In a recent article by Vernon Bogdanor on the Northern Ireland Protocol, he argued, to various howls, some as far away as Tuscany, that Northern Ireland’s remaining in the UK was an act of self-determination. He writes:
In December 1921, the Anglo-Irish Treaty recognised the right of self-determination of 26 counties in the island of Ireland to secede from the United Kingdom. Northern Ireland then exercised her own right of self-determination by deciding to remain a part of the United Kingdom. This decision was legitimised in 1998 by the Belfast or Good Friday Agreement which guaranteed Northern Ireland’s constitutional position by providing that it should not cease to remain part of the United Kingdom until a majority so consented.
It is not unusual to see claims that Northern Ireland came into existence through self-determination. Unionists have been especially keen to make this point. But even as a possibility it is more complex than some would allow. This complexity is perhaps one reason why Bogdanor locates Northern Ireland’s self-determination in the Anglo-Irish Treaty. By the time the treaty was agreed Northern Ireland was already in existence, created by the Government of Ireland Act 1920, the first elections had taken place, and King George V had opened the parliament. The Anglo-Irish Treaty formally saw Northern Ireland as part of the Irish Free State but it had the option - which it exercised as soon as it could - to secede from the secession. This act of self-determination then is one that can be cleanly identified and demarcated (it is also one that can be retrospectively linked to the consent principle in the Belfast Agreement. This, I suspect, another reason why Bogdanor focusses on the treaty.) But the obvious limitation is that Northern Ireland existed prior to it.
Typically when unionists say Northern Ireland is an instance of self-determination they are not thinking of secession from the treaty. They mean something like that the creation of Northern Ireland by the Government of Ireland Act 1920 was a recognition of the unionist North East’s desire to remain part of the United Kingdom. The problem with this, however, is that if self-determination is the normative basis on which states or countries exist then one claim to self-determination does not have priority or precedence over another, other things being equal. Irish nationalists would seem to have an equal claim to self-determination. The border, in that case, would have had to maximally achieve the claims of both as far as possible. To say, it’s unlikely Northern Ireland would have included parts of Fermanagh, Tyrone, South Armagh and South Down on self-determination.
Part of the problem here is that unionism has swallowed whole the idea of self-determination and that Irish nationalism is an example of such. It has therefore sought to justify itself in similar terms. But should it?
What distinguishes a nationalist account of self-determination is a thick cultural concept of group membership that precedes the state - the nation. In the case of Irish nationalism in the early 20th century the Irish nation had broadly become defined gaelicism, agrarianism, Roman Catholicism, romanticism. Irish nationalism claims that this ‘Irish nation’ has the right to self-determine for the territory of the island of Ireland. The problem that this has presented for Irish nationalism, even as it has moved away from aspects of what it was, is that there are a group of people in Ireland - concentrated in the North East - who say they are not part of this Irish nation.
An important unionist response was to accept a nationalist account of self-determination and construct a rival version to Irish nationalism on the basis of another, different, shared culture. This was largely inspired by two nations theory, which argued that there are two nations on the island. A theory that originated in the late 19th Century and which only grew in prominence throughout the Third Home Rule Crisis and, then, in retrospect post-partition. The virtue of this is that it is authorised by the same principles as Irish nationalism and therefore shows the hypocrisy in which Irish nationalism is engaged - Nationalism for me but not for thee. And even with the consent principle in the Belfast Agreement this remains the case. The retrospective linking of consent in the agreement to the formation of Northern Ireland a mistake. Unionists, per the agreement, do not have the right to self-determine. Varadkar was right in his recent comments on this, Foster and others wrong in their pointing to the Agreement. The Irish nationalist image of its self-determination applying to the whole island is firmly in place. But hypocritical though Irish nationalism is, there are two problems with this kind of unionism. First is that it itself is a form of nationalism which, I think for other and multiple reasons, should be rejected. The second is that although there was a partition that could be justified on this basis, you likely don’t get Northern Ireland.
A better alternative is available. Merely the belief that Irish nationalism is false. It is false because it claims that the ‘Irish nation’ is coextensive with the whole island. Yet if there are a group of people concentrated in the North East who do not consider themselves, and however composed, to be part of the Irish nation then it is false that the Irish nation is coextensive with the whole island (some in Irish nationalism, of course, have sought to get around this problem using settler colonialism or false consciousness.) Although this also follows from the construction of a unionist nationalism, the mere belief that Irish nationalism is false does not involve other commitments, for example to a form of nationalist self-determination. Two things are achieved. Irish nationalism cannot criticise unionism for not having a coherent account of self-determination because it itself does not have one and, consequently, there is space for an alternative account of Northern Ireland.
