Blood and Belonging (37 page)

Orangemen will tell you nostalgically about the days when Catholics used to come and watch. As in Serbia and Croatia, both sides have an interest in conjuring up a lost paradise of inter-ethnic accommodation in which each side had amused respect for the other's rituals. It's easier for Loyalists to believe this than admit the truth, which is that Orangeism has always had a fiercely anti-Catholic edge and that the God-fearing, law-abiding side of Protestantism has always loved the intimidating and violent thunder of its own drums.

They march or walk to send a message to the other side, to say: Here we are in our mighty throng; take heed and stay indoors. But they also march to send a message to themselves, to reassure and comfort the faithful. For Loyalism is much sapped with doubt about its long-term survival. The statistics from the 1991 census tell a gloomy tale. Twenty years ago, the Catholics stood at 34.7 percent of the population of Northern Ireland. Today the figure is 41.4 percent and rising rapidly. It is rumored that among school-age children in Belfast the Catholics are up to 50 percent of the total. The statistical picture of Protestantism is of an aging population in decline, faced with a slow but steady hemorrhage of its best and brightest to the mainland. These numbers haunt the faithful, so much so that in the Twelfth of July booklet the Grand Master of all Ireland warns his fellow Orangemen not to put faith in “deliberately falsified census figures,” just as he warns them, darkly, that agents provocateurs may be lurking about the parade, wearing Orange Sashes.

So as they march up the Lisburn Road, heading toward Edenderry Field, with their banners held high—the Duke of Manchester's Invincibles and Cromwell's Ironsides, the Lame Protestant Boys and the Ballygally Flute and Pipe, the Rising Sons of the Somme, Carrickfergus—you count every Orangemen under forty and you wonder how long the Order has to live.

But they do make a magnificent sight, the pipe and drum bands, the accordion bands, and the bagpipe bands, as they stream beneath the great oaks flanking the downward-sloping cow pasture at the edge of Belfast that is known as the Field. Down at the bottom is a small raised platform to hold the dignitaries, and a few rows of chairs to hear the speeches, but of the thousands who march into the Field, perhaps only a hundred bother to listen. The rest sprawl about on the grass, with a Union Jack or an Ulster Red Hand flag covering their faces from the sun, drums piled together, uniforms, leggings, socks, boots, all in a tangle, among the chips and the crisp packets, the beer cans and the cigarette packs. Even the police take off their bulletproof vests and lounge on the grass with their heads against the bumpers of their Land Rovers. The speeches drone on, the age-old religious invective rises from the podium: “Roman Catholicism is a perversion of true religion. Irish Catholicism is the most perverse of all religions,” I hear one reverend gentleman bellow. Another speaker thunders: “The Protestants of Ulster are going to make Ulster great again and restore the greatness of Britain which has been sorely declining these past years.” Again, no one seems to be listening. While their elders thunder impotently on, young bandsmen fall fast asleep.

CARGO CULT

The great king from across the water disembarks from his white ships. In a great battle, he delivers the natives from their tribal enemies, in victory guarantees their religion, and confers on them master of their island forever. Having accomplished these magic designs, he departs, never to return. Ever after, the natives venerate his name, paint his picture, decorate their drums with his face, carry his portrait in their processions. They hold his memory sacred long after all trace of him has vanished from the traditions of the land whence he came.

According to the
Encyclopedia of Anthropology,
a cargo cult is a millenarian movement of native peoples who believe that the millennium will be ushered in by the arrival of great ships loaded with European trade goods or cargo. The goods will be brought by the ancestral spirits and will be distributed to natives who have acted in accordance with the dictates of one of the cults. Some cult leaders call for the expulsion of all alien, colonial elements as a precondition of salvation, while others insist on the abandonment of traditional ways of life and the adoption of European customs.

