|
Post by hibernicus on Sept 26, 2012 20:13:47 GMT
The problem with the view that some people are more authentically British/American etc than others is that it relates to the question of what does assimilation mean - how far existing British/Irish/American identity should change to accommodate the new arrivals and how far the new arrivals should be required to assimilate to those already there. (For example, there were a lot of people in nineteenth-century Britain and America who believed that their national and political identity was inextricably bound up with Protestantism as source of their traditional liberties, and that the Celtic Papist hordes arriving in their harbours would never be acceptable until they turned Protestant. Oddly enough, I have come across present-day Catholic New Yorkers and Bostonians who defend their hostility to Mexican immigration by arguing, consciously or unconsciously, that the nineteenth-century nativists who wanted to keep out their ancestors were perfectly correct.) There are other complicating factors relating to the question of shared identity. For example, many of the West Indians who came to Britain in the 1940s and 1950s did so with a strong belief that they were truly British (they were after all British subjects and Protestant Christians) and idealised view of Britain, of which the native population attempted to disabuse them purely because of the colour of their skin. One interesting parallel is that during the Troubles some Unionists tried to argue that Britishness was superior to Irishness because the former is a civic identity based on political allegiance, while the latter being an ethnic nationalism is more restrictive. There is actually some truth in this (which is why, for example, most non-Catholic ethnic minorities in Northern Ireland tend to identify with the Unionist/Protestant rather than the nationalist/Catholic community); the trouble is that it elides the extent to which many Unionists see Britishness not in civic terms but as a cultural-ethnic identity, and do so in terms which the mainland British generally do not share (e.g. emphasis on Protestantism). The displacement of the UUP by the DUP as major unionist party is in some respects a move from Britishness (whether of the civic or exclusivist variety) to a local Ulster Protestant particularism.
|
|
|
Post by hibernicus on Sept 26, 2012 20:15:50 GMT
Here's an interesting thought BTW - the West Indian nurse MAry Seacole is regarded as an example of forgotten black British history and as having been airbrushed out of history in favour of Florence Nightingale, but I suspect that at the time her being a Catholic would have been regarded as somewhat more significant in defining what she was or wasn't. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Seacole
|
|
|
Post by maolsheachlann on Sept 26, 2012 20:29:38 GMT
I guess the real crux of the matter is that every nation is sui generis, and it is perhaps impossible to distill the essential elements of nationhood and nationality from case studies. Often when I find myself thinking of this, I end up wondering if national identity is too narrow a subject and if we should really be pondering local identity-- by "local" I mean spatially defined. The Hobsbawms of this world may argue that nationhood is a historical construct, and they may be right to some extent, but I'm pretty sure that every human being who has ever lived has considered himself or herself to belong to a particular group-- be that a tribe, speech community, ethnicity, region or village.
|
|
|
Post by Young Ireland on Oct 11, 2012 23:31:42 GMT
|
|
|
Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Oct 15, 2012 13:29:57 GMT
|
|
|
Post by hibernicus on Oct 17, 2012 21:15:28 GMT
In response to Youngireland; I agree that 1916 was deeply problematic and that Pearse's version of national-catholicism is seriously flawed, but I would make a couple of points: (1) The view that Ireland was going to get independence anyway with Home Rule doesn't take account of the fact that many people distrusted British willingness to deliver on Home Rule (partly unjustly, at this stage the British saw us as a dreadful nuisance and wanted to get rid of us provided they could be sure we wouldn't then pose a danger to them). (2) It's not really possible to understand the beliefs and actions of the 1916 rebels, and the fact that the majority of Irish nationalists retrospectively endorsed them, without taking into account all the sufferings and humiliations of the nineteenth century. Connolly's Marxism was a reaction to the hideous slums of Dublin, Edinburgh etc of which he had direct personal experience; he may have come up with the wrong answer but this still has to be taken into account, and part of his posthumous attraction was that he addressed an awareness that not everything in the garden was as rosy as official Ireland made out. (3) My big problem with the 1916 cult is that it was often accompanied by valorisation of sacrifice for its own sake (rather than for a specific purpose) and has now morphed into a celebration of political violence as self-empowerment for its own sake. It has become detached from living memory/experience and become a symbol for people who know little of the actual events and people involved. (4) De Valera had his shortcomings but even if you see the regime he presided over as Fantasy Island, he didn't do it on his own - a lot of people bought into it for reasons of their own related to the nature of Irish society at the time. It's never a good idea to pick out a single person and demonise them as the cause of all our woe - they couldn't do it by themselves.
