Global Ireland || Irish Political Community in Transition

Irish Political Community in TransitionAuthor(s): Gerard DelantySource: The Irish Review (1986-), No. 33, Global Ireland (Spring, 2005), pp. 13-22Published by: Cork University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/29736267 .

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Irish Poli^^?pmmun?ty inYrans?tion

GERARD DELANTY

The

current transformation of political community in Ireland, as else?

where, can be related to developments that can be broadly summed

under the heading of globalization, as the title of this issue suggests. The

broad designation 'Global Ireland' points to a conception of political com?

munity different from 'national Ireland', but it is far from clear what this

entails and what the consequences of globalization exactly are. It can be

assumed that globality brings with it far-reaching implications, presenting both dangers as well as opportunities for democracy, citizenship and justice. Central to this is the changed status of the nation: is the nation still relevant

or is it obsolescent with the rise of new kinds of political community

beyond the nation?

It has been widely recognized that, on the one side, the tie between citi?

zenship and nationality has been broken and, on the other, the nation and

state have been decoupled.1 Especially in the countries of the European

Union, residence is increasingly coming to be the over-riding factor in cit?

izenship rights. What in effect is happening is that citizenship is being

fragmented into its parts and is no longer exclusively a bundle of rights that

are underpinned by a passport and separated from another bundle of rights called human rights. Although still based on the priority of national

citizenship, a legally codified European citizenship now exists as a post national citizenship. Moreover, human rights and the rights of citizenship are increasingly difficult to separate. As a result of the Europeanization of

the nation-state, the state is no longer underpinned by a nation, but is

shaped by transnational forces which have undermined its sovereignty. Out of this fragmentation of the nation-state, many projects emerge,

ranging from recalcitrant nationalism to cosmopolitanism. The state has lost

DELANTY, Irish Political Community in Transition', Irish Review 33 (2005) 13



its traditional moorings in the state and, in the view of many, has become

helpless in the face of global capitalism and new kinds of crime undermine

one of the traditional functions of the state, namely to provide security for

citizens. On the other hand, processes that can also be related to globaliz?

ation, for instance, new expressions of civil society, have created new

scenarios for citizenship politics, nations and the state. In this view 'gover? nance'

? rule by the many

? replaces 'government.'

Migration has changed the field of citizenship everywhere. This is es?

pecially the case in European societies today. Where citizenship was once

confined to civic, political and social rights within national societies, it now

extends more and more into the domain of culture and identities and is

increasingly taking 'postnational' forms. With the rise of group or cultural

rights, citizenship is no longer exclusively about the pursuit of equality, it is

also about the preservation of group differences, which is an essential com?

ponent of democracy. As a result of migration, changes in the relation of

nationality to citizenship, new human rights regimes, inter-societal cross

fertilization, globalization and other major social transformations,

citizenship has become an issue that cannot be addressed without consider?

ation of its cultural dimensions, especially in the context of migration and

ethnic mixing. As a result of these developments not only are ethnic identi?

ties in a state of flux, but so too are national and regional identities.

Whether globalized conditions ? arising out of the transformation of

trade, economies, communication, patterns of migration, crime, disease,

culture and politics - mark the end or the beginning of political com?

munity is the subject of wide-ranging debates in contemporary social and

political theory. This essay will consider some of the issues arising from

these debates with respect to conceptions of nationhood in Ireland. Of par? ticular salience is the question whether political community can continue

to be based on nationhood or must secure other reference points. What

ever these reference points might be, it is evident that the condition of

globality has created a situation in which societies must learn to live with?

out fixed markers of certainty.

The Nation and Political Modernity in Ireland

The answer to the question posed in the foregoing will largely depend on

how nationhood is conceived. It is helpful to distinguish between three con?

ceptions of the political community of the nation: the republican conception of the nation as a sovereign state; the communitarian conception of the state

as an ethnically defined cultural community of shared descent and common

heritage and values; the civic conception of the nation as one of citizenship.

14 DELANTY, Irish Political Community in Transition', Irish Review 33 (2005)



The first two of these tend towards authoritarianism, while the third points to cosmopolitanism and has a contemporary resonance in new political currents and therefore may be more relevant to the current situation.

