Identity in Northern Ireland

This book gives an innovative account of communal identity in Northern Ireland and its relationship with a changing landscape. It argues that the development of a multi-level polity in the European Union (EU) and the sustained Anglo-Irish commitment to political process in Northern Ireland are twin dynamics shifting the political context for Ulster Unionist and northern Irish Nationalist identities. In this changing context, the modern emphasis on objectivity and territorial parameters delimited by the nation-state are beginning to be displaced by a postmodern concern for the representation of difference and transterritorial networking. As a result, northern Irish Nationalists and Ulster Unionists are being forced to re-examine the (premodern) cultural and (modern) territorial resources of their respective identities. The book provides a forum (through dialogues) for the representatives of these identities to consider changing conditions and attempts to evaluate their implications for future structures of government and for communal identities themselves.