John Nagle

Nostrums and Palliatives: Exploring a Shared Society

Outsiders, encountering for the first time a society characterized by ethno-national division and conflict are often at a loss to clearly distin guish members of one ethnic group from another. These outsiders have yet to acquire the insiders’ skill of ‘telling’: the syndrome of signs (dress, name and place of residence) that people use to stereotype strangers as belonging to a particular ethnic group (Burton 1978: 4). Without the proficiency of ‘telling’, outsiders are confronted with people who often share the same skin colour, language, values, and many other com mon cultural accoutrements. For instance, in his analysis of the con flict in the Balkans, as part of his ‘journey into the new nationalisms’, Ignatieff (1993: 22) observed: ‘An outsider is struck, not by the differ ences between Serbs and Croats, but by how similar they are. They both speak the same language … and have shared the same village way of life for centuries’. Commenting on Northern Ireland, an English politician claimed that its citizens ‘are so similar in outlook, humour, language, attitude … that for an outsider to understand their bitter, ancient dif ferences is well-nigh impossible’ (Needham 1998: 165). Likewise, con sidering Rwanda, Volkan (1997: 14) notes that ‘the physical distinction between many Tutsi and Hutu has gradually lessened, to the degree that most foreigners cannot distinguish between members of the two groups’.

Neoliberalism and Shared Consumers

There is an apocryphal story that during a visit by Catherine the Great to view her newly acquired lands in the Crimea she was delighted to see beautiful villages lined along the banks of the river Dnieper. Little did she know, the vision was a hollow facade built by her Minister Potemkin to obscure the desolate tundra. Trite as the comparison seems, it is tempting to conclude that tourists visiting contemporary Belfast city centre are endowed with a variation of the ‘Potemkin Village’ (see Nagle 2009e).

‘Our City Also’: Sharing Civic Space

Sunday 8 August 1993 was eagerly anticipated by many Irish national ists in Belfast, for this was to be the day when the security forces would grant permission for the first ever nationalist parade to enter the city centre. On that afternoon, parades from thirteen Irish nationalist areas across Belfast converged on Belfast City Hall in the heart of the city centre to commemorate the 22nd anniversary of internment. Labelled a ‘Nationalist Rights Day’ by the organizers, the march attracted up to 10,000 Irish nationalists. Many of the marchers brandished placards stating ‘Our City Also’, and they cheered and gave clenched-fist salutes as they turned into Wellington Place, the thoroughfare leading directly up to the City Hall. The crowd sang the civil rights anthem ‘We Shall Overcome’ and a huge Irish tricolour was draped over the front gates of the City Hall, on top of which a Union Jack flag fluttered. A small contingent of marchers broke away from the main body of the parade and climbed above shops facing the front of the City Hall where they unfurled a banner proclaiming ‘Ireland unfree shall never be at peace’.

Shared Rituals and Symbols

On Palm Sunday 1990, Franjo Tuđman, the newly elected nationalist leader of Croatia addressed a crowd of thousands of supporters in the French Republic Square in Zagreb. Tuđman spoke: ‘On this day, Christ triumphant came to Jerusalem. He was greeted as a Messiah. Today our capital is the New Jerusalem. Franjo Tuđman has come to his people’. With this, Tuđman released a flock of doves and the sahovnica, Croatia’s red-and-white checkerboard national emblem, was unveiled to the singing of the Croat national anthem, ‘Lijepa nasa domovino’ (‘Our Beautiful Homeland’) (Glenny 1992: 89, BBC 1995, Kaufman 2001: 183). For Croats, the pageant represented the rebirth of Croatian nationalism after years of proscription. Under the control of the former leader, Josip Broz Tito, Croatia, like the other Yugoslavian federations, was forced to mute its ethno-national identity in favour of the unifying socialist chorus of ‘brotherhood and unity’. Even the singing of Croat nation alist songs was enough to have an individual imprisoned and Croat cultural institutes were severely curtailed (Silber and Little 1995: 82). On Palm Sunday 1990, Tuđman, who had once himself been gaoled for Croat nationalist sentiments contrary to the spirit of ‘Brotherhood and Unity’, augured the resurrection of a proud independent Croatia, replete with the symbols of Croat nationalism.

Consociational Power Sharing: Conflict Regulation or Exacerbation?

In the space of nine days in late October 1993, 25 people were killed in sectarian and paramilitary violence across Northern Ireland. A pro cession of politicians lined up to warn that if Northern Irish society was not peering down a dark abyss, it was on a civil war footing. Less than five years later, in 1998, a peace accord called the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) was signed in Belfast, which it was hoped, would her ald a new shared peaceful future for the people of Northern Ireland. Today it is common to read that the Northern Irish peace process and the power sharing forms which underpin it provide a successful model for violently divided societies to emulate (cf. Mac Ginty 2009). World leaders, seeking to purchase some of the kudos, indulge in hyperbole. Bill Clinton, for instance, has called Northern Ireland a lesson in how intractable disputes can be resolved, and as such should be ‘studied’ across the globe by those interested in securing peace (RTE 2009). If the ethno-national conflict in Northern Ireland had once appeared totally impervious to any solution (Whyte 1981), it is now commonly framed as an archetypal success story of conflict management.

Conclusion: The Narcissism of Minor Differences?

In some of his writings, Sigmund Freud (for example, 2004) argued that the smaller the real differences between two peoples, the larger it is bound to loom in their imagination, a phenomenon he called the ‘narcissism of minor differences’. In fact, Freud noted, conflict often occurred between individuals and groups who appeared highly similar even to the point of being doppelgangers or identical twins. Freud, however, stopped short from arguing that the existence of close resemblances between groups was more likely to induce conflict compared to when a large physiological or cultural chasm was present. Nevertheless, the idea of the narcissism of minor differences has been resurrected in recent decades by commentators seeking to comprehend the seeming surfeit of ethnic conflicts which have emerged particularly since the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Many of these conflicts, as we noted at the beginning of Chapter 1, seem to be fought between groups who share so much and who often appear indistinguishable for outsiders.

Between Trauma and Melancholia: Shared Forms of Commemoration

Commemoration is Janus-faced. As much as commemorative practice often evokes an aura of timeless continuity with the past, commemoration can simultaneously serve as a rite to signify rupture from tradition. In the aftermath of the French and American revolutions, writes Gillis (1994: 8), ‘the need to commemorate arose directly out of an ideologically driven desire to break with the past, to construct as great a distance as possible between the new age and the old’. In societies journeying through the liminal space of conflict transition the ruptured face of commemoration is often brought to the fore. This rupture is articulated as an exacting effort to abstain from ancient grievances by advocating healing and reparation, mechanisms to confront the wounds of the past and offering a new and shared future (Consultative Group on the Past 2009). The logic of dealing the past in many divided societies, as Hamber and Wilson (2002: 35) critique, is that it is supposed to ‘facilitate a common and shared memory, and in so doing create a sense of unity and reconciliation’.

Unity through Diversity: A Shared Civil Society

At midday Tuesday 1 May 2001— May Day — up to one hundred anti global capitalism protestors stormed Gap, the US based clothes retailer, which had opened a branch on Royal Avenue, the commercial thor oughfare of Belfast city centre. Calling themselves Globalise Resistance, located within the Global Justice Movement, the group has sought to create a broad based mobilization to ‘oppose the neo-liberal policies of the G8, IMF, World Bank and WTO’. A decentralized yet globally linked movement, they ‘seek to increase the involvement of Trade Unions and to increase collaboration between different strands of the movement, including environmentalist, NGOs, progressive faith groups and other campaigning organisations’ (Globalise Resistance 2007).