Pathways of identity between our two islands

WorldView: If Tony Blair survives as prime minister until 2007 he will have been in office for 10 years. Whatever about his achievements in other spheres, it has been a momentous decade in British-Irish relations.

This owes a lot to Blair's commitment to improve them - and not least his close personal relationship with Bertie Ahern. His re-election provides an opportunity to review these developments and to see how they might develop over the next 10 years.

British-Irish relations (rather than Anglo-Irish relations): this way of describing the relationship was inscribed in the 1998 Belfast Agreement, which should be seen as part of an exercise in the devolution of power within the United Kingdom to Scotland and Wales.

That process - arguably Blair's greatest achievement - has contributed to reconciliation in Ireland by creating new pathways of identification between the two islands for both unionists and nationalists.

It has both complicated and simplified Ireland's relationship with its large neighbour, by disaggregating Britain's scale and making it easier for Irish people to recognise themselves in its different nations and regions.

The results are readily seen in everyday contacts between the two islands, which have multiplied in the last 10 years. Tourism, the retail scene, sporting involvement, media interpenetration and popular and high culture reflect this as much as trade, investment and high politics.

Surveys show most Irish people recognise a distinctive intimacy with the British; increasingly their mutual entanglement is understood and commented on, as a revealing book of essays published by the British Council in Ireland earlier this year testifies.

At a debate it sponsored on the subject "This house believes Britain is just another foreign country" not one person in the audience agreed at the end that the proposition is true. Rather does the idea that Irishness and Britishness are linked and that there may be much of the one in the other gain a hearing. Blair's foreword to this book underlines his Donegal connections.

It helps enormously, too, that this mutual accommodation is happening in a wider European and Atlantic setting in which both these identities are reaffirmed and strengthened, although variously so.

This new interdependent, more equal, more internationalised, indeed increasingly normalised relationship is not without tension, of course. Much of it has to do with the inherently asymmetric differences between an island of 5.5 million people and one of some 60 million. There are echoes here of Danish attitudes to Germany, Finnish to Sweden, Polish to Russia, Greek to Turkey, South Korean to Japan.

Usually such fraught relationships reflect historical relations of power, including imperial conquest and rule, as well as of geographical proximity and human interdependence.

Even when these have been largely or fully resolved they leave a legacy of odi et amo; it can be daily reinforced by seemingly casual appropriations of Bono, Seamus Heaney or Noel Gallagher by British political or media figures, which infuriates Irish people.

Applying Freud's notion of the "narcissism of minor difference" to the phenomenon does not help if it reinforces the assumption that these are trivial affairs, rather than revealing a deeper and longer mindset in the larger entity.

It can be difficult for the smaller one to come to terms psychologically with the idea that scale asymmetry itself reproduces such banal misrecognitions. This ensures the reproduction of their cultural identity as a new form of nationalism, albeit a civic not an ethnic or exclusivist one.

Ireland's historical quarrel with Britain has been largely with its southeast and the imperial governing class which had its socioeconomic base there. Over the last 10 years Blair's devolution programme and the marginalisation of the Conservatives into a Eurosceptic English nationalism have facilitated the transformation of British-Irish relations. Labour's Britain is more readily recognisable from here, even if many of the Irish in Britain now vote Tory.

Ireland's EU involvement has gone with the grain of its civic nationalism, in sharp contrast to the Tory one - but also with Blair's own difficulties in achieving his ambitions to bring the UK to the heart of Europe.

The basic assumption guiding Irish EU policy has been that the UK would be a late joiner of the euro rather than a non-participant in the medium to longer term. Looking ahead five or 10 years from now, it can be seen how far this scenario needs to be stretched into the future by the election result.

Blair takes over the EU presidency in July and has an active international agenda to pursue with it, overlapping with his chairmanship of the G8.

His major domestic preoccupation will be how to win the referendum on the EU constitutional treaty to be held in about a year's time. If France votes Yes in three weeks' time, which now looks somewhat more likely, Blair's task will be more difficult.

From the Government's point of view it would be preferable that the British would support the constitution; if they reject it and the French accept, a Franco-German inner core project is likely to be relaunched. It would be on an axis at variance with the "Anglo-Saxon" economic and social values shared by the Blair and Ahern governments.

Aside from that, the likelihood that Blair will be replaced by Gordon Brown mid-term - or immediately after a referendum defeat next year - would install a rather different set of European (and Irish?) priorities in Whitehall and Westminster, which would be reinforced by any Franco-German core. Were a Tory revival to replace Labour in 2009-10 the prospect of UK membership of the euro would be put off even further.

Maybe that will not make the major difference assumed in recent years, given the respective performances of the European, British and Irish economies. But a prolonged British-Irish differentiation on the common currency makes North-South economic integration all the more difficult, despite the installation of cross-Border bodies.

These scenarios deserve closer investigation now that Blair has won again. The minimal progress on Britain in Europe is one of his great failings. It was knocked sideways by Iraq and by his own unwillingness to make it a central political priority.

All the more reason, then to expect that he will redouble his efforts to implement the Belfast Agreement as a lasting monument to his three terms in office.