A Second Republic, Irish Citizens, British Identities

If there were to be a United Ireland it is obvious that there would then be a significant minority in the country who would find themselves in a state to which they do not wish to belong. The unhappy experience of the nationalist minority in Northern Ireland is often used as a framework for thinking about possible outcomes, but the parallel is not really relevant, though tempting. The big external systemic drivers that a post-unification society would face, such as climate change, mass migration,  the energy transition, the place of Ireland in Europe and the world, are very different from those of the aftermath of the First World War. Even more importantly the Republic of Ireland is in no way a good parallel for the Northern Ireland state of the 1920s. Even in the unlikely event of the most inflexible incorporating union with no acknowledgement of the constitutional history of Northern Ireland, Northern Unionists would still enjoy all the rights and protections of citizens of a state within the European Union. 

I was reminded that this very experience happened to my family, when I was at a dinner in Derry recently. I was swapping stories with my dinner companion and she remarked that if my great-grandfather had gone on the beach in Belfast rather than Cork I'd be Johnny Adair. That is taking it too far (though both he and I are bald, were born in 1963 and have houses in Scotland), but the key point, that if my Royal Navy great-grandfather from Salford had fallen in with a friends from Portsmouth or Chatham, or any of the other Dockyards other than Haulbowline, then I wouldn't be Irish. The Donovans he had met in Essex (and whose daughter Alice he married in 1884), and the Andrews and the Flynns he had sailed with gave him more reason to come ashore in Cork harbour than to return to the basement in Sandywell Street in which he had been born in 1860. Mortimer Cuffe's reasons for coming from St Pancras in London are less clear, but that move is another contingency.

Not long after having that conversation an old school friend who I hadn't seen for a while called and I mentioned the conversation to him and also remarked that in ancestry I was more English than Irish, to which he replied that all my schoolmates knew that about me (this was news). That conversation in Derry crystallised some ideas and stories that I had always been aware of, but never really connected. 

I've always understood that the family is fundamentally Atlantic working class and naval. My maternal grandmother was born in 1913 in Hell's Kitchen to her Irish mother, an O'Brien, and James Carter who we think was from Glasgow, and who had helped found the Marine, Port and General Workers Union in Cork. That last nugget only came to light when the new Connolly Hall invited my grandmother to an opening and her sense of family history overcame her conservatism. Everyone on my father's side was involved with the sea, mostly in unions and navies. There are still Liveseys in the US Navy; a cousin just graduated from Missou as a Naval Doctor., and her father was an official in the Boilermakers, having served himself, as had his father. One of the pleasures of historical scholarship for me in the past decades has been reading the work of colleagues like Rediker and Frykman which has given me a much deeper understanding of the long history of that maritime community.

What I never really thought through in any depth though was how British the family was. The evidence was always out in plain sight. Both my mother and father's sides of the family were English immigrants in the late nineteenth century, working and lower middle class Protestants initially, then the families became Catholic through intermarriage, but they remained fundamentally Unionist.  Family lore has it that my great-grandfather, Samuel Livesey had a bust of the old Queen and crossed Union flags in the porch of his house up to his death in 1933. My maternal uncle was born on the day of George VI's coronation and so was named for him. Two of his uncles, Willie and Ernie Cuffe, went off to war in 1939 and never again set foot in Ireland. Ernie never recovered from being shelled in Caen in 1944 and died in the Chelsea Royal Hospital. For the Liveseys especially, Irish independence was challenging not for political reasons, but because the Naval Dockyard closed, which was the main source of employment in the village. By 1928 five members of the Livesey/Russell/Flynn connection were in the Bronx.

The British and Unionist elements of my family and my experience had always been present without me being totally aware of them. Much of it was offhand comment that I only realised the import of many years later. I remember my father discussing the murder of Admiral Boyle Sommerville. This was not current affairs (it happened in 1936), but he was still really cross about it in the mid-70s. He explained to me that Boyle Sommerville helped local Cork men to find jobs in the Navy, which was a Godsend in the depression. He thought the people who had killed him were more stupid than evil, as anyone who was on the coast understood how naval recruitment worked and his recommendation was necessary. Interestingly this was exactly the view Edith Sommerville took at the time, in a letter to an American friend. Paul Durcan has a great poem that expresses how that death remained a wound, precisely because of that stupidity, "I knew then that only the sky had a roof".

There were other pieces of that heritage lying around. A friend of my father fascinated me as a child with stories of serving with Mountbatten in the Kelly on the Malta convoys in 1941. My grandmother discussing the burning of Cork was always more disappointed than incensed. Fifty years later she still took personally that the government, as it then was from her point of view, turned the Tans on the population. When times were very tough after the closure of the naval dockyard my grandfather worked and lived on the Newnham Estate at Coolmore. And these signs extended out from the family. In the music corridor of my school the photograph of the successful candidates for the Indian Civil Service in 1937 hung very close to that of the last hurling team the school put out before the ban. 

