Advancing a position unpopular in contemporary Scotland, Fred Halliday (1946–2010) permits himself a volcanic eruption of principled feeling about nationalism in an otherwise sober essay based on his Ernest Gellner [1925–95] Memorial Lecture:

In both quoted extract and full essay alike, Halliday probes the implicitly and explicitly normative claims of nationalism on a number of fronts: national self-determination, the national in relation to the supranational, nationalism's moral agenda, and its uses of history. In all these areas Halliday poses substantial questions: whether national self-determination is always worth the cost in terms of social upheaval (Kosovo is his most recent example); whether it always delivers more humane state formations (Chechnya being a case in point); whether the national, as a given, should invariably trump the supranational (the routine flouting of the United Nations charter and aims by national interests, nuclear proliferation argued on the basis of national defence); whether loyalty to the nation state should always supersede other loyalties (class, gender, faith); and whether nationalism's relaxed attitude to its own diverse ‘imaginings’ needs to be challenged (Ernest Renan [1823–92]'s famous belief that ‘Getting your history wrong is part of being a nation’).

Halliday's timely reminder that nationalism is not a natural but a historical phenomenon challenges those in Scotland and elsewhere who would regard scepticism about nationalism as tantamount to treason. His piece should be read as a backdrop to this essay, which is about some of the cultural dimensions of the collective turn to nationalism of a significant section of the Scots intelligentsia. In particular, this essay emphasises the silences and deformations that this turn imposes on them with regard to their position on certain popular Scottish cultural phenomena, most notably, what has come to be known as Tartanry or Highlandism.