Unionisms in Times of Change

Brexit, Britain and the Balkans

Jennifer Todd, Dawn Walsh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000439502
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Unions and unionisms are important because they offer an alternative form of politics to that of nation-states and nationalisms. They allow a wider variety of relations between a plurality of peoples, opening prospects of resolving territorial politics. But unionisms, as state- or polity-centred perspectives, are also typically power-centred, often using the resources of the polity to resist assertion by their members, thereby turning democratic challenges into secessionist ones.

Unionisms in Times of Change: Brexit, Britain and the Balkans focusses on these two faces of unionisms: the flexible alternative to the nation state, and the assertor of central power. This book is particularly timely at a period when the unions of the British Isles and of Europe have been disrupted by the process of British exit from the European Union, creating new dilemmas and options for unionisms in Northern Ireland. The chapters in this volume map the conceptual structure of unionisms; the ways unions are defined and defended in Northern Ireland, the United Kingdom, the European Union, the Balkans and Moldova; the ways they deal with challenge, conflict and change; the prospects of negotiation; the ways unionisms move from flexibility and accommodation to repression and back; and the opportunities for agreement and conflict resolution.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Irish Political Studies.

Unionisms and the challenges of change

Jennifer Todd

ABSTRACT

This article considers unionism as a set of ideas that informs political movements, situating it theoretically within the broader field of territorial politics, showing the dimensions on which it converges with or diverges from nationalism, outlining a preliminary typology of unionisms and showing the limits on the capacity of each type to respond to challenge and conflict. It shows the relevance of this for study of contemporary unionism in Northern Ireland.

Introduction

Unionisms are Janus-faced. On the one hand they are state-centred ideologies, using the cultural and often also the military resources of the state to repress challenge. On the other hand, they offer an alternative plural form of politics to nationalisms and nation-states. If, in one face, they appear as a form of state-centred nationalism, in their other face they represent a politics that is open to resolving territorial and ethno-national disputes. In this paper I argue that unionism is a distinct type of territorial politics, relevant in a contemporary world where difference is recognized and institutionalized within states, and where regional polities, like the EU, overarch and encompass existing states. When challenged, however, unionisms are prone to sway between centrist repression and flexible negotiation. In this paper I argue that there is a conceptual logic to this instability: a tendency, rooted in the conceptual repertoires of unionisms, to become fixated on the existing institutional union in ways that generate opposition, repression, and the possibility of total defeat. Unionisms and unions can sustain their positive potential, I argue, only by dialogically forging and democratically sustaining projects that unite their varied parts.

‘Unions’ are understood here in the broadest sense, to include states or polities with multiple (named and recognized) peoples and/or territories.¹ Unionisms are the movements and ideologies concerned to hold those polities together against separatisms, secessions, irredentism and other forms of boundary change. Unions and unionisms are not simply particular legal-institutional forms of federation or confederation, but rather they are broad historical phenomena and movements, akin to nations, nation-states and nationalisms, equally open to theoretical and historico-comparative analysis.²

In the contemporary world, unions and unionisms offer an alternative form of politics to nation-states and nationalisms, promising flexible interrelations between peoples and their polities. Unions allow asymmetry in their relations with their parts (Weller & Nobbs, 2010). Thus while one territory cannot – short of joint sovereignty – be a part of two distinct nation states, it can in principle be a member of several distinct unions as long as its rules within one union are not incompatible with its rules within another.³ But if unionisms can in principle be pluralist, welcoming difference and asymmetry within a state, and distinct from the particularism and assumed homogeneity of ‘narrow nationalisms’, in practice things are more complex. Unionisms may also be brittle, strident and resistant to negotiation: examples include Algérie Française; Milosevic’s militaristic response to the impending breakup of Yugoslavia; UK Brexiteering unionism that ignores the will of a majority in Scotland and in Northern Ireland; and – as Murphy and Evershed (this volume) argue – the contemporary Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) in Northern Ireland.

Ulster unionisms – in the DUP, the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) and their predecessors – have historically been strident, resistant to negotiation, and slow to compromise. Unlike the Scots, for whom unionism and nationalism can converge, or the British for whom the Union can be reconfigured to adapt to new circumstances, unionism in Northern Ireland has found itself in constant battle with Irish nationalism, and sometimes also with the British centre. I argue that its particular problems also reveal some general characteristics of unionism.

The article outlines the distinct ideological-identitarian logics of unionism, showing the conceptual tools it uses to negotiate conflict, and presenting an empirically-grounded analysis of the concepts, values and dilemmas that inform unionist politics in response to challenge and change. Comparative analyses of nationalism have developed typologies of nationalism, based on the interrelations of key concepts.⁴ This article outlines a preliminary typology of unionism, based on the interrelations of key concepts. This allows analysis of the opportunities and limits on negotiation given by the cultural logic of each form of unionism and it raises questions of how, when and in response to what incentives unionists themselves change from one type of understanding to another.