Until now the national tradition has been mostly shaped by the first two

of these. One of the major influences in Irish political modernity has been

the republican conception of political community. This is derived from the

Jacobin tradition that emerged with the French Revolution and was charac?

terized by a belief in the absolute superiority of political leadership. In this

tradition, it is the political elite, those self-appointed leaders, who establish

political goals for society and represent the popular will. For this reason the

defining tenets of Jacobin republicanism - such as the idea of self-determi?

nation, secularism, security of the nation ?

reflected a strongly

state centered

conception of society. One of the main aspirations of republicanism is the

view that the nation must be embodied in a state. For this reason republi? canism tended towards authoritarianism, since the result was quite simply state patriotism. This strand within the republican tradition gave to the Irish

republican tradition a radical impetus, the legacy of which was that political institutions were continuously fraught with the spectre of violence.

It is of course also the case that the Jacobin tradition was a key agent of

secularization, although in Ireland this lost its direction as a result of the

rising tide of political Catholicism since the latter part of the nineteenth

century. From 1922 Catholic doctrines were finally institutionalized by a

national state that had, in the aftermath of civil war, renounced many of the

republican aspirations.2 Since the foundation of the Free State republican nationalism and cultural nationalism combined to produce a political cul?

ture in which nation and state were effectively equated. The result was that

the earlier republican idea of self-determination, essentially the nation's

right to autonomy, became simply the determination of the other: the

rights of the nation took precedence over the rights of the individual. The

civic nation with its cosmopolitan elements was entirely eroded by a state

centric ideology coupled with cultural authoritarianism.

Nevertheless, Irish political modernity did not have a weak democratic or

constitutional foundation. The constitutional tradition and most democratic

liberties, which since the 1801 were heavily institutionalized in the political culture and by the standards of the time were relatively strong, were not

defeated by fascism, as was the case in much of continental Europe. Paradox?

ically, Ireland inherited the best as well as the worst of British political

modernity. Unlike Scotland, which has had a strong civic conception of the

nation, Ireland has shared with England a weak civic tradition. In addition to

the state tradition, the tradition of cultural nationalism created a strong eth?

nic conception of the nation as a community of shared descent. Although the




origins of this were in liberal and romantic nationalism, it was not unlike

English cultural nationalism, which was also a feature of Welsh nationalism.

In the Irish case, the cultural conception of the nation was nurtured by the

Irish diasporic community, on the one side, and on the other by the official

political culture of Catholicism. The tension between this cultural concep? tion of the nation and the republican vision of the unity of the state had been

one of the major factors in twentieth century Irish history. The civic concep? tion of the nation tended to have been eclipsed in the greater contest

between church and state in the formation of modernity. The civic nation does not define the nation in the image of the state or

in purely cultural terms. The nation is the political community of citizens

and signals an inclusive conception of the polity rather than one defined in

purely exclusionary ethnic or in power terms. With its origins in eigh?

teenth-century Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, it was neither

particularist nor universalist. The civic nation has been one of the chief

rivals to the dominant traditions of the republican nation-state and the

communitarian, conservative conception of the cultural nation. One of its

notable characteristics is the possibility of nationhood without nationalism.

Where the state nation and the cultural nation have fostered violent forms

of nationalism, the civic nation has nurtured a benign patriotism that has

been a vehicle of cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism has a strong civic

dimension. Some of the most influential programmes in modern national?

ism, for instance Guiseppe Mazzini's Young Europe movement, founded in

Berne in 1834 to promote republican nationalism and outlined in The

Duties of Man, was based precisely on the cosmopolitanism of nationalism.

One of the major developments in recent times is the relative decline in

Ireland of both the republican and communitarian projects of modernity,

along with state and church. The cosmopolitan currents of certain tenden?

cies resulting from globalization provide opportunities for the nation to be

redefined in civic terms. The traditional sources of Irish national identity have been eroded or have ceased to be relevant. State formation has been

diluted by Europeanization, diasporic emigration has been reversed by sig? nificant immigration, and Catholicism has lost its capacity to define the

horizons of the society. What remains is more of a postmodern condition

of a reflexive appropriation of these traditions within the context of a

globalized world in which the traditional ways of defining society no

longer pertains. This situation however does not mean that the category of

the nation no longer makes any sense. It may be suggested that in fact the

idea of the civic nation is becoming more relevant and with it we are

witnessing the revival of an older current in modernity. The following trends towards a civic sense of the nation can be observed.