|
|
|
Post by Young Ireland on Oct 17, 2012 22:00:50 GMT
In response to Youngireland; I agree that 1916 was deeply problematic and that Pearse's version of national-catholicism is seriously flawed, but I would make a couple of points: (1) The view that Ireland was going to get independence anyway with Home Rule doesn't take account of the fact that many people distrusted British willingness to deliver on Home Rule (partly unjustly, at this stage the British saw us as a dreadful nuisance and wanted to get rid of us provided they could be sure we wouldn't then pose a danger to them). (2) It's not really possible to understand the beliefs and actions of the 1916 rebels, and the fact that the majority of Irish nationalists retrospectively endorsed them, without taking into account all the sufferings and humiliations of the nineteenth century. Connolly's Marxism was a reaction to the hideous slums of Dublin, Edinburgh etc of which he had direct personal experience; he may have come up with the wrong answer but this still has to be taken into account, and part of his posthumous attraction was that he addressed an awareness that not everything in the garden was as rosy as official Ireland made out. (3) My big problem with the 1916 cult is that it was often accompanied by valorisation of sacrifice for its own sake (rather than for a specific purpose) and has now morphed into a celebration of political violence as self-empowerment for its own sake. It has become detached from living memory/experience and become a symbol for people who know little of the actual events and people involved. (4) De Valera had his shortcomings but even if you see the regime he presided over as Fantasy Island, he didn't do it on his own - a lot of people bought into it for reasons of their own related to the nature of Irish society at the time. It's never a good idea to pick out a single person and demonise them as the cause of all our woe - they couldn't do it by themselves. Hibernicus, Your point is taken about the need to put 1916 into context. I would argue though, that whatever the demerits of Home Rule, that the "Irish Republic" did not have the competent authority necessary to invoke the just war theory. It is far better to be satisfied with your fill and receive it, than to be throwing a tantrum like a toddler just because your mother won't give you more jelly babies, and not getting anything at all. I agree with you that much of Britain's behaviour towards Ireland in the 19th century left a lot to be desired. It is often ignored, however, that though restricted by laissez-faire doctrine, the British did try to alleviate the suffering during the Famine. Queen Victoria famously donated £2000 towards the relief effort. Also, I agree that conditions in the tenements were atrocious, but Pope Leo XIII was not unaware of this, leading to Rerum Novarum. Any attempt to improve conditions should have had this as a basis rather than resorting to extreme Marxism. I don't mean to attack DeValera as a person. I probably should have referred to "DeValereanism". Nevertheless, it must be said that linking Catholicism with an attempt to magically turn back the clock was an absolute disaster. It was completely unnecessary to coerce people into learning a language that was/is of virtually no use outside the Gaeltacht (though I do believe that people have every right to learn Irish if they wish, even to the point of forcing schools to provide teachers for the subject). It was unnecessary to censor any opposition to Irish nationalism (James Dillon got kicked out of FG for merely expressing a dissenting view on neutrality, btw I do think we did the right thing in staying neutral). It was abominable to give the impression that a devout Catholic could support an organisation determined to wage unjust war and murder innocents in the process (an error still very much alive in Catholic circles today). Given that the Church in Ireland was associated with all this via DeValereanism, is it any wonder that mass apostasy ensued in its wake?
