Материал: Rethinking ethnicity, 2nd Edition by Richard Jenkins

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the six counties ‘back’. The 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement, the 1998 Belfast Agreement and the current ‘peace process’, taken together, can in part be read as an ongoing attempt to forestall that scenario by the gradual establishment of some kind of joint sovereignty that will prove bearable – if not wholly acceptable – to all parties. In most respects, ‘normal politics’ is the order of the day in the contemporary Republic of Ireland.

In Northern Ireland, partition had deep roots in violent conflict between the British (before that the English) state, the Catholic Irish and a population – settled in Ireland for many centuries – identifying itself variously as Ulster Protestant, British or Scots-Irish. Cultural and political differences between the Irish and the descendants of the settlers found, and still find, powerful expression in religion. As I suggested in Chapter 8, although essentially political, the Northern Irish conflict is symbolized and reinforced by an important religious dimension.

Partition reinforced a further ethnic identification, with the new state of Northern Ireland. This Ulster identity, although claiming an ancient Gaelic province as its own,3 was Protestant, new – rooted in the north’s development as the industrialized region of Ireland and northern anti-Home Rule agitation during the previous thirty years – and distanced from both the Irish and the English. The latter distance increased in subsequent decades, as successive British governments allowed the internal affairs of the Province to slip ever further beyond their oversight and Ulster Unionists were happy to let them.

For most of the period4 between partition and the present ‘troubles’ northern nationalists were torn between refusing to recognize the new state and striving to improve the Catholic lot (Phoenix 1994). Nationalist political participation was discouraged by the stance of Unionism, the Protestant party of government in Northern Ireland for an unbroken fifty years. Northern Catholic politicians had to choose between a dangerous and uncertain military strategy (which would attract little Catholic support but would invite a repressive response from the state), remaining aloof from the Unionist state and waiting for history to deliver the millennium of Irish unity, or attempting, under unfavourable conditions, to improve the socio-economic position of the minority.

These options reflect two political traditions: gradualist constitutional ‘nationalism’ and physical-force ‘republicanism’ (Ruane and Todd 1992: 189). In Northern Ireland, republican nationalism was represented by Sinn Féin, allied to the Irish Republican Army (IRA), and constitutional nationalism first by the Nationalist Party – until 1969 – and subsequently by the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP). In reflection of the old conflicts of the post-independence Civil War, the same distinctions can be observed in the politics of the Republic of Ireland, although the official legitimacy of nationalism there makes for more complexity. The poles of republican and constitutional nationalism are represented by Sinn Féin and Fine Gael, respectively, with Fianna Fail occupying a shifting position which is usually towards the constitutional end of the spectrum.

The differences between modern nationalisms re-emerged in the early 1960s in the campaign to redress the electoral, social and economic grievances of Catholics. The Civil Rights Movement, and Protestant reaction to it, led to escalating violence, the introduction of the British Army, and the dissolution of the local parliament and the assumption of direct rule from London in 1972. In 1969 resurgent nationalist violence split republicanism into the Official and Provisional movements,

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reflecting a shift in the centre of gravity of republicanism to the north, a retreat from the socialism which had been influential within the movement, and a return to physical force and a Gaelic cultural tradition. These developments were associated with a new, working-class militant republicanism in Belfast and elsewhere. The Provisional movement – as represented by Sinn Féin – is now the authentic voice of a large constituency of northern Catholics (and has moved to the constitutional end of the spectrum). Constitutional nationalism reorganized into the SDLP, absorbed some of the civil rights activists, and forged a new strategy after the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985, relating directly to Dublin and London. Although it aspires to Irish unity, the SDLP’s nationalism is compromised these days by its relationship with establishment politics in Dublin. Sinn Féin’s participation in electoral politics in the Republic adds further complexity to the picture, increasing the urgency with which the Dublin political establishment desires a solution in the north, to take the issue out of the limelight and disarm the republican threat in the south.

This account suggests some observations. Irish history, first, is a history of nationalisms – both Irish and British – rather than nationalism. Nor – as I suggested in Chapter 9 – is it easily shoehorned into the frameworks proposed by Anderson, Gellner or Hobsbawm. The problem, for example, with Coakley’s argument (1990) that Irish nationalism in some senses conforms to the European norm and is in some senses deviant, is its presumption of both an Irish nationalism and a typical European model. Furthermore, nationalism of various hues is of considerable antiquity in Ireland. There are few reasons to confine our recognition of Irish nationalism to the nineteenth century and since. As discussed in Chapter 7, Ruane and Todd’s model (1996), in which five ‘dimensions of difference’ have interacted with each other during a long history, offers more nuanced possibilities for understanding the complexities of Irish nationalism.

Which brings me to ‘streams of tradition’, pace Barth. Notions of shared history require caution: history is both the circumstances in which men and women make themselves (and make more history), and the myths and inventions by which they live. Too little can be made of history, and too much. If there are today two nationalist traditions in Northern Ireland then we must explain them with reference to more than history (unless one regards what happened every yesterday as history, in which case all social science is history). It was despite the mutual enmities of the past and the present that the leaders of Sinn Féin and the SDLP, calculating the odds about the future, held the private talks which produced a joint submission to the Dublin government, the Anglo-Irish Downing Street Declaration of December 1993, the paramilitary cease-fires of 1994 and the subsequent ‘peace process’. Without this process the multi-party talks that led to the 1998 Agreement would never have happened.

