Interviewer: What have you got against Roman Catholics? Belfast Protestant: Are you daft? Why, their religion of course.

Things in Ireland can be even worse than that. Sectarianism from a Belfast Protestant is nothing new; but even Irish liberal pluralists can be a bitterly partisan bunch, excoriating traditional prejudices with a virulence so unremitting as to involve them in a kind of performative contradiction. In this articulate, claustrophobic, intensely combative culture, theoretical enquiry is now so locked into political doctrine, power and discourse so intimately intertwined, that even Michel Foucault might have been driven to put in a word for disinterestedness. There are commentators on Irish affairs today who would be simply incapable of giving a fair review to the work of their political opponents. And much of this is in line with a history which, given the relative absence of an industrial middle class, the depth of ethnic division and the dominance of a corporatist Catholicism in the island as a whole, never produced any very flourishing liberal tradition.

John McGarry and Brendan O’Leary’s eminently judicious, splendidly level-headed study of Northern Ireland is therefore especially welcome.footnote＊ McGarry and O’Leary, it should be said, are not in the least disinterested—they are, by and large, ‘neo-nationalists’ of the sdlp variety—but they strive to give both Unionist and traditional nationalist causes their due, before proceeding to rap them both sternly over the knuckles (the book’s partisan subtext peeps through in the more sardonic, polemical tone of its endnotes). Beginning with Irish nationalism, while properly insisting that Unionism is in fact a species of nationalism too, they discriminate its exclusively ethnic and inclusively civic varieties, and acknowledge that Sinn Fein, despite its almost wholly ethnic constituency, is formally committed to the latter. They are critical, however, of Sinn Fein’s majoritarian (all-Ireland) principle of self-determination: if the principle of majority self-determination within Ulster alone had been operative at the time of partition then Fermanagh and Tyrone, along with the city of Derry, should have become part of the Irish Free State, but the authors, like the Unionists, see no overwhelming reason why the most reasonable plebiscite area should have been the whole island. In Ireland, the issue of self-determination is plagued by a conflict over what counts as the relevant unit of self-determination in the first place, in what one might see as illustrating a profound tautology built into the very notion of political democracy. The people must govern themselves politically, but what counts as the people is itself a political construction. Even so, McGarry and O’Leary are in no doubt that the Irish Free State should have been granted jurisdiction in 1921 over far more people and territory than it actually obtained. While the Unionists insisted on the right of Northern Ireland to secede, they acknowledged no such right for people or areas within its boundaries. To avoid imposing on Ireland a system rejected by a quarter of its population, the British government of the day created an artificial state rejected by one-third of its population.

McGarry and O’Leary are also sceptical of the nationalist belief in British imperialism as the cause of the current conflict, or as the central obstacle to its resolution. It is, they argue implausibly, ‘merely one set of causal agents’ in the struggle. With some justice, they see traditional Irish nationalism as having drastically underestimated the tenacity of Unionist political preferences, and deny that ira violence, unlike that of the Irish war of independence, has either any popular mandate of legitimacy or any claim to meet the eminently reasonable criteria for a just war embedded in Catholic theology. One such criterion is that violence must be the only means available to resolve a serious injustice, whereas the ira would presumably have to claim with neo-scholastic subtlety that violence was the only means available to them to resolve an injustice by other means. In McGarry and O’Leary’s eyes and, as some Sinn Feiners will now acknowledge, the armed struggle has served to reinforce Unionist intransigency, inhibited political reform and economic investment, and provoked the British authorities into further erosion of civil liberties. Irish unification, so the book argues, demands the consent of the Unionists, a continuing British presence in the country and changes in the constitution and public policy of the Republic; and European institutions may well facilitate it better than traditional nationalist models.