|
|
|
Post by hibernicus on Feb 8, 2013 20:05:28 GMT
This thread seems to have languished a bit, so I'll bump it up with a link to a similar thread on Politics.ie, started by an English-born poster of Irish descent and strong links to Ireland. He remarks that the people of the older generation he knew/knows are clearly different from their British contemporaries, whereas the younger generation seem almost indistinguishable in terms of attitudes, pursuits, etc. He suggests that whether or not you like Catholicism, it was the major factor differentiating Ireland and Britain, and its decline means that Ireland has become much more like provincial Britain. www.politics.ie/forum/culture-community/205761-what-left-distinguish-irish-culture-provincial-british-culture.html Two points I can think of: (1) It seems to me pretty incontrovertible that if Ireland had not been predominantly Catholic Irish nationalism would not have been intense enough to produce a separate state. A Protestant Ireland, even if as impoverished as Ireland was in the C19 would probably be a bit more Irish-speaking and would have been dominated by Liberals in the late C19 and Labour in the C20 as an expression of local identity (a la Scotland and Wales) and there would probably have been a nationalist movement, but it's unlikely to have achieved the "critical mass" needed for nationalist as distinct from regionalist politics. Second, much of the particularism of the older generation was related to a deliberate policy of provincialisation - the efforts of earlier nationalists and Catholics, most strongly in the early-to-mid-twentieth centuries, to insulate Ireland from British (and to a lesser extent) American popular culture and to promote distinctively Irish and Catholic local substitutes. My generation (mid-to-late 40s provincials) were still touched by the aftereffects of this policy, despite its collapse from the 60s onwards. (The most lurid British tabloids were not sold outside Dublin until the mid-80s, large areas of the country had no access to non-Irish TV and in some remote regions shops didn't sell the IRISH TIMES, provincial papers were still owned by long-established local families who mostly sold up in the subsequent boom, etc). I remember some of my student contemporaries who were not particularly religious reacting to the tone of the coverage of the first divorce referendum by asking "What's wrong with Ireland being different? Why shouldn't we have an Irish solution if we want it?" That mindset, which in their case was little more than a reflex reaction, has completely disappeared.
|
|
|
Post by maolsheachlann on Feb 8, 2013 20:45:44 GMT
I have spent a lot of time discussing this with various people, and the discussion often seems to boils down to the question; is national identity a kind of historical accident that should be recognized insofar as it exists, but not cultivated, or should it be actively cultivated? I am a partisan of the second view. I suppose the first view would be that of the liberal nationalist, the second that of the conservative nationalist.
By the way, regarding your first point, I recently read it argued (in a booklet called the Great Silence by a fellow called Seán de Fréine, 1978) that the relationship between Irish national identity and Catholicism worked the other way too; that perhaps the main reason Ireland didn't become Protestant after the Reformation was that it was Irish-speaking and that, unlike in other Reformed countries, there was no sudden stream of vernacular religious books in Irish.
|
|
|
Post by assisi on Feb 9, 2013 22:16:17 GMT
You could probably add the term 'economic nationalist', especially from a N.I. viewpoint. This would be a person in the North who would consider themselves Irish but would prefer to stay in the UK because the Health Service is free and the welfare benefits more reliable.
I think the prevailing consumerist view that holds sway in the West is best served by creating a homogenous global market that can be easily targetted en masse. To achieve this entails diminishing customers ties to non-consumerist 'competitors' such as religion and strong national identity.
The large corporations, Hollywood, MacDonalds. Coca Cola etc. appear to emphasise a multculturist image in their advertising , but their tilt is towards a melting pot of nationalities and cultures, not an appreciation of maintaining unique cultures. You can advertise and sell to the melting pot commonality much better than more self contained local and regional cultures or nationalities.
|
|
|
Post by hibernicus on Feb 9, 2013 22:52:37 GMT
There is something in De Freine's claim - the Crown authorities were very reluctant to produce printed books in Irish because they saw it as an obstacle to civilisation - but then again the same was true of Scots Gaelic and Welsh. If there had been a significant body of Irish-speaking Protestants they would have produced their own print culture (and I might add that there were some large-scale attempts at Protestant evangelisation through Irish in the early to mid-C19 with very little result.) De Freine's thesis also doesn't account for the failure to win over much of the Old English population. Other factors would include - much of Ireland remained outside Crown control until the end of the C17, allowing religious orders like the Franciscans (whose role as popular evangelists was absolutely crucial) to survive and regroup - the Catholic hierarchy survived and were able to provide direction and leadership - Irish secular clergy could be trained on the Continent in sufficient numbers to make a difference.