But what if there is no such space? Self-determination is supposed to provide an answer to the problem of the legitimacy of a state or, in other moods, the secession of a group from a state to form another. It was used by Lenin against imperialism and then Woodrow Wilson towards the end of the First World War. It was through Wilson, the League of Nations and then the United Nations that it gained prominence as an international political principle. But despite its prevalence and status in international politics, it has received relatively little attention in comparison to other issues in political philosophy, political science and intellectual history. One reason for this is that it’s extraordinarily difficult to construct a theory of self-determination for the real world. The world is very messy. The idea results and has resulted in competing and conflicting claims with seemingly no principled resolution. But it is also messy in that most existing countries were not formed on the basis of self-determination. They are the products of history. As Hume famously said ‘almost all governments, which exist at present, or of which there remains any record in story, have been founded originally either on usurpation or conquest, or both.’ Together suggestive of why we don’t commonly see states making constitutional provision for secession based on self-determination or making it easy for secessionist groups to do so - UK governments perhaps one outlier.
A notorious problem that self-determination faces was pithily expressed by Robert Lansing, under-secretary of state to Woodrow Wilson, a century ago, when he said ‘the people cannot decide unless somebody decides who are the people.’ Lansing’s point was that there is nothing given about who can and who can’t self-determine - Ireland provides an obvious example of this. This is particularly acute for democratic accounts of the state where self-determination simply becomes begging the question. But theories are rarely left without options (of the making of distinctions there is no end) and so the focus becomes demarcating what is meant by ‘self’. One possibility is a territorial account. Any theory of self-determination will require a theory of territory but territory simpliciter fails to get going because it lacks subjectivity. The need for a subject is why self-determination theories have drifted towards some kind of nationalism. But many who think that self-determination is an important political value see nationalism and self-determination as an ugly combination and have instead attempted to provide a ‘liberal’ account. A recent example of this is Margaret Moore’s A Political Theory of Territory (2015). In this she argues that the object of self-determination is a people rather than a nation. A political identity rather than a cultural nation. Yet it’s hard to think that such a distinction has the stability it needs in order to avoid cultural nationalism, if one thinks it should be avoided. But even if it can, it doesn’t avoid the problems with application. The real world is indeed messy. For instance, Moore’s discussion of Northern Ireland doesn’t focus on its origins but finds that the consociation theory that underpins the Belfast Agreement is consistent with her account. But for reasons already given on the problems faced by Irish nationalism, a political rather than cultural identity doesn’t get any further on this.
Apart from self-determination’s difficulties with coherence, it also faces challenges from differing conceptions of politics, including those that accept the need to provide a normative basis for territory. One example is that the various moves that a self-determination theory is obliged to make are based on what Jeremy Waldron has called the ‘politics of affinity’. But this overlooks the extent to which politics is fundamentally about managing difference and conflict. This is the tradition that was largely started by Hobbes and modified in various ways in the centuries since between conflict and difference. The liberal state, for instance, may wish to think better things of human nature but it famously values (at least it claims to) individualism and value pluralism. Operating with something like this account of the state, Waldron argues that polities are about proximity. They form in the places where people are. Boundaries in this case have a contingency that are not fundamental to the theory. The emphasis is shifted to the quality of the state. This is not to suggest that this is a better theory, only that there are alternatives that continue to be argued for. It also presses that the nature of politics itself is in dispute. In other words, self-determination presupposes something about politics that is also highly contestable and, indeed, contested.
Given the problems with the claims Irish nationalism makes for itself and the difficulties faced by self-determination theory in general there isn’t really a compelling reason for unionism to adopt it or to continue to use it. Unionism, instead, must have the confidence to do its own thing.
We can turn, then, to a prudential basis for partition and the partition we got. One that can still recognise the contested nature of the politics of the time and since but without the normative conceptual structure implied by self-determination theory. One that can also invert the nature of partition from the partition of something called Ireland to the partition of the United Kingdom and then the complete separation of the Irish Free State to become the Republic of Ireland. Unionist opposition to Irish Home Rule for the whole island and the eventual reluctant acceptance of partition showing the wisdom of Carson’s claim that there could be no permanent resting ground between it and total separation. Many disagreed with the boundaries, including unionists outside of Ulster and the three other Ulster counties, but many that argued for them did so on the basis that it was the best and most prudent outcome that could be achieved in the circumstances to keep as much of the island in the United Kingdom as possible.
If the creation of Northern Ireland highlights the political achievement of unionism, a lesson for unionists today, the other issue at stake, and another lesson for today, is that without being committed to the idea of the self-determination of competing nationalisms, it is freed to think, speak and act in relation to everyone in Northern Ireland. Not as a ‘Unionist’, ‘Nationalist’ or ‘Other’ but as citizens of the United Kingdom.