Partitioned Lives: The Irish Borderlands

Catherine Nash, Bryonie Reid

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317083672
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Geography
• Index: Social Sciences

Partitioned Lives: The Irish Borderlands explores everyday life and senses of identity and belonging along a contested border whose official functions and local impacts have shifted across the twentieth century. It does so through the accounts of contemporary borderland residents in Ireland and Northern Ireland who shared with us their reflections on and experiences of the border from the 1950s to the present day. Since the border is the product of the partition of the island and the creation of Northern Ireland, its meaning has been deeply entangled with the radically and often violently opposed perspectives on the legitimacy of Northern Ireland and the political reunification of the island. Yet the intensely political symbolism of the border has meant that relatively little attention has been paid to the lived experience of the border, its material presence in the landscape and in people's lives, and its materialisation through the practices and policies of the states on either side. Drawing on recent approaches within historical, political and cultural geography and the cross-disciplinary field of border studies, this book redresses this neglect by exploring the Irish border in terms of its meanings (from the political to the personal) but also, and importantly, through the objects (from tables of custom regulations and travel permits to road blocks and military watch towers) and practices (from official efforts to regulate the movement of people and objects across it to the strategies and experiences of those subject to those state policies) through which it was effectively constituted. The focus is on the Irish border as practised, experienced and materially present in the borderlands.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Partitioned Lives: The Irish Borderlands offers an exploration of the nature and effects of the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland from the perspectives of those who have experienced it most directly in their everyday lives. This border stemmed from the partition of Ireland in 1921 and, unsurprisingly, its subsequent meanings have been deeply entangled with the radically and often violently opposed perspectives on the legitimacy of Northern Ireland and the political reunification of the island. As a line on the map, it stands for the long and complex political and cultural history that led to partition and for the political geography of the island since then. Yet for many of those who have lived and continue to live on or near the boundary between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic – often known as borderlanders – the border is not only a symbolically loaded political boundary but also a presence that impacts on everyday life as it is experienced on the ground. The border has had a material presence in borderlanders’ lives in myriad ways, not only through its more or less obvious existence in the landscape and its varying effects on cross-border mobility, but also through the effects of living where two political jurisdictions (or three including the wider context of the United Kingdom) with all their responsibilities and regulations, policies and procedures meet. In Partitioned Lives: The Irish Borderlands, we approach the border as lived as well as symbolic, delimited by the cartography of partition but effectively constituted through the materialities of its physical form and the objects of its regulation (from tables of custom regulations and travel permits to road blocks and military watchtowers), and through practices (from official efforts to regulate the movement of people and objects across it to the strategies and experiences of those subject to those state policies). Our focus is on the ways in which this intensely politically symbolic border has been practised, experienced and materially present in the lives and landscapes of the borderlands.

The establishment of the border in 1921 followed the Government of Ireland Act of 1920 and Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 which ended the Anglo-Irish War (1919-1920) and granted dominion status to a new Irish Free State composed of 26 of the 32 counties of Ireland and, in response to unionist resistance to Irish independence, established Northern Ireland as a political entity governed by a unionist majority in Belfast, under British state authority (Figure 1.1). The border is thus fundamental to the existence of Northern Ireland and, like the political status of that polity, it remains deeply contested. The history of the origins and legislative establishment of the Irish border gives some sense of the struggles over identity, culture and territory that underpinned Irish nationalist challenges to British rule in Ireland and unionist resistance to the end of the Union that preceded and followed partition. Yet such a perspective provides little sense of how the border was brought into being on the ground and how its nature has changed over the course of almost a century of partition. Nor does a political focus enlighten our understanding of geographical variations along the border’s length, or how it has been experienced by those who have lived nearby. The intensely political symbolism of the border has meant that relatively little attention has been paid to the lived experience of the borderlanders and the actual material of the border as a presence in the landscape and in people’s lives. Despite the volume of historical research on the political processes that led to partition, there has, until recently, been considerably less attention to the nature of the Irish border itself. Now, much more nuanced accounts are emerging which see the border as a product of the conflicts, compromises and negotiations between Irish nationalism, Ulster Unionism and British imperial interests.1 Equally, work on the contemporary border is more attentive to its lived realities as well as its changing economic and political status.2 Nevertheless, our knowledge and understanding of the political origins and ideological meaning of the border are still more developed than work on the border itself, as practised, material and lived, as well as symbolic and discursive.

Figure 1.1 Ireland, Northern Ireland and the Irish border

This book explores everyday life and senses of identity and belonging along a contested border whose official functions and local impacts have shifted across the twentieth century. It does so through accounts of some 80 contemporary borderland residents in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, set within the context of extensive fieldwork and photography within the borderlands.3 Our focus is on borderland life within the memory of those that shared their reflections and experiences with us, and so concentrates on the border over the last 60 years or so, from the 1950s to the present day. This introduction outlines the thinking that shaped the gathering and interpretation of the research material that is the basis of this book which includes 80 in-depth interviews as well as a range of contextual sources. Our perspective is informed by recent geographical and wider cross-disciplinary approaches to conceptualizing and understanding political borders, especially those which focus on everyday lived experience in borderlands.

Political Borders, Border Identities, Borderland Life

Since the early 1990s, borders have been the subject of a considerable body of work across a range of disciplines including geography, politics, anthropology, sociology, history and cultural studies. The borders in question can be international state boundaries or symbolic social and cultural lines of inclusion and difference, or often both, in studies which focus on the relationships between the lines of territorial demarcation and social categories defined through or in relation to ideas of the nation-state.4 The particular concerns and approaches vary according to disciplinary biases, but much of this body of work has addressed the historical formation and contemporary re-configurations of the nation-state, from European state formation and settler colonialism to contemporary globalization. As such, it has been part of the broader poststructuralist critique of naturalized social categories and boundaries. ‘Border’ suggests both the material and imagined, literal and figurative, and it is this expansive ambiguity of the term that makes it a fertile focus for exploring the entangled relations between the bounding of territory through political borders and the making of social and cultural categories of identity and difference at different scales.5 Creative and critical engagements with borders, which see them as metaphors and imaginative resources for the making and policing of collective identities and the construction of difference, work to denaturalize and subvert powerful and exclusionary borders, boundaries and categories.

