saved the system. Nation states and their domestic taxpayers failed out the banks. Thirdly, I don't believe global solutions to things like migration and climate change, that don't work. We had the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, right? It was 25 years ago. Since then carbon emissions have gone up 60%. So people can talk about we need global solutions, work together. It means fuck all. Actually, there's a massive fucking, sorry, I've got flu, believe it or not. There's a massive correlation between appealing to global solutions and that then meaning elites can get away with doing sweet FA because there's no accountability. The accountability is at the level of the nation state. I did want to put one point in here. I think it's really an important discussion. Seizing state power is different from electing Jeremy Corbyn as Prime Minister. The two are different things. We all agree, we all agree on that. No, I know, but this is quite important thing to discuss because when you talk about the EU's failings, actually they would regard those failings as great successes and this is what the EU is set up for. This is what nation states are set up for. They're set up to ensure that the unity of the working class, that the international unity of the working class cannot challenge the system. And have you ever played whack-a-mole? Yes. That's the EU. As a radical left government comes up, they whack them down. There's no chance of a kind of smooth orientation of radical left governments popping up in France and Spain and everywhere else and reforming the EU. That's not how it's going to work. All right, in the second part of the show we're going to talk about some concrete examples of nationalist movements or national liberation movements. To start us off, there's some archive footage. It begins with Pep Guardiola talking about his Catalan identity. We then get Alex Salman talking before the Scottish referendum in 2014. And at the end we have Nasa who's talking after the British and French had been defeated at Suez. Nasa was the president of Egypt from 1956 to 1970. We have to play with the Spanish national team. The Catalan national team is not legitimate to play in European or international competitions. And if the national team or as I played with the Spanish national team, they called me and told me I had to play. I'm delighted to play, but I can't deny what I feel, what one loves. I feel very close to my country, to Catalonia, and I feel very close to what I feel inside my head, inside my heart. A country that has its own language for 800 years, but absolutely its own. Therefore, I don't feel this as part of... To determine the next chapter of that story. And when the pages of books yet written speak to generations yet unborn of this time and this place of our Scotland today, what is the story they'll tell? They can say that we who lived at this special time recognised the Christless moment for what it was. Those who saw this chance did not balk at it. Those who were given this moment did not let it pass by. That we, Scotland's independence generation, reached out and grasped the opportunity of a lifetime when it came our way. We will not, in the morning of the 19th September next year, wake up and think to ourselves what might have been. We shall wake up that morning filled with hope and expectation ready to build a new nation which is both prosperous and fair. After almost a century of Scotland moving forward to this very moment, let us ask ourselves these simple questions. If not us, then who? If not now, then when? Friends, we are Scotland's independence generation and our time, our time is now. Yes, we feel that we are stronger. We feel that the world has changed. As soon as the British authorities come out and say that the beauty of Abdul-Nasir is a dog, for example, like his family. We say that you are a 60-year-old dog. And then, we say that we are good people first. It was a time when the time that you are writing a word, the time of the British people is now. We are going to talk about these in the reverse order to which you saw them. We chose Nasser because he's really the paradigmatic example of someone who fought both for national liberation and really mobilized a popular discourse of popular sovereignty and socialism. Daliya, I want to begin with you and ask about the record of nationalism in national liberation struggles how far did it take those movements in in a struggle for emancipation beyond independence from colonial powers? Right so for me you know anti-colonial national liberation movements are kind of the only context in which this could have made any resemblance of sense I still fundamentally think it doomed the independence movements from from the beginning but you know I think I'm much more willing to have a conversation about these forms of nationalism about you know reclaiming some kind of British or English nationalism but and I'm gonna go from the example that we just had of Abdel Nasser in Egypt you know we there is he achieved a huge amount through his nationalist rhetoric through his defeating of the British the British Empire not just on the basis of an Egyptian identity but also on the basis of an anti-capitalist kind of nationalism I personally would not actually be here if it wasn't for his redistribution programs they literally saved my grandmother's life but ultimately what happened was whilst independence was one on these national terms it ultimately ultimately meant in the long term it was able to very easily seed power to other more right-wing forms because ultimately nationalism is just a framework it's a kind of affect and it's one that the right generally have a lot more power over they historically have because it fits their kind of model of politics much more than it does ours furthermore when you have one other problem is that you have the nation essentially like by going on this national framework you essentially concealed class relations within the nation state and that enabled bourgeois interests once Abdel Nasser died it enabled bourgeois interests to reclaim Egypt on the same basis because they were able to say well we are all here for Omidunya which is what Egypt calls you know mother of the world as we like to call ourselves that you know we are Egyptians we are you know my grandfather came from this far down I'm this