There are many continuities from this history to the contemporary experience of my family. However for all practical purposes it had no impact on my life or anyone else's whatsoever. There were some obvious signs of that heritage, like the photo of Major Cuffe in the front room, and some more subtle ones, like the absence of any religious or farmers in the family, but it never dawned on me, or on anyone else, that it mattered, even during the worst years of the Troubles. My father, whose love of hurling knew no bounds, as a member of the Cork county board worked openly to change the GAA rule demanding that members boycott foreign games without ever worrying for an instant that anyone would take any interest in his background. In some way that escapes ethnicity, culture, or heritage we, that is the family, had become Irish. 

There is a lot to say about the changes in Irish public culture in the twentieth century, and Diarmuid Ferriter's work is not a bad place to start to explore work in this area. I've always been struck by Sean Ó'Faoláin's observation in the biography of De Valera he wrote when he returned from the US in the 1940s that there was a new kind of demotic spirit about, and that even though the outcomes of the Revolution were not what he had hoped for, they were positive and interesting. I think that is right, and that social and cultural moment was the condition for the economic change that has driven the history of Ireland since the mid 1950s. It is an interesting question to work out why between my great-grandfather's death in 1933, or my grand-uncle's rally to the colours, and my birth thirty years later, what had previously been important, became less so. However for the purposes of thinking about the Unionist community in Northern Ireland, the important fact is not why that happened, but that it did.

Very often, when articulating anxiety about the prospect of constitutional change, identity becomes the matrix through which that anxiety finds expression. No-one is denying the importance of identity, but it is hard to see  a post-unification Ireland putting any constraints on expressions of British identity. One of the most obvious features of the last hundred years in Ireland has been the developing acceptance of the complexity of the cultural identities in the population. One of the reasons that immigration has, so far, not been challenging in the Republic was that ethnicity, citizenship, and identity have been disarticulated. This was not at all clear during the period of dominance by the Catholic Church of course, but more recently expressions of integral nationalism by people like John Waters just end up sounding odd. Politics in the Republic is not conducted through cultural mobilisation or negative ideation around an imagined "other". Of course there is at least some chance that misguided goodwill might import consociation, and "Ulsterise" Irish politics, but the likelihood of that has to be low. The chances are that identity issues in a United Ireland would not be particularly difficult to resolve.

Of course none of this is compelling to Unionist opinion, for whom the constitutional link to the United Kingdom is intrinsically valuable, not a best option among many. Even if that community were convinced that every practice they hold dear would be cherished and protected that would not be reason for them to accept a United Ireland. Unionist opinion has a reasoned intuition that the end of Northern Ireland will bring an end to a political and social world they have known. This is often articulated as the view that Irish identity is substantially constructed through anti-Britishness. That seems to me empirically wrong and a projection of Ulster's politics onto Ireland. But if the process of unification is to go well, it has to be acknowledged that the fear of change is not irrational. Once the structures change that will initiate a cascade effect and entirely new and unpredictable dynamics will emerge.

What I think our experience at least suggests, is that Unionism as currently constituted and understood will not survive a United Ireland. However there is no reason to fear some kind of terrible assimilation and elimination of historical memory. There has not been, and will not be, an imposition of a unitary imagined past. However for families like mine, working class with their roots in Protestantism, the prospect of release from the narrow ground and from political conservatism will, I think, create the space for change. I think we can predict with some certainty that the Northern Irish Unionist and Loyalist working class will not continue their historic pattern of voting with and for parties that are conservative. Similarly it is hard to see them adhering to nationalist parties. What I hope for is that they can recover their roots in the British radical tradition, many of the best elements of which already embedded in Irish constitutional practice. 

The Republic of Ireland owns the historic achievement of having separated citizenship from ethnicity and identity, without creating an arid public culture. If - and it can only be if - there is a United Ireland, then I have great hopes that a Second Republic will extend this experiment in positive ways. I look forward to the insight and understanding that the British citizens of Ireland will contribute to us remaining a free people, in the face of the challenges all peoples face. 

Green Jacobinism

 Adam Tooze has a really interesting review in the LRB organised around Andreas Malm's ideas on the politics of the climate crisis. AT pinpoints the view of the Zetkin Collective that the climate crisis represents a revolutionary moment without a revolutionary subject. Along with AT I am minded to take Malm's invocation of War Communism as a model of political response to climate (in)action more as a theoretical provocation than a real historical analogy. The question Malm raises is what is politically optimal if catastrophe is imminent and there are no clear saviors in sight. Climate change, in this view of the world, is to our moment what fascism was to the early part of the twentieth century.

