To examine “post-colonial globalization” in the case of Ireland inevitably
depends on the assumption that Ireland is a post-colonial locale, but strictly speaking, Ireland is not so purely post-colonial. British colonization of Ireland has a long history, generally dating as far back as to the early 16th century, when Henry the Eighth, then King of England, was also announced to be the King of Ireland and inaugurated a series of colonizing acts. There have been many violent revolts organized by Irish Catholics against English Protestants since the 16th century, and as a result, the relationship between Ireland and England is usually understood as “a relationship of the colonized and the colonizer” (Cairns and Richards 1). However, a recent school of Irish historians is skeptical about the postcoloniality in Ireland. Kevin Kenny, for example, argues that Ireland’s participation in British colonialism in Asia and Africa renders Ireland a dual status of both being the “agent” and the “victim” of British colonization (93). Many Irish men serve as soldiers in British colonization of non-European countries, which makes it difficult to discern if Ireland is colonial or post-colonial. The ambivalence of Ireland’s position in post-colonialism is vividly described by Luke Gibbons: “Ireland is a First World country, but with a Third World memory” (3).
Even though Ireland can be recognized as both colonial and post-colonial, there is no denying that the constant conflicts taking place in Northern Ireland are one of the bitter consequences of early British colonization in Ireland. Easter Rising broke out soon after the staging of Yeats’s Cathleen ni Houlihan, an anti-colonizing and nationalistic play that encourages Irishmen to fight for the land stolen away by British strangers, and the period during which Yeats and Maud Gonne were active in Abbey
Theatre becomes the peak of Catholic-Protestant antagonism in the early 20th century.3 After the 1949 independence of the Republic of Ireland in the south, antagonism continued between ascendants of Protestant colonizers and ascendants of the Catholic colonized. From 1969 to the mid-1990s, the period known as “the Troubles,”
paramilitary conflicts, car bombing, terrorist attacks, and street fighting resulted in numerous deaths of citizens in Northern Ireland as well as in England. “Violence,” as Robert J. Young puts it, “has often been characterized as ‘endemic’ to Ireland” (299).
David Lloyd, in his book title, also describes Ireland as “anomalous states.” It is in this history of violence resulting from essentialist nationalism that “post-colonial globalization” arises in Ireland.
With the accumulation of violence and increasing numbers of death, many anti-colonizing nationalists begin to be aware of the fact that, if put in Young’s words,
“the possibility of achieving liberation by military means appeared remote” and thus
“violence versus non-violence – that was the question” (296). In view of the violent conflicts between Catholicism and Protestantism during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, critics begin to urge both sides to think beyond nationalism. Proposing a
“post-nationalist Ireland,” Richard Kearney advocates “post-nationalism” to replace modern nationalism in a post-modern age. In his Post-nationalist Ireland, Kearney cites Jean-Francois Lyotard and views the post-modern as a war on totality and totalitarianism. A post-modern age “puts the modern concept of nation-state into question” and “points toward a decentralizing and disseminating of sovereignty”
(Kearney 61). Because identities can be plural in a post-modern age, the old
antagonistic relationship resulting from monolithic identity of Catholic nationalism or Protestant unionism in Ireland must be reconsidered. For Kearney, “rethinking Ireland and Britain means thinking otherwise” (11, emphasis original), and to think otherwise is to think beyond nationalism, to renounce the “totalizing notions of identity,” to
3 In Yeats’s Cathleen ni Houlihan, the old woman whose land is stolen away is played by Maud Gonne.
replace “absolute sovereignty” with “a community where identity is part of a
permanent process of narrative retelling,” to go “beyond a centralist government,” and to form “a postmodern republic” with the virtue of “inter-dependency” (62-63). Since Catholics are minorities in the North and Protestants are minorities in Ireland as a whole, Kearney recognizes that in Ireland “everyone [is] a minority” threatened by
“the vulnerability of minority population” (77). Kearney’s vision to get out of “the current impasse” in Northern Ireland is that both communities should think not in terms of nation-state but in terms of a “region” in Europe as a whole, re-positioning Northern Ireland “in a set of European contexts, guaranteeing participation and minority rights, economic development and cultural diversity” (89).
Despite the call to embrace “the corresponding right to have one or more
identities of nationality and regionality” in a post-modern age (Kearney 59), Kearney does not argue for the fusion of the two ethnic communities in Ireland. As Kearney himself explains, to critique the nation-state does not mean to repudiate all forms of nationalism (57). What Kearney has in mind is actually the model of European Union, along with its slogan “unity in diversity,” which is hailed by Kearney as “the
European regionalism” (105). The Single European Act in 1988 integrates Ireland and Britain “into a community of almost three hundred million citizens,” and in Kearney’s opinions, this is one of the models to think otherwise (101). Kearney identifies
European regionalism as “a pooling of sovereignties,” in which “European
inter-dependence can only come about through negotiations between regions that are
sufficiently autonomous and free to consent to a sharing of their sovereignties” (105,
emphasis mine). As Kearney puts it more explicitly, “the drift towards a more global understanding of identity calls for a countervailing move to retrieve a sense of local belonging” (102, emphasis original). That is, the constitution of a global world must be based on the prerequisite that every local region is sufficiently autonomous and does not lose its sense of locality, and thus the local will never be absent in the global.Kearney combines the EU mode of Anglo-Irish relationship with an Irish mystic
legend, proffering the renowned propaganda “the Fifth Province: between the local and the global.”4 The Fifth Province, according to Kearney, is “the middle of the world … here and elsewhere,” and to imagine the Fifth Province is “a question of thinking otherwise” (100). The Fifth Province is a “spiritual-cultural unity” rather than a political-governmental one (102), and to seek the Fifth Province is also a quest for “cultural pluralism” and “the affirmation and acceptance of differences” (107).
