Retaining identities within the EU

The Irish traveller in central and eastern Europe is becoming more used to sympathetic and informed interest in our country as a possible model for political and economic development in an enlarged EU. There is particular interest in how within the EC/EU Ireland has managed to diversify and multilateralise relations away from over-dependence on Britain without losing its national identity through the European integration process.

This week detailed negotiations on EU accession were formally opened in Brussels with Poland, Hungary, Estonia, the Czech Re public, Slovenia and Cyprus. Lithuania, Latvia, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Romania are also on the formal list of accession states, on a slower time span; but several of them are catching up fast and unhappy to be put in a second division.

Turkey is in a third category, acknowledged by Brussels as an accession candidate, but with continuing argument among the member-states about its European credentials and political preparedness for membership (economically it is well ahead of most other candidates).

Explaining Ireland's experience in the EU it is necessary first to theorise it a little. The crucial aspect has been diversification away from over-dependence on Britain. Thus, if the ethno-cultural project of Irish nationalism was to de-anglicise Ireland, the achievement of the civic modernisation project of the last generation has been substantially to reduce its anglocentricity.

Rather than concentrating on the creation of an Ireland that is not Britain, by retrieving lost cultural and linguistic essentials, there has been an alternative process of multilateralising economic and political affairs.

This was inherent in the transition from the de Valera to the Lemass eras, of course, and is not to be explained only by the 25 years of EU membership being commemorated this year. But such membership was a crucial element in Lemass's vision of a more open economy and political system, and it has, in fact, provided the framework to achieve real independence, insofar as that is possible within such an interconnected world. Thus, Ireland has gained legal and political independence by pooling sovereignty.

The paradox is not, of course, accepted by those in Ireland who oppose European integration in principle, but seen rather as an unresolved contradiction.

Their views are echoed in an emerging debate in the Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) countries between those who say Ireland's experience can be replicated and those who say that joining the EU could on the contrary overwhelm a sovereignty so recently regained from Russian hegemony by swapping it for an equally unacceptable German one. Their fears are echoed by a different stream of argument, which says that premature accession would drown these struggling economies and transitional democracies in a much too competitive environment.

Irish political culture, accustomed to dealing with large states and skilled in wheeler-dealing and clientelism, took enthusiastically to Brussels, operating effectively in the multilateral setting of Council meetings which levelled the playing field with British ministers. Foreign policy and diplomacy were likewise adapted. So, of course, was trade and investment.

This was in due course perceived as a kind of liberation, an affirmation rather than a dilution of national identity. It changed the cultural formula of Irish nationalism by returning it to more ancient hybrid or multiple identities, including particularly its European and American ones.

There are clearly analogies and perhaps a model here for other smaller states in the shadow of bigger neighbours, including Finland vis-avis Russia and Sweden and Austria visa-visa-vis Germany.

Among the accession candidates, nearly all of them anxious to escape from the Russian sphere of influence, the same applies, in relation both to NATO and the EU. And it should be noted that it has taken the CEE states only a fraction of the time to diversify their trade and investment patterns that it took Ireland.

There is a deeper sense of similarity, too, between most of the CEE states and Ireland. It has to do with the nature of their nationalisms. The Belfast Agreement can be read in large part as dealing with majorities and minorities, their rights and loyalties. There are few analogies in western Europe for this (South Tyrol is one), but many in central and eastern Europe.

One influential researcher, Rogers Brubaker, has proposed an imaginative schema to understand them in a recent book*. He distinguished between national minorities, the newly nationalising states in which they live and the external national "homelands" to which they belong, or can be construed as belonging by ethno-cultural affinity though not by legal citizenship. National minorities, such as the Hungarian minorities in Slovakia or Romania, are caught between nationalising states in which they are not classified as part of the core nation, and external national homelands with which they have an ambiguous relationship.

This triadic structure of understanding and explanation uncannily resembles that in Northern Ireland - much more so than elsewhere in western Europe, where the congruence of state and nation is more complete. Looking at the CEE states from an Irish perspective one suddenly sees parallels and similarities which make our national questions more normal - and soluble.

The Belfast Agreement would not have been possible without the umbrella of European identity and its political and legal order which created the confidence among Irish nationalists to make the necessary compromises.

* Nationalism Reframed, Nationalism and the National Question in the New Europe, Cambridge University Press, 1996.