Postnationalist Ireland

Politics, Culture, Philosophy

Richard Kearney

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN:
  9780415115025
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134821693
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The encroachment of globalization and demands for greater regional autonomy have had a profound effect on the way we picture Ireland. This challenging new look at the key of sovereignty asks us how we should think about the identity of a postnationalist' Ireland. Richard Kearney goes to the heart of the conflict over demand for communal identity - traditionally expressed by nationalism, and the demand for a universal model of citizenship - traditionally expressed by republicanism. In so doing, he asks us to question whether the sacrosanct concept of absolute national sovereignty is becoming a luxury ill afforded in the emerging new Europe. Kearney then takes us beyond the political with chapters on the influence of philosophers such as George Berkeley, John Toland and John Tyndall and looks at some of the myths in Irish poetry and nationhood. Postnationalist Ireland provides a recasting of contemporary Irish politics, culture, literature and philosophy and will appeal to students of these subjects and Irish studies in general.

Part I
Politics

1
Beyond sovereignty

In modern republics the origin of sovereignty is in the people, but now we recognize that we have many peoples. And many peoples means many centres of sovereignty—we have to deal with that.

(Paul Ricoeur)¹

‘What ish my nation?’ asks Captain Macmorris in Henry V in what must surely be one of the first expressions of Ireland’s identity crisis. Ever since, the same question has found multiple forms of response, each contriving to make sense of complex, and often conflicting, allegiances—Gael and planter, Catholic and Protestant, Republican and Loyalist, tribal and cosmopolitan.

A change seems to be occurring in recent times, however, as Irish people, North and South, move gradually beyond the orthodox equations of political and cultural identity. For unionists and nationalists alike, this means rethinking traditional fidelities to unitary ideals of nation-statehood: a United Kingdom for the former, a 32-county Republic for the latter. The 25-year war in Ulster epitomized the clash of irreconcilable territorial claims. Hence the need for a movement beyond sovereignty—at least understood as an absolute principle of ‘one and indivisible’ power. And the attendant need to think further than the conflict between British and Irish nation-states towards a new configuration of identities.²

The central wager of this opening chapter may be stated accordingly: contemporary Ireland is in historic transition and calls for new modes of self-definition in keeping with an overall move towards a more federal and regional Europe. In the new European dispensation, nation-states will, arguably, become increasingly anachronistic. Power will be disseminated upwards from the state to transnational government and downwards to subnational government. In this context, future identities may, conceivably, be less nation-statist and more local and cosmopolitan.

A EUROPEAN SOLUTION TO THE IRISH-BRITISH PROBLEM?

Ulster is an Irish problem and a British problem. But it is also a European problem. Ireland’s historical divisions are, in significant measure, European in origin. We often forget that the Viking invasion was plotted in Norse; the twelfth-century conquest in French; the Battle of the Boyne in Dutch; the Great Armada in Spanish; the 1798 landing in French; the 1941 blitz of Belfast (where five hundred died in one raid alone) in German. Ireland is also a European problem requiring a European solution.

In the New Ireland Forum in 1983, Bernard Cullen and I proposed a form of jointsovereignty for Northern Ireland (a model retained as one of the three options in the final Forum Report, 1985). But it became clear over the years that many unionists resisted the principle of dividing or diluting sovereignty in an Anglo-Irish context. The only parameters within which they seemed prepared to share sovereignty were, tellingly, those of the European Community. With the signing of the Single European Act in 1988, both the United Kingdom and the Republic agreed to a significant sharing of sovereignty with the other ten members of the EU—and, by implication, with each other. The unionists raised no objection. (Unlike the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1989 which they vehemently opposed.) Moreover, unionist representatives, disinclined to cooperate with their nationalist counterparts in Westminister or Dublin, had little difficulty voting and campaigning with them in Brussels or Strasbourg. Why? Because, once removed from the disabling conflict of Anglo-Irish sovereignty claims, the urgent social and economic needs of their common Ulster region became paramount. Thus, Paisley and Hume, while implacably at odds on the issue of national sovereignty were almost invariably at one on regional issues of agricultural policy, fishing quotas, social cohesion funding, etc. The lesson? That unionists and nationalists can agree at regional and European level, but not at national level. Once again, the vexed issue of nation-state sovereignty remained the bone in the craw of Ulster.

