As well as becoming fluent in Italian, it was during this sojourn that he began to transcend the limits of orthodox Marxism, particularly while exploring the writings of Antonio Gramsci.
"If you were a Marxist [in Britain] you were a Stalinist or a Trotskyist," he later explained, "but I was insulated against that by my Italian experience... there was a much wider intellectual, cultural atmosphere that one could go on breathing.
In 2001 he was invited to take up an Innovation Professorship in Nationalism and Cultural Diversity at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia and worked with Paul James.
By contrast, Nairn was long an advocate of European integration, an argument he first put forward in The Left Against Europe (1973),[9] when leftist opinion in the UK was very much against the idea.
While critical of Scottish elites, Nairn considered that Scotland's economic potential had been limited by the concentration of power in London in combination with what he claimed was the archaic nature of the British state.
Essentially, Nairn contends that imperialism from the core countries (Western Europe) amongst the peripheral nations (Africa, Asia, Australia, etc.)
Nairn's ideas on nationalism were in the news during Britain's protracted Brexit negotiations from 2016, and Scotland's desire to remain in the European Union; his major works have been reprinted.
[4] His republican inclinations meant that his The Enchanted Glass (1988) was one of the earliest serious modern investigations into the British monarchy from an abolitionist perspective.