If the cause in question in Ulster is the defense of the Union, then it is a cause that moves few British hearts. Yet this is paradoxical. British nationalism has always been of the civic variety: an attachment to the institutions of a state— Crown, Parliament, rule of law, the Union itself—rather than to a nation. Yet like Canada, India, Belgium, and other multi-ethnic states, it is discovering that attachment to the state may prove weaker than commitment to the nations that comprise it. The Union, after all, is a constitutional contrivance, and who can feel deep emotion about constitutional contrivances?
Ethnic nationalism attaches itself to the defense of a tradition and way of life, and all of this could survive a redrawing of the Union. The British could cede Northern Ireland and few on the mainland would feel the sting of shame or the twist of remorse. Whether they should do so is another matter. But what exactly does this tell us about Britain—that it has lost the nationalist impulses which might once have rallied to Ulster’s defense, or that it never had them in the first place?
THE ENGLISH HAVE always made the comparison between their own tolerant moderation and the nationalist delusions of other peoples a touchstone of their identity. Living on an island, having exercised imperial authority over more excitable peoples, priding themselves on possessing the oldest continuous nation-state in existence, the English have a sense of a unique dispensation from nationalist fervor. An ironic, self-deprecating national character that still prizes the emotional reserve of its officer class approves of itself for declining the strong drink of nationalist passion.
Hugh Seton-Watson, a great English historian of Eastern European nationalism, was convinced that there was no such beast on his own soil. A people who have never been conquered, invaded, or ruled by others, he believed, could not be nationalistic. “English nationalism never existed, since there was no need for either a doctrine or an independence struggle.” A Scottish nationalism perhaps, a Welsh nationalism, too, but never an English nationalism.
After 1707, and the Union of the Scottish and English Crowns, a British national identity was forged which allowed the British to develop their unique double affiliation—to their nations of origin, and to the nation-state and empire. As the original multi-ethnic, multinational state, Britain was perhaps the first country where patriotism was directed to the imperial state, not to the nations that comprised it. In its imperial heyday, British civic nationalism focused on the image of Britannia, ruler of the seas.
Imperialism was the form and expression of such British nationalism as there has been, and Britain’s colonial peoples were never in much doubt about the incorrigible self-regard of their masters. Yet the masters themselves believed that their patriotism was by its nature different from the nationalism of other peoples. This view of nationalism as an illness that infected only foreigners provided a rationale for centuries of British imperial rule. Bringing the lesser breeds within the law meant freeing them from lesser tribal fanaticisms and teaching them the civil temper of the English race. Even when it proved that colonialism, far from extinguishing ethnic loyalties, actually helped to solidify them into nationalist consciousness, the British believed themselves confirmed as a people raised “above” the tribal emotions of others. Hadn’t they acquired the Empire, according to a celebrated phrase, “in a fit of absence of mind,” and didn’t they relinquish it with a degree of dispatch which proved that they were free of grasping nationalist ambition? Imperialism may have been the face of Britishness for two centuries, but by its own reckoning, imperialism was a unique form of disinterestedness, a “burden” diligently borne and willingly renounced.
As the British adjusted to a new post-imperial era of genteel relative decline, they could find reasons to praise themselves for being immune to the lure of the kitsch of national self-regard. The stridently patriotic self-confidence of the Americans served as a perfect foil for the elaboration of a post-imperial national identity that regarded any form of British national self-regard as a comic turn.
The Cold War also acted to repress national self-definition, not just in Britain, but across Europe. The normal national self-assertiveness and competitiveness of the Western European states were suspended for fifty years by the agreed necessity to present a united front against the Soviet threat.
At the same time, the relative prosperity of the 1950s and 1960s eroded British provincialism and began to weaken the British confidence in the charming and incorrigible distinctiveness of their way of life. A new black and Asian population arrived whose simple presence began to expose how very white and imperial were the symbols of collective belonging. The old national rituals began playing to a new audience; and in the process both the audience and the spectacle had to change. Even the monarchy ceased to be specifically British: it became the fairy-tale family romance for the entire planet.
