This article first appeared in The Northern Star here: https://thenorthernstar.online/2024/09/25/reconstituting-the-nations-britain-and-ireland-after-brexit/
This is the text of a talk given by Peter Ramsay to the Desmond Greaves Summer School 2024 in Dublin. He argues that the reconstitution of a sovereign nation-state in Britain depends on the achievement of Irish national sovereignty, and that the relation of the two nations exemplifies the inherent internationalism of the politics of national sovereignty.
(It’s a long read, and links have been added at some points.)
It is an honour to speak in Dublin on the subject of the Irish and British nations. And it is a particularly intimidating privilege to speak on that subject at an event that commemorates a fellow Englishman who dedicated so much of his life to the problem of the relation between our two peoples.
I am fairly certain that Desmond Greaves would have agreed with me that there is no other nation whose national sovereignty is as important to the national sovereignty of my people—the British people—than that of your own, than the sovereignty of the Irish nation. And I am sure it will not surprise you to learn that this is a truth that goes universally unacknowledged in Britain. But it is true nonetheless and of the highest importance, and that’s what I want to talk about tonight. For if we are to reconstitute Britain as a nation, which I think we need to, then you will need to reconstitute Ireland. And I think this may hold true in reverse.
For the best part of two centuries, the relations between Britain and Ireland were framed by what was called The Irish Question.
The Irish Question was a question posed by the Irish people. It was the question of whether and how the claims of the Irish nation could be adequately represented in the institutions of the United Kingdom. To cut a long and familiar history very short, Britain’s answer to the Irish Question was Partition. From the point of view of the Irish people, Partition was, to put it politely, an inadequate answer. But for 50 years it worked from the British point of view, because it allowed the British political establishment to forget about Ireland. The inadequacy of Partition as an answer was exposed when the Protestant supremacist regime in the North broke down once young Irish nationalists began to raise the Irish Question again in the late 1960s.
At that time, Britain quickly came up with a new, or newish answer, to the Irish Question. Retain Partition, only now with internal power-sharing in the North underwritten by the political authority of the Republic. It took another quarter of a century of war before that answer could be implemented. But eventually, in 1998, the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) was signed. The GFA formalised the pacification of the North and, although it resulted in governmental paralysis in Northern Ireland, the British could again largely forget about the place.
However, 20 years later, in 2016, Partition again came back to the forefront of British politics. Only this time it was not the result of the Irish people asking the Irish Question. In one of those magnificent turns of history’s dialectical flow, the Conservative Party gave the British people an opportunity to pose a different question to the British state. The question we asked was how the claims of the British nation could be adequately represented in the institutions of the United Kingdom. We could call this the British Question.
If the Irish Question arose because the claims of the Irish people were not adequately represented in the British state. The British Question arose because the claims of the British people were not adequately represented in the British state.
So this evening I want to explore three related issues:
- First, I want to explain the nature of the British Question, which is only dimly understood, and as I do that you might perhaps want to consider to what extent a similar story can be told about political life in the Republic.
- Second, to think about the relation of this British Question and the Irish Question, and the implications of the British Question for the future of Britain and Ireland.
- Third, to consider what this story of Britain and Ireland tells us about the national question more generally in the present.
I emphasise this is an exploration. My map is very incomplete. I know much more about Britain than I do about Ireland, and you will no doubt correct me where I am taking wrong turns. But the old political order is decaying fast, and, ready or not, this question is forced upon us all.
So let’s begin with the British Question.
When the electorate voted for Brexit in 2016, it voted against what we might call Third Way Britain. In Third Way Britain most voters had been effectively excluded from the political life of the state. It is important to understand this aspect of Brexit because this is the real essence of what happened, and without understanding it Britain’s current political condition is incomprehensible. Let’s look first at the political exclusion of the majority and then at the EU’s part in that exclusion. It is a story that I suspect will be a familiar one.
British citizens were excluded by a duopoly of political parties that ruled Britain, and which had political programmes that barely differed. Everyone accepted Margaret Thatcher’s doctrine that ‘There is no alternative’ to the market. The big questions of political economy were settled and depoliticised. Monetary policy was handed over to the Bank of England; the regulation of the economy, trade, investment, labour markets and much else besides was conducted in the secret diplomatic conclaves of the European Commission and the European Council of Ministers under the watchful eye of the European Court of Justice enforcing the treaties and the four freedoms. Foreign and security policy was similarly conducted in secret in the war councils of NATO.
The result back at home was political passivity. The plurality of voters gave up voting after 1997. The membership of political parties declined. The influence of party members over both their leaders and their fellow citizens declined too. Politics was at most a spectator sport: showbiz for ugly people. Political activity withdrew into the institutions of the state. Ordinary citizens withdrew from the public life of the state into the private life of consumption and lifestyle. By 2010, and the parliamentary expenses scandal, popular indifference to politics and to politicians turned to contempt.
This didn’t matter too much while the economic times were good, but it was precisely at this moment that the political economy of the era decisively failed. Since the Great Financial Crash, real wage growth in the UK, which was already weak, has come to an end. At the same time investment in housing and infrastructure has stagnated while mass immigration has continued, and housing costs have skyrocketed. The standard of living for the majority, and especially for the young, has stagnated or declined.
Critically, in the face of this economic crunch, citizens found themselves without representation of their interests.
The Irish political scientist Peter Mair described this failure of representation as opening up what he called a “void” at the heart of the state. The breakdown of relations of political representation is a breakdown of the relations out of which the British nation was made. Mair’s void is the empty space where the nation used to be.
To understand this better, we should briefly remind ourselves of what a nation is. And to do that we must turn first to another Irishman, and happily for this occasion, an Anglo-Irishman, Benedict Anderson.
Anderson’s well-known definition of a nation is that it is ‘an imagined political community: limited and sovereign’. A nation is a political community that has to be imagined because we will never personally know everyone that comprises it. And we imagine this political community through imagining its limits and its sovereignty. The nation’s sovereignty is its autonomous authority, its untrammelled right to rule itself, but that self being only a limited, particular people (not the whole of humanity) in a particular territory (not the whole of the Earth). But how do we imagine this nation with its sovereignty? For the answer to this question we must turn to England’s greatest political thinker, Thomas Hobbes.
Hobbes teaches us that we imagine our unity in the form of a state, a singular entity through which all of the people who comprise the nation are united as if we were one. This imagined unity of all, this state, comes into existence by its being represented by certain public offices (a monarch, or a president or a parliament or some combination), and these public offices are authorised by the subjects as our representative to exercise sovereign powers, that is to exercise the ultimate autonomous capacity to make laws and to enforce them in order to achieve collective national ends. It is only because those who occupy the offices of the sovereign are the representatives of the people, that they have the political authority to rule or the political right to rule. Despite his reputation as an absolutist, Hobbes himself realised that in the final analysis, this political relation that we call sovereignty leaves the sovereign’s power ultimately accountable to, and dependent on, the opinion of the people.
We represent ourselves as a nation through this sovereign state: the nation-state. Of course, we make this act of representation of ourselves as a nation to others, but more importantly we represent ourselves as a nation to ourselves. National sovereignty is usually conceived as an external relation to other nation-states. But we should not be misled. This external sovereignty depends on the prior internal relation of political authority between the people and their representative institutions, the relation through which the nation is imagined.
Since 1707, the British state achieved this political unity of the British nation by political representation through its constitutional doctrine that the Crown in parliament is sovereign. It was a doctrine that never adequately represented the Irish people, but it did successfully represent the British people. And this is why the withering away of this political relation of representation between the citizens and the formal institutions of the state, particularly its parliament, is the withering away of the nation. Mair’s political void is the disintegration and evacuation of the nation-state. A state bureaucracy remains, but it is increasingly isolated from the people over whom it rules. The people that it polices, regulates and taxes. This is how the British Question arose. And it brings us back to Brexit.
