The Left against Europe?

by Tom Nairn

"I imagine that by about the turn of the century something like a United States of Socialist Europe will exist. A timid and conservative prefiguration of these United States is naturally the Common Market, for even conservative, bourgeois politicians are beginning to sense that the nation state, at least in Europe . . . has become an anachronism."

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1973

About the author

Tom Nairn was a Scottish political theorist of nationalism. He was an Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Government and International Affairs at Durham University.

Nairn attended Dunfermline High School and Edinburgh College of Art before graduating from the University of Edinburgh with an MA in Philosophy in 1956. During the 1960s, he taught at various institutions including the University of Birmingham (1965-6), coming to prominence in the occupation of Hornsey College of Art (1967–70), after which he was dismissed. He worked at the Transnational Institute, Amsterdam from 1972–76, and then as a journalist and TV researcher (mainly for Channel 4 and Scottish Television) before a year at the Central European University with Ernest Gellner (1994–95) and then setting up and running a Masters course on Nationalism at University of Edinburgh (1995-1999). In 2001 he was invited to take up an Innovation Professorship in Nationalism and Cultural Diversity at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia, leaving in January 2010. Returning to the UK, he became a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Durham University in 2009.

Reviews

[Zoonanism · Rating 3 out of 5]

Crafty prose, redundant Marxist premises, nice snapshot of the arguments and intellectual mood of that era