Wherever Green Is Worn?

Multiculturalism in contemporary Ireland.

Michael Valdez Moses from the February 2003 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

Declan Kiberd's fascinating and trenchant essay, "Strangers in Their Own Country," gets directly to the heart of contemporary Irish concerns about the prospects for the nation's multicultural future. Kiberd takes due note of the shocking instances of racial violence that have beset Ireland in recent years: unprovoked attacks on newly arrived immigrants, asylum seekers, and political refugees from Romania and Nigeria. He likewise notes the unprecedented challenge posed by the first generation of Muslim immigrants for a society that has been, since the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922, overwhelmingly Roman Catholic.

Arguably the most prominent and prolific literary scholar living in Ireland today and one of his nation's most renowned cultural critics, Kiberd stands out among his European intellectual counterparts for his relative enthusiasm for economic liberalization. He is an eloquent defender of open borders and an astute commentator on the economic advantages that the free movement of labor across national borders offers to Ireland in particular, and to Europe and the Third World more generally. He writes that "the arguments for embracing immigrants are not just moral or cultural, but economic as well. At present the Irish labour force is seriously short of skilled and unskilled workers...and those who come to Ireland...are here to work, not to live on the state; and they will invariably pay far more in taxes than they will receive in state hand-outs."

In a rhetorical move meant to remind the Irish of their own beleaguered history, Kiberd continues, "by tradition, it is the energetic and enterprising people from poorer countries who usually get up and travel to another land: and the money which they earn in the host country helps, through the subventions which they send home, to reduce poverty in their native countries as well....The Irish, many of whom lived on remittance letters from Britain and the United States in the nineteenth century, should understand this better than most. So also should they recognise the immense levels of energy and creativity in those who migrate." Adam Smith could hardly have made the point any more succinctly.

Kiberd, who for some years was accused (erroneously, in my view) by his cultural critics of harboring "green" sympathies (that is, being too sympathetic to the irredentist ambitions of Irish Republicans who endeavored to unite the whole island under an Irish national flag), has become the nation's leading advocate of cultural hybridization and cosmopolitan globalization. In his dazzling and immensely erudite works, Kiberd has investigated the historical and cultural processes by which a seemingly monolithic and homogenous "traditional" Irish culture was, in fact, constructed by revolutionary Irish nationalists, politically motivated ideologues intent on uniting the citizenry against their imperial English overlords.

Following in the footsteps of the historians Hugh Trevor-Roper and Eric Hobsbawm, who have traced the creation of British "tradition," Kiberd notes that what often passes in Irish pubs from Boston to Belfast as authentic Irish culture are, in fact, examples of "invented traditions" and "instant archeology," creations of late 19th-century and early 20th-century Irish politicians, artists, journalists, and scholars.

In his now-classic work of literary criticism, Inventing Ireland, Kiberd tells the story of Gaelic-speaking Blasket islanders, gathered around a cottage hearth during Easter Week, 1916, who first hear the news of the violent uprising in Dublin. Informed of a rebellion mounted by Irish nationalists hoping to restore Ireland's glorious pre-colonial Gaelic identity, one of the more skeptical islanders, the writer Tomás Ó Criomhthainn, points out to his Gaelic-speaking friends that there is no word in Irish for the "republic" that has just been proclaimed on their behalf.

In contradistinction to less reflective celebrants of all things Irish, Kiberd willingly embraces the invented character of contemporary Irish culture. Indeed he is uncharacteristically acerbic in characterizing his well-heeled media antagonists on the far left who declaim against both the stultifying effects of traditional nationalism and the corrosive effects of globalization; they are, in his memorable phrase, "designer Stalinists." In fact, the invented or self-consciously chosen character of the Irish national culture is for Kiberd an invitation to the ongoing reformation and reinvention of Ireland today. As Kiberd sees it, "the nation is less a legacy of the past than the site of the future, a zone of pluralisms which will prove its durability precisely by the success with which it embraces refugees, exiles, and newcomers."

