Draw Breath

Three fine, if inconsequential in the greater scheme of things, discoveries in the last 24 hours:

1) There's a cycle messengers' world championship and this year it's in Dublin.

2) Comments captchas can be put to good use. ReCaptcha creates Captchas for your site by sending words that the Internet Archive book digitisation project can't decipher so you can read them and send your answer back. It's a sort of SETI for books. Who'd have thunk it?

3) The bloke that wrote The Red Flag came from the same village as my Grandmother.

I almost guarantee that you and your life was were less fragrant before you read this.

I'm not usually a fan of Johan Hari's writing, but his review of Nick Cohen's What's Left is absolutely excellent in pointing out what's so profoundly mistaken about the pro-war left.

As you can see, I posted on Wednesday last week on Chekist's post about civic unionism. This provoked an interesting discussion, both here and on Three Thousand Versts… about what civic Unionism might entail. Anyway, I've been a bit lazy and have left two comments unanswered, one by O'Neill and one by Chekist himself.

I've started out writing a brief reply, but for distinctly Mark Twainian¹ reasons, it turned into a 1500 word comment. Given that I think I raise some interesting, or at least mildly diverting, points, I think that it merits a post to itself. Basically, if you're too lazy/wise to read on, I tackle O'Neill's comment (with whom I agree on a lot) on the subject of trends in social conservatism north and south and I address Checkist's comment both on ethno-nationalist origins and on why a United Ireland used to be justified but isn't now.

Social Conservatism: As I said, I think I agree with pretty much everything O'Neill says in his comment. I am interested, however, in his characterisation of Ireland as socially conservative and in the rest of the UK, or Whitehall at least, as liberal, and in his suggestion that this observation provides good grounds for remaining in the UK.

I think O'Neill is quite right that Ireland (as in, the ROI) is in general more socially conservative than the UK and that Irish political life is also more socially conservative. I also agree that, given my residence in the socially conservative periphery, I’d personally prefer a situation where my neighbours’ more, um, pious urges are constrained by a liberal metropole than one where they are implicitly encouraged by a similarly conservative centre.

This in itself was a bloody good reason why all of Ireland ought not to have left the Union when it did, just as the UK was beginning to develop proper democratic institutions, and social democracy not much later.

One point on this though: the liberal metropole has not done a particularly efficient job at restraining the small-town conservatism of Northern Ireland society. It seems to remain, in Whitehall's eyes, something to be circumvented (say by exporting unhappily pregnant women to GB) than challenged.

Northern Ireland has been surprisingly isolated from the trends of mainstream UK society since partition. Indeed a liberalising trend is arguably far more obvious in the Republic. In fact, you could say that, over time, Ireland has become more British than Northern Ireland, which is to say more post-war European.

In which case, while the secession-within-a-secession delivered things like the NHS for Northern Ireland, it didn’t do the region’s progressives any favours in terms of the ‘British-isation’ of the society. Arguably the rest of Ireland is achieving that feat a little faster.

Perhaps this is for precisely the same reason that Ireland’s liberalisation took so long to begin: anyone with an ounce of liberal sentiment finds it easier to indulge in Ireland’s long-standing tradition of hopping on the boat to London than to listen to their neighbours.

Ethno-Nationalist Origins: I think my difference with Chekist comes down to a reading of what a civic patriotism might mean. He has a soft reading of it: the state ought not be founded along ethno-nationalist lines. I have a hard line: any specific state ought only be supported as a provider of institutions that adhere to social justice, democracy, human rights etc.

Two points: first, Chekist is of course correct that the origins of the ROI lie very much in ethno-nationalism (though in fairness, in terms of some of the high-jinks in Europe at the time Ireland’s ethno-nationalism, while ugly at times, was relatively benign).

