Fintan O'Toole - Borders and Belonging: British and Irish Identities in a Post-Brexit Era

tonight is a bit of unique event is it's an event that we're doing in partnership with our good friends at the coremedia communities who are taking the unprecedented step of letting someone from my site Queen's University chair this evening's event so Podrick Touma will be your chair for this evening and we're delighted to have him and Fenton here so just to give a bit of a background to both our speakers tonight Podrick needs probably new introduction to most people in the room through some of the great work that it is with the coremedia community but you are aware that Podrick outside of the community does a bit of poetry in a spare time amongst other things and there's a field who didn't piaced here in Belfast and at the end of tonight's proceedings I'm going to ask you all to give a small donation if possible to the quorum in the community which is a very good charity that we'd like to support and recognition of being here tonight our guest this evening again needs no introduction he's an author and a critic a historical writer a political commentator he writes regularly for there's times and the Guardian he is also the Leonard L Miller burg visiting lecturer in Irish letters at that other university that we tried to compete with Princeton and he is received the 80 cross award for his supreme contribution to Irish journalism amongst other many accolades so to chair tonight's proceedings I am delighted to introduce our friend from the quorum in the community particle tumour Thank You Ryan and thank you to all of you for coming the Irish word for border is children and this can be understood as limitation as well as border and we're certainly at a time when what had begun to be taken for granted Dublin London cooperation three government consultations on the future of the Good Friday Agreement public gestures of goodwill and generosity through visits of queens and presidents to each other's jurisdictions those things seem like things of the past the Irish phrase air ska hayla Waris novena is one that we hear often it is in the shelter of each other that the people live is how it's often translated but lurking behind the word in Irish for shelter score here is another meaning of that same word shadow and some of the headlines of the last few years have certainly shown us that we live more in each other's shadow than we had been imagining and not only that we also live in our own shadows the brexit project has opened up parts of the past of all the jurisdictions of Ireland and Britain that need clarity and criticism honesty and cooperation and in order to continue the work of many organisations who were exploring brexit and the contemporary state of British Irish relations were honored tonight to welcome Finn - no - as Ryan was saying he's one of Ireland's leading public intellectuals a leading columnist for the Irish Times contributing regularly to the new New York Review of Books The New Yorker grant The Guardian The Observer and other international publications his books on politics include ship of fools and enough is enough and he's the official biographer of Nobel Prize winning poet Seamus Heaney in the wake of breakfast I began looking for public voices who were speaking since and not sense in the sense that they only spoke to one politic but in the sense that they spoke truth to power were they indeed false binaries were comfortable challenging both Empire and sectarianism and like many I found challenge and sense in the writings of Fenton or to a brief scan of some of his recent headlines is enlightening here's one headline the kind of unity Ireland needs isn't about territory it's about people another the hard-won kinship between Britain and Ireland is threatened by brexit idiocy another why apples low deal low Tac steel is no blueprint for brexit britain another EU backing for Irish unity after brexit is a big deal but it's not a solution another Brett Kavanaugh shows white Irish Catholic is now core of u.s. reactionary politics another why is Ireland unable to solve basic problems another there is nothing undemocratic about voting again and brexit and another national anthem is tone-deaf to a new Ireland this demonstrates the capacity to be exhibiting the muscle of criticism in many directions his writing doesn't fit in easily with voters who only vote in one particular way he doesn't display loyalty to one side at the expense of truth about that same side I lead corrymeela a community who since 1965 have been dedicated to transforming divisions through human encounter we work with about 10,000 people a year to engage in programs that address sectarianism marginalization the legacies of conflict and public theology and in this one always hopes that we're looking for truth and truth is usually inconvenient where one might seek to apportion pure blame one finds complexity and where one might seek to find national or historical innocence one finds complicity and a journalistic ethic like that if internal tool is vital in the unfolding of a sophisticated reconciliation not because it's not critical but because it is urgently so and it's with honor that we've worked with Queens for this event and great thanks to Ryan Feeny and Aileen Cummins and Mars McCartney of the Queen's public engagement unit and pro-vice-chancellor Queens here Richard English as well for Swift and collegial cooperation and so friends a hard may I invite you to join with me in welcoming Fintan O'Toole to address us this evening on the topic of borders and belonging British and Irish identities in a post brexit era [Applause] good evening friends it's absolute delight to be here with you I'm very grateful to you for turning out I know I wouldn't come to hear me and an evening like this so I'm humbled by your presence particularly delighted to be to be back in in Queens and also delighted too that this event is co-sponsored by by Cara Miele one of these at Queen's and Carmilla shares that there they are themselves shared spaces we take for granted that Queens kept open a shared space in this city and in Northern Ireland throughout the very very difficult years of the troubles and that it has remained so ever since and indeed as we've grown in that capacity and Carmilla courses is also a shared space not just physically but also mentally a temp to hold open the space where the kind of honesty that Roderick was talking about is is possible shared space as I think Carmilla has demonstrated isn't just about a kind of happy clappy lovey-dovey idea that we all kind of embrace each other and love each other it's actually about having a civilized context in which we can address the things that divide us and try to find at least a common language in which to articulate who we are where we are indeed it's it's that idea of shared space that I just want to address over the next four hours or so the question I think that haunts all of us at the moment is is shared space possible we're obviously obsessed in particular with the idea of a border and the Rhian position of a border and of course that obsesses us not just because of its potential physical reality but also because of its potential mental resonance as a statement that the island is no longer a shared space but beyond that I think there are other questions of shared space and it's some of those that I want to bring into play as well this evening Alan Foster said on Tuesday that the maintenance of the integrity of the Union is a blood red line and I think the phrase was in poor taste but I think it was also in its own way aleck once it's told us something that kind of overheated language emerges only when people know they are protesting too much we reach for those rhetorical Heights when we know that the ground beneath us is shifting and the reality is that the Lord redline of the Union is actually a very thin red line and that underlying the earthquake that we're all still living through at the moment is the problem of the Union itself and it's a problem that's not going to go away simply by reasserting in ever more profound and potent terms the sacredness of the Union something else has to be addressed so before we talk about the shared space of the island I think we have to address what is not being addressed which is what happens to the idea of the Union itself and and how it is to be understood it's been striking in particularly in recent weeks as the brexit negotiations move towards we hope some kind of point that there's been an opening of this rhetoric of the sacredness of the Union within British conservatism in general