ABSTRACT
State, nation and nature The nation and the modern state emerged together as part of a conjunction of economic, social, technological and political forces that unfolded from the late eighteenth century onwards. As Ernest Gellner tells us in Nations and Nationalism, the modern world is the site of ‘a deep adjustment in the relationship between polity and culture which is quite unavoidable’ (Gellner 1983). Identity and political power are fused together in the form of the nation-state. Nationalism provides a compelling model of collective identification in an age of mass media, anonymity and disorienting social change (Anderson 1991; Breuilly 1993), while the modern state’s project of homogenisation and infrastructural control over its territory naturalises the nation-state unobtrusively but powerfully in everyday life (Giddens 1996; Mann 1993). These processes are greatly reinforced by the constantly repeated ‘we’ and ‘here’ of nation and state circulated through mass media, addressing people as part of a collective whose boundaries and identity are so obvious that they don’t even have to be named. This ‘banal’ or everyday nationalism so powerfully analysed by Billig (1995) is crucial to the naturalisation of state territory. When state, territory and nation are brought into close alignment they combine to exert an almost ‘magical’ power, as Sack (1986 38) puts it, to make it seem as though a contingent set of political and social arrangements is deeply natural, inevitable and eternal. While pre-modern rulers looked upwards to sanction their authority, to divine powers represented by the sun or heaven above, claims to authority in modernity search for legitimation in the opposite direction, looking downward to the ground below their feet. In the modern spirit of the natural sciences, they seek authority in material rootedness rather than transcendence. The naturalisation of national territory makes it seem as though political authority derives from the earth itself, the ultimate source of authority in a ‘disenchanted’ world. A strongly naturalised national territory is a cornerstone of state legitimacy in the modern world. Ireland provides an especially valuable site for understanding and exploring the forces that sustain this modern alignment of polity, territory and culture precisely because the interrelated naturalisation of state and nation on both sides of the Irish border is so fractured and incomplete. Ireland is a site at which the
interaction between territorial boundaries, collective identity, state apparatuses and global flows are much more exposed, much more susceptible to analysis, at which we can more easily pull apart the separate strands of state and nation and analyse the varying ways in which they intertwine. Irish nationalism has long emphasised the ‘natural’ unity of Ireland as a social and political unit, its borders ‘unmistakeably delimited by the Ocean’.1 Political borders are far from natural of course. They are a product of human action and have to be actively maintained and constantly reproduced in everyday interaction. Nonetheless, natural features have long played an important role in legitimising and naturalising sovereign states: the Rhine and the Pyrenees for France, the ‘sea to shining sea’ of the United States (US) and the surrounding seas of Shakespeare’s ‘sceptred isle. . . . This fortress built by Nature for herself ’.2 For this reason there is a strong bias towards seeing island unity, whether in Cyprus, Sri Lanka or Ireland, as a project that has the force of history and nature behind it (Guelke 2001). But if island boundaries and a prior existence as a single administrative unit help to naturalise pre-existing territorial frameworks long after they have been partitioned, state borders have a naturalising power of their own that works in the opposite direction, and at the deepest levels of everyday life. The boundary between the Irish state and Northern Ireland is reproduced through state apparatuses that operate different education, health, taxation and regulatory systems on either side of the border. The modern state reaches so deeply into all aspects of everyday life that it becomes central to the constitution of the subject. The deepest emotional attachments to home can become strongly associated with landscapes that are heavily imprinted by the state apparatus. Consider, for example, the successful lobbying by German soldiers in Afghanistan to have the postboxes in their bases painted in the familiar yellow of the German postal service. ‘Gelb heißt Heimat’ – ‘yellow means homeland’, as the Deutsche Post put it in a press release about their Afghanistan service.3 To move from one jurisdiction to the other in modern Europe is to experience a sharp, albeit often subtle, shift in numerous aspects of everyday life, most immediately apparent in the landscape and the built environment. Distinctions that have arisen between the two Irish jurisdictions because of differing planning regimes, agricultural regulations, signage and road-building practices, not to mention the switch from kilometres to miles, and from pounds to euros combine to subtle but powerful effect. Many of these differences have widened considerably in recent decades. Take the banal matter of licence plates. At the time of partition Irish counties were part of a single alphabetically organised system, plates for Fermanagh ending in IL for example, with IM for Galway. Until the 1980s they remained recognisably part of a single system, although the colour of the plates varied. But when the Irish state moved to an entirely different system and the use of white and blue European licence plates in 1987 the distinction was sharpened significantly. This novel visual cue signalled the political division of Ireland in the most direct and unavoidable way, on every side-street and country road, impressing it on everyday consciousness over and over again.
