Memory, Politics and Identity

Haunted by History

C. McGrattan

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781137291790
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Relazioni internazionali

The question of how to move beyond contentious pasts exercises societies across the globe. Focusing on Northern Ireland, this book examines how historical injustices continue to haunt contemporary lives, and how institutional and juridical approaches to 'dealing' with the past often give way to a silencing consensus or re-marginalising victims.

1

Dealing with the Past in Northern Ireland

This book takes as its starting point the idea that not only does the present shape how we think about the past, but that the past is not entirely mutable since experiences and interpretations of events often endure. The past, of course, is fraught with political import: perceptions of unresolved grievances and injustices are inextricably linked with questions of power by providing rationales for whose voices are heard and whose voices are silenced in the public arena. Likewise, ideas about the past are impossible to divorce from ideas about identity: we articulate who we are in the present in relation to where we have come from and the values and aspirations we wish to see sustained and fulfilled in the future. Of course, these ideas are also imbued with ethical significance and concern our adherence to the beliefs of our forebears as well as our responsibility to future generations. Stories about the past, as the historian and political philosopher Michel de Certeau pointed out, act as a bridge: they give our everyday lives meaning but also act as guides to our future decisions. As such, the politics of the past represents a juncture between everyday life and the ‘high politics’ of decision-making and policy implementation.¹

Yet, while it is important to recognise the fundamental importance of the politics of the past, it should also be acknowledged that the past need not necessarily be ‘dealt’ with as regards to certain aspects of policy: residual problems relating to, for example, segregation, sectarianism, social exclusion, and the violence of ‘spoiler’ groups can be immediately tackled through dedicated policies in housing or education; rights-based safeguards; and a robust security response. The imperative to ‘deal’ with the past is, however, a more fundamental demand and involves core ideas about ourselves and the type of society we wish to live in. There is no easy policy fix to that demand and this book rejects simplistic notions relating to the nurturing of post-conflict identities through the construction of a ‘usable past’.² Instead, I wish to suggest that the power and identity-based dynamics involved in talking about the past always involve questions relating to the values we wish to bestow to the future: our approach to the past always therefore involves both political and ethical considerations that cannot be separated.

Remembrance and silence

While opportunities to initiate policy on issues surrounding the legacies of the past are constantly changing, the past itself remains a disruptive and disrupting influence on transitional societies. Psychologists and sociologists have, for example, examined the related phenomena of collective trauma and transgenerational transmission of trauma. Thus, returning to the South African case, it has been noted that

[M]emories of unresolved trauma are often perpetuated through stories told within the family and broader community. Memories continue to affect generations even when they do not directly experience the specific traumatic event. These ‘received’ memories shape identities as well as fuel negative perceptions and stereotypes of difference, often hindering reconciliation processes and perpetuating identities of continued victimisation.³

In other words, violent pasts may adversely affect younger generations who did not experience conflict directly or who may not be totally conscious or deliberately choose to ignore recent history. The idea that received wisdoms about the past colour attitudes and beliefs in the present is, in some ways, an obvious point. But it is also, paradoxically, somewhat insubstantial: history by itself cannot mould identities; rather, its prime political function is, arguably, to lend legitimacy and authority.⁴ What is perhaps more consequential, though, again in subterranean ways, is the fact that trauma, politically speaking, can be constructed strategically. The psychologist Vamik Volkan, for example, speaks to this idea in his description of ‘chosen trauma’ – namely, the adoption of traumatic language and perception through the selection of particular historical reference points or interpretations. For Volkan, chosen trauma works itself out in a number of ways – division, victimisation, guilt, shame, humiliation, helplessness – and, he argues, it can become particularly problematic when it becomes taken for granted; that is, when historical events become mythologised and psychologised to an extent that the perception and representation of events become more important than what actually happened.⁵ The sceptic may respond that that is the post-modern condition: reality is mediated and the most persuasive rendition will win out; again, the pessimist may respond that that is so, but it is person who can proclaim her version of reality the loudest will prevail; a more sanguine observer (perhaps, even, a political realist) might reply that it all depends on how we approach the subject.