and this is almost taken for granted it's the kind of rhetoric that we expect but I want to suggest that it's a it's a rhetoric of deflection and distraction and that it's missing the central point I was actually happening underneath praxis in saying this I'm not I'm not attacking unionism or undermining its legitimacy as a political position either within northern ireland's or more generally I'm not attacking the idea of a British identity I'm simply suggesting that as dong Xiao ping says we must seek truth from facts let's look at what has actually been happening think about how it plays into brexit and think about how brexit in turn has played back into these ideas of identity if we've been standing here five years ago and we were talking about the future of ideas of belonging on these islands we would have been talking mostly about two things we would have been talking about Ireland's and Irish identity and how the Irish question is going to play out over the next 20 years and we would of course also been talking about Scotland and the idea of Scottish identity the rise of Scottish nationalism and where that might eventually lead what we would not have been talking about is in retrospect what we should have been talking about what we should have been paying attention to and I include myself very much in that which is Englishness and English identity perhaps it's inbuilt in unions with a dominant partner that the identity of the minority partners will always be problematized and that the identity of the dominant partner will never be nobody thought about the English and nobody thought about what English think of themselves nobody that is except English themselves silently quietly but in an extraordinary way over a very short period of time there's been a radical seismic shift in the nature of English identity and we have to place this at the center of how we think about Briggs's and what's happening with brexit English identity after all should not be in itself fundamentally surprising to us if you look at history at all a couple of things they're obvious one is that England itself is probably the first functioning nation-state anywhere certainly in Europe it emerges as a political community in certainly by the 14th century it has a centralized governments it has a single vernacular language and it has a defined and stable territory people know what England is this is not true of France for example for you know for a very very long time after that Germany Spain Italy you know most of the major countries of Europe simply do not have this England does and it's accompanied by a very aggressive and South confident and triumphal idea of nationalism and of national identity so one of the questions is then what happens to it why should we be surprised at its reimagines and we should be surprised because I don't know if anybody remember in the 1970s there was a very popular BBC TV series called the the rise and fall of Reginald Perrin the older people here will remember that and Reginald Perrin faked his own death that was the whole point of the story and English identity faked its own death it did so by folding itself into two other large constructs which were interrelated now this is obvious enough stuff I won't I won't labor the points but one of those constructs of course the Union initially across the union with Scotland and very closely interrelated without his the Empire effectively there was a kind of deal it was not a quick deal and it was not an easy to you in fact if you look at historically took the English quite a long time to get over hating the Scots for example as as a key part of their identity England traditionally had two others one was France and the other was Scotland for obvious reasons that France and Scotland were allied through most of the medieval wars against the English why did the English overcome this antipathy and agree to fold themselves into Union because it was a precondition for being able to rule the world you cannot construct a global Empire if you do not control your own home island at the very least if it's if it's not peaceful and if it's not integrated into the Imperial structure of course Ireland always remains problematic in this regard but the construction of the Union over time was sufficiently robust to allow the construction of an empire which of course the English were at the heart but of course also the Scots and the Irish in the wealth so Empire was the payback for the quietude of the English identity and the Union was the form in which that peace was guaranteed it's not therefore surprising in retrospect that if you take away those two things that what had been folded into them would unfold again so if Englishness was folded into Empire and Union well Empire is over and in spite of the fantasies of some of the Praxis here's it's not coming back and therefore because Empire was so interrelated with with the idea Union the Union itself of course has become increasingly problematic two big things of course happened in the 1990s one was the Belfast Good Friday Agreement which explicitly made part of the Union contingent so it said that's yes of course Northern Isles remains part of the Union but only so long as a majority of its people wish it to be there is a kind of withdrawal mental withdrawal at work there I've used to say the future is up to you it's not up to us we don't have a stake in your future and very shortly after of course you've had the establishments of the Scottish Parliament with very significant powers and powers which have grown over time and of course then that leads to a process where I mean Scottish Parliament is acquires a nationalist major nationalist majority and and it leaves it up to the referendum and leads to a growth of the idea of Scotland as a separate political community that's very least and I suppose what none of us thought one of the ways we all get pissed about I should say we all I do anyway most of us get history wrong is you you always think about history in accordance with the action and never in accordance with the reaction to that action what was the reaction to these things going to be in England and the reaction in retrospect is very predictable which is you begin to get an English mental withdrawal from the Union and this is still the great unacknowledged political fact of these islands over in particular the last ten years but it's a process that's been on the go really since the late 1990s with the Belfast agreements of the Scottish Parliament it's an extraordinary process and I think one of the reasons why we it's being ignored very largely by politicians and by journalists is because it's not like what we usually see usually in history of nationalism nationalism arises when you have a political party political movement that is sort of you know driving it you have a media apparatus you have at least some newspapers you know that are part of this Nexus and you have also a strong artistic and cultural element cells right so English nationalism doesn't have a political party other than extreme parties on the far-right racist fringe it has no independent media presence right there's there's no no English newspapers there are English editions of British newspapers and there's no there's no English Robert Burns or WB ace right there's no surrounding cultural hinterland that's seriously engaging with the idea of an English identity and so because you don't have those markers we tend to say well this is not happening it's not real and yet underneath it and this is why we don't recognise it is what's a genuinely organic growth of the idea of England as an autonomous political community the figures of this are really very very stark and really quite remarkable by 2011 which is the last UK census 60% of people in England given asked the question about what is your primary identity say English not British conversely fewer than one-third of people in England in 2011 in the census expressed any British identity at all even as British and English this is an extraordinary breathtaking development and one that almost no attention was paid to now you might say that's just a matter of you know supporting a football team or it's a general sense of identity there's no political meaning and nothing could be further from the truth it has a very specific political meaning at a very specific political identity the first thing that's striking about it is that it is very self-conscious so not only are people in England in a significant majority saying they are English and not British they're also saying in answer to the question there's a question of a consciousness in