Countries shape character (so get ready to like Scots less)

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[/audioplayer]As I write this, I am sitting outside a weinhaus in Kaub, a half-timbered town on the wooded slopes of the middle Rhine. If you don’t know the place, I recommend a visit: the scenery is lovely, the hiking is fine, and the Riesling is great (they have to handpick the grapes, like peasants in a Brueghel painting, because the river-ine vineyards are too steep for machines).

But there is another reason to make the agreeable journey to Kaub: it’s a brilliant place to contemplate the mysteries of nationalism and national character — i.e. what makes one nation ‘different’ from another. A question which, as we face the separation of Scotland, has a serious resonance for us all.

Kaub’s contribution to this debate is historical. It lies on one of the great fault lines of Europe, between France and Germany, between Catholic and Protestant — it was devastated many times in the 30 Years’ War, when the Catholics fought the Reformation and a fifth of Germans died. It also lies on the old frontier between the Roman Empire and the barbarian nations.

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But there is a more recent event which has even greater relevance. On New Year’s Eve, 1813, the Prussian Field Marshall Blucher (of Waterloo fame) ambitiously marched an army of 50,000 men across the Rhine, at Kaub, to drive Napoleon out of Germany. It was a first inkling that the tide was turning: that Prussia/Germany was overtaking a slowly declining France.

Beneath this military derring-do lies the vital paradox. The Prussian nobility who led that assault on France all spoke French. This is because upper classes across Europe, at the time, saw French culture, language and customs as superior, and enviable.