Revisioning, reversing and reviving: visions of Ulster politics
Last week was the first anniversary of the death of John Hume. The day was marked by many, using various superlatives, to recall Hume’s contribution to the Northern Ireland peace process and the Belfast Agreement. Although Hume was an actor in it he’s not credited merely as an actor like, say, Lord Trimble is. Hume is substantially credited with providing the intellectual and moral framework behind it. Principally, the union of Ireland as the union of its people not, in the first instance, the unity of a state. This was to be achieved through the ‘two traditions’ in Northern Ireland working together towards common ends through a power sharing assembly and executive. Where power sharing is a recognition of the contested political landscape, it answers the problem of democratic consent that supposedly dogged Northern Ireland since 1921. In the power sharing assembly, Irish nationalism in Ulster had for the first time the ability to govern itself. The structures arising out of this thinking providing the practical and normative basis for a settlement in Ireland.
The successful ‘yes’ campaign for the agreement brought to an end the debate within unionism on what it was and what it was for, one that had been going with intermittent enthusiasm since the seventies. By the time of the agreement this debate may have been withering on the vine in whatever soil unionism was planted but after it, while it certainly would not have agreed, and would not agree, with my characterisation of the thinking behind it, it would become almost wholly committed to devolution and power sharing. The framework was a neutral one, built upon the idea of consociation, that respected ‘both traditions’ and was governed by the principle of consent. Consent was supposedly the great unionist intellectual achievement of the agreement because for the first time Irish nationalism had, we were told, formally recognised the legitimacy of Northern Ireland. ‘We have them on the hook of consent’, as Trimble liked to say when campaigning for ‘yes’ in the referendum. It was also the basis on which people like Peter Taylor have argued that unionism actually won out in the agreement but, as some have said, was too stupid to realise it. But this victory isn’t at all what it seems. Indeed, the consent principle as it is construed in the Belfast Agreement - Northern Ireland, not unionism, as the object of consent - is an indicator of the baleful intellectual fortunes of unionism.
But it was in unionism making this move that it was made possible for Hume’s construal of the Northern Ireland question to take uncontested form. So conventional, so beyond dispute that it largely goes by unnoticed that it is invented not discovered, that it is Irish nationalist not neutral. And such is the intellectual collapse in political unionism that the current DUP leader, Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, who opposed the agreement at the time, has since acknowledged just how right Hume was, how far-seeing he was, how choose your superlative he was — there are pessimists by disposition and pessimists by experience, unionism ought to be dominated by the latter.
Yet for all this, Hume’s name is now invoked to recover the promise of the agreement. Last week, for instance, the New Statesman ran a piece by Stephen Lynch claiming that Hume’s vision offered a way forward for Northern Ireland now. We see it also in the ‘new’ or ‘shared’ Ireland rhetoric to which many in Irish nationalism now repair. The frothing sectarianism we see in Ulster’s political institutions nothing to do with entrenching sectarianism in its political institutions. Just try Hume again but harder, maybe with even warmer words. This characterisation, of course, may be dismissed as glib or unfair or what’s your alternative but it bears observing that good intentions and consequences are different things. That the consequences we think we will get - which may be relevant to moral evaluation - are not necessarily the consequences we do get. The observation that sectarianism was being entrenched was made at the time (and before) and it was dismissed at the time (and before). It is not an accident or a failure that that is indeed what we have got or that political dysfunction is its fruit.
The problem is no doubt difficult, it may even be intractable (for now). This, however, is hardly a response worth making. If we’re throwing arms in air, we may wonder why to the left and not to the centre or to the right. No, the political structures we have are the result first of a normative understanding of Ireland and then secondly of Northern Ireland which perpetuates and canonises the division it pretends to help solve. That point, irrespective of what else one may think, of whatever and whichever realities one thinks one can see, remains. That this understanding continues largely unchallenged, twenty three years after the agreement is just grim.
What’s worse, so far as unionism goes, it could provide an alternative if it would only attend to it. The main manifestation of this alternative in unionism was what is known as ‘integrationism’. This is the view that Northern Ireland’s government should be fully integrated into the institutions of the UK state - Westminster, the civil service etc. Following the prorogation of Stormont in 1972, some unionists started repenting of their home rule ways and believed that integration was the best solution to the problem. It led, in time, to the Campaign for Equal Citizenship in 1986 following the Anglo-Irish Agreement. It would ultimately be eclipsed by devolutionist thinking in the Ulster Unionist Party, and found a rumpish home in the long defunct United Kingdom Unionist Party led by the Robert McCartney QC. It lives now on Twitter, mostly in meme form. Of course, recommending integration today is likely to elicit howls of disapproval or dismissive laughter - the slowest of the slow learners. Stubbornness competing with pessimism for the crown of unionist virtues.
Well okay, I won’t recommend it. It is, I said, a manifestation of an alternative. This is to say, it is only possible given certain conditions or the absence of certain conditions. These could be framed in multiple ways. One way is to motivate a modern individualist account of the state which buffets the normative pretensions of Irish nationalism and may even have some virtues of its own. Recall that underlying the idea of consociation is another idea that there’s a thing called Irish nationalism that *cannot* otherwise be governed but by Irish nationalism on pain of colonialism. This argument has most recently been advanced by Brendan O’Leary - another, if lesser known, brain behind the agreement - in his ‘Treatise on Northern Ireland.’ But on the modern state account there is no Irish nationalism – or a unionist nationalism for that matter - in a normative sense. If that opens up to unionism a way of thinking, speaking and acting in Northern Irish politics that does not presuppose or perpetuate sectarian division, it also challenges those who think in ways that do to say why. A commitment to the claims of Irish nationalism, for instance. This serves to expose what is and is not or is of lesser importance. If the modern state is one way, another is to dissolve the magistracy of political ideology. This has all the relevant advantages of the former but also shifts us from the right theory to the world of prudence. If the former might variously be called liberal or pluralist unionism the latter is the application of a mode of conservatism to unionism that is awaiting its christening. The two, thankfully, can make common cause.
There are at least two objections to this. The first is that it amounts to a victory for unionism because it favours the status quo. And Hume was very clear there can be no victory for ‘either side’. Two replies will do here, Hume’s framework smuggles in Irish nationalism by the front door and the objection would only go through if Irish nationalism and unionism are playing the same game. But the good news is, and it is good news, they’re not playing the same game. At least they ought not, if unionism would only realise it. The second is that it ignores the reality of division in Ulster. Holding faith with pairs, there are two responses to this. The first is that it need not and it does not. The division is lamentably all too real. The issue is not whether there is division but how we think about it and what we do about it. Following from this, the second is to say the goal is not to resolve the division with an alternative account but what possibilities it provides in how to respond to that division. One that can entertain possibilities that have not failed is perhaps worth considering.
It is true to say that Irish nationalists are committed, to varying degrees, to Irish nationalist claims. The probability of arguing people out of those claims may be remote. While attempting to do so ought ultimately to be unionism’s concern, unionism must first revive a conception of itself that is able to do so. Such a revival would not be an entirely comfortable prospect for many because it would likely involve loss as well as gain. But if we are to move beyond the sectarian politics of past and present it must be done.