Our starting point in this book is an international political boundary rather than borders in this broader sense, but the book is closely attentive to the relationship between political borders and the ongoing making and reconfiguration of social and cultural categories. This is both in relation to the origin of the Irish border in accounts dominated by ethno-nationalist identity and difference – Catholic and nationalist or Protestant and unionist – and also in relation to its effects on shaping identities that override, co-exist with, or reinforce those categories. But in foregrounding this question of the distinction between borders as the edges of state territory and borders as social and cultural boundaries, it is not meant simply to juxtapose the imaginative or metaphorical with the hard material realities of borders as lines of territorial demarcation. Political borders are simultaneously configured through material forms, discursively constituted, legitimized and contested, and made in practice, both in their reinforcement and in their subversion.

Much of the work on territorial borders has been devoted to exploring the ways in which all political boundaries, however natural and fixed they appear, are products of particular histories of nation building, state formation or colonialism.6 State boundaries are reconceptualized as the historically contingent outcomes of modern state formation and territoriality whose functions to delimit and contain the state co-exist with contemporary transnational and globalized flows and scales of connection that cross, but do not simply dissolve, national boundaries.7 This attentiveness to the historical making of political borders has been extended in recent approaches which address not just the political processes that lead to borders that are then imagined as stable entities, but also how borders, including apparently uncontested examples, are made in an on-going sense in terms of ‘symbols, signs, identifications, representations, performances and stories’.8 Political borders are continually and contingently constructed through practices that shape the differentiated mobilities of people and objects.9 They are increasingly understood as ‘institutions and symbols that are produced and reproduced in social practices and discourses’10 and which ‘mediate and generate interactions and meanings’.11 This is a conceptualization of borders in terms of contextual political, cultural, economic and governmental performances and practices through which the border itself and also the territorial claims of the state, are continually remade.12 But, as recent work suggests, this is not simply a matter of the processes of initial border demarcation but ongoing practices surrounding its role in lived experiences. From this analytical perspective, engaging with borders is not confined merely to addressing their symbolic significance, but is concerned with the ways in which borders are institutions that are continuously constituted and, in turn, help constitute the state through these routine practices of ‘making territory’ at its edges.13 In his call for more attention to the ‘ordinary practices through which the state’s effects are actualized in daily life’, Joe Painter points to how the ‘routine and everyday production of territory through the maintenance of border crossings, the decisions of immigration officials, the issuing of visas, the policing of smuggling, the drawing of maps and the provision of national infrastructures all speak of the mundane labour involved in making territory’.14 In one fundamental sense, borders are constituted by the territorial practices of the states that they define.

But they are also made in the ‘borderlands’, defined as the flexibly defined region in which proximity to an international state boundary shapes everyday life and identities in diverse, complex and often contradictory ways. This is most usefully envisaged as a cross-border region, as we do is addressing the Irish border, such a perspective emphasizing the interconnections across the border zone while, equally, attending to the significance of the border and the distinctiveness of its implications either side. Effectively, this provides an analytical approach that can explore the social, economic, cultural and political dynamics of borderlands rather than a state-centric approach that confines research to one side or the other.15 Territorial borders attempt, but never succeed, in simply demarcating neat geographies of identity, belonging and allegiance either side. As visual artists, writers and film-makers, as well as many scholars, have vividly demonstrated, political borders never coincide neatly with social and cultural categories since these categories are themselves fluid, complex and overlapping and rarely tightly geographically bounded.16 Equally, borderlines never fully seal off what they try to contain but are contested, not only through actual conflict over territory, but also because they enforce a simplification of territory, identity and belonging and non-belonging. The violence of the tracing of a borderline is thus both material and symbolic.17 Border identities have particular complexities that are shaped by historically specific geographies of identity and difference in borderlands, including local patterns of ethnicity, the histories of their making, the political relationships between states, and economic differentials between them.

Four models of interaction have been suggested as a tool for understanding and comparing borderlands. They include: ‘alienated borderlands in which routine cross-border interchange exchange is practically non-existent, mainly due to animosity between the two sides of the border’; ‘ coexistent borderlands’ in which a minimum of cross-border contact exists, despite unfriendly relations between the two states’; ‘interdependent borderlands ’ in which the societies on both sides of the border are linked symbiotically, leading to a considerable flow of economic and human resources across the border’; and ‘ integrated borderlands ’ in which ‘practically all barriers to trade and human movement are eliminated’.18 These broad models provide a useful heuristic tool but need not be imagined as stages in a natural progression of borderlands that culminates in the effective elimination of the border. Thus, the four models do not follow a simple development cycle from ‘closed’ to ‘open’ but are subject to the national and international forces that push for different forms of permeability and closure. Indeed, borderlands are often characterized by the simultaneous and shifting dynamics of contact and division in different dimensions of borderland life.

Borders frequently cut through networks of ethnicity and kinship that pre-exist the border, or persist despite the border, or are reconfigured by the border. So while borders are often sites in which the ide...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Partition: Political Origins, Historical Geographies, and the Making of the Irish Border
• 3 Relative Calm: Borderland Life in the 1950s and 1960s
• 4 The Troubles, the Border and Borderlands, 1969-1995
• 5 After the Troubles: Reconfiguring the Border and Border Identities
• 6 Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index