IRISH and British nationalism are Siamese twins. They came into existence together and can only grow beyond their present condition by reciprocal agreement.
Northern Ireland is the place where the sibling nationalisms meet. Two nation states claim sovereignty over the same territory - and two into one won't go. You cannot have a United Kingdom and a United Ireland at one and the same time. So either you have a unilateral surrender of one sovereignty claim to the other (which further alienates one of the two communities, republican or unionist) or you opt for a simultaneous renunciation of both.
I propose we follow the second option and envisage the possibility of Northern Ireland as a demilitarised region within a new Irish British Council eventually evolving towards a "Europe of Regions".
The advantage of this model of concentric circles - Ulster Irish British European - is that it allows for the expression of multiple identities and allegiances. It's a scenario explored by many of our writers - Hewitt's "regionalism" or Heaney's "twin mindedness".
John Hume has repeatedly identified himself as a "post nationalist" promoter of a Europe of Regions and David Trimble and the UUP have recently invoked the idea of a British Irish Council dealing with the "totality of relationships between the two islands" (a telling phrase taken directly from Paragraph 39 of the Joint Framework Document, issued by both sovereign governments in February 1995).
Moreover, it is worth recalling that both governments have already agreed to a significant pooling of sovereignty on signing the SEA and the Anglo Irish Agreement, and have proceeded to establish a British Irish Interparliamentary Body, with 25 members from each parliament, which is waiting in the wings for a post election relaunch of the Peace Process. The fact that Mo Mowlam, Labour's spokeswoman on Northern Ireland, restated the vital importance of the "Dublin Westminster strand" only this week is highly significant.
Most telling of all indicators, however, are recent polls showing, first, more than 40 per cent of Northern Ireland citizens declare themselves neither republican/nationalist nor loyalist/unionist and, second, a majority on this island are now prepared to consider a post United Ireland option for the sake of peace. These are tokens surely of a widespread openness to alternative models of government, if politicians would only grasp the nettle and respond.
In this context, one might remember Michael Collins's courageous statement of willingness, in the wake of the Treaty, to cooperate with Britain "in a free association on all matters which would be naturally the common concern of two nations living so closely together" (Manchester Guardian, December, 1921).
In this Irish British connection, we might also cite current surveys which show twice as many people of Irish origin living in Britain as in Ireland.
Such statistics remind us that our peoples are fundamentally mixed up with each other, culturally, ethnically and socially and that our shared history as "mongrel islanders", occupying an increasingly common civic and economic space, is rendering the rival sovereignty claims of our parliaments redundant.
This redundancy is not yet acknowledged, alas, by all political parties. The British Tories are experiencing deep paranoia at the threat represented to their nationalist ideology - UKianism - by Europe and by growing demands for regional government within Britain (e.g. Scotland).
The Tories always had difficulties accepting that, the nation state is a relatively modern invention (17th to 18th century) and one which often masks a people's mongrel and multiple pedigree. One of the great ploys of Tory nationalism is to deny that it exists. Nationalism is always elsewhere over the sea or over the border. It belongs to others - Irish, French, Africans.
In Ireland, this strategy of identifying one nation by scapegoating another began as early as the 14th century when the colonial settlers were so fearful of mingling with the natives - of becoming more Irish than the Irish themselves - that they invented the infamous Statues of Kilkenny. Non observance of these separatist laws wash called "degeneracy" expulsion from the gens (people). The colonising "gens" thus came to define itself over against its colonised "de gens". Us against them. And two rival nations were born.
But the ploy was a fatal one then. And still is. The ghost of "the other" invariably returns, like Banquo, to haunt the imperial banquet. Ireland remains Britain's special alter ego, the spectre of its political unconscious, ally and enemy, familiar and foreign. Which may explain why British nationalism has always been obsessed by Ireland, and oblivious of it, at one and the same time. Ireland is the double which haunts and fascinates. Part of Britain and, not part of it. Its phantom limb.
Britain will preserve what is best in its constitution, I suggest, by reiterating its civic rather than territorial legacy. The democratic impulse to accommodate different peoples is an indispensable antidote to the sovereignty neurosis in Ulster. If we can acknowledge ho", fluid the circles of Irish and British identity really are, we may begin to envisage a situation where borders effectively disappear from these islands. A new Irish British council, drawing on the experience of the successful Nordic Council, could then evolve, under the horizon of a decentralised Europe of small regions.