The Transformation of Nationhood

The first illustration of a mutual coincidence of a civic conception of the

nation with a cosmopolitan project is the emergence of what can be

called, following Charles Taylor, a politics of recognition, which has

become the basis of an official kind of multiculturalism.3 The key event in

this politics of recognition is the Good Friday Agreement, which has led

to a certain reconciliation of the older confessional and territorial politics inherited from the earlier days of the foundation of the state. While the

peace process has a long way to go before significant progress will be evi?

dent, the fact that such a process is underway is an indication of the

institutionalization of pluralism and the public recognition of the need to

move beyond forms of identity based on statehood and territory such as

republicanism and its rivals, Unionism and Loyalism, which have been

some of the more extreme forms of state patriotism that endured into the

late twentieth century. It is, however, evident that the emerging pluralism is highly limited, confined as it is to the reconciliation of the dominant

confessional groups and there has been no attempt to extend the politics of recognition to other contexts. Although what is at issue here is not the

recognition of minorities but the accommodation of dominant national

groups, nevertheless a significant dissolution of hegemonic identities has

occurred and with it a growing transgression in borders and the intellectu?

al discreditation of the traditional nationalist ideology. The second indication of an emerging cosmopolitanism is less devel?

oped and relates to the emerging new pluralist agenda, which can be

classed a second wave politics of recognition.4 Where the old pluralism concerned the accommodation of the religious/territorial identities ? and

is mostly pertinent to Northern Ireland ? the new pluralism concerns the

accommodation of immigrants and minorities of various kinds, indige? nous groups such as Travellers. Although racism and xenophobia is on the

rise in Ireland, there are no extreme right wing parties. In this along with

the UK and Sweden, Ireland is an exception to an emerging European trend. It is possible to characterize this as a potential new kind of pluralism that has arisen in the context of what can be called cosmopolitan chal?

lenges. It is far from evident if the new pluralism will have anything to

learn from the old pluralism, which was never conceived of in terms of

accepting difference, but in achieving a certain kind of accommodation

with the two dominant religious identities. If this is correct, the impulse for a new politics will have to come from other sources. Nevertheless, the

fact that the republican tradition has given way to a limited pluralism is in

itself significant.




A third example of a loosening of the older forms of nation is the un?

deniable fact of Europeanization. Europeanization of the nation state has

had a tremendous impact on the traditional conception of national and ter?

ritorial sovereignty. There can be little doubt that there is a high degree of

identification with the European Union in Ireland and a lesser resistance to

Europeanization than in Britain and many other countries. Undoubtedly some of this can be explained by the need to move beyond the antagonism to Britain and the civil war legacy in order to find new reference points for

national identity. Coupled with this there is also the simple fact that that

many of the older national myths are no longer credible. Like many other

EU countries Ireland has now become for the first time a relatively pros?

perous country. In this context the older myth of Ireland as a poor country of emigration has to be reconsidered. With the rise of a large middle class,

poverty has not disappeared but is becoming less pervasive.

Fourth, one of the most significant factors in shaping a potential cos?

mopolitanism are major shifts in identity and values amongst young people.

Throughout Ireland the collapse of the moral standing of the Church and

the financial scandals surrounding the political elites have undoubtedly con?

tributed to a climate that is conducive to a move to a new national

self-understanding. The growing importance of non-national politics, such as

environmentalism, gender politics and quality of life issues, has also played a

significant role in redefining the terms of debate of nationhood around post national identities. The result is that political loyalities today are becoming

increasingly conditional and can no longer be regarded as a durable resource

to be tapped by political elites. Loyalties can be recalcitrant and unpredictable and this is especially the case where political elites are perceived as having

betrayed democracy. Today more than ever before loyalties are refracted

through democracy and cannot be simply derived from the uncritical values

of duty, patriotism or obedience. Moreover, many cosmopolitan expressions of loyalty, such as loyalty to humanity, to the earth, future generations, justice cannot be a basis of a distinctively national identity.

One of the greatest challenges for the emerging postnational Irish

society is to articulate core cross-national values that will give citizenship substance in an age of flux, uncertainty and flows. Different national and

regional identities are redefining themselves in their relation to each other

and increasingly to national ethnic minorities, which are now more likely to include new and possibly transient groups. Indeed the very category of

what constitutes a group can no longer take for granted some of the older

assumptions.