In relation to the first paragraph, it depends what you mean by "not cultivated". I would say it should be cultivated by private citizens if they feel like it but not imposed by the state in the sense of promoting cultural uniformity.
|
|
|
Post by hibernicus on Aug 4, 2013 16:15:09 GMT
This thread has languished quite a bit - perhaps I will stir it up by playing devil's advocate. Quite recently on another Catholic forum I came across an Irish-American opining that the immigration of blacks into Ireland was the result of a "genocidal" plot to destroy "the ancient civilisation" and replace it with "an Africanised hybrid"; that there was a deliberate conspiracy by our governing elites to drive the native Irish to emigrate while "some African is living it up in their place". Leaving aside the deplorable racism of this individual, which is so reminiscent of the things people used to say about Irish immigrants to America, I would note (a) That some Irish commentators (cf Fintan O'Toole, Roddy Doyle) do indeed welcome immigration because they see it as undermining traditional views of Irishness as Catholic and Gaelic/nationalist (b) that emigration from Ireland was chronic long before we had significant immigration, and continued under governments that were about as nationalist and committed to economic autarky as possible. We also have Des Fennell's view that the Irish national project as he sees it has failed and that Ireland has in his opinion become a nullity or even an anti-Ireland. Leaving aside for the moment the question of what one thinks of these views of Irishness, what might be the evidence for such a view. Here are some suggestions: (1) It can be argued that nineteenth and twentieth-century Ireland did not possess an "ancient civilisation". It did possess two things; a folk-culture which contained many ancient/archaic elements (though these had adapted to contemporary conditions more than was realised, and continued to do so from peasant pragmatism), but whose survival was largely due to poverty and provincialism. (An early twentieth-century Gaelic Leaguer, warning against over-idealisation of the Kerry Gaeltacht as a redoubt of conscious Irishness, pointed out that it began where the railway ended and ended where the railway began.) Secondly, it possessed a Catholic-national(ist) project or projects which drew both on the folk-culture and on older images/articulations of what it was to be Catholic (One thing that has struck me recently in my reading is that in a society where large numbers of the professional and clerical classes knew Latin the texts of the early modern period and of the Reformation disputes were immediately accessible in a way that is not the case nowadays except for a small number of specialists, and the horizon of the "usable past" was correspondingly more elongated. The nationalist project(s) were aimed at articulating and developing a way of being Irish that would be compatible with the pressures of modernity, through the creation of a mass popular culture and a professional/administrative class. (The fear that rising nationalists/Catholics would be seduced by the attitudes and habits of the older Anglo-Irish governing class because they were the only model of a governing class available, and because they had the wealth and power, is a recurring theme; part of FIanna Fail's attack on Cumann na nGaedheal in the 1920s was that they were too close to the old masters and were picking up their aristocratic affectations.) In the same way, however much importance we attach to the "devotional revolution" - whether it should be seen as appearing ex nihilo as Emmet Larkin suggests, or built on existing beliefs, it was seen as the legitimate way of developing and giving expression to the existing popular sense of being Catholics. The high-point of this development would be seen as mid-twentieth century Ireland, in which popular culture was dominated by a sense of historic nationalist identity developed in the nineteenth century and popularised through universal education and a popular newspaper press, and by the C19 Catholic revival and its public displays. The idea that every decent-sized town had its own identity bound up with the national struggle, with the local paper (founded in the C19), with a few local business and shopkeeping families, with the confraternity and the parish, (sustained by various types of censorship and exclusion) was pretty much taken for granted. This is the "ancient civilisation" that has broken down, and the devil's advocate would argue that it has been breaking down since the 1950s and 1960s, long before we got significant immigration. I have to go to a social engagement now; I'll try to conclude these reflections some time in the near future.
