Материал: Rethinking ethnicity, 2nd Edition by Richard Jenkins

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British state-penetration of Ireland was therefore, at best, formally accomplished no earlier than 1801. Yet it remained incomplete and persistently illegitimate. Ireland was never treated as if it were just like England or the rest of Britain … the programme of plantations meant that the ethnic politics of the island could not develop on the model of the English, Welsh or Scots: cultural autonomy within a wider political union … the processes which encouraged ethnic integration and nation-building elsewhere in early modern Europe were mostly absent from the relationships between the two largest islands of the nineteenth-century UK. (O’Leary and McGarry 1996: 73, 75)

The unity of the Kingdom, when viewed from this point of view, begins to appear as imagined as, of course, it is. However, with respect to Tom Nairn’s celebrated argument about the ‘break-up’ of Britain (1981), for example, the account offered here suggests two things: the ‘twilight of the British state’ that Nairn diagnosed decades ago looks these days more like an obstinate northern midsummer glow than a prelude to pitch darkness, and the origins of the crisis, such as it is, are to be sought farther back in time than he looked, in the oldest origins of the state itself.

The strength or weakness of political integration is, as one might expect, relevant to the issue of the state’s monopolization of violence. In Wales, following

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Glyndwr’s defeat in 1408, the state monopolization of violence was more or less total. Such major interruptions of the state’s capacity to guarantee public order as there were – the Civil War, for example – were conflicts within the state of England and Wales, the legitimacy of which was not in doubt. In the nineteenth century there was violent class-based conflict and disorder – the Rebecca Riots of 1842–3 and the earlier Chartist rising in Newport, for example – but this was largely similar to contemporary events in England. There was no peculiarly Welsh problem of public order. From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, politics in Wales has been largely – bearing in mind the General Strike of 1926 and the miners’ strike of the early 1980s – governed by rules that do not allow for violence. The military has long since withdrawn from politics, in Wales as in England.

Northern Ireland, once again, is different. In Ireland violence has never been – and is not fully yet, north or south of the border – successfully monopolized by the state. Since the first arrival of the Normans, every century has been marked by uprisings against the English or British state. More to the point, the state has been ethnically partisan. After 1921 it only managed to achieve a partial monopolization of violence in Northern Ireland by authorizing informal Protestant violence in the shape of a local, paramilitary police force. For fifty years, the state in Northern Ireland was, effectively, the Protestant population, and its rule was based on direct coercion or its threat.

Violence remains a key item in the repertoire of political options in Northern Ireland; it is an integral part of the rules of the political game, even the current game, in which agreements to renounce violence are key to negotiating positions. The current ‘peace process’ notwithstanding, at least three of the major parties to the current situation – Protestants, Catholics, and the British state – depend in part upon violence and the means of violence, whether explicitly or implicitly, in commission or de-commission, as the means to their particular ends.

Which brings us, once again following Max Weber, to an important distinction, between power and authority (Smith 1960: 15–33). Power is basically the capacity to make other people do what one wants them to do, most typically through

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the use of coercion. Authority is the legitimate and delegated right to command obedience. Power is rooted, ultimately, in the use of force; authority in law and custom. In Wales, for a very long time now, the state has been legitimate and so has its authority. Most of the spectrum of nationalist politics operates within the framework of this overall legitimacy. In Northern Ireland, however, the legitimacy of the state is problematic for the Catholic nationalist population (and since 1972 and direct rule, this has also been true for a significant number of Protestants). Politics in Northern Ireland are thus a matter of power rather than authority, at least with respect to the basic questions of the nature, form and functions of the state, and violence remains one of the recognized possibilities with respect to political action. The transition from power to authority is, in fact, what is at stake in the current ‘peace process’.