It may be suggested that Irishness refers less to an identity as such

(whether personal or collective) than to a category within which different




collectives identities exist. The notion of an Irish identity needs to be

deconstructed of essentialism. Collective identities do not exist on the level

of such generalized categories. There are different kinds of Irish identities

(Catholic Irish identity, an Irish left identity, a Protestant Irish identity) as

there are different kinds of European identities, but there is no Irish identi?

ty anymore than there is a European identity. One of the major problems for late liberal societies is in articulating forms of collective identity that do

not reduce the nation to an essentialistic identity. Instead, what is needed is

a conception of the nation as an inclusionary category in which different

kinds of collective identities co-exist and interpenetrate. As argued earlier, a

conception of the nation must be found that is compatible with the condi?

tion of globality in which all societies now find themselves and which is

characterized by the absence of fixed markers of identity. In Ireland, as in many European countries, citizenship and nationality, until

recently closely linked, are becoming more and more loosened. The de?

coupling processes are present in Ireland, but like other comparable

countries, for example Denmark, has difficulty in moving beyond the notion

that there is only one cultural conception of nation. Although this is clearly a

problem for all European countries, which have mostly been formed on the

basis of one cultural group whose values either directly or indirectly formed

the basis of polity, it is particularly a problem for Ireland. As noted earlier, the

Good Friday Agreement does reflect an accommodation of another national

tradition. But whether the politics of recognition will go beyond this con?

ventional level of polynational coexistence to a more extensive

multiculturalism is not clear at the moment. The suggestion made in this

essay is that essential to this task is the creation of a civic sense of the nation

rather than a national identity defined by reference to the nation-state or to a

particular cultural conception of the society. It is a question of new cos?

mopolitan imaginaries for defining peoplehood rather than the idea of'the

people'. The republican model of politics is poorly placed to generate such

critical and reflexive forms of self-understanding since the very basis of the

republican ethos has been the pursuit of a state-centred conception of the

polity to house an undiflferentiated conception of the national community.

Rethinking the Nation without Nationalism

If the older models of political community ? the republican and communi?

tarian/ethnic visions of the nation ? no longer hold sway, what, then, is the

contemporary conception of political community? There are four com?

peting models: Postmodernism, globalism, liberal pluralism, and

cosmopolitanism. Postmodernism suggests hybridity and the recombination




of tradition. It is certainly relevant to the recent trends, with the decline of

the political project of modernity and the emergence of post-historical culture. However, postmodernism does not adequately capture the true

nature of political community, which while having a more pronounced

pluralist dimension is still heavily influenced by other traditions within

modernity and which cannot be dismissed as grand narratives, such as the

continued belief in justice and democracy. Where postmodernism would dismiss the possibility of creating shared

public culture, an increasingly popular position is a belief in the promises of

globalization. Consequently globalism can be summed up as a position that

expresses a belief in a global or trasnational civil society, which can exist

beyond the state or below the state in regional and city based movements.

Dismissing the nation-state, in favour of a global society may be an alterna?

tive to the limitations of nationalism, but it reflects a too strong belief in

globality. A more limited position might be to replace national with Euro?

pean political community, with the European Union replacing the

nation-state as the object of loyalties and identification. This is tempting, but there is not enough evidence to suggest than in fact this is possible.

Recent research has shown that while identifications with Europe are not

as intense as national identification, complementary attachments to nation

and to Europe are increasing, suggesting that Europe is not replacing national identities but existing alongside them.5

Liberal pluralism is a position that can be identified with the political

philosophy of a variety of liberal thinkers, of whom the most influential are

John Rawls and Will Kymlicka, but can also be associated with thinkers of

a stronger communitarian bent, such as Charles Taylor and Amy Gutmann.

The essence of this broad position is that modern societies are made up of

competing conceptions of the common good as a result of diverse identi?

ties but nevertheless must find an 'over-lapping consensus'.6 This will entail

an accommodation of the perspective of others and an acceptance of some

values. An overlapping consensus is achieved through a process of discursive

agreement and unlike traditional conceptions of the common-good is

r?visable. One of the main limits of this view of political community is that

it is addressed to large scale groups whose identities needs to be anchored

in a pluralist constitutional order. For this reason it is particularly relevant

as a framework to interpret the Good Friday Agreement. But when it

comes to wider social and cultural issues it is of limited relevance.

