Fintan O’Toole on nationalism and its deformations
In Ireland and England
Fintan O’Toole is a political writer and drama critic for The Irish Times, a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, a winner of the Orwell Prize, and a professor of Irish letters at Princeton. This is taken from an interview in the NYRB titled “Theater, Politics, and Critic.”
Nationalism was “the dominant political ideology” in Ireland all his life, and he was raised “steeped in the epic martyrology of the Irish struggle for independence,” and that taught two things, he wrote.
One is that nationalism has a claim, in one way or another, on all of us. It’s not rational, but it is undeniable. The Ireland I grew up in was something of a basket case, yet I would still never have wanted to go back into the UK.
But the other thing most of us in Ireland learned the hard way is that nationalism can very easily slip into a kind of nihilism where “us” is merely “not them.” It’s always easier to define yourself by what you are not. Once you go down that road, you’re open to ridiculous distortions of your own identity and to hatred of whoever happens to be the Other.
I have no quarrel at all with the right of English people to be proud of their country or with the idea of England itself as an imagined community that people might want to belong to. The problem is that from the seventeenth century onwards, Englishness was wrapped up in two other concepts: the Empire and the Union.
The first of those is gone and the second is, to say the least, under strain. Englishness is re-emerging but it is a love that dare not speak its name. There is no coherent idea of what it might mean in political or cultural terms.
So it is all too easy to manipulate. It became, with Brexit, a kind of parody of a national liberation movement with the EU standing in for the imperial oppressor that must be overthrown. That is innately absurd.
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