Borderland Anxieties: Brexit, Upper Silesia and Irish Partitions in Recent Novels by Glenn Patterson and Szczepan Twardoch

Northern Ireland owes its existence to a partition of Ireland that took place a century ago. The knottiest problems involved in the UK’s recent divorce with the European Union can be traced back not only to the Belfast Agreement of 1998 but also to the establishment of a new border, and a new borderland, in the island of Ireland in 1922. The same year (1922) saw the coming into effect of a partition of Upper Silesia, which was triggered by the events and political decisions taken in 1921. The primary focus of this essay is on literary representations of crises and anxieties connected with the transformations of the geopolitical statuses of the two provinces (i.e. Northern Ireland and Upper Silesia) and selected historical, political and cultural parallels between them. Those anxieties are exemplified and illustrated by the leading characters of Glenn Patterson’s Where Are We Now? (2020) and Szczepan Twardoch’s Pokora (2020). Both novels yield to provincial readings that explore basic aporias of uprootedness, displacement, deterritorialization and identity crises, collectively identified here as borderland anxieties. In consequence, transnational and postnational perspectives that emerge from Patterson’s and Twardoch’s works count as proactive responses, encoded in literary texts, to current geopolitical crises in Europe.

The Irish Border

The emergence, development, and transformation of the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland reveals much about the changing nature of nation-statehood over the century that followed its creation. In its own way, it is also a subject of innovation. The three interrelated strands of relationships safeguarded by the Good Friday (Belfast) Agreement of 1998 in many ways define the border. These relationships run within and between the two islands of Ireland and Britain, and also between the two political traditions in Northern Ireland. Nationalists and Unionists have come to define much of their ethos in relation to the symbolic meaning of the Irish border: The former want the border removed and the latter see the border as necessary to keep Northern Ireland as part of the United Kingdom. This helps to understand the prominence given to the Irish border in the context of the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union (EU), as well as the controversy around the terms of the U.K.–EU Withdrawal Agreement, which changed the nature of the relationship between Northern Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom as well as between Northern Ireland and Ireland. As a consequence of Brexit, the future of borders in and around Ireland—their openness and their governance—will be inevitably shaped by the vicissitudes of the EU–U.K. relationship.

Overcoming Identity Crisis: Limits of Consociationalism and Stagnation in Northern Ireland Conflict Regulation

For many decades, Northern Ireland has been characterized by a tense conflict of identities with frequent outbreaks of political and religious violence. At the end of the 20th century, a consensus was reached between the opposing sides on the need for a peaceful settlement of the contradictions, which was reflected in the 1998 Belfast Agreement. The most important part of the agreement was a transition to the consociational model of governance. Consociationalism was assumed to “cure” the Northern Irish region, save it from violence and antagonism, and help to establish a dialogue between the representatives of the region’s key collective identities — unionists and nationalists. However, although 22 years have passed since the introduction of the consociational system, the settlement of the conflict has not seen any obvious progress. The article attempts to trace the reasons for this state of affairs and, in particular, to find out whether consociational model could, in principle, live up to the expectations. Based on the analysis of the fundamental characteristics of this model, as well as the institutional patterns in the Northern Irish politics, P.Maksimova comes to the conclusion that consociational practices not only failed to contribute to the elimination of the antagonistic moods in the society, but also helped to preserve them. According to the author, consociational system is merely an instrument of crisis management, which, if misinterpreted, can only intensify confrontation and block the final settlement of the conflict. This is exactly what happened in Northern Ireland, where the specific features of the consociational system made it almost impossible to abandon group identities.

Mourning the Troubles: Anna Burns’s Milkman as a Gendered Response to the Belfast Agreement

The past two decades have produced extensive criticism of the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement’s (1999) progressivist logic in its proposal of a “fresh start” as the best way to honour the victims of the armed conflict that took place during the Troubles (1968-1998). In this paper, we argue that, by refusing to forget and to move on without exposing its grief, Anna Burns’s novel Milkman (2018) mourns the Troubles in the public arena, undoing the Agreement. With special interest in Burns’s narrator and protagonist who evades the reality of violence by “reading-while-walking”, we read Milkman as a gendered response to this enforced forgetfulness. If walking the city frames this young woman’s trauma within the collective trauma of the Troubles, it also offers the nomadic possibility of refusing the sectarian identities available to her.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the book as the first of a two-volume study which seeks to provide a comprehensive analysis of devolution in the UK. It focuses on the period from 1997 to 2007, addressing the origins and introduction of the original devolution settlements, and the subsequent decade of their development until the end of the Blair government in 2007. In these years, the original devolution reforms followed extensive debate in the 1980s and 1990s, including in Northern Ireland a peace process and talks that led ultimately to the historic 1998 Belfast Agreement. Referenda in each of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland were held in 1997. The subsequent development of devolution up to 2007 included the move to start at least a debate about further reform in Scotland, as well as more immediately a second Government of Wales Act in 2006. In Northern Ireland, the 2006 St Andrews Agreement reset the terms of the original 1998 settlement, and enabled the resumption of devolution in 2007, after the Northern Ireland Assembly had spent more time suspended than in session. A referendum on an elected assembly for the North East in 2004 ended in a 'no' vote, but the powers of central government offices in the English regions, Regional Development Agencies and indirectly elected regional assemblies nevertheless increased.