The article begins by situating unionism theoretically as a form of territorial politics that shares with nationalism a bank of key concepts but differs in emphasis on and combinations of them. It goes on to build a general typology of unionisms, then focusses on a few empirical types, showing how these have been combined in real-world political movements. In a third section, the article sketches the cultural logics that lead unionist political movements to revert to repression and majoritarianism in face of nationalist challenge. It then shows the applicability of the argument to some contemporary unionist political dilemmas, particularly in Northern Ireland.

Situating unionisms

Concepts

Unionisms are part of a wider set of ideologies and political movements concerned with territorial politics, appealing inter alia to territory and polity, peoplehood and identity, democracy and self-determination, law, constitutionality and rights. Although always likely to provoke conflict and sometimes violence, the concerns of territorial politics cannot be bypassed (Keating, 2013). In the contemporary world, there are no alternatives other than to find ways better to construct and interrelate these key reference points. Nationalisms assign one set of prioritizations and emphases to them and unionisms another.

Unionisms are thus siblings of their arch-opponents, nationalisms, and usefully analysed in comparison and contrast with them. They share the same characteristics that Hutchinson and Smith (1994) use to define nationalisms: unionism is territorially defined (although not always clearly bounded, since an open-ended expansive unionism is possible); it is focussed on a particular polity (often but not always a state); it involves a historical narrative that part-constitutes an identifiable named unit (the union), constructed as the home of a people and/or peoples that may not possess affective solidarity but at the very least are shaped into a unity by their mutual engagement, commitment and reciprocity.⁵ Unionisms, like nationalisms, may conservatively defend achieved political institutions against challenge, or may expansively work to create such political institutions. They differ from nationalisms in their emphasis on polity as prior to peoplehood, and in their recognition of a multiplicity of peoples united in the polity.

Within this, unionisms vary quite as widely as do nationalisms, as is shown by recent scholarship on unionisms in the EU, in the UK, in Scotland and in Ireland/Northern Ireland.⁶ In some contexts, as Kidd (2008) has shown in the Scottish case, unionism and nationalism may converge in their political aims of retention of the union. There was a similar convergence in Northern Ireland between 1998 and 2016, when increasing numbers of nationalist voters came to prefer the Union of Great Britain and Northern Ireland to a united Ireland (see Coakley, this volume). Unionisms, understood as ideologies and movements in support of union, thus encompass a very wide range of ideological positions, political stances and forms of identification and argumentation: in any given union, unionists support different political arrangements for different reasons and from different interests.

Whether the dominant ideology is unionist or nationalist partly constitutes whether a state is a union-state or a nation-state. Paradigmatic union-states, like the United Kingdom and Spain, evolved from older empires and are thus very different from the new nationalizing states that formed in the break-up of empires and in reaction to them. But there were different ways of evolving from empire, and nation-states like France and Turkey retain older imperial pluralities in their territorial and ethno-national make-up if not in their legal-institutional form. Nor are new nationalizing states ever homogenous and increasingly they are forced by international pressure to accept their own plural ethnic make-up (see Keil, this volume). Since all contemporary states and polities are composed of multiple parts and peoples that are increasingly recognized institutionally, their self-definition by nationalism or unionism partly constitutes their nature as nation or union. Much as Ian Lustick (1993) argued with respect to colonial status, whether a polity is a union or a nation is a matter of hegemony, ideology and self-understanding, not simply of organization, institution and law.⁷ The role of unionism in the state, and the specific type of unionism that dominates, are important in defining what is expected of the state, whether or not it functions as a union state, and how it deals with internal dissent.⁸

Unionism and nationalism: dimensions of distinction

The distinction between unionism and nationalism is characterized by emphasis on key concepts, which I order here in three dimensions.

The political dimension: polity or people

Peoplehood is central to nationalism, and self-determination and democracy its core norm; thus statehood is always subject to democratic consent. Nationalisms often prioritize popular agency and will over achieved institutions: even state boundaries are seen as institutions which crystallize power relations rather than defining the limits of justice and de...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Unionisms in times of change: Brexit, Britain, Northern Ireland and the Balkans
• 1 Unionisms and the challenges of change
• 2 Choosing between unions? Unionist opinion and the challenge of Brexit
• 3 The DUP and the European Union: from contestation to conformance and back again . . .
• 4 Same but different? The Democratic Unionist Party and Ulster Unionist Party compared
• 5 Public attitudes to different possible models of a United Ireland: evidence from a citizens’ assembly in Northern Ireland
• 6 The fragility of unions: the United Kingdom and Moldova
• 7 Imposed unions and imperfect states: the State Union of Serbia-Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina in comparative perspective
• 8 Symbolic right-sizing and Balkan nationalisms: the Macedonia name dispute and the Prespa Agreement
• 9 Unionisms in the UK’s Brexit crisis
• Index