It was precisely the manifest failure to divide or share sovereignty within the British- Irish context that prompted me to try to think beyond the ‘joint-sovereignty’ option of 1984 in favour of more ‘European’ options (see below the joint submissions with Robin Wilson to the Opsahl Commission in Belfast, 1994, and the Forum for Peace and Reconciliation in Dublin, 1995). The basic line of thinking here was: Could a European model not supplement and ultimately subsume the existing Anglo-Irish initiative? Was there not a compelling logic to the notion of Ulster as a quasi-autonomous region relating, interdependently, to other regions on (a) the island of Ireland, (b) the archipelago of Britain and (c) the continent of Europe? Might such a trilateral allegiance to the concentric circles of Ireland-Britain-Europe not enable both nationalist and unionist communities to put their sovereignty-quarrel behind them and work for the common good of their region under a broad European roof? Indeed, was the model of a federal Europe of regional participatory democracies not what Voltaire, the Enlightenment visionary, originally had in mind when he dreamt of ‘one great Europe made up of parts each corresponding equally to the other’?

The wager, simply put, was that the reconciling of divided communities—in Ulster, no less than in Gibraltar, Germany, Belgium or the Basque country—could no longer be confined to isolated nation-states. The claims of absolute national independence, predicated upon exclusivist notions of state sovereignty, were no longer feasible, nor desirable, in the emerging European configuration.³ Approaching a new millennium—in the wake of the paramilitary ceasefires of 1994 and ongoing Peace Process—it seemed that Northern Ireland might well, ironically, be in a position to take the lead in the European resolution of national conflicts.

CONCEPTS OF SOVEREIGNTY

One of the most pressing tasks in this attempt to rethink Ireland is the separation of ‘nation’ and ‘state’. Is it possible to break the equation of national self-determination and state sovereignty? Is it possible to rethink the question of sovereignty culturally as well as politically? In terms of identity rather than territory? Or, given Hannah Arendt’s argument in Crises of the Republic that ‘as long as national independence and the sovereignty of the state are equated…not even a theoretical solution of the problem of war is conceivable’—where do we begin looking for an alternative theoretical model?

I have already alluded to the practical, and I believe practicable, possibilties contained within the European Union charters. But we cannot think forward without at the same time thinking back. How, after all, are we to supersede the limits of sovereignty if we do not first understand something of its genesis in Western political thought? By summarily retracing the genealogy of this key concept I hope to free up some conceptual space to think again about some of its more immediate implications today.

Originally, the concept of sovereignty meant ‘supreme power’. As derived from the Latin superanus through the French souveraineté, the term connoted the ultimate authority or overseer of order. Initially attributed to a divine ruler, the mantle was gradually passed onto divinely elected ‘representatives’ in history—kings, pontiffs, emperors, monarchs—before being finally delegated to the ‘people’ themselves in many post-revolutionary republics and nation-states. Today, sovereignty is one of the most controversial concepts in political theory and international law, intimately related to concepts of state government and/or national independence.

The term ‘sovereignty’ first came to prominence, as a modern theoretical principle, in the sixteenth century when Jean Bodin invoked it to consolidate the power of the French King over the insurgent feudal lords. The historic transition from traditional feudalism to modern nationalism was thus facilitated—albeit within a monarchical system. In 1576 Bodin promoted a concept of absolutist sovereignty, defining the sovereign as one who makes the laws but is not himself bound by the laws he makes (Majestas est summa in cives ac subditos legibusque soluta potestas). With the publication of Leviathan in 1651, Thomas Hobbes confirmed the identification of the sovereign with might rather than law. Sovereign power is as absolute as men can make it, he argued, and since law is what the sovereign commands it cannot itself command or limit the sovereign.⁴

With the contractual theories of John Locke at the end of the seventeenth century and of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the eighteenth, we witness a shift towards a concept of popular sovereignty. The state is now considered to be founded upon a compact or contract between citizens through which they entrust such powers to a government as is deemed necessary for common protection. This doctrine of popular sovereignty found clear expression in the US Declaration of Independence in 1776. But it underwent yet another shift with the French revolutionary constitution of 1791 where it assumed the guise of national sovereignty. Citing key phrases from Rousseau’s The Social Contract, this constitution states that ‘sovereignty is one, indivisible, unalienable and imprescriptible; it belongs to the Nation; no group can attribute sovereignty to itself nor can an individual arrogate it to himself’. The sovereign people now becomes identified with a sovereign nation embodied in an organized, centralized state.