the future of England surveys that are done in 2020 2011 or 2012 asked them our English people becoming more conscious of their identity and the vast majority because people say yes they are so it's a conscious process it's not something that's just kind of instinctive and it's highly political its politicized it's about who governs England there's a question that's been asked in very large scale surveys since like 1990s and the answer to it is is extraordinarily stark the question is do you think that England should be governed as it is now with laws made in the UK Parliament the most basic simple existential question we know all about it in Northern Ireland who makes your laws who should make your laws what is the lawmaking body for your nationality should England be governed as it is now with laws made in the UK Parliament in 1999 just around the time just after Belfast agreement and the setting up the Scottish Parliament 62% of English people say yes status quo that's fine by 2008 its 51% by 2011 it's 24% and by 2012 it's 21% three-quarters of people in England are saying that the England should not be governed as it is now by law as made in the UK Parliament it's an extraordinary developments particularly since nobody's telling them to think this much right it's not like there's a major campaign going on it's not like there's a major political party that's adopting this position it's not like there's a huge amount of media discussion around this it's it's it's happening organically and therefore is is largely ignored and this is the existential question this is the question of democracy right which is who should make your laws and I would go so far as to say that there is a silence secession of England from the Union going on it's not articulated and I think it's not coherent so I'll come back to that but it's happening it's like you know where we're gonna mark shortly the centenary of the 1919 general election on this island which of course saw Shane win a majority and secede from Westminster this is like a secession without a sheen thing so I'm without without a 1916 rising or without any of that it's it's just happening quietly in the way English people are thinking about themselves and it is the emergence of England in the minds of the majority of English people as a distinct political community why do we not talk about this why do we not see it why is it not articulated one of the reasons and this is where brexit comes in is that if you look at this English identity as its emerging there's a very very strong correlation between us and anti-european sentiment so Marya --ks plis --it in the future of england surveys that were done the two of them published in 2012-2013 making the point that there is not a British anti-european ism there is an English answer Europeans and this will be borne out very much in the present vote why the brexit vote should have been a surprise is itself the surprise when you look at the data when you look at the figures when you look at what's been going on underneath there are two very striking things going on here one of them is that in all of these surveys the English stand out from everybody else in Europe on one question the question is who do you think is most influential in governing your country what institution is most influential right is it local governments is a national government isn't your opinion pretty much all over Europe people out of the European Union people generally say about seven or eight percent of people say the European Union is the most influential thing in governing my country in England it's 31 percent it's vastly out of kilter in Northern Ireland it's seven or eight percent in Scotland at seven or eight percent in England certain one percents right so Englishness is being connected to something around not being governed by who you want to be governed by and I would suggest there's a very large degree of displacements going on here so unhappiness with the structure of the Union is expressing itself as well we can't get out of the Union we don't know how to get out of the Union but we can get out of Europe right and it's it's it's partly connected with this complete misapprehension about the overweening role of the European Union in day-to-day governance of England itself this is this is very striking because it will play out exactly in the Praxis referendum one of things we should say about it is that it's it's it's an invention one of things we've seen happening with English so called URL skepticism not a word I like I think everybody should be sceptical to your opinion and everything else but anti-european sentiments was to give it its proper name one of the striking things about it is it's geographically based it's not just England it's non-metropolitan England so it's the England oddly enough where there are fewest immigrants where there is least multiculturalism and perhaps where there's contact with the idea of a new new kind of way of which is much more open and cosmopolitan it's often regarded as that Bray's often explained in class terms and they're undoubtedly of course there are huge issues around working class resentments deindustrialization all of those kinds of things but it doesn't explain it it doesn't explain why the heartland of brexit is what Anthony Brown calls England with that London it's and it stretches from the stock broker belts in Surrey through the Cotswolds yes up to up to Sunderland up to the posts industrial north but it's just as prevalent in the south as it is anywhere else and this is exactly what you would expect with the nationalist revolution nationalism brings together classes around an idea of national identity good or bad I'm not I'm not you know judging whether this is a good thing or a bad thing but that's that's what it does and this is something you can very much see and this will express itself then in the bracelet pose so it's it's never given a chance to articulate itself what happens when all the data is showing that you have this English silent withdrawal from the Union well three three things happen the first of them is nothing an extraordinary absence of any real responses by political parties by journalists by the media in general by civil society that nobody rushing to say look there's a problem here which needs to be addressed and needs to be addressed in a civilized civic way why because for all sorts of historic reasons English identity is associated with the armory it's associated with football hooliganism is associated with xenophobia and racism in the far-right but none of this is necessarily so there is nothing innately shameful or reactionary or destructive about the idea of an English national political community any more than there is in relation to Scotland or Ireland or Northern Ireland or anywhere else the content that matters not the sense that there is a political community but if you don't give that content some kind of positive force if you don't address it the only outlet product is going to be destructive so that nothing is is a potent nothing and the second thing that happens then is that if you try to keep the lid on something that is as potent as this the lid will blow off and that's brexit once this buildup of a sense that we are not being governed in the way we want to be covered our political community is not being represented all these surveys are showing things like do you think the Westminster Parliament represents English interests no I mean extraordinary stuff when that's building up and you keep the lid on it and you ignore it and you pretend it's not happening it's going to blow and David Cameron in his extraordinary blindness and self-confidence get gave it a form in which the explosion could happen and that form was wrecks it and that's exactly what was represented in brexit there's no question if you look at it g a-- graphically the areas in which the brexit vote is highest correlate exactly to the areas in which people in the previous surveys were most strongly expressing an english-only identity and the British electoral survey all of the big official surveys that has been done since asking voters why how they voted identifies very very very strongly that if you said that your identity was very strongly English you were almost certain to vote for breakfast and if you said otherwise if you said I'm a dentist kind of British in English or kind of British you were almost certain to vote early it's it's a very very strong correlation so that's the second thing happens is the explosion but the third thing that's happened and this is where we are now is putting the lid back on again what's