The EU provides a way in which those who occupy the sovereign public offices of state can avoid the nation they claim to represent. It does this by institutionalising a duty and a responsibility on them to a higher cosmopolitan order than the nation. The EU is the form of government that develops to rule the void where the political relations with the national population used to be. Nation-states—in which governmental legitimacy arises from the vertical relation of political authority, from representing the unity of its nationals—are converted into member-states—in which governmental legitimacy arises from the horizontal relation between national elites that represents the cosmopolitan interests of capital and its legions of hangers on in the professional middle classes. Member-statehood is the governmental form of Mair’s political void.
For almost 30 years the British parliament outsourced its sovereignty to the diplomatic forums of the EU and drew its legitimacy from its service to cosmopolitan ideals. For politicians and civil servants, the forums of the EU were the places from which they derived their own sense of their significance, where things got done. Parliament was a talking shop where the politicians performed for the cameras.
And during those 30 years of parliament’s service to that cosmopolitan order and its four freedoms, investment in the infrastructure of the British nation withered away: the political parties hollowed out; Britain’s public assets and private corporations were sold off to foreign corporations; its small cities and provincial towns, outside of a few favoured areas, were left to rot; the economy’s growth became dependent on financial services and the mass importation of immigrant labour, so that investment in skills and productivity stagnated as did the real incomes of British citizens. To paraphrase Desmond Greaves’s summary of James Connolly: the British Question is a social question.
This was the context in which the Tory Eurosceptics and Nigel Farage’s UKIP were campaigning to withdraw from the EU. The Tory Brexiteers thought that leaving the EU was a question of opening up Britain’s borders to global free trade. But the Eurosceptics were in truth a hangover from an earlier age: Thatcherites who blamed the EU for the lacklustre and dissatisfying outcome of Margaret Thatcher’s victory over socialism. They mistakenly conceived of the EU as a foreign superstate that dominated Britain, even colonised it. What they failed to understand was that Britain’s EU membership was—like that of all member-states—a carefully constructed internal constitutional arrangement that depoliticised the state. Leaving the EU would tear that arrangement up.
The large majority of the ruling class understood this very well. The leaders of the political parties and the majority of MPs, the civil servants, the senior bureaucrats of the police and regulatory agencies, the directors of the big corporations and the quangos, the universities, the professional associations: they all hated Brexit. And they still hate it precisely because it threatens their carefully constructed constitutional arrangement, and their entire cosmopolitan self-image.
You have to understand that Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg are not typical members of the British ruling class. They were rather a postmodern parody of the old imperial ruling class who, for a little while, got to pretend they were in charge of the state. It is a sign of the unseriousness of contemporary politics that almost everyone—Europhile and Eurosceptic alike—willingly suspended their disbelief in the face of this comic opera. They did this because it allowed them to avoid admitting to the realities of the British state.
Voters, especially the more provincial and plebeian, intuited the true significance of the EU much more accurately than the Tory Brexiteers did. Millions of voters saw the referendum as an opportunity to strike back against their political exclusion from their own state, and they took it. In so doing they posed the British Question, but the British political class has been unable to come up with an answer.
The form in which a lot of voters asked themselves the British Question was the unprecedented levels of immigration. This should come as no surprise. They asked themselves why when their own towns and neighbourhoods were blighted by low investment and stagnation, the political class was so keen to import more and more people from abroad. And, compellingly, they asked themselves why they were never asked about this change in priorities. It appeared that the British political class was more interested in foreigners than its own people. Before the referendum, voters got no real answer to these questions from the Westminster parties, from academics or from professional experts.
They were told that immigration was good for the economy. But since it wasn’t improving their lives, this argument cut no ice with many voters. British academic Anand Menon tells the story of speaking at a panel discussion in north-east England during the referendum campaign. They were discussing how much GDP would fall as a result of leaving the EU and a member of the audience shouted out, ‘That’s your bloody GDP, not ours’. The quip sums up the disintegration of the nation.
Without a positive economic case for EU membership, the ruling class instead adopted Project Fear. We were terrorised with the prospect of the economy collapsing if we left the EU. This proved to be completely untrue. Brexit has not been the Great Leap Forward imagined by the Tory Eurosceptics, but it has not been the catastrophe prophesied by Remainers either. Britain’s trade relations in goods and services with the EU have continued on their pre-2016 trend, as have the indicators of Britain’s generally dreary economic performance. Brexit has been what Remainer journalist Wolfgang Munchau of the Financial Times predicted it would be – a macroeconomic non-event. It was, however, a political earthquake.
When the vote finally arrived—and it was a highly class-correlated vote in which the poorer a voter was the more likely they were to favour Leaving—the majority correctly divined at least part of the answer to the British Question. A key reason that the political class was more interested in foreigners than in the electorate, and never consulted the electorate on immigration was the European Union. As members of the EU, Britain’s governing class was more interested in its relations with people like themselves in the other member-states than it was in its relations with its own people. And there was nothing to be said about controlling immigration because the treaties demanded free movement of labour. This is the political evasion at the heart of the EU. If the cosmopolitan interests that governments serve through the EU need something that will be unpopular—like free movement of labour—then governments nod it through and blame ‘Europe’. The apparently external constraint of EU obligations is embraced by political elites the better to evade political accountability internally.
It was only after the vote to Leave that the representatives of the ruling class offered an explicit answer to the British Question, and it was a telling one that confirmed how right the voters had been to ask it. The answer from the great and the good was that for the electorate even to ask the question about control of migration showed that they were idiots and racists. And anyone who sought to make the case for national sovereignty was condemned as a fascist. We were apparently ‘Worse than Nazis’, as our current Foreign Secretary described Eurosceptic MPs at the time. In other words, the very request to have your interests or opinions represented in national decision-making, especially if it involved an insistence on the sovereign authority of the nation-state over its own affairs, was, if you will forgive the metaphor, beyond the Pale. In the cosmopolitan dystopia of the member-state, raising the question of political nationhood is illegitimate a priori—it makes you ‘far right’.
After the referendum, the losing minority repudiated the legitimacy of the decision of the majority and called for the vote to be run again. In so doing they repudiated the principle of democracy and split the nation. Remind you of anything?
So, the answer to the British Question that voters got from the actual Remainer ruling class was contempt. However, the answer voters got from the Eurosceptics made no sense at all. And it was in its own way equally insulting. The tragic irony of Brexit is that the Tory Eurosceptics were Thatcherites, obsessed with free trade, who led a movement of Brexit voters who wanted the state to control labour and capital markets in the interest of the nation, not liberate markets further in the interests of big business.
The Tory Brexiteers had no idea how to restore Britain’s national sovereignty because they had no grasp of what sovereignty is or what the British nation actually consists of. They understood national sovereignty only in its external aspect. They had not thought at all about the nature of the British state or the problem of the state’s political authority—the problem of the nation—chiefly because they were part of that problem. They thought that having pulled out of the EU all they needed to do was raise the Union flag over public buildings and presto! A nation once again.
Five years on from Britain’s departure and we can see their incoherence clearly. Johnson promised in 2019 to address the demands of the politically excluded by ‘levelling up’ and by getting control of immigration. But his party had no desire to achieve the former and no capacity to achieve the latter. Johnson was turfed out by Thatcherites of epic incompetence, who have now been turfed out by the electorate in their turn.
Britain has left the EU but remained in the void. The houses are unbuilt, the wages still stagnant, immigration (from outside the EU) has accelerated. A huge section of the population remains politically excluded and the British Question is unanswered. Keir Starmer has been explicit that Ukraine will be ‘at the heart’ of everything his government does because he rules on behalf of a networked, transnational state elite which loves to flatter itself about its concern with global problems but has no answer to the problems of British society, except to maintain the current path of stagnation and disintegration.
