Jack Foster (1944-) hails from east Belfast, spent most of his career as a professor of British and Irish literature at British Columbia, and is now an honorary research professor at Queen’s University Belfast. He lives in the Ards peninsula and is also a Titanicologist.
This curiously titled collection, which I will explain, gathers essays published between 2017 and 2023, printed in numerous outlets, including Irish and Northern Irish newspapers. It contains a small number of footnoted updates, but otherwise the items are unamended — and uncorrected.
Foster excuses “whatever repetition there is in the essays and articles” as flowing from the “reiterative demands of [Irish] nationalism but also from the diversifying promotion of a Northern Ireland outside the UK”. Irish Times readers beware: de te fabula narratur!
Foster writes well, avoiding the pretentious obscurantism which has marred Anglophone literary criticism for decades. His readers will therefore see his weaknesses as well as his strengths. He can be curmudgeonly funny. “Pretendians” is a biting account of North Americans who have faked indigenous or black heritage, while “An Angry Wind” is a sharp, albeit jaundiced, dissection of Maud Gonne.
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When Foster became a Canadian, the citizenship judge told him and his cohort that they were not to leave their previous cultures behind. Being from Northern Ireland, Foster deemed that foolish counsel, but the judge need not have worried: Jack did not, and has not, left his culture behind.
Foster tells us that he has preferred Dublin “socially” to Belfast, and that he identifies as British and Irish “in equal and inseverable measure”. This dual identity he shares with 0.61 per cent of those who answered the 2021 census in Northern Ireland.
He also observes that he lost a few friends in the fair city when “I ticked Yes to Brexit”.
“Brexit,” as Prof Foster should know, wasn’t on the ballot paper, because Britain is not the official title of the relevant state, and it is not an accurate legal synonym for the UK. And, yes, because Northern Ireland, part of the UK, is not in Britain, or part of Britain — and certainly not Great Britain — no matter how much he may wish otherwise. Northern Ireland, of course, contains numerous British citizens and identifiers — and was originally created to satisfy them.
In fact, citizen Foster ticked “leave” in answer to the question, “Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?”
Yet, “Brexit” is what has happened. Foster doesn’t like the consequences, though he does not hold himself and fellow “leavers” fully culpable for their ill-considered folly.
By overwhelming majority decisions at Westminster, endorsing two treaties, the full secession of Great Britain has occurred from the institutions of the EU — and the European Single Market and Customs Union.
But Northern Ireland, though removed from EU political institutions, because of the famous protocol, remains in the single market for goods and agriculture, and the UK administers the EU’s customs code at ports and airports between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Not one word or item of punctuation in that protocol has been modified by the Windsor Framework, or by Rishi Sunak’s policy paper, Safeguarding the Union.
Regarding these last observations, Jack Foster, Jim Allister and this reviewer are in full agreement. The BBC uses the expression “post-Brexit trading arrangements” to summarise the protocol but it covers much more than trade. It ensures no diminution in the rights provisions in the Good Friday Agreement (GFA), including those in the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, and it cements the international protection of the GFA.
Foster warns us that any hostility in his collection is owed “to the post-Brexit surge of exclusive Irish nationalism across swathes of Irish society, including the so-called moderate nationalist political parties, and which harries unionists with its clamour for a border poll and predictions of unification”.
Among the allegedly guilty are Leo Varadkar, the Irish literature professor and Irish Times columnist Fintan O’Toole, Ireland’s Future and yours truly — though I am “reviewed” through critical citation of a friendly review, not through the pleasure of being accurately read.
Standard whataboutery will occur to most readers. Wasn’t there a surge of exclusivist British — and English — nationalism before and after the 2016 referendum? And shouldn’t Foster acknowledge being swept up in that?
He saw Brexit as “the desire for elbow room and fresh air”. What a weird approach to political economy. He also thought it arguable, like Ray Bassett, Ireland’s former ambassador to Canada, that the “economic logic of Brexit” would be “Irish co-withdrawal” from the EU. That would have been a suicide pact with the tall kingdom that overlooks our shoulder.
Foster excuses his poorly researched decision by asserting that “to vote Remain” would have been “to remand the UK in the custody of a vast bureaucracy” and elsewhere writes of an Orwellian “Big Brotherish mega-bureaucracy”. (My emphases).
The European Commission has about 32,000 full-time officials, including contract staff, ie, not much more than are employed by the City of Philadelphia. The European Central Bank has a further 5,000 employees, but the UK had an opt-out from the euro.
Foster also refers offhand to “the 4,000 pages (or is it more?)” of EU regulations. It is a lot more.
There are 35 chapters in the “acquis communautaire”, which, depending on the language of the member state, and the relevant pagination protocols, may vary from anywhere between 80,000 to 170,000 pages of text. The UK has had to keep or amend — rather than delete — much of this settled EU law to staunch the bleeding of its economy; and any modern economy requires at least this level of regulation.
