Atlantic Disruptions: Ireland and the US
The disruption of the Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar’s visit to Washington last week was an amalgam of bad timing and political ill feeling. On the one hand, the tradition of the “shamrock ceremony,” which has its origins in the early 1950s, was cancelled due to coronavirus fears. On the other hand, the tradition of the bipartisan luncheon, established in 1983 and hosted by the speaker of the House, was boycotted by President Trump and Vice President Mike Pence who wanted to keep their social distance from Nancy Pelosi.
These breakings of norms upended the careful choreography of Irish diplomacy around the St Patrick’s Day engagement with the White House, an annual and impressive example of soft power, whatever the ersatz setting. It is but one mini-drama in the growing, epic drama of Atlantic disruptions in the age of Brexit and Trump.
Atlantic Disruptions is a working title for a research project and a series of events and talks that UCD Clinton Institute is running with partners in the US and Ireland. We aim to consider political, economic and cultural disruptions in transatlantic affairs and how Irishness is positioned and performed in relation to these.
Our title clearly registers turbulence in Atlantic relations, broadly taking up questions of paradigm change occasioned or accelerated by Brexit and other disruptions in transatlantic affairs, including matters of immigration and borders, populism and ethnonationalism, and race and class discontents.
An Interregnum
At the most superficial level, “Brexit” names a dramatic rupture in the political economies of the UK and the European Union, but we know that underlying that rupture are cultural and political disturbances that are deeper, broader and less easily named, and that have not yet fully played out in either political or cultural representation.
In this regard Brexit designates a fundamental paradigm shift and a period of suspension that may be understood as an interregnum, to invoke Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci’s term, a time when “the old is dying and the new cannot be born.” In the broadest, global terms Brexit is symptomatic of a crisis in the liberal world order as the once hegemonic power of liberal market economies lose their allure.
In Europe we see if not a collapse at least a significant loss of faith in social democracy and disaffection with ideas of integration, as resurgent forces of right wing nationalism disrupt politics across the continent.
In the US, the presidency of Donald Trump has ignited an attack on liberal democracy that may prove epochal and that is evidenced in the deep divisions within an increasingly polarised and partisan nation.
However you like to articulate the paradigm wars of the moment – between globalists and nationalists, say - there is an unmooring of familiar points of reference. The tectonic plates of socio-economic realities have moved and shifted some of our bearings. We know the pieces are moving around but not how they will settle, with what violence and with what results.
Boston or Berlin
How will Ireland fare in this remaking of the liberal world order?
Ireland has long had to carefully triangulate its interests and relations between the UK, Europe and the US. Brexit has raised the stakes in this complex diplomatic and economic positioning. It is a challenging scenario for a small state as these more powerful entities are also in the midst of reconfiguring their relations with each other.
In 2000, then Tanaiste (deputy head of the Irish government) Mary Harney gave a speech in which she remarked on Ireland’s Janus-faced position, between a Europe representing social inclusion and government regulation and a US that promoted the free market and minimal government involvement. Weighing their relative merits for an Ireland experiencing the full-throttle economic boom, she concluded that “spiritually we are probably a lot closer to Boston than Berlin.” It was a conclusion that reflected the optimism of the time, that Ireland was the new poster child of globalisation.
Is that true today? The answer is not obvious, in part because Boston and Berlin no longer symbolise what they did in 2000 – as already noted, both the EU and the US are experiencing seismic challenges to their political economies. More than that, since 2000 Ireland has experienced the financial crisis of 2008, the bailout and austerity measures that followed, and two major referenda. The long nineteenth century ended with such a rush in Ireland it can be head-spinning to take measure of its hyper-modernity today.
The most recent government, led by Leo Varadkar, sought to manage this change by melding economic conservatism and social progressivism and continuing to champion globalisation. It was an ambitious and not very successful formula if we judge by recent election results, which revealed deep discontents in the country. And now a new government must seek to restore relations between the state and its public while balancing relations with the UK, the EU and the US.
Washington
There are signs that Brexit has stimulated Irish American political interests in a way nothing has since the end of the conflict in Northern Ireland. It is a stimulation that the Irish government and the Irish American lobby in Washington is seeking to manage to Ireland’s interest. The pressure point is the Irish border and the question of how Brexit will impact a peace process brokered and guaranteed by the US.
Irish-American politicians have been on message since January 2019 when congressman Brendan Boyle introduced a resolution in Congress opposing the establishment of “a hard border” on the island of Ireland. In April, Nancy Pelosi amplified the message when she led a delegation of US politicians on a “fact-finding mission” to the UK and Ireland. “Let me be clear,” she said in an address to the Dail, “if the Brexit deal undermines the Good Friday Accord, there will be no chance of a US-UK trade agreement.”
The bluntness of the message was calculated and multi-directed. It is at once an intervention into British-Irish-EU deliberations on Brexit – on the grounds that the US is a guarantor of the Good Friday Agreement – but also a message to Donald Trump. Pelosi was warning the president that a Democrat-controlled Congress will not allow him to make a trade deal on the hoof with the UK.
The message has been consistently repeated and given further heft by congressman Richard Neal who is chair of the influential House Ways and Means Committee that will oversee any post-Brexit trade deal between the US and the UK. He is also a co-chairman of the Friends of Ireland Caucus in Congress, and a long time spokesman for Irish interests in Washington.
It is clear that a coordinated flexing of diplomatic and political muscles is happening here, though the outcome is still far from clear. What is significant at this time is the confidence shown by Ireland - this is high-wire diplomacy for a small state – and the residual power of Irish-American political capital at a time when it is thought to be moribund.
Irish America
St Patrick’s Day is a good time to take some soundings not only of Ireland-US relations but also of the Irish diaspora in the US.
The relationship between Ireland and the US has long been subtended by that between the Irish and Irish America. The nation and its diaspora exist in a dyadic relationship in which each seeks meaning about itself in the other. While these mirrorings have never been in synch they are particularly disjointed at present.
For Irish Americans, particularly of older generations, Ireland appears to be morphing into a secular, progressive state that does not gel with their imaginings of the old country. For domestic Irish, Irish America appears to be becoming more conservative, closed and forgetful of its immigrant past.
Of course, these are distorting fantasies but nonetheless powerful (as is the fantasy of English nationalism driving Brexit) and they impact on Atlantic perceptions and relations. At their roots are different ideas of what it means to be Irish. These ideas have been notably sharpened and challenged by Trump’s presidency.
In March 2017, anticipating the St Patrick’s Day meeting of then Taoiseach Enda Kenny and Donald Trump, the Irish journalist Fintan O’Toole wrote in the Irish Times:
This is a moment of truth about what it means to be Irish in the world. We either wink at a racism that affords most of us the privilege of a white skin. Or we honour the struggles of so many millions of Irish immigrants to be accepted as equal human beings.
That’s a heady claim, one that posits a deep investment in the Irish-US relationship, and a stark articulation of what is at issue in this moment of Atlantic disruption - a fundamental challenge to the historical and ideological sureties of Irish identity. In this claim, Trump, or perhaps better Trumpism, is as much an existential challenge to Ireland and Irishness as is Brexit.
Conclusion
Conflicting claims to Irish identity are a significant feature of the Atlantic disruptions of the present, signifying not only economic instabilities but also ideological and existential uncertainties. This is the nature of an interregnum, a time of suspended norms and expectations. It is a precarious time in which Ireland will need to carefully navigate its place in an emergent world order.