Introduction
This book is about everyday identity change in divided societies and its role in transforming ethnic, national and religious divisions. It focuses on the ordinary people who live in, through and around composite, institutionally embedded, symbolically oppositional divisions. It explores when and how their satisfaction with group identities and divisions is undermined, the role of reflexive self-change in the process, and the ways such change is often stalled or reversed.
Recent sociological and psychological work has emphasized the group-context of social life, focusing on hardened identities that are difficult, or even impossible, to change.1 In conflict situations, group solidarity becomes important for self-defence, self-justification and self-esteem, and it is reproduced by everyday practice within the institutionalized âconflict ethosâ of a divided society (Bar-Tal 2013). Closed boundaries, hardened identities, group oppositions and ethnic conflict recur, and the varied mechanisms that reproduce themâfrom relative self-esteem to collaborative cognition to discursive practicesâhave been much researched.2
This book balances the current scholarly focus on micro-solidarities and group identities with an empirical focus on micro-reflexivity and identity change. It demonstrates that the impulse to identity changeâwhat I call individual identity innovationâis prevalent, especially in conflict-ridden societies, and traces how it is enabled and constrained by social institutions and cultural norms. It is easy to see such everyday challenges to group division as of little importance, easily marginalized socially and politically. Of course, this is a weak force against violence and power. But it is perennial, intermittently public and strong, and can be further strengthened by focused policy. It can change the cultural substratum of everyday life and condition the success or failure of collective action and political projects.
By identity change I do not mean individual exit from groupness, or individual change from one group to another. Rather I mean a process of individual distantiation from key social and symbolic divisions, a directional value-laden process that has real consequences in the individualâs relationships. Whether or not that process affects wider group boundaries or the social practices and institutions of division is an empirical matter to be explored. This book maps the micro-level cultural logics and social patterns of identity change and their wider impact in two divided parts of a divided island. It compares those who change with those who do not. It shows empirically and comparatively how and when ordinary citizens undermine closure and cultural power through their reflection, interaction and choice, and it identifies the social and cultural obstacles that they face. In these ways it shows the contours of ethnic and national division and the prospect and difficulty of overcoming it.
This book explores identity change as it is undertaken by people who are socially rooted and who cannot easily escape communal ties and constraints. It conceives of identity change not as exit from the national group nor as change from one nationality to another, but as being national in a different way. Of course a gradual revision of ways of being national is always ongoing usually without much impact on national or ethnic tensions and conflicts (Hutchinson 2005). Identity change becomes significant when it affects, and at its most radical transforms, the individualâs inter-group relations. It is particularly important in societies coming out of conflict. The functioning of power-sharing institutions and the compromise between once-conflictual groups depends on identity change that creates new intra-group balances between those eager to compromise or willing to dialogue and those who reaffirm traditional aims. Analysis of identity change is also of intellectual importance, showing the role of reflexive action in changing the form of ethnic division. It is of wider importance again, in understanding the micro-processes that underpin contemporary nationalisms.
This book works through detailed case studies and comparisons of identity change and continuity in contemporary Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.3 The island of Ireland provides a good context in which to study identity change because of the depth and historical continuity of its internal religious and national divisions, and because of the contrast between the two political jurisdictions. In the 2000s, Northern Ireland was part of the rich and powerful British state. It had new institutional and symbolic links to the Republic of Ireland, itself relatively wealthy. Both existed in a rich and stable European regional context. The long conflict in Northern Ireland had ended with the negotiated Good Friday Agreement (1998) and the systematic group inequality there was effectively being reformed. This allowed processes of individual identity change to proceed without being overtaken by catastrophic violence or shortcut by struggle against horizontal inequality. For these reasons, and because of the different social structures in each part of the island, the cases form a sort of natural experiment that allows a teasing out of the micro-mechanisms of identity change and continuity, the conditions that favour and hinder them, and their wider social impact.4
In the 2000s, when most of the interviews took place, it was a time of social change. The Good Friday Agreement was being implemented in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland was in the midst of an economic boom. Still the research findings were unexpected. Ordinary citizens, who would normally be expected to reproduce the codes of division in their everyday practices, rethought, questioned, subverted, undermined and challenged them. Half of our respondents did this, and two thirds in Northern Ireland. Most of the rest were satisfied with existing group identity and boundaries, revising them only to make them better fit a changing world. A few proudly reaffirmed the old divisions. What is startling is the reversal of the expected balance: rather than those who challenge division being an exceptional, contrarian minority, they were ordinary mainstream citizens, not much different from others, and there were a lot of them.
The book traces the changing social and symbolic divisions in the two parts of Ireland (Chaps. 3 and 4), showing who does and who does not challenge them and why (Chap. 5). It analyses the processes of identity change undertaken by so many of these respondents (Chaps. 6 and 7), showing its impact on group boundaries and institutional divisions (Chaps. 3 and 9). In the Republic of Ireland the slow incremental change of the 2000s accelerated, although unevenly, in the 2010s. In Northern Ireland more intense and extensive change was later reversed. The book conceptualizes this, traces the processes, and explains the contrast.
The book uses qualitative, lightly structured âethnographicâ interviews and participant observation to reveal the contours of everyday division and the ways individuals amend and change conventional national and ethno-religious meanings in their own social practice and self-understandings (see Appendix). This is used to shed light on issues of general significance in the contemporary world: the character of socio-cultural opposition and embedded division, the mechanisms of change away from division, the obstacles to change, the intermittent windows of opportunity that permit widespread identity change, and the policies and public norms that allow it to spread.
Subsequent chapters ask how division is practiced and understood (Chap. 4), how much identity change exists at grass-roots levels, among whom, when it occurs and what provokes it (Chap. 5), what form it takes (Chap. 6), what obstacles it meets (Chap. 7), how it doesâor doesnâtâtranslate into macro-level change, and what the obstacles are to such translation (Chap. 9). In addressing these questions I engage with contemporary thinking on processes of boundary-work and identity change (Chaps. 2 and 8), while tackling long-standing puzzles about the character of ethnic division (Chaps. 2 and 3), the appeal of nationalism (Chap. 4) and the nature of identity politics (Chaps. 8 and 9).
Nations, Nationalism and Ethno-religious Division in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland
Religious, ethnic and national distinctions have long been intertwined in Ireland. They informed colonial plantation, the systematic domination of the Catholic population, and later political mobilization, conflict, partition, and the development of two states on the island. Ireland was unusual in its colonial legacy and the degree and range of horizontal inequality it brought, but the coexistence of culturally distinct religious communities in an uneasy and unequal relation to the state was similar to other cases in Europe, like them reproduced through the efforts of preachers and priests, families and neighbourhoods (Coakley 2009; Ruane 2014; Wright 1996). In the Irish cases, ethnic and national division, largely invisible, and informally as well as politically reproduced, was and remains multiply resonant with religious, class and civilizational meanings and identity is defined in these terms.
The form and function of these social and symbolic boundaries have developed in different ways in each society in the century since partition in 1920â1922. They organized politics, inequality, and violent conflict in the North, while in the South religious difference was slowly differentiated from nationality. The two societies now provide differing opportunities and resources for identity change, which has had very different impact in each. Thus the two cases invite comparative research on the differing ways ordinary citizens (not activists or leaders) accept or renegotiate the same ...