Kiberd sees in the rising generation that has come of age since the birth of the Celtic Tiger an admirable flexibility, creativity, and cultural promise: "What these young people grasp most clearly of all is that Ireland itself was always multi-cultural, in the sense of being eclectic, open, assimilative. The best definition of a nation was that given by Joyce's Leopold Bloom: the same people living in the same place. As an outcast Jew, condemned to wandering, Bloom may in fact have had more in common with the members of the historic Irish nation than most of the characters in Ulysses: and he would certainly endorse the view that mono-culture works as badly in the body politic as in agriculture, rapidly wearing out the earth's potential." Thus does Kiberd address a diasporic people still haunted by the potato famine that wiped out the only staple crop of the 19th century Irish peasantry and forever altered the course of Irish national history.

To be sure, Kiberd is critical of the excesses of materialist individualism and "economic self-interest." He expresses concern that a society that ceases to respect the "res publica" and loses all faith in a "national philosophy" may well drift into an asocial and culturally vacuous anomie. In particular, Kiberd is critical of what he sees as too sharp a divide between the private and public spheres in multicultural America. For him, the very notion of culture is ultimately a transindividual one, and hence incapable of complete privatization.

If Kiberd is sometimes overly critical of the American melting pot, it is in part because he feels that contemporary American (and especially academic) multiculturalism has abandoned its "secular republican ideal." The result, according to Kiberd, is an unfortunate obsession with the "identity politics" of one's own ethnic group that inhibits rather than encourages genuine cultural exchange. For Kiberd the "evolving multicultural syllabus" in the United States "may serve as a warning of how not to do multi-culturalism in modern Ireland. This is one which presents students with entirely separate versions of Hispanic, African or Indian cultures, each of them honourably rendered in some of its richness, but none of them shown in interaction." In such passages Kiberd hints that what passes as "multi-culturalism" on U.S. campuses is in fact more nearly akin to the cultural tribalism of which Northern Ireland has had such bitter and regrettable experience.

Kiberd also writes suggestively on the ways in which well-intentioned efforts of a government to impose a top-down model of the multicultural society may have unintended and undesirable consequences. Without taking issue with those commentators who've analyzed the racist attacks on Nigerians in Dublin during 1999, Kiberd notes that some have suggested that the deepest source of contemporary interethnic violence is not necessarily a profound or atavistic racism lurking in the Irish soul, but rather "a bureaucratic central government" that imperiously and "suddenly plants refugees" in the midst of local communities, thereby "massively disturb[ing]" long-established streets and villages.

While Kiberd does not call for government to abandon all efforts at social engineering, his comments nonetheless highlight a suggestive instance of the manner in which government bureaucracies create, or at the very least catalyze, those very problems of a multicultural society that they subsequently claim justify their existence and necessitate their intervention. No thought is given to how the unregulated and free-flowing cultural negotiations of individuals in civic society might better manage the challenges and conflicts of contemporary multiculturalism.

Kiberd's most important contribution to the global debate over multiculturalism is his insistence on a conceptual distinction recently made much of by Tom Garvin, one of Ireland's leading political scientists. That distinction is between the nativist or romantic notion of ethnic nationalism that understands the nation to rest on inherited linguistic, racial, or "organic" cultural traits, and an enlightenment or rationalist notion of civic nationalism that conceives the nation to be composed not of a naturally given group or groups, but of free rational individuals who chose to become citizens of a secular, liberal, and democratic republic. If the former sort of ethnic nationalism triumphed in late-19th century and early 20th century Ireland and continues to prevail among the more ardent adherents and sympathizers of the IRA and Sinn Fein, the latter notion is a lost but recuperable heritage of the United Irishmen.

The United Irishmen was an ecumenical organization of Protestants and Catholics, inspired by the examples of the American and French revolutions, who unsuccessfully attempted to overthrow British imperial rule in 1798; they offer one potential source of "traditional" Irish culture that waits to be realized. Suitably reimagined and reinvented, their legacy of civic nationalism, deeply indebted to the ideals of Enlightenment rationalism, and to a genuinely tolerant notion of citizenship indifferent to the categories of religion, race, ethnicity, gender, and class, might provide a wider, safer, and more promising path toward the multicultural future of Ireland -- and of America, too.

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