Samhain '94 Samhain '94Greens have their own contribution to make to what we hope will prove to be a process of peace. The emphases of Green Party policy - a rejection of either/or solutions in favour of searches for the lowest common denominator, represented procedurally by the preferendum rather than the yes/no referendum, administratively by our emphasis on decentralisation and a moving away from nation states, and of course by our rejection of military solutions, whether by the paramilitaries or by the British Army - offer a possibility of a sustainable peace reached by a deconstruction of the rigid alternatives of national boundaries. This lateral thinking is perhaps connected to the "virgin birth" of the Green Party: we are the only party in the Dáil without a family tree leading back to the political and military organisations of the period of independence and Civil War.
The articles which follow represent differing ideas and resources, ranging from through political proposals through historical analysis to examination of national identity in the Republic. These contributions are relevant not just to the Green Party, but to all of those within the green and alternative movement who are engaged in redefining the boundaries and meanings of national identity. In the long term, the social and cultural transformations brought about by the movement - in deconstructing machismo, in encouraging openness and experimentation, and in shifting attention to the local and the everyday rather than the national and the symbolic, are likely to be as important as the action of political parties.
Discussion of the prospects for peace in Ireland tends to take the idea of national identity for granted, whether positively or negatively. It is conventionally assumed that national identity is a given need, and that the problem is to define appropriate units and construct appropriate meanings. This assumption may not be true. Firstly, it is not clear that an ideal green future would contain units to which a national identity could be meaningfully attached. It can be argued that the requirements of grassroots democracy exclude not simply nation-states, but states as such. In particular, the idea of a single dominant level of decision-making, and the idea that territorial units would form the basis of a green society, conflict with the basic principle of participatory democracy that decisions should be made by those affected by their outcome - a principle which has no inbuilt bias towards territoriality.
More importantly perhaps, national identity (or any other reified identity) can be seen as ultimately restrictive of individual self-development, a barrier to human communication, and incompatible with a transcendence of the distinction between "insiders" and "outsiders". We certainly have to come to terms with people's attempts to act as if a closed culture could be created and as if group membership could be straightforwardly determined; but we need to think whether we want to support these attempts. In this respect, the discussion of what the content of identity should be might perhaps be complemented by the question of what it would mean to transcend identity, how we might behave if we had to take full responsibility for our own actions and our own states of mind (if identity has no implications for either, it is hard to see that it exists at all).
Lastly, national identity does not have to be seen as a constant of human nature. Xenophobia may be universal, but self-identification with a state and the acceptance of ideas simply because of their association with that state are developments with a distinct historical origin and - hopefully - a historical "sell-by" date. This is already visible within the green movement: in the scope of its issues, the range of its contacts and networks, and its everyday membership. National difference is most evident when we emphasise conventional attitudes and behaviour and our everyday experience of the old society. In Green parties, in the peace movement, among rainbow nomads, on alternative farms, or in urban counter cultures, the similarities - and the desire for contact - reach across national boundaries. While the green and alternative movement remains marked by the dominant social and cultural forms, what it is creating in its global and local activity is located at those levels and characterised by the similarities and differences arising there.
None of this means that we should ignore the very immediate relevance of nationality as a means of self-identification, or that we should not work for changes in the units which people identify with and the meanings that are ascribed to them. But it is also worthwhile to raise the question of where, in the end, we think we are heading.
Laurence Cox
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An Caorthann (The Rowan Tree) Irish green-alternative magazine Editor: Laurence Cox Web weaver: Anna Mazzoldi |