and descended from blah blah blah claiming that blood soil kind of like identity and for me the anti-colonial movements were at their strongest when they articulated themselves very much within that framework of solidarity where people fighting anti-colonial fights saw them saw much more in common between them and peasants in Algeria and peasant you know people in Palestine than they did with their own national elites and one kind of one example that I think is you know some people can contest as to whether this was an anti-colonial movement but the Black Panther Party very much saw themselves in the tradition of anti-colonial movements and whilst there was a streak in the Black Panther Party that was very nationalist they were at their most powerful and the intellectual the core of the Black Panther's intellectual contribution was it said we as black working class people reject the black bourgeois Americans in favor of the multi-racial working class within the US and also the working class fighting out colonialism in Algeria fighting colonialism Palestine in South Africa these are for me these decolonial movements were the most interesting sort of fights against national like global capitalist power that we've had in the past hundred years and they were at their most beautiful at them strongest when they moved away from the nation as their subject and towards that kind of internationalist orientation and they did it and when we say what does internationalism looks look like there are examples of moments when that was really articulated in a very powerful way we only need to look back and sort of feed on that history from the panel on the national liberation movement and whether even this example of the invocation of nationalism which is most likely to be accepted and celebrated by the left was itself a mistake I mean if you look at the two historical two of the historical revolutions the 20th century the Russian revolution the Iranian revolution in both instances before prior to seizing state power obviously you can't do that through democratic means they effectively set up parallel structures to the state weird rush we have the Red Army etc etc with Iran you have literally the day that Ayatollah Khomeini touches down into Iran with the formation of the Revolutionary Guard which now controls 40 percent of the Iranian economy that 120,000 of them they make up a large part of the state bureaucracy one of their wings is basically the country's equivalent of the SAS and Yemen and Syria so if you are going to say we're on a revolutionary project and we're not going to see state power I would say well if you set up parallel structures they almost certainly will look like those state structures you're actually seeking to subvert or undermine so there's not really much of a I want you know I want an example here of another way of taking power of transforming the world which doesn't either take those institutions or create new ones that actually look just like them. The question that links into that is when you see an example of sort of a nationalist project that went awry does that teach us that we should reject nationalism or that people should have fought for a different vision of what the national polity should look like and so should it be a struggle for against nationalism or a struggle over what kind of nationalism should Egyptian should the Egyptian nation have looked like? Well I think it's really interesting because when we talk about can we fight for a different nation that was very much what was being fought for by in Egypt again like for example like the women you know women played a huge role in the Egyptian independent in the anti-colonial movements in Egypt but and you had male nationalists sort of writing sort of reams and reams on how you know the woman question is at the heart of the new Egypt and if we want to prove ourselves to be you know a modern nation and you know the greatness of the Egyptian woman and like she has to be at the center the minute they see state power women couldn't even vote and the reason is because and this is for me like the real flaw of just viewing it as like one strategic like and when I mean this I mean like nationalism as like an affect and as an ideological framework is that you you just cannot decouple the nation from the forces that made it and those forces are inherently patriarchal heteronormative and racist and I don't you know the reason why Egyptian women didn't have their rights after the movement wasn't because Egyptian women didn't fight for them it was because they were so easily sidelined once they gained power so that's why I'm generally so skeptical of ideas that we can somehow defeat you know conceptions of the nation that have existed for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years and through which the nation came to be Jonathan I mean it's really interesting discussion Aaron asked the question you know other examples and talks about how you know dual structures of power that are set up often mirror the pre-existing structures of course one of the big reasons for this is because they're engaged in in a political combat which requires them to organize in that kind of fashion otherwise they face probably immediate defeat but I think really the core of this question underlines the need for the left in western countries to have an anti-imperialist ingredient to their vital systems when it comes to the question of national liberation movements because national liberation movements which I don't think we have we can put any kind of precondition on right require there to be support from the imperialist countries themselves that goes for any of the national liberation struggles that you might care to mention so anti-imperialist politics is fundamental not just to the struggles that take place by national liberation movements but they're also fundamental to the emancipation of ordinary people and workers in the west and places like Britain and America and so on themselves and because those people we cannot be free while we live under the domination of a state who has an imperial foreign policy and who is intent on dominating huge sections of the world this of course will be a big big challenge and a big test for Corbyn Corbyn himself is an authentic anti-imperialist he comes from the anti-war movement and that's what a