Jennifer Todd

Two traditions in unionist political culture

Abstract This paper identifies two ideological traditions within Northern Irish unionism. The first, Ulster loyalism, is defined by its primary imagined community of Northern Protestants and its secondary conditional loyalty to the British state. It treats religion and politics as inextricably interrelated. This ideology is reproduced by potentially dominatory marches. Ulster British ideology, in contrast, is defined by its primary imagined community of Greater Britain and its secondary regional patriotism for Northern Ireland. It professes liberal political values. This ideology is reproduced by the extensive linkages between Northern Ireland and Great Britain which create typical life paths for Ulster British individuals. After analysing the structure of each ideology in terms of its imagined community, its Other and its fundamental structuring concepts, the paper discusses the possibilities of change of each ideology.

The Roots of Intense Ethnic Conflict May Not in Fact Be Ethnic: Categories, Communities and Path Dependence

This article criticizes two theoretical strategies of approach to ethnicity and ethnic conflict and proposes an alternative. One strategy emphasizes the intense solidarity generated by the ethnic or ethno-national bond and the resistance to change of the communities thus formed; it explains these phenomena in terms of the deep feeling surrounding the quasi-kin sense of ethnicity. The other strategy emphasizes the contingency, situatedness, variability, even superficiality of ethnic feeling, and shows how the emergent and unstable linkages which constitute ethnic ‘groups’ are formed from an interplay of ethnic categories and ethnic entrepreneurs within a given institutional and legal context. We adopt an alternative theoretical strategy, seeing ethnicity as a distinctive type of ‘thin’ concept which always requiring additional content, and locating it as one factor among many, which, depending on the tightness or looseness of their interlinkages and mutual feedback mechanisms, may form a path dependent self-reproductive system generating communal opposition and ethnic conflict.

Path Dependence in Settlement Processes: Explaining Settlement in Northern Ireland

The recent literature on path dependence provides a model that can be used in explanation of ethnic conflict and settlement processes. Using Northern Ireland as a case study, this article identifies path dependent patterns of conflict embedded in long-term processes of political development whose change may interrupt these patterns. It highlights the importance of long-term state trajectories in constituting and reproducing these patterns, the generation of ‘endogenous’ processes of change and the impact of wider geopolitical processes in strengthening these. It shows how and why factors such as power, perception, networks and institutions vary in their impact on conflict and explains when they work together to produce settlement.

Fluid or Frozen? Choice and Change in Ethno-National Identification in Contemporary Northern Ireland

Theories of nationality pose a paradox. Given the possibilities of identity plurality and identity shift, why is ethno-national identity so deeply embedded and so prone to produce conflict? Working with in-depth interviews in Northern Ireland, this article illustrates some typical mechanisms of change in national identity. It shows that plurality of identification is compatible with deeply embedded identities, that change in such identities is possible but costly for individuals, and that change in identity content is more frequent and often more important politically than change in identity category. It shows the greater frequency and ease of change in conflict-intensifying than in conflict-ameliorating directions. Thus it explains the “stickiness” of ethno-national identity and its persistent tendency to produce conflict.

The Politics of Transition? Explaining Political Crises in the Implementation of the Belfast Good Friday Agreement

The implementation of the Belfast or Good Friday Agreement has been marked by recurring crises. While each of these has its specific causes, they are symptomatic of contradictions in the underlying conditions of conflict. These made the Belfast Agreement possible, but they also create difficulties in its implementation. The Agreement echoes – not least in its ambiguities – the underlying contradictions, reconstituting the political terrain in terms of them. This has reproduced the tendency toward conflict even among the supporters of the Agreement, whose different responses and ends-in-view reflect the objective uncertainties in the situation. Political crises are likely to continue even after the full implementation of the Agreement.

Northern Irish nationalist political culture

Abstract Irish nationalism in Northern Ireland is a complex, internally differentiated ideology, centred on three interrelated concepts ‐ nation, community and justice. The development of Northern nationalism is traced from the 1920s to its reconstruction in the 1970s by the SDLP and Sinn Fein. It is argued that its complex conceptual structure has allowed it to express central aspects of Northern Catholic experience.

Protestant Minorities in European States and Nations

Little attention has been paid in the recent scholarly literature to Europes old religious conflicts – particularly those that stem from the Reformation. Yet for a long time religiously informed conflict was the principal source of internal state division and the major perceived threat to state stability and security. This article looks at the institutional changes and cultural renegotiations that allowed traditional religious oppositions, rivalries and conflicts to fade in most contemporary European societies. Focusing on the Czech, French and Irish cases, it argues that neither modernisation, democratisation nor secularisation were enough to resolve deep-set tensions. The long-term resolutions involved a restructuring of polity and nation in a way consistent with minority, as well as majority, culture. In the past – and perhaps also in the present – such opportunities were rare and demanded choice, strategy and political fortune.

Thresholds of State Change: Changing British State Institutions and Practices in Northern Ireland after Direct Rule

A long process of state-institutional change underlay an eventual swift restructuring of Northern Ireland on a more equal basis in the 2000s. This article shows how change occurred and explains its phasing, arguing that it took a threshold form. It gives a distinctive characterisation of the ‘recognition’, ‘agenda‘ and ‘implementation’ thresholds, and the different politics that followed each. This model of state change is of interest in three ways: in providing a distinctive characterisation and explanation of the process; in addressing the comparative literature on ‘exclusion’, conflict and settlement by sketching a threshold model of change from ‘exclusion’ to ‘inclusion’ and in speaking to a pressing moral concern – if settlement was possible at all, why was it not possible sooner? The article makes use of new evidence in the form of over 70 elite interviews with senior British and Irish politicians and officials who made, influenced and closely observed the process.

Does being Protestant matter? Protestants, minorities and the re-making of ethno-religious identity after the Good Friday Agreement

The Good Friday Agreement of 1998 gave an opportunity to remake not just political institutions, but ethno-religious distinction in Northern Ireland. This article looks at how individuals reconstruct their way of being Protestant in Ireland and Northern Ireland in the context of social and political change. It shows individuals renegotiating their ways of being Protestant, attempting sometimes successfully to change its socio-cultural salience, blurring ethnic boundaries, distinguishing religious and ethno-national narratives, drawing universalistic political norms from their particular religious tradition. It argues that these renegotiations are highly sensitive to the macro-political context. Changes in this context affect individuals through their changing cognitive understandings and strategic interests that, at least in this case, are as important to identification as social solidarities.

The Moral Boundaries of the Nation: The Constitution of National Identity in the South Eastern Border Counties of Ireland

Abstract This article argues that nationalism is more varied in the way that it constructs its boundaries than contemporary scholarship suggests. In an interdisciplinary, multi-stranded qualitative study of ethno-national identity on the Southern side of the Irish border, it shows the moral repertoires that qualify, conflict with, and on occasion replace, territorial, ethnic and state-centred aspects of national identity. It refocuses attention on the cultural and normative content of imagined national communities, and the different ways in which general norms function in particular communal contexts. It casts a new light on Southern attitudes to Irish unity. More generally, it suggests that a form of ‘moral nationalism’ is possible, distinct from the forms of nationalism—ethnic and civic nationalism and trans-nationalism—discussed in the literature.