The Good Friday Agreement
by Desmond Clarke
What, then, for the future? The Irish Constitution, even when amended as a result of the Good Friday Agreement (42) is fundamentally inspired by a nationalist ideology. It assumes the existence of a people, naisiun na hEireann, which is distinct from other European peoples with whom we share much of our history and our culture. It attributes to this people a national language which is not widely spoken among its members. It claims for this people a right to self-government, and assumes that its political jurisdiction should coincide with the island of Ireland as its rightful "national territory". Following the Good Friday Agreement, the Constitution has been amended to acknowledge that membership of the Irish nation is open to many people whose religious, cultural and political traditions differ significantly from those whose philosophy inspired the text of 1937. By accepting the principle of consent, the amended Constitution also modifies the measures that may legitimately be used to realise the nationalist goal. However, it changes little in the goal itself. More fundamentally, it changes little in the way in which we conceptualise the competing claims of members of a multicultural population.
As already mentioned above, this is not a comment about the Good Friday Agreement, but about the kind of nationalism which survives even in an amended version of Bunreacht na hEireann. The Belfast Agreement represents an evidently welcome compromise between competing political objectives. The focus here is on analysing the political philosophy that is presupposed in one [or both?] of those objectives, namely, in nationalism. Thus, despite the parallel statements of the rights and duties of the contending traditions, and of the common ground agreed by both, there remains a question about the ways in which the disputing parties conceptualise the realities about which they disagree. The political landscape could be changed almost beyond recognition by revisions in that underlying political philosophy. This would imply that we begin from the reality of individuals who currently live on the island of Ireland; that we acknowledge the extent of their religious, cultural and political diversity; that we accept the principle of democratic consent; and that, one these realities have been acknowledged, we consider the feasibility of different political structures that would respect the diversity of the people who live on the island. In particular, it would involve deferring assumptions about the nationality of different groups until their equality as citizens is first established, and surrendering the fundamental principle of nationalism identified by Gellner, namely, that political units or structures emphasis on parity of esteem. Evidently, such an inversion of the logic of nationalism is feasible - even in an ideal political community - only if he cultural and civil rights of different groups are respected equally. An oppressed group in any society is likely to develop a distinct national consciousness as a means of developing the kind of solidarity that is needed, among the oppressed, to assert their rights.
In a less than ideal community, the new millennium beckons us to question
the nationalist assumptions by which we have classified and divided from
each other the people who live on the island of Ireland. We could try thinking
first about citizens, about their rights and interests, and only later consider
the various "imagined communities" to which they belong. In summary, to
conceptualise the history and political realities of the island of Ireland
in terms of national affiliations is to assume a framework which classifies
citizens in terms of incompatible nationalities (43) If this classification
includes the Gellner thesis, implicitly or otherwise, to the effect that
a nation has a right to exclusive sovereignty over its national territory,
the apparent insolubility of the constitutional issues that beset the island
is logically implied by the very terms in which they are conceived, that
is, in compatible claims by different communities to different national
identities, and in claims to exclusive jurisdiction over the same geographical
region which result from competing nationalities. Any hope of progress presupposes
an alternative conceptualisation. Minimally, it requires a surrender of
the claim that a distinct national group must have exclusive political control
over a geographical region identified as "the national territory", even
when it includes a significant population which, by its own choice, claims
a different nationality to that of the majority. Cultural nationalism in
this sense, that is, nationalism without exclusive territorial claims, is
compatible with a wide range of political structures which respect and accommodate
multicultural citizens. |