lot of his support is but when you're in charge of the British state or when you are you know the premier the figurehead of the British state that becomes very quickly a very difficult question one of the challenges I would put is to a milliformity who I think is already sliding on the question of foreign policy not just when it comes to Israel I happen to debate her up in Glasgow and I think she defended the US-UK special relationship in such a way that made me quite concerned so the anti-war element of this process going on in the Labour Party and around the Labour Party is really vital to the question of national liberation struggles yeah and I think sorry yeah yeah I think that that is so often sidelined when we talk about Corbyn it's so and I think that's almost like we as the left are not giving him the space to push that kind of forum we're allowing him to not not talk about that because that's where he that like you said that's how he came into politics was through anti-imperial anti-war um organizing and that makes him very very special and is why I would give him more time than I would give any other person in the Labour Party um and I think that it's strange that we on the left are not mobilizing around that to give him the space to push for that and we're kind of and this is something that that concerns me and we don't talk about it we don't talk about the momentous nature of that intervention not just in British politics but in the Labour Party which has its own history of complicity with Britain's imperialism what would it look like to make the space for Corbyn to enter government and sort of operate a genuinely anti-imperialist foreign policy from within the British state well I think it would look like step by step guys the pre-point plan well I think it would look like having you know policies surrounding like Palestine for example um having policies you know which I think is kind of a very key in part with where Britain holds a lot of power historically and contemporarily um but it means that when he if he does come to power when he does come to power obviously um that those are on his agenda those kind of policies that begin to break down Britain's role in this kind of neo-colonial um system you know and contesting for example NATO allowing him to contest the terms on which institutions like that exist Michael um point I was really good mate sorry yeah I put a question between your last point um answer whatever question you want I'll go I'll go for both I mean I think um I'm very very um sort of not pessimistic exactly because obviously Corbyn has a good record on anti-imperialism though you know there are problems with that as well which maybe we're not worth fully discussing now but I mean the intellectual groundwork on Corbyn um and sort of the the sort of big groundwork just hasn't been done on any of these issues and essentially what our what our strategy similarly the strategy to brexit I mean our strategy on wearing poppies the military the police um all of these sort of like more culture worry issues around the British state around the the role of the monarchy all of that sort of stuff which we just don't Corbyn's at the moment the the strategy is just don't don't talk about it and so I guess I am quite pessimistic about that I wanted to come back briefly um in terms of the nation as a subject and um because Aaron mentioned the Russian Revolution and I think it's in it's an interesting discussion to have also in the context of what we were talking about with Egypt and so on in the you know the the nation is not the subject of the Bolshevik Revolution really at all I mean what it does is it gives people autonomy and not independence but like autonomy in various different ways in which in where they never had um in the Russian Empire before um but you know nationalism in the in the in the Bolshevik in the Russian context appears as a counter-revolution it appears as the Stalinist counter-revolution that took over the state you know the great patriotic war the uh the you know the the lyrics to the you know the national anthem gets changed because it's too internationalist socialism in one country is announced and that one country is the Soviet Union and uh and and what does that go along with well it goes along with uh recriminalizing homosexuality uh etc etc etc um so that's the the the nation is a subject being objectively uh reactionary is supported by that as well can i just quickly i want to let's go Aaron and Jonathan we're saying about like the the foreign policy stuff we need a a russi of the left we had a big big anti-imperialist think tank if there's any people watching this you're gonna have to explain what russi is it's literally opposite the cenotaph if you want to understand what its purpose is um we need a big think tank to come up with foreign policy for anti-imperialist post-imperialist britain we need about 100 people watching this to go to sandhurst and become the most senior officer in the british army we need about another 100 people watching this join the foreign combat office become the 100 most senior 100 senior most diplomats off to sandhurst go on i've got asthma so i'm for you but um never that that will be the scare if you wanted to basically create a post-imperial britain we go oh well you can't ever have you know people in the military they're all scumbags were actually the portuguese revolution you had precisely that uh and that is the scale of the task and yes it's far beyond just corporate entering tendering street we need new ideas new subjectivities new people new institutions and transform existing ones i think we're going to try and finish in about five minutes so i've got one question for jonathan about alex salmond and then we're all going to talk about pep guardiola so uh one the biggest critique well not the biggest but one common recurring critique of nationalism from the left is that it alludes or hides the genuine conflict that exists in society uh before the independence campaign you obviously allied yourself with the snp and alex salmond and do you feel like that in a damaging way sort of interlinked your strategy and your politics with the tartan torres with a with a party and a politics that isn't necessarily socialist in any way or form you have to remember of course that the snp's political orientation in the years