Identity, Unity, and the Limits of Democracy

Irish Studies in International Affairs, 2021

Nations and Nationalism

How does political structure affect ethno-national distinction? Parti- tioned societies are a good test case where we can see the effects of changed socio- political circumstances on historically inherited distinction. This article takes nominally identical distinctions of nationality and religion with common historical roots and shows how they are differentially understood in two polities partitioned in 1920: Northern Ireland, a devolved region of the United Kingdom, and the Irish state. Using a data base of interviews with over 220 respondents, of which 75 in Northern Ireland, conducted between 2003 and 2006, it shows how complex, potentially totalising and exclusive ‘ethnic’ and ‘ethno-national’ divisions are built up from simpler and more permeable distinctions. Respondents interrelate the same elements into a loosely-knit symbolic structure – different in each jurisdiction – which frames expectations and discourse, and which is associated with different logics of national disco...

Nations and Nationalism, 2007

Much scholarly writing on states and state boundaries assumes that these form or at least condition the bounds of identity. The 'institutionalisation' process is said to be one where the boundaries of the state become the boundaries of everyday life and imagined community. In an interdisciplinary, multi-stranded qualitative research on the Irish border, no such process of institutionalization was found. Rather the state border was perceived as a fluctuating area of danger and economic opportunity. To the extent that it was perceived to impact at all on identity, it was on the moral and cultural content of identity rather than its national form, on the mode in which national and ethno-religious categories were lived rather than on those categories themselves.

In the increasingly mystifying, mendacious discourse that characterises the politics of Brexit, few words have been employed so often, and in such a debased manner, as the word 'democratic'. Majority rule may be the most common form of democratic decision-making, particularly in Britain, but it by no means exhausts the possibilities, and it should come as no surprise that the imposition of profound, irreversible constitutional change against the wishes of 48 per cent of the population has put the political system under enormous pressure.

2021

This paper explores two contradicting sets of political identities, Protestant unionist and pro-British on the one side, and Catholic Irish nationalist and republican on the other, which shape the social and political sphere of Ireland. The aim is to describe the manifestations and transformations of these two identities in Northern Ireland. The concepts of contested identities, religion as an identity boundary and elements of nationalism provide the theoretical background. The conclusion indicates that Irish Catholic identity has gained in confidence, because it improved its political and social position in Northern Ireland. On the contrary, the Protestant unionist community perceives a loss in their status, which generates frustration and leads to disputes on cultural issues.

History of European Ideas, 2023

The concept of ‘Ethnicity’ still enjoys some currency in the historical and social science literature. However, the cogency of the idea remains disputed. First coming to prominence in the 1980s, the word is often used to depict the character of social relations in the context of conflicts over sovereignty. The case of Northern Ireland presents a paradigmatic example. This article is a rejoinder to Ian McBride’s contention that my scepticism about the notion lacks justification. With reference to disputes over the state, I show in response that ‘ethnicity’ in effect means nationality. I further claim that the nation state is a successor to the dynastic state. In clarifying the meaning of this arrangement, the article brings out how the nation is a juridical rather than empirical category. More specifically, it derives from the notion of corporate personality in law. For this reason, its retrospective integrity is a matter of fabrication, depending on the fiction of ancestral continuity. At the same time, its future-oriented cohesiveness means that it must be invested with a unifying will. I conclude that the legitimacy of a nation state rests on its democratic will, whose coherence is expressed in the action of its government.

The Troubles in Northern Ireland and Theories of Social Movements, 2017

Northern Ireland is a deeply divided society. The divisions, however, are socially and spatially uneven and their intensity varies over time with individuals swaying from relatively liberal and permeable views to deeper polarization and back again. John Whyte (1991) documented this for the 1960s and 1970s and it is still the case today (Ruane 2017). Even at the height of communal polarization the division was never complete: there were individuals and subgroups who ignored it and seemed immune from antagonism, and local areas where mixing continued in the midst of violence. The basis of division is also diverse. It has ethnic, national, religious, and colonial dimensions and its logic is not reducible to any one of these. It is not 'an ethnic conflict' or 'a colonial conflict', and still less a 'religious conflict', tout court. On the contrary, division persists and polarizes not because of one foundational element but because of the entwining of different cleavages in a context of power and inequality. As we have long argued, there are historically deep structures of power and inequality within the British-Irish archipelago, embedded in institutions and routinized practices in Northern Ireland which themselves embody overlapping and intersecting cultural differences, and which in turn produce and reproduce communities as emergent entities with richly layered repertoires of opposition (Ruane and Todd 1996, 2004, 2015). The communities are composite products of successive conjunctural confrontations during this long historical process. Contesting subgroups within each community may emphasize religion or nationality or colonialism, according to their particular ideological standpoint or interest, and each reproduces conflict between communities in the process of asserting their interests within them. Others-keeping themselves detached from conflict for the most part-retain links with those more directly involved by family, schooling, and neighbourhood which allows for future communal mobilization. If the emergent communities-in-conflict might be conceived as 'ethnic' communities, they are not ones defined by descent or

This paper considers how a new cosmopolitan vision of integration and the integrated society associated with the work of Jürgen Habermas and Ulrich Beck has been applied by Bryan Fanning (2009) in the context of the Republic of Ireland. It suggests that there is a need to seriously consider the limitations of how subjectivity is theorised in this model. The paper specifically questions the implied necessity of having to consider how the politics of integration is always dictated in the last instance by the centrality of the nation-state to the demand for solidarity. It instead problematises the associated image which this reproduces of the absolute space of subjectivity given the emphasis on dichotomous categories such as included/excluded, national/non-national, new Irish/old Irish, guest/host. What is suggested is that this model presents a very specific conception of what and where the politics of integration can be, namely as that which must be defined in the last instance in terms of already divisible sovereign autonomous persons or autonomous groups of such persons who need to be bonded with each other. The paper uses the work of Julia Kristeva to suggest how a different politics of solidarity might be envisaged. Unlike the former politics of solidarity which is based on the question of how to build bonds between those included in and those excluded from Irish society (thus emphasizing the need for ever more integration). This is one which is based on the importance of recognizing the manner in which people are always already bonded to each other and to Irish society in many different ways associated with contingent space which dominant dichotomous categories of subjectivity cannot account for.

Journal of British Studies, 2018

The study of the Northern Irish Troubles is dominated by ethnic readings of conflict and violence. Drawing on new scholarship from a range of different disciplines and on fresh archival sources, this article questions these explanations. General theories that tie together ethnicity with conflict and violence are shown to be based on definitions that fail to distinguish ethnic identities from other ones. Their claims cannot be taken as being uniquely or even disproportionately associated with ethnicity. Explanatory models specifically developed for the case of modern Ireland do address that weakness. Yet, this article contends, they rest upon the fallacy that the Catholic and Protestant peoples are transhistorical entities. Political ideas, organizations, and actions cannot be reduced to fixed group identities. This article argues instead that the Troubles centered on a political conflict—one over rival visions of modern democracy. The pursuit of equality, the core value of democracy...