Collective or societal trauma must be differentiated from personal, individual trauma by virtue of the fact that it is imbued with particular political resonance: namely, it is involved with questions of power insofar as it determines whose voices are heard and whose are silenced, whose stories are given public acknowledgement and whose are muted. Thus, trauma is not only a silence, but, politically speaking, it is an act of silencing. This silencing can be passive and active. It can, for example take the form of uncertainty: with reference to the Balkan conflict, the political scientist Stef Jansen has claimed that obfuscation is internalised in order to abdicate historical responsibility: vagueness, he writes, ‘was a crucial instrument of self-protection’: it allowed for generalised accusations while, at the same time, it served to deflect ‘probing questions’ relating to individual responsibility.⁶ Fundamentally, what this construction of trauma gives rise to is a skewered representation of our own selves:

If our common identity is shaped by its relation to the other, to silence the voice of the other is another form of repression within ourselves … To be so vocal about one’s past might in turn become a form of screening untold memories.⁷

Lucette Valensi, writing about the Algerian War of Independence, argues that the war is not over since ‘the other side’ is effectively excluded from the collective memory of their erstwhile antagonists.⁸ In this way, memories become reified and take on the character of ritualised narratives, becoming both totems and taboos that ensure communal and ideological orthodoxy. A similar point was made in Primo Levi’s final book in which he described how

a memory evoked too often, and expressed in the form of a story, tends to become fixed in a stereotype, in a form tested by experience, crystallised, perfected, adorned, which installs itself in the place of the raw memory and grows at its expense.⁹

Commemoration has functioned to provide victims, groups and elites alike with a vehicle for dealing with the past. It is therefore a political act insofar as it involves a repositioning of the past in relation to the present. As such, the politics of commemoration involve a dual process of de-politicisation and re-politicisation. Commemoration is de-politicising, firstly, because it is quintessentially a selective reading of the past: untidy narratives and unwelcome facts are conveniently written out of collective memory; historical facts and the memory of individuals are displaced, deferred and silenced. Commemoration is also an act of re-politicisation: it involves the inscription of authority in the present by reference to the past; events are framed and narratives are created to inform current understandings and to rally supporters to the cause in the present. As Rebecca Graff-McRea explains in her recent study of the resonance of the 1916 Rising throughout twentieth century nationalism, commemoration involves

[t]he construction and contestation of our past: it is intricately bound to discourses of the nation, the state, identity and opposition, and thereby decrees who is to be included, excluded or marginalized from both the group and history itself.¹⁰

In constructing and contesting our past, commemoration embeds division and polarisation with an interminable impression on the way that people think about future progress and relations. If the project of commemoration is intrinsically linked with the quest of an exclusionary nationalism, the progressive centrist parties and civic society function is glaringly discernible: to establish why and who we ought to commemorate, and in what manner. The potential for displacement, deferral and, ultimately, forgetting underlines the importance of that role. Collective memory is formed on absences and silences. Bonds are created by what is judged to be important to a community and for this to take place, memory must be circumscribed. The impulse towards commemoration stands at the beginnings of that creation, and, as the American sociologist Iwona Irwin-Zarecka, explains: ‘That which is not publicly known and spoken about will be socially forgotten’.¹¹ Rescuing silenced victims and displaced historical narratives from that process is politically difficult since it involves rowing against dominant tides; however, it should be an ethical imperative, involving as it does questions of recovering forgotten truths and making those truths visible.