But origins are not a good guide to how we ought to act today. It is entirely possible that a society living within a state, in Habermas’s terms,² can uncouple itself from its ethno-nationalist origins and develop a more civic patriotism along the lines of Chekist's, or perhaps even my, definition in the paragraph above. Now, I think we’d both agree that Ireland has a journey to make here. I think however, that Ireland has made a large part of that journey already. The church’s power has collapsed. The country is far more internationally oriented than the UK in ways that are rooted in but not confined to economic modernisation. To turn Fíanna Fáil’s last but one election slogan backwards, there is a lot more to do, but a lot has been done.

I too would not like ‘to see established and successful multi-national states broken up for no greater purpose other than to satisfy tribal nationalism.’ And I’m certainly not arguing for that here. All I am arguing for is that a civic Unionism ought not be afraid of saying that their interests in remaining in the UK rely solely on the UK delivering institutions of justice for the citizenry in a manner that the ROI does not.

My boundary conservatism point is that, if it’s a toss-up (and it’s far from that at this moment), the status quo is probably more palatable than radical change, for the important pragmatic reason that change can lead the rise of the sorts of atavistic nationalism we’re not fans of. A United Ireland that would radicalise a generation of already-marginalised loyalists when it would not deliver greater justice to anyone else is not one I’m interested in.

Boundary Conservatism: Which brings me to my second point: boundary conservatism. How, I wonder, would a civic-minded person have viewed the last century in Ireland? Here’s my tuppenceworth, borne of my rather unusual set of half-formed opinions on the constitutional course of Irish history in the last century.

As I said above, I think that we – the Irish – left the UK at precisely the wrong moment: the country was on the road to proper democratisation, including the subsequent establishment of a welfare state and the social justice that that brought. To swap a nascent welfare democracy for an impoverished rural entity that was in awe of the Church was lunacy, before even taking into account the fact that the process sowed the seeds of mayhem in the North of the island.

It may seem hard to imagine that a UI could be in anyone’s interests in those circumstances, but the dysfunctional turn the Northern Ireland statelet took after its quasi-secession was a disgrace. As a result, a UI might have been justifiable certainly up until Northern Ireland as an entity collapsed on its own contradictions (so to speak). At least under the assumption that the choice was between Unification and the unjust status quo.

Now, the primary problem with a UI would probably have been that, roughly speaking, Protestantism wouldn’t have had an adequate voice in a United Ireland, so would have been subjected to a sort of informal marginalisation. While I think this can be over-stated, given how large a faction Protestants would have made, it has to have been a valid fear.

Despite this, I believe a UI would have been a better option for much of the history of Northern Ireland, simply because Northern Ireland wasn’t delivering even on formal rights to a substantial number of its citizens, never mind its delivering on informal recognitions. Since the UK and its Stormont branch seemed incapable of delivering, the people were rather justified in seeking out somewhere that would. In these terms, Northern Ireland represented a profound injustice for many of its citizens.

The Good Friday Agreement changed this. I think a UI was preferable to the point where Westminster started trying to sort Northern Ireland out. Fair employment legislation and the reform of government were enormously important junctures in the validity of aspirations for a UI (if you see what I mean).

The current institutions complete that process. In essence, I think the Good Friday Agreement, in guaranteeing justice for all the citizenry of Northern Ireland, despite all its flaws, is an excellent argument against a UI. Why rock the boat when justice is being delivered on both sides of the border? What, beyond a stubborn wish to get one up on your adversaries, are good grounds now for a UI? Certainly there are continuously fewer social justice grounds for the move. The wrongs done to Northern Ireland’s Catholics have been redressed to a large extent. Unless the sort of calculation we discussed above goes the Republic of Ireland’s way, a change in sovereignty, rather than attending to their concerns would only act as an attempt to visit the same injustice on a new group as was visited upon Catholics in 1922.

Of course there’s a profound irony in all of this. Depressing though it is, some sort of crisis was obviously required for Westminster to do the right thing by Northern Ireland’s Catholics. It’s a tragedy that the collapse of Stormont and the rise of the IRA was the form that crisis took. But by (belatedly to a disgraceful extent) fixing the problem, Westminster has removed good reasons for a UI and any validity to the ultimate claims of Irish republicans.