What about culture and language, however? Once again, the key to understanding the situation seems to be the history of territorial integration into the state. The Welsh gave up armed struggle against England very early on in the history of its incorporation into Britain. As a consequence, Wales was subject to a less direct and repressive form of control and government than either Ireland or Scotland. This arguably created the social and economic space within which Welsh language and culture – not being sufficiently dangerous, perhaps – could survive. Whereas in Ireland and Scotland, indigenous culture and the Gaelic languages became identified with Catholicism4 and political rebellion in post-Reformation geo-political struggles, in Wales the language eventually became identified with Protestant nonconformity. This may have been a threat to the established Church, but it wasn’t a threat to the state (the campaign to disestablish the Anglican Church in Wales eventually succeeded in 1919). During the nineteenth century, and this once again is a reflection of the two countries’ differing relationships with the central state, there was the Great Famine in Ireland – which, with the benefit of hindsight was the biggest single blow to Gaelic Irish culture – and massive industrialization in South Wales, something which brought a late flowering of Welsh culture to the coal valleys. Just as the Famine would have been unthinkable in Wales, so industrialization was out of the question for the south and west of Ireland.

The north of Ireland was, by the nineteenth century, if not altogether Anglicized, culturally distinct in its local mixture and cross-fertilization of Gaelic Irish, AngloIrish, English and Scottish cultures. The Plantation, two centuries earlier, had seen to that. Throughout Ireland, the state’s control was more repressive and more severe than anywhere on the British mainland. In the north, where industrialization did occur – although not on anything like the scale of south Wales – it was largely in Belfast and its hinterland. The Irish language did not survive the migration to the eastern seaboard in search of employment. There was neither the social nor the economic space available to facilitate any late recovery for a language and a culture which had been marginalized -at best – by the Plantation, undermined by the Penal Laws in the eighteenth century, and dealt a final blow by famine and rural social dislocation in the nineteenth century.

The suggestion is, therefore, that the conditions which facilitate the survival of a minority language are bound up with the way in which the linguistic homeland becomes integrated into a central state. Further, part of the structure of integration will be mechanisms and institutions of social control; some of these may be specifically

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aimed at discouraging the indigenous language and culture. This latter occurred more severely in Ireland than in Wales.

Comparing the nationalist movements of Wales and Northern Ireland, it is clear that the differences between them with respect to their capacity for the use of violence and their emphasis on language and culture are, in large part, a reflection of the history of each territory’s integration into the British state.5 Where the language of a peripheral territory has survived it is, ipso facto perhaps, likely to be a substantial item on the political agenda of any nationalist movement; where it has not survived in any major way, it is unlikely to offer a focus for popular support. So much at least seems obvious. Similarly, where the process of internal pacification, which Giddens has characterized as a central aspect of modern nation-state formation, has been successfully extended to the periphery, violence is unlikely to form part of the nationalist struggle. Where violence remains among the array of local political possibilities, it will, necessarily almost, be used.

A number of things can be said in closing. It appears, for example, that organized nationalist movements cannot be looked at in isolation. Their character and development, as ideological expression of the aspirations of peripheral minority peoples or dominant metropolitan populations, is inextricably bound up with historical processes of modern nation-state formation. In discussions of local-level identities and movements that are, in whatever sense, definable as nationalist, it is, therefore, not possible to limit the scope of analysis to that local level. The local has to be understood alongside, and analytically integrated into, the regional, the national and, these days, the supra-national (even the global). Nor is it possible to ignore an, often substantial, history of contact and state integration. Nationalist movements are not things unto themselves, and their history is shared with other peoples and places within a context of metropolitan expansion, power and the struggle for control.

Putting the historical politics of state formation at the centre of our understanding of nationalism, should not, of course, be at the expense of attending to economic and cultural factors. As I hope this comparison of Northern Ireland and Wales suggests – and it is also the implication of the previous discussions of Northern Ireland – this cannot possibly be the case. I am suggesting a middle-of- the-road argument – which resonates with the varied recent approaches of authors such as Calhoun (1997), Day and Thompson (2004), Llobera (1994) and McCrone (1998) – that that any analysis of nationalism must, within an appropriately historical framework, take proper account of political, cultural and economic factors. Anything else will be partial (and probably in both senses of that word). As examples of properly three-dimensional analyses of nationalism, I can recommend O’Sullivan See’s comparison of Northern Ireland and Quebec (1986), Ruane and Todd’s historical account of Northern Ireland (1996), or Brubaker et al.’s local study of a Romanian town (2006).