happened since brexit is a complete refusal to acknowledge or address one of the big things it was about which is English identity and it's its discontents and the question then is where this leaves us and how this plays out particularly for us in Ireland and how we need to address this I suppose often what happens when something shocking occurs and particularly with something shocking occurs that is not easily explainable is a resort to magic traditionally magic came out from people you know not being able to explain something that happened and needing an explanation and needing some potent force to rally around which seems to shield you against this great shock this is really what we've seen since then so in the immediate aftermath of Briggs's a lot of people started saying oh god there was all that English stuff that we never paid any attention to and maybe we should start thinking about it now maybe it needs to be addressed maybe there needs to be an honest conversation about what an English political community is and what it looks like and then nothing you go back to step one do nothing ignore us do not articulate it and what you articulate instead is go back to the very thing that the English were seceding from and that fed into their brains vote which is the Union go back to saying the Union is sacred the Union it's not not only now is the Union being validated but it's being fetishized one of these that was happening from the 1990s onwards was that there was the beginning of a recognition that whatever shape the Union had it was not static or stable and and in a sense could not be that that it would have to move in in different directions it would have to at the very least evolve different ways of belonging but what we've seen particularly in conservatism and particularly in the DUP is a response to this shock which simply goes back and pretends that there wasn't the problem in the first place and that we can rally around the blood-red line of the territorial integrity of the Union and that that becomes the fundamental shape of British policy in the brexit negotiations so the blood-red line becomes the only red line of brexit and therefor brags that has to be reverse engineered around this idea that nothing can challenge the territorial integrity of the Union as if the Union were a paragon of integrity as if the Union were actually United when brexit itself of course tells us that there were fundamental clefts within the Union Northern Ireland and Scotland boasted very differently from the way that England's it but also of course very fundamental flats even within Englishness London and Manchester for example of it very differently from the way that that rural and and industrial Rust Belt England if you like voted so you have a very divided unstable difficult Union which is now being fetishized as if it were a eternal truth which cannot be questioned and cannot be in any weight reduced and therefore checking the origin of a cow on a boat in the middle of the Irish Sea becomes an insult to the Union becomes the thing that is threatening the Union and this is a classic piece of displacement the Union is not being undermined by Michel Barnier it's being undermined by John Bull a big big thing that's happening to the Union is the emergence of English identity but because we don't want to deal with that because particularly unionism or Britishness can't deal with that it's displaced onto blaming applause by the Irish governments of the European Union to somehow construct this terrible border in the Irish Sea which will fundamentally undermine the territorial integrity of the Union so I want to then come back to why this does violence to where we have been going or where we might have been going the fundamental problem with this is that it it it's a it's a particularly it's not just that it's a defence of Britishness or a defensive union of the Union both of which as I say are entirely legitimate political constructs and aims it's that it's a fantasy version of what the Union is so any thinking unionist five years ago recognized that the Union is complex ambiguous multiple and changing but in the sort of dream time that breaks it has created the Union has to be imagined as a historic almost out of history it cannot be changed by history cannot be altered it cannot be in any way interfered with even just pragmatically around ideas of customs or some of the regulations of the single market that not a single one of us knows what they are or they'll have absolutely no effect on any of our lives you know but are purely technical things around standards of trade that these will be as I said fetishized as attacks on the Union why because unions now being imagined as if it's some sort of virginal pure untouchable sacred thing and this does violence to to where we are or where we we have been moving one of the ways in which it does violence is it is of course it's it it it contradicts in those fundamental ways the ideas of identity that are at the heart of the Belfast agreement the great radicalism of the Belfast agreement is that it recognized that there is no winner from the zero-sum game of competing national identities that if if that's the question you ask British or Irish unionists turn nationalist then there is no good answer that is not going to do fundamental violence to somebody's sense of themselves and therefore out of all of the pain of the suffering we had to arrive at a different sense of what is what national belonging means and that was a sense that contained three things and contained them in those very simple words it's a birthright of people in Northern Ireland to the Irish or British or both as they may so choose says three things about identity that are very different from this idea of identity as a fixed sacred unchanging thing so what it says is that firstly identity is not necessarily singular it can be multiple secondly that it is a matter of choice it's not a matter of rule of law it's not a matter of inheritance it's a matter of human choice and thirdly implied in it being a matter of choice is that it can change its contingent you know if you can choose to be one thing or the other or both so you can also choose differently in the future and within that formulation there's actually a very radical reimagining of what national identity might be and this one of the aspects of this that's I think generally ignored is the changes to the Irish Constitution in relation to this the referendum on the changing articles two and three to the Irish Constitution was 20 of course morale I think 96% of people voted yes and that's always a worry if 96% of people in Ireland vote for anything things they probably haven't really paid much attention to it and probably didn't think about how extraordinarily radical the shift in the statement of what Irish national identity is that was being made in constitutional terms and this goes back to almost the equivalence of that question I was talking about the wrastling which people who should make your laws well it's not quite deeper than that but it's almost as funds met which is what is your nation you know that question that's asked in by by Mack Morrison Henry the fifth and Shakespeare's Henry the fifth the first Irish man appearing on on the English stage what is my nation and it comes up with an extraordinarily radical answer because what it does is it D Territory Eliza's an idea of national identity the old articles two and three and I won't worry you so much of this but just they were they were classic 19th century statements of what a nation is how it maps onto territory and then makes the kind of irredentist claim which is a bit of our national territory is not included and we want it back classic claim the national territory consists of the whole island of Ireland its islands and territorial seas and then of course with the great sort of doublethink it says pending the reintegration of the national territory and without prejudice to the right of Parliament's and government established by the Constitution to exercise jurisdiction over the whole territory blah blah blah the laws will be the laws of terror right so the national territory the reintegration of the national territory this is the classic definition of how you understand your sense of belonging so there are 71 words in the old articles 2 and 3 and territory or its derivatives are five of them it's really at the heart of this the new article students are the ones that were replaced 20 but we're put into the Constitution 20 years ago replay those other ones it is the entitlement and birthright of every person born in the