The Good Friday Agreement
by Desmond Clarke
Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly [Vol. 51, No. 1]
Why Change
Why should the people of a given geographical region re-think their national identity? Why should they re-write their history - that is, the account of their past to which they have become accustomed - and perhaps, in doing so, re-evaluate the honorific status of those who engaged in the "heroic and unremitting struggle" for the international recognition of Ireland as a distinct nation? Is it not an extreme and implausible form of revisionism not only to re-evaluate the past but also to attempt to change our identity by modifying our current beliefs about who we are?
The answer to the first question, in summary form, is easy: because justice demands it. Justice demands, in a region that includes individuals with diverse cultural identities, that their cultural diversity should be acknowledged and that no group should be allowed to impose its culture, by exclusion or enforced inclusion, on others. This is an insight that has emerged relatively recently in discussions of multiculturalism and in what Charles Taylor has called the "politics of recognition"(39) .
Evidently, major questions may be raised about what counts as a legitimate part of one's culture, and about the extent to which cultural practices that compromise the rights of individuals should be legally recognised in a modern democracy. None of these issues is addressed here (40) But one could at least begin by recognising that linguistic diversity is a characteristic feature of many modern democracies , and that it is unnecessarily coercive of individuals to require all co-nationals to speak the same language(s). Thus the Irish Constitution might begin by recognising both Irish and English as equally official and national languages, so that citizens are free to carry out their public duties by using either one.
Once the question is raised about linguistic prerequisites for national membership, the apparent necessity of other criteria may also be queried. It may not be necessary, in order to be genuinely Irish, to share the enthusiasm of many citizens for the games sponsored by the Gaelic Athletic Association, to share the religious beliefs of a majority of citizens in the Republic, or to enjoy the music and dance that are typically classified as "Irish". As the list gets longer, it might seem as if we have embarked on an extremely slippery slope [in the logical sense], and that there remain no criteria at all by which to distinguish those who properly belong to the Irish nation. However, the danger threatened by a slippery slope is a sufficient reason not to ask questions only for those whose insecurity outweighs the logic of argument. The guiding principle remains, despite the danger of slippage: justice demands that our concept of the nation be catholic enough to include those who were born in Ireland, but whose religious and cultural affiliations alienate them from the hegemonic and exclusive nationalism of one dominant, politically active group.
Should we also re-write history? This question may sometimes be asked in a rhetorical style, as if merely asking the question suggests an obvious negative answer. However, it is an extremely simplistic view of history, as a story about out past, either to think that it has already been written perfectly by others, or that there is no selection made in the events discussed or the interpretation of them that is generally endorsed. Any history is a theory about the past. Recent work in philosophy of science has shown the extent to which, even in the sciences, our descriptions of what are usually called "facts" are theory-laden because of the conceptual framework used to describe them (41). If physics is theory-laden, then a fortiori so is history. We can either repeat what earlier historians have written - in which case we are not doing history at all - or we can put our minds to the interpretation of the past in the light of the best and most recent scholarship available. Doing history is, of necessity, re-writing the story of the past.
Of course, neither reconceptualising our national identity nor re-writing
our history is remotely as easy as the arguments that support their necessity,
because the effort involved in either case is not exclusively intellectual.
Both are inhibited by interests that are more deep-seated and less explicitly
acknowledged than the logic of any argument. However, we can begin the task
by questioning the justification offered by proponents of exclusive nationalism,
because their justification is articulated in the world of ideas and of
speech, rather than in the murky, intractable underworld of competing political
and economic interests. |
