For those who spoke on behalf of Leave voters, the result on 23 June 2016 meant the people of the United Kingdom were taking back ‘control’ or getting their ‘own country back’. However, two parts of the United Kingdom did not vote Leave: Scotland and Northern Ireland. Here, the significant counterpoint to ‘taking back control is “waking up in a different country”’, and this sentiment has unique political gravity. Its unique gravity involves two distinct but intimately related matters. The first concerns the politics of identity. The vote was mainly, if not entirely, along nationalist/unionist lines, confirming an old division: unionists were staking a ‘British’ identity by voting Leave, and nationalists an Irish one by voting Remain. The second concerns borders. The Good Friday/Belfast Agreement of 1998 meant taking the border out of Irish politics. Brexit means running the border between the European Union (EU) and the United Kingdom across the island as a sovereign ‘frontier’. Although this second matter is discussed mainly in terms of the implications for free movement of people and goods, we argue that it is freighted with meanings of identity. Brexit involves a ‘border in the mind’, those shifts in self-understanding, individually and collectively, attendant upon the referendum. This article examines this ‘border in the mind’ according to its effects on identity, politics and the constitution, and their implications for political stability in Northern Ireland.
An explicit and politically mobilised English nationalism has been remarkable because of its absence from deliberation on constitutional change in the United Kingdom. In short, it remains a mood and not a movement. This article explores the mood and explains why that mood has not become, as yet, a movement. It examines three related aspects of the English nationalist mood. First, it considers anxieties about the condition of contemporary England which can be found in the work of intellectuals and artists. Second, it identifies the sense of injustice which animates the lobby group the Campaign for an English Parliament. Finally, it looks at how mainstream party politics responds to these national anxieties and that sense of national injustice. KEYWORDS: anxiety; Britishness; Campaign for an English Parliament; Englishness; injustice; nationalism This article considers contemporary English nationalism from three related perspectives. The first is from the perspective of political and cultural anxieties found mainly in the arguments of writers and journalists. These anxieties have their own historical lineage but it is their novel character that warrants discussion. Their significance lies in the mood they convey. The second is from the particular perspective of the Campaign for an English Parliament (CEP), a lobby that shares these anxieties and argues that an English Parliament is necessary either to redress the peculiar asymmetry of post-devolution Britain or to pave the way for English independence. Its significance is the movement it tries to encourage. The third perspective is from the potential intersection of these anxieties and that perspective in English party politics. For without major party mobilisation of these anxieties and the promotion of an English Parliament, English nationalism is likely to remain a mood not a movement. English anxietiesFor most English people, these anxieties may be nothing more than what H. V. Morton called a 'vague mental toothache', a disquiet based on the feeling that the English should feel anxious rather than the state of actually being anxious (Morton 1927: 46). And there is always a popular constituency
A B S T RAC TThis article explores one of the paradoxes of the Belfast Agreement. On the one hand, the provisions of the agreement are presented as a model of democratic ingenuity and political inclusion. On the other hand, the creation and maintenance of the agreement have been judged to involve lying and deception. The article is divided into two parts. The first part examines the relationship between modern democratic theory and the art of political lying. The second part assesses how suspicion of deceit informs the mood of certain constituencies of opinion within Irish republicanism and Ulster unionism. The article concludes with the suggestion that the longerterm effect of political lying, which was a necessary to achieve the agreement, is to undermine the essential attribute of agreement, namely trust.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.