Noble ideas misused as toxic forces: The threat of insular nationalism
If you accept that religion, any one of the hundreds of variants cherished around the world, is a noble ideal often hijacked in ignoble causes then you probably regard nationalism in the same light.
Often an empowering, uplifting energy, nationalism is, sadly, too often a mask for our less admirable natures. It can be driven by unspoken fear. It is often driven by base instincts that suggest that for us to succeed another must fail.
It is too often used as a stick to beat rather than a catalyst tide to lift all boats.
This is especially true when religion and nationalism become besotted bedfellows, creating a vortex of blind certainty that broaches no opposition — and, as history shows graphically, condones atrocity dressed as a do-or-die struggle for independence and autonomy, security or even racial purity.
The Crusades, the European settlement of North America, and in our own case, the Plantation of Ulster are all examples of this God-sent-us appropriation.
The barbarisms of Islamic State and the relentless “settlement” of Palestinian lands by Israel are just two examples of this contemporary justification for foul deeds.
The quickly-changing face of European politics and Europeans’ ambitions, show that these usually latent forces are always susceptible to whoever might stir the us-alone embers. Brexit may be, from an Irish perspective, today’s most toxic expression of old-style, insular nationalism but Britain does not stand alone.
Catalonia’s efforts to secede from Spain seem a benign enough assertion of nationalism but at a moment when liberal democracies are under such threat, it is hard to welcome that, or the Brexit, go-it-alone hubris.
Catalonian secessionists’ ambitions pale in comparison to some of those gaining momentum in the European Union, especially on its eastern fringes.
Hungary has, under the leadership of Viktor Orbán, prime minister since 2010, followed policies directly and maybe even purposely in conflict with EU principles. It is impossible to see Mr Orbán as a force for good.
Earlier this week, in our High Court, Ms Justice Aileen Donnelly made a ruling that suggested that she does not see Poland’s government, under the right-wing prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki of the Law and Justice party, as a force for good either.
On Monday, she stopped an extradition case involving a Pole, Artur Celmer, sought in his homeland on drug-trafficking charges, to seek guidance from the European Court of Justice because, she believes, the “immense” legislative changes to Poland’s judicial system call into question the mutual trust that forms the basis of the European
arrest warrant system. Senior Warsaw judges described her ruling as a “nuclear bomb”.
The ruling is, by itself, unlikely to dissuade those stirring the old hatreds — especially anti-semitism — but it shows an awareness of how European liberal values are under threat from intolerant voices — and that they must be faced down.
In the coming years we will mark the centenary of the most bitter expression of our nationalism — our civil war. It is essential that is done without renewing the kind of division threatening Europe and that afflicted Ireland for generations.