On this account Brexit would seem a political failure. The British electorate posed the British Question but in the end the answer was more of the same, only worse. There is some truth in this. But to stop there would be to miss something very important. The political class’s unwillingness to answer the British Question is fatal. For notwithstanding the void, the problem of the nation will not go away. The EU is not what the Eurosceptics thought it was. It is not a superstate, developing towards a federal Europe. It is the key means by which Europe’s political elites evade their obligations to their own nations. EU member-states are still nation-states, but nation-states in denial of their national character. And that key mechanism for denying the nation has been taken away from Britain’s political elite. This is why, following the Tories’ recent defeat, there is no return to some pre-2016 normality. On the contrary, the national elite’s denial and evasion of national reality is taking us closer to state failure.
Being unable to answer the British Question, the old political order is on its last legs. The Labour Party got elected in 2024, but it did not recover the votes it lost in 2019 when it repudiated the referendum result. The party’s support is reduced to the public sector and third sector middle classes. And even among them, there is no enthusiasm for Labour’s barely existent programme. The Tories and the Scottish National Party have all but collapsed. The British elite is out of its depth, and it will increasingly have to rule its own state using the techniques of the colonial power that Britain once was—sectarian divide-and-rule.
Nowhere was the Brexiteers’ failure to address the British Question clearer than in the problem of what to do with the Irish border.
And this brings us to my second theme: the relation of the British Question, on the one hand, to Britain’s existing answer to the Irish Question, on the other.
After Britain’s electorate voted to leave the EU, Britain found itself confronted by a problem that resulted from its previous solution to the Irish Question. The Good Friday Agreement effectively granted Dublin a veto on matters pertaining to the border. Dublin chose to exercise that veto with respect to the trade border after Brexit and this threw British politics into chaos. Theresa May negotiated the ‘backstop’ deal which would have neutered Brexit by giving the EU the final say over whether the UK could leave the EU. The backstop was rejected by the Brexiteers and that created what would in another era have been a pre-revolutionary situation in the UK. After nearly a year of political paralysis, Boris Johnson fudged it with the Northern Ireland Protocol splitting the border into two, a political border on the land and an economic border in the Irish Sea.
If Partition had once served as a distinctly inadequate answer to the Irish Question, so the Northern Ireland Protocol and the Windsor Framework symbolise the British ruling classes’ underlying inability to answer the British Question.
The Protocol leaves Northern Ireland in the Single Market and subject to EU regulations. The Windsor Framework makes clear that the EU gets to decide when trade within the UK is unacceptable to it, and where it is not acceptable, the EU will act to protect the Single Market in Northern Ireland. Moreover, it also makes clear that major divergences from Single Market rules in respect of tax or state aid by the UK may lead the EU to interfere with intra-UK trade. The effect is to deter major divergence by the UK from Single Market rules in order to preserve the UK’s internal market. In other words, the Protocol announces that it will be business as usual in the sphere of economic policy, as if Britain had never left the EU.
Throughout the Brexit process and up until today, the UK’s existing answer to the Irish Question has proved to be a major obstacle to its national sovereignty, its autonomous capacity to govern its own economic life.
Britain’s retention of the six counties of Northern Ireland once permitted the formation of an independent Irish state, but at the same time frustrated the capacity of the Irish people to rule themselves. Now the Protocol has allowed Britain to reclaim its ultimate legal self-determination from the EU, but only at the cost of paralysing it.
Just as the EU itself provides an apparently external constraint on national policy-making, that is voluntarily acquiesced in by national political elites, so the Protocol is an indirect method of achieving the same end. Britain is no longer a member-state of the EU, but neither it is a fully fledged nation state. It is best described as a post-member state.
Now Britain’s inability to realise its national sovereignty might tempt an Irish nationalist to schadenfreude. But that would be a mistake politically. The Irish Republic is ruled by the Irish section of the transnational cosmopolitan ruling class with similar debilitating effects for the Irish nation. Rather, the irony of the current situation should alert us to a critical point about national sovereignty.
In general, the sovereignty of nations is interdependent. Nations should respect each other’s sovereignty if they wish to exercise their own. And specifically, our long shared and conflictual history means that the sovereignty of the British nation and that of the Irish are especially interdependent. To emphasise the point, we should understand just how essential the reunification of Ireland is now to the sovereignty of the British nation; that is, to providing an adequate answer to the British Question.
The Protocol can play its role in frustrating British national sovereignty within Britain itself because it is the effect of the Good Friday Agreement. (Or at least it is for as long as Dublin insists on the Protocol.) And, critically, the GFA is the only way that Britain has to maintain its rule in Northern Ireland. We can be sure of this because at the peak of the crisis, following the Eurosceptics’ rejection of Theresa May’s backstop, the Brexiteers were unable to offer an alternative to the GFA, and ended up agreeing to the Protocol that makes a mockery of the UK’s sovereignty by leaving one province of the UK under the EU’s economic regulation. The Brexiteers couldn’t come up with another solution because there isn’t another solution for as long as Britain wants to maintain the Union.
From the moment, more than 50 years ago, that British ministers and civil servants took over directly in Northern Ireland they have been trying to draw Dublin in to stabilise the province, and there is no way back from that. The reason for this constant in British policy since 1972 is that the British state lacks sufficient political authority to rule Northern Ireland. Britain’s sovereignty there is hollow. The institutions of the Crown can only be sustained by one version of sectarian division or another. Northern Ireland is a constitutional anomaly still governed, as it has always been governed, on a completely different basis to the rest of the UK. The British authorities have always tacitly recognised that Northern Ireland isn’t really part of the British nation. And now the Dublin elite has used its political leverage under the GFA to put a trade border in the Irish Sea. The result is that Northern Ireland has reached the end of the road politically, and its internal political paralysis is being exported to Britain.
The only way truly to revive British sovereignty and reconstitute a British nation is to end the Union with Northern Ireland. Ireland’s reunification is a necessary condition of an adequate answer to the British Question.
Now, of course, this is something that nobody in the British ruling class understands or even could understand. (Some posh Brits can just about grasp that the Irish were the victims of the British Empire and, in their enthusiasm for rubbishing all things British, will make the right noises and admire the Anglophobia of some of your fellow citizens. But this cultural condescension is as far as it will go.) Nevertheless, we should not conclude that in this respect Brexit has been a failure. Even if the Protocol is part of the British elite’s inability to answer the British Question—and something we should urgently want to be rid of—Brexit and the Protocol have nevertheless exposed the objective reality of the Union by their demonstrable failure to reassert British sovereignty in Northern Ireland. As a consequence, Brexit is proving to be a wrecking ball for the old Ulster Unionism.
Brexit has called time on the Union of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. It is now a question of when and how, not if, Ireland will be reunified. For the moment, the majority in Northern Ireland still prefers the Union to the Republic. And almost nobody in British politics wants to understand the constraint on Britain’s sovereignty that Northern Ireland represents. The pro-Brexit parties in Britain are all self-defeatingly Unionist, while British Europhiles and political cosmopolitans have much more reason to want to hold on to the Union. The British Question may remain unanswered. But the asking of it has decisively exposed the redundancy of Britain’s old solution to the Irish Question. I don’t think it would surprise either Connolly or Greaves that it is the British people, acting in pursuit of our own interests, who have fatally undermined the political conditions for Partition.
Here we come to a particularly interesting twist in the story. Reunification is a necessary condition of the sovereignty of the Irish nation. But it is not a sufficient condition. You would still need to withdraw from the EU, and even then as Britain’s experience shows there would be more work to be done. But it seems to me that Irexit is really much more likely in the event of reunification. Again, I am an outsider and you will know much more about this than I do. But it seems to me that many more Irish people will be able to see the advantages of leaving the EU once Britain has finally left Ireland. The Irish people will have less need of the counterweight to Britain’s gravitational pull that is provided by Brussels. They will have more of their own. Even then, as Britain’s experience shows, Irexit is only another necessary condition. You can learn from Britain’s experience that Irexit needs to be brought about by a political leadership that also wants to rebuild the internal relations of political authority that constitute the nation.
And this takes me to the third and last question that I want to address. What does this story tell us about the national question in the 21st century? Or, to put it another way, how do we rebuild the relations of political authority and reconstitute the political life of our two nations?