islands of Ireland which includes its islands and seas to be part of the Irish nation note not juicy we're not claiming your allegiance right it's an entitlement it's a right you know you can choose it that is also the entitlement of all persons other otherwise qualified in accordance with law and then furthermore the Irish nation cherishes its special attention people of Irish ancestry living abroad who share its cultural identity and heritage right so it's kind of saying this is a actually pretty broad thing this is this idea of allegiance this idea of identity and then article 3 extraordinarily drops all the stuff about territory just drops it it appears whoops when it appears in a radically altered context which is the context of shared space it says that it is the firm will of the Irish nation in harmony and friendship to unite all the people who share the territory of the island of Ireland in all the diversity of their identities and traditions multiplicity is built into it it it expresses nationality as a desire not as a fact doesn't say we history has given us this nation and we claim it it says this is a desire to create something and territory instead of being about the reintegration of the national territory is shifted to a desire to unite the people who share the territory fundamentally radically different way of thinking about the relationship between territory and identity as I said I think perhaps if people are known how radical this was it might have been a bit more I would dispute about it because it I don't think there's anything quite like get in the constitution of any other country that I know of now why does this leave us it leaves us with two very different things going on at the same time so on the one side we have slowly evolving idea of identity as being about sharing and as being about the creation and maintenance of a shared space which then says actually how that space is shared is up for negotiation may change in the future but in whatever way it changes it will always have to be shared there can be no winner in this there can be no return to a singular monolithic territorial idea of identity and when people talk about you know a united Ireland for example as a solution to brexit it's all very well but it has to address the fact that the stated wish constitutionally of the Irish nation is for a share territory and not fundamentally for a unified state the unified state is one possible expression of what people sharing and Islands might look like it's not the only one and that itself is qualified it's qualified by the sharing it's qualified by in two ways that it must be brought about in harmony and friendship cannot be coercive and it must still in whatever shape it takes recognize the diversity of identities and traditions so so it can never look like what Britishness is being proposed to look like in the current discourse that's emerging from what British is those look like in the discourse emerging from praxis which is as a single unified uncomplicated simple thing so we have this fundamental tension and we are in a situation where what we have to resist is the loss of that complexity the loss of that commitment to the idea of shared space and one part of this is undoubtedly the debate about the border you know the border can't be ignored in all of this but in a sense the debate about the border is only an expression of the more fundamental question which is what kind of shared spaces exists and will in future exist on these islands what's the shared space of this island and what is the larger shared space between this island and the neighboring islands after brexit these questions cannot be answered by simply going back to a static fantasy version of Britishness whether you are unionists or nationalists you have to recognize that something really fundamental is happening to that idea of Britishness and that praxis is in a large measure and expression of that two important things I think to end with what is that even if you could imagine it even if you could accept practices and say okay it it solves the problem it solves the you know what the current rhetoric is trying to do which is to say yes breaks it may be hugely divisive yes you may have a complete loss of political authority in in Britain the place may have become on governor bill in certain ways but don't worry Britishness will keep us together and we can rally around us it will become this kind of sacred moments of Britishness like Dunkirk for example which was mentioned in the Tory partial conference we will face Bragg's it with Dunkirk Spurs you know or like the Hundred Years War like a shank or something you know I mean this kind of fantasy dreamland kind of versions of precision us so that's one what one way of thinking about it let's even accept that that is feasible in itself which it's not even if it were one of the fundamental points about it is that it does not answer the question it does not answer the English question leaving the EU is a transference and a displacement of the question of English national identity it may well satisfy in some ways the fundamental desire Alvin on happy political community to give somebody a kick but it does not address Englishness in fact as we've seen it's moved in the opposite direction partly because of the very strange way that history works the dup the accident of the DUP gaining the balance of power at Westminster means that a certain version of Britishness which suits the DUP is has been taken back into English political discourse as if it were on problematic but the very thing that calls the earthquake is is not being addressed at all one way to think about president in this regard I think is that an unhappy national identity is like a sore tooth it's a sort your tooth is not the most important part of your body and most of us don't wake up every day thinking about what is my national identity what political community do I belong to you know we think about getting to work and beating their kids and basic stuff like that however if you were really sore - so you can't think about anything else until you deal with it and whether we like it or not an English political community has been formed and it has to be dealt with it's a it's it's there and I've said it is not necessarily toxic or reactionary there is lots of wonderful things about English identity lots of enormous history of egalitarianism and a struggle and a feminism and a socialism and the NHS and of radical thought and you know but will many many aspects of English culture and identity that are much more positive the problem with Bragg's it is it's it's like you've gone to the dentist for your sore tooth and you've had your lungs removed you know a major major operation has been performed under anaesthetic and I think it was performed under anaesthetic and it has left the sore tooth entirely intact so you you you you come out of the operation and you can't breathe and your tooth is still really sore so it has not really fundamentally addressed the issue that lies at the heart of itself and therefore appealing to Britishness even if it were a kind of coherence and even if it could work in the short-term which I don't think it can it's it's not an answer and it's not going to make this fundamental question about the Union go away the question about the Union is what are you what are you united to you know you may have a very very powerful sense of of the Union you may have a very powerful sense of pressure identity but you have to be united to something and the something you are united to is is shifting very very radically and very uneasily and that's going to play out regardless of brings it over quite a long period of time we haven't seen the end of this stirring British identity because the very things that are at the heart of it which is the collapse of Empire the rise of Scottish nationalism they're not going to go away if anything they're going to become even more acute with Briggs's brexit is going to disillusion the English about their place in the world even further you know it holds out some kind of false promise of a resurrection of a world centred on England that's it's not coming back and I think people will realize pretty quickly that it's not coming back when the Nissan Plant pulls out of Sunderland and the devastating kind of consequences that we'll have you realize pretty sharp that you're not at the center of the universe but also the likelihood is that Bragg's will sharpen the divisions within the union itself Scottish nationalism it particularly if it's a hard breakfast is is is is likely to be on the rise again all of