An alternative to these positions is cosmopolitanism. There is an undeni?

able confrontation with the culture of the other in contemporary society which has wider political ramifications and resonances in contemporary

thought. Despite their differences, the abiding message in recent




cosmopolitan philosophies is the challenge of living in a world of diversity and a belief in the fundamental virtue of embracing the values of the other.7

Cosmopolitanism is not the same as postmodernism or the fact of multi?

plicity or pluralism. Cosmopolitanism does not require hyphenated or hybrid

identities; it is rather a disposition characterized by a reflexive relation to

one's identity. The reflexive relation is different from a hyphenated one as

such, signaling instead a critical and transformative self-understanding. One of the most influential expressions of a cosmopolitan conception of

political community is J?rgen Habermas's theory of constitutional patrio? tism.8 This vision of the nation claims that the only kind of identification

possible today is identification with the principles of the constitution. The

basis of Habermas s argument is that political identity does not have to be

based on a cultural identity. Culture is particular, while political identity offers in principle the possibility of a limited universalism. Originally advo?

cated in the context of post-second World War German debates on the

viability of national identity, it is relevant to all post-national societies. It is

pertinent in so far as it avoids the problems of a narrow collective identity for a large-scale and diverse societies. Moreover, the multicultural reality of

contemporary society makes it impossible for a collective identity to be

based on a particularistic conception of peoplehood. This position goes

beyond the largely liberal presuppositions of the old pluralism, that has

been associated with the Good Friday Agreement, in that it suggests a

transformation of identities, as opposed to an accommodation of them.

Drawing on Habermas, then, a view of postnational political community

might be conceived as articulated through discursively mediated identities

and critical dialogue. In this view, one can simultaneously be Irish, Euro?

pean and member of an ethnic community. In conclusion, it can be said the category of the nation is still relevant to

political community but the understanding of the nation has greatly

changed. Globalization does not present an alternative to the idea of a

national community for several reasons. In so far as global society is a reali?

ty, it is not a basis for political community. More importantly, globalization has brought about not so much the end of national forms of political com?

munity as their transformation. One of the most important expressions of

this transformation of national identities is cosmopolitanism. Whatever the specific content of Irish national identity, it is not an iden?

tity rooted in a cultural form of life that might be the expression of an

'Irish People' and nor is it embodied in a state. The communitarian and

republican conception of the political community do not offer an alterna?

tive to the global market and instrumental interests. A cosmopolitan

identity suggests a collective identity beyond both values and interests.




Notes and References

1 Gerard Delanty Citizenship in a Global Age. Buckingham: Open University Press, 2001.

2 Patrick O' Mahony and Gerard Delanty Rethinking Irish History: Nationalism, Identity and

Ideology. London: Macmillan, 1998. New paperback issue, Palgrave 2001.

3 Charles Taylor 'The Politics of Recognition'. In: Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics

of Recognition. (Ed.) A Gutmann. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994.

4 See Nationalism and Multiculturalism: Irish Identity, Citizenship and the Peace Process, edited

by Andrew Finlay. LIT Verlag: London, Berlin and Hamburg, 2004. Some of the fol?

lowing remarks are elaborated in my chapter in this volume, 'From Nationality to

Citizenship: Cultural Identity and Cosmopolitan Challenges in Ireland'.

5 R. K. Herrmann, T. R?sse and M. B. Brewer, (eds) Transnational Identities: Becoming

European in the EU. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004.

6 John Rawls 'The Idea of an Overlapping Consensus.' Oxford Journal of Legal Studies.

1987, 7: 1-25.

7 See Breckenridge, Carol A. et al (eds) Cosmopolitanism. Durham, NJ: Duke University

Press, 2002; Cheah, Pheng and Robbins, Brice (eds) Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling

Beyond the Nation. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1996; Nussbaum, Martha

et al For Love of Country: Debaing the Limits of Patriotism. Chicago University Press, 1996;

and Vertovec, S. and Cohen, R. (eds) Conceiving Cosmopolitanism. Oxford: Oxford Uni?

versity Press, 2002.

8 J?rgen Habermas The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory. Cambridge, MA:

MIT Press, 1998; J?rgen Habermas The Postnational Constellation. Cambridge: Polity

Press, 2001.




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Global Ireland || Irish Political Community in Transition