Scribblings

Thoughts following St. Patrick’s Day

During the past week, the Irish Taoiseach, the prime minister, Micheál Martin, attended the annual St. Patrick’s Day meeting in the White House with the American President. During the meeting, Donald Trump suggested, like the real estate man that he is, that maybe the two parts of Ireland should “merge”. One island, one country. Site assembly for a building project is probably how Trump sees it.

I am Irish, from Dublin, and I would be quite happy to see a “merger”, as Trump puts it, of the two parts of the island. The sum would be greater than the parts, I believe. Nonetheless, while I was raised in a staunch Irish republican household, I came to realise a long time ago that “simplism” when it comes to nationalism is a dead end. I am under no illusions about how difficult a “merger” would be. I lost those illusions many years ago.

For the question is this. What constitutes a nation? Who determines that some particular piece of land should be one country? History, geography, language, religion, culture, tradition, or some mix of all of these. Are nations simply “imagined communities”, as Benedict Anderson puts it?

Is it not the case that practically every nation on this earth was born, or shaped, out of violence, whether war or revolution? Perhaps the “velvet divorce” of the Czech Republic and Slovakia might count as two countries being created peacefully, but it is the exception and not the rule. Maybe you could also include Switzerland.

There is no question that Ireland had a violent birth, as did the USA. France had the Revolution of 1798, Russia in 1918, and China had the civil war after WWII. That war is still unfinished. German and Italian reunifications in the 19^th century were not exactly bloodless. I could go on, but you get the picture. Polite moral codes rarely apply in these matters. When these nations were created, democratic means of looking to change things were generally not available.

Whatever about the past, surely today it might be argued, we are more civilised, and we have international conventions about the right to self-determination. For example, the UN Charter (1945), Article 1(2) sets the foundation, listing self-determination as a core UN purpose.

But who gets to “self-determine”? That is the critical question. In many countries, this is not a settled matter. I’ll come back to Ireland, where the issue is slightly more complicated than elsewhere.

Within the countries that make up the European Union, is the question of nationhood settled? No, it is not. In Spain, is every region happy to be ruled from Madrid? Don’t many in Catalonia or the Basque Country want their own independent nations? Is this regional desire for independence not a source of continuing tension in Spanish politics, with Castellans asserting that Spain is one, indivisible country and others disputing this?

I live in the north-east of France, a few kilometres from Belgium. I have lived in this part of the world for about twenty-five years. For as long as I have lived in Belgium and France, the question of the continued existence of Belgium as one country has been hotly debated. Between the Flemish in the north and the Wallonians in the south, there is constant rivalry, indeed bitterness. Not surprisingly, in Belgium, one of the homes of surrealism, the current prime minister, Bart De Wever, a Flemish nationalist, does not believe in the existence of Belgium as one nation. He wants to see it broken up. Only in Belgium could you have a prime minister who does not want his own job to exist.

The UK is no longer a member of the European Union. By a narrow majority, ten years ago in 2016, it voted to leave. It thought it would be better off on its own. As is by now well documented, that has not turned out to be the case, with one US study suggesting that GDP is some 8% lower than it would have been had the UK stayed in the EU. Many UK politicians know and accept this, but they lack the courage to try to lead the UK back into the EU. They are held hostage by English nationalism, a minority of the population, but a well-funded, vociferous minority.

The UK is a country, but it is not one nation. There are four parts to the UK: England, the dominant part, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. There is a strong movement in Scotland to see it go its own way, cut loose from the UK, and join the EU. We will see this coming May just how strong this movement is when the Scots vote for their regional parliament.

Could we also see a significant independence vote in Wales? Ever since anyone can remember, Wales has been a Labour stronghold, where they weighted the Labour votes rather than counted them. Out of Wales came Nye Bevan, who built the National Health Service while serving in the post-war Attlee government. Now, it seems the Labour vote in Wales is going to collapse. According to polls, Plaid Cymru, the Welsh nationalist party, may be on course to lead the next Welsh regional government. Like the Scottish nationalists, they want to break away from England and lead Wales back into the EU as an independent, sovereign nation.

Political earthquakes could be coming in the UK. The now evident political limitations of the Labour prime minister, Keir Starmer, make this all the more likely.

Which brings me to Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland has two distinct political/religious groupings, which can roughly be categorised as Protestant/Unionist and Catholic/Nationalist. I know things are not as neat as that, but it will suffice for this Scribbling. These are rambling thoughts on a Sunday morning, not a profound and researched policy paper.

If within the UK, Scotland and Wales just want to go their own way, separate from England, this is not true of Northern Ireland. The statelet was created to deliver a “Protestant Parliament for a Protestant People”, a land in which Catholic/Nationalists would always be in a minority. Except history plays cruel tricks, and it is now the Protestant/Unionists who are in the minority.

The Catholic/Nationalists want Northern Ireland to quit the UK and join with Ireland, merge, in Donald Trump’s words. The Protestant/Unionists want the province to stay with the UK. At some point, a referendum on the matter will be held, but who can say when? A democratic way of determining the future, though whatever the outcome, one side or the other will be bitterly disappointed. Will losers’ consent be forthcoming?

This is what makes Northern Ireland different from Scotland and maybe Wales, and Catalonia and Flanders. They all want to be independent, sovereign states. The two sides in Northern Ireland want to be part of another country, Ireland or the UK. There is no push for an independent Northern Ireland. For good reason. Northern Ireland is economically dependent on the UK. Northern Ireland, as an independent state, could not pay its own way.

Whether the calculus will change on the Protestant/Unionist side if Scotland and Wales break from England remains to be seen. The population of NI is close to 2 million. Let’s say that it is roughly 50/50 between Nationalists and Unionists. The population of England is now somewhere around 58 million. The population of Ireland is 5.3 million. Maybe it might be better to be citizens of a country, Ireland, where you can have a real say in deciding matters than to be a small minority in a country, the UK, where polls consistently show that a significant majority do not care for you and would wish you gone, and an increasing majority of your fellow citizens in Northern Ireland want to go anyway.

But who can know the future and the hold of political traditions on the mind?

One thing is certain, however. The future of both parts of the island of Ireland will be decided in a democratic manner. The days of violence are, hopefully, behind us, never to return. The violence of the IRA failed to deliver on its prime objective, to “liberate” Northern Ireland from the UK. For now, at least, it is still part of the UK, even if the power of the “Unionist Ascendancy” has forever been broken.

Where democratic means are available, even if they can be frustrating and take time, violence can never be acceptable.

Nationalist tensions across Europe are not going to go away anytime soon.