(c) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 42)  | |||
| Winter 2001/2 |
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Issue 42 | |
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Reimagining the Nation-State
Jim Mac Laughlin
London: Pluto Press, 2001, £15.99/£45
John Burnes
Mac Laughlin's book is a history of nation-building in Ireland. This overlaps with a study of Irish nationalism. The two things are not identical. Indeed, the tensions and differences between the two is one of his implicit themes.
The book is not a rehash of various nationalist myths. It examines the historical and geographical conditions in which many of those myths arose. His approach is not motivated by a desire to debunk nationalist history but rather to reimagine it so as to overcome its failures and limitations, suggesting that the process of nation-building in Ireland was incomplete. He uses a rich archive of material to establish this.
His basic thesis is that Ireland was in the most literal sense a colony, indeed England's longest surviving one. At various stages in its history, its colonisers have refused to accept this increasingly emergent fact. He has one amusing section demonstrating the lengths to which the colonisers went to deny this. Ireland was a 'home country' if not a home county (pp.76-82). Both the colonisers and the colonised were slow to recognise the nature of colonisation. This was because colonisation was itself a then emerging process. There's a Hegelian whiff to this. Neither the 'master' nor the 'slave' recognise the nature of their relationship until it is fully formed. It's through that relationship that they each become conscious of who they are. The colonisation of Ireland was an essential part of England's own sense of emerging nationhood
Marx, Hegel's most effective pupil, might have built a theory of colonisation on this if he hadn't shared many of the racial/racist assumptions of his contemporaries, including his liberal opponent, Mill. Mac Laughlin examines the growth of the notion of the 'native' in Ireland, with the concomitant fear of miscegenation. This is the root of the variously expressed notion that each wave of colonisers has gone native, as it were: from the Anglo-Normans to the Scottish planters who became today's Unionists. It was common from the 70s onwards to regard the Ulster Unionists as having taken on the characteristics of the 'native' Irish - wildness and savagery.
One of the benefits of Mac Laughlin's approach is to show how this apparently instant racism had deep historical and geographical roots. The root failure of national growth in Ireland was that two nations emerged, both of them equally native and both 'constructing' their identity partly in opposition to the other. One was Nationalist and the other Unionist. Mac Laughlin isn't simply jumping onto the parity-of-esteem band-waggon, here. He's recognising and analysing something real.
Crossed with the idea that Ireland was a colony, and thus faced all the problems of an emerging nation, is another theme, that of hegemony. Just as Gramsci analysed the emergence of fascism in Italy as an imposed answer to the failure of hegemony, so Mac Laughlin implies (he never states this) that the paramilitary solutions of both communities were the result a failure in the growth of national consciousness in Ireland. Fascism was the result of a failure of an emerging nationalist middle-class to secure the hegemony of its own values. It is this mixture of success and failure that is Mac Laughlin's real subject and the combination of the two above approaches that gives the book its subtlety and breadth in analysing this. Like Italy, Ireland had an industrial north and an agricultural south. Rather like Germany, another country with a Catholic 'peasant' south and a largely Protestant industrialised north, they were also both countries that partly failed to achieve a non-military transition from a society dominated by land-owning aristocrats to one based on a commercial middle-class.
Put simply, a little more Connolly and a little less Pearse might have made recent Irish history very different. But then Mac Laughlin is a socialist, of sorts, like this reviewer.
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