AT does a lovely job of putting Ecological Leninism in a frame where it can be apprehended as a political option alongside the liberal reformism that is the core tactic of the climate change movement (inspired by its understanding of the success of the non-violent rights movements) or the market adaptation favored by the energy companies and their allies (I don't think these are equivalents, but that is not the topic of the day). I think it is reasonable to take it as given that neo-liberal strategies will not solve the crisis, and the outcome of a climate change rhetoric with no action will be some kind of right-wing populist reaction, which leads AT to pose the following "Malm forces us to face a crucial question: what are the social democratic politics of emergency? If his version of ecological Leninism is to be refused, what is the logic of action in the face of disaster?"

I want to suggest the answer to that question is Jacobinism, The characteristic of Jacobinism that fits the moment is that it posits an idealised subject (the people). It is precisely the mode of politics that happens when an absolutely necessary revolutionary project lacks a revolutionary subject. What holds it together is the interaction of the positive notion of a citizen, as someone who accepts the law or necessity as their own will, with the negative antithesis, the aristocrat who denies they are subject to that law (and so holds privilege). Jacobinism is crisis social democracy, or rather is the form democracy takes when it faces existential threat. When in the summer of 1792 it became obvious that civil society restored to its rights could not find an equilibrium around justice, that created the Jacobin moment, that if such a regime could not be found then it would be made. Jacobinism, because of its incoherence and heterogeneity, can never deliver from its own resources the hoped for goal. What it does is end the revolutionary situation, and create the ground for a new "normal" politics. Just to be clear, that does not require Terror (in fact I would argue that was an incredible mistake),.

The most powerful example of Jacobinism is not French, but American. The Union side in the American Civil War was effectively Jacobin. It claimed to represent the people over and above all constitution and rights, it held together a heterogeneous social alliance, that collapsed very quickly once it had eliminated the threat, the power of Southern slaveholders, but while it existed it instituted a "second founding". Marilynn Robinson's wonderful Gilead sequence of novels paints an insightful picture of what happens to a Jacobin project (Iowa, the shining star of radicalism) when the Jacobin moment passes. The Jacobin moment feels like it reveals a more profound reality, being touched by fire. Of course it does not do that, it merely brackets social and economic questions for a moment, opening space to transform the normative content of all institutions and disarm the opposition. At which point every interest again asserts itself and tries to co-opt that new space.

What will characterize Green Jacobinism will be an expanded idea of who/what is a citizen, in the sense of a subject whose integrity and moral subjecthood has to be acknowledged, beyond the human. And the aristocrats will be those who deny the extension of the political community in that way. This is already beginning to happen as green politics builds a special place for indigenous peoples and their lands. And a Green Jacobin project will share other things with the American experience, including a strong religious content. Richard Powers' novel The Overstory picks up all of these themes and anticipates the tragic vision of this kind of Jacobinism.

This has been the successful logic of action in the face of disaster, much more successful than Leninism. Of course that Jacobin moment may never find its Lincoln or Robespierre, the scattered and heterogeneous forces that accept the need for transformation may not be mobilised, or they may, but find the climate aristocrats too powerful to defeat. Strong analogies do not hold.

The End of a Very Old Song

On Saturday morning, for the first time since 1169, the larger part of the island of Ireland woke up without a constitutional or political connection with the island of Britain. Right through the twentieth century Ireland either used sterling or was in the European Community with the UK (and up to 1949 was in the Commonwealth), both forms of institutional and constitutional connection. As I write all of that has ended. The institutions of the Good Friday Agreement entangle the two states in complex ways of course, but for reasons I will explain I think those have less general significance than is generally supposed. Over the long term I think this moment will prove to be really important, and I had some thoughts about how it affects Irish policy and strategy.

The core new fact is that Ireland is now a European country and the UK is not. I would go so far as to claim that fact is the determining strategic fact for Irish policy makers for the foreseeable future, more foundational than the ongoing relationship with the UK, mediated through the status of Northern Ireland, or the relationship with the US. Why do I think that? It is because the confederal structure of the European Union offers the best chance of ensuring the well-being of the population and provides the context that gives the community the best chance of collectively acting to solve our problems, advance our interests, and pursue our values (as we discover and articulate them). 

The informing strategy of Irish international policy since the foundation of the state has been to support collective institutions. Sean Lester was the last Secretary General of the League of Nations, and there can hardly be a more telling illustration of commitment to the institutions of collective security than going down with that particular ship (though as Sam Moyn has explained, it was important to maintain the continuity of international organisations and jurisprudence, so this may not have been quite so Quixotic). The EU opens a much wider scope for that strategy and allows Ireland to have leverage on issues like climate change and international trade which otherwise would not be open to us. 

