The logic of peacebuilding in Northern Ireland runs something like this: peace will come when both the Protestants/British and the Catholic/Irish ‘communities’ can proudly declare a love of ‘their own’ identity whilst also celebrating the identity of the ‘other’. In other words, peace requires benevolent but absolute ethnic bifurcation. Since the 1990s, the principle of ‘parity of esteem’ has been the core value of the peace process and the cornerstone of power-sharing governance. Aside from its reification of ethnic boundaries,1 this peacebuilding philosophy foregrounds mutual recognition of a pluralist multicultural sort, foregrounding the ‘celebration of differences’ whilst ignoring the fundamental ‘power relations of the social structure’ (Kincheloe and Steinberg 1997, p. 17). The Northern Irish state in the twentieth century, and the civil war itself, was grounded—at least in part—in sectarianisation and the systemic marginalisation and exclusion of Catholics. However, with the conflict being read as being essentially about antagonistic and zero-sum cultural identities (Gilligan 2007; Finlay 2010), the key questions that came to be asked were not those related to how Northern Ireland could deal with its multifaceted history of social, political, economic and ideological violence and domination. Rather, questions of ethno-cultural recognition were foregrounded, including those related to the fact that Northern Ireland’s Protestants lacked a coherent narrative of ‘their’ cultural identity.
It was in this context, in the late 1980s–early 1990s, that the Ulster-Scots movement began to be developed. Ulster-Scots is an ethno-linguistic and cultural heritage movement strongly associated with the ‘Protestant community’. Since its inclusion in the Northern Ireland Agreement2 in 1998, and the subsequent creation of intuitions to support its development and promotion, Ulster-Scots has since gained considerable ground in the region (Mac Póilin 1999; Níc Craith 2001, 2003; Stapleton and Wilson 2004; Gardner 2015, 2016, 2018a, b). Although it has been described as the Loyalist weapon of cultural war (Mac Póilin 1999), it is also firmly rooted in the discourse of Northern Irish peace. As one of my interviewees explained, speaking of the need for bringing Ulster-Scots education into schools across the province:
These views are entirely in line with those of certain quarters of the peace education literature, who call for space for school children ‘to explore their own identities, fears, and anxieties prior to exploring that of the other community’ (Kilpatrick and Leitch 2004, p. 582).In terms of Northern Ireland as a postconflict [society], there’s a re-building process … post-the Troubles …. There’s a sense in which if people don’t understand their identity, and who they are, it makes it much more difficult for them to relate to somebody else of a different identity and tradition. So, in actual fact, in terms of “cementing the peace”, as it where, Ulster-Scots … is fundamental, because increasingly what’s happening is that young people in the P.U.L. – what they call the Protestant Unionist Loyalist community – in particular, tend to find themselves in this kind of vacuum of not being sure or certain of their identity and their symbols and so on. And oftentimes that results in negative expressions of their identity, if indeed not violence, violent protest, and so on. So there’s a point about helping people to understand the strength of the identity that they come from, and [as a result] to then [be able to] engage with people from other traditions.
This book explores how ethnicity-building projects in line with this pluralist multicultural philosophy of peace3 can be problematic. In particular, I consider the content of a variety of ethnicity-building projects undertaken by the historically dominant, concentrating especially on the Ulster-Scots movement. With these identity narratives being written and re-written in the context of a (perceived) loss of dominance, I argue that they contain within them responses to the situation in which their writers find themselves. Crucially, these narratives tend to submerge, circumvent and obscure the very histories of social, political, economic and ideological violence and domination that need to be explored, responded to and dealt with for the creation of a more holistic peace.
In 2013, during her appearance on Judge for Yourself, a South African topical debate television programme, Sunette Bridges put forward her perception of an alleged ‘plight of white people’ in modern South Africa:
As the organiser and spokesperson for ‘Red October’, a movement aiming to raise awareness of what its organisers view as a ‘white genocide’ in the post-Apartheid era, Bridges has articulated her racial victimhood narrative on a variety of platforms (Bauer 2013; Thamm 2015). The discourse echoes those of white chauvinists in other contexts, complete with an unquestionably ‘me-tooist’ slant, anxious that ‘amid all this (all this?) attention being given to non-white subjects, white people are being left out’ (Dyer 1997, p. 10). Indeed, in the above interview, Bridges acknowledges the existence of Black Consciousness in South Africa and responds by asking, in predictably white pride rhetoric, ‘why is white consciousness not ok?’We are 4 million white South Africans left in this country. We do not have a vote,4 and we very rarely have a voice. … Twenty years after affirmative action and broad-based black economic empowerment – how many more white people do you have to move out of the job market? … We are being targeted, our farmers are not being looked after, our language is being worked out of schools … [South Africa] made this huge claim of being a rainbow nation: nobody ever said that we were going to stir all the colours together and become one unified culture. We were supposed to keep all the cultures and look after them and make them grow – and not get rid of them. There are black people – Zulu, Khosa, Tswana people, Pedi people – who are not happy that even their cultures are being intermingled and intermixed, and not acknowledged. But I am a white South African – that is what I am – but I am also an Afrikaner.5
However, Red October’s me-tooist discourse is not only one of white racial victimology; it is also ethnically inflected. As with several other groups in South Africa responding to the fall of white domination since the end of Apartheid—and especially to recent developments, such as the Rhodes Must Fall and Afrikaans Must Fall movements—the contention is frequently situated within a defence of Afrikaner or Boer identity. Where the defence of whiteness becomes untenable, or its connection to historical racial hierarchies and colonial dominations become too evident, the ethnic narrative offers a more defensible platform, merely defending the (allegedly) more legitimate and banal zone of culture, language and customs.
The defence of Afrikaans heritage is but one example of what is a global phenomenon. Ethnicity has been utilised in a variety of contexts world-wide as a defensive discourse by the once dominant, a mechanism for regaining ‘lost’ ground. In the face of perceived humiliation and loss—at least, a perception of the loss of their group’s absolute dominance in the society in question—certain actors utilise ethnic ‘stories of peoplehood’ (Smith 2003, 2015) as a conduit for reclaiming a sense of collective dignity. While some clearly use this narrative ingenuously, as a conscious subversive tactic, others appear to hold a bona fide belief in the need to defend and promote the position of their alleged ethnic identity, culture and heritage.
This book is about ethnically framed dignity discourses among those whose identity has been historically dominant. The precise meaning of the term ‘ethnic dignity’ will be described in greater detail in this chapter and fleshed out further in those which follow; however, in brief, it refers to instances where dignity claims are couched in ethnic terms. In certain ways, the focus of this book chimes with elements of the work undertaken by Michèle Lamont and her co-researchers into responses of dominated groups to experiences of stigmatisation and discrimination (Lamont and Bail 2007; Lamont and Mizrachi 2012; Lamont et al. 2016). However, in obvious contrast to this research schema, I focus on discourses surrounding identities that have been historically in positions of power, but where there has been a (perceived) loss of that dominant position.
In order to do so, I focus much of the discussion on a case study with which I am intimately familiar, having spent two years collecting a rich dataset of primary data in the area. This is the case of Ulster-Scots in Northern Ireland. Although Ulster-Scots forms the primary case study for the book, Chaps. 1, 2 and 8 adopt a broader, more global comparat...