That said, we know what happened when they tried to kill Home Rule with kindness…

 

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1: Or rather, this is a misattribution. See Blaise Pascal's 1656 Letter to the Jesuits: "The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter." (back)

2: As set out by Habermas in many places, including in his 1990 essay 'Citizenship and National Identity,' tacked on to the end of Between Facts and Norms. (back)

Today’s Supreme Court Decision on a lesbian couple, their one year old child and the biological father of that child raises more questions than answers. In their appeal, the respondents sought to overturn the decision of the High Court Judge “…that the balancing exercise should be swung in favour of the child remaining in the jurisdiction, and within proximity of his father for the purpose of developing the relationship between father and child….”

The question is not one of guardianship because under Irish law, an unmarried father has no automatic guardianship rights, although these can be applied for. If the father was aware of this prior to donating his sperm and had any sort of expectation towards seeking guardianship, one would wonder why he decided to do so. One can only assume that this was an altruistic act which was not entirely thought through.

Equally, the decision of the couple to receive sperm from a friend may not have been made with sufficient foresight. A telling phrase in the judgment is that they anticipated that the role of the man towards the child would be that of a “favourite uncle” despite the fact that the child would know that this man was his father. How could this relationship be so clearly defined, at least in words, so early on when it was impossible to anticipate what feelings both man and child might develop towards each other over time? More fool them for thinking that that agreement was viable.

This case highlights the lack of clear legislation for the relatively large numbers of gay partners who decide to have a child but also for men who father children outside marriage in general.

By way of celebrating the Glorious 12^th, what better than a display of virtuoso drumming…

Chekist has had an interesting sequence (also here and here) on civic Unionism over on Three Thousand Verts of Loneliness that was picked up last month by United Irelander (with, for UI, a pretty interesting comments thread) and has timed its latest installment most appropriately for tonight. It's been an interesting series, probably more interesting than UI has allowed, but I do find it somewhat problematic.

On the specific level of the posts, I am suspicious of the robustness of the civic defence of Ulster Unionism. Purely civic philosophies that are attached to place are highly difficult to maintain. A civic philosophy would simply suggest that one ought to lend one's allegiance to be the available state that best meets the values one believes ought to be embodied in a state: democracy, rule of law, civic freedoms (formally and informally) etc. So one can be a Unionist for nothing more than the pragmatic reason that, assuming Paris is too far away, Westminster rule delivers on these norms to a greater degree than Dublin rule does.

The natural difficulty behind this sort of argument is that it is vulnerable to constant demands for a re-evaluation of the merits of both states (a strategy that UI leaps at). The moment Ireland best meets your political norms your allegiances ought to switch.

I sincerely doubt that this is a possibility many Unionists hold to, however. In fact, while it's probably right that the primary reason behind the rise of loyalist culturalism is that it is tracking the success of Irish cultural nationalism, it must also be to do with the fact that the pragmatic economic and social reasons for rejecting Irish unification are becoming ever more difficult for Unionists to sustain.¹

I suspect that allegiances in general are quite a bit stickier than civic patriots let on. States are like families: they have to become highly abusive before we head off to find something better. And sometimes not even then. Though things can get that bad, as evidenced by past Irish emigration and current emigration from Africa's kleptocracies, if we're to explain the general stickiness of people's allegiances, at least in the medium term, we're going to have to turn towards the attractions of deeper nationalisms than the civic tradition is comfortable with.

This places the more civic-minded (as opposed to culturally-minded) in the inenviable position of holding a political philosophy that describes how people ought to be in the world while simultaneously acknowledging that there is little evidence that this is how people can be. Wanting people to be more patriotic and less nationalist is a good thing. It's a huge and generally unpalatable leap, however, from having aspirations for society to devising of programmes that might encourage a shift in prevailing norms. Social engineering never looks very good.