|
|
|
Post by maolsheachlann on Aug 6, 2013 11:21:13 GMT
I would agree with that analysis. I think Irish national identity has been breaking down since at least the fifies and sixties and the introduction of television, with its glamorisation of sun holidays and rock and roll and cocktail parties etc., would have made that decline inevitable, for all RTÉ's early efforts to be truly Gaelically Gaelic. The nationalist revival was a valiant attempt to preserve and revive a traditional Gaelic culture-- aside from any consideration of how authentic and ancient that culture really was (does it matter?)-- but it required a national solidarity that was doomed to burn itself out, especially since younger generations always tend to spurn the values of their elders.
I agree with Desmond Fennell. Ireland no longer exists. All we have left is comedians and feature writers trying to get mileage out of "eejit" and red lemonade and barmbrack and memories of being taken to Mass as a child. We have a few still-glowing embers of national distinctiveness, but nothing more. Climate and geography and architectural heritage remain, but they are simply backdrop.
As for immigration, I am going to be controversial here and admit that I do not like large-scale immigration. It's certainly not out of a dislike of immigrants, but I can't help but think that it makes old-fashioned ethnocentric national identity impossible. We can no longer talk about "our ancestors" or assume a shared cultural past in terms of history, education, folklore etc. And I remain unconvinced that you can have a national identity not based upon a dominant ethnicity. They seem to have it in America but America is a special case and even there you hear people say, "I'm Irish" or "I'm Polish" or "I'm German".
However, as a Catholic, I believe immigrants are to be welcomed and treated with the same dignity and respect as anybody else. JPII in Evangelium Vitae lists deportation as one of the outrages that are always and everywhere contrary to human dignity. Whenever the Church speaks on immigration, it is to defend the rights of immigrants (as witness Pope Francis's recent comments in the island of Lampedusa). I suppose you could still be "tough on immigration" and an observant Catholic but there is such a thing as "thinking with the Church" and not simply sticking to the letter of dogma. When I find myself disagreeing with the Church, I conclude I am wrong and the Church is right.
In any case, as Hibernicus was saying, I think national identity is a dead dodo even without widespread immigration. Modern communications and the speed of international commerce make it impossible for national cultures to remain vibrant in the developed world, at least. I think there's no use holding onto an old-fashioned idea of national identity (or indeed any idea of national identity worth caring about)-- that game is played out. To the Fintan O'Tooles and Roddy Doyles of this world, it's good riddance. To me, it's rather heart-breaking, but there you go.
"The old order changeth, yielding place to new, And God fulfils himself in many ways Lest one good custom should corrupt the world"-- Tennyson.
|
|
|
Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Aug 6, 2013 14:48:25 GMT
I was looking at this again today. I think that globalism is a problem that needs to be addressed and this is part of what Desmond Fennell is railing against in "The Third Stroke Did It". The marketing of brands such as Coca Cola, McDonald's and the like is the consumerist aspect to the phenonomen. I regular laugh at the aging hippie who is totally opposed to US influence, yet habitually goes around in denims.
I mentioned the NYT/Guardian axis, but as Hibernicus points out, this is true of the EU. One way of looking at the outcome of WW2 is to see the defeat of nation states (Germany, Italy, Japan, and if the truth be told, Britain and France) by transnational entities (the USA and the USSR). Maybe this is the foundation. Then the nationalist set up which the victorious allies imposed on Europe in 1918 set the world up for this (and the set up of the Northern Ireland state in 1921 seems to have employed similar reasoning to the creation of states such as Czechoslovakia and Yougoslavia).
