Материал: Rethinking ethnicity, 2nd Edition by Richard Jenkins

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Act, that it is in other areas that distinctively Welsh policies on education have been pursued (Rees 2004).

All three issues – holiday homes, immigration, and education – are manifestations of the same problem: the perceived threat to Welsh culture, and its most visible and important manifestation, the language. How, nationalists argue, is Welsh culture to be maintained, let alone promoted, if the only arbiter of policy is the market, whether for labour or for houses? This is the central essence of the nationalist political agenda and, incidentally, goes to the heart of one aspect of the difficult relationship between nationalism and the Welsh labour movement: there is still much work to be done in constructing a satisfactory image of ‘real’ Welshness which admits the majority who do not speak Welsh (Bowie 1993; Giles and Taylor 1978). Nor is cultural differentiation quite as simple as this anyway. One ethnographic study has looked at different kinds of ‘Welshness’, focusing on the ‘Valley Welshness’ of the ex-mining and steel-producing communities of the valleys of south Wales, as distinct from from the ‘British Welshness’ of the borders and the southern coastal margin, and the ‘Welsh Welshness’ of the north and west (Roberts 1999). Bryant’s discussion of the variety of ‘contemporary constructions’ of Wales – from y fro Gymraeg to ‘Modern Wales’ – is also to the point here (2006: 124–49), and resonates with Day and Thompson’s argument (1999) that ‘Welshness’, like any other identity, is always locally constructed and experienced. Which brings the discussion back to Barth’s point about ‘the cultural stuff’. It may not be stretching the point to suggest that the sharing of a common ethnic boundary – with and against the English – is among the most important factors constitutive of Welshness, of whatever variety.

Although the language, and its defence, has been the unifying framework of Welsh nationalism, language and culture were never the only items on the nationalist agenda. After the defeat of the nationalist option in the 1979 referendum on self-government, the way forward for nationalists seemed to lie within Europe, as the overall framework in which a degree of local political autonomy could be achieved (Rees 1990). This changed in the 1990s, although due more to movement within the Welsh Labour party and, indeed, the wider Labour Party’s concerns about preserving the integrity of the United Kingdom, than to the success of nationalist campaigning. While Plaid Cymru retains its long-term commitment to greater independence, as the official opposition in the National Assembly since 1999 it has settled down to pursuing its cultural goals within the new framework of limited legislative devolution.

In Northern Ireland, by contrast, the Irish language is a relatively minor issue. It serves some symbolic purpose – it may be heard, for example, from the platform at the annual conference, the Árd Fheis, of the Provisional movement – and, as described above, there have been changes, which should not be underestimated, that testify to the language’s symbolic significance for nationalists (O’Reilly 1999). However, the defence and promotion of the Irish language is peripheral – at best – to the central demands of nationalism in Northern Ireland. Despite Sinn Féin’s pragmatic and politically astute participation in the current political settlement, with respect to limited local devolution, complete Irish freedom from Britain remains the objective. This is, what’s more, as true for the SDLP as for Sinn Féin (and, indeed, in terms of practical politics, as time goes on, given the apparent republican commitment to constitutional politics only, the gap between the two parties narrows).

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This is not to say that culture and language are irrelevant within Irish nationalism. They clearly have a place; there is, if nothing else, too much symbolic capital and mileage in the issues for the republican movement for it to be otherwise (O’Reilly 1999). There is also a long history of ‘cultural nationalism’ in Ireland (Hutchinson 1987); with its centre of gravity in Dublin, however, this slipped down the order of priorities once the Irish nation-state – minus the six northern counties – was established in 1921. While Irish-Gaelic culture continues to do useful service rhetorically, it is no longer central to nationalist objectives, whether they derive from north or south of the border. With the sophisticated development of tourism, the importance of international economic links, and the ongoing Europeanization and globalization of social life in the Republic, Irish culture – or, rather, the invented tradition of Riverdance, Guinness and the like – has become more of a successful marketing phenomenon than a matter for struggle.

Some explanatory options

I have compared two constituent territories of the United Kingdom, each part of the ‘Celtic fringe’, each institutionally integrated into the UK in different ways and to different degrees, and each possessing well-defined and supported nationalist movements. In Northern Ireland, although there are indications that this is changing, violence has long been part of the rules of engagement with the British state; in Wales, this is emphatically not the case. Wales, despite devolution, remains relatively uncontroversially part of the UK state, and the most important political issues, which serve to unify the competing strands of nationalist opinion, are culture and language. In Northern Ireland, by contrast, cultural issues are relatively insignificant when compared to the central nationalist objective: freedom from British rule.