those questions are going to return so we're not going to see out of brexit any settlements of the English question it's going to be there and in the meantime the question is does this other precious thing that we've kind of created on this island which is a more complex sense of identity what I think is a 21st century sense of identity which is a sense of identity which accepts those three basic things that identity is multiple that it's a matter of choice and that it's open-ended it can change those things are the things we've been grappling with and moving towards very imperfectly but them I'm not suggesting somehow that you know all of this has been fully rooted in society in Northern Ireland or indeed in the South you know there's still elements of a kind of 19th century nationalism which have never gone away but nevertheless we've made extraordinary progress at least conceptually towards thinking about ourselves in those ways and so the question is do we allow this retreat towards a very static monolithic idea of identity that's coming with Briggs's to fundamentally undermine the different ways in which we've been thinking and thinking about identity on this island and the absolute necessity is that we do not do this and this is why you know the ideas of the border the ideas of trade or customs of regulation are all very well and as we go into the certain easy grizzy of negotiations over the next couple weeks they're going to dominate completely but what we have to keep in sight is that this is actually about something to do with human progress it's actually something to do with the idea that out of extraordinary suffering you know we paid an enormous price to get to the point that we're at we didn't do it because we're better than anybody else maybe because we were worse than everybody else you know because we were locked ourselves into a horrific conflict in which nothing else but very radical thinking could possibly get us out of but if that's the if that was the price that we paid we owe it to ourselves we owe it to the memory of the dead we owe it to our own tangled histories on these islands to hold on and to insist on that notion that you will not take away this idea of shared space which is not to do with simple either or ideas of you're in or you're out what Northern Ireland if it had as it should have a government and a voice should be insisting on is being the Schrodinger's cat of praxis Schrodinger's cat famously is neither alive nor dead there is an opportunity in brexit for Northern Ireland to be thought of as the one place in Europe that can be both inside and outside the European Union and in a sense to fulfill the brexit dream the only place where the brexit dream might actually work is in Northern Ireland have your cake and eat it this is what we should be keeping in mind because that multiplicity is not just a pragmatic thing although pragmatism at this point should not be underestimated as a value it is also a statement about the future of Europe if the European project is to survive if we're not to sink back into the catastrophes from which the European Union was born we need to do what people in Ireland have been gradually managing to do which is hold in their heads at the same time different ideas of belonging to think about belonging as what you can live with rather than what you can die for I think we have been doing that you know I think for all the qualifications all difficulties all the terrible political failures but actually has been happening underneath the surface in on the island and this brings us back finally to the small stuff we've had enough of the epic we've had enough of the great stories of Irishness and Britishness of reformation and and and and counter-reformation of narratives that are deeply moving to the people who who tell the stories and deeply and after noted the people who do not Northern Ireland has something to offer which is smallness and intimacy and the particularity that happens within that intimacy which is when people whether they like it or not have to live together and have to find ways of thinking about their belonging that are as I said multiple contingent on choice and open to change these are small things in the very biggest sense because they project the complexity of individual human reality into the field of politics and to finish John Hewitt slide comes back to me these small rights require smaller stage than the vast forum of the nation's rage the vast forum of one nations rage is where we are all being invited to play out our sense of identity I think we must insist on the integrity of our smaller stage thank you [Applause] [Applause] Fintan thank you very much we're going to have a about 20 minutes of question and answers now before we do that I'm going to tell you that in my office I have a cup which one of my colleagues gave me that says I am silently correcting your grammar and I will not be silently correcting your grammar I will be vocally correcting your grammar if when you're asking you a question there isn't a question mark at the end of one of your sentences so in order to do that I'll be asking you if you can say what your name is and to say my name is and my question is and I'm asking you for your name so I can interrupt you if you're not asking your question so and we have some roving mics and those roving mics have been around you can just indicate with a hand up and you can come speedily to your question hello John thank you very much Fenton for your for your talk my question is that and I think we would all agree that the agreement has opened up these possibilities of a 21st century identity the sad reality is though the institutions are not delivering here we have people in Northern Ireland I mean the same wards that were deprived 20 years it all still the same so how would you respond to that lack of delivery of the peace dividend here which is leaching away any of the enthusiasm that you talked about yeah it's it's it's it's it's a great question and you know we must always accept that identity is not abstract you know it's it's our our identity becomes problematic when it's unfulfilled and when our lives are insecure you know as I said most people don't around thinking about this stuff most of the time most of us try to think about our identity through our kids or through our neighbours or friends or families that's the fundamental of primary identity for most of us and most of us when we think about then where do I belong what are the people I love belong one of the ways what you think about that is where are they going to be in the future and we'll the questions have hangs over not just Ireland and Britain and most of the Western world home is isn't like is my kids future gonna be better than mine is there life country better than mine and the answer for more and more and more people here and and in many parts of England many parts of Ireland many parts of Europe any parts of America is no I don't think so and that that fundamental lack of belief in the future you know is not abstract you know it's it's you're actually thinking about you know people people will do the most extraordinary things they will put up with the most extraordinary awful lives if they think there's hope for the next generation for the people around the people they love you know and we know this working-class people have done this through the generations man and women have always done but if you turn that off if you say actually there's a good chance your kid's life is gonna be worse than yours that the chances you had the health service that might have been there for you the education opportunities that have been there for you the housing that might've been there for you are not going to be there for your kid you know I remember watching a documentary and it wasn't in northern I was in I think Sheffield and they were talking to 17 18 year old boys you know and there was a kid was one the most heartbreaking has ever so they don't there are some questions what would be your dream life you know he thought well he starts I'd love to play football for you know you know and score a goal in the European Cup or whatever he said I'd love to have my father's life I said what was your father like Oh baby his father was like some film star her father worked in a steel plant well his father's working steel plant he was probably thinking this is a horrible life I wish I could do something else you know tough difficult but dignified a sense of purpose a sense of the future being in a union having a paycheck feeling that you were contributing something you know and that your kid's