After Brexit, Britain’s ruling class in the UK remains in full flight from the problem of the British nation, from the British Question. My rulers are preoccupied with global issues on the one hand—climate change and the new Cold War with Russia and China and, on the other, with the cosmopolitan sectarianism of identity politics. Their policy is fundamentally globalist, intersectional and anti-national. We are a post-member state, that has left the EU but remains in the void. But, as I have said, the British Question that Brexit raised is still working its way through the body politic.
The next step in answering it will be dealing with the problem of what comes after the failure of the Labour government and the further decay of the entire political structure of 20th-century politics in Britain. Something similar is happening across Europe, in Italy, the Netherlands, France and Germany; and again you will correct me if I am wrong, but from the outside, this process seems to include the Republic of Ireland. So, the national question is increasingly sharply posed everywhere.
The void where the nations used to be is the void where their old traditions of political representation used to be before they died. The zombies of the old political traditions still stalk the corridors of power, unaware that the life has gone out of them. In Britain we call them Labour, Conservative, Liberal. In Ireland you call them Fianna Fail, Fine Gael and Sinn Fein. We need to wake from the dreams and nightmares of the twentieth century. For me the politics that can help us do that is a politics of nation-building.
British liberals like all Western liberals like to patronise the global south with NGOs who help them with nation-building. But this is in truth a psychological projection. A denial of the condition of their own states.
I want to spell out three specific intellectual challenges that are presented to us if we are to develop a politics of nation-building adequate for 21st-century Europe. No doubt there are more, but these seem to me the most significant.
First, the project is one of nation-building. We need to follow Connolly in rejecting the element in Ireland’s national movement of his own time that indulged what he called the ‘morbid idealising of the past’. Understood as a social question, the nation is the way to address the problems of its actual living people—by concentrating political accountability in their representatives. Morbid victim nationalism may have a long history in Ireland, but it is now getting a grip in England too in the form of national-populism. The politics of nation-building needs to reject and to polemicise against this tendency.
And this forward-looking project of nation-building is a political project more than it is a cultural one. Here again the politics of reconstituting the nation needs to polemicise against national-populism and its cultural atavism. Refilling the political void is a political process. A dynamic national movement will have cultural impact, but it needs to be that way round. A culture influenced by a new politics, not a politics that is the mere expression of a stale old culture.
In England at least there is little barrier to this as England is culturally already the 51st state in any case. There is little left of its old distinctive culture. The Protestantism is gone. The Queen is dead, and the royalism is a soap opera. The Empire is gone, only vestiges remain. The militarism still shows some vigour, but the military is severely diminished. Chicken tikka masala has replaced fish and chips. Even the pubs are barely hanging on. There is virtue to be found in this necessity. It creates space for a politics of nation-building. The first challenge is then to draw our national poetry from the present and the future, not the past.
Second, this forward-looking political project of nation-building cannot be a nationalist one. Unlike the historical origin of nations in nationalism, the reconstitution of our nations is an inherently internationalist project.
In principle the pursuit of national sovereignty requires the mutual respect of sovereigns. But in the 21st century, this mutual solidarity of nations is also a practical necessity of their reconstitution. It is obvious that no nation can really break the grip of the global markets without like-minded national movements in other powerful states working together in solidarity.
We therefore need to sharpen the distinction and the contrast between, on the one hand, the cosmopolitanism of our transnational ruling classes and all their hangers-on, and, on the other, the internationalism of national sovereignty. Cosmopolitanism is a dystopian bourgeois fantasy of escaping the political burdens of the nation and the responsibilities of national sovereignty. Internationalism is the solidarity between the peoples of sovereign nations. True internationalism is the property of political sovereigntists not political cosmopolitans.
This distinction is illustrated by the contemporary impact of Ireland’s partition on the British Question. True sovereigntists in Britain and Ireland, being internationalists, recognise the necessity of ending Partition. Cosmopolitan globalists have reason to maintain Partition in one form or another.
The third challenge is that the politics of nation-building are inherently democratic. The real concrete nation can only achieve its sovereignty through democracy. In the 21st century, democracy is the only conceivable source of the political authority that is required to get the houses built, the jobs secured, and the skills provided. The greatest threat to democracy is not Vladimir Putin but our own cosmopolitan ruling castes. This is most obviously apparent in both Britain and Ireland in the ongoing assault on freedom of expression.
Here the challenge is to rearticulate the necessity of democratic political authority and to overcome the disastrous legacy of socialism’s failure in the 20th century. In Britain at least, many of the most energetic young people who are opposed to the political status quo are libertarians. They are rightly suspicious of the use of repressive state power that is favoured by our cosmopolitan ruling class, and by its left-wing apologists. We need a national movement that articulates the political connection between democratic government and maximum civil liberty much more clearly. We need, on the one hand, to demonstrate why democracy and not private property is the true bastion of civil liberty; and on the other, we need to polemicise against the left’s authoritarianism and show how it serves the interests of cosmopolitan capital.
In summary, to defeat the zombies that rule us, I think we need: a nation-building politics that critiques populist cultural atavism and nostalgia; an internationalist critique of cosmopolitanism; and a democratic critique of libertarianism.
We need to bring these politics of democratic internationalism to the task of reconstituting the British and Irish nations. In Britain, a defining characteristic of these new politics will be the recognition that Ireland’s unification is an essential condition of Britain’s national unity and self-government. In Ireland, the prospect of reunification confronts the Republic with the question of how it can be reconstituted in such a way as to achieve adequate authority with something close to a million northern Unionists. This requires winning the respect of enough of them for the new state, and at least a grudging willingness among the rest to go along with it. This is the challenge of magnanimity after such a long and bitter history. And internationalism and democracy will be a better guide than either cultural nationalism or cosmopolitanism.
But I want to conclude by briefly considering how the internationalist politics of democratic nation-building can address perhaps the most pressing challenge for the reconstitution of both Ireland and Britain: mass migration.
For cosmopolitans, mass immigration is an unqualified good because the cosmopolitan mind does not like to imagine a political community that is limited and, therefore, capable of sovereignty, indeed it is repelled from it because such a political community implies political accountability for its elites. By contrast, in our current circumstances of politically weak nation-states created by cosmopolitanism, the internationalist sees that mass migration further undermines national sovereignty in both labour-importing and exporting countries. (I stress, this is true in current circumstances and not always the case. But it is true at the moment and that’s one of the reasons cosmopolitans like mass migration.)
Mass migration undermines the national sovereignty of labour-exporting countries to the extent that it strips them of their skilled and enterprising young people, inhibiting the economic development of those countries and therefore their capacity to achieve an adequate degree of real political autonomy. We should propagate outrage at the theft from African, Asian, Latin American and Eastern European countries of their educated young people, and especially of their trained teachers and medical personnel.
Mass migration undermines the national sovereignty of labour-importing countries by disintegrating the nation internally. The pull factor in mass migration is an economic growth model that substitutes expansion of the labour force for investment in skills, machinery and basic infrastructure (such as health and education services and above all housing). This growth model systematically undermines the social position of poorer citizens. Moreover, mass migration into states that are already both economically stagnant and politically exhausted presents an immense challenge to anyone who would reconstitute the nation because it makes the task of political reintegration, the reconstitution of the nation more difficult.
We need to understand that for our cosmopolitan rulers inclusive policies towards immigrants are a way of maintaining the exclusion of the existing population. This is a modern form of an old imperial technique for ruling conquered peoples. At the same time, the existing population includes many recent immigrants. We can and must therefore embrace actual immigrants as fellow citizens (or potential fellow citizens) while simultaneously seeking to end mass migration. The embrace of immigrants as fellow citizens should be seen not as a celebration of cultural difference but as an integral part of the process of closing the void between the state institutions and the entire population, as an aspect of nation-building.
We should reject both the backward-looking cultural nationalism of the populists, and the cosmopolitan multiculturalism and intersectionalism of the ruling class and its left-wing apologists. Both are positions that are leading to disastrous sectional division. The trick here is to take up the cudgels against mass migration while arguing that the idea of inclusion in a unitary, democracy with internationalist policies will be very appealing to many actual immigrants, and that we should draw them into the cause of building a national secular democracy.
