Divided Nations and European Integration

8. The Divided Irish

CHAPTER 8 The Divided Irish Etain Tannam Northern Ireland is now an example of a successful resolution to the problem of divided nations, although disputes continue as to why it has had a successful peace process and a stable political settlement (for example, see Taylor 2009). In this chapter the contribution of European integration to conflict resolution in the region is examined, beginning with a discussion of the partition of Ireland and its consequences. Partition divided not just the Irish national community but also the British national community in Ireland , although the southern segment of the British community subsequently became integrated into Ireland. For this reason the focus here is on the issue of the “divided Irish,” which remains salient and which has been associated with Western Europe’s most violent conflict since World War II. The two segments of the Irish nation have diverged somewhat since partition, largely because of ninety years of living in different states. The subsequent focus here is on Europe’s part in Northern Ireland’s peace process, including its role in improving relations between the United Kingdom, the “host state” of Northern Ireland’s Irish nationalist minority, and the Republic of Ireland, the Irish minority’s “kin-state.” Cooperation between these states is widely seen as crucial to Northern Ireland’s transition from violence to peace, but there is much less consensus on Europe’s influence . European integration in fact played a supportive and positive role, including in promoting minority rights protection in Northern Ireland and in providing institutional models that informed the Good Friday Agreement, but it is difficult to conclude that the European Union’s role was decisive. 252 Chapter 8 Cooperation between the British and Irish states preceded their entry into the European Union (EU) and was also driven by independent imperatives, including the desire to stop violence. The conclusion to be drawn is that the European Union has provided a forum for enhanced functional cooperation between unionist and nationalist political parties in Northern Ireland and between Northern Ireland and Ireland, but that it is difficult to isolate Europe’s independent influence from that of the two sovereign governments, which also backed cooperation. In spite of common arguments that the European single market would promote trade and tourism between the two parts of the island and that European integration would erode nationalist and unionist identities while promoting a European identity, there has to date been no significant change on any of these fronts. From Partition to the Belfast Agreement Historically, political and violent division in Ireland has centered on antagonism between Irish nationalists, who wished to form part of a united and independent Irish state with thirty-two counties, and British nationalists, that is, unionists, whose allegiance was to the United Kingdom. There were two nations on the island as a whole: a majority Irish community descended mainly from the native, Irish-speaking, and Catholic population; and a minority British community descended mainly from the settler, Englishspeaking , and Protestant population. In Ernest Gellner’s (1983) terms, both communities developed as separate national communities during the modern industrial period, although Protestant Ireland was more industrialized than Catholic Ireland. The partition of Ireland by the Government of Ireland Act (1920) and its ratification in the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 (which gave the newly created Northern Ireland the right to opt out of the Irish Free State and to stay within the United Kingdom) reflected an apparent attempt by the British state to relieve the tensions caused by these two irreconcilable nationalist sets of preferences. The unfolding story of the Irish border, according to one view, is largely about the assertion of northern unionist independence from Ireland (Coakley and O’Dowd 2007, 7); according to another, it is the story of Ireland’s increasing separation from the United Kingdom (Kennedy 1988). For unionists, partition was a bulwark against a feared nationalist threat. They sought a six-county Northern Ireland that would remain part of the United Kingdom, Irish 253 rather than a nine-county Ulster, as the historic provincial borders of the island would have implied. If the border had been drawn to separate Ulster from the rest of Ireland, unionists would have had only a slim majority of around 55 percent, whereas the six-county option gave them 65 percent. Even this latter option, however, meant that Northern Ireland started with an uncomfortably large minority, which was to grow significantly...