Denominations and combinations: versions of ‘community’ in the proclamation of Easter 1916 and the Good Friday Agreement

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis paper raises the question of the ‘existence’ (the ontological status) of the nation and other ‘collective identities’ in connection with issues of community and violence. It is widely recognised that ‘the nation’ must be understood as a social construct rather than a naturally or essentially ‘given’ entity; but this recognition is not enough if we then simply continue to think of the nation as an entity outside ongoing processes of construction and deconstruction. The details of the way each political entity is constructed are important. We examine two key documents and draw out two ways in which community (and thus democracy) can be constructed. An examination of the kind of ‘national identity’ projected in the Proclamation of 1916 illustrates the process of denomination that posits closed collective ‘communities of identity’ which reduce to friend–enemy, inside–outside binaries, thus setting the scene for conflict. Elements of the Belfast or Good Friday Agreement show we can extrapolate ways of creating a ‘we’ that does not reduce to one or another positive identity but that takes place when different people combine in the space opened by a commitment to non-violence and democracy in a ‘community of others’.