History, tradition and current politics combine, in Northern Ireland as in Wales, in questions of identity. Are Protestants, for example, Irish? Leaving aside the nationalist rhetoric which insists that they are, the answer is complex. Survey evidence suggests that there has been a change in identification. In 1968 three identities were important in Northern Ireland: ‘British’, ‘Irish’ and ‘Ulster’. By 1978 this had polarized into ‘British’ (most Protestants) and ‘Irish’ (most Catholics), a state of affairs that had apparently changed little ten years later (Moxon-Browne 1991: 29);

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however, as Moxon-Browne observed, Protestants appeared to know what they were not better than what they were, depending upon with whom they were contrasted. By the time of the 2003 Northern Ireland Life and Times survey,5 the multidimensional profile had changed to ‘British’ (49 per cent, largely Protestant), ‘Northern Irish’ (33 per cent, evenly split between Protestants and Catholics), ‘Irish’ (30 per cent, overwhelmingly Catholic) and ‘Ulster’ (11 per cent, overwhelmingly Protestant). Apart from reinforcing the theme of this book, that identifications and their meanings may change as circumstances change, the safest conclusion is that it is, as yet, difficult to know what data such as these might mean in terms of practical politics (see also Todd et al. 2006).

Ulster Protestants, to return to the discussion of Chapter 7, have two Others. Do they feel quite as British as the British? How do they identify themselves as against the English? And how do the other British identify them? Nor do we know what the difference is between middle-class Unionism and working-class loyalism (analogues of constitutional and republican nationalism). As social anthropology insists, ‘it’s not as simple as that’, particularly in rural districts (McFarlane 1986). Nor is it clear that ‘Irishness’ is the same in the north as in the south. Etcetera.

The 2003 survey data indicate that most northern Irish Catholics and Protestants share no common national identity, and that Protestant identifications are the more ambiguous. Some aspects of this ambiguity – this ‘crisis of identity’ – have been discussed in Chapter 7. There is, however, more that can be said. Witness, for example, the attempts by the Ulster Defence Association – a now illegal Protestant paramilitary organization – and others to invent a new history and mythology of and for the Ulster Irish (Bruce 1992: 233–36; Buckley 1989). Witness, too, the social science disagreement about whether Protestant ethnic chauvinism – sectarianism – is a form of racism (Brewer 1992; Clayton 1996: 50–83; Miles 1996; Nelson 1975). And if not racism, what? Nationalism? Ethnicism? Does a Protestant nationalism make sense? It made sense, after all, in eighteenth-century Ireland. But if it were to make sense, in what terms – given the locally definitive Catholic appropriation of nationalist rhetoric – would Protestants make their case?

Although they might see themselves as British nationalists, Protestant Ulster nationalism is at the moment an unlikely prospect, despite Finlayson’s insistence to the contrary (1996). His argument requires us to overlook the self-identification of most Ulster Protestants and to redefine nationalism. This surely is too much to expect. At the heart of the problem is the nature of the Protestant claim to a ‘historical destiny’. In denying themselves an Irish future in 1921, and accepting a reluctant and conditional incorporation by Britain, they arguably wrote themselves out of history for fifty years. When they re-emerged in the late 1960s, as oppressors of the Catholic minority and an embarrassment to the rest of the United Kingdom, their moment had passed. In the light of the successive false dawns offered by the 1998 multi-party Agreement and various attempts to make the Assembly work, the return of that moment still looks to be some way off. That Protestants remain neither fully Irish nor fully British does, as Mitchell suggests (2003), allow a chink of light through the hatches that are so tightly battened down on their insecure imaginings of community. However, as McKay (2000) reminds us, it leaves many of them, at least for the time being, ‘unsettled’, seeking a destiny as well as an identity.

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Denmark

On the face of it, there is no nationalism in Denmark. A lack of nationalist movements has, in fact, been identified as a general characteristic of Nordic societies (Elklit and Tonsgaard 1992). Although this absence may reflect their own tight definition of nationalist movements,6 for Elklit and Tonsgaard it indicates the solution through other kinds of politics of ethno-national grievances which could otherwise foment movements of this kind. Not everyone, of course, takes this view. Eriksen, for example, suggests (2002: 100–3) that weak nationalism has been influential in the history of the Nordic peoples – in his example, Norway, in particular – and a similar thesis runs through the contributions to Tägil’s collection on nationbuilding (1995).