Out of decolonization, immigration, and genteel economic decline there emerged a new style of national identification which enjoyed and celebrated Britain precisely because it was essentially post-nationalist, because the demands it placed upon individuals were mild and fluid enough to enable each to be as British as he pleased.
I arrived in Britain from Canada in 1978. I rather liked Britain in supposed decline. It was relatively free of the provincialism of those nations which take themselves to be the center of the world. It was less self-important than the United States; less complacent than West Germany; less self-enclosed than France. It was in trouble, and that made it an interesting place to live.
I both disliked and disbelieved the ambient rhetoric of national decline. It struck me mostly as a suppressed form of imperial nostalgia. Almost everything that was taken as a symptom of decline and decay—loss of Empire; a new African, Asian, and Caribbean population; traumatic economic restructuring—seemed a sign of health to me. Postwar Britain had been forced to change as radically as any society in Europe, and it had done so without falling apart, without ceasing to function as some kind of liberal democracy.
But as I have lived here longer, I have come to see that the space for a multicultural, multiracial, post-national cosmopolitanism in Britain was much narrower than I had supposed. Those who speak on behalf of that kind of identity remain locked in a battle of ideas with those who still imagine a Britain on its own, safe from the incursions of Europe, defined by its monarchy and the sovereignty of its Parliament. This is the cause at the heart of the thirty-year war over Britain’s place in Europe, and only a fool would suppose that history is on the side of the cosmopolitans.
The depth of the resistance to Europe led me to suspect that I had been taken in by the British image of themselves as beyond the lower nationalist emotions of the Continentals. This is just another of Britain’s stylish affectations. In reality, the British are among the most fiercely nationalistic of all peoples. Indeed modern nationalism is an English invention.
The very idea of the “nation” acquired its modern meaning during the Protestant Reformation in England. In the 1530s, the Tudor state, under Henry VIII, led a nationalist revolt in the name of “the English nation” against the Papacy and the Catholic Church. At the same time, the Tudor state initiated the conquest of Catholic Ireland. From the very outset of its nationhood, Englishness was defined antagonistically as the creed of an Anglo-Saxon Protestant nation locked in a battle with continental Europe, the Papacy, and the Catholic Irish. From the Marian persecutions of the 1550s, through the Spanish Armada of 1588, to the execution of Charles I in the Civil War, the English nation defined itself against Catholic invaders from abroad and Catholic despots at home.
One of the turning points in the formation of English identity occurred when the Catholic King James II ascended the throne in 1685 and set about challenging the authority of Parliament and persecuting the Protestant faith. A national rising in 1688 appealed for deliverance to the Dutch ruler, William of Orange, who arrived in England, put James to flight, and established both the sovereignty of Parliament and the supremacy of the Protestant religion.
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James retreated to his Catholic domains in Ireland and began reconquering it as a prelude to an invasion of Britain. At the same time his ally and patron, Louis XIV of France, invaded Protestant Holland. The fate of Protestant Europe hung in the balance. All of Ireland was soon in James’s hands, except the Protestant north. In 1689, the Jacobite armies laid siege to Londonderry, and for 105 days it held out, giving time for William of Orange to disembark and commence the reconquest of Ireland. In June 1690, William of Orange himself came ashore at Carrickfergus. At the Battle of the Boyne, fought on July 12, 1690, he decisively defeated the Catholic pretender.
William of Orange’s victory has entered British myth as the Glorious Revolution, inaugurating the imperial high noon of parliamentary sovereignty, religious toleration, and constitutional monarchy. In Ulster, William’s triumph became a founding myth of ethnic superiority. For Ulstermen, the Battle of the Boyne is exactly what the Battle of Kosovo is for the Serbs—the moment when a small people, in battle with mortal foes, defended Christendom for all of Europe. (While the Protestants won at the Boyne, and the Serbs lost at Kosovo, both cultures came to see themselves as heroic and misunderstood defenders of the faith.) The Ulstermen’s reward, as they saw it, was permanent ascendancy over the Catholic Irish, whom they now conceived, once and forever, as potential rebels against the British Crown.