Reviewing the comparative case studies, the question may be asked: to what extent are we actually talking about the same phenomenon in Wales and Northern Ireland? The legitimacy of the central state is central to any answer we might offer to this question. The fact that each ‘nationalist’ movement has recourse to essentially nineteenth-century rhetorics of self-determination does not make them the same thing (and much the same could, I suspect, be said about the various nationalisms

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which have emerged in eastern and central Europe and the Balkans). In Wales the struggle is over culture and language and the state is, for the overwhelming majority of the nationalist population, a legitimate institution, if one whose further reform they seek. In Northern Ireland, the struggle, for most nationalists, is about the state. Their minimum goal is its transformation; at most they seek its dissolution into an authentically Irish state (and, what is more, a kind of state somewhat different to the existing Republic of Ireland).

The state’s legitimacy – which is, after all, at the heart of whatever generic political philosophy of nationalism it may be possible to identify – is wholly different in Wales and Northern Ireland. Is it, then, sensible to subsume nationalism in each place under the same conceptual umbrella? The fact that theorists such as Gellner and Hobsbawm so confidently predicted nationalism’s demise, only to be contradicted by the unravelling of the geo-political framework of the Cold War in Europe, invites a similar observation: nationalism is dead, long live nationalisms. I will explore this further in Chapter 10.

Before going on to that, a few more words about ethnicity and the cultural stuff. Elsewhere in this book I have raised the question of how to differentiate ethnicity from one of its most reactive allotropes, nationalism. The answer – to which I will also return, and in detail, in Chapter 10 – seems to definitively implicate processes of nation-state formation in nationalism. But those processes are also involved in the construction of differences between nationalisms. Nationalism in this sense might be thought to have its own array of allotropes. And these differences reflect not only the negotiation, exchange and imposition involved in political processes (of state creation, or whatever) across the boundaries between groups; they also reflect differences of culture.

Culture and political processes are reciprocally entailed in each other. If we accept, for example, that collective propensities to use violence are ‘cultural’ – inasmuch as they involve hierarchies of moral judgement and ideology – then they are, in part at least, emergent aspects of the histories of state integration that I have been discussing (cf. Brown 1975). The choice of political strategy – whether to resort to violence or not, for example – is not only defined by interests, circumstance and situation. Nor are interests in any straightforward sense ‘culture-free’ (whatever that might mean: Cornell and Hartmann 1998: 86–9; Jenkins 2006b: 394). Northern Ireland’s long-standing political history, in which violence – employed by the state and by allies and opponents of the state – has been a locally legitimate or accepted means to whatever end is in sight, is also a political culture, with respect to the specification of those means and ends. Which is not to characterize Northern Ireland and the present ‘troubles’ as a ‘culture of violence’ – as if that might actually explain anything – and to dismiss or blame the locals accordingly. It is to insist that the local cultural contents of ideologies of ethnic identification such as nationalism or ethnicism are not independent of either ongoing politics – within local, regional and national networks of power and authority – or histories of relationships with Others.

Finally, it has been suggested that a nationalism whose primary objectives are couched in terms of ‘culture’, and a nationalism that has self-government in its sights, are rather different phenomena (cf. Hutchinson 1994). Fair enough. But it is not quite that simple. What do they have in common? Is each not, after all, a matter of culture? And don’t nationalists in Northern Ireland and Wales face a similar

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problem: how to create a sense of shared collective identity in populations that, for historical reasons, can see their differences from each other more clearly than their similarities with each other? How, in the first instance, are nationalists themselves to create that sense of shared identity in their own breasts? How to create, if you like, a new and authentic national ethnic identity out of two (or more) ‘old’ ones, whose authenticity is sanctioned by shared history and the consequential oppositional realities of everyday life? Aren’t these political problems about culture? In this sense, the distinction between the cultural-ideological content of ethnic identity and the political processes that produce its boundaries is a distraction from the reality that each feeds off the other in an ongoing internal–external dialectic of collective identification. And ends and means are never easy to disentangle.