This is the way to reconstitute our nations.
This article first appeared in The Northern Star here: https://thenorthernstar.online/2024/09/25/reconstituting-the-nations-britain-and-ireland-after-brexit/
This is the text of a talk given by Peter Ramsay to the Desmond Greaves Summer School 2024 in Dublin. He argues that the reconstitution of a sovereign nation-state in Britain depends on the achievement of Irish national sovereignty, and that the relation of the two nations exemplifies the inherent internationalism of the politics of national sovereignty.
(It’s a long read, and links have been added at some points.)
It is an honour to speak in Dublin on the subject of the Irish and British nations. And it is a particularly intimidating privilege to speak on that subject at an event that commemorates a fellow Englishman who dedicated so much of his life to the problem of the relation between our two peoples.
I am fairly certain that Desmond Greaves would have agreed with me that there is no other nation whose national sovereignty is as important to the national sovereignty of my people—the British people—than that of your own, than the sovereignty of the Irish nation. And I am sure it will not surprise you to learn that this is a truth that goes universally unacknowledged in Britain. But it is true nonetheless and of the highest importance, and that’s what I want to talk about tonight. For if we are to reconstitute Britain as a nation, which I think we need to, then you will need to reconstitute Ireland. And I think this may hold true in reverse.
For the best part of two centuries, the relations between Britain and Ireland were framed by what was called The Irish Question.
The Irish Question was a question posed by the Irish people. It was the question of whether and how the claims of the Irish nation could be adequately represented in the institutions of the United Kingdom. To cut a long and familiar history very short, Britain’s answer to the Irish Question was Partition. From the point of view of the Irish people, Partition was, to put it politely, an inadequate answer. But for 50 years it worked from the British point of view, because it allowed the British political establishment to forget about Ireland. The inadequacy of Partition as an answer was exposed when the Protestant supremacist regime in the North broke down once young Irish nationalists began to raise the Irish Question again in the late 1960s.
At that time, Britain quickly came up with a new, or newish answer, to the Irish Question. Retain Partition, only now with internal power-sharing in the North underwritten by the political authority of the Republic. It took another quarter of a century of war before that answer could be implemented. But eventually, in 1998, the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) was signed. The GFA formalised the pacification of the North and, although it resulted in governmental paralysis in Northern Ireland, the British could again largely forget about the place.
However, 20 years later, in 2016, Partition again came back to the forefront of British politics. Only this time it was not the result of the Irish people asking the Irish Question. In one of those magnificent turns of history’s dialectical flow, the Conservative Party gave the British people an opportunity to pose a different question to the British state. The question we asked was how the claims of the British nation could be adequately represented in the institutions of the United Kingdom. We could call this the British Question.
If the Irish Question arose because the claims of the Irish people were not adequately represented in the British state. The British Question arose because the claims of the British people were not adequately represented in the British state.
So this evening I want to explore three related issues:
I emphasise this is an exploration. My map is very incomplete. I know much more about Britain than I do about Ireland, and you will no doubt correct me where I am taking wrong turns. But the old political order is decaying fast, and, ready or not, this question is forced upon us all.
So let’s begin with the British Question.
When the electorate voted for Brexit in 2016, it voted against what we might call Third Way Britain. In Third Way Britain most voters had been effectively excluded from the political life of the state. It is important to understand this aspect of Brexit because this is the real essence of what happened, and without understanding it Britain’s current political condition is incomprehensible. Let’s look first at the political exclusion of the majority and then at the EU’s part in that exclusion. It is a story that I suspect will be a familiar one.
British citizens were excluded by a duopoly of political parties that ruled Britain, and which had political programmes that barely differed. Everyone accepted Margaret Thatcher’s doctrine that ‘There is no alternative’ to the market. The big questions of political economy were settled and depoliticised. Monetary policy was handed over to the Bank of England; the regulation of the economy, trade, investment, labour markets and much else besides was conducted in the secret diplomatic conclaves of the European Commission and the European Council of Ministers under the watchful eye of the European Court of Justice enforcing the treaties and the four freedoms. Foreign and security policy was similarly conducted in secret in the war councils of NATO.
The result back at home was political passivity. The plurality of voters gave up voting after 1997. The membership of political parties declined. The influence of party members over both their leaders and their fellow citizens declined too. Politics was at most a spectator sport: showbiz for ugly people. Political activity withdrew into the institutions of the state. Ordinary citizens withdrew from the public life of the state into the private life of consumption and lifestyle. By 2010, and the parliamentary expenses scandal, popular indifference to politics and to politicians turned to contempt.
This didn’t matter too much while the economic times were good, but it was precisely at this moment that the political economy of the era decisively failed. Since the Great Financial Crash, real wage growth in the UK, which was already weak, has come to an end. At the same time investment in housing and infrastructure has stagnated while mass immigration has continued, and housing costs have skyrocketed. The standard of living for the majority, and especially for the young, has stagnated or declined.
Critically, in the face of this economic crunch, citizens found themselves without representation of their interests.
The Irish political scientist Peter Mair described this failure of representation as opening up what he called a “void” at the heart of the state. The breakdown of relations of political representation is a breakdown of the relations out of which the British nation was made. Mair’s void is the empty space where the nation used to be.
To understand this better, we should briefly remind ourselves of what a nation is. And to do that we must turn first to another Irishman, and happily for this occasion, an Anglo-Irishman, Benedict Anderson.
Anderson’s well-known definition of a nation is that it is ‘an imagined political community: limited and sovereign’. A nation is a political community that has to be imagined because we will never personally know everyone that comprises it. And we imagine this political community through imagining its limits and its sovereignty. The nation’s sovereignty is its autonomous authority, its untrammelled right to rule itself, but that self being only a limited, particular people (not the whole of humanity) in a particular territory (not the whole of the Earth). But how do we imagine this nation with its sovereignty? For the answer to this question we must turn to England’s greatest political thinker, Thomas Hobbes.
Hobbes teaches us that we imagine our unity in the form of a state, a singular entity through which all of the people who comprise the nation are united as if we were one. This imagined unity of all, this state, comes into existence by its being represented by certain public offices (a monarch, or a president or a parliament or some combination), and these public offices are authorised by the subjects as our representative to exercise sovereign powers, that is to exercise the ultimate autonomous capacity to make laws and to enforce them in order to achieve collective national ends. It is only because those who occupy the offices of the sovereign are the representatives of the people, that they have the political authority to rule or the political right to rule. Despite his reputation as an absolutist, Hobbes himself realised that in the final analysis, this political relation that we call sovereignty leaves the sovereign’s power ultimately accountable to, and dependent on, the opinion of the people.
We represent ourselves as a nation through this sovereign state: the nation-state. Of course, we make this act of representation of ourselves as a nation to others, but more importantly we represent ourselves as a nation to ourselves. National sovereignty is usually conceived as an external relation to other nation-states. But we should not be misled. This external sovereignty depends on the prior internal relation of political authority between the people and their representative institutions, the relation through which the nation is imagined.
Since 1707, the British state achieved this political unity of the British nation by political representation through its constitutional doctrine that the Crown in parliament is sovereign. It was a doctrine that never adequately represented the Irish people, but it did successfully represent the British people. And this is why the withering away of this political relation of representation between the citizens and the formal institutions of the state, particularly its parliament, is the withering away of the nation. Mair’s political void is the disintegration and evacuation of the nation-state. A state bureaucracy remains, but it is increasingly isolated from the people over whom it rules. The people that it polices, regulates and taxes. This is how the British Question arose. And it brings us back to Brexit.
The EU provides a way in which those who occupy the sovereign public offices of state can avoid the nation they claim to represent. It does this by institutionalising a duty and a responsibility on them to a higher cosmopolitan order than the nation. The EU is the form of government that develops to rule the void where the political relations with the national population used to be. Nation-states—in which governmental legitimacy arises from the vertical relation of political authority, from representing the unity of its nationals—are converted into member-states—in which governmental legitimacy arises from the horizontal relation between national elites that represents the cosmopolitan interests of capital and its legions of hangers on in the professional middle classes. Member-statehood is the governmental form of Mair’s political void.