How are we to understand these differences? The social science literature on nationalism is an obvious place to turn for inspiration. One of the most celebrated and influential contributions to the debate has been Ernest Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism (1983). In his account, nationalism, as a self-conscious political ideology concerned with the self determination of ‘nations’, is a product of the nineteenth-century rise of industrial society, with its linked requirements of cultural-linguistic homogeneity and a workforce generically educated for participation in a modern economy. Here the stress is on the relationship between an industrial system and a literate, national ‘high’ culture. Benedict Anderson, in his discussion of the ‘imagined political communities’ which are nations (1983), adopts a perspective that is in important respects similar to GeIlner’s, although his emphasis is on industrial capitalism, rather than the more general ‘industrial society’, and upon the homogenizing potential of print technologies for the creation of national self-consciousness.

One of the few authors to have examined comparatively the situation in Wales and Ireland is Michael Hechter, in Internal Colonialism (1975). In that book, and more clearly in a subsequent paper on ‘ethnoregionalism’ (Hechter and Levi 1979), Hechter relates the development of different kinds of ethnoregional – in this

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context, nationalist – movements to different configurations of ethnically structured divisions of labour. In other words, what matters is how different ethnic or national groups are incorporated into the economy and into the stratification system, producing either a hierarchical or a segmented cultural division of labour (an analysis which has much in common with the notion of ranked and unranked systems of ethnic stratification: Horowitz 1985). Within the economistic framework that he proposes, Hechter also acknowledges the role of cultural differentiation and the behaviour of the state in producing nationalistic political movements.

In the analyses of Gellner, Hechter and Anderson, economic factors are, in one way or another, central. Anthony Smith, by way of contrast, has put forward an ‘ethnosymbolic’ model, in which culture and the power of symbols are most significant (Smith 1981, 1986, 1991, 1999, 2003; see also, Hutchinson 1994). Smith’s emphasis is on group identification as a complex bundle of cultural processes – as, in fact, ethnicity – that precedes the modern ideology of nationalism and, paradoxically perhaps, encourages its continued vitality at a time when, according to other authors (Gellner 1983: 110–22; Hobsbawm 1990: 163–83), its vision and seductive attraction ought to have been on the wane. Kedourie’s argument (1985) is even more idealistic than Smith’s: for him, nationalism is a political philosophy in its own right – not ‘a reflection of anything else’ (be it economic or cultural) – with its power rooted in nineteenth-century political history.3

In the first instance, Gellner, Anderson and Smith, between them, laid out the ball court for social science debates about nationalism: on the one hand, models of nationalism that are rooted in economic factors and emphasize the modern nation-state project; on the other, the assertion of deeper historical roots in ethnicity and an emphasis on culture, ideology and/or values. Increasingly, however – and the first edition of the present book, published in 1997, was part of this trend – these debates have been superseded by a varied range of theoretical syntheses that recognize the historical and contemporary relationships between ethnic and national identification, acknowledge the centrality to modernity of nationalist projects, and are clear that ‘one-size-fits-all’ models of nationalism do no justice to the diversity of political movements and conflicts that are called, by themselves or others, ‘nationalist’ (e.g. Breuilly 1985, Calhoun 1997; Day and Thompson 2004; Eriksen 2002, Llobera 1994, McCrone 1998; Thompson 2001; B. Williams 1989). In particular, there is a growing recognition that, bearing in mind the specifics in each context of history, politics, ethnicity and economics, it may be more appropriate to talk about nationalisms than nationalism.

With respect to the specificities of relationships between localities and their regional or national institutional contexts, I want to suggest that, in addition to economic and cultural factors – and as the previous chapters have emphasized, these are extremely important for our understanding of Northern Ireland, for example – politics and the state, particularly long-term processes of state formation, must be placed at the centre of models of nationalism. In particular, drawing on Max Weber’s classic account of the rise and nature of the nation-state (1978: 54–6, 901–26) and Anthony Giddens’s more recent discussion of the importance of ‘internal pacification’ in state formation (1985: 172–97), I propose to look at two linked historical processes that are central to any understanding of why nationalism in Northern Ireland is so different to nationalism in Wales. These are the incorporation

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of each territory into the United Kingdom state, and the attempt by that central state to monopolize violence in each territory (and, correspondingly, the degree to which violence has been removed from the political domain).

Northern Ireland and Wales compared (again…)

To look first at processes of state integration, Wales was finally formally politically united with England in 1536. Before that, integration, built upon the accession of the Welsh Tudor dynasty to the English throne, following Henry Tudor’s victory at the battle of Bosworth Field in 1485, had been effective rather than constitutionally recognized. Before that again, the last major Welsh rebel against Anglo-Norman

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suzerainty, Owain Glyndwr, had been defeated in 1408, and before that again, by 1283 Edward I had subdued the kingdoms of Gwynedd and Deheubarth. Not only is the political unity of England and Wales long-standing, it is legitimized by the role of the Tudors in the establishment of the modern English state and by their contribution to modern images of the continuity and the role of the English monarchy. The use of the title Prince of Wales for the male heir to the throne is indicative of the perceived stability of the Union.