Instead of encouraging ethnic fusion, Kearney suggests a unity in diversity, or a way that different ethnicities can form a culturally plural world system, in which identities are not mutually exclusive.
If multiculturalism can be defined as “finding a way to preserve discrete ethnic identities while at the same time finding in citizenship a countervailing identity that unites the disparate groups within a polity” (Kivisto 36), Kearney’s philosophical proposal of a post-nationalist Ireland is a demonstration of “post-colonial”
multiculturalism, namely, a multicultural suggestion that tries to unite the disparate groups of Irish Catholics, the colonized, and Protestants, the colonizers, without fusing discrete ethnic identities. The definition of multiculturalism is similar to the root meanings of the term “cosmopolitan,” which derives from cosmos (world) and
polis (city or people) and describes “a (potentially) egalitarian concept of ‘world
citizenship,’ understood as a universal love of humankind as a whole, regardless of nation” (Kuhling and Keohane 62-63). In the trajectory from nationalist topost-nationalist, the “growing disenchantment” of modern nationalism is mainly due to the “rise of a cosmopolitan culture,” namely, the advent of globalization (Smith 132). Because Kearney’s “post-nationalist Ireland” reflects the spirits of
multiculturalism and the influence of a cosmopolitan culture, the proposition of a post-nationalist Ireland can be viewed as one of the consequences of globalization’s impact on a post-colonial nation, termed by James Goodman as the “cosmopolitan
4 Geographically, Ireland has four provinces, but the Gaelic word for province, coiced, also means
“fifth” (Kearney 99).
mode of official nationalism” or “cosmopolitan reconciliation” (90-91). That is, with the advent of globalization, essentialist national ideology gradually gives way to a multicultural, plural, and post-modern understanding about the uncompromising differences within a post-colonial nation, and thus under the influence of
“post-colonial globalization,” the relationship between Catholic nationalists and Protestant unionists is expected to turn over a new leaf.
The RISE of postcolonial multiculturalism in Ireland is a fact that we cannot deny; however, we should not readily jump to the conclusion that the quest for a
“post-nationalist Ireland” has been a success, nor should it be hastily extended into the argument that Ireland now is a fully post-national or a multicultural nation already.
Actually, Irish post-colonial multiculturalism is an ongoing process controversially with both anticipations and suspicions. The philosophical proposal of a
post-nationalist Ireland at times becomes a difficult agenda that vexes the Irish people and it does meet with some obstacles when put into practice. In her “Multiculturalism and Northern Ireland: Making Differences Fruitful,” an essay published in 2001 reviewing the local development of Irish post-colonial multiculturalism in the 1990s, Edna Longley observes “two broad obstacles” of its implementation. For Longley, the first obstacle is that post-colonial multiculturalism often “signifies cultural
co-existence rather than cultural exchange” (6). Proposals of Irish multiculturalism usually claim to ensure the co-existence of Catholics and Protestants idealistically by laws, and as a result “in some circumstances, a minimalist, constitutional
multiculturalism may be enough” (5-6). Irish post-colonial multiculturalism is in its minimalist form because it is easier to be propagated in laws but more difficult to be performed in everyday life. Hence, in some cases, post-colonial multiculturalism results in electoral failures because it is not easy for every Irish civilian to get rid of essentialist identity. For some Irish politicians, multiculturalism is at times not desirable because “to dilute the ethnic essence is to sacrifice electoral asset,” and for the common people, “cultural diversity can be twisted to mean that there is no
difference” (8). The second obstacle Longley observes is that, though constitutionally Irish people try to implement multiculturalism, culturally “both unionism and
nationalism want multiculturalism on their own terms” (8). Citing the opinions from the North and the South as the base of her comparison, Longley notes that, for the North, culture is what must divide Ireland, but for the South, culture is what must integrate Ireland (9).
In Ireland, the changing Catholic-Protestant relationship is mainly a
late-20th-century phenomenon, especially after the accumulation of deaths in post-colonial conflicts. After years of post-colonial conflicts, post-colonial
multiculturalism emerges in Ireland, but simultaneously there exist some suspicions about the quality of its real practices in the Irish daily life. In spite of the suspicions, there is no denying that the mutually antagonistic relationship between colonizers and the colonized is under transformation in the age of “post-colonial globalization,”
when Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants are supposed to incorporate their
differences into a multicultural post-nationalist Ireland with plural and post-modern identities. The rise of Irish post-colonial multiculturalism, along with some of the obstacles it encounters, can be observed in some incidents in Northern Irish politics and literature.