For almost 30 years the British parliament outsourced its sovereignty to the diplomatic forums of the EU and drew its legitimacy from its service to cosmopolitan ideals. For politicians and civil servants, the forums of the EU were the places from which they derived their own sense of their significance, where things got done. Parliament was a talking shop where the politicians performed for the cameras.
And during those 30 years of parliament’s service to that cosmopolitan order and its four freedoms, investment in the infrastructure of the British nation withered away: the political parties hollowed out; Britain’s public assets and private corporations were sold off to foreign corporations; its small cities and provincial towns, outside of a few favoured areas, were left to rot; the economy’s growth became dependent on financial services and the mass importation of immigrant labour, so that investment in skills and productivity stagnated as did the real incomes of British citizens. To paraphrase Desmond Greaves’s summary of James Connolly: the British Question is a social question.
This was the context in which the Tory Eurosceptics and Nigel Farage’s UKIP were campaigning to withdraw from the EU. The Tory Brexiteers thought that leaving the EU was a question of opening up Britain’s borders to global free trade. But the Eurosceptics were in truth a hangover from an earlier age: Thatcherites who blamed the EU for the lacklustre and dissatisfying outcome of Margaret Thatcher’s victory over socialism. They mistakenly conceived of the EU as a foreign superstate that dominated Britain, even colonised it. What they failed to understand was that Britain’s EU membership was—like that of all member-states—a carefully constructed internal constitutional arrangement that depoliticised the state. Leaving the EU would tear that arrangement up.
The large majority of the ruling class understood this very well. The leaders of the political parties and the majority of MPs, the civil servants, the senior bureaucrats of the police and regulatory agencies, the directors of the big corporations and the quangos, the universities, the professional associations: they all hated Brexit. And they still hate it precisely because it threatens their carefully constructed constitutional arrangement, and their entire cosmopolitan self-image.
You have to understand that Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg are not typical members of the British ruling class. They were rather a postmodern parody of the old imperial ruling class who, for a little while, got to pretend they were in charge of the state. It is a sign of the unseriousness of contemporary politics that almost everyone—Europhile and Eurosceptic alike—willingly suspended their disbelief in the face of this comic opera. They did this because it allowed them to avoid admitting to the realities of the British state.
Voters, especially the more provincial and plebeian, intuited the true significance of the EU much more accurately than the Tory Brexiteers did. Millions of voters saw the referendum as an opportunity to strike back against their political exclusion from their own state, and they took it. In so doing they posed the British Question, but the British political class has been unable to come up with an answer.
The form in which a lot of voters asked themselves the British Question was the unprecedented levels of immigration. This should come as no surprise. They asked themselves why when their own towns and neighbourhoods were blighted by low investment and stagnation, the political class was so keen to import more and more people from abroad. And, compellingly, they asked themselves why they were never asked about this change in priorities. It appeared that the British political class was more interested in foreigners than its own people. Before the referendum, voters got no real answer to these questions from the Westminster parties, from academics or from professional experts.
They were told that immigration was good for the economy. But since it wasn’t improving their lives, this argument cut no ice with many voters. British academic Anand Menon tells the story of speaking at a panel discussion in north-east England during the referendum campaign. They were discussing how much GDP would fall as a result of leaving the EU and a member of the audience shouted out, ‘That’s your bloody GDP, not ours’. The quip sums up the disintegration of the nation.
Without a positive economic case for EU membership, the ruling class instead adopted Project Fear. We were terrorised with the prospect of the economy collapsing if we left the EU. This proved to be completely untrue. Brexit has not been the Great Leap Forward imagined by the Tory Eurosceptics, but it has not been the catastrophe prophesied by Remainers either. Britain’s trade relations in goods and services with the EU have continued on their pre-2016 trend, as have the indicators of Britain’s generally dreary economic performance. Brexit has been what Remainer journalist Wolfgang Munchau of the Financial Times predicted it would be – a macroeconomic non-event. It was, however, a political earthquake.
When the vote finally arrived—and it was a highly class-correlated vote in which the poorer a voter was the more likely they were to favour Leaving—the majority correctly divined at least part of the answer to the British Question. A key reason that the political class was more interested in foreigners than in the electorate, and never consulted the electorate on immigration was the European Union. As members of the EU, Britain’s governing class was more interested in its relations with people like themselves in the other member-states than it was in its relations with its own people. And there was nothing to be said about controlling immigration because the treaties demanded free movement of labour. This is the political evasion at the heart of the EU. If the cosmopolitan interests that governments serve through the EU need something that will be unpopular—like free movement of labour—then governments nod it through and blame ‘Europe’. The apparently external constraint of EU obligations is embraced by political elites the better to evade political accountability internally.
It was only after the vote to Leave that the representatives of the ruling class offered an explicit answer to the British Question, and it was a telling one that confirmed how right the voters had been to ask it. The answer from the great and the good was that for the electorate even to ask the question about control of migration showed that they were idiots and racists. And anyone who sought to make the case for national sovereignty was condemned as a fascist. We were apparently ‘Worse than Nazis’, as our current Foreign Secretary described Eurosceptic MPs at the time. In other words, the very request to have your interests or opinions represented in national decision-making, especially if it involved an insistence on the sovereign authority of the nation-state over its own affairs, was, if you will forgive the metaphor, beyond the Pale. In the cosmopolitan dystopia of the member-state, raising the question of political nationhood is illegitimate a priori—it makes you ‘far right’.
After the referendum, the losing minority repudiated the legitimacy of the decision of the majority and called for the vote to be run again. In so doing they repudiated the principle of democracy and split the nation. Remind you of anything?
So, the answer to the British Question that voters got from the actual Remainer ruling class was contempt. However, the answer voters got from the Eurosceptics made no sense at all. And it was in its own way equally insulting. The tragic irony of Brexit is that the Tory Eurosceptics were Thatcherites, obsessed with free trade, who led a movement of Brexit voters who wanted the state to control labour and capital markets in the interest of the nation, not liberate markets further in the interests of big business.
The Tory Brexiteers had no idea how to restore Britain’s national sovereignty because they had no grasp of what sovereignty is or what the British nation actually consists of. They understood national sovereignty only in its external aspect. They had not thought at all about the nature of the British state or the problem of the state’s political authority—the problem of the nation—chiefly because they were part of that problem. They thought that having pulled out of the EU all they needed to do was raise the Union flag over public buildings and presto! A nation once again.
Five years on from Britain’s departure and we can see their incoherence clearly. Johnson promised in 2019 to address the demands of the politically excluded by ‘levelling up’ and by getting control of immigration. But his party had no desire to achieve the former and no capacity to achieve the latter. Johnson was turfed out by Thatcherites of epic incompetence, who have now been turfed out by the electorate in their turn.
Britain has left the EU but remained in the void. The houses are unbuilt, the wages still stagnant, immigration (from outside the EU) has accelerated. A huge section of the population remains politically excluded and the British Question is unanswered. Keir Starmer has been explicit that Ukraine will be ‘at the heart’ of everything his government does because he rules on behalf of a networked, transnational state elite which loves to flatter itself about its concern with global problems but has no answer to the problems of British society, except to maintain the current path of stagnation and disintegration.
On this account Brexit would seem a political failure. The British electorate posed the British Question but in the end the answer was more of the same, only worse. There is some truth in this. But to stop there would be to miss something very important. The political class’s unwillingness to answer the British Question is fatal. For notwithstanding the void, the problem of the nation will not go away. The EU is not what the Eurosceptics thought it was. It is not a superstate, developing towards a federal Europe. It is the key means by which Europe’s political elites evade their obligations to their own nations. EU member-states are still nation-states, but nation-states in denial of their national character. And that key mechanism for denying the nation has been taken away from Britain’s political elite. This is why, following the Tories’ recent defeat, there is no return to some pre-2016 normality. On the contrary, the national elite’s denial and evasion of national reality is taking us closer to state failure.