In a professor, these are inexcusable lapses in factual care.
Foster does score some successful points in reviewing Fintan O’Toole’s amusing philippic Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain (2018).
“Psychology,” Foster writes, “not political science, is the ‘discipline’ which drives Heroic Failure.” True, and O’Toole certainly anthropomorphised England as a masochistic patient suffering from imaginary oppression, though like most, I think, Heroic Failure is best read as Swiftian satire rather than the work of a committed Freudian reader of nations. Foster is right that O’Toole overdid imperial nostalgia as the ruling explanation of why Brexit happened — but it is part of the story.
Nevertheless, Foster’s own lack of “discipline” is evident. For example, he asks rhetorically, by comparison with Germany and France: “Are there far right-wing parties in the British parliament?” His reader is supposed to nod “No”. But that would be to forget the DUP, then propping up the Tories when O’Toole was writing, and to forget O’Toole’s discourses on the “European Research Group”.
The title of this book is supposed to be an ironic riposte to “England out of Ireland”, a banner held up in the St Patrick’s Day parade in New York in 2019, including by Mary Lou McDonald, according to Foster. It is also the title of the longest essay in the book, which is mostly an accurate collection of anecdotal reports of very successful (southern) Irish emigrants to Great Britain, with sardonic references to the more recently tagged as Niple (“new Irish person living in England”).
What’s the point? First, it seems, that “Britain is an extension of Ireland — even in some sense a colony of the Irish mind”. That’s not persuasive, even as a metaphor. The large presence of Algerian emigrants — and their offspring — in France has not made France a colony of the Algerian mind, though some of Madame Le Pen’s supporters think otherwise.
There is an overlooked difference here, which should register with a Canadian professor, between those who arrive in a place through voluntary migration, and are accepted, and eventually integrated and assimilated, and settler colonists who displace natives — sometimes killing or expelling them, taking their lands, segregating them and forcefully changing their culture.
The second reason given is better. “It is healthier for Ireland and the Irish to acknowledge and embrace the Irishness of Britain and the Britishness of Ireland.” But such mutual acknowledgements — and practices — do not require Foster’s fantasy, namely, a return of all of Ireland to “archipelagic” unity with Great Britain. These goals would be more easily met by the UK’s return to the EU.
It is also debatable whether the most ambitious Irish see London as their favoured metropolis, whether they be in construction, academe, the arts, banking, tech or indeed in politics. I suspect, without survey evidence for proof, that the most ambitious Irish see San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, New York and Washington as the world cities where they’d like to be at least temporarily successful and recognised.
Foster’s hostility to Sinn Féin, in all its historic guises, and to those who have always favoured a peaceful, democratic and constitutional path to unification is both passionate and lacking in nuance about past sources of conflict and current predicaments.
Passion leads him to reject the Shared Island Initiative with almost as much vehemence as the IRA’s militarism. Who knew that Fianna Fáil Tánaiste Micheál Martin could be perceived as such a cunning threat to unionists?
Despite what Jack Foster avers, the letter and ethos of the GFA do not require nationalists to stop seeking a united Ireland, any more than they require unionists to cease to want to preserve the union with Great Britain. It requires respect for nationalists, unionists and others, for British and Irish, and both. It is a constitutional truce.
It prescribes powersharing within the North, and deep North-South and east-west co-operation if Northern Ireland remains in the union. It contains many possibilities for future models of a united Ireland. And all of them, if properly crafted, should envisage a united Ireland in which Jack Foster, as a British citizen and dual British-Irish identifier, would be comfortable if not best pleased.
Brendan O’Leary is Lauder Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. His most recent book, Making Sense of a United Ireland, won the 2023 Brian Farrell Prize
Further reading
Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights by Will Kymlicka (Oxford University Press, 1995)
The Canadian philosopher Will Kymlicka distinguishes national minorities, living on their homelands, in multinational states, from ethnic groups (especially voluntary immigrants) living in multiethnic states. He argues that both need cultural rights, but stronger protections are owed national minorities.
Thinking About Democracy: Power Sharing and Majority Rule in Theory and Practice by Arend Lijphart (Routledge, 2008)
A collection of the Dutch and American political scientist’s most impactful essays on powersharing — with accessible discussions of consociation, federation, coalition governments, election systems, and the limits of majority rule.
The Passage to Europe: How a Continent Became a Union by Luuk van Middelaar (Yale University Press, 2013)
A highly readable use of Machiavelli and others to explain and justify the development of the European Union. To be read before its sequels: Alarums & Excursions (2019), and Pandemonium (2021). The Dutch man proves that writing about the European Union need not be dull.
