WORLDVIEW: 'The Union's capacity to accommodate minorities is one of its strengths. It is truly a Union of minorities who have found common cause in the quest for permanent peace and prosperity in a turbulent world, writes Paul Gillespie
These words were spoken by Romano Prodi, president of the European Commission, in his speech in Dublin Castle last Saturday prior to the moving ceremony at Áras an Úachtaráin to welcome the 10 new member-states. He made the point that, although the EU "is now closer to becoming geographically coterminous with our continent", there is still much unfinished business to attend to.
The vote by Greek Cypriots against the Annan plan shows "the grand goal of a broad-based European unification can still be undermined by unresolved regional concerns. Throughout its relatively brief history, the European Union has already demonstrated its capacity to act as a reliable and trustworthy broker in overcoming such problems," Mr Prodi said.
I was reminded of his words at a conference on EU enlargement this week organised by the Northern Ireland Council of Voluntary Action (Nicva) in Belfast. Seamus McAleavey, its chief executive, recalled Jacques Delors's activism on peace and reconciliation in the North immediately after the IRA ceasefire in 1994 and his ability to deliver on it through the special support programme.
Nicva has now prepared a "Peace III" set of proposals for the many cross-community and cross-Border organisations arising from the first two rounds of funding. They form a new "community infrastructure" underwriting the peace process and deserve to continue despite new levels of prosperity.
McAleavey pointed out that, based on this experience, Northern Ireland has much to give the new enlarged Europe dedicated to peace and reconciliation as well as to take from it. People should remember that for centuries most European states and peoples were criss-crossed by armies engaged in wars. The 17th-century wars of religion were typical, making Ireland a microcosm of Europe.
The conflict in Northern Ireland is, therefore, not isolated from Europe but part of it. EU enlargement brings this historical truth home because it underlines structural similarities between Ireland and the states which became our partners last weekend in Dublin.
This becomes more clear when we reflect on the role of ethnic, cultural and political minorities over the last 100 years, as we did at this conference in a group masterfully led by Duncan Morrow, chief executive of the Community Relations Council in the North and formerly a political scientist at QUB.
In many ways the history of the century's two major wars and three major settlements can be written in terms of the fate of minorities. They were scattered right through the central European empires before the first World War. The victory of Britain and the US in that conflict made national democracy, not imperial multiculturalism, the new paradigm of political order and power.
This posed a profound problem for minorities. National democracy was based on majorities, and much of the substance of politics concerned how to draw the boundaries between the new states. Self-determination created a psychology in which majorities were winners and minorities losers.
A vicious cycle of competing loyalties and growing mistrust ensued. If citizenship and nationality go together, how could you trust minority nationalities with equal rights? A hierarchy of rights resulted from that, against which internationally agreed human rights were left undeveloped. The League of Nations was not strong enough to overrule national sovereignty and singular identities.
National minorities were tugged between what the US scholar Rogers Brubaker has called the competing claims of these new nationalising states and the external homeland nationalisms with which they became indelibly associated. Thus German minorities in Poland and Czechoslovakia were widely regarded as fifth columns, as were Hungarian minorities in Romania and Czechoslovakia and Turks in Bulgaria.
So, too, were Catholic nationalists in Northern Ireland after 1920 - a minority regarded as disloyal. In Ireland as a whole unionists regarded themselves as a beleaguered minority. What makes Ireland distinctive in Europe is that the distribution of minorities here is much more like that in the central and eastern parts of the Continent than its western parts.
The Versailles story of collapsing empires and emerging nations gave 60 million people a state of their own; but whereas 8.6 million people living in the west were minorities (roughly one in 20 of the total population) there were about 25 million in central and eastern Europe (roughly one in four).
The resulting conflicts helped to create the facile stereotype of bad ethnic nationalism in the east contrasted with good civic nationalism in the western part of Europe. Irish people of whatever persuasion have become used to such condescension (not least from commentators who contrast British patriotism with Irish xenophobia as if there were never such a thing as imperial or English nationalism).
It is now easier to see how the complex approach taken in the Belfast Agreement towards universal rights, institutions and power-sharing draws on, and can contribute to, the solutions found by European integration in confronting the legacy of the second World War. It was caused by the collapse of the Versailles settlement as the big states took sides when Germany moved to reclaim its minorities.
As Morrow sees it, Hitler based fascism on the resentment of those trapped as losers within the post-first World War borders; he made it a national policy in which the defeated minorities came to the centre of power.
The 1945 settlement solved the minority problem drastically by expelling 14.6 million people from the newly reconfigured states, homogenising many of them and then refusing to talk about it during the Cold War. The EEC/EU was based on universal rights, supranational institutions and a determination that France and Germany would never again go to war.
Thus EU enlargement on a continental scale has special implications for Ireland. If it is true that for the new member-states Europe is a memory, in contrast to western Europe, where it has been a project, Ireland has a sense of both these dimensions, arising from our recent experience and a comparison of it with the new member-states.