running up to the independence referendum was certainly nothing like the tartan torres they were in fact in many ways to the left of labor new labor at the time they opposed the iraq war and they were opposed to swinging cuts and so on so forth so that was their political orientation but the key point about 2014 was that in fact the snp despite them despite themselves being the formal leadership of the movement actually didn't have the kind of ownership of the movement that you might expect their membership was about 20,000 25,000 people there was a mass movement from below that exploded and exploded not because of a nationalist impulse but because of 2008 because of new labor because of the iraq war because of all these things and the independence referendum became fulcrum for all these kinds of issues and for me it was very easy to make the decision not only to argue for people to vote yes but to launch and to be part of launching a campaign that was going to shift that whole debate to the left and we did have some success in this and if you look at the way in which we were able to and it's difficult to say we were able to because it was organic to the movement these kinds of politics the snp at every single step from the launch of the s campaign in 2012 all the way through to the day of the referendum itself were a behind the mass movement completely behind they started off with a completely stale corporate campaign that wanted to cover up all the major questions of the day to say nothing would change and that got completely usurped now after the referendum of course this could have been different in terms of how things progressed if there was a yes vote in fact those who argued for a noble those in the labor left who argued for a noble in the face by the way of a huge working-class mobilization are actually culpable for what we've seen out which is a more entrenched form of nationalism which has depleted confidence amongst those people who got involved for the very first time in politics many of them voting for the very first time in politics and that's the critical point the defeat of the noble has led to a form of intellectual decline there's no doubt about it but we did have to put down a marker and I'm proud that we did by standing in the 2016 election against the SNP now we knew that we were going to receive relatively derisory results right but that wasn't the point the point was to put down a political marker that said actually it's not just the question of the SNP when it comes to independence it's actually much broader I'll finish by saying this the task of doing that was made a million times more difficult when on September 19 100,000 people joined the SNP because they didn't want to feel that sense of power slip through their fingers because that's what people felt ordinary people organizing huge meetings up and down the country and because of the no vote I'm afraid that the situation in Scotland has gone into retreat and when Richard Leonard stands up and this is one of the big challenges for Richard Leonard in the Scottish Parliament in Cestan and Custodian well you're implementing the cuts from the Tory government it's very easy to turn around to Richard Leonard and say well I'm sorry mate but you're the one that's ensured that we've got a Tory government because you argued that we should vote no in 2014 all right I'm going to ask the final question but it's also going to be your wrap up point so you can bring in the answer to any other question you want so that's allowed I put in the Pep Guardiola video there because I assumed that we'd be talking about nationalism whether or not it's tactically something we should or should not engage in but ultimately something that should be at the fundamental level nationalism for itself dismissed and I wanted to know how how everyone on the panel relates to Pep Guardiola when he's talking about the genuine warmth and passion he feels for his country and speaking his language and playing for a potential Catalan team and whether or not we judge him to be basically subject to false consciousness or whether there's something going on there that we should engage with on a genuine level that takes it at face value and this is also going to serve as your final points question so I'll begin I'll finish with you because you won't last so Michael. It's out of the go. About a minute. Oh great. Well is it false consciousness I mean yes to a certain extent I think it's fine I think being proud of being proud of where you're from etc etc and having that kind of localist politics is something that the left can absolutely engage in does that necessarily mean that we endorse nationalism no I think that there are ways of disagreeing with people's national identity in the existence of national identity in a way that isn't just you know patronizing and dismissive so I wouldn't walk up to him and say comrades you have false consciousness but obviously if we want to live in a post-nation world then obviously we have to start to address and take on that identity I did want to come back on the Scottish point I grew up in Edinburgh and I was a member of the Scottish Socialist Party as a teenager I'm very inactive didn't really do anything but I signed a form and I identified with it and and I guess look what I see and I think I think the the Scottish Left is soft on nationalism I think we'll disagree on quite a lot of stuff but I mean in many ways what the what the Scottish Left did by by being swept along in in what was actually no but what what what what was just as important no you got I'll say it before you Johnny now are in what was a I probably have ended up voting yes at the time I didn't get a vote because I was living in London but and I'd have done that because obviously the progressive sort of left thing to happen would be to the yes to win however the dividing line the fact that we now have the dividing line of Scotland's politics as the national question has ruined will ruin the Scottish Left because it because it will because of the well yes but is you can you can argue that if you think that independence is a fundamental is a fundamental point of principle that everyone on the left in scotland must have if it's not and if it's a tactical or strategic question it clearly isn't the fundamental point of prism and let unless you think Scotland's