According to anthropologists who have studied such cults in the Pacific South Seas, the critical feature is that “cargo cults are movements where whites lose control of their ability to police and direct the desires of their subjects. Having harnessed and in part created those desires for whiteness as part of a project of motivating villagers to take up development, the administration is horrified when those desires come to be turned against itself.” Anthropologists define the cargo cult as the result of an “uncontrolled mimesis” in which native peoples take over the rituals and behavior of
whites only to subvert them and transform them into an object of worship that actually emancipates them from the European original.

British cargo cults are among the most tenacious and enduring in the world. In the Canada of my youth—in the salons of the Ritz in Montreal, the Royal York in Toronto, and the Empress in Victoria, British Columbia—but also in the Raffles at Singapore, the Mandarin in Hong Kong, from the tea plantations of Sri Lanka to the hill stations of India, tea and cucumber sandwiches continue to be served and the rituals of a defunct empire float on in their ghostly afterlife. Here the loyalism implied by the ritual is merely nostalgic or elegiac. But there are insurgent cargo cults of Britishness— for example, as practiced in the whites-only Rhodesia of Ian Smith after it declared unilateral independence from Britain in 1965. Here was a Britishness in revolt against Britain itself.

The sashes, the bonfires, the burning Popes and Tricolors, the Lambeg drums, the marching bands, the Red Hand flags, the songs: in all my journeys, I've never come across a form of nationalism so intensely ritualized. At one level, the reason for this is obvious. Here Britishness is ritualized because it is up against its antithesis and nemesis: Irish Republicanism

Since the enemy are “nationalists,” Loyalists are barred not merely from using the term but from thinking of themselves in this vein. Yet perhaps that is what Loyalism is—a nationalism that dares not speak its name. Loyalism, on this reading, is really loyal to itself, but since it cannot say so out loud, it says so tacitly, in rituals of belonging which elaborate an identity all its own.

The Red Hand sums up all of this ambivalence. You see it everywhere, on flags, on paramilitary murals, in candy replicas sold in every sweetshop. According to Celtic legend, two
Scottish kings were swimming to Ulster. Whoever touched Ulster soil first would win the race and earn the right to rule the province. As the swimmers got closer, the one losing the race cut off his left hand and, with his right hand, threw it to the shore, thus claiming the prize.

It is a grimly appropriate symbol, especially in the way it consecrates the province as the bloody prize of a sacrificial struggle. It is both a respectable and an insurgent icon, figuring both on the official emblem of a province and on the paramilitary wall paintings that lionize Loyalism's thugs. Celtic in origin and unknown to mainland Britain, the Red Hand shows just how tensely poised Loyalism is between identification and rejection, between fidelity and rebellion. Ulster worships at seventeenth-century Protestant shrines that mainland Britain no longer recognizes as its own. It elaborates a Britishness which it believes its mother has betrayed. It cannot pass into nationalist rebellion, since that would give comfort to its republican enemies, and it cannot subside into contented obedience, since that would trust the mother too far.

Yet it is also specifically British, above all in its imperial memory of being masters once, and thus in its inability to conceive, let alone accept, becoming a minority in someone else's nation. It is also specifically British in its injured assertion of rights denied and betrayed, and in its inability to translate the sense of democratic injury into a genuinely democratic nationalism. This is true of mainland British nationalism as well. British national consciousness as a whole continues to see the nation embodied, not in the people, but in the Crown. The British think of themselves as subjects, not as citizens, and popular commitment to the civic achievements of British history—the rule of law, the sovereignty of Parliament, the stability of the state—tends to express itself
in an infantilized idealization of the monarchy. A nation of citizens, it could be argued, might prove more resolute and courageous defenders of these achievements than a nation of subjects.

Cargo cults are caricatures of their original. Yet caricatures reveal a truth, as fairground mirrors do. If Ulster is unable to decide what it is loyal to—its own people or the Crown—this may be because Britain as a whole no longer has an answer to the same question.

In the cargo cult of Ulster Loyalism, the ethnic and civic components of British nationalism are beginning to uncouple. Loyalism is an ethnic nationalism which, paradoxically, uses the civic symbols of Britishness—Crown and Union Jack—to mark out an ethnic identity. In the process, the civic content is emptied out: Loyalist paramilitarism, for example, makes it only too clear what a portion of the Loyalist community thinks of the rule of law, the very core of British civic identity. In the end, the Crown and the Union Jack are reduced to meaning what they signify when tattooed on the skin of poor, white teenagers. They are only badges of ethnic rage.

The same uncoupling could easily occur, indeed is already occurring, in Britain. Symbols of identity like the Union Jack and the Crown that once stood for the rule of law and the civic integument of a nation-state come to be debased, by disillusion, injustice, and oppression, into pure symbols of whiteness. If a society no longer teaches its children that Britishness has a connection, not to ethnicity, but to justice, then its symbols are bound to figure on the placards of hatred.

As can be seen in Canada, India, Czechoslovakia, Belgium, and elsewhere, Britain is not the only place where the civic and ethnic components of national identity are
uncoupling. Most multinational, multi-ethnic nation-states are discovering that their populations are often more loyal to the ethnic units that compose them than to the federation and the laws that hold the state together.

What keeps ethnic and racial tension within bounds in the world's successful modern multi-ethnic societies is a state strong enough to make its authority respected. This remains true even in Northern Ireland. Despite the fact that British institutions do not command equal respect from both communities, the British state still manages, just, to hold the ring. What saves the province from becoming Bosnia is nothing more than the British Army, policemen who do their jobs, and courts that convict upon evidence.

There is a larger moral to be drawn from this. The only reliable antidote to ethnic nationalism turns out to be civic nationalism, because the only guarantee that ethnic groups will live side by side in peace is shared loyalty to a state strong enough, fair enough, equitable enough to command their obedience.

THE HUNGRY AND THE SATED

I end my journey where I started, thinking about the relation between arguments and consequences, between nationalist good intentions and nationalist violence. A rationalist tends to believe that what people do results from what they say they intend. Thus when nationalists say violence is warranted in self-defense and in seeking self-determination, a rationalist concludes that this is why violence occurs.

I am no longer so sure. So often, it seemed to me, the violence happened first, and the nationalist excuses came afterward. The insensate destruction of Vukovar by both
sides, for example, struck me as a perfect example of this. The nationalist rhetoric in that instance is best understood as an excuse for what happened, not as an explanation for what occurred.

Everywhere I've been, nationalism is most violent where the group you are defining yourself against most closely resembles you. A rational explanation of conflict would predict the reverse to be the case. To outsiders at least, Ulstermen look and sound like Irishmen, just as Serbs look and sound like Croats—yet the very similarity is what pushes them to define themselves as polar opposites. Since Cain and Abel, we have known that hatred between brothers is more ferocious than hatred between strangers. We say tritely that this is so because hatred is a form of love turned against itself. Or that we hate most deeply what we recognize as kin. Or that violence is the ultimate denial of an affiliation we cannot bear. None of this will do. There are puzzles which no theory of nationalism, no theory of the narcissism of minor difference, can resolve. After you have been to the waste-lands of the new world order, particularly to those fields of graves marked with numberless wooden crosses, you feel stunned into silence by a deficit of moral explanation.

In his essay “What Does Coming to Terms with the Past Mean?” Theodor Adorno says, in passing, “Nationalism no longer quite believes in itself.” There was a bewildering insincerity and inauthenticity to nationalist rhetoric everywhere I went, as if the people who mouthed nationalist slogans were aware, somewhere inside, of the implausibility of their own words. Serbs who, in one breath, would tell you that all Croats were Ustashe beasts would, in the next, recall the happy days when they lived with them in peace. In this divided consciousness, the plane of abstract fantasy and the
plane of direct experience were never allowed to intersect. Nationalism's chief function as a system of moral rhetoric is to ensure this compartmentalization and in so doing to deaden the conscience. Yet it never entirely works. The very people who absorb such generalizations with such apparently unthinking zeal often still hear the inner voice which tells them that, actually, in their own experience, these generalizations are false. Yet if most people hear this inner voice, few seem able to act upon it. The authority of nationalist rhetoric is such that most people actively censor the testimony of their own experience.