Our ineradicable need for identity and allegiance must gradually be channeled, upwards and downwards, but away from the exclusive focus of the nation-state. For history has shown its tenure to be insecure and belligerent.
We must foster in its stead variable layers of compatible identification allowing citizens of Northern Ireland, for example, for the first time in history to owe differing degrees of allegiance to an expanding range of identifications: from city or region, parish or province to national constitution (British or Irish or both) and, larger still, to the trans-national union of Europe.
A distant dream? Not at all. The post-nationalist paradigm already exists which allows us to embrace this process. The aim of the new British-Irish Council of Isles, which held its first meeting on 18 December, 1999, as the Agreement told us, was to promote the harmonious and mutually beneficial development of the totality of relationships among the peoples of the British and Irish islands.
What we are witnessing on the Irish-British archipelago as we pass into a new millennium is little short of a revolution in our political understanding. With the ratification of the 1998 Belfast Agreement, both sovereign governments effectively signed away their exclusivist sovereignty claims over northern Ireland and came of age. The Siamese twins can now, one hopes, learn to live in real peace, accepting that their adversarial offspring may at last be British or Irish or both (p. 2, para vi).
Ireland as Britains unconscious
It is of course the very ambiguity of Irelands insider-outsider relation with Britain that made it at once so fascinating for the British (witnessed in their passion for Irish literature from Swift and Sheridan to Wilde, Yeats and Shaw) and so repellant (evidenced in the portrayals of the Irish as brainless simians in Londons Fleet Street media).
This paradoxical combination of attraction and recoil is also to be found in Edward Saids concept of orientalism: Ireland serving as Britains Orient in its own backyard. It also approximates to what Freud describes as the uncanny (das Unheimliche) the return of the familiar as unfamiliar, of friend as stranger. Ireland served, one might say, as Britains unconscious, reminding it that it was ultimately and irrevocably a stranger to itself: that its self-identity was in fact constructed in the act of screening its forgotten other in both senses of screen: to conceal and to project.
The nature of this unsettling rapport was evident not only in the mirror-plays of Irish dramatists like Shaw and Wilde, but also in the works of English dramatists who reflected on the neighbouring island. Already in Shakespeare we find echoes of this. In Henry V, for example, Captain MacMorris, the first true-blue Irishman to appear in English letters poses the conundrum: What is my nation? thereby recalling not only that Ireland is a nation still in question, but that England is too. And we find an even more explicit example in Richard II, when the King returns to the British mainland from a visit to Ireland, disoriented and dismayed. Having set out secure in his indivisible sovereignty, he returns wondering what exactly is his identity, and by implication, his legitimacy as monarch: I had forgot myself, am I not king? he puzzles. Is not the kings name twenty thousand names? (III, ii). In short, Ireland takes its revenge on the king, by forcing upon him the discovery that the very notion of a united national kingdom is nominal rather than real, imaginary rather than actual.
Paradoxically, where Ireland had some advantage over England/Britain was that it never achieved indivisible sovereignty as a nation and so was less liable to mistake the symbol for a literal reality. (For the Irish, from ancient legend to the present day, the idea of sovereignty was linked to the notion of a fifth province: a place of mind rather than of territory, a symbol rather than a fait accompli the Irish for province is coicead, meaning a fifth, but there are only four provinces in Ireland!).
The endgame of old Britain
The British crisis of sovereignty has reached its own peak in recent times. This was brought on by a variety of factors: 1) the final fracturing of the empire (with the Falklands, Gibraltar and Hong Kong controversies); 2) the end of the Protestant status quo (with the mass immigration of non-Protestants from the ex-colonies Asian, African, Carribean and Irish); 3) the devolution of power from over-centralized government in Westminister to regional assemblies in Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast and probably, in time, to different English regions as well; 4) the ultimate acknowledgment, with the mourning of Princess Diana and the birth of New Labour, that Britain is now a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, multi-confessional community which can no longer sustain the illusion of an eternally presiding sovereignty; 5) the entry of the UK, however hesitantly, into the European Union which ended Britains isolationist stance; and finally, 6) the ineluctable impact of global technology and communications.
To be sure, Thatcherism represented one last desperate exercise in denial, finding its perfect foil in the IRA. Terrorist bombings of London and Birmingham momentarily served to rally the British people against the alien Irish in their midst: people who looked and spoke like them but were secretly dedicated to their destruction. But even the IRA at their most menacing and however associated with similar anti-British monsters like Galtieri, Gadafy and Saddam Hussein could not save Britain from itself. Thatchers last stand to revive one-nation Toryism was just that, a last stand. The break-up of Britain was as inevitable as it was overdue. So much so that the enormous out-pouring of grief at Princess Dianas demise was not just mourning for a particular person but for the passing of an imperial nation.
If Ireland was present at the origin of the British nation, as I have suggested, then it is equally present today in the guise of the Ulster crisis and resolution precipitating its end. Ireland is the cracked mirror reflecting Royal Britannias primal image of its split self: John Bulls other island sending shock waves back to the mainland; returning to haunt its inventor.
