Beyond exception: the Irish border and the limits of cosmopolitan nationalism

Abstract

ABSTRACT Much debate surrounding Brexit and its implications for the Irish Border has leant on exceptionality, framed within the historical context of the ethnonational dispute between Ireland and the UK, with causality for Brexit fixed in anachronistic and unattainable imperial nationalist understandings of territorial sovereignty emanating from the English core. The Irish border resonates at both historical and metaphorical levels; it was the site of disproportionate levels of fatal political violence and has acted as an ideological battleground in the longer-term proxy war between the Irish and British patron states. Deep concern remains about the potential for Brexit to undo the progress made towards peace on the island. Yet the immediate threat now facing the border is one of unexceptional forces of neoliberalism, in which fears around resurgent ethnic conflict have been subordinated to those of market maintenance and stability. This paper considers the neglected role of, and implications for cosmopolitan nationalism under this new dispensation, identifying the Eurocentric understandings of diversity upon which the openness of borders such as that on the island of Ireland are contingent. For Ireland and Europe more generally, this necessitates a fuller reckoning with the multiple implications of ‘empire’ beyond the immediate British melancholic context.