From 1688 until 1912 at least, the Ulster Protestants believed that their founding myth was also the founding myth of the British state—defeat of King James guaranteed a Protestant ascendancy in Ireland and constitutional monarchy in Britain. Yet this was not to be. Ireland proved to be the great failure of British state and nation building. The Protestantism at the very heart of the British identity made it impossible to assimilate successfully the Catholic Irish into the Union. When, in 1912, the British conceded Irish Home Rule, Ulstermen, led by Sir Edward Carson, rose in fury to resist, believing that the most loyal of all the Crown’s subjects had been rewarded with a betrayal of the essential element of Britishness itself, its Protestant core.
The inability of the British to think of Ulster as an essential part of Britain has much to do with British awareness that their nation building met its greatest failure in Ireland. The Troubles have reinforced in the British mind the conviction that Ulster is, after all, paradoxically and impenetrably Other, i.e., Irish.
Since Irish independence in 1920, Catholic Ireland has ceased to be one of the mirrors in which the British define who they are. Ireland and Britain are no longer brother enemies. Protestantism, once the very touchstone of what differentiated Britain both from Ireland and from Catholic Europe, is now a vestigial element of self-definition in a secularized country in which only 15 percent of the population define themselves as regular church attenders. Not so in Protestant Ulster, where 65 percent of the population attend services on Sunday. They, alone of the British people, remain face-to-face with the Other which has defined Britishness for centuries. No wonder theirs is the fiercest British nationalism on these islands; no wonder to visit Ulster is to travel down through the layers of historical time that separate mainland Britain from a Britishness that once was its own.
TOMMY DOYLE
It is old but it is beautiful, and its colours they are fine
It was worn at Derry Aughrim, Enniskillen and the Boyne
My father wore it when a youth in the bygone days of yore;
So on the Twelfth I always wear the Sash my father wore.
Tommy Doyle is wearing his Orangeman’s sash and he is pacing to and fro in front of the Cenotaph, waiting for the Somme memorial service to begin. The Belfast Cenotaph, Tommy tells me, was the very first one erected in the Empire after the Great War. It is in the shadow of Belfast City Hall, a great imperial building itself, erected when Belfast was the linen and shipbuilding capital of the British Empire. Next to the Cenotaph is a statue of the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, Governor-General of Canada, Viceroy of India, complete with twin statues of a turbaned Sikh and a Canadian fur trapper, their heads bowed in mourning for an Ulsterman proud, so the inscription reads, to be remembered as a “great Irishman.”
Tommy, a trim seventy-four-year-old with bright blue eyes, belongs to the post-partition, post-imperial era, when no Ulsterman would think of defining himself as an Irishman. Tommy is reputable Loyalism personified: deputy Grand Master of Ireland, Lodge Master of No. 2 Belfast district; a devout churchman and teetotaler. He worked all his life behind the counter of a wholesale ironmonger, but it is Orangeism, not his work, that has been his life. There is not a fanatical bone in Tommy’s body. He practices what his order preaches, which is to hate the sins of Romanism, but not the poor deluded Catholic sinner.
When a “wee brown packet” arrived through his letter box, one morning in 1977, Tommy thought at first it might be a letter bomb. But after he had gingerly sliced open the seal and checked for suspicious-looking wires inside, a nice letter from Her Majesty the Queen came sliding out, together with a shiny silver Jubilee medal, which he wears on ceremonial occasions, pinned to his Orange sash.