A sovereignty of peoples, not land
A new post-national constellation is emerging in the British-Irish context. The seminal idea of a British-Irish Council, constituting the third spoke of the Belfast Agreement wheel alongside the internal NI Assembly and the North-South cross-border bodies, harbours great promise. What this trans-national model effectively recognizes is that citizens of Britain and Ireland are inextricably bound up with each other mongrel islanders from East to West sharing an increasingly common civic and economic space.
In addition to the obvious contemporary overlapping of sports and popular cultures, the citizens of Britain and Ireland are becoming ever more mindful of how much of their respective histories were shared during centuries when the Irish sea served as a waterway connecting the two islands, rather than a cordon sanitaire keeping them apart. And this is becoming true again in our own time with over 25,000 trips being made daily across the Irish Sea, in both directions. It is not entirely surprising then that over eight million citizens of the United Kingdom today claim Irish origin, with over four million of these having an Irish parent. Indeed a recent survey shows that only six per cent of British people consider Irish people living in Britain to be foreigners. And we dont need reminding that almost a quarter of the inhabitants of the island of Ireland claim to be at least part British.
Nor was it surprising, in light of this reawakening to our common memories and experiences, to find Prime Minister Blair receiving a standing ovation from Dail Eireann, the Parliament of the Irish Republic, following the 1998 Agreement. Such a visitation had not occurred for over a century, and the ghost of Gladstone was not entirely absent from the proceedings. Blair acknowledged openly on that occasion that Britain was at last leaving its post-colonial malaise behind it. He suggested that a newly confident Irish Republic and a more decentralised UK would have more common tasks in the scenario of European convergence than any other two-member states. We had come a long way from 1366 to 1998.
Though no one is shouting about it, a practical form of joint-sovereignty has now been endorsed by the Irish and British peoples. This necessitates, I believe, a radical rethinking of our hallowed notions of sovereignty. In essence, it means the deterritorialisation of national sovereignty namely, the attribution of sovereignty to peoples rather than land. Hence the Agreements extension of national belonging to embrace the Irish diaspora which now numbers over seventy million worldwide.
Marvellously mixed up
That the Blair government seems prepared to grasp the sovereignty nettle and acknowledge the inevitable long-term demise of Britain, qua absolute centralized state, is to its credit. But it is not a decision taken in a vacuum. There are precedents for sovereignty-sharing in Britains recent experience, including Westministers consent to a limitation of sovereign power in its subscription to the European Convention on Human Rights, the Single European Act, the European Common Defence and Security Policy, and the European Court of Justice. Moreover, the EU principles of subsidiarity and local democracy, promoted in the European Charter of Self-Government, offer a real alternative to the clash of British-Irish nationalisms that paralyzed Ulster for decades.
In this respect, one should not forget either that the forging of Britain into a multi-national state constitution was predicated, at its best, on a civic rather than an ethnic notion of citizenship and belonging. We need only recall how radically the borders of the British nation have shifted and altered in history (for example, in 1536, 1707, 1800 and 1921) to envisage how they may shift and alter yet again perhaps this time so radically as to remove all borders from these islands.
The conflict of sovereignty claims exercised over the same territory by two independent governments issuing in decades of violence is now being superseded by a post-nationalist paradigm of intergovernmental power. That conflict showed the necessity of ultimately separating the notion of nation (identity) from that of state(sovereignty) and even, to some extent, from that of land(territory). Such a separation is, I submit, a precondition for allowing the co-existence of different communities in the same society; and, by extension, amplifying the models of identity to include more pluralist forms of association, such as a British-Irish Council, the Irish and British diasporas and a European network of Regions.
In sum, it is becoming abundantly clear that Bossuets famous seventeenth century definition of the nation as a perfect match of people and place where citizens lived and died in the land of their birth is no longer tenable.
The fact is: no pristine nations exist around which definitive state boundaries demarcating exclusivist sovereignty status can be fixed. (Germanys attempts to do this, from Bismark to Hitler, led to successive and disastrous wars). The post-1998 paradigm acknowledges the historic futility of both British and Irish constitutional claims on Northern Ireland as natural national territories. Instead, such seminal models as the Intergovernmental Council or the British-Irish Council hopefully foreshadow a network of interconnecting assemblies guaranteeing parity of esteem for cultural and political diversity and an effective co-management of practical common concerns such as transport, environment, social equity and e-commerce.
British and Irish citizens are, in effect, being challenged: first, to abandon their mutually reinforcing myths of mastery (largely British) and martyrdom (largely Irish), going back to the fourteenth century; and second, to face their more mundane post-imperial, post-national reality. Moreover, might not the project of a trans-national council, as Simon Partridge suggests, even serve as an inspiration to other parts of Europe and the globe still mired in the devastations of ethnic nationalism?
The task is to embrace this process of hybridisation from which we derive, and to which we are committed willy-nilly. In the face of resurgent nationalisms in these islands and elsewhere, fired by rhetorics of purity and purification, we do well to remember that we are all mongrelized, interdependent, marvellously mixed up.