Truth recovery and tolerance

During the twentieth century policymakers have grappled with issues regarding post-conflict societal transitions:¹² The German case is illustrative: Faced with the problem of how to move beyond civil war and revolution in Germany in 1919, Max Weber advocated adopting a responsibility to the future – raking over the past, the causes of the war, would be, he argued, detrimental to the debt that the survivors of the catastrophe owed to their children; again, on the eve of the Second World War, the Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin, argued that our primary debt is to the dead, the victims of violence, and that the only sound basis of morality is to remember those who suffered and could no longer speak of their suffering, those who were rendered voiceless again by the march of progress.¹³ The Nuremburg Trials instituted a bridge between Weber and Benjamin: a debt should be acknowledged and accountability be ensured in order to move forward and draw a line in the sand.¹⁴ Regardless of the Benjaminian approach, debates about how to deal with such contentious pasts tend to coalesce around one of two fundamental ideas:

1. Unpicking the past may endanger fragile social cohesion in the present. The emblematic case in this instance is the Spanish pacto de olvido. The pact was not so much a commitment to forgetting, but was rather an informal understanding reached in the post-Franco era among Spain’s political elites to not talk about the past in ways that would create political capital in the present.

2. Leaving questions unanswered about what took place may lead to the festering of wounds and the deepening of division. Here, the paradigmatic example is the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which awarded amnesties for cases of violence and human rights abuse that were judged to be politically motivated.

Both of these approaches to the question of dealing with difficult, divided pasts, to a large extent, depend upon and proceed from an ideal of tolerance: we tolerate compromises in order to ensure cohesion; or we tolerate hurts in order to reach consensus. In so doing, they contribute to a negative conception of peace – that is, peace merely being the absence of war – and offer little in the way of a more maximalist notion where peace can be equated to beliefs in the importance of social responsibility, scrutiny and accountability, public deliberation, and popular engagement in the political process.¹⁵ The English historian, Theodore Zeldin alludes to the limitations inherent in tolerance when he argues that ‘toleration was adopted for largely negative reasons, not out of respect for other people’s views … but in despair of finding certainty. It meant closing one’s eyes to what other people believed’. Toleration however, is still a vital and necessary first step: ‘The ideal of toleration … is a stepping stone. Understanding others is the great adventure that lies beyond it’.¹⁶ In his survey of the twentieth century, which was first published in the same year as Zeldin’s Intimate History of Humanity, Eric Hobsbawm makes a complementary point: ‘what stands in the way of understanding is not only our passionate convictions, but the historical experience that has formed them. The first is easier to overcome … it is understanding that comes hard’.¹⁷ In other words, we will always have an opinion on violent pasts – particularly if we have lived through them or if we have been directly affected by conflict – but an understanding, that is a communication and a conversation about what occurred, might just be possible. But it involves a study of the workings of the past in the present.

Dealing with the past in Northern Ireland

Republican terror groups – most notably, the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) – hold the main responsibility for conflict-related fatalities: almost 60%, compared to loyalist terrorists being responsible for almost 30%, and state forces almost 10%. Nevertheless, Provisional republicans consider themselves as victims of British oppression, and without wishing to denigrate the very real suffering and abuses perpetrated by the British state, their story is easily told and fits the decolonial paradigm: an imperial power thwarted legitimate self-determination claims, and PIRA reaction/defence followed repression. This historical narrative is not only true – the British state was responsible for sickening outrages, and more often than not, working-class Catholics bore the brunt of its ill-advised adventures. Yet, beyond that qualification, the Provisional republican narrative also represents the core conceit of the Troubles: – the malingering lie that violence was inevitable, along its surrogate falsehood that everyone bears a responsibility for what occurred. A cursory glance at the best histories of the civil rights movement or the origins of the Troubles,¹⁸ which have appeared in recent years, easily dispels any queries about the historical inaccuracy of the Provisional republican narrative; yet, the truth of Volkan’s notion that perception, when it becomes entrenched, is more important than reality, is sadly demonstrated in the fact that that narrative has saturated the thinking of governmental elites. The Consultative Group on the Past (CGP) makes this fact clear, for it was well aware that terrorist organisations’ principal targets were their own communities; as its chairs, Robin Eames and Dennis Bradley, acknowledged in May 2008: ‘We also met families who suffered at the hands of paramilitaries from within their own communities and listened intently to their sense of helplessness and in some cases, hopelessness’.¹⁹

Despite this, the Group’s Report represents a peculiar form of silencing as the focus shifts from the terror perpetrated by paramilitary organisations, to a focus on British state forces as the foundational perpetrators:

The Group heard how [such communities] had to endure over many years the presence in their...