Nations Still

The Women of the Confederacy located at the state capital building, Raleigh, North Carolina

THE YOUNG Somali taxi driver sped me to downtown Raleigh. He had lived for a while now in the State capital of North Carolina and he was curious to know my origins too. “Wales!” he said, hearing my answer. “Then you know Cardiff City.” I was expecting him to talk about football but he referred constantly to his visit to “Cardiff City” and also to “Bristol City”. This was indeed the New South: a vibrant, multi-ethnic society that has absorbed and even sublimated much of the culture of the old country. Like in Britain, the pace of the latest round of nation-building is breathtaking.

The role of nationalism is often ignored in America. Yet it was not always so. Alexander Hamilton, that overlooked but arguably most influential Founding Father, thought nationalism a vital force that both required and permitted strong federal government. There was no need to fear that it would lead to the usurping proclivities of imperial government because “in any conflict between the federal head and one of its members [the States] the people will be most apt to unite with their local government” (Federalist 25). This same debate rages today over the question of healthcare. The students I lectured at the College of William and Mary in Virginia were intrigued to learn that health policy was entirely devolved in the UK. Many in America feel the President has infringed States rights on this issue. As Jonathan Turley put it in USA Today “Federalism was already on life support” but this encroachment could amount to a “do not resuscitate order for federalism” (31 March).

Nationalism in both the UK and the USA has a beguiling and ever changing nature. Sometimes its lack of explicitness can fool one into thinking it is in fact absent. What is Britishness, I am sometimes asked. The best reply is “an identity as elusive as Welshness or Scottishness”. When I asked American students whether they felt Southern, they were utterly puzzled. I might as well have asked whether they found breath one of life’s necessities.

What then of nationalism in the South? Inevitably, we begin with the Confederacy. It is everywhere: in the flags, statues, and Civil War memorials. Its harsher attitudes are less ubiquitous, that is also true. Tobacco and casual racism are now the private vices of a minority, and unacceptable in the public square. The Neo-confederacy is a softer, more romantic cultural construct. Yet the shrill blast of history can interrupt this polite re-interpretation. The Governor of Virginia declared April “Confederate history month” but without any mention of slavery. Thankfully, he was lambasted. There is little that is multi-cultural in this type of nationalism. I saw a disturbing poster in one of Savannah’s finest Victorian townhouses which said it all,

Live as a Nation
Fight as a Nation
Stand as a Nation
Anti-Obama Nation

Well perhaps this has more to do with the Tea Party movement that is sweeping across Red (that is, Republican) America. What is most noticeable here is that it is the Republicans who now self-identify as the party of States rights while the Democrats have become the party of the Union. However, the Republicans seem to hate government in general rather than the Union in particular. What gave the South national virility in 1860 was, of course, the threat of secession.

Fort Sumter, Charleston, South Carolina

It all started at Fort Sumter in 1861. The fort is located on a tiny sand spit at the mouth of Charleston harbour – the South’s most important port (and still the fourth largest in the USA) Fort Sumter could have strangled the Confederacy at birth if left under Union command. Few of the tourists who visit the fort today have much sense of the conflict’s asperity. They are out to enjoy a beautiful boat trip and children clamber over the long spiked cannons as if they were playing in the local park. It seemed to me that Fort Sumter had little reach beyond the history books but I was surprised to learn in the monument’s gift shop that Confederate souvenirs easily outsell those of the Union. There is little embarrassment about sporting the symbols of this ambivalent cause, much like our thoughtless participation in the rituals of Guy Fawkes’ night, I suppose.

If there is a Southern nation then its spiritual capital is indeed Charleston. The Great Old Lady of the South combines abundant colonial and ante-bellum architecture with the tasteful developments of a thriving modern city. The city is proud to have been home to the Nullification movement which argued years before the Civil War started that the federal Union could be dissolved. Even in South Carolina, there were not many supporters of independence in the early 19th century; but slowly, remorselessly divergent trading patterns pulled the North and South apart. South Carolina was the first to secede – just like it was the first to declare independence from British rule, as the locals are quick to remind visitors. In Charleston’s Museum of the Confederacy the Civil War is still referred to as “the second American Revolution” or as “the War Between the States” when feeling conciliatory.

Perhaps what is driving nationalism most in the New South is immigration. On Savannah’s buses all the signs are bilingual – English and Spanish. The South is noticeably more Hispanic than when I was a student there in the mid 1980s. And the South is attracting migrants from within America, some of them the brightest young minds, intent on working in one of the many new high-tech industries such as those clustered around the Research Triangle of Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill. North Carolina suffered more casualties than any other Confederate State in the Civil War. Today it boasts one of the highest survival rates for new high-tech businesses in the world. One happy affect is that the Indian and Chinese research students demand good tea in the local cafes. Now that is a big change, almost as welcome as the growth of micro-breweries across the South which mean that Bud is no longer King in this part of America.

Of course migration has always been one of the main springs of nationalism. The millions who poured into the USA from southern and eastern Europe after the Civil War helped forge the new American Nation that was the essence of Lincoln’s vision. Today it is often in Britain’s Asian and Afro-Caribbean communities that the most exuberant expressions of Britishness are to be found.

“Could Scotland or Wales leave the UK?” I was asked the secession question by a student at William and Mary. A murmur of surprise went around the audience when I answered that Celtic secession has been accepted as possible under certain circumstances by successive British governments. Britain, I said, is similar to Canada in this respect, where the people of Quebec clearly have the right to self-determination. I added that in my view permitting the possibility of secession might actually help a state stay together because it would be more likely to negotiate the compromises that are necessary to keep a multi-national state healthy.

Compromise is certainly the heart of it all. Nationalism is not necessarily monotheistic. We can be Welsh and British; Southern and American. Nations are never fixed and final entities. Just like customs and mores, they change and what was common in one generation can seem quirky or downright nasty in another. It is those with the delusion of truth- my truth/our truth- that cause the most trouble. There were plenty in the South who supported the Union but wanted to negotiate better trading policies for King Cotton. When Virginia’s state convention voted on secession in April 1861 it voted by a two thirds majority to stay in the Union. They did not prevail: over 600,000 Americans died in the world’s first modern war; the South was laid waste; racial equality actively resisted for over 100 years.

In Marion Square, Charleston, an American tourist mistook me for a local and asked who was perched on top of the massive obelisk. “John Calhoun,” I replied. Noticing that he was little the wiser, I added: “He was the great advocate of State rights and so the villain of the peace who led America to civil war, or the true defender of the South, depending on your point of view.” He answered: “Then Calhoun was one of the poles that keeps the constitution strong.”

No wonder both America and the South are nations still.