ABSTRACT
Introduction Northern Ireland’s ‘Troubles’ are often seen as radically different from the Balkans’ conflicts. If the latter, according to Gagnon (2002) are driven by leaders’ interests rather than popular ethno-national antagonism, the former are rooted in popular divisions of protracted historical provenance (Wright 1996). If in the latter, fluid and permeable distinctions are forged into exclusivist ethnic boundaries by violence, in the former, ethnically exclusivist populations respond with violence to opportunity and threat. Of course some ethnic divisions are more fluid and permeable than are others (Wimmer 2013), but it is to caricature both the Balkans and Northern Ireland to see them as at opposite ends of the ethnic continuum. In fact, in each case ethnic divisions are at once more institutionally embedded and more fluid than such a dichotomy suggests. Malesevic (2012) has shown the embeddedness of popular division in the Balkans in class and status divisions associated with state-building processes, and only later politicised. So too the ‘ethnic’ division in Northern Ireland – although politicised at an earlier period – was embedded in horizontal inequalities and institutionalised in the state-building process and in the political organisation of the dominant unionist bloc (Ruane and Todd 1996; Bew et al. 1995). Of course the historical patterning of conflict in the Balkans differs markedly from that in Northern Ireland, but in each case longer historical patterns shaped the form of conflict, and settlement required that they be tackled (Ruane and Todd 2015). In this chapter I will argue that ethnic distinctions in Northern Ireland are not only embedded and polarised, but also fluid and permeable. The permeability of boundaries and ‘event-like’ character of ethnic polarisation in the Balkans is often attributed to framing processes (Brubaker 2002; McAdam et al. 2001). In Northern Ireland too, boundaries are usually permeable, even in situations of violence, and polarisation is a function of framing. However framing takes place not by the topdown categorisation that is often described (McAdam et al. 2001) but rather by a bottom-up process of totalisation and combination of categories, assumptions and values into a composite, salient and exclusivist division. It is a function, in Bourdieu’s sense, of converging expectations and judgements (a common habitus)
in a large swathe of the population, who themselves are moderate and permeable in most of their everyday interactions but who converge on polarisation in response to specific events. Polarisation is not a function of extreme ideologies and ethnic hatreds, but rather of an everyday grammar of understanding that is shared by ‘moderates’ and by ‘extremists’. In this sense, Northern Ireland may be culturally more like the Balkans than is often believed. The chapter begins with a brief discussion of the wider theoretical significance of the issues and the case study, discusses the cyclical nature of polarisation in Northern Ireland in the past and present, and finally turns to analyse its causes and its wider comparative significance.