Nationalist Ireland has suffered in two respects: the fall out of the Second Vatican Council on religious identity and the reaction to the Northern Ireland troubles on political/cultural identity. Previous responses left a lot to be desired (Fennell's response is an example), but at the moment, there is no response. I am not sure it is any better.
|
|
|
Post by hibernicus on Aug 6, 2013 21:06:58 GMT
One area that might be worth discussing is whether Mazzini and Douglas Hyde were right after all, albeit in the long term - that while the Irish language might not have been necessary for the creation of a national identity it would have been necessary to revive it on a much larger scale in order to sustain one which is really distinct from the cultural pull of Anglo-America. That doesn't mean an Irish-speaking Ireland would have had no such influence - the major European nations have all been heavily influenced by American-style consumer culture, even the French who see themselves as exceptional have a love-hate relationship with it - but a separate language would have been a clearer marker of differentiation. In relation to Alasdair's point about WW2 as the defeat of nation-states by transnational entities; it might be borne in mind that both Britain and France were imperial powers who saw themselves as incarnating universal values, rather than nation-states pure and simple. (But of course those universal values turned out on closer inspection to have distinct national inflections, as the Indians who absorbed the English curriculum on the basis that it would make them equal to the English - as Macaulay claimed when he persuaded the Indian administration to base its curriculum on English rather than Oriental languages - found out when the English jeered at them as "babus", and Kipling portrayed them as the monkeys in THE JUNGLE BOOK who think knowledge of fire will make them human. Similarly, a lot of the dotty/sinister French cultural theory that was inflicted on us at university derives in part from an attempt by left-wing French intellectuals to dismantle the claim of Frenchness to incarnate universal values, because that claim seemed to lead in practice to Dien Bien Phu and Algeria.) This sense of universalism faded for the British as they turned away from empire, and as they came more under American cultural influence. (There is actually an interesting crossover between sections of the British left and right of resenting the Americans as jumped-up yahoos who have debased Britain, and feeling that the Russians might actually be more civilised, or at least have more in common with the British imperial and post-imperial experience.) The French have retained more of it, though I believe now they talk more in terms of France as an exception rather than an alternative model. The big difference with the Germans and Japanese of the World War II era might be that they were much more openly based on ethnic nationalism - the idea that some nations/cultures/races were inherently and unalterably superior than their rivals. (Or, if you want to be more cynical, that they elevated into a really horrifying principle what their opponents did, less systematically, in practice.) Certainly a lot of post-war, especially post-sixties, political theorising is on the lines of "civic nationalism good, ethnic nationalism bad". The classic defence of ethnic nationalism is that it should really be based on a Herderian live and let live policy, of many little nations coexisting in harmony: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Gottfried_Herder Chesterton BTW can be seen as an example of this; he was certainly in a Little England tradition which criticised empire on the grounds that it produces a "blowback" which corrupts and undermines the metropolitan power itself. This has its attractions in theory, but its big problems are that there is always a temptation to see your nation as "special" and incomplete, and needing what others have (that coalfield or harbour just over the border, say) if it is to accomplish its true mission, that really autarkic nations tend to be poorer than their inhabitants will tolerate, that ethnic boundaries are blurred (I have a good deal of sympathy - considering what happened next- for those hapless Silesians of 1900 who, under violent pressure from the Polish endeks to declare themselves Poles and the German artamanen to be true Germans, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artaman_Leagueen.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Democracy maintained that they were Silesians who had more in common with other Silesians of different ethnicities than with outsiders) - in short, that it's really not possible to separate nation-states into neat little boxes. Indeed, I believe there are scholars which argue that European integration post-1945 should be seen as a rescue of the nation-state - that the nation-state concept is really only workable within the Euro-framework (the alternative being either naked domination by the strongest power or renewed conflict). Perhaps we approach this from the wrong end in seeing the nation-state as the fundamental unit. What if the real unit is a civilisation, and an international framework (cultural, political or whatever) is not an optional add-on but a necessity, so the question should be how the different units/nations can exist/develop within such a framework
|
|