Some of these constitutional arrangements gradually changed during the twentieth century. First, a range of specifically Welsh public and governmental agencies came into being, pre-eminent among them the Welsh Office, created in 1964 and run by the Secretary of State for Wales, a ministerial post of cabinet rank. Barry Jones (1988) has argued persuasively that the degree of autonomy from London that these institutions possessed was often limited, as was the extent to which they penetrated and established a legitimate relationship with Welsh civil society. Criminal law and the justice system, for example, remained, as still today, within a unified jurisdiction, England and Wales. Second, as part of a UK-wide process of constitutional change (Deacon 2006; ESRC 2006), and following a Welsh referendum in 1997 in which the devolved option only narrowly passed the electoral test, limited legislative devolution was granted, in the shape of the National Assembly of Wales, which opened in 1999. Many of the powers of the Welsh Office passed to the Assembly. Despite this new degree of Welsh institutional devolution and specialization, the unity of the United Kingdom remains the overarching and axiomatic political reality for most Welsh people; nationhood is largely a matter of culture and identity.

Northern Ireland is a wholly different case. Apart from the period between 1800 and 1921, Ireland has never been an institutionally integral part of the British polity. Irish history since the arrival of the Normans in 1169 has been a history of more or less violent attempts to impose or maintain British control, and more or less violent resistance to that control. The north of the island proved particularly obdurate and remained the heart of Gaelic Irish culture; so much so that, as discussed in Chapter 7, in the sixteenth century the English adopted a policy of dispossessing the indigenous Catholic Irish population by force, replacing them with immigrant Protestant Scots and English settlers. This settlement – the Plantation – is the reason why there are in Northern Ireland today two mutually antagonistic

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ethnic populations, and the reason why they are nominally identified in religious terms as Catholic and Protestant.

The province of Northern Ireland was established as part of the United Kingdom in 1921, in reflection of the, often violently expressed, determination of the Protestant population not to join the rest of Ireland in its newly won freedom from British rule. Many Catholics in the north, perhaps the majority, did not accept the legitimacy of the partition of the island. Between 1921 and 1972 the Province was a semi-independent member of a federal United Kingdom, with its own parliament, governing its internal affairs largely in the interests of Protestants. Following the force majeure imposition in 1972 of direct rule from London – the result of renewed serious violence, the perceived inability of the local administration to deal with it (let alone deal with it even-handedly), and the likelihood of ever-increasing British military involvement – and the collapse in 1974, in the face of loyalist resistance, of the power-sharing Northern Ireland Executive, the Province has remained substantially apart from the rest of the UK. It is legislatively distinct, with completely different systems of local government, public service administration and justice.

Northern Ireland has also been part of the UK’s late-twentieth century constitutional reforms. The difference is, however, that devolution has been an integral part of the ‘peace process’. And this difference is not minor: between its establishment in 1999 and 2007, the Northern Ireland Assembly was suspended more often than it was in session, as a result of conflict and lack of trust between the two main parties, the Democratic Unionists (DUP, led by Ian Paisley) and Sinn Féin. The problem did not seem to be public rejection of devolution. Finally, in May 2007, Sinn Féin having jumped the final hurdle, recognizing the legitimacy of the new Police Service of Northern Ireland, and following new Assembly elections, the DUP agreed to lead a power-sharing Executive including Sinn Féin.

The other significant difference is that Northern Ireland’s membership of the UK is constitutionally conditional upon the continued assent to the status quo of a numerical majority of the population. There is nothing conditional about the unity of the rest of the Kingdom. Furthermore, following the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement and the 1998 Belfast Agreement, not only does the government of the Republic of Ireland have a formally defined – although locally contentious – consultative role in the Province’s affairs, but some matters are, ideally at least, increasingly dealt with by cross-border bodies.

In terms of state integration, therefore, Wales is strongly and securely a part of the United Kingdom, firmly tied in to the legislative and administrative order. Nor are the law and the institutions of government the only relevant considerations here. Drawing on Linda Colley’s analysis (1992) and Bryant’s recent overview (2006), Wales and the Welsh have been able to maintain their distinctiveness in the context of a relatively recently constructed British identity – which remains in place, in increasingly diversified forms that reflect the growing differentiation of the Scots, uncertainties about the distinct place of England in the new scheme of things, and anxieties about multi-cultural diversity (Curtice 2005; Kiely et al. 2005; McCrone 2002; McCrone and Kiely 2000) – the creation of which must be counted among the successes of the state-building project which followed the 1707 Act of Union. Northern Ireland, by contrast, is a peripheral and weakly integrated member of the UK, part of the greatest failure of that project and perhaps its greatest victim: