ABSTRACT

An Poblachtánachas Cultúir (Mar Réiteach ar Fhadhbanna an Domhain)

Alan Titley

Cultural Republicanism (As a Solution to the World's Problems)

Much of the history of the modern world is a history of devoiced peoples gaining a measure of freedom of expression from their masters in the great empires. All empires are, by definition, anti-democratic. The nationalism of submerged societies grew apace with democracy. Nationalism among the community of nations is the equivalent of democracy among the community of individuals. Cultural republicanism recognises the equality of citizens as individuals, but also recognises the rights of peoples as members of communities. These communities are not ‘invented’ or ‘imagined’ (in Benedict Anderson's terms), nor have they been utterly assimilated (as desired by the empires). They inhere because of a vast network of symbolic meanings that have been lived and sensed through time. They are not merely economic in the capitalist sense, nor do they override the rights of man in the universalist sense. But this sense of identity—national, local, regional, communal—is what drives politics, more than class, or economics, or simple self-aggrandisement.

All such groups should be given whatever automomy they desire. This is the basis of democracy, against international corporate capitalism whose disdain for the individual is only matched by its disdain for the local gadfly polity. This democracy is the beginning of a better world, where people can make a difference free from a political control that despises them both as individuals and as members of a nation.

The imperial mind may reside in the most well-meaning and liberal thinkers. Certainly, Marxists did not want such meaningless entities as Estonia to gain their independence, while the idea of a Basque state provokes righteous anger, even if this is what a majority of Basques desire. We make some quiet noises about Tibet, but the Kurds can remain split among the nations. It is as if some peoples deserve freedom, while others do not—which is precisely what the imperial anti-democratic project was about in the first instance.

There is virtually no border dispute in any part of the world without an ‘ethnic’ dimension—an element of one group thinking that they are superior to another. This imperial implant is the biggest barrier to complete tolerance among peoples. National communities, of course, have responsibilites as well as rights, but these are met by incorporating international human rights law into their legislation, and historical memory, their own history of subjection, can play a huge part in the healing imaginative process.

The argument about small nations being locked away and isolated from the rest of the world is patently absurd: no nation is ever isolated from another because of the normal intercourse of culture and commerce; more saliently, the smaller the nation the more open it is. It is the big empires of the world who are narrow because they do not have to look outside themselves; it is the small nations who are the most cosmopolitan, because they have to be.

Alan Titley is the author of novels, plays, stories and literary scholarship. He is head of the Irish Department at St. Patrick's College, Dublin City University.