a colonization which I think anybody seriously argues then obviously it's a strategic a tactical question in which case you've got to accept that large chunks of the left are going to take a different view on that tactical strategic question so to blame it all on the outcome of the referendum I think is is reinforcing the national question as the main dividing line of Scottish politics and if the left in scotland continues to do that it will end up I mean you know we there was this enormous radical independence campaign enormous radical independence campaign it's about to be overtaken and they know that the sort of radical left leadership in Scottish politics is about to be taken on by the Scottish Labour Party I mean how did this radical independence movement get overtaken by the Scottish Labour Party sure but then it wasn't an independent position that could have been put across Aaron Pep Guardiola and your final thoughts so yes nations are imagined communities they're not real but lots of things that we imagine still matter triangles have three sides go show me a triangle go show me the color yellow but we all know what that means okay so they're important social constructs and for many people actually for all of us they guide all manner of things in our daily lives another thing that Benedict Anderson says in regard to the imagined community of the nation and the nation state is that it's an outgrowth of the arrival of the printing press and all of a sudden you have a shared public sphere around a shared language shared which is what Pep Guardiola is saying and that's true and I think only people that speak a couple of languages know that my personality changes when I speak one or two languages quite significantly and that that really can't be dismissed and one thing I'd say with and I I couldn't care less about Englishness or Britishness but when you do have an internationalism that cannot be articulated by your opponents as a hatred of your own country or a privileging of other countries at the expense of your own because that's not true I care about working-class people in Iran or in China or in Britain exactly the same because it's a global struggle at the point and often within discourses of internationalism we can forget that then finally around the Scotland stuff you know what Johnny needs to do is join the labour party all his comrades on the in the independence movement to join the labour party because if there's a labour majority we're going to have a constitutional convention within probably the first six months for labour government that'd be one of the first things they'll do and voices like yours need to be a central part of that and I don't think that means that they're irrelevant but I think we may have a conclusion around this stuff which is probably quite different to what you thought it would be two years ago as I kind of said before obviously you know the nation is a very effective like affective apparatus but it's also something that's always changing so in terms of how do we engage with it that's for me is a difficult question and one that I don't have an answer to as someone who is just like instinctively not invested in any in any nation in any way shape or form but I wanted to leave with this like one quote that I think is why we need to be very careful about this issue and this is Eli Mosley of the Fascist Group Identity Europa and he's talking about basically how he says we need to be explicitly anti-capitalist there is no other way forward for our movement 2018 is going to be the year of leftist joining the white nationalist movement so we need to be aware that this alt-right is is has clocked that articulating an anti-globalist anti-globalization socialist narrative is the way forward through a nationalist lens so in my view that means that we cannot give a single inch to that we have to articulate something far more compelling far more engaging and we have to invest in stories that bring people away from that we cannot cede ground to it and we certainly can't be seen to endorse it in any way shape or form in the 1970s the labor manifesto was arguably more left-wing there was a huge trade union movement there were thousands of revolutionary socialists in the form of the militant inside the Labour Party and even in that situation it would be difficult to implement a radical socialist platform from the British state and even in those circumstances they would have been a huge battle now what Corbyn has done is opened a door right he's opened a door to the possibility of a re-emergence of a radical leftist programme but unless that comes alongside a extra parliamentary movement not just in the trade unions but right across society that's going on the one hand defend the Corbyn government from sections of the state which he won't be in control of from the city of London from international capital then as a project it's not going to come to fruition now that's why I don't join the Labour Party because in Scotland the best way of doing that is to be in a position where you can start to unite people who are pro-independence who are not pro-independence who go to yes who go to no around key class questions which are going to rise over the coming years and I'll just end by saying this I think the Varimedia is playing an absolutely central role to what's going on in England and I'm not just saying that I'm really not just saying that I look at what's going on in England just now and think I wish I were there right because Scotland is different it is more complex it requires a longer discussion but what's going on in England is vital important and I don't want my comments to anyway undermine that process what's happening it must come to Victoria's second conclusion and things like the Varimedia are going to be central to that. Paul gets bonus points if they finish the final point with a celebration of the Varimedia so thank you Jonathan we didn't tell anyone that Michael it was organic thank you all so much for joining me this was we're thinking of doing these about every month fixed debates slightly longer than the normal fix where we'll be debating the key issues which we'll be facing the left in 2018 we've got one more fix of the year which is next week it's going to be a review of the year that was thank you all for joining us this was the fix see you next week