Being unable to answer the British Question, the old political order is on its last legs. The Labour Party got elected in 2024, but it did not recover the votes it lost in 2019 when it repudiated the referendum result. The party’s support is reduced to the public sector and third sector middle classes. And even among them, there is no enthusiasm for Labour’s barely existent programme. The Tories and the Scottish National Party have all but collapsed. The British elite is out of its depth, and it will increasingly have to rule its own state using the techniques of the colonial power that Britain once was—sectarian divide-and-rule.
Nowhere was the Brexiteers’ failure to address the British Question clearer than in the problem of what to do with the Irish border.
And this brings us to my second theme: the relation of the British Question, on the one hand, to Britain’s existing answer to the Irish Question, on the other.
After Britain’s electorate voted to leave the EU, Britain found itself confronted by a problem that resulted from its previous solution to the Irish Question. The Good Friday Agreement effectively granted Dublin a veto on matters pertaining to the border. Dublin chose to exercise that veto with respect to the trade border after Brexit and this threw British politics into chaos. Theresa May negotiated the ‘backstop’ deal which would have neutered Brexit by giving the EU the final say over whether the UK could leave the EU. The backstop was rejected by the Brexiteers and that created what would in another era have been a pre-revolutionary situation in the UK. After nearly a year of political paralysis, Boris Johnson fudged it with the Northern Ireland Protocol splitting the border into two, a political border on the land and an economic border in the Irish Sea.
If Partition had once served as a distinctly inadequate answer to the Irish Question, so the Northern Ireland Protocol and the Windsor Framework symbolise the British ruling classes’ underlying inability to answer the British Question.
The Protocol leaves Northern Ireland in the Single Market and subject to EU regulations. The Windsor Framework makes clear that the EU gets to decide when trade within the UK is unacceptable to it, and where it is not acceptable, the EU will act to protect the Single Market in Northern Ireland. Moreover, it also makes clear that major divergences from Single Market rules in respect of tax or state aid by the UK may lead the EU to interfere with intra-UK trade. The effect is to deter major divergence by the UK from Single Market rules in order to preserve the UK’s internal market. In other words, the Protocol announces that it will be business as usual in the sphere of economic policy, as if Britain had never left the EU.
Throughout the Brexit process and up until today, the UK’s existing answer to the Irish Question has proved to be a major obstacle to its national sovereignty, its autonomous capacity to govern its own economic life.
Britain’s retention of the six counties of Northern Ireland once permitted the formation of an independent Irish state, but at the same time frustrated the capacity of the Irish people to rule themselves. Now the Protocol has allowed Britain to reclaim its ultimate legal self-determination from the EU, but only at the cost of paralysing it.
Just as the EU itself provides an apparently external constraint on national policy-making, that is voluntarily acquiesced in by national political elites, so the Protocol is an indirect method of achieving the same end. Britain is no longer a member-state of the EU, but neither it is a fully fledged nation state. It is best described as a post-member state.
Now Britain’s inability to realise its national sovereignty might tempt an Irish nationalist to schadenfreude. But that would be a mistake politically. The Irish Republic is ruled by the Irish section of the transnational cosmopolitan ruling class with similar debilitating effects for the Irish nation. Rather, the irony of the current situation should alert us to a critical point about national sovereignty.
In general, the sovereignty of nations is interdependent. Nations should respect each other’s sovereignty if they wish to exercise their own. And specifically, our long shared and conflictual history means that the sovereignty of the British nation and that of the Irish are especially interdependent. To emphasise the point, we should understand just how essential the reunification of Ireland is now to the sovereignty of the British nation; that is, to providing an adequate answer to the British Question.
The Protocol can play its role in frustrating British national sovereignty within Britain itself because it is the effect of the Good Friday Agreement. (Or at least it is for as long as Dublin insists on the Protocol.) And, critically, the GFA is the only way that Britain has to maintain its rule in Northern Ireland. We can be sure of this because at the peak of the crisis, following the Eurosceptics’ rejection of Theresa May’s backstop, the Brexiteers were unable to offer an alternative to the GFA, and ended up agreeing to the Protocol that makes a mockery of the UK’s sovereignty by leaving one province of the UK under the EU’s economic regulation. The Brexiteers couldn’t come up with another solution because there isn’t another solution for as long as Britain wants to maintain the Union.
From the moment, more than 50 years ago, that British ministers and civil servants took over directly in Northern Ireland they have been trying to draw Dublin in to stabilise the province, and there is no way back from that. The reason for this constant in British policy since 1972 is that the British state lacks sufficient political authority to rule Northern Ireland. Britain’s sovereignty there is hollow. The institutions of the Crown can only be sustained by one version of sectarian division or another. Northern Ireland is a constitutional anomaly still governed, as it has always been governed, on a completely different basis to the rest of the UK. The British authorities have always tacitly recognised that Northern Ireland isn’t really part of the British nation. And now the Dublin elite has used its political leverage under the GFA to put a trade border in the Irish Sea. The result is that Northern Ireland has reached the end of the road politically, and its internal political paralysis is being exported to Britain.
The only way truly to revive British sovereignty and reconstitute a British nation is to end the Union with Northern Ireland. Ireland’s reunification is a necessary condition of an adequate answer to the British Question.
Now, of course, this is something that nobody in the British ruling class understands or even could understand. (Some posh Brits can just about grasp that the Irish were the victims of the British Empire and, in their enthusiasm for rubbishing all things British, will make the right noises and admire the Anglophobia of some of your fellow citizens. But this cultural condescension is as far as it will go.) Nevertheless, we should not conclude that in this respect Brexit has been a failure. Even if the Protocol is part of the British elite’s inability to answer the British Question—and something we should urgently want to be rid of—Brexit and the Protocol have nevertheless exposed the objective reality of the Union by their demonstrable failure to reassert British sovereignty in Northern Ireland. As a consequence, Brexit is proving to be a wrecking ball for the old Ulster Unionism.
Brexit has called time on the Union of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. It is now a question of when and how, not if, Ireland will be reunified. For the moment, the majority in Northern Ireland still prefers the Union to the Republic. And almost nobody in British politics wants to understand the constraint on Britain’s sovereignty that Northern Ireland represents. The pro-Brexit parties in Britain are all self-defeatingly Unionist, while British Europhiles and political cosmopolitans have much more reason to want to hold on to the Union. The British Question may remain unanswered. But the asking of it has decisively exposed the redundancy of Britain’s old solution to the Irish Question. I don’t think it would surprise either Connolly or Greaves that it is the British people, acting in pursuit of our own interests, who have fatally undermined the political conditions for Partition.
Here we come to a particularly interesting twist in the story. Reunification is a necessary condition of the sovereignty of the Irish nation. But it is not a sufficient condition. You would still need to withdraw from the EU, and even then as Britain’s experience shows there would be more work to be done. But it seems to me that Irexit is really much more likely in the event of reunification. Again, I am an outsider and you will know much more about this than I do. But it seems to me that many more Irish people will be able to see the advantages of leaving the EU once Britain has finally left Ireland. The Irish people will have less need of the counterweight to Britain’s gravitational pull that is provided by Brussels. They will have more of their own. Even then, as Britain’s experience shows, Irexit is only another necessary condition. You can learn from Britain’s experience that Irexit needs to be brought about by a political leadership that also wants to rebuild the internal relations of political authority that constitute the nation.
And this takes me to the third and last question that I want to address. What does this story tell us about the national question in the 21st century? Or, to put it another way, how do we rebuild the relations of political authority and reconstitute the political life of our two nations?
After Brexit, Britain’s ruling class in the UK remains in full flight from the problem of the British nation, from the British Question. My rulers are preoccupied with global issues on the one hand—climate change and the new Cold War with Russia and China and, on the other, with the cosmopolitan sectarianism of identity politics. Their policy is fundamentally globalist, intersectional and anti-national. We are a post-member state, that has left the EU but remains in the void. But, as I have said, the British Question that Brexit raised is still working its way through the body politic.