Anyway, back to Ulster Unionism. Chekist wants an inclusive Unionism that is engaged with the rest of the UK. Which is a very good thing to my mind. One ought to actively engage with the state at all levels. But that doesn't really answer the driving question for Northern Ireland – what is Northern Ireland to be? If Unionism was entirely civic, then Unionists would simply shrug their shoulders at the border question, essentially leaving their judgements to an index along which performance on various norms will be measured. The fact that I don't suppose very many people actually do that reveals that, at best, Ulster Unionism is part of an across-the-UK soft British nationalism. More likely, it's very much a local variant on British nationalism. And that Unionism certainly has borders.

Of course, none of this is by way of a defence of Irish nationalism. Quite the contrary. I'm simply making the point that societies have a terrible habit of seeing themselves as being more than the sum of their individual parts. Many nations have argued that their sentiments are different, more rational, but I'm genuinely sorry to say that I know of none where the claim is particularly credible. For the most part, the force of 'shining city on a hill' arguments lie not in the city's merits but in who lays claim to the hill.

 

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1 That said, as the health of the Irish economy and the sanity of Irish society has improved, the argument for a United Ireland has looked ever more incoherent from the southern side of the border.

As I explained last night, I was beset by noisy teenagers on my way down to Dublin yesterday. But it didn't end there. We had an alarm going off all night in one of the flats above and are now being entertained by a bass-laden broadcast from another flat. Don't you just love city living?

My esteemed fellow-blogger has spotted me giggling and rolling my eyes and, fearing that the neighbours might end up wearing her bodhrán as an Elizabethan-style ruff (or maybe she is worried about my imaginative intentions towards her cipín), is taking me off to Wicklow for the weekend.

Adieu.

Well you learn something new every day! I hadn't really thought about it, but didn't realise that there was a controversy over why Ian Paisley left the Orange Order. I think I just presumed that he regarded the order as too soft, or too not-led-by-Paisley, for his tastes.

It seems, however, that this story is a source of some controversy. Cutting through the jibes, there's a fascinating conversation in a comments thread over on Slugger between Michael Shilliday and others as to the roots of the split.

By the way, I'd never actually thought of Orange Arches as being owned, which was a little naive of me. Interesting stuff.

I've said it before (and sadly used my only good relevant story in the process) but anyway: happy July 4th!

As I said before, I miss Frank McGahon's blogging presence. We saw eye-to-eye on enough things to make arguing over the many things we certainly don't agree on very interesting indeed! Anyway, following a statcounter link last week, I discovered that Frank had moved to occasional blogging on a group enterprise called Distributed Republic. And what a good site it is too. Very libertarian, but in a way that a liberal (in the American sense) like myself can really get my teeth into.

Anyway, I inadvertently started a row over there this afternoon in response to this post, which is really a lifting of a rather silly (to my mind) critique of Michael Moore's Sicko. I haven't seen Sicko, but I do take issue with someone, as the commentator did, suggesting that 'When governments attempt to regulate the balance between a limited supply of health care and an unlimited demand for it they're inevitably forced to ration treatment.' Where to start with this nonsense I don't know. I chose to object to the idea that there is a potential for unlimited demand for healthcare, which irks the pedant in me, though I could just as easily narked that markets also ration treatment. They just use price as the mechanism for deciding how treatment ought to be rationed. I prefer a system that uses illness (say, as defined by a triage nurse) as a mechanism for distribution.

Anyway, I wrote a rather tetchy comment and to my surprise provoked a load of responses. To which I responded in turn.

As I write my very long response is in a moderation queue and I don't know if it deserves to come out the other end, but I think the thread is interesting enough already. And if my post does turn up, I'm sure that by the time I wake up tomorrow I'll have been bollocked to high heaven by my interlocutors.

Is it terminally geeky to think that good non-flamey online rows are fun?