life could be better than yours and when you get into that you're absolutely right of course if that's true of so many communities here and on these islands and elsewhere you know when you get into that that's when things turn toxic you know I I did a talk before I call the sore tooth on the broken umbrella you know and the sore tooth this is kind of set this unsettled sense of identity the broken umbrella is people you know the state should be the umbrella under which you can shelter we all know people aren't stupid they're not naive they know that there is huge global forces that are you know turning their lives upside down and they know they have to face that you know the but but they want an umbrella at least you know and they want a state to be the umbrella and so part of the appeal of nationalism has always been you know this is an umbrella over my head it's something I can shelter under and when the state keeps turning around to you and saying actually the markets gonna deal with all that don't worry you know that we're we're not there to do that for you and if the market isn't interested in you well sorry you know then you get these two things coming together you get the broken umbrella and you get the sore tooth and that's when I think these things really take on this kind of very negative reactionary kind of form and so brexit will not be fixed unless the sore tooth is addressed and it will also not be fixed or less the umbrellas fixed my name's Brian my question is within England and the rise of English identity and nationalism you mentioned that London and Manchester maybe the big metropolitan areas were exceptions how are they going to deal with it inside England yeah thanks referring to a great question again that's what the first thing to say is that that's you know the patterns are very very clear so the you have this kind of the big metropolitan areas voted against praxis and the non-metropolitan areas of England belted for us in huge numbers up to 80% some of them you know very very very heavily so that first of all tells us that in English although it's not it's both an emerging political community with this very strong sense of identity and very fractured you know so it's it's actually very much divided between these two things in terms of identity one of the things that's very obvious is that if you when you ask these questions about Englishness and Britishness the only places in which people still Express a strong British identity is in London Manchester Liverpool so except the bigger more multicultural cities Britishness still has a meaning for a lot of English English people as a as a as a multiple identity in fact you know so it you know it's be fair it's not just about you know Empire and law so that's about actually particularly of course for people of people of color people of ethnic minorities Britishness means something if you if you came to England on a British passport from the old Commonwealth for example British means something to you in a way that maybe Englishness doesn't so that cleavages is is is is very powerfully there I think again this is why brexit is not going to answer any of these questions because it will not be accepted by those communities particularly if it's the kind of hard brexit that that you know did Boris Johnson's and the reason Boggs of this world want the irony is that the the wealthiest parts of England of course are right in London on the southeast that's itself as of course is a huge problem because it's north-south divide but in those areas they voted against practices and they're actually not head up with the big question of not not wanting immigrants you know because they're used to immigration it's part of the way the society is so the whole tone of the thing the whole shape of it the whole way in which it will unfold is almost certainly going to deepen these cleavages so so this again is I think what you'll see is you will see a kind of ramping up of the rhetoric of Britishness and patriotism very interestingly trees they and her in her speech said patriotism not nationalism you know very much about avoiding the question of the English nationalism that's there but the this stuff is not going to go away will it it probably may express itself in in an even deeper cleavage between labor labor England and Tory England possibly will you have a some kind of third force that will emerge Manan tea breaks it's party who knows will you have an English Nationalist Party you know which given that the stuff is not is not it's not being addressed my sense of it is that what has been broken will not be quickly put back together again you know that when the brexit vote happens sure you we all were the same you know five o'clock in the morning or whatever when David timidly announced that brags if it had passed the image that came into my head was slightly odd image of have you ever seen you know that trick that people can do where they pull on a tablecloth and and they can you know if they've also stuff on the table it all stays in a very very neat trick to see but you ever seen somebody slightly drunk doing it and that's kind of the image that occurred to me that that the idea price was you could take out a layer of governance and authority which was the European layer and leave everything else intact and my sense is still that you know if it's a drunk person doing this you you you've successfully pulled out the tablecloth but you've also taken authority with it there is a vacuum of authority and I don't think it's going to be easily recreated people blame Theresa May for being a very weak leader which may or may not be true but but I think anybody in that position would be weak simply because the idea of authority itself has been so fundamentally undermined remember that one of the key aspects of British identity is the sovereignty of Parliament you know historically that's absolutely at the core of what was Bragg's it - it says actually no you know what Parliament isn't sovereign we're gonna do this thing called a referendum which we don't really understand which is not in our Constitution which we don't really know how to do and then we're going to make it sacred we're going to say you can never go back you can never think about that ever again you know it changes everything and you have one shot at it and that's it it's a it fundamentally disturbs even a very basic idea of sovereignty I think and I I just don't think it's going to be easily recouped my name is me my question is you say that for British unis there's a need to know what united states and the Union with respect to UK in your view is there something that fundamentally United Nations across the European Union and if not well discontent you're seeing with in breaks it within England and arise more across the European Union thanks mate great question um so I ran on the French philosopher in the nineteen century said that it a great pamphlet called what is a nation and he basically concluded that a nation is a group of people held together by common misconceptions about their origins and knows lobster of course every nations are sort of fictional constructs you know we we we agree and of course if we don't tell the same story we don't have the same nation and we know this and this island we don't tell the same story so we don't have summation most European countries have of course because their countries complex stories and stories which suppress and forget and huge amounts of an easier an stories that are contested and stories that include and exclude certain people however there are certain things that at least at the moment still more or less hold them together and one of those is a particular memory of the Second World War it's actually still quite powerful you know and it's it's it's we're gonna find out just how powerful it is because it's one of the few bulwarks we now have against fascism to put it bluntly you know is it is a sense that if if you don't hold together with some kind of institutional authority with some kind of soup supranational Authority in the European Union then it's not just that you it's not just a negative that you don't have those things is that you have something else which is the abyss you know that there's a very strong chance of going back to the conditions out of which contemporary Europe came one of the most obvious things about Britain and in particular I would argue but England is that it doesn't have that same memory it has a very DIF memory of the Second World War it's very interesting if you look at the white paper that was published in 1971 on British entry into the European Union