Debates about the recognition of Ireland's part in European culture are often tied up with the modernity of the past 40 years, writes Fintan O'Toole.
In an interesting letter to The Irish Times last week, Val Nolan expressed a view that is probably more widely held than it is openly articulated: "Ireland is, at best, only tangentially a part of Europe . . .. We are attached to the same continental shelf, yes, but beyond that we share very little socially, politically, linguistically or culturally with Europe. Twenty-first century Ireland is, and will continue to be, unmistakably part of the Anglo-sphere."
This is a very useful and honest encapsulation of a notion that hovers around our wider debates about Ireland and the EU: Irish culture looks westwards rather than eastwards. It has visceral connections to the United States and, unavoidably, to the UK, but merely pragmatic ones with continental Europe. This raises two basic questions that underlie our current political dilemma. Is there such a thing as European culture? And, if there is, are we really part of it?
It is very easy to argue that the honest answer to both questions is no. The EU's patchwork of languages and cultures make it a unique experiment - unique precisely in that it is an attempt to found a political entity without even the credible pretence of a common cultural base. The immense difficulty of finding a language that is not vacuous in which to define common cultural values, and the failure of the EU to become any kind of large-scale force in areas like cinema, television and popular music production tell their own story. The fact that the continent's only large-scale, long-lasting cultural forum is the Eurovision Song Contest seems to say it all.
As for Ireland's place in the cultural world, it is unarguable that the most visible influences, especially in popular arts, are Anglo-American. Our cinema is essentially American and, when it's not, it draws obviously on the traditions of British social realism. Our TV is mostly a remake of British forms, whether it's Fair City's self-conscious existence as a local version of Coronation Street or the plethora of me-too "reality" show formats. Our popular music is mid-Atlantic. Even in forms like painting, where the European tradition is so immense, it is arguable that the strongest imprint on contemporary Irish work is still American abstract expressionism.
There's also, at a deeper level, a profound sense of disconnection from the big events that have shaped continental culture - the Holocaust, the second World War, the Cold War. You can see this even now in the casual way in which comparisons with the Nazis can be thrown around here, whether by the President linking Ulster unionists with Nazis or, in another recent letter to The Irish Times, by the painter Robert Ballagh comparing EU leaders to Nazis and the Irish political establishment to the Norwegian collaborator Quisling. You just can't do this kind of thing so lightly in countries that were actually occupied by the Nazis and the difference reminds us of the extent to which we were absent from much of modern European history.
But let's not get carried away here. Let's remember, for a start, that the Anglo-American popular culture which influences us does not in fact cut us off from the Continent. If there is a common European popular culture now, it is American movies, TV and music. If there is a common EU language from Berlin to Bari and from Stockholm to Seville, it is American English.
Rambo and Mickey Mouse, Jack Bauer and Tony Soprano, Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears, are, for better and worse, woven into the fabric of French and Italian, Swedish and Greek, as well as of Irish, culture.
Secondly, cultural and linguistic diversity doesn't contradict the notion of a European culture - it is European culture. What defines Europe as an imaginative space is precisely the degree to which - unlike, say, the US or China - it is shaped by profoundly disparate, and extraordinarily tenacious, nationalisms. Irish cultural nationalism is an utterly European phenomenon - very different to the imperial nationalism of the UK or the "melting pot" ideology of the US, but completely consonant with so much of the continental experience.
Thirdly, this European nature of Irish culture tends to be invisible because we look for it in the wrong places. Because we only became officially European in 1973, we look for it in the modernity of the last 40 years. We miss the paradox that the parts of Irish culture that are most profoundly European are those that are most "traditional".
The big forces that shaped 20th century Ireland - cultural nationalism, Catholicism, the struggle to achieve a level of intellectual independence from Britain - are utterly European.
Visit any church in Italy or Spain and you'll see where the devotional practice and imagery of Irish Catholicism comes from. The standardised Gaelic that was crucial to the language revival was in large part the creation of German scholars like Kuno Meyer, Ernst Windisch and Heinrich Zimmer and French scholars like Henri Gaidoz and D'arbois de Jubainville. For Irish nationalists, being European was the obvious way of not being British: Arthur Griffith declared himself a follower of the German economist Frederick List and proposed a Hungarian solution to the Irish problem. Yeats and Synge first met, not on the Aran Islands, but in Paris. Joyce and Beckett would never have dreamt of practising silence, exile and cunning in London or New York.
It may be true, of course, that these cultural forces - Catholicism, nationalist modernism, ideals of a Gaelic identity - have now weakened to the point where we can be assimilated easily to globalised Anglo-American norms.
That, oddly enough, was exactly what Irish cultural nationalists feared a century ago. Their answer then was to try to become more, not less, European.