This standard modern equation of sovereignty and nation-state underwent certain subsequent readjustments. In the nineteenth century, the English jurist John Austin and others argued that sovereignty was ultimately vested in a nation’s parliament, thus promoting the concept of parliamentary sovereignty. Parliament was now envisaged as the supreme body that enacted laws binding upon everyone but itself—since it, and it alone, had the right to change these laws at will. This notion of legislative sovereignty— still conceived in absolute and indivisible terms—was, however, somewhat revised when applied to the American situation where the US Constitution did not endow the national state legislature with supreme power but imposed important limits upon it—the famous principle of ‘checks and balances’. Hence the principle of constitutional sovereignty where ultimate power is invested in the fundamental document of the Constitution itself.

The principle of nation-state sovereignty thus evolved through a number of genealogical mutations—popular, national, legislative, constitutional. But with each shift, a basic consciousness was emerging: sovereignty cannot finally be considered as synonymous with absolute and unrestricted power. This deconstruction of the principle of absolute sovereignty came from two directions at once—from within and from without. Sovereignty became challenged internally by (a) the recognition that power may well reside in several centres at once, e.g. in different political, economic, social or religious groups that govern a state (the notion of pluralist sovereignty developed by Guguit, Krabbe and Laski in the twentieth century); or (b) the partition of sovereignty between the union and its constituent units in the federal structure of the USA (a de facto form of dual sovereignty as required by the 10th Amendment of the Constitution whereby separate states retain powers not delegated to the US state Congress). Besides the USA, other countries found it increasingly difficult to attribute all power to a single repository of sovereignty as competing criteria were invoked in different legal cases—the laws of nature, reason, God, region, community (ius gentium) in addition to the nation-state itself.

But sovereignty was also challenged externally by the development of international law in the twentieth century. With the Hague Conferences of 1899 and 1907, followed by the Covenant of the League of Nations and the Charter of the United Nations (art. 2), significant restrictions on the action of states were laid down. A system of international checks and balances was now being introduced limiting the rights of sovereign states to act as they please in all matters. Moreover, the increasing interdependence of states—accompanied by a sharing of sovereignties in the interests of greater peace, social justice and economic exchange—qualified the principle of absolute independence for the nation-state. ‘The peoples of the world have recognized that there can be no peace without law, and that there can be no law without some limitations on sovereignty. They have started, therefore, to pool their sovereignties to the extent needed to maintain peace; and sovereignty is being increasingly exercised on behalf of the peoples of the world not only by national governments but also by organs of the world community’.⁵

If this pertains to the ‘peoples of the world’ generally, and to the peoples of Europe particularly, how much more does it pertain to the peoples of the islands of Britain and Ireland? This is why I argue, in my three opening chapters, for a surpassing of the modern nation-state model in the direction of a federal Europe of regions—postmodern, postnationalist and postsovereign. The nation-state has, I believe, become too large and too small as a model of contemporary Irish identity. Too large for the growing need of regional, participatory democracy; and too small for the increasing drift towards transnational exchange and power-sharing, at both British-Irish and European levels. Hence the relevance, in my opinion, of the the Nordic Council analogy as a model for resolving the historical sovereignty dispute over Ulster, declaring it a demilitarized zone, along with the Spitsbergen and Aland islands.⁶

NATIONAL-POPULAR SOVEREIGNTY AND IRISH NATIONALISM

Before leaving our summary genealogy of sovereignty I would like, however, to take a closer look at the specific development of national-popular sovereignty in the eighteenth century, which exerted a formative influence on Irish nationalism.