it's a very interesting document actually and one of the things it says is we don't share the same conception of the war as there as the rest of Europe but it actually says it very very clearly we think of ourselves as victors we were never invaded we won our myth is a myth of but they don't say the myths of course but I'm saying it that they're myth is a myth of finest hour standing alone being the exception we were the ones who stood out and of course they were not invaded you know that of course they were bombs they suffered enormous ly they showed enormous courage and heroism but they were not invaded and so their experiences wars is very hard very different why are they still going on about John Kirk you know you know right I would get a dominic Rab stand up and say we are a but the Jeremy Hunt trailers that if the European Union continues to insult us like this we will show the don't care experiment what are you going on about you know what why are they so denying about you know about the idea of you know the the conception of the European Union that was at the heart of it was completely continuous with their conception of Nazism you know there is nothing in history I think quite like what happened to the British which is they won a major war I'm really major war I mean one of the existential conflicts of human history they won it and within ten years they were doing worse than the countries they had to faeces there's no other example of that I think anywhere in history that I can think of so the Axis powers Germany Italy and and Japan were all in their resurrection mode by the by the mid 1950s we're beginning to boom they're the industrial revolutions whereas the British economy was stuck Britain was bankrupt and it was losing an empire as well so it's stuck in a sense that we didn't get our just deserts from the war and it's it's not a very it's a very patronizing joke but I think it's true that the English never got over winning the war you know so that's what I'm saying is that there's a there's a different narrative there's a different story of Europe there's a different story of how did we emerge into our current state and that story is undoubtedly fragile in Europe you know there's a generational shift we're seeing the rise again of a kind of artistic rhetoric that would not have been think about in the mainstream 20 years ago because of this memory but it's it is still a kind of substrate it's still there in the groundwater and I think it was never in the same in the same sense there in in England and the problem with English nationalism is because it's very powerful it's very strong it's it's really but it is not articulated so it has no story it has no positive story about itself to tell because nobody's helping it nobody you know because it's not being addressed it's very in articulate don't say that in a patronizing way it just as a kind of factual thing that it's nobody is really engaging with it nobody is saying look at the suffragettes look at George Orwell look at Shakespeare look at Mary Wollstonecraft look at you know the extraordinary things that are implicit in English identity about egalitarianism about you know the rights of women about building some kind of fundamental decency and society you know there's a there is an English identity to be constructed which is democratic and egalitarian and and based on ideas of human dignity but in the absence of a story of an articulation of that I think the only expression it's allowed is a kind of negative expression and again I'm not being caption rising about this because that's exactly what Irish nationalism did for so long right which is if you don't really know who you are the easiest thing to say is well we're not them and that's what essentially what English nationalism was done which is to say well we're not those European Nazis who have been dominating us for for it for for all of this period of time for one final short question and one final short answer I might add to my right hi my name is Alena thank you so much for your marks it's been really fascinating so you talked a lot about nationalism in the nation-state and I was wondering one of the things you didn't discuss is the impact on technology particularly the Internet has as a challenge to the nation-state and I was particularly struck by your discussion of the changes in the Irish Constitution and the D territorial zatia the internet as literally a place less place so do you think in the future that the nation-state is going to survive that's a great question I will try give a short answer I'm very sorry for the length of my these are a big questions so I think all the evidence systems the nation-state is going to survive as a layer of multiple identity so I think if we've learned anything from history a powerful factor we learned nothing from history the only thing other things we've learned is that things don't go away much you know both for good and ill and ideas of belonging I think are sedimentary and almost archaeological you know the layers are always there some layers will come to the top and some will sink down over over long periods of time but I don't think they go away I mean why I think we're still talking about Asian core for example so I think once the nation-state has has been have existed for a significant period it's it's going to be a layer of our of our identity but it's not the only one you're absolutely right about cyberspace we have to be right about the need release did trans national identities multiple identities shifting identities personal identities have changed in really kind of radical ways what we know is that we need to have civilized shared spaces and civilized shared spaces can be created in all sorts of ways but they're precious and they're fragile and just as cyberspace for example can be invaded and has been invaded politically and in all sorts of other ways you know the nation-state of course can be turned into a toxic brand of aggressive nationalism the European Union you know fine as I believe it is can be turned into a sort of technocratic super state idea that's that's very injurious to people's ultimate sense of belonging so they all have the potential to be dangerous and damaging and the struggle that we always face all the time is to keep them open as spaces of civility spaces of detail and the hope is that we're actually very good at this you know when you look at human beings for all the pressures on us to be hateful to go into our boxes and to stay in those boxes we naturally want to complicate our lives we're actually naturally quite comfortable with ambiguity in spite of what politicians and institutions try to make us and the challenge is to make our political institutions look more like us and this is why I think the very small nough southern ireland which has been its terror the intimacy of the terror is also it can be a very important place for Europe the last point I would make is that if there's one good thing that might come out of this is that Europe has been forced to engage with Northern Ireland in a way it has never done before when you hear Barney a and tusk and all I'm saying Ireland first right they actually mean Northern Ireland first for the first time in history Northern Ireland is at the center of major international negotiations that are not about internal arrangements in Northern Ireland are not about the troubles they're actually about what is this place how can it fit in a broader sense of belonging and of institutional structures and the fact that Northern Ireland poses really interesting problems created in the Belfast agreements some very interesting answers the hope is that if we if we can stop being hysterical of a brexit stop looking to it as being solved by blood-red lines and go back to the basics of belonging that this engagement with Northern Ireland might also be very good for Europe in the long term it might help Europe to think about the question that has never answered which is how can you have a European identity international you have to be at the same time well northern says look that's just life having different identities having them in this kind of complex multiple open-ended way it's just the way we're all going to have to learn to live in this 21st century so maybe Northern Ireland which is often seen as being incurring an awful legacy of the past could also be at least conceptually an aperture into the future [Applause] you [Applause]

Channel: Queen's University Belfast

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Length: 85min 42sec (5142 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 08 2019