ABSTRACT
This article considers unionism as a set of ideas that informs political movements, situating it theoretically within the broader field of territorial politics, showing the dimensions on which it converges with or diverges from nationalism, outlining a preliminary typology of unionisms and showing the limits on the capacity of each type to respond to challenge and conflict. It shows the relevance of this for study of contemporary unionism in Northern Ireland.
Acknowledgements
Acknowledgements to Michael Keating and the participants at the panels on unionisms at the PSAI conference, Limerick, October 2018, and at the CES conference, Madrid, June 2018, and to Dawn Walsh, Michael Keating and John McGarry for very valuable comments.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes on contributor
Jennifer Todd is a Fellow, Geary Institute, UCD, Research Director, Institute for British Irish Studies, UCD and Professor Emeritus, School of Politics and International Relations, UCD. Her most recent books are Identity Change after Conflict: Ethnicity Boundaries and Belonging in the Two Irelands (Palgrave, 2018) and with J. Coakley, Negotiating a Settlement in Northern Ireland (Oxford UP, 2020).
Notes
1 ‘Unions’, in this broad sense, include those states where self-identified distinct peoples have local and/or non-territorial autonomy (Coakley, Citation2017). The many consociational polities are ‘unions’ as thus understood. This broad definition allows us to explore the cultural logics in common across these cases.
2 Rokkan and Urwin (Citation1982) coined the term ‘union state’ as distinct from nation-state, and the concept was later developed by Keating who has recently refocussed attention from federations to the broader concept of ‘unions’ (Citation2013, Citation2018). In this understanding, not all political federations are unions (even if the United States is said to be composed of separate peoples, they are no longer territorially distinct and the complex federal machinery does not empower them), and not all unions are federations.
3 This allows the possibility that Northern Ireland after Brexit may be subject at once to British sovereignty within the asymmetric union of the UK, and to the rules of the EU single market and customs union.
4 For example, contemporary typologies emphasise interrelations of ethnic commonality, cultural features, civic values, and state-belonging in different types of nationalism (variously Bonikowski, Citation2017; Brubaker, Citation1996; Hutchinson, Citation2005; Keating, Citation2001; Pehrson, Citation2019; Wimmer, Citation2002), and the conventional grammars by which they are interrelated (variously Hutchinson, Citation2005; Todd, Citation2018, 71–95; Wodak, de Cillia, Reisigl, & Liebhart, Citation1999).
5 To use Honohan’s (Citation2001) metaphor of citizenship, the members of a union may be as colleagues shaped by their interaction, rather than as friends or family shaped also by affection.
6 See variously Bulpitt, Citation1983; Keating, Citation2001, Citation2018; Kidd, Citation2008; Nicolaidis, Citation2013, Citation2017; Rose, Citation1982. On Northern Ireland, see Aughey, Citation1989; Bew, Gibbon, and Patterson, Citation1979; Hennessey et al., Citation2019; Jackson, Citation1989; McAuley, Citation2010, Citation2016; Miller, Citation1978; Mulholland, Citation2000; Todd, Citation1987, Citation1993; Tonge et al., Citation2014; Walker, Citation2004; Wright, Citation1973.
7 Historically embedded complex states are meaning-laden and open to different readings. Thus even the relatively centralized French republic can be seen as a military-administrative complex imposing itself on a conglomerate of disparate territories and peoples under a unifying political myth (as radicals like Lafont, Citation1967 have argued), and should this ever become a widespread perception the nation dissolves into a political union whose very legitimacy comes into question.
8 Of course, some institutional configurations make unionist readings more plausible than do others. The lean but strong British state historically allowed separate institutions, cultural norms and different laws in each of its parts, and thus it is easily seen as the political expression of a ‘union’ of separate territories; but the United Kingdom also developed nation-state characteristics that waxed and waned at different historical periods so that it often also made sense to speak of a British nation and indeed many nationally-oriented Scots did so (Kidd, Citation2008; Robbins, Citation1989).
9 See variously Honohan, Citation2002; Miller, Citation1995. On some analyses the nation-state itself may be a form of union constituted by a cultural compromise amongst multiple peoples who retain ethnic distinction within the state (Wimmer, Citation2002, pp. 26–34).
10 This is as much the ‘invention of tradition’ as is any national myth of origin. For a critique of this myth along the lines of contemporary critiques of nationalist myth, see Nairn (Citation1988).
11 Nationalists, in contrast, prioritise peoplehood over polity (BAC, BCA, CBA) and often, if not always, singularity of culture and peoplehood.
13 Laffan (Citation2019), shows that ‘unity’ and ‘principle’ (indicative of project unionism) predominated as themes in the EU’s response to Brexit, while both its procedure and its practice emphasized the interests of the members (constructive unionism).
14 Bulpitt (Citation1983) gives a classic analysis of this mindset from an Anglo-centric perspective. McCrudden (Citation2015) shows the 19th century constitutional spectrum as expressed by Bryce and by Dicey.
15 The English, as Kumar (Citation2003) has argued, had an underdeveloped nationalism as is functional for empires. Similarly the Russians (Csergõ & Goldgeier, Citation2013) were under-stated nationalists in the USSR, and the Ottomans hardly nationalist at all (Braude, Citation2013).
16 Graham Walker finds only a few cases, even in the more liberal 1950s and 1960s, when constructive unionist positions were voiced, and at least until the late 1960s, none where they won (see Walker, Citation2004, p. 148).
18 Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization – Democratic Party for Macedonian National Unity.
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