"Binary identity"

Speaking in the context of Britishness, former leader of the Ulster Unionists, Mike Nesbitt, says he does not believe it is helpful to think in terms of 'binary identities', that is, thinking of people as being either British or Irish, or British or European. He cites poet John Hewitt's hierarchy of identity; Ulster, Irish, British, European. One can be all four.

He further adds that he does not believe that it is honest to think in this way on the basis that there are not many "pure gaels" or "pure Brits". He points to the fact that many Irish Catholics fought in the first world war, i.e. they were Gaelic yet British.

Fintan O'Toole, Irish Times columnist, agrees with him saying that around the year 2011/12 Irish and British people (probably meaning such people on the island of Ireland) were moving away from the "neurotic" approach of defining themselves on the basis of who they were not and in fact started to define themselves "by the actuality of their real existence which is quite complex and ambiguous rather than through these binaries." He then makes the point that Brexit has upset this and that the push for a hard Brexit is forcing people back into these binaries.

It is undoubtedly the case that one can have multiple identities, or at least that there can be multiple levels to one's identity. What is not the case, though, is that a person can have more than one political identity. A political identity is a very particular type of thing and one can ultimately only owe one's allegiance to one political order. Otherwise what would happen if two or more of the political orders one subscribes to came into conflict with each other? Implicit in the idea of order is the idea of  singularity. If you had multiple orders, this would lead to potential chaos which is clearly a contradiction. 

A person could certainly be politically British and only culturally Irish, or vice versa, and this would not cause a problem per se. Ian Paisley Sr. was an example of a man who considered himself Irish, though in a cultural/provincial sense that was subordinate to his political Britishness. Crucially, this did not mean Paisley was in any doubt as to Westminster's ultimate right to govern Ireland. That was the order of things. His Irishness only went so far.

Both Nesbitt and O'Toole seem to miss this important distinction between political identity and other types of identities. In speaking of people having complex and ambiguous identities, O'Toole appears to say that this means your political identity becomes equally complex and ambiguous, i.e. because the Irish are now so ambiguous and complex, so is their politics. I believe this to be rubbish. Our political identities are just as binary as they ever have been and ever will be; it's just that the politics we identity with have changed profoundly. We don't think in terms of a Holy Messianic struggle of National Liberation from Monarcho-Imperial oppression anymore. We now think in terms of being the model citizens of a global liberal democratic order. The binary is still there, it has simply moved.

What really copper-fastened the peace process in the North was not belligerents overcoming their differences but the divisions between them being rendered utterly trivial in an age of globalisation. Like a tidal wave, it washed away the importance and significance of their enmity. New enmities and divisions replaced the old, defined according to notions like the War on Terror. Irish and British cultural identities, along with many others, were subsumed into a new bigger narrative. But the binary distinctions that mark the political in any society at any point in history remain.

Thus, at the heart of Nesbitt and O'Toole's account is a delusion, if not a deceit, that the end of old school nationalism and unionism marks the end of binary identities.