Tommy is also wearing his Sir Edward Carson tie, with “No Surrender” inscribed upon it. Sir Edward helped to mobilize and arm the paramilitaries of his day, the Ulster Volunteer Force, which was raised in 1912 to defend Ulster against Home Rule. When war was declared against Germany, this force volunteered to defend the Empire, and they went off to die at the Somme as the 36th Ulster Division. In two days of battle, in July 1916, 5,500 men of the Ulster Division were killed or wounded. What Gallipoli was for the Australians, Vimy Ridge for the Canadians, the Somme was for Ulster. But while the blood sacrifice of Gallipoli and Vimy completed the national emancipation of two young colonial dominions, the Somme myth locked Ulster into the stasis of its basic myth of loyalism betrayed. For the returning Ulster Volunteer Force had their devotion rewarded, four years after the Somme, with partition and the emergence of the Irish Free State.
All the bitter ambivalence in Ulster Loyalism is encapsulated in this story of the Ulster Volunteers: a paramilitary unit, raised to fight the British over Home Rule, fought and died to defend the Empire at the Somme, only to lose Ireland with partition. In the 1960s, the Ulster paramilitary tradition revived, and took the old name to fight British betrayal once again.
Tommy’s remaining cause in life is to build a memorial in France to the Ulster Orangemen who died in July 1916. He has the monument already designed, and paid for by Orange Lodges around the world, and soon he will travel out to a field near Thiepval Wood, in northern France, and see his dream realized. He grew up in working-class Belfast streets where every third or fourth house held the memory of a son or a husband who never came back. Tears come into his eyes when he tells about the sixteen-year-old lads found dead on the battlefield with birth certificates that faked their age to make them eligible for service. He seems truly haunted by this lost generation, and if there is any bitterness in an otherwise sunny temperament it is in the suspicion that the British don’t remember them half so tenaciously as he does.
But he brightens when he hears the pipe and drum bands coming up the avenue and he sees his brethren from the lodges in the city marching toward the Cenotaph, with their bowler hats, their white ornamental cuffs on their serge suits, some carrying rolled umbrellas, others a sword, still others bearing the colors—the Union Jack and the Ulster Flag, with its bloody Red Hand in the midst of Saint Patrick’s Cross. Wreaths are laid, the “Last Post” is sounded, the colors are lowered, and a hundred aging, worried-looking men sing in quavering voices Ulster’s hymn, “O God, Our Help in Ages Past.”
When the Orange bands have marched away, Tommy takes me up to the central Orange Lodge, built in 1883, as it says on the pediment, directly below the twin Union Jacks and the statue of William of Orange on a rearing horse. The front façade is covered with steel mesh, spattered with white paint from a paint bomb hurled from a passing car a few nights before. The lodge is a faded bunker of Britishness, dark as a tomb, because the windows h
ave been sealed with steel antiblast shutters. “We need to spend some money on this place,” Tommy admits, surveying the faded brocade wallpaper, peeling at the top, the dusty portraits of lodge masters past and present, the discolored mezzotints of Queen Elizabeth, circa 1953, the brass plaques in memory of Orangemen “killed by enemies of Ulster.” Tommy takes me to the inner sanctum, the council chamber, where from the carved wooden throne at the head of the long baize table he presides over lodge meetings on Monday nights.
When we get talking about Loyalism itself, Tommy begins speaking like a somnambulist, drawing perfectly formed sentences from the depths of his unconscious. He is loyal, he says, “to the religious and civil liberties established and confirmed by King William the Third of Orange, when he defeated the Catholic forces of King James at the Battle of the Boyne in July 1690.” When I remark that this is not what the British seem loyal to he shrugs sadly and admits that it may well be so. “They don’t stand up for ‘The Queen’ at the end of the pictures either.”
What it means to be British for Tommy is essentially what it means to be Protestant. The two cannot be distinguished, and between the two and the “theocratic” state to the south there is an impassable gulf. Orangeism is his life because both of his loyalties, to the Crown and to his religion, are united in the Orange creed. It is what makes Tommy a happy man: he knows who he is and that he is doing God’s work. But it also means he is a man who cannot change or learn. He is what he is. “I’ll tell you one thing,” he says as we get up to leave. “If they took the cross of Saint Patrick out of the Union Jack, there wouldn’t be much of a flag left. Now, would there?”
Blood and Belonging Page 26