Times Change
A Quarterly Political and Cultural Review
Autumn 1998 Contents
Politics and Ideology
John Bruton
Everybody has a political ideology, either conscious or unconscious. By political ideology I mean a set of linked ideas, which guide response to particular political decisions and which ought to have some measure of consistency with one another. Some ideologies are more comprehensive than others. Some pragmatists proceed from a fundamental assumption that all human thought is fallible and therefore that great systems of thinking are liable to be mistaken because of the fallibility of the thinker. But even the most sceptical pragmatist acknowledges the requirement for some measure of consistency and predictability in regard to the way various issues are dealt with. The whole concept of law has at its core the idea of consistency of rules. No politician is so 'pragmatic' that he rejects the idea of law and claims that every case must be looked at individually without reference to any general principle at all.
I believe that there are two fundamental types of political ideology. One is universalist and the other particularist.
Christian Democracy and Socialism are both ideologies that I would describe as universalist because they aspire to be universal in their application. Christian Democrats and Socialists believe that, to some degree at least, they are pursuing the universal good of mankind and that the insights that they derive from their belief systems can be applied to people in all societies. Christian Democrats and Socialists also share a concept of the brotherhood of man, regardless of geography, nationality, race or religion. Christian Democrats would express their belief through the formula 'every person counts'. Socialists might put a greater emphasis on society than on the person, but they do not reject the concept that every person (regardless of background) must be included as a point of reference for political thought.
What I would describe as particularist ideologies, on the other hand, are ones that are designed to meet the needs of one section of humanity. Nationalism is in this sense a particularist ideology. It places the needs of one's own nation above those of the rest of man-kind. Some Christian ideologies which make a distinction between the 'saved' and those who are not 'saved' would also qualify as particularist ideologies. The ideology of some Islamic states, which gives priority to those who follow Islam over those who do not, would also qualify as a particularist ideology. So does the Jewish.
The most particularist of all ideologies is what I would describe as tribalism. Tribalism would put the needs of one's own ethnic or religious group ahead of all other groups and particularly ahead of those of its immediate rival in its part of the world.
Tribalism and Nationalism differ in the sense that nationalists accept that membership of a nation is open to all who live within its area. Membership of the 'tribe' is not open to those who do not qualify on whatever is the defining characteristic of the tribe - for example ethnicity, or religion, or a combination of the two.
The conflicting ideologies in Northern Ireland have elements of more than one of the types I have mentioned. Nationalists believe that the Irish nation should determine its own future separately from all other nations and that no part of the island of Ireland has a right to opt out from the majority self determination of the nation as a whole. Republicans have - on paper at least - a slightly different definition. Their concern is not just with Ireland being separate from other nations, but also with the form of government that Ireland should have.
Some nationalists and republicans combine a policy of separation from Britain with a policy of integration in a wider European federation. To this extent they are reducing their nationalism by saying that people owe an allegiance to Europe as well as to the Irish nation.
Early in this century unionists took the view that the future of Ireland as a whole should be in a union with Britain, making Ireland part of the centre of what was then a worldwide system of government, the British Empire. In a sense, Unionism in its original form was a universalist political ideology, insofar as the British Empire then aspired to a role of governance in the whole world. Historical events have changed all this.
The British Empire no longer exists; Britain no longer aspires to provide a worldwide system of government. Indeed, Britain itself is beginning to break up. Scotland may eventually opt for independence within the European Union. The problem for unionists could become one of answering the question: union with what?
The problem that the Good Friday Agreement set out to solve was that of reconciling the conflicting ideological varieties of Nationalism and Unionism. The Agreement achieved this through a complex web of political structures which reflect each of the competing ideol-ogies. The all-Ireland bodies represent the nationalist world view, the continued membership of the European Union represents the European world view, and the continued sovereign link with Britain represents the unionist view.
Each of these institutions will compete with one another, as all political institutions do. The decision about who does what will always be an argument as to whether the job should be done by a European institution, by an all-Ireland institution, a British/Irish institution or an internal Northern Irish institution. This 'who does what' problem is not resolved by the Good Friday Agreement. The Agreement simply establishes a format in which the decision can work itself out: this is a big step forward. The past absence of a format for allowing the different views to compete constitutionally left greater space for the option of violence. But the Agreement has not, in itself, resolved the fundamental ideological conflicts between the different points of view.
This brings me to the main point I want to make in this article, an article written for a Democratic Left magazine by a Fine Gael politician. The role that our two parties can perform, as Socialists and Christian Democrats respectively, is to argue the case for political ideologies that can compete without being in conflict and that can transcend Unionism and Nationalism. Christian Democracy and Socialism are ideologies that provide a better philosophical basis for non-sectarian politics, because their point of reference is the whole of mankind rather than any particular group within it.
Comment on the peace process, even in some of our 'quality' Sunday papers, still sees the process as a matter of 'our' side versus 'their' side. For example, there is often an unstated assumption that a Southern politician who expounds a view on a topic that is different from the view held by a large number of northern nationalists, is somehow 'letting our side down'. That way of thinking could ultimately be fatal to the peace process, because it is particularist rather than universalist.
My view is that the Good Friday Agreement institutions will not work well if that sort of particularist ideology continues to predominate. It will aggravate the inevitable turf wars over which institution should do what.
To overcome this, we must have a political ideology that is universalist. There is, therefore, a place in the politics of the peace process for the ideological debate of the kind this magazine facilitates. It helps us all to lift our sights.
John Bruton is TD for Meath and leader of Fine Gael