John Coakley, the professor of politics, defines nationalism as an ideology and political mobilisation aimed at addressing the "perceived absence of fit between the boundaries of the nation and the boundaries of the state". The question of how to fit them together or keep them apart in Ireland suffuses Dynamics of Political Change in Ireland: Making and Breaking a Divided Ireland, a book dedicated to his scholarly work.
Coakley’s fellow political scientists, sociologists and historians range authoritatively over the politics of Ireland and Northern Ireland, their relations with Britain, and how the European Union and other international actors have influenced agreements, institutions and change on the island. Coakley’s research into Irish politics and nationalism, Irish-British relations and comparative ethnic politics continually informs their work.
It is a complex and cautionary tale. The prolonged efforts to find a settlement in Northern Ireland through the 1998 Belfast Agreement are themselves subject to domestic and geopolitical shifts that make apparently permanent arrangements contingent and fragile. The book was completed after last June’s Brexit referendum in the UK. As Brendan O’Leary puts it, the anniversaries of 1916 and the Battle of the Somme, “long feared by governments and professional historians as potential sources of instability, have proven much less consequential than the two unanticipated referendums held in 2014 and 2016, which have jointly put into question three unions”.
Asymmetry
These unions are between Scotland, England and Wales in Britain, between Britain and Northern Ireland in the United Kingdom, and between the UK and Ireland in the European Union.
Paul Arthur points to the “huge asymmetry of power relations” between Ireland and Britain. Western Europe’s most effective imperial state was ignorant of the smaller island, while Ireland brought a suffocating and claustrophobic binary to the relationship. Membership of the EEC/EU changed that by widening relationships and providing a model of negotiated governance to influence the Belfast Agreement.
Jennifer Todd asks how durable that agreement is following the two referendums. Why has the agreement become prone to crisis since 2012 over flags and emblems and successive rows over funding and individual projects? In the 1990s the global environment encouraged an inclusive and fair settlement capable of dealing with pluralist identities and mutual respect. These values were inscribed in the agreement but are not sufficiently practised to sustain it. A new political conjuncture has shifted international priorities. Changing conceptions of sovereignty and power, in England especially, threaten its unions with Scotland and Northern Ireland as well as with the European Union.
Brigid Laffan describes how the new EU context changed the Irish State and nation. Its most important impact was to offer Ireland “a way of diluting its excessive economic dependence on the EU and mediating the asymmetry of the bilateral relationship between a large and a small state”. But the 2016 referendum means the nations and states of both islands “face a more uncertain future than at any time since 1973, when both joined the EU”.
Joe Ruane asks how Ireland’s crises, in the North concerning the peace process and in the South relating to economic austerity, can best be modelled to anticipate rather than predict likely outcomes. He concludes that mutual spillovers are on balance unlikely, even those arising from Brexit, because of the relative normalisation of the Border between them.
Banal everyday discourse
Niall Ó Dochartaigh subtly portrays how that normality is reinforced by banal everyday media, institutional and political discourse, notwithstanding all-Ireland nationalist rhetoric. Yvonne Galligan and Melanie Hoewer empirically and theoretically document gender inequality and women’s activism in both parts of the island. Michael Gallagher, Jonathan Tonge and John Garry provide rich analysis of nationalised electoral competition, political parties and Sinn Féin’s contrasting appeal north and south.
Andy Pollak’s detailed chapter on North-South co-operation under the Belfast Agreement, with EU funding, ascribes the suboptimal outcome so far to northern intransigence and southern indifference. The Fine Gael-led governments from 2011 “felt little ownership of the Northern peace process”. Katy Hayward and Kevin Howard bitingly argue in the book’s final chapter that the 2004 referendum, which ruled out birthright citizenship, privileges concerns about immigration over fuzzy boundaries and multiple identities.
Those values of the Belfast Agreement are now under threat from Brexit. Defending them may require a radical shift of gear on Irish unity and European integration for which Ireland is ill prepared intellectually and politically. That is why we should appreciate such a high-level discussion of the issues involved.
This book is far too highly priced for its potential wider readership in a time of profound change whose contours it illuminates so well. It ought to be made into an accessible paperback and presented as the first in a series of studies from talented and critical authors such as these.
Paul Gillespie is an Irish Times columnist and adjunct senior research fellow in the school of politics and international relations at University College Dublin