The next step in answering it will be dealing with the problem of what comes after the failure of the Labour government and the further decay of the entire political structure of 20th-century politics in Britain. Something similar is happening across Europe, in Italy, the Netherlands, France and Germany; and again you will correct me if I am wrong, but from the outside, this process seems to include the Republic of Ireland. So, the national question is increasingly sharply posed everywhere.
The void where the nations used to be is the void where their old traditions of political representation used to be before they died. The zombies of the old political traditions still stalk the corridors of power, unaware that the life has gone out of them. In Britain we call them Labour, Conservative, Liberal. In Ireland you call them Fianna Fail, Fine Gael and Sinn Fein. We need to wake from the dreams and nightmares of the twentieth century. For me the politics that can help us do that is a politics of nation-building.
British liberals like all Western liberals like to patronise the global south with NGOs who help them with nation-building. But this is in truth a psychological projection. A denial of the condition of their own states.
I want to spell out three specific intellectual challenges that are presented to us if we are to develop a politics of nation-building adequate for 21st-century Europe. No doubt there are more, but these seem to me the most significant.
First, the project is one of nation-building. We need to follow Connolly in rejecting the element in Ireland’s national movement of his own time that indulged what he called the ‘morbid idealising of the past’. Understood as a social question, the nation is the way to address the problems of its actual living people—by concentrating political accountability in their representatives. Morbid victim nationalism may have a long history in Ireland, but it is now getting a grip in England too in the form of national-populism. The politics of nation-building needs to reject and to polemicise against this tendency.
And this forward-looking project of nation-building is a political project more than it is a cultural one. Here again the politics of reconstituting the nation needs to polemicise against national-populism and its cultural atavism. Refilling the political void is a political process. A dynamic national movement will have cultural impact, but it needs to be that way round. A culture influenced by a new politics, not a politics that is the mere expression of a stale old culture.
In England at least there is little barrier to this as England is culturally already the 51st state in any case. There is little left of its old distinctive culture. The Protestantism is gone. The Queen is dead, and the royalism is a soap opera. The Empire is gone, only vestiges remain. The militarism still shows some vigour, but the military is severely diminished. Chicken tikka masala has replaced fish and chips. Even the pubs are barely hanging on. There is virtue to be found in this necessity. It creates space for a politics of nation-building. The first challenge is then to draw our national poetry from the present and the future, not the past.
Second, this forward-looking political project of nation-building cannot be a nationalist one. Unlike the historical origin of nations in nationalism, the reconstitution of our nations is an inherently internationalist project.
In principle the pursuit of national sovereignty requires the mutual respect of sovereigns. But in the 21st century, this mutual solidarity of nations is also a practical necessity of their reconstitution. It is obvious that no nation can really break the grip of the global markets without like-minded national movements in other powerful states working together in solidarity.
We therefore need to sharpen the distinction and the contrast between, on the one hand, the cosmopolitanism of our transnational ruling classes and all their hangers-on, and, on the other, the internationalism of national sovereignty. Cosmopolitanism is a dystopian bourgeois fantasy of escaping the political burdens of the nation and the responsibilities of national sovereignty. Internationalism is the solidarity between the peoples of sovereign nations. True internationalism is the property of political sovereigntists not political cosmopolitans.
This distinction is illustrated by the contemporary impact of Ireland’s partition on the British Question. True sovereigntists in Britain and Ireland, being internationalists, recognise the necessity of ending Partition. Cosmopolitan globalists have reason to maintain Partition in one form or another.
The third challenge is that the politics of nation-building are inherently democratic. The real concrete nation can only achieve its sovereignty through democracy. In the 21st century, democracy is the only conceivable source of the political authority that is required to get the houses built, the jobs secured, and the skills provided. The greatest threat to democracy is not Vladimir Putin but our own cosmopolitan ruling castes. This is most obviously apparent in both Britain and Ireland in the ongoing assault on freedom of expression.
Here the challenge is to rearticulate the necessity of democratic political authority and to overcome the disastrous legacy of socialism’s failure in the 20th century. In Britain at least, many of the most energetic young people who are opposed to the political status quo are libertarians. They are rightly suspicious of the use of repressive state power that is favoured by our cosmopolitan ruling class, and by its left-wing apologists. We need a national movement that articulates the political connection between democratic government and maximum civil liberty much more clearly. We need, on the one hand, to demonstrate why democracy and not private property is the true bastion of civil liberty; and on the other, we need to polemicise against the left’s authoritarianism and show how it serves the interests of cosmopolitan capital.
In summary, to defeat the zombies that rule us, I think we need: a nation-building politics that critiques populist cultural atavism and nostalgia; an internationalist critique of cosmopolitanism; and a democratic critique of libertarianism.
We need to bring these politics of democratic internationalism to the task of reconstituting the British and Irish nations. In Britain, a defining characteristic of these new politics will be the recognition that Ireland’s unification is an essential condition of Britain’s national unity and self-government. In Ireland, the prospect of reunification confronts the Republic with the question of how it can be reconstituted in such a way as to achieve adequate authority with something close to a million northern Unionists. This requires winning the respect of enough of them for the new state, and at least a grudging willingness among the rest to go along with it. This is the challenge of magnanimity after such a long and bitter history. And internationalism and democracy will be a better guide than either cultural nationalism or cosmopolitanism.
But I want to conclude by briefly considering how the internationalist politics of democratic nation-building can address perhaps the most pressing challenge for the reconstitution of both Ireland and Britain: mass migration.
For cosmopolitans, mass immigration is an unqualified good because the cosmopolitan mind does not like to imagine a political community that is limited and, therefore, capable of sovereignty, indeed it is repelled from it because such a political community implies political accountability for its elites. By contrast, in our current circumstances of politically weak nation-states created by cosmopolitanism, the internationalist sees that mass migration further undermines national sovereignty in both labour-importing and exporting countries. (I stress, this is true in current circumstances and not always the case. But it is true at the moment and that’s one of the reasons cosmopolitans like mass migration.)
Mass migration undermines the national sovereignty of labour-exporting countries to the extent that it strips them of their skilled and enterprising young people, inhibiting the economic development of those countries and therefore their capacity to achieve an adequate degree of real political autonomy. We should propagate outrage at the theft from African, Asian, Latin American and Eastern European countries of their educated young people, and especially of their trained teachers and medical personnel.
Mass migration undermines the national sovereignty of labour-importing countries by disintegrating the nation internally. The pull factor in mass migration is an economic growth model that substitutes expansion of the labour force for investment in skills, machinery and basic infrastructure (such as health and education services and above all housing). This growth model systematically undermines the social position of poorer citizens. Moreover, mass migration into states that are already both economically stagnant and politically exhausted presents an immense challenge to anyone who would reconstitute the nation because it makes the task of political reintegration, the reconstitution of the nation more difficult.
We need to understand that for our cosmopolitan rulers inclusive policies towards immigrants are a way of maintaining the exclusion of the existing population. This is a modern form of an old imperial technique for ruling conquered peoples. At the same time, the existing population includes many recent immigrants. We can and must therefore embrace actual immigrants as fellow citizens (or potential fellow citizens) while simultaneously seeking to end mass migration. The embrace of immigrants as fellow citizens should be seen not as a celebration of cultural difference but as an integral part of the process of closing the void between the state institutions and the entire population, as an aspect of nation-building.
We should reject both the backward-looking cultural nationalism of the populists, and the cosmopolitan multiculturalism and intersectionalism of the ruling class and its left-wing apologists. Both are positions that are leading to disastrous sectional division. The trick here is to take up the cudgels against mass migration while arguing that the idea of inclusion in a unitary, democracy with internationalist policies will be very appealing to many actual immigrants, and that we should draw them into the cause of building a national secular democracy.
This is the way to reconstitute our nations.