Strategic choice imposes limits as well as opening opportunities. As the EU has confronted problems like the financial crash of 2008 it has assumed new executive functions. The scope of the European Council has widened as the competence of institutions like the ECB has extended. Europe is becoming a political reality and taking on a political nature, often in ways that have not been anticipated in the treaties. That dynamic is continuing. The new trade treaty with China is a geo-political move by Europe and if some collective response to managing relationships with Russia, North Africa, and the Middle East could be achieved, that would be a real success. If (when?) a crisis analogous to the Yugoslavian crisis were to emerge in the future it is hard to imagine Europe being as inert as it was in that moment. For Ireland, accepting that the EU will take on a military aspect will be difficult, but given the US commitment to NATO is no longer taken for granted, it is almost inevitable.

That is only one of the many ways in which threads of European experience will start to weave through Ireland and the other members of the EU and pull them closer together. The constitutional frameworks that reflect European rather than British experience, which are already present in Irish structures, will, I think, become more prominent. The rights-based model of citizenship, which is fundamentally French, has been hugely important in the development of the Republic, so too has the creation of a constitutional jurisprudence. Those features are much closer to the French model of "thick" citizenship and active democratic participation than the liberal British model. As the EU develops its political practice, and in particular works out how the larger and smaller states can work together effectively, that will open up real opportunities for Ireland to operate. Europe will never be a nation state, but pretty soon there will be questions asked about the relationship between democratic participation and the European executive and judiciary. The practice of whatever comes out of that moment is more likely to echo the early-modern comity of multiple monarchies, city states, and territorial republics of continental Europe, than the incorporating union of the United Kingdom with its much more unitary model of sovereignty. 

As these dynamics make Ireland more constitutionally European, analogous to a state of the old Holy Roman Empire, it will pull it further away from the UK. This could cause real problems if there is any prospect of unity between the Republic and the North. Obviously any movement in that direction would have to be handled with enormous sensitivity and generosity. Unification would create a new entity, not simply absorb the North into the Republic. However core constitutional principles that align Ireland with the European Union, principally the model of citizenship, could not be compromised. The consociational model of representation that animates the Good Friday Agreement, is completely incompatible with the universalist model for citizenship that has been successful in creating a democratic order in the Republic and that aligns it with the EU. The entire premise of the Christian Democratic/Social Democrat model of citizenship is secularisation, which is much more than the separation of church and state. It pulls off the trick of creating a model of citizenship that has real consequence in terms of rights to participate in the public life of the community in all its aspects, supported by educational, welfare, health and other rights that enable that participation, and so is very "thick", but which is separated from the most profound identities and values of the individuals. More liberal models of citizenship are thinner (more concentrated on protecting property rights) and populism rejects secularisation and demands unitary identity as a condition of citizenship. 

The Republic was interesting, and odd, because even when the population was overwhelmingly Catholic, formal secularisation was sustained, and the difference between the citizen and the believer was respected (I realise that is a deeply theoretical position and the dominance of Catholic values and institutional perspectives is obvious for most practical purposes, but the secular norm was always there and was the ground for much of the change of the last forty years). That univeralist model of citizenship has become more important in recent years as Ireland has become a country of immigration.You can't simultaneously have a consociational and universalist model of citizenship. And this is why I don't think the institutions of the Good Friday Agreement are going to operate as a bridge between the Republic and the UK. They only have reference to the special conditions of Northern Ireland and cannot have sustained constitutional purchase. 

If Scotland secedes from the UK this constitutional problem will come to a head as the sustainability of the UK as an entity will then be in question and I doubt that in those circumstances England will sustain the transfers necessary to maintain reasonable standards of living in Northern Ireland. That would be a political circumstance that would bring the issue of Northern Ireland to a head (there are many others that could do the same thing of course). It is completely predictable that a body of Unionist opinion will only assent to a United Ireland on consociational grounds and that is likely to be unacceptable to the majority of Irish citizens, for whom being citizens is a big deal. 

This circumstance, where the UK is no longer capable of sustaining Northern Ireland, but no agreement is possible on a set of constitutional principles for a Second Republic, seems to me to be the greatest medium-term strategic threat to Ireland. If my thinking is right, and the core interest of Ireland is in its engagment with and full membership of the EU, then that is the criterion that we should use to guide ourselves through the predictable constitutional politics of the new decade. I think that being clear about that would also be helpful to the communities of Northern Ireland, who also face a very changed circumstance. In imagining a United Ireland everything would not be on the table, and a Northern Ireland trying to find safe harbour for all of its peoples deserves to know that.