Old nationalisms once more entrench NI

IT IS depressing to return from holidays to an Ireland which has gone through such a thorough reversion to primordial identity in the North. Many of the elements on which a settlement might be agreed have been put firmly in place, including a much greater readiness to accept a pluralism which could detach political identity from nationality.

This is the beginning of liberation from the crippling burden of the conflict between two exclusive nationalisms; it can lead on to a more radical detachment of citizenship from nationality within a wider European or cosmopolitan setting. The conflict in Ireland is something of a laboratory for constitutional relations between majorities and minorities elsewhere.

The Northern negotiations, the current constitutional review in the Republic and the Irish presidency of the European Union's Inter Governmental Conference all serve to heighten public awareness of these issues.

As we shall see, there is an opportunity to draw on some of the most interesting streams of contemporary political theorising about them.

It may be all the more necessary to do so given the impasse into which the Northern process has been driven in recent months and weeks. As Frank Millar reported in these pages yesterday, Dublin and the SDLP are gloomy about the prospects for progress, based on an assessment "that the unionist parties lack the necessary sense of urgency, while the British lack the necessary energy and capacity". Government sources in Dublin cannot see a coherent strategy among the unionists, other than to delay or block progress.

Millar concludes that, even had it the inclination, a new British government after the election, led by Mr Tony Blair, might have little time for Irish adventures, given the large constitutional agenda he would face himself with devolution in Scotland and Wales, electoral reform, the outcome of the IGC and whether to join a single EU currency.

MR BLAIR, or a reelected Mr Major, would be better advised to approach these questions as a whole.

Their interconnectedness became all the more apparent during the Drumcree crisis. This tics in with a reassertion of British, or rather English nationalism vis a vis Europe and especially Germany. As the election looms in Britain, it is Northern Ireland's misfortune that the electoral dynamic, parliamentary arithmetic in Westminster and events on the ground all militate against an inclusive settlement and an escape from essentialist nationalisms based on primordial ethnic identities.

The German social theorist, Jurgen Habermas, has argued that such identities cannot form the basis of intra nationalist settlements. They hark back to the forces that threw Europe into war twice this century, especially in his own country.

He proposes a different formula, constitutional patriotism, to describe an alternative source of legitmacy, allegiance and post national identity. He argues that "in complex societies the citizenry as a whole can no longer be held together by a substantive consensus on values but only by a consensus on the procedures for the legitimate enactment of laws and the legitimate exercise of power". An ethics based on discourse and critique would help to reconstruct legitimacy.

Gerard Delanty* has suggested that Habermas's ideas are highly relevant to the conflict in Northern Ireland. A new identity could emerge out of the very process of conflict resolution, a set of new loyalties to the outcome of a peace process and the institutions it throws up, including equal citizenship and democratic participation.

But it could not be based on the essentialist extremes of nationalism or unionism, rather on achieving common ground between the moderate sides. Although this may seem too optimistic, even naive, at this juncture, some such model underlies the views of many participants in the Northern Ireland process.

Habermas also suggests that multiple identities are characteristic of modern complex societies - and furthermore, that "European identity can in any ease mean nothing other than unity in national diversity". These two principles offer another way out of the entrapment of essentialism nationalisms in which citizenship and nationality are mutually reinforcing.

The wider European framework offers an alternative scenario, in which multiple citizenship and political identities can be developed, not as a substitute or transcendence of national identities but as a weaker one in a circle of identities. EU citizenship was established in the Maastricht Treaty on the basis that "every person holding the nationality of a Member State shall be a citizen of the Union". The IGC is examining whether it should be extended beyond the existing limited provisions.

This is a highly contested area, which pitches those who believe the nation state must remain the main locus of identity and those who wish to go beyond it or to supplement it in recognition of the internationalisation of political and economic life. It is discussed in the European context by several Irish authors, myself included, in relation to the IGC**.

This discussion offers a supplementary European dimension to the identity conflict in Northern Ireland. It is not, however, just a matter of belongingness, politically or psychologically, but of democracy as well. The idea of cosmopolitanism, belonging to all parts of the world, has been revived to refer to a world made smaller by globalisation. If democracy is not extended beyond the nation state, either in regional organisations such as the EU, or at a global level through the United Nations, these processes will amount to a reconfiguration of power in favour of capital and international bureaucracy away from labour and national citizenries. Contemporary communications makes it possible to think of these questions afresh beyond the boundaries of the nation state, as David Held has argued in a stimulating study***.