Introduction: change and continuity

For over two centuries, republicanism and unionism/loyalism have marked polarities in Irish politics - the former committed to a 'sovereign' all-Ireland republic, the latter to the maintenance and consolidation of Ireland (and Northern Ireland since 1920) as part of the United Kingdom. Much has changed, however, in the period between the United Irish Rebellion of 1798 and the Belfast Agreement of 1998. In the first instance, the social composition of the constituencies supporting both ideologies have altered substantially over time, influenced by Ireland's complex integration into the global capitalist economy, by famine and war, and the outcome of political struggle. In the interim, too, the substantive issues at the heart of unionist-republican conflict such as the 'Union', the 'Republic', self-determination, government, democracy, the state, Irishness, Britishness and 'Ulster' have changed their scope and meaning. Irish unionism and republicanism also register the successive imprints of their changing international contexts - the republican revolutions in the US and France; the subsequent 'age of imperialism'; and imperial fragmentation and the growing significance of the national state in its aftermath.

Against this vast panorama of change, the first part of this chapter examines some of the reasons for the endurance of unionism and republicanism. It suggests that the roots of their survival are to be found in a resilient, if highly asymmetric power structure, the legacy of colonial and imperial Ireland and the working out of the Partition settlement. Within this power structure, nationalists and republicans have developed characteristic, if asymmetric, views of the relationship between state and nation, modes of remembrance and styles of political mobilisation. The second part of the chapter sketches how Partition reconstituted unionism and republicanism and discusses how the ‘politics of culture’ has come to be central in the Northern Ireland conflict and in the search for a solution.