A famous 1791 document of the United Irish Society hailed the French Revolution’s transfer of absolute sovereignty from the King to the people as follows: ‘on the 14th of July, the day which shall ever commemorate the French Revolution, let this Society pour out its first libation to European Liberty…’.⁷ While Bodin had argued in Les Six Livres de la République that sovereignty could only be effectively maintained in a true monarchy, the French Revolution replied that the proper place for sovereignty—still understood as the ‘unitary will’ of ‘absolute and perpetual power’—was in the nation itself.⁸ With the reign of Louis XIV, sovereign power had begun to distinguish itself from the juridical order which it was in theory supposed to preserve. The ‘state’ (understood as the active agency of power) began to separate itself from ‘society’. Kings were no longer conceived as servants of God; they became identified with gods themselves who ‘in some fashion partake of divine independence’.⁹ The monarch was sovereign therefore precisely because the law, the state and the divine will were deemed to express themselves through his individual person. He alone was the truly public will; or as Bossuet put it: ‘the whole state is in him, the will of all the people is encompassed in his’.¹⁰ The establishment of absolutist sovereignty thus witnessed the imposition of centralized command on local practices of participation and consent, with judicial government being replaced more and more by administration government. For the ancien régime in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, ‘sovereign power—the power of the state in the active modern sense—no longer simply upheld the social order from within; it acted upon society from without’.¹¹

From the mid-eighteenth century on, a noticeable shift occurred where the locus (if not the character) of sovereignty transferred from the body of the king to the body of the nation. As noted above, Rousseau was a key theorist of this transfer. Rousseau agreed with Hobbes and other advocates of absolutist sovereignty, that the transmutation of multiplicity into unity could only be effected by the ‘irrevocable submission of every individual to a single, unitary person’.¹² But according to Rousseau’s The Social Contract, this person could no longer be identified with the actual person of a king but with the collective personification of citizens as a whole. While inheriting the monarchical doctrine that sovereignty is inalienable and indivisible (it cannot be delegated or represented without subverting the unity of the body in which it inheres), he reintegrated sovereign power back into the social order by situating sovereignty in the body of the people understood as a collective abstraction: the famous ‘general will’. Rousseau thus provided the theoretical basis for the French Revolution’s transfer of power from Crown to nation.

The most influential doctrine of national sovereignty to emerge from the revolutionary debates was, however, Sieyès pamphlet, Qu’est-ce que le Tiers Etat? Revising the notion of the historical nation, Sieyès empowered it with the immediate active sovereignty of the people (understood in Rousseau’s sense). The nation assumed the status of both the popular and the natural order, deriving its authority from no source other than itself. And with this radical formulation of national sovereignty, we encounter one of the most formative models of the modern nation-state. As Keith Baker explains: ‘By a dramatic inversion, the nation, created in the course of centuries by the persistent efforts of the monarchical state, now became metaphysically prior to it. The logic of Qu’est-ce que le Tiers Etat? threatened the entire standing order of international relations no less radically than it subverted the institutional order of the French monarchy. Once it was adopted, the history of humanity could be nothing but the story of national self-determination inflicted everywhere upon it in the two centuries since the French Revolution’.¹³ The national will becomes its own origin and end, with nothing before or after it. The common will of the nation is a justification in itself: it is legitimate by virtue of the fact that it is. It is absolutely representative precisely because it represents—quite literally—itself. When it comes to the nation, there is no dualism of body and soul. This is why, for Sieyès, ‘the national will needs only to exist in order to be legal at all times; it is the source of all legality’.¹⁴ And it is also why, in Sieyès’s cryptic formula, a ‘nation cannot decide that it will not be the nation’. The nation is self-founding, self-representative, self-evident.

It was a short step from the arguments of Rousseau on popular sovereignty, and Sieyès on national sovereignty, to the creation of the National Assembly and the Revolutionary Constitution’s claim that ‘sovereignty is one, indivisible, inalienable, and imprescriptible. It belongs to the nation’.

The story does not end there, however. Several difficulties ensued from this equation of absolute sovereignty with the nation. First of all, there was the vexed problem of representation inherent in the very concept of national/popular sovereignty—a problem by no means confined to French nationalism. The problem runs something as follows: If the people of the nation are everywhere—since sovereignty is inalienable—does that mean that everyone is the people? In other words, if the people are the totality, how are they to be ‘represented’ at the level of bodies such as the National Assembly where they (the totality of the people) are not immediately or directly present? If the ‘people is always there’, as the conventionnels proclaimed, why is there a need for them to be ‘represented’ at all? And how are individual wills to be identified with the general w...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I: Politics
• Part II: Culture
• Part III: Philosophy
• Postscript
• Notes