Choosing between unions? Unionist opinion and the challenge of brexit

ABSTRACT

Support for Brexit in Northern Ireland has been substantially associated with the unionist community, and has evolved against a backdrop of changing patterns of relationships between Northern Ireland and the United Kingdom, and between Northern Ireland and the Republic. But the shape taken by the Brexit project is such that it also offers an existential threat to the Union. Is the phenomenon of the unionist Brexiteer simply an unexpected conjunctural development, or might it be explained by reference to distinctive features of unionist ideology? This article provides an initial overview of the comparative and historical context in which unionism responded to major political restructuring in the last century. It asks if the very quest to uphold the Union in contentious times leads to strategies that appear to have the opposite effect. It suggests that the phenomenon of the Brexit-supporting unionist may derive from a distinctive strand of Ulster unionist ideology, one which prioritises the symbolic interests of the ‘imagined community’ in Northern Ireland.

KEYWORDS:

• Northern Ireland
• European Union
• Brexit
• nationalism
• unionism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

John Coakley, MRIA, is a professor in the School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics at Queen's University Belfast and a fellow in the Geary Institute for Public Policy at University College Dublin. His research interests include nationalism, ethnic conflict, and Irish and Northern Irish politics.

Notes

1 In response to the question ‘There has always been a lot of controversy about the constitutional position of Northern Ireland. On balance, do you approve or disapprove of it?’, 68% of Protestants approved and 10% disapproved; the corresponding figures for Catholics were 33% and 34%. In an open-ended question ‘What changes, if any, would you like to see concerning the border?’, 19% of Protestants supported its abolition though being vague as to what form this should take, while a further 4% supported Irish unity; the corresponding figures for Catholics were 42% and 14% (Rose, 1971, pp. 189, 213).

2 The standard question in the main survey series, the Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey, was changed slightly in 2007. Up to that year, there were two predefined responses to the question ‘What do you think the long-term policy for Northern Ireland should be?’: ‘Remain part of the United Kingdom’, and ‘Reunify with the rest of Ireland’. In 2007, however, the first of these was divided into two options: ‘Remain part of the United Kingdom with direct rule’, and ‘Remain part of the United Kingdom with devolved government’.

3 Gibraltar’s population (32,000 in 2012) is much smaller than that of Northern Ireland (1.8m in 2011) and is much more homogeneous (with Gibraltarians and ‘other British’ at 92%, and a Spanish minority of only 2%). Representatives of its government were warmly received at the annual conferences of the DUP in 2017 and 2018.

4 Data are based on Eurobarometer trend file, 1970–2002 (numbers for early 2000s too low for statistical significance); available from Central Archive for Empirical Social Research, University of Cologne, study no. 3521; technical details: www.gesis.org/en/za. Northern Ireland is not a full participant in the Eurobarometer survey, but data are collected by oversampling within the UK (normally, N=300). Since, however, the available numbers of cases are very small, they have been grouped into five-year categories (in the Northern Ireland subset, total N = 10,072). The question was ‘Generally speaking, do you think that … membership of the EU is a good thing, a bad thing, or neither good nor bad?’. This question was discontinued in 2011.

5 The People Before Profit Alliance, long hostile to the EU as a capitalist club, supported the ‘leave’ position.

6 Interview with Jackie McDonald in Carruthers, 2013, p. 239.

7 Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey, 2016; see www.ark.ac.uk/nilt/.

8 The ‘ethnic’ and ‘civic’ conceptions of national identity should be seen as ideal types that form the poles in a continuum, and that do not necessarily exist in pure form; most societies contain mixtures of the two types, though one may be more prominent than the other (see Coakley, 2018).

9 In reality, the decline of religion in western Europe has created secular societies, but the historical tradition of several of the core EU member states has been a ‘Catholic’ one (Coakley, 2009).