The absence or weakness of nationalist movements is widely held to be part of a Nordic political style that emphasizes conflict avoidance and the promotion of consensus. The most cursory look at Denmark illustrates the point: it is difficult to find anything that would identify itself, or might be identified by others, as a nationalist political party per se. The major party of the extreme right that focuses, increasingly successfully, on immigration and similar issues – Dansk Folkeparti, The Danish People’s Party – is perceived, by most of its opponents, as racist rather than specifically nationalist. Yet this is despite Denmark’s progressive loss of oncesubstantial peripheral territories (Borish 1991: 28–37). It is despite invasion and occupation by Germany three times between 1848 and 1945. It is despite incorporation into a much-enlarged European Union of which many Danes, perhaps the majority, are deeply suspicious and fearful (Buch and Hansen 2002). It is despite increased unemployment. It is despite recent immigration from southern Europe and the Middle East, increased popular ethnic intolerance (Enoch 1994; Gundelach 2002: 119–27; Hervik 2004; Wren 2001), and a hardening of political attitudes on immigration that has united the broad middle ground of Danish party politics and resulted in ever more restrictive policies in this respect (Østergaard Nielsen 2003). And it is despite a contemporary European political climate in which nationalism has regained much of its potency. Any one of these might provide the catalyst for a nationalist political party. But there is none.

Understanding nationalism’s apparent absence, no less than its presence, demands recourse to history. The development in Denmark of a characteristically Nordic political style is only part of the explanation (and something which itself requires explanation). Three other themes in recent history are significant (Jones 1986: 59–151; Østergård 1992b: 63–83). First, contraction and international decline produced a political territory that, with the notable and complicated exception of the southern border region, is a relatively homogeneous linguistic and cultural unit (Jenkins 2005). Second, the reaction to contraction was a rapid and non-violent process of modernization, taking Denmark from late absolutism in the early nineteenth century to the foundation of a precocious social-democratic welfare state by the early twentieth (Jespersen 2004: 58–82). Finally, this process does not seem to have been underwritten by industrialization – Denmark remains among the least industrialized of northern European states – but by land reform, the modernization of agriculture and a corporatist political strategy based on egalitarianism.

Hvad udad tabes, det skal indad vindes – ‘What is lost outwards, shall be won inwards’ – was the motto of the Danish Heath Society, which in the nineteenth

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century promoted the cultivation of hitherto infertile land. It is paradigmatic of an acceptance of constraints, and a resolve to overcome them, which was central to modern Danish nation-building. Inward looking and reconstructive, within a culturally homogeneous polity, that process is crucial to understanding why there appear to be no nationalist movements in Denmark today.

But the detail of everyday life suggests a different picture. Take, for example, the white cross on the red field of Dannebrog, the Danish flag. Many Danish houses have a flagpole in the garden, from which the flag is flown to mark the whole range of domestic festivals and rites of passage. Those households lacking a flagstaff may display instead a small portable version on a wooden base. At Christmas, miniature paper Dannebrog, which are sold in every supermarket, may adorn the tree, and a birthday cake is incomplete without at least one. Dannebrog has even become essential to consumerist marketing strategies in Denmark. ‘Flying the flag’ is central to the symbolization of Danish national and civic culture; in the process, family celebrations become more than simply domestic (Jenkins 2006a: 374–8).

A comparative perspective brings this into focus. In Northern Ireland, flags – on the one hand the Union Flag, the Ulster flag or various loyalist paramilitary flags, on the other the Republic’s tricolour – are part of ethnic boundary maintenance and a recognized element in the rituals of confrontation of the annual ‘marching season’ (Bryan 2005). In Britain, a private citizen flying the Union Flag runs the risk of being diagnosed as eccentric, at best, or racist and fascist, at worst. The latter is certainly what is symbolized by the Union Jack T-shirt of the English football fan abroad.

Dannebrog painted on the face of a Danish football supporter, however, symbolizes something different; certainly not the xenophobia which informs much British political discourse, even in the mainstream, and from which the English football fan draws a sense of his place in history. But what does it signify? And what does it mean when Danes tell you, with unselfconscious pride, that Queen Margrethe II’s line of descent extends back more than a millennium to Gorm the Old, the oldest royal line in Europe? Or, to return to the flag, what should we make of its myth of origin, which has it dropping from heaven as a gift from God to King Valdemar II during a battle in 1219? Although Danes acknowledge the invention of this particular tradition, ‘even so it is considered the oldest of present-day European flags’ (Jacobsen 1986: 23). Here it is possible to have one’s traditional national cake and eat it.

The recipe for that cake is the usual mixture of contradictions. Insofar as one can generalize, Danes like to appear to be understated in their national pride, modesty and restraint being important components of a relatively consensual model of ‘proper’ Danishness. They celebrate the fact that Denmark is a small country, et lille land. Østergård, a perceptive local commentator, calls this ‘lilliput-chauvinism’ (1992b: 56) or ‘humble assertiveness’: ‘We know we are the best, therefore we don’t have to brag about it.’ (1992c: 170). However, there is also defensiveness: although it is ‘bad form’ to be a nationalist, ‘intrinsic nationalism surfaces immediately foreigners start criticising anything Danish’ (Østergård 1992c: 169). Despite the public framing of the controversy within Denmark as a matter of freedom of the press, outraged national chauvinism was certainly part of the Danish reaction to the international furore during 2006–7 about the ‘Muhammad cartoons’ published by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. In this context, the national and international political climate since 9/11 has encouraged the assertive appropriation of